The Savvy, The Extreme & The Idealist

The Occupy Movement

2011-11-23T10:01:00.000-08:00

(Re-posted from Out Of Tune)

I know it is probably a little late to be chiming in about the Occupy Wall Street movement at this point but, what the hell, everybody and their mother has voiced their opinion about them at this point so I'll offer my two bits.

Last month my wife, our daughter and I marched with Occupy Chicago. We found, as I expected, a group of people who care deeply about the future of the world and the glaring economic inequity and the damage it has caused. I was proud to have my three-year-old daughter alongside of them. It is not my future they fight for, it is my daughter's.

A big dig at the movement I've heard from the right-wing media is that it is just a bunch of disgruntled young people. This isn't really true, there is representation from all age groups in this movement, though the leadership does seem to be heavy on a younger generation. But even if this was just young people, so what?

Who the fuck do you think makes real change happen in this world? By and large it is young people. Who was marching against the Vietnam war in the 60s? Who fought the civil rights battles alongside Martin Luther King, Jr? The reason we have so many of the leaders and participants of the civil rights movement still with us today is that they were so young back then. Julian Bond helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when he was 20-years-old, led protests against segregation all through his early 20s, was only 25 when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law and began serving as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives at the age of 27. Stokely Carmichael, Diane Nash and the great John Lewis, other co-founders of the SNCC, were all of similar age. MLK led the Montgomery bus boycott at the age of 26.

Of course this movement is young people. This is what young people do. Our world has done its best to keep them distracted with gadgets, TV, video games, etc to make them as apathetic as possible, but they care about the future a lot more than we want to give them credit. Instead of dismissing them we should be thanking them.

And how can anyone put down a movement for being a bunch of disgruntled young people and then turn around and support the crazy crowd of screaming, angry, middle-aged white people that calls itself the Tea Party?

To the Occupy movement I say this: Stay strong brothers and sisters and screw those people that dismiss you because you're young. Keep fighting for your future and my kid's future.

And, at the risk of sounding like a condescending middle-aged guy, I'm so proud of you. The next generation is not full of nothing but those who have buried their brains in the world of iPods, texting and angry birds. Like I sometimes think.

You are beautiful and I love you.

And thank you.

Is Wikileaks The New Media?

2010-12-07T04:29:00.001-08:00

Short and sweet: Yes!

I write this full of emotion and incredulity on the heels of breaking news that Julian Assange has surrendered himself in the UK on weak, trumped-up rape and sexual abuse charges by two Swedish women--one of whom is a CIA collaborator.

I admit that initially, just after the newest round of leaked documents on U.S. diplomacy, I believed Assange was being naive and was conducting a personal vendetta against government in general. I thought: what in hell is so controversial about this particular disclosure? Anyone with half a political brain knows the machinations of State Department wrangling with foreign governments behind the scenes. The geopolitical world has always been a backroom of nasty deals and compromises with shady characters working on behalf of "squeaky clean" administrations. And so Assange must be personally after some kind of entity or organization.

But as with any opinion I form in haste, the line of my thinking quickly changed. I realized Assange himself (like many curious people who vote and who bother to read political science literature and exposé) was quite aware of what goes on in diplomacy. The stuff he made public was, more or less, already out there. If you happen to watch PBS' "Frontline" you'd know. Or read things like this.

Assange's point was not to embarrass governments--they do that quite well on their own. Instead, the newest disclosure is meant to educate the likes of the Palin brigade, and the insufferable parrots aligned with either party, who robotically list party talking points lifted straight off Olberman's or O'Reilly's shows when conducting an argument.

In a simple answer: Yes, Wikileaks is the new media, in that it makes available to the (sometimes un-educated) public the nasty truth behind diplomacy, war, social, and financial systems (Bank of America is in the crosshairs).

There is a brilliant line in the fifth episode of the first season of Mad Men with which Don Draper defends his career choice in advertising to a young, beatnik-type. Draper says: "Americans like to be told what they want. What to do." And the media has quite happily agreed to borrow and carry half the baton from its boss, the advertising industry.

This is what Edward Murrow said about television in 1958, at the RTNDA Convention in Chicago:

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.

For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally. If there were to be a competition in indifference, or perhaps in insulation from reality, then Nero and his fiddle, Chamberlain and his umbrella, could not find a place on an early afternoon sustaining show. If Hollywood were to run out of Indians, the program schedules would be mangled beyond all recognition. Then some courageous soul with a small budget might be able to do a documentary telling what, in fact, we have done--and are still doing--to the Indians in this country. But that would be unpleasant. And we must at all costs shield the sensitive citizens from anything that is unpleasant.

This sentiment holds beyond prophetic now, for the media in general. If there exists an outlet truly designed to inform the public of the realities of our modern world, as it exists now in the 21st century, then that outlet ought to be given, even nurtured, its voice.

The criticism that Assange and his Wikileaks is committing treason (put forth with much vigor by Sarah Palin herself) is beyond obtuse. This is where an ill-educated public comes into play, repeating and disseminating this inaccurate statement into the public psyche. Assange is not an American citizen, and Wikileaks does not operate on American soil, therefore a charge of treason cannot be leveled.

It's this idiocy perpetuated by the ill-informed parrots and followers of any particular party that Wikileaks aims to stem with its disclosures.

On the heels of Assange's arrest, and of the several attempts to hack the Wikileaks site, as well as the "circling of the wagons" by many of the world's governments and multi-national corporations (fuck you Amazon, fuck you PayPal, fuck you MasterCard, fuck you Joe Lieberman--you spineless political parasite, fuck you Twitter for not listing Wikileaks as a trending subject the last few days, fuck you France and Sweden for not having the balls and fortitude to support free speech, etc.), I am happy to report that over 500 mirror sites have popped up online.

A group called "Anonymous" is working hard to launch these mushrooming venues all across the Internet, making sure nothing is disrupted as Assange moves forth with his defense.

This is the real media, in the real age of information. Wikileaks would make Edward Murrow proud.

Forget 911...

2010-11-27T07:35:00.000-08:00

...the media is a bloody joke.

Yesterday, checking up on my Twitter feed (which is basically an endless 'wire' of news and information set up a la the good ol' Telex days), I ran across this wonderful juxtaposition of headlines tweeted back to back by CNN: "North Korea Warns Region is on Brink of War" / "Shoppers Crowd Malls All Night Long."

This absurd pairing of news came rat-tat-tat-ing on my Tweetdeck literally within two seconds, and it efficiently introduced my coffee to my keyboard, via my nose. The latter piece of information was then basically regurgitated and repeated throughout the entire day and evening and into this morning by virtually every American news outlet I can think of, accompanied by the usual B-roll of herds of people pressed against glass doors, waiting for someone to open the malls, so they can trample one another for the iPad or the newest generation iPhone.

I worked in "the media" for nearly 7 years, from 1993 to 2000 (television), and before that for almost two years, just out of college from 1991-1993-ish (USIA-radio/Voice of America). My experience in the television field was quite interesting. I was a freelancer working for a brand new cable network run by the insufferable Roger Ailes (now president of Fox) named "America's Talking." Soon after my position there, the network folded and its airways were taken over by Bill Gates and Microsoft, who created MSNBC. I stayed on, and within a short period of time became one of the directors of Chris Matthews' show, which went through several incarnations before settling on "Hardball." Ailes went on to helm the newly-created Fox News for Murdoch. We all know how that has turned out.

But being there, at the inception of the 24-hr news cycle networks (aside from CNN and Bloomberg, this was a revolutionary concept, and at the very least it provided competition for CNN; Bloomberg was and is an all-business TV outlet) was savage and weird. Gone were the standards of journalism I had learned and practised while working in the VOA newsroom. People no longer needed to check sources, they just ran with whatever stories surfaced--whether inaccurate or not.

Being on for 24 hours meant there was a huge need for content. Any kind of content. Controversial content. Ridiculously mundane content. Even made up content.

I remember being called in to direct a live shot out of Washington during the "breaking news" that president Clinton's plane (Air Force One) was temporarily stuck in the mud at the airport in Memphis. We had aviation experts and chattering talking heads go on for literally two hours, speculating what might have gone wrong, what could be done right, and whether or not this was some sort of conspiracy by the Right Wing (imagine the off-air jokes containing right/left wings and airplanes--this was happening during Clinton's impeachment process).

"Producers" of these types of shows were literally 21-year-olds, straight out of university with poli-sci degrees, not seasoned veterans of journalism with ethics and standards. These kids were busting into our studios looking to put on the air anything that might carry some controversy. They had taken their cue from the daytime Jerry Springer shows and were implementing the strategy into this sacred field of journalism, which was systematically being eviscerated and fucked proper by their doing.

Chris Matthews took to literally muttering at all times off air: "...numbers, we need numbers tonight, anything to get the numbers..." (referring to the ratings of his show).

Anything to get the numbers. This was in 1995! I quit the business five years later, but scanning the airwaves just this morning, the same gang of usual suspects is making the rounds on these insufferable all-day and night outlets.

You name the talking head, I've worked with him/her. I remember hanging out on K-Street and 18th, just outside the entrance to the MS/CNBC studios, smoking stogeys with the fellows on the crew, when a then unknown Ann Coulter joined us, clad in a puffy Chinchilla coat, talking all kinds of nonsense about how much better clubs in New York City are than in Washington. We smiled and nodded politely at the emaciated Valley Girl holding court on a subject neither of us had any interest in. We all know what's become of her now.

I lost an acquaintance and a professional friend in the attacks of 9/11. Barbara Olson was the wife of the then-Solicitor General Ted Olson. She was a frequent contributor and guest, and a lovely person-despite her GOP leanings and ideas. She had concise, cerebral arguments that counter-balanced the madness and screaming among the other guests. She and I often went on to digest these issues in the Green Room, after the segment or show. She was a good person.

I got into conversation several times with Chris Hitchens--another frequent guest--who would usually show up in the late afternoons dis-shevelled and somewhat inebriated, yet lucid and sharp as hell. Most of the time, the issues he discussed with me went above and beyond my head, and I was always intimidated, but he took an interest in me and in the fact that my mother had been a translator in Romania for Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, when they visited in the '70s. We all know the scathing books Hitch has written on Kissinger and Nixon.

There were a handful of good people that walked the guest beat, but even they were prodded and pushed (off air) to say something ridiculous, to create some sort of fight within the segment.

"Numbers, we need numbers tonight...anything to get the numbers."

And so, now almost 11 years removed from an ever-rotting field, I make sure I perform my due diligence when it comes to digesting news and information. I literally don't trust any one single outlet. Even Wikileaks has come under my scrutiny. Stories in which I have interest get cross-checked and cross-referenced at least five times, from different angles.

The truth always lives somewhere in between the barriers and distractors and smoke and fog and mirrors and layers of information. If it exists at all.

On Pride and Prejudice

2010-11-19T05:05:00.000-08:00

The greatest thing about not having any ambition to seeking political office is freedom to talk. Or even better, write. Or even mo' better: think. Over the past two years, this medium has given me ample opportunity to spill vitriol...or talk sense, depending on your political affiliation and/or religious beliefs. I am forever indebted to the founders of this site, who have respectfully asked me to "come back to the fold" to plagiarize from The Beige One in his column below. So here we go: 2012 is looming. We're back in business baby!

Checking through my news sources this morning I see the elephant dung beetle that is Sarah Palin has launched a barrage of usual horse shite against Michelle Obama--questioning her patriotism and pride in a racially-charged passage from Palin's new book (link and book name purposefully not included).

Audacity and obtuse racial and religious sentiment in this country has me raising my leery eyebrows. Just a few days ago Roger Ailes, Fox News channel president, called NPR a bunch of Nazis. This term has been thrown around loosely by the GOP now for over two years, and alarmingly seems to be accepted.

The cycle, as I see it, goes like this: outlets like Fox and its cronies start circulating ideas about Communist/Fascist influx into this country's government. Other news organizations give that 24-hour play because it's controversial...and controversy = ratings = advertising dollars. The Archie Bunkers plopped on their recliners watching tee-vee believe this is the word of God. Which in turn fuels their inner, dormant racism, and gives them the balls to actually put Hitler mustaches on Obama posters, carry firearms to protests against gays/lesbians/atheists/Muslims/insert anything you want here that doesn't jive with their values or lifestyles, and vote the aberration that makes up the Tea Party into our legislature.

It's a pretty simple cycle if most of your audience likes to not think for itself. Not to sound like an elitist, but if you don't have the curiosity to cross check ideas and sources (coming from either Left or Right or Middle or wherever), then I have no mercy for you and will assume you are a glib sheep who whistles Dixie on the way to your systematic slaughter.

It may very well be that we will get what we deserve. Or that we have already gotten it. After all, we are a democracy and we choose the evil that we choose--not necessarily wisely--but nevertheless consistently.

I can honestly say that my pride for this country, especially in the last two years, has dwindled down to nothing. And the level of frustration as I read or listen to these simpletons spew their fearful, racist, religious, and most importantly uninformed vitriol before news cameras, has over-spilled the mental vessel.

Strangely enough, I still have hope. But it's of the skewed kind. That is to say, upon seeing the stalemate that is now all but assured in Congress for the next two years, the same Einsteins who voted these incompetents into our government, will turn around and "punish" them by voting them out. And so it will go into my twilight, our economy slated to follow in Japan's footsteps.

To be perpetually continued, and made into a Hollywood movie starring Sisyphus and his buddy: one large, pesky rock.

2012: Starting A List, Checking It Twice

2010-11-18T12:29:00.000-08:00

So, while the White House fritters away portions of its day by doing little things like the historic Four Loko decision*, Republicans begin exerting their influence by saying to women: "Equal pay for equal work? Fuck off."

And so, the march toward 11/6/2012 begins, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's been remarkable to see the atmosphere since the mid-terms took place: Conservatives and the Tea Bag Party candidates proclaiming that we're going back to the '50s; Democrats running around yelling "WOE IS US! THE SKY! IT FALLS! WHAT DID WE DO WHAT DID WE DO?!?!!", only to be outdone by the lefty pundits; Progressives yelling at them to stand the fuck up, fucking pussies. and fight for their honor.

And the losers in all of this? The public, especially those who thought that the Tea Party was going to do for them. One wonders when they'll finally wake up to the reality, or if they'll just continue echoing the noise coming from the top down (in this instance, I'm not an idealist).

Well, after essentially taking it easy for the last two years, I'm fucking tuned in; not that I was too far gone...And while I am impressed at all that Obama has done in his first two years, if he doesn't take this last election as a wake up call to feed his supporters on the left, he's doomed to be a one-term president.

Seriously, what's the point of continuing to cater to the right? They pillory him at every turn, so come back to the fold, Mr. O, come back.

Anyway, onward and leftward.

*I maintain that these little empty caloric decisions are part and parcel with daily life in the White House, regardless of administration. What's sad here is that there's nothing else the current White House can claim as new policy, yet.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

2010-10-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

"I decided talking to a conservative is like talking to your refrigerator. You know, the light goes on the light goes off; it's not going to do anything that isn't built in to it. And I'm not going to talk to a conservative anymore than I talk to my damn refrigerator." ---Utah Phillips (1935-2008)

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Pick up my New York Times from the hallway outside our apartment door this morning and start perusing the headlines before my daughter would wake up. First one I notice is an article titled, Climate Change Doubt Is Tea Party Article of Faith. I start reading the article and it opens with a scene of an incumbent Indiana Democratic congressman defending his climate bill vote in front of a hostile crowd full of people self-identified as part of the "tea party" movement. He calls global warming real and indisputable, just like the vast majority of scientists who know anything about climate.

He is showered with boos. This is the next bit of the article:

...including a hearty growl from Norman Dennison, a 50-year-old electrician and founder of the Corydon Tea Party.
“It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”

Seriously.

And here we have the fundamental problem with trying to talk sense to conservative Christians. Put the facts in front of their face, shower them with reason, use real data to make your argument and you will be wasting your time.

The liars that are Glenn, Rush, Sean, Sarah, et al; a 2,000-year-old piece of poorly written fiction. This is who they will choose to believe, this is where they get their "truth." These sources give them the narrative as they want it to be and that's good enough for them, no matter that it flies in the face of all common sense or what the actual truth might be.

This is how it is possible for Obama to be simultaneously a Socialist and a Nazi. How he is trying to make you enroll is big, bad, government-run socialized health-care and also take away your Medicare. How he wants to redistribute the wealth and is also the puppet of Wall Street bankers. they believe every one of these things about him, never mind that they are all contradictory of each other. I suppose that makes it just like believing in their bible.

They are stupid and they are very proud of it.

This country is fucked.

(Originally posted at Out Of Tune)

Screw Tolerance

2010-10-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

Things are heating up for gay rights issues in this country. "Don't ask, don't tell" is gasping at its final breaths and the issue of gay marriage is winding its way through the court system on its way to an inevitable showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court, and even if it loses there the next generation of Americans - the ones who are now in their teens and twenties - will legalize same-sex marriage anyway.

This is all great news, as the bigots - though it has taken way too long - are losing again. That is always a good thing. It has been, and still is, a long hard-fought battle for equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in America. We're winning the argument, us progressives, because, well, the argument on the other side is stupid.

There is one aspect to the argument that comes from the liberal side that I do have an issue with. It seems that since the 90s we have been urging people to be "tolerant" of the queers.

I say, fuck tolerance.

Gay is not something to tolerate and it sends the wrong message to the bigots and hate-mongers of the world.

I tolerate the asshole walking down the street texting who bumps in to me, instead of elbowing him in the face like I really want to do. Because in a civil society I need to resist those urges, even if someone deserves it.

I tolerate the moron on the subway listening to his headphones so loud that everyone can hear his music, instead of ripping his iPod out of his hands and crushing it with my foot. See above reason.

I tolerate conservative bible-thumpers, instead of stabbing them in the throat. Because there are too many too kill them all and it would be very messy and tiring.

The point is, you don't tolerate something that's not bad because there is nothing to tolerate. By using this word you are giving credibility to the bigotry. You are saying it is OK to think of homosexuals as sinners who are going to hell, but just be hush-hush about it.

Look, if two people enter a committed relationship with the intention of spending their lives together, regardless of their gender, it is either a) something to be celebrated and honored, or b) something to not give a shit about at all. Period. There are no other options. And you can switch back and forth between the two. I have friends and family that are answer "a" and others that are answer "b."

I'm not sure who decided on this "tolerance" mantra many years ago, and I wish I could find out what they were thinking. I suspect that comes from the left's own faulty tolerance. Specifically tolerance of fucked-up religious beliefs. Too many people on the left try to cling to their own religion that they go too much out of their way to respect the religion of others. So we ended up tip-toeing around their religion and the result is asking them for their tolerance. But in that process we give credibility to their dumb religious beliefs and we head down the road of respecting all sorts of asinine things, from polygamy to female genital mutilation. Where will it stop?

What we are supposed to say to these people is, "fuck your religion."

And there are only two real reason we have to make in our argument of why their religion should be fucked:

One is, your religion has nothing to do with what should or shouldn't be against the law in a secular nation. If you want to live in a theocracy go ahead and move to Saudi Arabia or the Vatican.

Second, I call bullshit that this is really about your religion, anyway. There are tons of things in the bible that you choose to ignore (like slavery or selling your daughter being just fine and dandy with your god) so why are you so hung up on this one? I know why, and it has nothing to do with your religion. It's because the thought of two dudes doing it grosses you out. (And let's face it, if only women were queer they would have been allowed to get married years ago, because even your most conservative born-again guy thinks two chicks getting it on is hot.) OK, maybe not all of you are grossed out by it. As we've learned from several militant "anti-gay" preacher-crusaders, some of you are turned on by it and it scares you.

But you know what? Just because gay guys can get married doesn't mean you have to have sex with guys. Or watch those guys have sex.

Hey, truth be told - and I'm sorry my gay friends - a couple of guys going at it kind of grosses me out, too. I thought maybe I was hipster enough in college and my years in Seattle in the 90s that maybe I could go gay or bi, but I just don't dig the fellas.

One night out at a bar in Seattle one of my gay pals planted a big old kiss on me, wet and sloppy with a tongue in my mouth. I acted all cool about it, but in the back of my head I was thinking, "Yuck! Gross! Ewww!" Just wasn't my thing, you know? It certainly affirmed that I'm straight, no question. (I later told said friend that I didn't enjoy it and he never tried to do it again, and we stayed friends. Just like I would do with a girl I was friends with but not attracted to.)

But just because I didn't dig it why would I try to stop him from sticking his tongue (or dick for that matter) down the throat of some guy who does? Why would I care? I was never in to black girls either - just never had any attraction to any - but that doesn't mean I should want to stop other white guys from hooking up with black women.

People have incredibly varied sexual and relationship preferences - an infinite amount, really - gay, straight and bi. They don't have to be in to the same thing as me for me to be OK for them to exists, or even be friends with them.

People are attracted to who they are attracted to, for reasons they only have to explain to themselves, and that's a beautiful thing. To try to keep them apart is such an asshole thing to do. It's as stupid as hating people for being left handed.

So fuck tolerance. As the bumper sticker I saw years ago said, "I don't tolerate differences, I celebrate them."

I think we need less tolerance in the world. Specifically, we need to stop tolerating people who use an over 2,000-year-old piece of fiction as an excuse for a pass on their fucked up bigotry.

I will never, not ever, tolerate them.

(Originally posted at Out Of Tune)

Media Manipulation

2010-08-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

Like most things that go "viral" on the internet these days, I usually see it after one of my friends post it on Facebook. I'm not sure if this video was one of these but several people that I know posted it to their Facebook pages and commented how wonderful it is and how they got the warm fuzzies from it.

It is over ten minutes long but you only have to see a little bit of it to know how the whole thing goes:

So yea, it is a ten-minute montage of soldiers surprising their families - some moms and wives, but mostly kids - who didn't know they were coming home. Accompanied by shitty, new-age yuppie music (Praan by Gary Schyman, which appears to be this year's favorite montage music much like Solsbury Hill was several years back) it was created with the sole purpose of puling at your heartstrings. And I suppose it works. But I had a different reaction.

I tend to pride myself on saying that I don't get offended by anything. Sure things annoy me, piss me off or make me think, "what the fuck...?" But I don't think I get offended in the same way that people who use that word, like those who were up in arms about Janet Jackson's booby (almost) being flashed on TV. But this video might be an exception.

I think this manipulative piece of shit is the definition of offensive.

Some of these clips look like home videos, but it appears a good majority of them are from media outlets, both national and local. And I know from seeing some of these clips before that these surprise coming homes at kids' schools were set up by the media themselves and were not just cameras tagging along.

So what we've got is media corporations setting up these choreographed surprises of a kid seeing their dad for the first time in probably months, and maybe even a year or more. For what purpose? Well, ratings to be sure is one reason. But even more disturbing is how this type of storyline is used to change the narrative of war to something warm, fuzzy and patriotic from what war really is about. It is not much different than the schlocky movies that came out of Hollywood during World War II. It wouldn't be surprising to find out that the Pentagon had a hand in setting some of these up just as they had involvement in those movies from the 1940s.

And this is what the media does. Rather than investigate what a war is about, why it is being fought and the brutality that is happening, we get heartwarming homecoming videos and a heroic president landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit. And yet the conservatives of this country continue to to push the bizarre charge of "liberal bas" in the media.

Another purpose of a video like this is to prop up the conservative charge that to criticize a war or the (Republican) President is to "spit" on the "troops" and, by extension, their children. But who is spitting on the children here?

I just don't understand how people can look at this and have good feeling about it.

How dare they use children this way? These kids are going through what is probably the most emotionally fragile time of their lives. One of their parents has been halfway around the world for a long time (even longer to a kid) fighting a war and there is a good chance they won't come back from it. When this parent does come home someone thinks it is a good idea to surprise them in front of news cameras, at their school surrounded by their classmates? Who's to say how that might affect a kid? Do the producers even consider that? Do the parents? The principals and teachers who let it happen in their schools?

Another issue, do they check to make sure this kid is not in a class with the child of a soldier who maybe came home in a box and that maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to do this in front of them?
I don't think they give a shit as long as they get their ratings and get across the narrative they are selling. Fuck the children.

If anyone suggested that they have cameras there when they tell a kid that mom or dad are not coming home because they were blown up, nobody would think that an appropriate thing to do.

This isn't either.

People shouldn't feel warm and fuzzy from looking at this video. They should be pissed and be reminded of why these homecomings are happening in the first place. Because the media is not doing the job it is supposed to be doing.

If they were then maybe we would be living in a world different from one where soldiers get ripped apart from their families because of stupid, pointless wars started by a retarded Texan for the financial benefit of his pals in the military-industrial complex.

Wishing You The Best

2010-06-28T05:27:00.000-07:00

I will try to keep this short and concise--unlike my other rants (which I've been told, at times aggressively, that they ramble for too long).

As Obama's poll numbers begin to plummet, as the "public" seems to lose confidence in this administration and its watered-down legislation like healthcare or financial reform, I hope and wish the American people realize the massive, inexorable corporate juggernaut under which we are all living, and its reach into our political system.

Until special interests are at the very least relegated to the political sidelines (the hope would be for lobbyists to be eliminated altogether--but dream on dreamer), there isn't much any administration will be able to do that will bring about urgent change. Couple with that, the media's adulation for the Right vs. Left partisanship rift, and we're basically at a stalemate, and will be for the rest of my life, I foresee.

Change is needed urgently. And while I realize that most everything in this country is implemented in baby steps, we have run out of time. Congress on both sides is dragging its feet, members incessantly protecting their jobs instead of trailblazing or implementing visionary legislation. When the mission of a politician is job security, we are doomed. That has flowed as the standard for many decades, but our time is up. As you can deduce, I am very much in favor of short term limits for everyone in government.

The Right vs. Left construct (being exploited and exacerbated by all media) is at the same time artificial as detrimental to progress. My wish is for disillusioned voters (like me) to realize that a perpetually-revolving door of administrations will not solve environmental or social issues. It will not "fix the economy." It will not create jobs. My wish is for all voters to realize that fundamental flaws and obstacles begin with Congress. In a way, we are aware of that: how else can the constant approval rate of Congress be so low? Yet the same characters show up for work decade after decade.

I write this on the heels of Robert Byrd's death earlier this morning. Byrd was the longest serving Senator in the United States Congress. He had been a stalwart in our government since January 3, 1959! Term limits and special interests reform must be addressed first, before anything of substance can be achieved in America.

Here's wishing us all the best; things ain't looking too rosy at the moment.

You Lie!

2010-06-15T04:27:00.000-07:00

The hell with Joe Wilson and his attention-grabbing antics during Obama's healthcare speech last September, this is me lobbing the accusation at the White House, regarding the present hemming and hawing on withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan.

Seems like the stalemate that has been predicted by virtually everyone with a functioning brain who has studied history, has crystallized tensions within the government over the viability of President Obama's plan to turn around the country and begin pulling out by July 2011.

From the New York Times: For now, the White House has decided to wait until a review, already scheduled for December, to assess whether the target date can still work. But officials are emphasizing that the July 2011 withdrawal start will be based on conditions in the country, and that the president has yet to decide how quickly troops will be pulled out.

Even if some troops do begin coming home then, the officials said that it may be a small number at first. Given that he has tripled the overall force since taking office, Mr. Obama could still end his term with more forces in Afghanistan than when he began it.

“Things are not looking good,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a regional specialist at the Brookings Institution who helped formulate the administration’s first Afghan strategy in early 2009. “There’s not much sign of the turnaround that people were hoping for.”

Add to the clusterfuck that is Afghanistan the recent news that the war has surpassed the longevity of the clusterfuck that was Vietnam, and...

...but wait. Hold the horses and the carts brothers. Seems the United States has "suddenly" discovered a veritable treasure of nearly $1 trillion of un-tapped mineral deposits in the land of poppies and public stonings in soccer stadiums. We can't possibly leave now, right? Not with all that booty of iron, copper, gold, and lithium (your iPods/iPhones/iPads/iEyes are made from this sought-after alkali) waiting to be extracted.

This is complete and utter rubbish, and I expect a hell of a lot more from this administration, but time and time again it's disappointed beyond belief and in this particular case it's acting much like its predecessor. Knowledge of this "suddenly-discovered" treasure chest by the U.S. military has been floating around concretely since the Soviets stuck their fat Commie fingers into Afghanistan in the late 70s. You see, it wasn't just an ideological conversion the boys in the Politburo were after; the old hags knew very well what laid buried beneath that dusty, crusty (and aptly-named) lithosphere.

Despite the staggering news yesterday that the vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was just recently discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists and that the Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, there is published evidence that the government has known about this for at least three years.

A 2007 United States geological report indicated that Afghanistan may very well be the "Saudi Arabia of lithium," reported the New York Times.

But, as a (sometimes disputed) literate, interested person in our long, convoluted history and subversive political and military meddling into Afghanistan, I call bullshit even on that timeline. If the Soviets knew about this booty in the late 70s, you better goddamn well believe Langley and the NSA were on top of this.

And so it goes. Orwell's prophetic words from 1948 ring true at almost every step, throughout almost every decade. War is indeed peace.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter III of "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" by Emmanuel Goldstein, the book that Winston Smith reads in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" before being arrested. If someone wants to know where the current idea of a never ending war (in this case against terrorism) comes from, the answer is here: a lucid analysis of the function of war and why war (and terrorism) will forever be with us unless we deal with and dispose of state and super-state power once for all.

All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different.

I Am Part Of The Problem

2010-06-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

When it comes to the environment I really do go out of my way to be good to the earth, for someone who lives in the modern world. I take cloth bags with me to the grocery store, I don't put my produce in those plastic produce bags (I never understand why anyone does, and I've seen people put a single apple in a bag. What the fuck?!!?), I buy organic local as much as I can, I look for bulk bins so I can avoid small plastic bags. The downtown farmers market has a bin of black beans from a farm within 100 miles and I can scoop them right in to a paper bag, thus avoiding both plastic bags and tin cans while buying a product from nearby instead of from California or Mexico.

I also get to the store by foot or public transportation, how I get around in my daily life. I put my kid in the stroller, throw my bags underneath and come home lugging sometimes three full bags of groceries. I haven't owned a car in 18 years and I'm really proud of that fact. Yes, my life would be easier with one, and there are days when I'm going home with heavy groceries, pushing the stroller and getting rained on that I really question that choice. But I'm glad I do it. The world would be a better place with a lot less cars in it.

We, my wife and I, even spend a little more money to use an environmentally-friendly diaper system that involves reusable pants and liners stuffed with biodegradable inserts that collect all the pee and poop. No plastic goes in to the landfills from our diapers. We also use cornstarch garbage bags to limit the amount of plastic we throw out so we can avoid adding to the continent made of plastic swirling around in the Pacific.

And I recycle like crazy.

But there is a good chance that all of this good I try to do for the earth is negated by how much I travel. See, even though I really can't stand to fly I do it a lot. And you want to talk about how many pounds of carbon per passenger mile a jetliner puts out? Ooh boy, no other mode of transportation even comes close. And it puts the stuff a hell of a lot farther up in the atmosphere, as to maximize the damage.

And in the next four months alone I will be taking at least four round trip flights. All from Chicago; two to the East Coast, one to the West Coast and one to Europe. That doesn't even get us to the holidays so who knows how many I might have by the end of the year? And we already know we are going to France next summer.

I certainly do well once I'm in my destination. I'm a master at getting around public transportation around the world. It is very rare that I need to rent a car. It is just the getting there that I'm helping to pump the air full of CO2. Granted, I'm better than someone who drives an SUV in their everyday life and also travels as much as me. But still.

I love to travel. I love it more than I love doing just about anything else. I talk to other people that like to travel and they always mention that, even though they love traveling so much, they are always happy to get home. Not me. Whenever I'm in line at U.S. Immigration after getting off a plane form overseas I'm always thinking to myself, "Fuck, I'm home."

I certainly would fly less if given the chance. I think a lot of people would. If they could get a real high speed train going between Chicago and New York, ones that can go 200+ mph like ones in Europe, that trip could take as little as six hours or less. Even if it got cut to eight hours I would choose that over the plane. But when it takes an overnight 18-hour trip it is hard to pull off when a person has only a certain amount of time. If it wasn't for our laughable vacation time in America it might be possible. My wife gets four weeks, which everyone considers a lot, but would be a reason to go on strike in many European countries.

A train that could go that fast could put air routes between many cities, like Chicago-NYC, out of business. And the environmental impact difference would be amazing. Especially if those trains ran on renewable electricity. If I could get around my own country on just trains and only have to fly when going overseas I would feel a lot better about it.

But for now I know not what to do. I have an insatiable and incurable wanderlust. (To the point where it can drive my wife mad. I started talking to her the other night about thinking where we wanted to move next. This is after we just moved less than ten months ago for her to start a new job. I'm pretty sure she wanted to smack me in the head.) I want to see as much of the world as I can before I die.

I can't imagine giving up travel, even though I know the environmental toll. It would kill me.

I'd like to think I'm better than that asshole driving around Manhattan, the place with the best public transit in the country, in an SUV. But maybe I'm not, after all?

Gaza, Israel, etc. Follow Up

2010-06-14T11:14:00.000-07:00

Great essay by Rich Cohen in this morning's Salon selections, that I believe serves as a great continuation of the discussion established by Deni last week.

I don't know enough if the history of the region to say whether or not the solutions offered by Cohen have any merit, but the introspection and tailored writing are most welcome.

Israel, Gaza and "Anti-Semitism"

2010-06-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

Before I begin this post I should make the disclaimer very clear. While it is true that all posts here at SEI represent the opinions of the individual person who writes it, and are not necessarily representative of all SEI bloggers' opinions (though generally they probably usually do), this one more than any other probably needs this disclaimer. So:

The following post represents the opinions of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of all members of the SEI team.

---------------------------------------------------------

I hate the conflict in the Middle East. Drives me insane and sometimes I think it will give me an ulcer. There are times that just thinking about it, and wishing so hard it could be solved, has been the cause of some of my panic attacks. It is just tragic. Such senseless violence, destruction and misery.

The other thing that frustrates me so much after a major incident involving Israeli forces happens is that many of my American Jewish friends - usually some of the most liberal, fair-minded and compassionate people I have in my life - completely lose their minds and become crazy right-wing militant propagandists. It is like they all find their inner Sarah Palin.

As soon as the most recent event happened, the attack on the aid ships heading to Gaza by Israeli commandos, many of my Jewish Facebook friends - and most are actual friends, not just people I used to kind of know that friended me on Facebook - started posting links to sites that purported to justify Israel's actions and to expose the "truth" about what "really happened" on the boats.

Some of these (and most of my Jew friends linked to the same stuff) were lists of "facts" that supposedly proved Israel acted honorably and were fully justified to do what they did. Another is the now popular video shows the "truth" about what happened, that the activists on the boat started it and the Israeli commandos were only defending themselves.

These lists that were linked to were nothing more than claims made by pro-Israeli organizations that did not resemble anything close to journalism or objectivity. They were merely propaganda with nothing to back them up. I won't go through all the claims I read but there were a couple that stood out to me. One was the claim that Israel acted in accordance with international law when it boarded the Turkish-flagged ships. Nothing from international laws or treaties is cited to bolster this claim. But it seems to be a very weak claim on the surface seeing as how these ships were taken by Israeli forces in international waters. In fact, what they did can be called an act of war against Turkey. It is also piracy.

Another is that Israel offered to let the boats dock in one of their ports and they would transfer the supplies to Gaza once they were inspected for "weapons." This is basically a diversion from the real issue since the whole point of this exercise was to highlight the fact that Israel has banned many items that don't even come close to resembling weapons components (cumin?!?!) and that the blockade seems to be more about making life in Gaza as miserable as possible and not about security.

And that video. This thing is such an obvious piece of slanted propaganda that the very idea that my Jewish friends would post it is so disheartening and sad. First off, whoever made this video claimed it was footage that was censored by the media. What a bunch of nonsense. It wasn't censored at all and has been all over the media. Then the video itself. It is two minutes long, with the first ten seconds being title screens and it goes back to title screens at 1:40. So the whole video is a minute-and-a-half long and much of it is footage that repeats. It is also full of incendiary captions, telling the viewer what they should think about this. So what you have is the briefest of video snippets, heavily edited to convey a particular point of view and heavily captioned to support that viewpoint.

Now this video purports show proof that backs up their claim that the activists started it and the Israeli forces were just defending themselves. This proof is mainly that as the commandos were landing on the boat after repelling from the helicopters they were quickly beaten with what appear to be metal rods. But, these ships were being boarded by force by heavily armed people in international water (and many of the people on the boats claim they were being fired upon prior to forces landing on the decks). Hitting invaders as they land on your boat is self defense by even the strictest of definitions. If you don't see that then you don't understand what self defense means.

It is a piece of propaganda as bad as the five-second video made by Terri Schaivo's religious fanatic parents to try to prove that their daughter was aware of her surroundings. You remember the one, with the brain damaged Schaivo seeming to be tracking a balloon with her eyes that the media showed over and over during the moronic fight to keep her alive. What the unedited version of that video showed, of course, was that her eyes moved randomly all the time and for those couple of seconds they happen to coincidently go the direction her parents were moving the balloon. She was never following the balloon, but that didn't matter to the people with an agenda who wanted to believe it.

Videos of this nature should never be trusted no matter which makes it. A similar video made by Palestinian activists with their bent would be criticized immediately by the same people promoting this video, and rightly so. So why do they so easily buy in to this one? And as Andrew Sullivan pointed out last week on Bill Maher's show, Israel has only put out these short snippets of video even though they have so much more that they will not allow anyone to see. They also confiscated all video from the reporters on the boats.

Posting something that supports what you want to be the truth without even taking a minute to really consider the validity of it is incredibly reckless and dangerous. It lessens our discourse to who can produce the best propaganda, and away from wanting to find out the actual truth.

I have also seen posted that the soldiers were justified because some of the activists were chanting something like "death to the Jews" while they fought with them. What the hell does that have to do with anything? We now get to shoot people in the head for yelling nasty, vile, hate-filled crap? Well then, would you excuse me for a second? I have to run down to the gun store then to the FOX News studio.

The most ridiculous link I've seen posted - again, by usually sane, liberal-leaning, Barrack Obama-supporting, Tea Bagger-hating Jews - is an incendiary and pointless op-ed (with its dumb allusions to the Holocaust, pointing out there are 6 million Jews in Israel and using the phrase final solution) written by Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer is probably by far the most insane, right-wing, bigoted, lying waste of oxygen of anyone that works for a mainstream newspaper. I would say in the whole of media but for the fact that Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck exists.

Krauthammer said on TV last week that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Seriously, he really did. About a place where more than 80% of the population is dependent on USAid for food and a large number of their buildings are piles of rubble.

I didn't respond to any of these posts on Facebook, until I saw one of the links to the Krauthammer article and then I just pointed out that when one posts a link to someone like that to backup their argument they lose all credibility.

I was, as expected, challenged hard. Not as much by the person who posted the article as by one of their friends. I was told I didn't know what I was talking about because I must never have been to Israel (what the hell does that have to with anything?) and I obviously wasn't paying attention, which just doesn't make any sense as an argument.

And then it happened. Very quickly in fact, even quicker than it normally happens in one of these arguments. I was accused of being an anti-Semite.

Not in a direct way, of course. In a more passive-aggressive way that is all the rage these days. It was suggested that I "guess it's OK if Jews are getting killed." Oh brother. I responded one more time, just pointing out that just because someone doesn't back Israel on every action they take that doesn't make them a Jew-hater who would like to see them all dead. I did it in a very sarcastic way and I also called him a putz for making the suggestion. I didn't look at any more responses after that as it was obvious this person was not interested in an actual debate or exchange of points of view, just in shouting me down and calling me a bigot for not being in lockstep with the idea that everything Israel does is justified and for their security.

Anybody who knows me knows I'm not a Jew hater and the accusation is laughable, which is why I just always stop having the conversation at that point. There is no reason to continue to have a conversation with someone so divorced from reality. No, I dislike all religion equally and Judaism gets no free pass. Ok that may not be exactly true, I probably tend to be annoyed more by Catholicism, Mormonism and Evangelical Pentecostals then most other religions. But that's mostly because of the country I live in. I imagine if I were an Indian I would have stronger negative feelings about Sikhs and Hindus.

Point is, I don't have a dog in this fight. I think that rather than accusing me of bigotry, pro-Israeli American Jews should just maybe for a minute consider that I might be coming at this issue with a better sense of reason, logic, fairness and a hell of a lot less bias than them. I have no religious blinders affecting my opinions. Rather than my possibly being an anti-Semite, isn't it more likely that a Pro-Israeli Jewish person has a harder time seeing the situation from an objective viewpoint? I believe in human rights, a sense of fairness, freedom and peace. I am not interested in there being a "winner" in this madness.

Every American politician must always, at some point, profess the belief in Israel's "right to exist" and critics of Israel are frequently and strongly challenge with the question of whether or not we support that right. It is a way to devolve the issue down to a black and white, with no gray allowed. It is the same as George W. Bush's "with us or against us" mantra; a way to back the critic in to a corner with a lose-lose question. (Bush's other favorite political game, the straw man argument, commonly comes in to play by Israeli supporters as well. "Critics of Israel think it is OK for Hamas to fire rockets at us and we shouldn't defend ourselves," is one example, as if anyone really ever said that. It is so similar to Bush accusing critics of the Iraq war of thinking that "Iraqi's don't deserve freedom like everybody else." Such bullcrap. But I digress.)

But that is not really the question, not the entire one anyway. What they really mean when use they ask that question is, "Do you believe in Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state?

And my answer to that is no.

Ok, now pull your jaw off the floor. Yes I said it. But what does that have to do with not liking Jews? I also don't believe that Afghanistan or Iraq should be Islamic states, that Tibet or Cambodia should be Buddhist states, that England should be a Protestant state and Ireland a Catholic state. I think the Vatican should be reabsorbed back in to Italy and the pope should be kicked out of his castle on to his child rapist-protecting ass.

Theocracies are bad. Period. I criticize my own country a lot, but the beautiful thing about America was that its very foundation was that of a religion-free government (despite the revisionist history that many Christians in this country promote). The founding may have had a ton of other flaws (like slavery) but The United States' greatest achievement from the very beginning was being the first non-theocratic government in the history of the world. It cannot be understated how much better the world is because of that. Modern science thrives because of it and Europe was saved from itself by following our lead, and now even surpassing us as we regress to the likes of leaders like Bush and Romney.

People defend Israel as the only democracy in the middle East, but that is really disingenuous. So much of Israeli policy is influenced by orthodox religious groups. n fact, there are ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel who are funded by the government to just study religion all day instead of getting an actual job to contribute to society and they are also excused from the military duty that is required of every other Israeli citizen. That is an unthinkable policy in a democracy. It is the kind of thing that goes on in places like Saudi Arabia. There are even laws to force business owners, even the secular Israeli, to make accommodations for people with extremely crazy religious beliefs about not pressing buttons on the Sabbath. This means that on a Saturday in Israel you can get in to an elevator and need to go to the 20th floor, you'll be on there by yourself but the damn thing stops on every damn floor just in case there is an ultra-orthodox lunatic who needs to use it and he can't press the buttons.

The entire West Bank settlement policy is based on a group of religious fanatics who claim their right to that land because the bible said so. That is as delusional as an Islamic terrorist who thinks he will get 40 virgins in heaven for blowing himself up in a school or a Catholic who believes the pope ins infallible. It is as crazy as the evangelical "friends of Israel" who are helping to get all the Jews on Earth to the holy land because they believe it will bring about the Rapture and the Second Coming of Christ, along with the destruction and sending to Hell of all the Jews. (Really Jews, those are your "friends" and I'm the anti-Semite?)

None of this seems like democracy to me. Neither does the wholesale oppression of an ethnic group. Several years ago I was having a conversation with a Jewish actress that I was doing a show with at the time and we got on to the topic of Israel. At one point she said to me, "How can I, as a Jew, support a country that requires people in a minority group to carry papers with them at all times that must be presented on demand?"

Ironically enough, bigotry knows no bias. Bigots come in all shapes, sizes, races and religions. Show me a an ultra-orthodox Jew (Hasidic, Haredi, etc.) and I'll show you someone who is as hate-filled to other races and as convinced of his peoples' superiority over other human beings as any dumb cracker white supremacist, Holocaust-denier or Islamic extremist out there.

They have a champion in the hate monger Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party, who profess to seek peace with the Palestinians. What they really seek, and it seems obvious to any objective observer, is to push the Arabs out of the West Bank and to basically starve them to death in the Gaza Strip. For anyone to believe the illegal blockade of Gaza is about security is just foolish. All you need to do is look at the list of things they are not allowing in to Gaza to see that's not true. Banned items include coriander, potato chips, fabric for clothing, fresh meat, wood and fishing rods. Lord knows what kind of havoc Hamas could wreak if they could just get their hands on some coriander. They could over spice some falafel and bring down the entire region! (See the entire list here. Compiled by an Israeli human rights group, founded and run by Jews)

Palestinians are forced off their land in East Jerusalem, among other places, they have no freedom of movement in a place where their family has lived for dozens of generations , whole roads are built that only Jews are allowed to use (often through land belonging to Palestinians). Palestinians that live in Israel, the so-called Israeli Arabs, are segregated and harassed. I have been told stories by an Israeli friend of mine's parents, who were raised there, about things like coming to the defense of an Arab shopkeeper being harassed by the police for having his business open on a Jewish holiday. They are also being expelled from Israel for any excuse that can be thought up, due to the fact that they are breeding faster than Jews. And Gaza has been turned in to the world's largest refugee camp. Which has not made Israel any more secure and has bred more militancy.

A country that practices Apartheid is no democracy. And it won't survive that way.
But instead of examining itself and its actions, Israel calls any of its critics Jew-haters and bigots. Jimmy Carter, a man who worked to bring peace to Israel and one of its longtime enemies, was treated viciously for daring to question Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, especially by American Jews. One of them being Alan Dershowitz , a man who thinks we should legalize torture.

American Jews who get out of line are also treated horribly. Tony Kushner has been unfairly attacked repeatedly and even seen protestors show up when receiving an award from a predominantly Jewish university. Noam Chomsky is denied entry in to Israel to attend a lecture he's been invited to give. I've heard both men referred to as "self-hating Jews."

The anti-Semite tag has been used too often as a way to shut down debate. Too often it is allowed to work. I say no more.

Those of us who believe in reason, logic and objectivity should not allow ourselves to be beaten back by those who base their arguments on a 3000-year-old piece of fiction that tells them they are the "chosen people." A book that, it should be pointed out, also says it is OK to own slaves and sell your daughter. A message delivered from a god by the guy who supposedly parted a sea on his way to delivering the Jews to Israel.

I have been accused of judging Israel by a double standard, Israel supporters often pointing out how Hamas and Hezbollah act. Is that really what you want the frame of reference to be? Two terrorist organizations? Yes, I do expect a democratic government to act better than terrorists. Israel holds itself up as the moral superior player in the Middle East. So yes, they are going to be held to a higher standard because they claim to have a higher standard.

At the end of the day, through all of the propaganda being thrown out from all sides of this debate and all of the incendiary language and accusations, there are two basic truths that my pro-Israeli Jewish friends ignore. Israel has not released all of the video footage and made it available for the international media to inspect it to try to hash out what really happened aboard those ships. And Netanyahu has said he will not allow an independent, third-party investigation. Israel can investigate itself, thank you very much.

So I ask all pro-Israeli people this: If Israel acted honorably and within its rights to defend itself, why are they acting like a country with something to hide? An innocent government welcomes an full and open process.

Believing in that doesn't make me a Jew hater.

---------------------------------------------------------

SEI welcomes all comments at all times from all viewpoints. But those who insist on accusations of anti-Semitism (unless you can back it up with evidence and keep it civil) or "wanting to see Jews get killed" will be ignored and your comments will be deleted.

The Unfortunate Reply to "Don't Blame Obama For Bush's Mistakes"

2010-06-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

I was never all that comfortable with the Facebook meme mentioned above. I understand that the majority of the people who espoused the meme were specifically talking about things like the economy tanking, unemployment, etc.

I also suspected that, for at least a few of those adherents, that sentence became something of a mantra to ward off any and all criticisms of Obama's administration, which...well, no; to put it simply.

You wanna know why? Here's why.

Helen Thomas Must Die

2010-06-07T08:57:00.001-07:00

Author's Note: I originally intended to write this piece as a criticism of the older generation's perceived entitlement to spew out racist or sexist language (my parents often like to loudly express their obtuse, horrifying opinions to the public at large). Upon re-reading this, I realise that it unfairly slams one of the last, great journalists left out there. During my brief stint as a newswriter for the U.S. Info. Agency/VOA in the early 90s, I got a chance to be in the White House Press room for a handful of Q&A sessions, with Helen leading them off. As a newbie to the field of journalism, I stood literally in the last row, just inside the door, behind all the rag tag camera guys--themselves relegated to the back of the rack. I often was quite jealous of Helen's front row seat, literally three feet or so away from Prez Clin-tohn. And no, I don't really want her to die...I just think she should have used her head a little better and re-worded her statement. After all those decades of playing the game, she made the wrong move. I suppose if one is 90 years of age, one slips every now and again. Helen Thomas was a life long Liberal and many of us will always remember her contribution to the field of journalism. It's quite sad the way her career (at least with Hearst) had to end. Over the last few years, however, she had become an opinion writer for Hearst, and I'm not so sure an op-ed columnist ought to have a front seat at the show--but if anyone ever deserved it, Helen was it.

Even if she hadn't bollixed herself into a tight corner last week by loudly declaring that all Jews in Israel "should leave Palestine and go back to Poland and Germany," I would have called for and endorsed Helen Thomas' overdue demise. I mean just look at her. Hasn't she been around for long enough? Give somebody else a chance, madame. Should there not be term limits on that badass, front row seat in the White House press room?

What in hell is that thing hunched over and making gurgling noises every day? Christ, if I didn't know any better, I'd have thought it was this nasty thing from Genesis' "Land of Confusion." How's that for an earworm. But I digress.

Ms. Thomas later apologized for the incendiary remarks, saying they did not properly reflect her position on the conflict of the Middle East (wtf? How is that an un-clear position?) but the criticism has been scorching ever since. Late Friday night, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer called for Thomas' firing from Hearst news service, where she serves as a columnist. And yesterday, Nine Speakers, Inc. -- Thomas's long time speaking agency -- announced they've dropped her (inquiring minds are anxiously awaiting to see if they change their name accordingly to Eight Speakers, Inc.) from their line up.

To me, this sort of nonsense is de rigueur for the majority of old people--famous or not--who obtusely believe that their prolonged longevity on this planet, gives them Carte Blanche to disseminate their racist, sexist vitriol that, supposedly, had been festering inside for decades--more than likely checked by the semi-lucid realization that one could not really function in civilized society spewing daily Nazi mantra.

But apparently once one becomes a septuagenarian all bets are off. There seems to be a "Common Sense" switch up there in ye olde grey matter that magically gets turned off. Incredibly, that coincides with the involuntary all-out geyser of shit that begins to spew from the mouth around the same age.

"Respect your elders" has always been a laughable concept to me. In my life, most of the elders I've encountered have thought along the lines of Ms. Thomas. In their philosophy, they have shown themselves to be brutish, conservative, bigoted, sexist, fear-laden insects with skewed values and outdated familial ideas. Respecting these people or giving them credence or a voice is detrimental to a civilized society. This is the generation that holds back progress; that clings tightly to outdated ideas, concepts, and way of life.

Personally, I root for the quick demise of such parasitic vermin. And foot-in-mouth, career-ending statements like the recent one from Ms. Thomas only make me rejoice at the consequences.

Hopefully there are consequences.

BREAKING (as of 12:22 pm EST): Helen Thomas announced today that she is retiring, effective immediately, according to a statement from Hearst Newspapers.

Engineering Degrees

2010-06-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

I was reading something in the last couple of days about how this administration is going to support more transportation funding for things like mass transit, biking and walking. Whatever it is I was reading included a derisive quote from George Will about how Obama is practicing social engineering and trying to take away Americans' freedom to drive wherever they want.

I can't remember where I saw this and an internet search didn't turn up the exact quotes I read. I did find a George Will article from last year that basically says the same thing, where he calls Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood the "Secretary of Behavior Modification." (There is a fairly decent rebuttal to this article here)

This yet another one of those silly conservative talking points to try to disparage a progressive policy by giving some creepy-scary sounding label. Usually these labels aren't really anything bad, but conservatives use them in bad ways enough to give them a negative connotation whenever people hear them. They've done this, with much success unfortunately, a lot in the past; creating vocabulary bogeymen out of liberal, secular humanism, progressive, Socialism..... The list goes on and on.

And of course you can easily make social engineering sound bad, it is something the Nazis did! (Gasp!)

Of course it is social engineering. That doesn't make it a bad thing. Conservatives don't have a problem with other forms of social engineering, just progressive versions of it. Playing the Stars and Stripes before baseball games is some serious social engineering. And when the right-wing religious types accuse us of social engineering..... really? Can you even think of anything in the history of mankind that is a better example than religion.

Desegregating the schools was a heck of a job in social engineering and behavior modification. Does any non-crazy conservative argue that was a bad thing?

Fact is, social engineering has been a part of civilization since there has been civilization. It has certainly always been a part of any government that has ever existed, both good and bad.

Will doesn't seem to have a problem with the social engineering that resulted from the highway and freeway systems built by our government. And that is the kind that conservatives are supposed to hate - a big, bloated government program comes in, gives direct and fully subsidized competition to private industry (passenger railroads) and drives them out of business. That was OK?

Take away Americans' freedom to drive? Are you fucking kidding me? Nothing that has been proposed comes even close to that, much as I personally would love to see that. What we are looking for is some equality in how the money is divided up among transportation modes. 'Cause you know what? 90% going to roads and only 10% going to all other options (rail, bike, walk, etc) combined just isn't very fair. What's more, polls show that this is exactly the kind of thing that a vast majority the Americans that George Will professes his love for say they want. Isn't choice a freedom?

And what about our freedoms, those of us that live in the urban areas that are the most affected by congestion? Don't our rights to clean air, bikable and walkable cities, open space and the ability to get around without a car matter? I assume that George Will lives in the suburbs, because there is no way that guy can be a city dweller. A lot of us who live in the city feel like we have a right to not have our homes invaded by bumper to bumper cars from the suburbs every day, ruining both our air quality and the general livability of our neighborhoods. We should also have the right to have sidewalks that are wide enough for the amount of people that use them instead of the narrow slivers of concrete next to 4-6 lanes of traffic whizzing by that we so commonly have to deal with.

The American people also have the right to have the freedom to move about the country without being tied to car ownership. People unable to drive, the blind for example, should also have the freedom to get around. Like I said, the American people overwhelmingly support these ideas. It's why when they build a new mass transit system that people flock to use it, even in cities where critics claim that no one will ever take it. Light rail systems in Charlotte and Dallas (yes, Dallas!) are years ahead of their ridership predictions for a reason. Yes, there are going to be people, like George Will, that will cling to their love of the car and pooh-pooh public transit. I call them assholes. But they might best be described by one of the accusations that gets thrown at us on the left all the time. Elitists.

I believe we also have the right, and responsibility, to not leave our children and grandchildren a country that is completely paved over. The is the ultimate result if the automobile continues to be the main transportation option. There needs to be a place to put all those cars as the population grows and grows.

The article that George Will wrote last year included taking potshots at Portland, OR for their anti-sprawl regulations and pro-biking and mass transit policies.

That just goes to show what a different planet George Will lives on from me.

All other things being equal (basically meaning you could have your job wherever you wanted) would you really make the case that Houston, L.A., or Phoenix would preferable to Portland?

If Portland is an example of social engineering and those other cities an example of whatever the opposite of that is, I'll take social engineering policies every time.

Love Story - La Fin

2010-06-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

It popped up on the "news" yesterday that Al and Tipper "turn that potty-mouthed music down" Gore have split up after 40 years of marriage.

On behalf of all of us here at SEI, let me extend a heartfelt "Who gives a fuck?" to the Gores.

I would also like to know why this "story" is at the top of the Google News page and why I have to keep seeing this headline every time I open my Yahoo mail.

Real shit is happening in the world, that a legitimate news organization would have even one goddamn reporter or even an unpaid intern devoting any time at all to this nonsense is just ridiculous.

That is all.

For now.

BP = Big Phuck-UP

2010-05-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

I've kept quiet about the role of the White House in this calamity some still insist on calling a "spill." But on the heels of the failure of "Top Kill" this past Saturday, I feel I should chime in.

I think, unfortunately, this situation, coupled with a slow economic recovery, a severely watered down healthcare bill, and incessant Congressional spending on Afghanistan while constantly slashing education, infrastructure, arts, and science budgets will make Barack Obama a one-term president. The frustrating thing is that his successor will step in and do nothing more, or nothing better. I am thoroughly convinced that with our Congress operating in the way it has, nothing of substance can get done. So all the perturbed proclamations from either side (Tea Baggers/Partiers whatever they're called) don't send waves of panic in me anymore. The Elephants' trunks will be just as gridlocked and tied as the Donkeys' tails have been. Until we get rid of the entrenched nepotism and corruption in Congress, we shall expect nothing to be passed.

Watching the millions of gallons being let loose into the Gulf has enraged me beyond belief. I dream about this catastrophe almost every night. I am obsessed with it. Like millions of citizens, I want to hold the White House responsible or--rather--yell at it for seemingly not doing anything. But then the more rational side takes over and I realize that the White House doesn't know what to do.

If BP has no idea, how can the White House? And even if it did, we are flat broke. There is no money to do anything...other than allocate borrowed Chinese funds to the perpetual disaster that is Afghanistan. And so, while I'd love to shake my fist and yell obscenities at the gates of the West Wing (and believe me, I have done that before, at the risk of looking like a fool or being arrested), realistically there is nothing they can do about this but stand by like all of us suckers and wait for August when both relief wells will have been completed and the gusher finally tamed.

The repercussions of this atrocity will be felt for generations. I literally foresee two to three decades of environmental affect from this unimaginable catastrophe. What no one seems to be underscoring is that, as of tomorrow, we're into "hurricane season." And so the drilling of the relief wells that is scheduled to be completed by August can be potentially shut down a few times. This, coupled with NOAA's forecast of an active storm season, is a recipe for...I've run out of synonyms for "disaster."

No one knows what to do in the short term. While the administration will be forever tainted with this as "Obama's Katrina," in reality it is as clueless as BP. Besides, it's not quite fair to invoke Katrina here--the White House did not have a 5-day warning on this catastrophic explosion. Mark my words (which don't really carry any gravitas, but still): we will all be standing by, holding our bollocks for the next 6 weeks, if we're lucky, while everything in and around the Gulf of Mexico begins to die off.

The oil geyser catastrophe is a horrendous crime upon both humanity and environment, assigned to be solved by its perpetrators.

TheWar of Northern Aggression

2010-05-25T05:36:00.000-07:00

via Google images

All is not peachy and sunny as these North Korean babes (via Beloved Leader Kim Jong-il) would have you believe. Take a nice, good look at this...and now imagine hundreds of thousands of people being starved by the government... literally dying on the streets, on railroad tracks, in concrete, government housing.

What has been happening the last few days between North and South Korea has been personally un-nerving. Mainly because this writer, having been born and having lived under a similar closed society regime for eleven years, does not believe the international community has a solution for North Korea.

On Monday, South Korea cut off trade with North Korea, denied North Korean merchant ships use of its sea lanes and called on the United Nations to once again censure the North for what it called the deliberate sinking of one of its warships by a North Korean submarine. Forty-six sailors were killed in the March 26 sinking.

Past experience with sanctions has shown that only innocent people are affected by embargoes. North Korea's citizens have been starving in the streets for decades. And the world has yet to find solutions for dealing with closed society systems; particularly ones with nuclear capabilities (Iran--and make no mistake, Iran is a closed, totalitarian regime--if you believe otherwise you are naivé)

South Korea formally designated North Korea as its “principal enemy” in 1994 after the North threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire” during the height of an international crisis over its development of nuclear weapons. But that designation was dropped in 2004, the same year the two Koreas also suspended propaganda broadcasts across their border.

The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, whose government has threatened an “all-out war” against any sanctions, has ordered his military and reserve forces to be ready for war, said an organization of North Korean defectors on Tuesday. Last Thursday, when the South formally accused the North of torpedoing its ship, a senior North Korean general relayed Mr. Kim’s order through a broadcast to intercoms fitted at most North Korean homes, said North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, a Web site based in Seoul and run by North Korean defectors.

Moreover, concerns over this grave situation have shaken global markets--particularly the super-fragile European economy.

“The North Korean situation is also putting pressure on stocks,” said Philippe Gijsels, head of research at BNP Paribas Fortis Global Markets in Brussels. “In a normal environment, this wouldn’t be having such a big impact — they talk about going to war every few months, it seems. But markets are quite nervous and will take any excuse to sell off.” (NY Times)

At this point, no one has any idea why the DPRK sank the South Korean ship in March. No one has much of an idea of anything that's happening inside that country.

Secretary of state Hillary Clinton wrapped up two days of high-level meetings with the Chinese in Beijing on Tuesday with no progress on winning China’s backing for international measures against North Korea.

So where we stand is basically on the sidelines, with no viable solutions. The situation is grave; North Korea pops up, it seems, every few months with bizarre behaviour and aggressive tactics. Time and time again the international community has shown it has no answers other than imposing embargoes on an already starving population.

My father, a simple peasant at heart, once told me: often times people don't understand or thoroughly process anything but extreme violence and oppression brought down upon them. The brutes of North Korea ought to be exterminated with nuclear weapons. And with extreme prejudice (he likes to quote from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, whenever possible).

While I'm far from endorsing that hawk-ish proclamation, I can't help to wonder what exactly it would take to tame an insane cult leader.

The Mad Doctor

2010-05-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

Dr. Rand Paul, eye surgeon and son of presidential candidate Ron Paul, has just won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat in Kentucky being vacated by Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Bunning.

Of all of the primaries happening this election season, Rand Paul's got maybe the most national exposure, being that he was the most prominent candidate from the self-labeled "tea party" movement. That is, he got a lot of the usual kind of attention that the mainstream national media give to politics, the silly soap opera and the "horse race" rather than actually discussing issues and substance.

So not until after Dr. Paul smokes his opponent in Tuesday's primary, and not until he asked about it by NPR's Robert Siegel and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, does some information come out about some really disturbing views he has about civil rights. This information was printed in an editorial by the Courier-Journal of Louisville almost a month ago. It was revealed that Dr. Paul believes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has some major flaws. Namely, he doesn't believe that a private business can be told they can't discriminate against someone due to their race, color, religion or national origin. Yes, really.

What should have been a major story about the radical views of a candidate leading in the polls was completely ignored by the media. The main storyline about Rand Paul to this point, by design of backers of the movement, is how his success is about the strength of the so-called tea party agenda. Everything else about his primary challenge was ignored.

Now Paul, being basically a Libertarian, believes this because he thinks the world is a better place with smaller government, not because he likes racism. He also has problems with the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Fair Housing Act. Dr. Paul thinks it is OK to refuse to sell your house to a black person because, hey it's your house, and that the government has no business in making the world more accessible for those with disabilities.

From the Courier-Journal (which was written after sitting down for lengthy interviews with the candidates):

For instance, he holds an unacceptable view of civil rights, saying that while the federal government can enforce integration of government jobs and facilities, private business people should be able to decide whether they want to serve black people, or gays, or any other minority group.

Of course since this story broke, the good doctor has done a major backpedaling, saying he fully supports the Civil Rights Act and doing the typical right-wing nut-job MO of blaming liberals for "distorting" his views. But make no mistake, what he really believes has been expressed many times in both interviews and his own writing, like a 2002 letter to a newspaper arguing against the Fair Housing Act.

Now, these views may or may not mean that Dr. Paul is a racist. But they most certainly do mean that he is a complete boob.

He says that the good part of the Civil Rights Act was ending "institutional" racism, by which I assume he means ridding the world of Jim Crow laws and desegregating the public schools. But if restaurant owners, private bus companies (like Greyhound) home sellers and a myriad of other private businesses were allowed to discriminate against people due to their race, what exactly does he think would have happened? I'll tell you. We would have restaurants all over the southern US where black people are not allowed to eat, blacks forced to sit in the back of Greyhound buses, whole neighborhoods where minorities are not allowed to live and an untold number of workplaces that don't hire anybody but white people.

That IS institutional racism.

And therein lies the problem with Libertarianism. (Full disclosure - I fucking hate Libertarians. Nothing more than extreme right-wing Republicans, except they are OK with smoking pot.)

Because they are such a niche (re: fringe) group, Libertarian types have basically been allowed to define themselves in the media without any real questioning by reporters. This is mostly because mainstream reporters are either too stupid or lazy to take on the task of defining what it would really mean to live in a Libertarian world. It is really easy to repeat over and over that they believe in "limited" government, but it is a lot harder to explain what that would actually do to our lives and back up those claims with real research and scholarship.

Maybe now that there is a prominent candidate that comes from this background and we actually know it in advance this time - unlike when we don't find out until after they are elected that they hold such extreme views - the press will start to ask the real questions of him.

Shouldn't we know what Dr. Paul specifically means when he says we should limit the amount of government in our lives? (Oddly enough, this limited government mantra does not extend as far as a woman's body, as Dr. Paul believes abortion should be outlawed even in cases of rape and incest. Or gay rights, he's also against allowing gays and lesbians the right to marry)

Types like Rand Paul claim if we allowed their limited government utopia to happen that people would all behave appropriately, with the power of the profit motive the only encouragement people need to do the right thing and treat others fairly.

To believe this is to have a complete and willful ignorance of human history.

His interview with Rachel Maddow (below) is fascinating, watching him try to make it a 1st Amendment issue and also trying to square what he believes with the beliefs of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Transparency Will Be Brought To You or How The Revolution Will Be Televised

2010-05-20T05:34:00.000-07:00

WikiLeaks is one of the increasingly shrinking reasons I love the Internets (is that good syntax? Whatever). If you are a patron of this site, you've no doubt heard of WikiLeaks last month when it released a U.S. military video of a helicopter attack on Iraqi journalists, graphic images that drew a worldwide audience, as well as outrage.

But don't try to figure out where or who WikiLeaks is. For an organization dedicated to whistleblowing, WikiLeaks keeps a tight lid on its own affairs. Its Web site doesn't list a street address or phone number, or the names of key officers. Officially, it has no employees, headquarters or even a P.O. box.

The site has provoked official and corporate anxiety for over three years, and according to its sources, the video released last month is just a warm-up. Newly leaked material -- including what WikiLeaks officials describe as an explosive video of civilian casualties in Afghanistan -- is being prepared for release, part of a growing catalog of formerly secret documents and recordings that exceeds a million records.

WikiLeaks is tapping new technology and a growing list of financial backers (nonprofit foundations, private donations) to move closer to what the group says it has long sought to become: a global foe of excessive government secrecy and an enabler of citizen activists, journalists and others who seek to challenge governments and corporations.

In a culture in which "journalism" is defined by outrageous hyperbole spewed incessantly by pretty and not-so-pretty talking heads on both Left and Right 24-hour newschannels, WikiLeaks is the long-awaited messiah.

According to an article in the Washington Post, WikiLeaks has pioneered an approach that capitalizes on its secretive nature. Lacking a home base or traditional infrastructure, it is almost entirely virtual, relying on servers and helpers in dozens of countries. It is accessible anywhere the Internet goes, yet it is relatively immune from pressure from censors, lawyers or local governments. Its founders say those who submit material to the site typically do so anonymously.

The goal, says Daniel Schmitt, one of WikiLeaks's five core directors, is to make the organization unstoppable.

And while that kind of proclamation or language borders closely on corporate or closed society ideology, I have to trust that it is an almost necessary mission statement for a whistleblowing organization. Fight fire with fire, in a sense.

WikiLeaks's tactics have irritated governments around the world, with some striking back. China has repeatedly sought to block the site, and corporations have filed lawsuits, all of them without success.

Also watching closely are mainstream news outlets. At a time when newspapers and broadcast organizations are shedding jobs, the arrival of a global leak machine untethered by traditional journalistic rules of attribution and balance is inciting intense interest as well as apprehension. (Washington Post)

Information on WikiLeaks is vetted with the help of a network of hundreds of expert volunteers with specialties ranging from law to handwriting analysis and video encryption. To limit the possibility of threats or legal intimidation, only two members are public about their roles: Schmitt, and co-founder, Australian journalist Julian Assange. They, along with the three other founding members, draw no salaries.

WikiLeaks officials say they want to empower traditional media outlets by increasing their reach and investigative firepower at a time when many newspapers and broadcasters are slashing budgets.

"We're not there to take journalists' jobs away," Schmitt said. "On the contrary, our goal is to make mainstream journalism cheaper. We enable them to do things that no single newspaper can do by itself." (Washington Post)

A New Season of War

2010-05-19T02:57:00.000-07:00

Saurabh Das/AP

Remember Afghanistan? Think hard. I know other, more important stories have taken over our attention lately: the gushing geyser of oil threatening the eco chain in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond, the pseudo civil war in Thailand, the European economy in the toilet, Rachel dating Jesse St. James of Vocal Adrenaline...

But guess what tovarich? Spring in Afghanistan doesn't just mean a fresh, new field of fiery red poppies to refine into opium and heroin. No suh, you crazy trainspotters. May means we're back in the business of war, wa-hoo! Unlike most Americans who have so moved on with this story, yours truly is obsessed with the "Central Asian Roundabout." Maybe it's because, as the namesake of You Know Who The Great who failed to annex Afghanistan to his collection of real estate, I feel the need to vindicate my brother-from-across-the-centuries and pick up the slack--pen, not sword, you understand. Hey baby what can I say... I'm a lover, not a fighter.

Or maybe it's because somwhereabouts the winter of '79 your not so humble opinion writer was hanging around a disgusting pensione in Rome, waiting for his entry visa into the United States, and befriended an old Soviet emigré who proceeded to school yours truly on the catastrophic mistake the CCCP had just made, invading Afghanistan. And ever since, this always-curious writer has been shaking his head at just how idiotically analogous to the Reds, America's meddling into افغانستان has been. Maybe not.

In any case, Spring has sprung, the roads have defrosted, and it's back to the front we go. If you haven't yet heard, Taliban insurgents launched a brazen assault on the American base at Bagram Wednesday morning, sparking a "large and confusing gun battle that left at least five American soldiers wounded and seven guerrillas dead." (NY Times)

Taliban leaders claimed that seven suicide bombers had blown themselves up at the gates of the base, clearing the way for more than 20 other fighters to get inside. The Taliban reports appeared a bit conflagrative, as they often are. But American officials confirmed that the base, one of the largest in Afghanistan, had come under an "ambitious and unusual assault." (NY Times)

An American official confirmed that the base was bumrushed by as many as 30 insurgents, but that no one had actually breached the defenses.

The assault on Bagram comes on the heels of an attack Tuesday by a suicide bomber in Kabul, who rammed an explosives-laden bus into an American convoy, killing 18 people, including five American soldiers and a Canadian officer.

That attack — and the one on Bagram on Wednesday — appeared to be part of a larger campaign directed at the capital and its environs. In recent days, the Taliban have smuggled five suicide bombers into the area, an American military official said.

A last check still has the White House muttering something about packing up and getting out only after establishing a strong, local governance. Historically speaking...good luck with that. If the Achaemenid Empire, the Macedonian Empire, the Indian Maurya Empire, the Muslim Arab Empire, the Sasanid Empire, and the Great Soviet Empire couldn't tame the baby, chances look a bit thin for our broke-ass selves. But hey, have you heard? Fox is putting on Glee after the Super Bowl next year.

In a move to head off questions about its long-simmering tensions with Hamid Karzai, last week the Obama administration rolled out the red carpet for Our Man in Afghanistan, granting him unprecedented access to Washington's top brass and royal treatment denied to even the closest of US allies.

But don't be fooled by appearances. Tensions are still boiling just below the surface. For all the pomp and circumstance of the four-day visit by the Afghan president and his posse of cabinet ministers and senior advisors, the Obama administration is working hard behind the scenes to weaken his authority by reinforcing local governance to boost elusive stability of the war-torn country.

Stay tuned. This series is slated to develop very slowly. And more than likely, never end. But you know, in the wise words of Eric Arthur Blair (aka Georgie Porgie Orwell): "War is Peace."

A salam alaikum brothers, and pass the AK-47s.

BookFaced

2010-05-18T11:29:00.000-07:00

I'd like to humbly offer my reasons for deleting my profile on Facebook, at the risk (and reality) of losing touch with many good friends--some of whom write opinion here.

The answer that I've heard time and time again to my recent move has been: it's online, it's the Internet...you should assume everything is public. If you don't want your information or data made public, you should not have made a profile on the service to begin with.

Yet therein lies the issue. When I first signed up with Facebook, back in 2006-ish, I was promised complete control over information I wished to keep private. Over the last four years, Facebook has continually changed its parameters and has constantly worked to un-cover information that would then be sold to third parties for the sole purpose of marketing. Or...for, perhaps, something else.

As Facebook has relentlessly changed its functionality, privacy controls have become opt-in, rather than in place by default. As users, we have been asked to constantly maneuver through the labyrinthine field of permissions to keep whichever pieces of data we want, private.

My second issue with the philosophy that "everything is public on the web" is: if that is true (or the norm) then what is to be done about the majority of us consumers doing, for example, online banking--moving money between accounts, or transferring into other accounts held with different banks, paying off credit cards, or entering our social security numbers into seemingly secure sites/fields etc.? It is quite un-nerving when you apply that open-web thinking.

And to the people who have told me: "I have nothing to hide, they can watch me, they can have whatever they want" I say: keeping information private does not always mean one is doing something illegal. One should have the option of storing information that will not be made public (think: private, IM conversations regarding one's sexual orientation).

But more than the annoyance of having my time line clogged with incessant Farmville or Mafia Wars updates from my high school buddies, or the inundation of requests for social causes and groups working to rid the world of evil, my departure from Facebook was fueled by the culture that is being nurtured by Facebook CEO, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg. It scares me. These are inroads for invasion of privacy that are rapidly transformed into slippery slopes to totalitarian domination. Closed societies, if you've studied history, don't start off with a bang. They slowly and systematically take away rights and freedom. I know. I come from a country which modeled itself after Stalin's Soviet Union.

Already Facebook has partnered with certain sites whose functionality one cannot fully enjoy, unless he/she has a Facebook profile. That is not an adherence to the philosophy of a free web; that is the beginning of "world domination" so to speak. When I log into Pandora and it offers me choices based on my Thumbs-Up preferences on Facebook, I get freaky-deaky about the shared information.

Since the deletion of my Facebook profile last week, I am sad to announce that I've lost touch with a handful of good people. I have sent emails, yes, but the interaction is gone. I wonder if it's for good. We'll see.

I'm not confident enough people on Facebook really care about what's happening. The service has become beyond addictive, especially to people in my age range (late 30s-early 40s)--a fact that to this day has me baffled. Maybe, at the core, we're insufferably narcissistic. Maybe we think the most mundane details of our lives are exciting. Maybe we've been tweaked by our parents, or not given enough proper attention, to believe that we are now, suddenly, the center of the universe.

For whatever reason, I'm out.

I Hear The Train A Comin'

2010-02-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

OK, so I'm still mulling over a diatribe about Obama's presidency so far and how I'm at this point going to have a hard time voting for his reelection in 2-1/2 years, but I haven't had any real time to think it through properly.

For now I'd like to talk about the recent distribution of money for rail projects all over the country that Obama just handed out. I'll do my best to not put you to sleep with this post, but I make no promises.

This will be a really long post it seems, so I put regions/states in bold so you could skip ahead to read what it happening by you, I know not everyone is all geeked out about the entire train network like me.

The national media has done a horrible job of describing what the projects are where this money is going. About the only thing most people know is that Obama just handed out $8 billion for "high-speed rail projects" that will come to fruition some time way down the road (and with how train travel has gone in this country for 40 years you couldn't be blamed for thinking this will all probably happen about the same time we colonize Mars).

Well, yes and no. I'm here to let you know some details that maybe you haven't heard. The first is that most of this money is not going to true high-speed rail lines and the second is that a lot of these projects will have real results a lot sooner than you think.

Now of course Obama's plan doesn't yet do anything close to what I would like to see invested in our rail network. To do that he would have had to announce a plan to convert our interstate highways to eight-track high-speed trunk lines (two tracks dedicated to freight, two local passenger tracks, two express tracks and two super-express tracks for going non-stop between large cities like Chicago to L.A. or San Francisco) and I know that's just a dream of mine that won't be happening anytime soon. But it does do some good things, even if they are not all high-speed rail systems, though the politicians love to refer to them as high-speed. Europeans must laugh heartily at us calling a train going 110 mph "high-speed."

Some of these plans that are being touted as high-speed lines will only be returning us to speeds (90 to 110 mph) that trains in America achieved on a regular basis as long ago as the 1940s. But let's not dwell on that.

Here are some of the details to some of the projects that just got funding. Note: almost all of my info comes from a news wire that is only accessible to Trains Magazine subscribers (yes, I'm that big of a nerd) so that's why there are no links to sources. At the end of the post you'll see a map of the projects.

And while I will be writing about the transportation benefits of these projects, Let's not forget that these projects, while helping rebuild our national infrastructure that is in such terrible decay that it might as well be made of sugar, will mean thousand and thousands of construction jobs as well as thousands and thousands of permanent jobs.

All aboard!

--------------------------------------------------

True High-Speed Rail Lines. Two states did very well, mostly because they both had true high-speed rail (155 mph and higher) plans in the works that had voter approval (Florida's story is complicated as the state GOP killed it several times even after voters passed it) and other financing in place.

Florida, (web site) with a huge population of senior citizens and the largest tourist attraction in the country has a major need for better public transportation, and this will be a big step forward. The $1.25 billion they got from the federal government will allow them to get to work immediately in building the first segment of their HSR system. Construction will begin in 2011 or 2012 for a dedicated passenger line between Tampa and Orlando that will have trains traveling at 168 mph, doing 16 round trips a day initially. Plans call for this segment to open in early 2015, five short years from now.

California (web site) got the largest chunk of the rail project money and for good reason. California has a plan in place for an HSR system that even the Japanese and the French would call "high-speed." Long term plans call for an 800 mile system stretching from Sacramento and San Francisco to San Diego with 300 daily trains traveling at 220 mph (!!!!!) by 2026. They will first build the Anaheim-L.A.-San Jose-San Francisco segment with completion targeted for 2020.

Once up and running, trains will make the trip from L.A. to downtown San Francisco in less than 2 hours and 40 minutes. Which kicks the shit out of the six hour drive. It also competes very well with the flying time of 1:15 considering the extra amount of time you have to spend getting to and from the airports, security screening, the longer amount of time required to board planes and other hassles. Downtown L.A. to downtown S.F. in 2:40? Try doing that on a plane and let me know how that works out for you.

Which is exactly the goal of high-speed rail. Build a nationwide network like what California is planning on building and you can accomplish a major goal of rail and transportation advocates - eliminating flights of 600 miles or less.

-------------------------------------------------

Midwest. (web site) I really though there would be more for the planned Midwest HSR. Obama is from Illinois and James Oberstar, the head of the House Transportation Committee and a big train booster, is from Minnesota. But I suppose Florida and California are much more important to keep happy with their larger number of electoral votes in presidential elections. But the Upper Midwest states didn't come up empty handed.

Wisconsin will be the one of the first places (along with Ohio, see below) that the public sees what is being accomplished with the rail funds. The fact that there is currently no train running between Chicago or Milwaukee to Madison, a major college town, is insane. That will soon end, with $810 million going to help with a planned Milwaukee to Madison extension of the current Chicago-Milwaukee route. Now this will not be a high-speed train like Florida or California, but there are plans to upgrade tracks along the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor (where there are already seven round trips a day) and from Milwaukee to Madison to give trains the capability to run up to 110 mph.

Not only will this train be great for those of us that live in Chicago and want to go spend a weekend in a great town like Madison, but gives a great transportation option for those UW students from the Chicago and Milwaukee areas, as well as giving them a direct "train to plane" transfer with a stop at the Milwaukee airport. It will also serve a large group of people in Wisconsin, with 76% of the state's population living within 30 minutes of a station on the route, giving towns without a lot of transportation options access to the national train network.

And best of all, thanks to some foresight by the state to have already ordered two 14-car trainsets from Talgo in anticipation (and to help their chances) of getting the federal grant, the Madison train will be up and running in 2013. That means in three years we will have train service where there wasn't any before.

The future of this line looks even better, as Minnesota was given $1 million to begin a study of extending it all the way to Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Over $1 billion went to a combination of Illinois and Missouri for improvements to the Chicago-St. Louis-Kansas City corridors. This will go for track improvements to bump up train speeds to 110 mph in several sections and add more trains to the now five round trips between Chicago and St. Louis and two to Kansas City.

Other funds went to a combo of Illinois, Michigan and Indiana for lots of track improvements to reduce congestion along routes between Chicago and Detroit/Port Huron/Grand Rapids. While this may be less sexy than a new high-speed line, it is no less important. Congestion on the lines kills on-time performance which in turn kills ridership levels. People will choose to take the train, even if it takes a little longer, as long as they know it will get there when it is supposed to get there. Amtrak's record ridership increases the last five years or so have quite a bit to do with their better on-time performance system-wide over that time.

Two projects that I'd hoped would receive funding but didn't are planned lines from Chicago to Iowa, one to Dubuque via Rockford and another to the Quad Cities that has future plans to also extend to Iowa City (serving a huge number of college students who live in the Chicago region) and Des Moines, and even to Omaha, Nebraska. Iowa right now has only one train going through it, the California Zephyr to the Bay Area from Chicago, and it goes through nothing but rural areas and hits none of the state's population centers. Yes, Iowa has population centers. Surprising I know. The only thing Iowa got was a little bit of money for some track improvements along their one passenger route, which will end up being a bigger benefit to freight than passengers.

But the Illinois government has committed to funding both lines, so they will happen, just not as soon as if they got the fed money.

No state with such a sizable population has been treated as crappy as Ohio by Amtrak. Four trains run through the state daily - the Lake Shore Limited eastbound to New York/Boston, the Capitol Limited eastbound to D.C. and each of those trains westbound to Chicago - and looking at the schedule you would think that Ohio had a population the size of Wyoming's instead of being the seventh largest state.

All of those trains call at their Ohio stops after 11:30pm and before 7:30am. It is even worse for Cleveland, the second largest city in the state (and the biggest metropolitan area), with all four of those trains making their stops there between 1:45 and 5:20 in the morning.

Two more trains - the eastbound and westbound Cardinal trains between Chicago and New York through a southerly route - go through Ohio. The only stop in the state is Cincinnati; they run three days a week each and also call only in the middle of the night between 1:15 and 3:30 in the morning.

So Ohio has a grand total of seven Amtrak stations, six see daily service, one sees thrice weekly service and all trains call in the middle of the night and predawn hours. That will change in just a couple of years.

Ohio Received $400 million to start rail service between Cleveland and Cincinnati, which last saw trains in 1971. It is the first line of a planned Ohio regional network called Ohio Hub, which calls for 1,244 miles of new passenger service on seven corridors centered on the hubs of Cleveland and Columbus connecting all the large towns in the state (and the small ones in-between) and reaching out to Pittsburgh, Toronto, Detroit and Ft. Wayne.

This initial line will go up quickly - a plan that has a lot to do with why they got the money, no doubt - with only six stations at first (Cleveland, Southwest Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, North Cincinnati and Cincinnati) and three round trips a day with a target opening date in 2012. Which means Obama could be at a ribbon cutting ceremony in the middle of his reelection campaign.

Then, riders of the light rail in Cleveland will finally have a reason to use the Amtrak station stop, which has never made sense since they built it, seeing as how the light rail only runs during the day and Cleveland's Amtrak trains only stop there at night.

I wish they would get money to move the train station back to Tower City in the middle of downtown instead of way out on the waterfront. Baby steps.

--------------------------------------------------

Southeast. (web site) This region, outside of Florida at least, didn't see a lot of major projects get funded. But there were a couple things done that could set the stage for future expansion.

North Carolina scored the best in this region, getting $520 million for upgrades on the state's successful Charlotte-Greensboro-Raleigh route, allowing them to bump up train speeds to 90 mph which will shave more than an hour off the travel time from Charlotte to Raleigh (competing nicely with travel time by car), and also to buy more locomotives and passenger cars to add more trains to the schedule, adding passenger flexibility which brings more riders.

There are long-term plans to get the line's speed up to 110 mph, which would get the travel time between Raleigh and Charlotte down to about an hour-and-a-half.

Virginia got $75 million to help add a third track to a section of the main passenger corridor through that state, which is huge when you consider that it is on the main corridor that connects New York and D.C. with just about the entire Southeast and sees lots of freight traffic. They also got another $25 million to add a crossover track to help ease congestion between Richmond and Raleigh, NC.

Again, not as sexy as some other projects, but more people take the train when they know it will get there as scheduled.

--------------------------------------------------

Of course, the Southwest got almost nothing. Texas got less than $11 million to do some work on an existing line even though they had applied for $1.8 billion. That's what you get for giving the world George W. Bush, bitches.

--------------------------------------------------

Pacific Northwest. Not as much as they hoped for, but money for the Eugene-Portland-Seattle-Bellingham-Vancouver Amtrak Cascades train will be a big help for capacity and on-time improvements.

Washington got $590 million for several track improvement and grade-separation projects to ease some bottlenecks and slightly increase travel times (the state DOT is saying by 5%) and they plan to add two more daily round trips between Portland and Seattle.

Oregon only got $8 million since there are only a few miles between the Washington border and Portland (the stretch to Eugene got no project funding this time around), which will go to some minor track improvements and upgrades to Portland's Union Station.

Washington and Oregon planners have high hopes to eventually get funding to build a dedicated right-of-way that handles 150 mph trains, allowing the trip between Portland and Seattle to take only a little over an hour.

--------------------------------------------------

Northeast. This part of the country is already the best served by rail, with the Northeast Corridor trains that include the pseudo high-speed Acela service (going up to 150 mph for a mere 16 mile of the entire route between Boston and D.C., mostly running between 120 and 135 mph) as well as a ton of other routes serving the region. A total of $485 million was granted to this region, here's how it breaks down:

The Northeast Corridor service (Boston-D.C.) was given $112 million, though Amtrak also was given another $706 million from a different pot for work on this line. Most of the money will go to replace infrastructure that will probably fall apart in a few years if something is done now, including a 100-year-old bridge in New Jersey that hosts 100 Amtrak trains and 330 NJ Transit commuter trains every weekday. Some of the funds will also go to study replacing the tunnel under Baltimore and to the building of a new station at the Baltimore airport.

New York was given a big chunk of the money to increase performance on their NYC-Albany-Buffalo Empire service. Trains already run faster in a lot of sections on this corridor (110 mph) than in most of the country, but some improvements will include a second track in an area where there is only one, track crossovers, better signal systems and the like to increase reliability (do I have to repeat that thing about people taking trains if they run on time?) as well as station upgrades in Schenectady, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, including work to make stations ADA compliant.

Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont were given a combined $160 million, all for improvements the Vermonter route, which runs from D.C. to St. Albans, VT. A beautiful train ride, it is also very slow. Major upgrades in tracks and routing - double tracking a segment in CT, new routing in MA (saving 25 minutes on the route) and lots of track work to increase speeds in Vermont - will make this train faster and more reliable, thus attracting more passengers.

Pennsylvania got $27 million to do some final small improvements on the NYC-Philly-Harrisburg Keystone service trains. They already run at 110mph on electric power, but three remaining grade crossings will be eliminated, taking away the last slower zones on the line. There is also money there for starting to plan the extension to Pittsburgh.

Finally, Maine got $35 million to extend their successful Boston-Portland Downeaster Amtrak train (one of the few trains in America to have free wireless internet) to Freeport and Brunswick. And in Brunswick there will be cross-platform connection to the spring through fall Maine Eastern tourist rain to Rockland. It has been a long time since people have been able to vacation in the beautiful state of Maine without a car, but that will be much more of an option in about two years when this extension opens. Someone will be able to jump on a train, well just about anywhere, get to Boston, jump on the Downeaster to Brunswick and take the Main Eastern to Rockland where they can grab a ferry to any of several beautiful islands.

A vacation to coastal Maine and you can read a book and have cocktails while getting there. Why the hell would anyone want to drive?

We've got a long ways to go to catch up with Europe and a few Asian countries, but this is a start. A very small one, but a start nonetheless.

(click to enlarge)

Today In Attack Ads

2010-02-03T16:13:00.000-08:00

Folks, this is epic, seriously, this ad has it all: You've got farm animal imagery for unfathomable reasons (well, I guess the reason is a cheap visual gag); you've got Terry Gilliam animation; you've got rambling rhetoric; you've got dramatic music...Too bad the point gets muddled in all the excess, and who exactly this ad is aimed at isn't clear, beyond "true" fiscal conservatives...Still and all, it's a hell of a three and a half minute ride. Enjoy.

Enormous hat tip to former SEI member Anna.

More. Of. This.

2010-01-29T20:10:00.000-08:00

It's being called Obama v. GOP. Doesn't matter what it's called, today Obama walked into the House of the Reps and went toe to toe with them during an Q&A session that lasted over an hour.

This is so good, I'll forgo my comment about this sort of thing being missing during the last 12 months.

Here's the Q&A session:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Answering the Beige One...

2010-01-29T15:02:00.000-08:00

There was a quote in the beige one’s recent post that got my attention and I wanted to answer:

Mr. President, during the State of the Union address, you said that you didn’t choose to tackle the health care reform issue just to get a legislative victory under your belt. I believe you, but can you tell me how taking someone that is unemployed, or maybe is employed, but still can’t afford decent health insurance and making them buy some kind of policy from the very insurance companies that have screwed us in the past; how is this not capitulation? How do you go from the Public Option (and you did campaign on the Public Option) to trigger plans and not see that as dispiriting for the people who voted for you?

I must call up a post I made on Ft. McHenry earlier today:

Reforming Health Care is more complicated than what the beige one is making it out to be in his statement. This is why the Democratic solution doesn't fit on an effing bumper sticker. Short of ripping everything up and installing a Single Payer Plan (which is my preferred choice – but good luck getting the votes for that in either chamber), you’re going to be surprised at what choices you have to do reform the system.

And by the way, I’ll get to the beige one’s unemployed dude in a minute. But to debate his point, I have to go to the beginning.

First, you start off with the concept of Universal Coverage. At its core, this is what we all want. Of course, since you want everyone to have access to the system, you have start with ending the ban on pre-existing conditions. This is just basic. Everyone loves this. It polls great.

But, if you end the ban of pre-existing conditions, what happens? Well, sick people who couldn’t previously get insurance will jump into the system, and healthy people will leave figuring (at this point correctly) that they can just buy insurance when they need it (i.e. when they're sick). If that happens, Insurance rates don't just rise, they skyrocket. (I believe Paul Krugman referred to this as an Insurance Death Spiral). If everyone in the Insurance Pool is pulling money out of the system, the Industry can't cover all the costs.

Not won’t, can’t.

So, to keep the healthy people in the system, thus keeping costs low, you have to force the Healthy People to buy insurance (yes, force). This is called a mandate, which everyone hates, and polls terrible.

The mandate is not Insurance putting a gun to our heads, and demanding our healthy citizens. This is just how Insurance works (Auto, Home, what have you). It’s all about managing risk. You have multiple Healthy people putting money into the system covering the one Sick person who takes money out. Doing that keeps our rates lower (though not non-existent). One day, those Healthy People will get sick themselves, but there will be other Healthy people covering them, so the cycle goes on.

Now, if people are made to by insurance, well...some of those people aren't going to be able to afford it (like The beige one’s unemployed guy), so you need to have subsidies to help those who can't pay for this crap, or increased access to Medicaid to do the same. Once you've taken that step, you pretty much have the bills that are wandering their way through Congress.

The lack of a Public Option is a loss, but there are parts of Europe (I think the Netherlands, hardly a bastion of Conservative thought) that have similar systems but don't have Public Plans. It's not a disaster if Health Care Reform doesn't have one. It's just infinitely better with one. What should still pass isn't not pretty. It’s nowhere in the same good neighborhood of Single Payer (the best and truly cheapest way to fix Health Care), but given the fact that Health Care Costs will double in ten years, it’s our best shot.

And might I remind the beige one a little something about his unemployed guy. Sickness cannot tell, nor does not care when someone don’t have a paying job. If he or his family gets sick while he’s unemployed, he’s screwed, and the rest of us are going to have to cover him. At least with even the crappier Senate plan, he has options, like Medicaid.

This is also a basic sketch of the Massachusetts Plan, which also wasn’t popular when it passed, but try taking it away from them now.

All that mess...was just for one issue: Health Care Reform. Imagine that, multiplied a thousand times (given the thousand problems we have) where every Federal dollar spent has a lobby attached to it.

If I have a complaint about my fellow progressives, it is that they’re spending a lot of time with their heads up their arses, thinking everything is simple. “If he just did this, everything would work…”

No it won’t.

Leadership is never simple. Certainly not as simple as Liberals make it out to be.

And comparing everything to the New Deal?

My fellow Liberals may be many things, but experts on Roosevelt they ain’t (particularly at the Huffington Post where they quote the New Deal like it was the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain. Too bad none of them seem to have...you know...read a book on the the New Deal.)

I’ve been working on a project set in the Depression so I’ve been reading nothing but Depression stuff for the last year and a half. And let me tell you, the New Deal was horribly, horribly compromised from jump. In fact Norman Thomas (Socialist Party leader and Dennis Kucinich of his day, once compared the New Deal “cough drop for a case of pneumonia.” African-Americans were suspiciously left out of a lot of New Deal Programs. Farm Workers were cut out of the National Labor Relations Act just as sharecroppers were going on strike. FDR had a more favorable Congress (with an even bigger majority), but even then they bickered and guffawed about every little damn thing. The Supreme Court struck down a lot of the initiatives from the 100 Days, being about as ethical as the current Roberts Court. There were fears of open armed rebellion, not in the south, but in fuckin’ Iowa. And oh yeah, unemployment was at 25%, almost triple what it is now.

Roosevelt got some things he wanted, some things he didn’t. (He was, it is often forgotten against the creation of the FDIC). You have to look at the whole picture, and not just your imagined corner of it. It is the overall metric of FDR's Presidency that we judge him on, and judge him rightly. It has to be the same standard for Obama, or otherwise the Progressive movement is more full of shit than I feared.

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

GOP – The Party of “No!” The Party of “Gimme!” The Party of “Fuck the Rest of You!”

2010-01-29T14:40:00.000-08:00

And nothing that took place after Obama’s State of the Union is going to change that impression (and before any potential conservative wags start their bellyaching about being painted in that light, let me ask you this: How would you fix this very real problem? Hint: Glib answers only prove my point).

In the meantime, have you read or listened to any of the Republicans’ replies to Obama? They all pretty much say the same thing, with tiny derivations of the following: “The President is not listening to the American people,” “job killing agenda” “same old liberal agenda” “they just wanna spend spend spend” ad infinitum.

In other words, after Obama’s call for bipartisanship, he was met with more non-bi-curious partisanship. Big surprise, and let’s just take as a given that this sort of behavior won’t change anytime soon.

While political points can and likely will be gained from continued conservative obstreperousness, there’s the matter of helping the left/progressive/Democrats find its spine; for if the Republicans are the party of “LALALALALALAICAN’THEARYOU!”, then Democrats are the party of “Why’d he hit me even after I gave him my milk money?” Current Democrats are the political equivalent of the simp at the beginning of that old Charles Atlas ad you used to see in the back of comic books, the one who got his girl taken away from him after some douche came along and kicked sand in their faces. (“It’s just fucking sand, you pathetic sack of flesh!” I’d think.)

This is an untenable situation, and if our elected representatives on the left are wondering why it is they can’t seem to get traction for their policies for longer than a couple of days, they would do well to remember that there’s a lot to be said for consistency, backbone and, ultimately, being able to deliver. I know a number of people who identify as Republican, whether they agree with the right’s policies or not, simply because they get things done.

Historically for the left, sticking to our guns has proven extremely effective. Roosevelt’s New Deal faced an unbelievable amount of opposition before its passage, and most of those programs are still standing to this day. Medicare has been so successful over the decades that the modern day base of conservatives believes its existence is their god-given right; the same is true with Social Security. Even right wing sops to progressives have proven necessary; whatever else could be said about Nixon (the last real conservative/Republican president in my estimation, nasty piece of business that he was), it was under his administration that the EPA was created.

This is why I appreciated Obama’s open admonishing of legislative Democrats during the State of the Union address, delivered just before he chastised their Republican counterparts.

However, admirable though it was, it’s surely not enough; at least not to satisfy my thirst for real progressive movement within our government, and, to be plain, the problem starts at the top.

Mr. President, beneath the fervent feelings the Left, the Progressives (oh, but not the Liberals, no; perish the thought) among us expressed for your candidacy during the 2008 campaign, was not just a desire for change or hope, but for leadership. It’s the sort of thing Jon Stewart expressed succinctly in this clip from the Daily Show.

Leadership is more than delivering uplifting, tough and compassionate oratory rhetoric. Leadership means sticking your neck out and providing ever important details, not just throwing out a blanket statement and then leaving the minions to figure out how to deliver that, and if they screw up, well, it’s their mess. “We still got some version of what we wanted, right?”

It means holding the hands of those doing the leg work, if necessary, in order to get them to deliver the desired policy you want. It means bolstering those who quake in their boots in the face of loud diversionary tactics as it is happening. It means browbeating those in your party who are visibly caving to the interests of lobbyists and industry.

It means not capitulating on goals and ideals in order to simply get things moving. It means remembering that bipartisanship is achieved by having a strong detailed plan and bartering over the small stuff. It means acknowledging that the other party isn’t being reasonable long before they just start saying no and acting appropriately at that moment, not weeks or months down the line.

Mr. President, during the State of the Union address, you said that you didn’t choose to tackle the health care reform issue just to get a legislative victory under your belt. I believe you, but can you tell me how taking someone that is unemployed, or maybe is employed, but still can’t afford decent health insurance and making them buy some kind of policy from the very insurance companies that have screwed us in the past; how is this not capitulation? How do you go from the Public Option (and you did campaign on the Public Option) to trigger plans and not see that as dispiriting for the people who voted for you?

Is it better than what we had before? I guess, but it isn’t Bold. Not as bold as the New Deal. It’s watered down Clinton progress and that is saying something.

That’s just health care reform; there are numerous areas where you’ve caved, Mr. President. I agree that some of that caving was probably necessary, but I don’t think that’s the case in every instance.

Lastly, I implore you not to take Progressives for granted. Please. One could say that it was moderate Republicans who put you in office, but beneath that, there was the massive Progressive support that provided the large bulk of your votes.

There is a school of thought that says that progressives will always turn out for the Democratic candidate, that they’d rather swallow a scumbag than face the alternative. You could argue that this has been true for quite some time.

But, increasingly, the more we get left out in the cold, the more potentially foolish notions get in our heads. Corrupt voting practices in Florida and the Supreme Court may have been responsible for handing George W. Bush the presidency in 2000, but let's remember that Ralph Nader was around to seduce valuable votes away from Al Gore.

It may be akin to cutting off our nose to spite our face, but not being heard, paid attention to, or appeased will drive anybody to extremes.

Consider this a friendly reminder.

K Bai

2010-01-20T02:36:00.000-08:00

At the end of this I am divorcing myself from writing about and dissecting anything that is political, so this will be a natural end to my relationship with this oh so wonderful, but sadly defunct site. The fellas and gals who usually contribute but lately have not been writing here, have nevertheless remained good friends across various other online milieus. In fact, in some form or another, they are people without whom I couldn't traverse my daily bridges or perform the usual duties in an orderly fashion; that is to say, without contact and interaction with them, life would grind even heavier.

Though he has been dealt a rough hand, Obama has disappointed this supporter back into his decades-old apathy and cynicism about politicians. More so now than ever, I truly believe nothing of import can be done in this country because there really is no consensus or majority to be had on anything. If 53% is considered a hefty win or a substantial margin for change, then truly nothing of substance can be passed or done here in the United States. Imagine what life would have been like had we been allowed to pass in school with 53% on our test scores. In fact, imagine if that were to be considered a majority or, rather, an A-like result.

My better half and I have been talking and planning our eventual emigration to a yet unknown country for 18 months and the plan is more alive now, after one year into Obama's administration, than before. For we both are truly convinced that this country is too large to effect any positive change on virtually anything. Too large and too equally and evenly divided. This country is primed for perpetual political stalemate.

Time after time Obama's administration, as well as Congress, has disappointed me by watering down proposed bills (health care is the star) and legislation in order to appease a government run by lobbyists (corporations). The change that was promised was a pipe dream. I should have known it. I should have known it like I always have, but I was guilty of being swept up by hope. I truly believed our politicians were capable of and ready for change. And like a young fool, I supported them. I invested myself emotionally and defended them. I cannot tell you how much time I wasted privately, whether through emails or phone calls or person to person interaction, arguing for the more liberal side. I would love to have that time and energy back; I would probably have been able to write half my novel by now.

The problem we have (and likely and truthfully not just in the States but mostly everywhere around the world) is that politicians look upon their chosen affairs as a lifelong job. Therefore the point is preservation, job security, perpetual longevity, nepotism. They have never cared for their constituency. They are not interested in making hard decisions or going against ingrained party lines because it is exactly that which puts one's job in danger.

The centrist position of a politician is analogous to and reinforces my belief in the inefficiency we have with a 50-50 split on most anything or everything. And the fact that corporations and banks---by nature animals committed to status quo---run our government and sadly within our empirical, capitalist, central-bank oriented system will always run our government, the political machine will never allow for full liberal or social inclination in our laws, teabaggers rest assured. It will never fully and truly be sensitive to our needs and our inextricable connection to our physical environment, and mandate change to improve the human condition. You can take that into the sunset and ride yourself out, cowboy. John Ford will see to it that you get a good exposure on that last screen shot.

And so it is that I end this personal struggle right here. I am not one to make resolutions, but this new year I am hoping to start and maintain a life as free of politics and involvement in them as possible. I don't quite care that I'll be labeled a cynic, a misanthrope, an apathetic citizen whose aim in life is indolence; at least I'll be much less bogged down intellectually, and have more free time to enjoy music, art, literature--you know, the things that truly count. My hope may be diminished on a grand, international scale, but there is a "local" life to be nurtured, brought up, guided, and educated. We are all cogs in the machine, yes, but some cogs tend to run smoother than others when they're not quite as concerned with the machinations of things. Once we realize the ghastly control exercised upon us by The Corporation (and our mind-boggling, consumer-driven blind refusal to oppose it), we can intellectually extricate ourselves from the system, Vaclav Havel stylee. The true, attainable idea of freedom that we still have in this country (although not for long) is the opportunity to divorce yourself from everything you deem detrimental in your life, and focus your efforts on a smaller, more local and personal microcosm.

I am growing a bushy moustache and a mullet, and I'll be donning incredibly truncated, tight, OP shorts and tube socks pulled up to my knees. If you should ever run into me, please refrain from talking about politics or the weather. Do feel free to buy me a drink, however. I am nearly broke and will gladly accept your gift. I drink most anything...in fact, I cannot think of something that offends me to the point of not accepting it gratis.

I'll see you around, gators.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Mass Backwards

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

The Short View

2009-12-14T07:43:00.000-08:00

The more I delve into our documented, muddled, historical involvement in Afghanistan, the more incredulous I become at the short-sighted war mongering of hawks like William Casey (former director of CIA under Reagan and the man almost solely responsible for escalating the covert war against the Soviet occupation of the late 70s-80s), Robert Gates (current Sec'y of Defense and former director of CIA), Charlie Wilson (didja see the movie with Tom Hanks?), Michael Vickers, Michael Pillsbury, and a whole slew of self-professed communist slayers playing backroom politics during the Reagan years.

Short-sightedness seems to be America's modus operandi in anything and everything; from internal issues at the municipal levels of government to international foreign policy. We believe more in slapping on band-aids and hoping for a natural wound heal, than applying stitches and nurturing the rift with careful tractability.

To learn about the fervent, Mujaheddin hatred of communism and capitalism equally during the time of Soviet occupation, and to realize that Casey et. al for some reason either overlooked this fact, or didn't have the foresight to anticipate the quick about-face by their beloved, supported Taliban, is beyond mind boggling. It's egregious, political thinking; or lack thereof. It makes a regular citizen like me almost scream outloud: politicians, are you kidding me? You honestly had no idea that once the Soviet "infidels" would eventually retreat (or be defeated), the Mujaheddin or Taliban fighters would re-focus their efforts on the imperialist Gargantua that is the United States?

A lowly schmuck like me can see the Jihadi tsunami coming for miles; and I have nary a course in political science, much less a degree in it like all proper analysts.

Is there a resolution viable in this "graveyard of empires?" Militarily, no. But there might be a small chance of self-governance if both the United States and NATO commit to (wait for it Fox News)...nation building. Yes, the two most awful words in political vernacular since "healthcare reform."

In a way, it's what U.S. military presence has been obtusely attempting with local Afghan ethnic groups---Pashtuns, Tajiks, and Hazaras alike. But it hasn't been altogether successful. How could it be? The high command's version of "nation building" consists merely of hand shaking and exercising good, pro-U.S. public relations. But guess what? We cannot slip these people a couple of packs of chiclets and hope to coax them to our way of life.

The Taliban resurgence, particularly in the southern provinces and on the Pakistani border, has been a sobering by-product of our failure to connect with the Afghan people and provide them with the necessities of a decent life. Indeed, it's our responsibility to do that, if we're occupying.

I realize the prospect of "nation building" sits in the mouth of an American tax payer as snugly as a root canal without anesthetic. But given the failed history of potential conquerors of this geographically-challenging, complex country, we have little choice. If this tactic is not employed by both the United States and its NATO partners, history will once again repeat itself and claim countless lives on both sides as collateral damage.

(Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard) Sheverdnadze had asked for American cooperation in limiting the spread of "Islamic fundamentalism" (after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan). (Secretary of State George) Shultz was sympathetic, but no high-level Reagan administration officials ever gave much thought to the issue. They never considered pressing Pakistani intelligence to begin shifting support away from the Muslim Brotherhood---connected factions and toward more friendly Afghan leadership, whether for the Soviets' sake or America's. The CIA and others in Washington discounted warnings from Soviet leadership about Islamic radicalism. The warnings were just a way to deflect attention from Soviet failings, American hard-liners decided.
--Steve Coll, "Ghost Wars"

Obama at Oslo

2009-12-10T10:57:00.000-08:00

There are days when the hours pass by with me feeling like I'm swimming in a bi-polar amniotic fluid of sorts. These are the days during which I curse myself for having voted for Obama, for letting him instill hope--all right, not just hope but a ton of it.

Looking at the health care "reform" Congress is slated to pass, I am infuriated at what a hunk of nothing this issue has become. I am on the brink of cynical apathy. I am on the brink of psychopathic pro-action. I am on the brink of desertion of both political affiliation and country. All of those at the same time.

Was Obama a naive Wonderboy who dragged all of us believers along to Washington---a 21st Century Mr. Smith? Or is he the typical Chicago-style politician? It's maddening, what the election of this man is doing to me. On. Off. On. Off. There are days when the only answer for me is to be found in my half-gallon bottle of Seagram's gin (hey, there's a recession going on and we're pinching Abe Lincolns wherever we can).

The latest Afghanistan troop announcement sent me reeling. This is the aptly-named "graveyard of empires." Ask Ghengis Khan. Ask Alexander. Ask Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernenko/Gorbachev. I've been reading Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" in order to understand our long, complex history of covert and overt involvement in this land, and the further I get into the 700-page account, the more horrified I become at the quick sand in which we're about to drown.

And then, there was this morning. I listened to The Kid give his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech via my computer, and--regarding the possible U.S. negotiations with the Taliban---heard this:

“I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach -- condemnation without discussion -- can carry forward only a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.”

Damn you, Obama. How can anyone not love the line: "...the satisfying purity of indignation." ? Maybe I'm severely blinded by cunning linguists. Maybe that's my problem here. I am, admittedly, a weak man; prone to corruption and much vice.

And so it goes...

A Tale of Two Transportation Political Agendas

2009-07-23T12:03:00.000-07:00

There were a couple of interesting articles in the New York Times this month highlighting the difference between the political wills in the U.S. and other countries when in comes to transportation.

The first was this this article about bus rapid transit in poor countries, specifically looking at the system in Bogotá, Columbia. In case you've never heard of bus rapid transit (BRT), it works similar to a subway or light rail line, with enclosed stations and fare control gates, except the system is run with buses on dedicated lanes that are set apart from car lanes by physical barriers.

Now I'm not one to promote the use of buses over subways or other rail systems, but the use of bus rapid transit in this way is very innovative and a ton cheaper to implement. And I'm all for anything that takes lanes away from automobiles.

Think about what you could do in a lot of American cities with this system. We seem to have a lot of what they call "express" buses in the U.S. that basically just have stops farther apart but still get stuck in the same traffic with all the cars clogging the road. And a bus can sit at a stop for five minutes or more while people pay their fares as they board.

What Bogotá and other cities with BRT systems do is get the cars the hell out of the way and speed up boarding by allowing all doors on a long, articulated bus to be used for boarding. Imagine this system being used on 1st, 2nd and/or 3rd Avenues in Manhattan, Western and Ashland Avenues and Roosevelt Road in Chicago; Aurora and 15th Avenues in Chicago; or any the dozens of wide roads in L.A. It could be done cheaply and quickly. Our city leaders could decide to do it today and have their systems running next year.

There is one other factor that makes the system work in Bogotá - automobile restrictions. Once they implemented their BRT a plan was put in place to get people out of their cars and on the transit system (or at the very least more carpooling). There is a alternate-day driving restriction that uses license plate numbers to decide who can drive in the city on any given day.

Think about what that would mean in a city like New York or Chicago, taking up to half the cars off the road on any given day. Bogotá also removed about a third of their street parking to make room for the BRT, another deterrent to driving into the city.

We could do this here easily, it only takes the political guts of our elected officials to get it done.

But what do we do in the U.S? We protect our single-occupancy vehicle addiction like it is a god-given right.

The other article in the New York Times was about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's study on cell phones and driving. The report found that driving while talking on the phone, hands-free or hand-held phone made no difference, makes a driver as dangerous on the road as someone who has a blood alcohol level of .08. What did our government do with this information? They suppressed it, of course.

We have people on the road causing accidents and fatalities at the same rate as drunk drivers and our government doesn't want us to know it. Public safety be damned, people have the "right" to talk on the phone while they drive if they want. There are only a few states that have laws restricting the use of cell phones while driving, and those only prohibit using your hand-held device behind the wheel even though it is well known that a hands-free phone conversation is just as likely to cause an accident.

Anyone who is a pedestrian in any big American city probably goes through the same crap I do walking the streets of New York. I must come dangerously close to getting hit by a car driven by someone talking on their phone at least three to four times a week. A slow week. (And yes, drivers, I know that pedestrians talking or texting on their phone and not watching where they are going when they cross against a light when cars are coming up the street are a big problem as well. That should also be dealt with.)

And other things that are dangerous distractions are just as likely to cause an accident as drinking and driving, such as smoking or eating in the car. I know of no place that has laws prohibiting these behaviors while driving.

And if you even suggest writing these kind of laws people have a hissy fit. We expect our cars to be a private domain, like our homes, and that anything we do in them is our business alone, no matter how many people it kills. There was a similar resistance to the drunk driving laws back in those days, too.

(This doesn't even get into the subject of our unsafe speed limits - which are casually enforced at best to begin with and then only to raise revenue, not for public safety - or the fact that it is legal to sell cars in the U.S. that can run at speeds in excess of 150 mph despite the fact there is no place that it is legal to drive that fast. One little law on the books about the speed ability of cars sold in the U.S. and you end all those high speed chases once and for all.)

And therein lies our problem. If we don't even have the political will in this country to even pass reasonable laws that are about the immediate public safety, how will we ever develop a public policy that is about stopping global arming, improving our horrible urban air quality and the overall livability and quality of life in our cities? Are we that afraid of people's love of their precious cars?

Public officials in Columbia had the guts to majorly restrict driving to the benefit of their society. New York couldn't even get a bill passed to charge a minimal fee to drive into the city center. (And if you are wondering, it was the Democrats that killed it in the state assembly. Can't blame the Republicans for that one.)

What does it say about us that elected officials in Columbia - Columbia! - are politically braver than any leaders in the U.S?

While you were lamenting...

2009-06-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

...the passing of Ed McMahon or Farrah Fawcett or Michael Jackson or even that guy who YELLED REALLY LOUDLY ABOUT LOUSY CLEANING PRODUCTS AND SOME OTHER SHITE, the Honduran army swiftly ousted President Manuel Zelaya on Sunday in Central America's first coup since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Soldiers entered the presidential palace in the capital, Tegucigalpa, and disarmed the presidential guard early Sunday, military officials said.

Political tensions had increased in recent weeks, as Zelaya pressed ahead with his Hugo Chavez-like plans for a nonbinding referendum that opponents said would open the way for him to rewrite the Honduran constitution to run for re-election despite a one-term limit.

President Obama said Sunday that he was deeply concerned by the reports from Honduras about the detention and expulsion of the president.

“I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic charter,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.”

Unfortunately I believe Obama is playing this ballgame a bit too safely in his condemnation of this latest infraction on the "democratic system." Zelaya is a close buddy of Venezuelan honcho Hugo Chavéz, enjoying full support and adulation of labour unions and the poor.

That being said, however, Honduras has long been a banana republic puppet controlled by rich corporations with North American interests. And so, as with everything that is the dirty game of politics and wrangling for power, the Honduran people are faced with two awful choices: Communism or Capitalism.

Eeee-rahn, Numbah One

2009-06-16T05:52:00.000-07:00

The iron cleric is now blinking. Get hot water quick.

Iran's Supreme Leader the Ayatollah Somethin' Somethin' Khamenei has agreed to a partial re-count of disputed ballots in Friday's divisive elections, although he ruled out an annulment of the vote.

Despite the Ayatollah's celestial right to govern, the presidency of Iran is far from unimportant. It is a critical part of the "managed democracy" that the ruling clerics have used to govern Iran for the last three decades. Khamenei himself is a former President. The job is important enough to have brought millions of Iranians to the polls on Friday, and thousands into the streets afterward — both supporters of the apparent loser--reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi--and members of the radical volunteer paramilitary forces who support the reelected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But the system is tricky. It actually allows the Supreme Leader to present different faces to the world. While he has strongly backed Ahmadinejad, for example, Khamenei also for a time designated one of the president's key pragmatist critics, Ali Larijani, as the point man in negotiations with the West over Iran's nuclear program.

I wonder, though, if the Obama administration wouldn't be under extreme pressure should Mousavi, the reformist, moderate candidate emerge victorious, while Iran's hard line regarding nuclear weapons is still maintained?

In dealing with Ahmadinejad, the administration has been able to gather international support and put enough pressure on Iran to at least soft-arm them into minute concessions. In the political milieu, we need to have a clear, defined enemy at the helm over there in order that we shine as the world's democratic example. And as all political establishments aim for status quo, I am suspicious of the United States' desire to truly oust Ahmadinejad.

In every fairy tale there is a clear good guy and there is a clear bad guy. Mir-Hossein Mousavi would muddy-up the equation enough to cause the administration severe migraines.

Machination

2009-06-15T04:49:00.000-07:00

It's beyond obvious that since the inauguration we've all lost our verve around here. Personally speaking, it took a bit longer than the rest of the contributors, but it's happened. I've turned back to the wall of cynicism and distrust of politics and its actors.

It shouldn't be a surprise. I was raised and went to university in the Washington D.C. area, and the weight and influence of the political machinery churning its soul-sucking cogs drove me away from this most corrupt of disciplines for the two decades I spent in that godforsaken city. Life inside the Beltway is so exclusive and insular, fraught with backroom deals and chest-stabbing followed by luncheons and myriad cocktails at The Old Ebbitt Grill, that I thoroughly believe everyone encircled and entrenched in that insufferable layer of hell has lost track of life outside it.

Having worked within it for six years I can testify to the ignorance of politicians for their constituency outside the Beltway--no matter what they all crow about on C-SPAN. The fact is, a pol's main mission(s) is/are to either get rich (hello corporation lobbying), headline the revered Cocktail Circuit, or get on the list of Ben Bradlee's and Sally Quinn's frequent Georgetown parties. Bob Woodward has become such an elite stalwart on the D.C. circuit that he himself now hosts the second most popular annual shin-dig at his Victorian or Tudor or whatever the hell style townhouse he has on M Street.

But Woody is a...journalist, and we all know journalists have no power to influence, no matter how much access they're given to an administration or how many "inside scoop" - type books they pen. Yes?

Basically, what I'm seeing now is a half-assed push for change by the current administration, which is being met in typical, status-quo fashion by the good ol' boys (and some girls) in Congress. Make no mistake, I knew from the start Obama was Obama--a skilled, intelligent, forward-thinking...POLITICIAN. And so I didn't expect anywhere as much as was promised. But what I'm seeing now is our system's machinations working flawlessly to effectively cut off any and every thing. Sure, you can give me your examples of this and that being passed or worked through, but generally it's business as usual on the old hill.

And if this administration isn't successful in pushing anything through, then I will not see true change in my lifetime. Of that, I am confident. That may be cynicism, but you won't blame me for inaccuracy. You'll see. I'm an old dog with wide open eyes.

On the healthcare issue*, I recently found out that one of the more popular versions (if there exists such a term for this initiative here in the States) of coverage with Congress is the mandatory purchase of the government-sponsored plan (Public Option). That is to say, EVERYONE must at least pay the government-sponsored premium, otherwise they will be fined. So, basically, if you're too poor to afford health insurance to begin with, the government wants to give you the option to pay the mandatory premium for its plan, otherwise be fined--a la the IRS coming after you. In some cases, people have chimed that the government fine for NOT choosing an option is actually more affordable than its premium.

Ladies and gents, this has GOT to be the most idiotic, half-assed scheme I've heard. I was under the impression that "everyone will be covered" meant healthcare is given to EVERYONE who...stay with me here...CANNOT AFFORD A HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUM OF EVEN $1. But no. In typical American fashion, we're going to make our citizens pay up, or be fined.

My friends, this is why I've said now for over a year that this system here, in this country, does not work for me and my family. It's compromises such as this that succeed in making me want to pick up that M-16, take the Orange Line to the Capitol South station, and pay a little visit to that revered hill. Say hello to my leeetle friend, you elitist, scheming, corporation and central bank-bought swine!

I am reduced to this. And it happens every time I dig down far enough into the nuts and bolts of our system. Fundamentally it doesn't work to help its citizens have a chance at a decent life.

And so I leave you with this cheery column on this soggy, cloudy Monday. I don't know what there is to be done about anything in Washington anymore. At this point, my personal answer to improving my life and my family's is to emigrate. All in due time; there are some loose ends that have to be slowly tied here, but the plan has been put into motion.

*Please note correction of single payer vs. Public Option note in the Comments by Teresa

The Third Hand...

2009-05-13T15:04:00.000-07:00

There’s a concept I’ve been discussing with my Father recently; a concept I’ve given to calling, the “Third Hand”.

When a Political Figure acts against his nature, for whatever reason, there’s usually some other force at work, something we don’t see.

Put a simpler way, you got one hand on Obama pulling him one way, you got another hand pulling him in reverse, and then comes another hand (hint-hint: a Third Hand), which pushes him the way he actually goes.

Think of it like this, if there’s a situation where Obama does something to deliberately anger his base, logic suggests that the alternative, whatever it may be, is far worse.

Thus, we come to the release, or non-release, of those Abu Ghraib Photos, and the President’s reversal on that decision. My fellow Progressives/Liberals are justifiably upset by the decision…or maybe not so justifiably.

Looked at on its own, by itself the decision to withhold those photos is indefensible. Lord knows people I read, admire and respect have been dumping all over it. (Though I will say, David Kurtz in TPM comes very close to the explanation I'm about to give you, and...after all...he's a professional, and got there first, so...kudos.)

But…and I hate to bring the West Wing into anything…but it’s like President Bartlet said in the episode Hartsfield’s Landing (Episode 58, Season 3): “See the whole board…”

What do I mean by that?

Ask yourself, what happened? What made President Obama change his mind, or more to the point, has something changed that would make President Obama change his mind??

I’d say, yes.

Mind you this is just a theory, but at the same time...

Since the last week of April, beginning of May, there has been a considerable uptick in the violence in Pakistan, as the Taliban has moved ever closer to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan (within 60 miles, so it seems). Now, the United States has been using Aerial drones to ice people across the Pakistani Border. The Pakistani Government has been upset about that, but since Pakistani’s Prime Minister is Asif Ali Zardari (aka Benazir Bhutto’s widower) and Islamist Militants were the ones who killed her, I don’t think he’s that upset…you know what I mean?

(In fact, should I mention that the Pakistani Government wants "ownership" over U.S. Drones? God, I hope we told them "hell, no.")

The situation was so bad that General Petraeus said that Pakistan was two weeks from falling, and the President was asked about the security of Pakistan’s Nuclear Arsenal at his last press conference.

But something has happened into the interim. Pakistan’s population has decided that they don’t much like the Taliban, or Taliban rule. In fact now that the Taliban has closed within 40 miles of the Capital, suddenly, we don’t have to bribe the Generals into defending their own country anymore. They’re actually (finally) pulling troops off the Indian border to get into the fight with the extremists. In fact, it’s creating something of a humanitarian crisis as refugees flee the fighting.

So, we are left with a situation where the Pakistani Military has finally gotten off its collective, and ineffective ass to start dealing some payback to the Taliban. There's popular support for the offensive in mainstream Pakistan, and all this is coming off recent American pressure to do so.

...and into this hyper-mega-combustile mix, some folks want to release some 2000 more photographs of Americans torturing Muslims?!?

Can you say…Danish Cartoons?? Times ten??

The President said that these Photographs were "not particularly sensational, particularly when compared to the painful images we remember from Abu Ghraib." Maybe, maybe not. We only have his word on this. I've heard in some quarters, these photos were pretty bad. They were bad enough to have Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman write the President a letter begging him to not to release the photos. (It's too bad they couldn't have gotten a Democrat to sign that letter. I would have been helpful if it was bipartisan.)

With the Pakistani populace finally seeing things our way, why do we want to go and insert into the discussion something that makes the Pakistanis start thinking that the Taliban has a point?!?

Listen, some of the stories I’m seeing are using a specific word: stall and/or delay. I think the Administration is eventually going to release these photos, on their own accord. Either that, or I wonder how far they'll fight the case in court. Either way, they’re not going to release those photos yet, not until Pakistan stabilizes.

Personally, I want the photos released, too, but I'm personally okay with this decision as long as it's only a stall, or a delay...and not an outright cancellation.

At the end of Hartsfield's Landing, Sam Seaborn (in case you don’t remember, played by Rob Lowe), asks President Bartlet (Martin Sheen), a question. The answer is one that is both simple and complicated all at the same time, and is one of the reasons (I trust) we all voted for the President in the first place:

SAM
I don’t know how you... I don’t know the word. I...don’t know how you do it.

BARTLET
You have a lot of help. You listen to everybody and then you call the play.

I think the President might owe us a better explanation than the “safety of American Troops”, which is both true and hollow all at once. But this advice is coming from his Generals (something we all thought Bush didn't do enough of), and its coming from his OLC (who may actually have read a Law Book or two in their careers).

Still, I think the real reasons play across a far wider board...one we all should try to see, but that the President is ultimately responsible for.

Please remember, there was a reason we decided we wanted this man to call the plays.

UPDATE (5:26pm Pacific): For the record, I beat Joe Klein to the punch.

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

The Stupid Chamber

2009-05-11T11:51:00.000-07:00

Among progressives, which I proudly am, a lot of attention and ire gets focused on the extreme right-wing media and their completely fucked-up agenda. I'm talking about your FOX News, WorldNetDaily and Human Events of the world. We spend a lot of our time attacking and exposing their lies, and rightly so. But I really don't think they are the most dangerous part of the media.

The right-wing whack-a-doodles in the general public will continue to believe their crazy nonsense whether there is a FOX News or not. My brother isn't going to suddenly see the light on socialized health care (he says that all the rich people in England come here for their health care, despite, you know, the facts) if Bill O'Reilly no longer has a platform for his bloviating every night. It's called the echo chamber for a reason. My dumb ass born-again sibling would still be an uninformed dunderhead, he just wouldn't have a TV legitimizing his screwed up points of view.

No, I think the most dangerous thing about the media today is the so-called "news" that gets reported in what is supposed to be the "legitimate" media. CNN is often put forward (often by themselves) as the centrist or "slightly left-leaning" (which is really laughable knowing they have Lou Dobbs) 24-hour news network. I could argue against these claims all day long, but that's not the real issue.

No, it is that the media is completely dumbed down and distracting the moron masses from the real important stuff of the day. We see stories about the president ordering a hamburger, live as it happens and called "breaking news." I imagine this whole week we will be enduring a whole lot of nonsense about Wanda Sykes being offensive or not. We already seem to be moving beyond the info-tainment we've had for several years and dropping the info altogether.

Case in point. I was flipping through the channels last week or so and I came across Larry King. I despise Larry King, it is hard for me to believe that anybody likes Larry King and can stand to watch him. I can feel my IQ dropping in just a few minutes of his show. He's like the 24-hour news version of Saved By The Bell. Even though I know better, when I come across him I seem to not be able to turn away from the intellectual car accident on my screen. (Which is also just like Saved By The Bell.)

On this particular episode, Larry started off the show with a short segment on the "breaking news" of the medical student who was robbing hookers in hotel rooms to feed his gambling habit and appears to have murdered one of them. And while I believe the too common violence against women should be highlighted in the media, this was just sensationalistic nonsense that involved Larry having on as guest some "friends" of the accused. These friends turned out to be a couple of guys who maybe sat beside him in a lab one time and most of the exchanges involved Larry asking them if they knew he was crazy back then. It reminded me a lot of the old SNL sketch when Buckwheat got shot. (You know the one. "Did you think he's shoot Buckwheat?" "Oh sure, it's all he ever talked about.")

This was just a prelude. That was only the quick, news of the day, put together segment because he guy just got arrested. No, when Larry went to commercial he announced that he'd be "right back with Perez Hilton and Dennis Prager debating Miss California.

Seriously. Perez Hilton, Dennis Prager and Miss California. It sounded like the Jeopardy answer to the question, "which three people would you most like to see knee-capped in the most painful way imaginable?"

How does this crap make it on to TV at all, much less a supposed "news" channel?

No my friends, the right-wing propaganda machine is the least of our problems as I see it. The mindless drivel that comes from the mainstream media today that is there to sell us crap and make our big concern be whether or not our cell phone makes our toast (props to George Carlin) is destroying us much more than Hannity ever could.

Not that Hannity's not trying to catch up.

Thrifty is Nifty

2009-05-10T04:17:00.000-07:00

I've been reading lately a whole slew about how thrifty Americans have become all of a sudden. The savings rate, according to an article in the NY Times this morning, has risen from zero percent to a bit over 4, in the last year. We went from a savings rate of 14 percent in the 1970s, to negative 2.7 percent in 2005, meaning Americans were spending more than they made.

Corporations had been salivating on the heels of these numbers. They had finally turned us into super-consumers who were actually brainwashed into living on credit. I recall a conversation I had with a friend in 1997 in which I extolled the virtues of paying off your home as fast as possible. My parents paid off their first home in 7 years, and their second in two. My friend shook her head and proceeded to explain how it's "healthy" to be in mortgage debt, and besides...you get to write off the interest at tax time.

Stupid Americans! (I thought). They'd rather pay off a mortgage perpetually and deduct A PERCENTAGE of the interest paid from taxes, than not have a mortgage at all. I never understood it. And never will. Perhaps I'm old school, but my idea is not busting out half my salary on a mortgage for the rest of my life. I'd rather take that $1500/month and store it up for travelling to Italy, Spain, France, Bali, Tokyo, Melbourne....somewhere else.

Now the Econ experts are biatching about how we're all going to railroad the already-struggling economy by not spending. I just shake my head at all of this; they continue to drive into our heads this horseshite that has already bankrupted us. But how to get the economy started again? Spend! Spend what? I think it's time for a new model, fellas.

In any case, I don't believe the majority of Americans have learned their lesson; they'll store away capital out of necessity, not enlightenment. But I am optimistic that our government will regulate bank products such as no-down-payment or no-income-verification mortgage loans and credit lines, thus putting some sort of halt on the Frankenstein that has been created by banks.

And a quick shout-out to all skewed, warped Americans who are now holding their heads in sorrow over the fact that they can no longer afford that third SUV: WAKE UP! "He who dies with the most toys..." still dies.

Let us know how well that overdrive system works in the 9th Circle of the Inferno.

Here comes Employee Free Choice...

2009-05-08T16:03:00.001-07:00

I hope to God this compromise is okay, and doesn't screw the Unions.

I'm getting this from Jane Hamsher's blogpost on HuffPo, but the data really comes from the National Journal (subscriber only).

[Diane Feinstein's] proposal would replace the card-check provision, which would allow workers to unionize if a majority signed authorization cards and strip a company's ability to demand a secret ballot election. "It's a secret ballot that would be mailed in ... just like an absentee ballot. The individual could take it home and mail it in," Feinstein said. If a majority mailed the ballots to the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB would recognize the union.

...and I did mention the part where Diane Feinstein wants to be Governor of Union heavy California, right?? Being the one to stop EFCA's passage is a good way to make sure you don't become Governor.

Listen to David Plouffe

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

From the Huffington Post. David Plouffe speaking at the Panetta Institute in Monterey, California:

"Because we've won so many House seats in the last two elections, we have got more Democrat representing swing seats, so the balance has shifted a little bit," he said. "Right now the Republicans are, I think, at a core in the U.S. House, where there may be four or five House seats that you can plausibly suggest the Democrats have a chance of winning. We've won pretty much all there was to win in the last two elections."

Later in the event, he cautioned that "some people in my party" are "a little over-confident now," after recent sweeping victories.

He's right. I just wish he hadn't said it in front of Karl Rove.

What's In A Handshake?

2009-04-21T05:22:00.000-07:00

Photo: AP

On 18 April, 2009 the world came to a virtual standstill, holding its collective stanky breath, about to be overwhelmed by "the vapors," Scarlett O'Hara stylee.

It wasn't the North Koreans launching their...satellite, which managed the impossible feat of halting earth's axial rotation, nor was it that British lady blessed with an angel's voice (but sadly pummeled by the ugly stick) belting out some shitty musical number from Les Mis. No sir.

What managed to plunge the news outlets and political talking bobbleheads into an analytical aneurysm (yees, I know...alliteration kills) was a simple handshake between our beloved Honcho-in-Chief and that incessant little barking dog down in Venezuela.

The earth-shattering gesture came at the opening ceremony of the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, where Mr Obama intended to make Cuba a key priority.

The press ran wildly with the story. What's in a handshake with Chavez? What kind of signal was Obama sending? Was this a clear sign of Obama's undying allegiance to Marx's dogma? Was the United States showing weakness in the face of tyranny?

Former Republican Speaker Newt "Galoot" Gingrich was having a shit-fit on "The Today Show": "Everywhere in Latin America, enemies of America are going to use the picture of Chavez smiling and meeting with the president as proof that Chavez is now legitimate, that he's acceptable."

Dick Cheney went on Fox to declare that Obama's encounters with both Chavez and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega were not helpful and "sets the wrong standard." He accused Obama of taking an apologetic tone about past U.S. policy on his trips to Europe and Latin America.

"I think you have to be very careful. The world outside there, both our friends and our foes, will be quick to take advantage of a situation if they think they're dealing with a weak president or one who is not going to stand up and aggressively defend America's interests," Cheney said.

Gents, please! Take your illegally-prescribed chill pills and relax. The world is not going to go to shite because of this. It's getting there, but not aided by some awkward 70s-type pressing of the flesh. And besides, I don't recall any of the top Elephants getting their knickers in a row over this particular encounter back in the day.

Echoing my sentiment, but in a much more civilised and eloquent manner, President Obama defended his show of good faith: "It's unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States."

Did Holder just leave himself some Wiggle Room?

2009-04-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

I got this from reading Andrew Sullivan (who was reading Marc Ambinder), so this is hardly a thought I can take credit for, but listen to what Ambinder has to say about Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement on the late and lamented Torture Prosecutions:

Here's what Attorney General Holder said today in his statement: "Holder also stressed that intelligence community officials who acted reasonably and relied in good faith on authoritative legal advice from the Justice Department that their conduct was lawful, and conformed their conduct to that advice, would not face federal prosecutions for that conduct."

The emphasis is Ambinder's.

Now, I work around Lawyers. I work around them every day. My Dad’s new wife is, in fact, a Lawyer herself.

I’m just saying, I know how these guys sound, and I know when they leave themselves wiggle room.

Folks, that ain’t wiggle room, that’s more like a tunnel in which large eighteen wheels can pass.

Sullivan puts it better than I can:

If evidence emerges of bad faith in torture sessions, then those staffers may well face legal consequences. Ditto if the legal advice was given in bad faith, along Nuremberg lines, Yoo and Bybee should start sweating. That's why the internal OPR report on the legal professionalism of the torture lawyers is so crucial and why it is being fought over so fiercely. If Yoo and Bybee's memos were so below legal standards that they can be objectively shown to be a means to get away with torture rather than good faith effort to apply the law to proposed torture techniques, then they too acted in bad faith. And they too are war criminals.

Now, all that said “wiggle room” isn’t a substitute for action (which I think we, the ACLU, Senator Russ Feingold, and civil libertarians would prefer). But it is something, especially when you couple this with action from the Congress. Either Chamber will do.

I think, in the wake of our most recent NSA Spying Story, the Congress might find itself a little more willing to act.

Granted, it has an air of “It’s one thing to have the mob get wiretapped, but now that it’s one of us…” but again, it'll do.

Oh, and in case your fingers were crossed, uncross 'em. Spain isn't going to help:

Despite recent reports to the contrary, Spain’s attorney general has now reportedly decided not to prosecute the Bush Six — the top legal officials in the Bush administration who allegedly approved the torture of terror suspects. Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpio said that the United States would be the proper forum for such a case.

We can only hope.

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

News from the Teabag Front in Sacramento, CA

2009-04-16T10:09:00.000-07:00

Kim, a 43-year-old homemaker, bellowed: "You hurt my family!" She argued that, thank to taxes and the stimulus package, "We've had to cut our long distance and caller ID." Her 22-year-old daughter, Ashley, with her baby sister strapped to her chest, cut in: "We even got rid of Netflix!" - War Room, Salon

Now we see why this astroturf movement isn't really connecting with, say, the average Somali.
---

Speaking of which, here's everything you need to know about how the situation in Somalia came to be, but couldn't find anywhere near the MSM. (Courtesy of Foreign Policy magazine, quickly becoming a favorite periodical.)

This is who they are...

2009-04-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

The following is intentional. I have collected a small smattering of images from today's Teabaggin' Parties from the Washington Independents' Aaron Weiner and David Weigel, as well as some stuff from Daily Kos.

These images, of course, show the worst of the worst. Protestors advocating violence, or racism, or toeing that fine line.

These images do not show all protesters. There were those who merely wanted to protest taxation and the deficit. I merely find these people deluded, not dangerous. And it is danger of which we speak here.

Yeah, let's link our deadly enemy, the one we might have to go to war with, with the duly elected President of the United States.

And yes, the sign says "While Some Kenyan tries to Destroy America". Forget the "In Living Color" quote.

Anything to make the President look alien and foreign.

And of course, my "favorite" for the day...

Apparently, it was from Chicago.

Are you sure you want to go there?

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

"Mental Gymnastics..."

2009-04-15T13:35:00.000-07:00

Even when I disagree with him, Taibbi is always fun.

And, right now, I certainly don't disagree with him.

It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy. In order to pull off this argument, in fact, you have to grease the wheels with a lot of apocalyptic language and imagery, invoking as Beck did massive pictures of Stalin and Orwell and Mussolini (side by side with shots of Geithner, Obama and Bernanke), scenes of workers storming the Winter Palace interspersed with anti-AIG protests, etc. — and then maybe you have to add a crazy new twist, like switching from complaints of “socialism” to warnings of “fascism.” Rhetorically, this is the equivalent of trying to paint a picture by hurling huge handfuls of paint at the canvas. It’s desperate, last-ditch-ish behavior.

...

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

Originally posted (such as it is) at Fort McHenry.

Are The Tea Parties Racist??

2009-04-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

I was flipping around Daily Kos today, and they posted a question that’s been on my mind for the last couple of days.

These…Tea Parties (I’m going to avoid calling these people Teabaggers)…

…are they for white people only?

‘Cause I’m looking at the photos, and…I ain’t seein' no people of color…

Anywhere.

Jim Crow Protest Rallies?

Really?

Are you kidding me?

Fortunately, I am not the first to have this thought. It turns out that a site called Jack & Jill Politics has been on this way before I was.

I'm not 100% percent convinced in the arguments they present in their piece. Still, I think they're onto something.

Are these the same people who were yelling "Terrorist" and maybe even "Kill Him" at some McCain-Palin Rallies not than long ago? To paraphrase the Governor of Alaska, you betcha.

Did we expect these people to simply engage in the debate and suddenly accept the fact that Barack Obama legitimately won the election? If Norm Coleman is any measure...

Does anyone…anywhere see any people of color in any of these photos in a participatory capacity, and not acting as Security Guards, Cameramen...or worse, picking up after these people?

Couple this with a report from DHS says Right Wing Extremism is on the rise thanks to the Economy (and blaming the Black President for it), there is always reason to be concerned.

Whatever reservations I have about their particular arguments, they did offer a handy guide to sniffing out an undercover racist attack on the President. It goes as follows (with corrections for grammar):

1) Is [said attack] unique to Obama. Is it a phrase we’ve never heard before applied to any other president or is it something we haven’t heard in recent memory?

For example: he’s not an American citizen or he’s a socialist who’s planning re-education camps for young people.

2) Is [said attack] illogical or impossible. Does the assertion plainly contradict the facts?

For example: not an American citizen, socialist, tax raiser, re-education camps for young people.

3) Is [said attack] repeated, over and over, by a desperate person whose team lost badly in the last election and who adopts a wide-eyed, credulous, nodding stare pronouncing the lie slowly, precisely, with a watchful eye to see if the listeners are buying it.

For example: not an American citizen, socialist, elitist, drug seller, tax raiser or terrorist. (aka, the entirety of the Glenn Beck Show)

Optional: Does the assertion cause nervousness, embarrassment or confusion among non-blacks (who are listening to said attack)? When other white people such as Tom Brokaw or John Stewart sense something wrong and start to ask questions like "Do you really believe that?," you know for sure you’re in the racist attack zone.

UPDATE 4:49PM Pacific: Michelle Malkin does not count. She started these damn things, and besides, I'd put her personal racially sensitivity quotient at about zero.

Originally posted on Fort McHenry.

Something Deni Will Love

2009-04-13T15:34:00.000-07:00

I know I like it: Obama to announce plans focusing on regional high speed rail.

This on the heels of the trip to Europe and the Middle East, and making moves towards establishing long-overdue relations with Cuba, O is batting .666. Not bad really, and I do like where he is going on a large number of issues; but until he does right by his constituents on the whole DOJ/Wiretapping business, where he's actually behaving worse than W/Cheney, he's not gonna get anywhere near 1.000...

Bo.

2009-04-11T21:15:00.001-07:00

Finally, something to lighten the damn mood. The first dog has arrived.

Revolution, 21st Century Style

2009-04-08T07:55:00.000-07:00

photo: net.effect

"Revolution happens 140 characters at a time."

This is what I recently sent out as my daily "Tweet" into the vast electronica of the Internets. This story holds much interest for me, as Moldova was once part of my Mother Country (and is also my father's birthplace) before it became independent with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.

Recent events in Chisinau, the capital of this small, forgotten "new" country in the Balkans, have made the front page of The New York Times, but not necessarily for the cause of the still peaceful, massive student protests against the Communist Party, which is back at the helm of government. This is the first full-on revolution aided by the instantaneous use of technology---mainly Twitter. And the news outlets are buzzing all about it.

For quite some time now I've been explaining to friends that Twitter is best used as a tool for disseminating information, not for banal friend status updates as part of the popular social network it's recently become. Twitter's initial purpose was to keep northern California firefighters informed of rapid-moving wildfires in the region.

I've been following the barrage of information being sent and shared by the Moldovan people right there at the scene---involved in the scene---and it's been an incredibly fascinating experience. Instructions are being given out on where to organize, which buildings to try to occupy (TV, of course), which services have been cut, which rail lines are inoperable, where troops are amassing, etc. I am witnessing live entities (crowds) move about this small country in real time, in real experiences, from real vantage points, sometimes as detailed as certain alleys on certain streets. It's mind boggling. I feel a mix of revolt and interest and desire to join the masses, if I could only board a flight out tonight.

If I could only...

What?

I wonder if the comfort of an ocean and a few thousand miles' buffer zone don't give me the bravado displayed in the paragraph above. I wonder if all of us Americans would be bothered to emulate the Moldovans if unfairly-elected governments came to power amid shenanigans at the polls (2001). Or would we be afraid of missing the next installment of "Lost" ?

I am first to say that I'm a master at doling out excuses of inconvenience. Am I the only one good at running in the opposite direction of the Revolution?

One day I'm gonna...

(update Tweet from one of the protesters: "the people's focus is too much on HOW students got to meet in #Moldova and not why?" )

(More developing events)

(Read an opposing opinion on the role of Twitter in this situation)

Eat that, Glenn Beck (VIDEO)

2009-04-07T13:54:00.000-07:00

Watch the joy.

"Scared for my country?" Not when I see this.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Queen is Dead / Meat is Murder

2009-04-02T14:05:00.000-07:00

The Queen, as in Elizabeth whatever her number, is apparently un-touchable. However, if one should be so lucky that she extend her hand in a friendly gesture, one is expected to take it, but not shake it hard...as obviously she is made of some kind of rare porcelain. Or just flabby, unstable gelatinous head cheese-type mass. In which case, one should always wear gloves when meeting The Queen, is what I propose. But onward o' Defender of the Faith carrying your lousy handbag and your bloody Yorkshires. The Pope and the Vatican say so. Well?

Imagine the collective, flatulence-like gasp released from her loyal subjects yesterday when Michelle Obama commited the unforgivable faux pas of lightly tapping Lizzy's back, in response to The Queen's own amicable tactile act before the world. Hey man, the monarch started it! The press went crazy. 10 Downing Street sent out no less than 4 Tweets on this monstruous infraction. Hundreds of years of protocol were violated in the span of maybe 2 seconds. The Queen herself seemed taken by surprise, and even retreated physically from this abominable act of...human contact.

Blogger, please!

You and I know fully well what was going through the old hag's mind. We don't need to go there. The Monarchy is one of the most racist institutions this side of the Klan, despite its philanthropic work and "modern" facade. These maggots have been brainwashed for centuries into thinking they're some sort of divine entities. I mean, seriously...are you not a laughable swine if you expect, no...demand a curtsy from your loyal subjects? What century are we in? That pre- and post-match shit that goes down on Centre Court at Wimbledon every June drives me insane. Bow before the Royal Box my white, pimply arse. I got yer Royal Box right here, eh? Right here, gagootz!

Dear readers, do you see what this subject reduces me to? Bad Joisey impressions are the sign of the Apocalypse and a last resort for a lousy, struggling writer. Next thing I'll be axing you which exit you live at.

And that's it. You know when you publish sentences ending with dangling modifiers it's time to quit the biz and head down to the pub for a few refreshing pints.

Hard elbows...

2009-03-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

There’s something of a pattern emerging in our collective quest to deal with the seeming imminent collapse of Western Civilization, a.k.a. the 2008-9 Recession.

Something happens. Something’s done about it. And then lots of people freak out.

That's not what I would have done...or...what I would have done was better...or you're not going far enough. Yadda-yadda-yadda...

Of course, it’s happening, again.

My fellow Liberals are indeed freaking out over what the President said today in regards his plan to deal with the American Auto Industry. Double standard is the term I keep hearing over and over again.

But to folks like Robert Kuttner, David Sirota (and basically all the Liberals that even I, another Liberal can’t stand), I have to ask the question…do you even read this stuff??

I hate to resort to a Basketball metaphor, but the Commander in Chief is a fan, and this one story seems particularly apt in for the occasion.

Bill Russell as a young Celtics star was, of course, talented…but also prone to having the snot beaten out of him in games because he didn’t have it in him to throw an elbow.

So one day, Red Auerbach comes up to him, and asks him to throw an elbow…but just one elbow…during a nationally televised game. He guaranteed that once you throw that one elbow, you’ll never have to throw another one again.

Russell did…and eleven championships later, the rest is history.

What we all saw today was our President delivering a nationally-television hard elbow to GM’s Bondholders, the rich bastages holding GM’s debt. Turns out they’re about the only party in this mess who has refused to sacrifice anything at the table. GM owes them a lot of money, and they want protection. They want to be first at the trough. Damn the consequences.

Well, the President just fired the CEO of GM. (He'll be fine, from what I understand he's walking away with 20 Million dollars in Retirement.)

The President also let the Boldholders know, in no uncertain terms, that GM’s plan is not complete, and that they have sixty days to fix it. So until then, no money.

Therefore, [President Obama] said, he is offering GM and Chrysler "a limited period of time to work with creditors, unions and other stakeholders to fundamentally restructure in a way that would justify an investment of additional tax dollars."

He expressed confidence that "this restructuring, as painful as it will be in the short-term, will mark not an end, but a new beginning for a great American industry."

He said he was "absolutely confident that GM can rise again, providing that it undergoes a fundamental restructuring." He stressed that the U.S. government "has no intention of running GM."

If GM is unable to restructure and Chrysler cannot strike a deal with Fiat, they might need to use the bankruptcy code "as a mechanism to help them restructure quickly and emerge stronger," Obama said. He said that could enable the companies to "quickly clear away old debts that are weighing them down," even as their workers remain on the job.

"What I am not talking about is a process where a company is simply broken up, sold off and no longer exists," he said. "And what I am not talking about is having a company stuck in court for years, unable to get out."

I wish Kuttner and Sirota would spend as much time finding out what happened, rather than flapping their gums. Their slavish devotion to Ideology-First is every bit as bad as all the Conservative scumbags we routinely bash on this site, and many others. It’s all there. They just have to keep reading. But I think in both their cases, they are more interested in cornering the market in Liberal Obama opposition than finding out what the hell is going on.

So, in summary: Obama’s message wasn’t so much to GM, but these Bondholders. You have sixty days to give up something, or face a structured Bankruptcy where you lose everything.

Their response?

“Our strong preference is to complete this restructuring out of court,” GM said in a statement issued after Obama’s speech on the U.S. auto industry. “However, GM will take whatever steps are necessary to successfully restructure the company, which could include a court-supervised process.”

Translation? GM is ready to go Bankrupt, if necessary.

“We look forward to working with the company and the task force to configure an exchange that will maximize the chances of a successful out-of-court restructuring,” advisers to the committee of GM bondholders negotiating with the company to restructure the automaker’s debt said in a statement. “All parties seem to agree that an out-of-court restructuring would be the preferred path to viability.”

Translation? Whooooaaa, slow down there, cowpoke. No need to get all hostile. Let's talk!

Also, it should be mentioned that Obama said Chrysler had 30 days to cut a deal with Fiat, or get nothing.

They cut a deal a few hours later. At least it was the framework for a pact.

Hard elbows in the paint. Seems they're the way of the world.

UPDATE 4:37pm Pacific: Slate's Daniel Gross (Senior Editor at Newseek, and frequent Slate.com contributor) agrees...and best of all has...umm...what do you call them again? Those things, little squiggly lines that didn't appear in the first draft of the GOP Budget Proposal?!?!?

Numbers! That's right, they're called numbers.

[GM] has loads of debt. The most recent quarterly results indicate long-term debt of more than $29 billion. And since the firm's credit ratings have been pushed deep into junk territory, that means most of the holders of this debt are hedge funds, private-equity firms, and other investment vehicles. (Many mutual funds and institutional investors like pensions or insurance companies eschew junk debt.)

GM's debt is trading at what is euphemistically called "distressed levels." As indicated here, bonds due in less than two years are trading at 20 cents on the dollar.

Many of those who bought GM's bonds did so because they hoped to 1) convert the debt into ownership in the case of bankruptcy filing or 2) see the bonds rise in value should the government step in and formally guarantee GM's corporate debt.

Obama made clear today what they suspected: No such guarantee would be forthcoming. While GM had tried to restructure, Obama noted, it hasn't yet done enough. "I'm absolutely confident that GM can rise again, providing that it undergoes a fundamental restructuring. Have they cleaned up their balance sheets, or are they still saddled with so much debt that they can't make future investments?" (If you answered this double question with a no and a yes, you're right!) The upshot: Holders of GM's debt, like other entities to whom GM has made financial commitments—dealers, the auto unions—are going to have to cut a deal, sooner rather than later, and accept less than they think they're entitled to. None of that AIG-creditor treatment for you.

It's been a busy day. Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

Oxymoronic Language

2009-03-30T12:40:00.000-07:00

Really, the entire piece written by Andrew Breitbart for the Washington Times' OpEd page fits that description, but some passages retain that flavor stronger than others. As an example, try this paragraph on for size:

The right, for the most part, embraces basic Judeo-Christian ideals and would not promote nor defend the propaganda techniques that were perfected in godless communist and socialist regimes. The current political and media environment crafted by supposedly idealistic Mr. Obama resembles Hugo Chavez's Venezuela more than John F. Kennedy's America.

Herbert Hoover for 2009

2009-03-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

Who's the real Herbert Hoover in our current financial catastrophe? Is it George Bush...or is it Angela Merkel??

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, an avowed friend of the United States and the leader of the European Union’s biggest economy, is diplomatic about the coming visit by President Obama. But she is clear that she is not about to give ground on new stimulus spending, stressing the need to maintain fiscal discipline even as she professes to want to work closely with the new American president.

The moment in Roosevelt's Presidency I bet he wishes he had back was 1937, when:

F.D.R. wasn’t just reluctant to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion — he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back into double digits and led to a major defeat in the 1938 midterm elections.

So what's Merkel, Amity Shlaes, and other worthless Conservative Ideology-Before-Country types suggesting? The exact same thing for 2009.

To again quote Krugman (and even though I'm pissed at him because he's overdoing it about his Bank-plan complaints, he knows his stuff, and I'll always listen to him):

Like many other economists, I’ve been revisiting the Great Depression, looking for lessons that might help us avoid a repeat performance. And one thing that stands out from the history of the early 1930s is the extent to which the world’s response to crisis was crippled by the inability of the world’s major economies to cooperate.
The details of our current crisis are very different, but the need for cooperation is no less. President Obama got it exactly right last week when he declared: “All of us are going to have to take steps in order to lift the economy. We don’t want a situation in which some countries are making extraordinary efforts and other countries aren’t.”
Yet that is exactly the situation we’re in. I don’t believe that even America’s economic efforts are adequate, but they’re far more than most other wealthy countries have been willing to undertake. And by rights this week’s G-20 summit ought to be an occasion for Mr. Obama to chide and chivy European leaders, in particular, into pulling their weight.
But these days foreign leaders are in no mood to be lectured by American officials, even when — as in this case — the Americans are right.
The financial crisis has had many costs. And one of those costs is the damage to America’s reputation, an asset we’ve lost just when we, and the world, need it most.

If Germany wants to fail, let 'em...but they should sink on their own.

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

This Is Why I Hate On The Media (A Remix to Beige's Remix)

2009-03-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

Beige raises a couple very good points about the President's lack of Honeymoon. We shouldn't be surprised. The Media is driven now not by...you know...what's it called again?? Oh yeah, news. It's driven by News cycles, things that dominate coverage for a period of time, so the NewsMedia can devote its already scant resources to pounding the living @#$% out of it.

What are you laughing at? It sells papers, and well...someone out there's buyin'.

As far as the Newspapers are concerned, however, I'm not sure it's the Liberal Papers that are buying it in particular.

A couple of years ago, the New York Times decided to make you pay for the privilege of reading some (note, not all) of their online content. If you wanted to read Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and Paul Krugman, you had to be a part of their premium access club.

The experiment lasted all of a year. You'll notice that the content is free again.

Weren't makin' no money.

So...it makes you wonder what exactly it is the Newspapers are complaining about? After all, most of them...at least the ones going out of business...are saying that it's the internet that's responsible.

Well, yes and no.

We've lost the Rocky Mountain News. We're about to lose the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Part of the problem is the fact that the Rocky Mountain News used to compete just against the other paper in town, the Denver Post.

Now they're competing against all of them.

I mean, across the planet...every single paper ever published, every day.

If you're a reader, and you want the latest Political News, or latest Foreign Policy News...and you're living in the Denver Area...are you really going to tell me your first choice is the Rocky Mountain News, when the BBC, Washington Post or New York Times is out there?

This happened with the auto industry back in the day. When it first started, there were hundreds of companies trying to make cars. You'll notice that only three survived (and barely that). The Marketplace found its water level. It could support three auto companies, nothing more.

If you lived in Denver and 5000 Newspapers opened up ...chances are 90% of them would fail.

Denver's Newspapers were only competing with each other one second, then Planet Earth the next.

Funny thing is, the Rocky Mountain News should've concentrated on local news, one area the BBC and Washington Post can't touch. They should have cut their budget a little bit, and--

--oh what was that?

They've already done that...all while sacrificing national and international coverage they used to do on their own??

Ugh.

This is going to be an ugly process. It's not the Newspapers' fault...although cutting back on newsgathering couldn't have been a smart move. The Marketplace expanded. The playing field changed. A lot of Newspapers are going to fail, including ones you like and depend on.

Pro-Life Myopia

2009-03-25T18:05:00.000-07:00

Used to be that there was one thing the pro-choicers and the pro-lifers would agree upon (at least among the moderates on both sides): The life of the mother was sacrosanct.

Of course that was before extreme fundamentalist thought became more mainstream; what I like to call the Jesus Campening of the US.

Proof of how far things have progressed (regressed?) lay in the movement to bestow "personhood" upon the fetus; a movement that has found sympathetic minds in the legislatures of various states in conservative frontierlands, specifically the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho and Oregon. In essence, what these states are trying to do is to give the fetus the same inalienable rights as a person, thereby making abortion the same as murder; what isn't said is that this also allows the state to make decisions regarding a woman's pregnancy, regardless of any possible health risks to the mother.

Exaggeration? A bit of hullaballoo to rile up the left? Not so; check out this quote from a video created by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women:

Angela Carder, a Clarksville, Md., woman featured in the video, became critically ill at 25 weeks pregnant. Her family and physician all agreed to carry out her wishes and keep her alive as long as possible -- but her hospital called an emergency hearing to determine the rights of the fetus. A court held that the fetus' right to life outweighed its mother's, and ordered a C-section despite the fact that the surgery could kill Carder. The operation was performed, and neither one survived.

(For more about the video, the NAPW, and further issues relating to "personhood," check out this item from Salon's Broadsheet; the bit about the woman from Florida who wanted a VBAC is just about as scary.)

Meanwhile, I am forced to wonder what's possible on the opposite end of the political spectrum: RU486 in the water? Sterilization at birth? The mind boggles.

This Is Why I Hate On The Media (Beige Remix)

2009-03-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

Just adding to the dogpile currently hosted on SEI (let us not forget, the d-bags deserve it):

Toward the tail end of Salon's commentary on O's press conference on Tuesday, Mike Madden notes "(b)arely two months into his term, Obama's honeymoon looks like it's already over."

There was a honeymoon?

Granted, even SEI hasn't resisted the allure of criticising the moves coming out of the Oval Office, but a) we'd do that for any president, regardless of whether we'd support him or not (and we do - I like to think), and b) we're on the blogosphere...On the left end of the blogosphere at that, no one's paying attention to us.

Compare that to the coverage O has received from the mainstream media and the right wing noise machine ("socialist agenda"; the re-rising of Limbaugh the Hut & The Dittoheads, "I want the president to fail"; the Cheney double-standard). And we haven't even seen the results of O's actions yet! This really does bring to stark relief just how different the media behaves when there's a Democrat in the White House.

W got a 6.5 year honeymoon, O didn't make it 64 days.
---
Tangentially, is it just me, or are the lefty-leaning daily newspapers of the world the ones that are dying off first?

It's certainly true of the Rocky Mountain News (lefty for generally red Colorado), and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (which was as lefty as a Hearst publication could get; RIP both institutions).

What about in your hometown?

This Is Why I hate on the Media (Swine Version)

2009-03-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

I've had it up to my thinning, graying crown with the American press corps; and with people in general. I am fully convinced we are the most despicable animals in universal history, and I ain't just sayin' this 'cause I'm the resident curmudgeon here.

This morning is abuzz with the nay-sayers and critics of Obama's press conference last night. The consensus among the swine periodistas is that the Prez appeared too non-plussed, too rational, too "...distant and intellectual" (according to Republican strategist Matthew Dowd, who in the past has extolled Obama's virtues). If we are to believe this excrement---and a lot of us do---then our leader is apparently a disconnected elitist smoking Gauloises cigarettes out on the West Wing porch, without any interest in or concern with the gargantuan economic outhouse in which we, and the rest of the world, find ourselves.

Ladies and gents, this is the type of horseshite that has, over the last thirty years, accumulated and finally tipped me over the edge of reasonable sanity. Never in my life have I seen such anti-education, anti-intellectual backlash as has been practiced in this country. "I" is the new scarlet letter, you hear that Nathaniel? I am baffled by the continuously low standards we are pushing onto ourselves and our children, and remain fully incredulous at what a negative connotation the word "education" continues to have in our vernacular. It's easy to recognize the psychology in this: set the bar low enough and no one stands to disappoint. Everyone wins, right? A nation of mediocrity forging through time and history like a blind donkey. But with guns. Big guns, at that.

I wonder: what exactly would have made the media happy last night? To stand before an irrational, sabre-rattling, fist-shaking rabid dog spewing revolutionary bile and incoherent solutions? If so, may I suggest they migrate their critiquing arses down to Venezuela and take a look at what's happening down there.

At one point during the conference, newly-minted Press Corps Douchebaggius Extraordinaireus Chuck Todd stood and delivered this doozy.

It was nothing less than astounding, considering what we now know about lack of responsibility and accountability from banks and the likes of AIG. But then again, it shouldn't be too outrageous or revolting. News outlets are, after all, owned by corporations. Or insufferable despots like Rupert Murdoch. Oh wait...that's redundant.

This is why I hate on the media...

2009-03-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

It’s a nothing story, but it shows how the media bends over backwards to twist things into whatever shape they want to, or care to.

The Hill has a story on its website today: McCain creams Obama — in NCAA picks.

McCain’s bracket has 14 teams picked correctly headed into the Sweet Sixteen, placing him in the 94th percentile after the first weekend of play.

Okay. Fine. Congratulations to the Senior (and I mean, Senior) Senator from Arizona.

One problem. There's this little piece in the Politico, an article called Obama's bracket looking up, which says:

The president's NCAA tournament bracket looked a lot better Sunday when he correctly picked 14 of the 16 teams to reach the regional semifinals.

So…ummm…you want to run this by me again?!?

Oh, and welcome back there, (S)wine.

Originally posted on Fort McHenry.

Por Ahora (Part Deux)

2009-03-23T05:56:00.000-07:00

Good morning. Remember me? I've been locked away for a while but way-ell...I've been keeping my eye on you. Yes you, Señor El Presidente Douchebag Chávez. Some of us here in the "North American Empire" are actually endowed with the education and ability to not only read, but analyse and form opinions and...as far as I can tell, are still allowed to criticise governments.

For our dear readers who haven't yet scoured the news wires this morning, El Presidente launched an uncalled-for, disrespectful salvo at the U.S. yesterday on his usual, interminable Sunday babblefest of a show, calling President Obama "ignorant," and saying he has a lot to learn about Latin America.

“At least one could say, ‘poor ignorant person,’” Chávez said, adding that Obama “should read a little bit so that he learns about the reality.”

Chávez continued his usual diatribe: “If Obama respects us, we’ll respect him. If Obama tries to keep disrespecting Venezuela, we will confront the North American empire.”

May I remind our loyal readers what I wrote in my original piece (December, '08) on this Castro-wanna-be clown:

...despite the muscle flexing, tough talk, and anti-American rhetoric, Chávez knows full well he's engaged in an interdependent political game with the United States to buy his country's oil. What most people don't realize is that Venezuela has no other market for the greater part of its oil: heavy crude.

Heavy crude is special stuff and is not for the average refinery. The majority of Venezuela's oil can only be processed in the specialist refineries run by Hovensa (a joint venture between US refiners Hess Corp and PdVSA) located in the US Virgin islands, among other places. Meanwhile, the U.S. readily accepts the Venezuelan heavy crude because without it the heavy crude refineries would close. There is no other supplier of this special crude available, so the U.S. would lose around 11% of its total domestic oil products supply in one fell swoop.

The result is of the 2.15 million barrels per day (mbpd) Venezuela pumps presently, 1.35mbpd has to go to the U.S. Simply put, without Venezuela, U.S. refineries will close and the country will have an oil supply crisis. Meanwhile without the United States, Venezuela will have no market for the lion's share of its crude, and thus Señor Presidente would be voted out.

Forget dependence on foreign oil; when will the American people and politicians realise that a total and complete divorce from reliance upon oil via innovation and the harnessing of alternative sources will not only spearhead the effort of a global movement to save this rapidly-declining planet, but will in effect get these irrelevant bozo Commie barbudos off our backs once and for all? These insufferable parasites hang around rattling their sabres like flies for a reason: we continue to produce and provide the manure which attracts them.
(source for Chávez quotes: The New York Times)

"The buck stops with me"... (VIDEO)

2009-03-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

The President on the White House lawn as he prepares to go to California...

The best part about his statement today was the fact that the President gave a wonderfully easy-to-understand explanation of why saving AIG is as important as it is. (About 11:32 into the video).

If you ever hear a Conservative say that we should just let AIG fail, remember this quote.

Last year when the Federal Reserve decided to step in, again, that wasn’t a decision that we made but I actually think it was the right decision. AIG had insured a whole bunch of losses for a whole bunch of banks that had made bad bets on subprime loans and mortgages that had been packaged and bundled up and made into securities. These were massive insurance policies. Unfortunately, because of a lack of regulation, they were able to issue far more insurance policies than they could pay out on these various instruments that these banks had issued.

And had AIG been allowed to simply liquidate and go bankrupt, all those banks who were counterparties with AIG would have experienced such big losses that it would have threatened the entire financial system.

The complete transcript is courtesy of CQ:

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

Ben Shalom Bernanke (VIDEO)

2009-03-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

The President sooo told him to do this.

A year in the making? Humanizing the Fed Chair? He's from Dillon, freakin' South Carolina?? His family business was once located on Main Street in Dillon? How, if you're our President, do you not promote that??

By the way, that's not a joke, or a dig. That's the man's name, Benjamin Shalom Bernanke.

Couple this with Geithner's recent (and I think successful) appearance on Charlie Rose, and this appears to be a coordinated effort by the Federal Government to tell America, "Hey, we hear you. You're pissed. We get it. We got this."

Here's Part 1:

And Part 2:

Originally posted on Fort McHenry.

"Your Bank has failed"... (VIDEO)

2009-03-08T20:28:00.000-07:00

...now what do you do?

It's time to highlight the importance of regulation; the effort to keep markets healthy and the financial system working. This was an effort largely abandoned by the previous Administration, due to a slavish devotion to an ideology based on unrestricted markets, and laissez faire capitalism.

We see where this has gotten us.

In the coming months, there is a possibility that your bank, whereever you may live, no matter how big or strong you think it may be, may fail. What do you do then?

If it's FDIC Insured...you do nothing. You don't have to. If you have under $250,000 in deposits, your money is safe.

Here's last night's 60 Minutes piece to show you why.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

Rush--New Leader of the GOP

2009-03-05T06:05:00.000-08:00

(Charlie's Angels, circa 1974)

See, I am, like, totally omigod excited at the prospect, even though I must admit to being just a bit frazzled by the obtuse allegiance with the Elephants. Given their long history with all that is experimental in music, art, and literature, I honestly pegged Geddy, Alex, and Neil for liberals---in fact, socialists.

So you can imagine my surprise when they decided to lean right. I will allow them this strange mis-calculation, however, due to their advanced age and decades of drug use. And anyway, seriously. Everyone over fifty is Republican, right? Still...it will be good to see the boys from Toronto in the spotlight again, especially as the new mouthpiece for the Republican Party. I am very much looking forward to Neil's eloquent speeches and rebuttals, seeing how our new prez is young, pragmatic, sharp, and thought of by most as...GASP...an intellectual who eats the likes of Bobby Jindal for lunch. With some kind of green leaf vegetable called arugula. Fight muscle with muscle, baby:

When our weary world was young
The struggle of the ancients first began.
The gods of Love and Reason
Sought alone to rule the fate of Man.

They battled through the ages,
But still neither force would yield.
The people were divided,
Every soul a battlefield.
(Rush, Cygnus X-1, Book ii; Lyrics by Neil Peart)

I mean, seriously? Our prez is toast.

Neil's retort to Obama's articulate and elevated rhetoric, and Alex's and Geddy's abilities to weave an improvisational ditty around those words as they are being delivered, are exactly what the struggling Republican Party needs in order to boost its dwindling image (26% of voters with positive impressions of the GOP). Who else but a bunch of old white guys from the North to shake up a party made of a bunch of old white guys from the South?

I say Hallelujah. Pass the dutchie on the left hand side and the hell with Jindal and Barbour, the lousy stiffs!

Exit...stage left.

One-hundred egos...

2009-03-03T07:58:00.000-08:00

Once again, a scumbag Senator is holding up not just one, but two of the President's nominees, this time in the field of science: John Holdren, who is in line to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco, Obama's nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

We should rise up, tar and feather the dirtbag Republican Senator who--

Excuse me, what was that?

It's a Democrat who's holding up the nominations?

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) has placed a "hold" that blocks votes on confirming Harvard University physicist John Holdren, who is in line to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco, Obama's nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to sources who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, Menendez is using the holds as leverage to get Senate leaders' attention for a matter related to Cuba rather than questioning the nominees' credentials.

Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), said of Menendez's objections, "We will work to try to address any concerns that he may have."

This is a slightly personal matter to me, as I met Dr. Holdren when he presented an award to my dear old Dad in 2007.

Needless to say, despite the fact that this situation is being driven by an allegedly fellow Democrat, my assessment of the situation is no less harsh.

Mr. Menendez:

You barely won re-election, and maybe the reason it was so close because of narrow-ass bull@$# thinking like this. So shut up, drop the hold or get nothing from this President ever again in the future, because Obama's carrying New Jersey in 2012 with or without you.

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

"A new regulatory framework" (VIDEO)

2009-03-01T21:31:00.000-08:00

President Barack Obama. February 24th, 2009:

"So I ask this Congress to join me in doing whatever proves necessary. Because we cannot consign our nation to an open-ended recession. And to ensure that a crisis of this magnitude never happens again, I ask Congress to move quickly on legislation that will finally reform our outdated regulatory system. It is time to put in place tough, new common-sense rules of the road so that our financial market rewards drive and innovation, and punishes short-cuts and abuse."

I imagine a good place to start would be the SEC, where...if this story from 60 Minutes is correct, the SEC Regulators are Lawyers with no experience in the fields they are regulating, and tend to come in after the bank's been robbed to assign blame and explain what happened.

I know for a lot of people (myself included) just seeing or reading the words high finance will make your eyes glaze over. But in case you haven't heard, the laughably poor standards of the Bush Administration paled in comparison to his SEC.

We need to do better.

If you ever need to remember why regulation of Financial Markets is vital and important, just watch this 14 minute piece from 60 Minutes.

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

It all depends on what your definition of "Residual Force" is...

2009-02-26T21:39:00.000-08:00

So, it's finally going to happen.

As I am typing this, on (Thursday evening, February 26, 2009) President Barack Obama is preparing to give an address at Camp Lejune, North Carolina where he will announce the end of the Iraq War.

Praise be Jesus!

Now, the plan has had a few changes. Instead of the 16 month withdrawal plan he campaigned on, he is now talking a 19 month withdrawal plan.

As much as I want the War over with (and over with yesterday), I can live with 90 extra days. I'm not certain some soldiers can, but if this is what he's gotta do...

Even Republicans are on board with this plan, including gasp, shock and horror, one John Sidney McCain.

And that's where the world goes all topsy-turvy. Because, while Republicans are signaling "thumbs up" for the plan, Democrats are signaling a definite thumbs-down.

"I'm happy to listen to the secretary of defense and the president, but when they talk about 50,000, that's a little higher number than I had anticipated," Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) said.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the pullout "has to be done responsibly, we all agree. But 50,000 is more than I would have thought, and we await the justification."

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) echoed his worries, saying: "I do think we have to look carefully at the numbers that are there and do it as quickly as we can." Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) issued a statement saying he is "concerned" about the level of troops that would remain in Iraq.

Nancy Pelosi's was on with Rachel Maddow, and said it flat out, she's not cool with the idea of leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq.

So, what are we talking here? Nancy and the Senators all seem to be objecting to the size of the force. They also seem a little put-off by the notion of a residual force in the first place.

You're kidding me, right?

I have to ask a question. Back in 2008, when the candidate was speaking, was anybody freakin' listening?!?

From a July 14, 2008 Op-Editorial, written by one...Barack Obama (which is basically his standard stump speech on Iraq in newspaper form):

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.

So, what did everyone miss?

I guess I get annoyed with the idea of a candidate actually saying something, and his fellow politicians (along with a heapin' helpin' of voters) all getting together and saying "Yeah, he said that, but he's really not going to do that, is he??"

Well, yeah. Apparently so.

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

Coming Out With a Boiiiing-Boom-Tschak!

2009-02-26T09:37:00.000-08:00

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was slated to have a grand coming out party Tuesday evening as the GOP's new, young gun delivering the response to the President's address before Congress. Instead, Jindall came across as an over-coached, over-rehearsed stiff spewing the same old tired rhetoric that the Elephants have been trumpeting now for what seems like eternity.

Jindal's speech garnered near instant criticism, including from those in conservative circles who have promoted the 36-year-old governor as the GOP's most likely advocate to bring the party back from the brink of irrelevance. Many conservatives admitted Jindal appeared at best off-balance and at worst buffoonish in his national debut.

From CNN Online:
"Some conservative needs to start a campaign to fire whoever wrote this cheesy response and coached him to talk like this," wrote conservative columnist Amanda Carpenter on the popular social networking Web site Twitter. "I can't watch."

"He should never be allowed near a teleprompter again!" declared the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez on Wednesday, while noting the governor had a much stronger performance on NBC's "The Today Show" the morning after his speech.

And on PBS' "The Newshour," conservative columnist David Brooks described the speech and the ideology it represented as "insane," "nihilist," and "a disaster for the Republican Party."

Generally an opposition party's response rarely wins wide praise. The location itself is a gigantic setback. While the President stands before a chamber full of opinionated, if at times grumbling old hags, hacks, and various partisan stalwarts who go about their usual jack-in-the-box applauding routine, the opposition response comes out of an ultra-quiet, usually depressing, and somber solitary room. The rebuttal is delivered straight into (what I suspect is) a locked camera, and if we're lucky we get the occasional slow push-in or pull-out on the zoom lens. That is, if the camera operator is awake.

But Jindal may be a victim of overhype and unrealistic expectations. The governor's impressive resume and compelling background have been touted to make him a natural fit to compete against the oratorically-skilled Obama. And let's face it, the prez is a hell of a tough act to follow, no matter what a cunning linguist one may be.

However, Jindal can take solace in the fact that in politics, one often gets to move on to Act 2. Some of the most prominent politicians still making waves today floundered on their first attempt in the national spotlight. Among them, former President Bill Clinton, whose speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention was immediately deemed a disaster, with many political chatterboxes predicting the end of his political career.

Le Fabuleux Gouverneur-Morons!

2009-02-24T08:02:00.001-08:00

Fuck Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and fuck Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and fuck Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi. How's that for a cerebral, eloquent opening line to a column? Fortunately, top brass at S.E.I. is keeping me on a fairly long leash; in fact even encouraging profanity when profanity is warranted.

And profanity is warranted in this mind-boggling case of idiocy. For those still hanging in with us and following the circus that has again commenced in Washington, the aforementioned trio of bozos---all rising stars in the Republican Party---have sternly threatened to turn away federal (stimulus) aid rather than use the money to expand access to unemployment insurance programs in ways that many other states have already agreed upon.

These awful decisions are little more than political posturing reinforcing the terrifying conclusion that the Republican Party is more interested in ideological warfare than in working on policies that get the country back on track.

The GOP's attacks on the unemployment insurance portion of the stimulus package are disturbing. From The New York Times:

"States that accept the stimulus money aimed at the unemployed are required to abide by new federal rules that extend unemployment protections to low-income workers and others who were often shorted or shut out of compensation. This law did not just materialize out of nowhere. It codified positive changes that have already taken place in at least half the states.

To qualify for the first one-third of federal aid, the states need to fix arcane eligibility requirements that exclude far too many low-income workers. To qualify for the rest of the aid, states have to choose from a menu of options that include extending benefits to part-time workers or those who leave their jobs for urgent family reasons, like domestic violence or gravely ill children.

Data from the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit group, show that 19 states qualify for some of the federal financing and that a dozen others would become eligible by making one or two policy changes. Unemployed workers are worst off in the Deep South, where relatively few people are eligible to receive payments. Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas stand out."

The governors have complained that the federal unemployment aid would lead directly to new state taxes. This is not complete horseshit, but very close to it. Fact is no one really knows what the economic situation will be several years from now when the federal aid has been used up. But dumping billions of dollars into shrinking state unemployment funds puts money into the hands of people who will spend it quickly on food and shelter. The immediate injection of capital could help the states through the recession and into a time when unemployment trust funds can be replenished. In other words, the stimulus could make a tax increase less likely.

Governors like the young, ambitious, and up-and-coming Mr. Jindal should be worrying about how to end this recession while helping his constituents put food on the table and keep their houses, not about finding ways to resuscitate tired old election-year arguments about big spending versus small government.

More than the Cartoon...

2009-02-20T08:01:00.000-08:00

I hate to disagree with my friend, Alex on anything, even mildly, especially since he invited me onto his lovely site to write and contribute.

All I can do now, is offer my perspective as an African-American. (Oh, and by the way, for those readers who didn't know before my "startling" announcement, uhhh, surprise! Yeah, I know. It's a blog, it can be hard to tell.)

There isn't an African-American that I know who saw that cartoon and didn't have a visceral reaction to it.

And yes, I mean that visceral reaction.

Drawing a cartoon, like that, with that subject matter, and placing a monkey anywhere within fifty miles of it, is asking for that reaction. I also believe that the (yes) racist, editor who approved the piece knew exactly what he was doing. The history of stereotyping African-Americans and animals is far too long, far too deep to be ignored.

I know there is a reaction from the quote-unquote white community that pushes back against anything the Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are for. I think a lot of my, again, quote-unquote white friends would be surprised how many in the African-American view these two as clowns. To me, Sharpton and Jackson's number one cause has always been Sharpton and Jackson. Any actions they undertake must always be viewed through that prism.

At the same time, when they're right, they're right. Don't blame the weak-ass messenger for the message.

Personally, I think you can debate the racial connotations of the cartoon. I think you'd be wrong, but you can debate it.

What cannot be debated is the violence associated with this cartoon, and in context of the Obama Presidency...that, more than the monkey itself is what's fueling the anger in the African-American community.

The President's personal safety is something that is personal to a lot of African-Americans. Lord knows its personal to me. It is a fear that almost kept some African-Americans from voting for him, much less believing he could win.

Look at the some of the incidents that have happened since the President's Election:

Sales of handguns have gone up.

A cross was burned on the lawn of Obama supporters in Hardwick, New Jersey.

Political Figures in both Georgia and Texas warned their constituents of an "Obama Dictatorship" or "Obama Tyranny".

A Teachers' Aide from the Allison Park suburb of Pittsburgh told a bi-racial student: "that Obama was going to be shot and killed. And that our flag is going to be the KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken] flag and that the new national anthem will be 'Moving On Up' "

Again, told this to a freakin' student.

Students on a School Bus in Idaho started chanting "Assassinate Obama".

The Secret Service arrested a guy in Mississippi for threatening to kill the then-President-Elect. (BTW, thank you Secret Service for nabbing this guy.)

A Colorado Man was indicted recently for threatening the same.

Three men torched black churches (allegedly) within hours of the President's swearing in.

And of course, there was the lovely story of the man who said he had a delivery for the President, and was actually packing a rifle. (Again, thumbs up Secret Service...but this one sounded kinda easy. He did walk up to the front door thinking he could get in and just see the President.)

Again, just since the Election.

Forgive us for being more than a little bit paranoid.

The introduction of anything resembling violence toward this President isn’t going to be greeted warmly by anyone in my community, not even in jest.

In the end, this was an image of a Police shooting, in and of itself a sensitive subject in my community. It is an image of the shooting of a monkey, given the history of stereotyping African-Americans, every bit as painful. The monkey is also supposed to represent the author of the stimulus bill. This is where there's room for debate over the racial connotations of the cartoon; the Artist going so far as to say "if anything, the monkey represents Nancy Pelosi."

Yes, because gunfire is exactly the reaction you should have to a piece of legislation you disagree with.

But while the President may or may not be the author of the Stimulus Package, his was the face most associated with it. (He may not have written it, but I have no doubt than an awful lot of it came out of the White House.) In the end, this Artist and his Editor have decreed, however seriously you want to take it, that the penalty for this bad legislation, should be death.

That struck a nerve.

It was not without good reason.

Originally posted on Fort McHenry

The Cartoon

2009-02-20T05:20:00.000-08:00

Here's why the now infamous New York Post cartoon didn't cut through me as deeply: I equated the animal with Congress in general, not the president. The language ("They'll have to find someone else to WRITE the next stimulus bill") also indicates the intent of the satire. Obama never WROTE the bill...that's Pelosi's and Reid's baby; if anything THEY ought to be offended. But in any case, I filtered it through my personal lenses and I realize those are of a white, foreign-born, middle class man. I am hyper-aware of that.

That being said, I get it. I see how it may cross lines...divisive lines, hurtful lines, historical lines. I understand the protests in front of the Post building yesterday, especially coming on the heels of Attorney General Holder calling us a "nation of cowards" when it comes to racial dialogues. I think the Post's apology was the right thing to do. It was insensitive to run the cartoon and I personally believe both artist and the paper knew this was coming. I don't trust corporations; this stinks of a benign-enough stunt for the Post to pull, then ameliorate the situation with a quick apology to the African-American community. The press it has generated for the paper is gargantuan...and invaluable. I believe the Post weighed its options and decided this was a good enough risk to take.

What I loathe is the reactionary furor from the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson---now longtime stalwart leaders of the African-American community---who need to realize that their time and glory days have passed. These are the community's dinosaurs who, much like parasites, now thrive on static and the toxic puss flowing from re-opening racial wounds perpetually. With these two men around there will NEVER be any progress made between the races; I whole-heartedly believe these men's personal and financial well-being is based upon widening division lines between whites and blacks. I am convinced that these two are detrimental to the African-American community.

The days are approaching when a new generation looks at a cartoon like this and does not let it divide and conquer its communities. That new generation is our children, raised by us to understand that the only race is the human race, and that color is absent, and equality and rights do not cut one way or another. Nor are they bought and traded like commodities. That new generation will shake its head at the insensitivity of such cartoons, understanding fully the history and struggles of the African-American community in this country, as well as the complex inter-relationships of human beings in general. The new generation will take unified, appropriate, consumer action against companies and corporations like the New York Post. It will speak with its all-inclusive, cohesive processes and will effect change by flexing its all-powerful consumerist muscles against all perpetrators or perpetuators of racism, bigotry, and exploitation.

I truly believe these days are coming. Personally, as a father, I am doing my bit to ensure I am privy to living in these times before my jig is up and they discard of me properly in a six-foot hole. That is my hope.

TPM: Trailblazer is Toast...Part II (Senate Version)

2009-02-18T17:40:00.000-08:00

This is from the office of Dick Durbin, and it's his official statement on the Burris matter. (That breeze you feel is the axe starting to fall. If not, he's getting awful brazen about wishing a colleague, a Democratic colleague, out of the Senate.)

(Note: All emphasis...of course...is mine.)

DURBIN STATEMENT ON SENATOR ROLAND BURRIS

[WASHINGTON, D.C.] - U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) issued the following statement today on the evolving situation regarding Senator Roland Burris (D-IL):

"When we met with Roland Burris in January, we made it clear that in order for him to be seated in the U.S. Senate he needed to meet two requirements - first, that he submit the proper paperwork certifying his appointment, and second, that he appear before the General Assembly's Impeachment Committee to testify openly, honestly and completely about the nature of his relationship with the former governor, his associates and the circumstances surrounding this appointment."

"We asked him to testify in the impeachment proceedings, not to embarrass Roland Burris, but to give him an opportunity to clear the air regarding this appointment from a tainted governor. Our hope was that he would use that opportunity to assure the people of Illinois and the other members of the United States Senate that he was not involved in any wrongdoing."

"Now the accuracy and completeness of his testimony and affidavits have been called into serious question. Every day there are more and more revelations about contacts with Blagojevich advisors, efforts at fundraising and omissions from his list of lobbying clients. This was not the full disclosure under oath that we asked for."

"These news reports and the public statements by Roland Burris himself are troubling and raise serious questions which need to be looked at very carefully."

"The State's Attorney in Sangamon County is reviewing the affidavit and other materials associated with Senator Burris' testimony to see if criminal charges are warranted and the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee has begun a preliminary investigation into this matter."

"This is the appropriate course of action and I await the outcome of those investigations. The people of Illinois deserve nothing less."

As I said yesterday, in far fewer words (remember, I'm not a U.S. Senator):

"If you sufficiently bury Blagojevich…if you prove to the Senate you are your own man, we'll get this over with and let you in."

Well, he didn't.

Multiple amended statements does not equal"testify openly, honestly and completely about the nature of his relationship with the former governor...

Toast.

Sooner or later, toast.

The Return of the Permanent Campaign (VIDEO)

2009-02-18T13:59:00.000-08:00

One of the things Scotty McCellan (aka Puffy McMoonface to you Stephanie Miller fans out there), bemoaned in his book "What Happened" is the culture of the so-called "Permanent Campaign" that's seemed to have taken over politics.

One of the things Puffy was going to look for in a new candidate was someone who was going to end the permanent campaign mentality. Puffy wound up voting for Obama.

Now, in all fairness, the President tried it his way for a couple of weeks early in the Stimulus Package. You see where it got him.

Now, Obama is waging full-on, non-stop assault for his Economic Recovery plan, all four phases of it (Stimulus, Homeowners, Banks, and eventually...Health Care). He's been out of Washington more than he's been in it, signing legislation, holding town halls, driving the Congressional Republicans off the front page, and...more importantly...driving everyone's poll numbers up (including Congressional Democrats, no small feat).

And now, we've got outside groups airing campaign ads...all this when there's no campaign going on.

I understand Puffy's point, but we tried it his way. So...tough [BLEEP]. He who tries it your way goes home four years from now.

Originally Posted on Fort McHenry

"Trailblazer" is Toast...

2009-02-17T15:58:00.000-08:00

I had a bad feeling about this dude.

I had a bad feeling from the start.

But now, my bad feelings about the guy may not matter. Sooner or later, Senator Roland Burris is toast.

It wasn't just the fact that he took an appointment by the most ethically challenged Governor in recent memory. It wasn't just the fact that he turned out to be far, far, far down the list, or that others had reservations about taking the appointment from Blagojevich and wisely said "hell no".

And it sure as hell wasn't about his grave, either.

When Harry Reid said, that the Senate would not seat him, I cheered. There quickly appeared an article in Slate.com that backed him up, saying that the Powell Case, the precedent most frequently mentioned in relation of the Burris case did not necessarily apply to the Burris case. Oh man, I loved that. I was so happy.

But then, it was just about the only article out there saying the Senate was right to not seat him. All the others, on the other hand, said the opposite.

Even my dead old Dad was against me. (Yeah, I'm talkin' about you, old man.)

In the end, he was seated. In the end, the math was too good. The Senate had to cave, and wanted to put this business behind it.

But as the cheese stood alone, I warned my Dad, I warned a lot of my friends…this guy was bad news.

And in this case, the Tombstone had a lot to do with it.

One of the conditions Harry Reid had put on Burris getting his seat was his testimony before the Impeachment Proceedings in the Illionois Senate. In a nutshell, "If you sufficiently bury Blagojevich…if you prove to the Senate you are your own man, we'll get this over with and let you in."

Thus, Roland Burris went before the Illinois Senate.

And thus, Roland Burris may have perjured himself.

During his January 8th Impeachment Testimony, Burris was asked this question:

QUESTION: Did you talk to any members of the governor‘s staff or anyone closely related to the governor including family members or any lobbyists connected with him, including, let me throw out some names, John Harris, Rob Blagojevich, Doug Scofield, Bob Greenleaf, Lon Monk, John Wyma? Did you talk to anyone who is associated with the governor about your desire to seek the appointment prior to the governor‘s arrest?

BURRIS: I talked to some friends about my desire to be appointed. Yes.

As Keith said last night, this was on its nose truthful, but at the same time a little vague, so he was pressed again.

QUESTION: The point is, I was trying to ask did you speak to anyone on the governor‘s staff prior to the governor‘s arrest or any of those individuals or anybody who was closely related to the governor?

BURRIS: I recall having a meeting with Lon Monk about my partner and I trying to get continued business and I did bring it up, it must have been in September, maybe it was in July of ‘08 that, you know, if you are close to the governor let him know that I am certainly interested in the seat.

So, Burris admits to talking to Lon Monk, one of Blagojevich's hacksabout wanting the Senate Seat in September or July of 2008, nice and specific.

The problem was he forgot to mention that he had talked to Rob Blagojevich about the Senate Seat as well. That would be Rob Blagojevich, Governor Rod's Brother, and apparently Chief of Staff (unindicted). The other Chief of Staff, John Harris was indicted and arrested along with the human hair helmet.

On February 4th, Senator Burris filed an affidavit amending his testimony before the Illinois Senate, where he goes from zero conversations with Rob (not Rod) Blagojevich to three conversations with Rob (not Rod) Blagojevich.

Oh, and Rob (not Rod) Blagojevich may have asked him for a contribution in advance of his getting the Senate seat.

Let me illustrate some of the problems this presents.

One, this affidavit is filed a month after Senator Burris's original testimony before the Illinois Senate, and a week after Governor Blagojevich is impeached. The timing couldn't be worse because it makes it look like Burris wanted the seat so bad that he kept his mouth shut (given the pressure put on him by Harry Reid) during the ImpeachmentTestimony, and once his seat was secure, in his mind, he "legally" covered his ass by filing the affidavit. This is what I think actually happened.

Two, another problem is that he has admitted that he sought to raise funds for Governor Blagojevich before he got the appointment. That has the effect of making it look like q quid pro quo situation for a Governor who's about to go to jail for asking for one too many quid pro quos.

Three, then there's the matter of Rod (not Rob) Blagojevich was asking him for a contribution before hand. Same instance, in reverse. Uhhh, isn't this the behavior that landed his brother in the hoosegow in the first place??

And given the gravity of the situation, how exactly does Senator Burris not remember this [BLEEP] when he's asked that question on January 8th? This is where Burris's Legal jeopardy lies.

And is it a coincidence that this all happened on January 8th, Elvis's birthday? You know the Governor is a devoted fan.

Again, everything is timing. Burris could well be innocent of the charges (I doubt it, but hell, you never know), but the people of Illinois and the Senate Ethics Committee have every right to start asking what did the Senator know and when did he know it.

It doesn't help when Burris gives answers like this went pressed:

No. The inconsistencies are coming from you all. The inconsistencies are coming from the press. There are no inconsistencies in my first voluntary affidavit, my testimony before the impeachment committee and no inconsistencies in the second affidavit that I submitted. None whatsoever. Those are factual. That‘s the truth and God knows we shouldn‘t even be here.

This is the answer of a defensive [BLEEP], with no answers. When you have the Law, pound the law. When you have nothing, pound the table.

Look, alledged Senator Burris, like it or not, there are inconsistencies. They may be explainable, but it's going to take a whole lot more than your word at this point.

This is a supposedly safe Senate seat for 2010. Burris shouldn't be running, but everyone in Illinois is acting like he is. The sooner this gets put down, the better for Democrats.

At the same time, a wise Politician, one holding on to some manner of dignity might spare us all this nonsense and resign right now.

But is there anyone from Illinois Government that has shown that kind of dignity recently?

UPDATE: 5:44pm Pacific: According to HuffPo, Toast is also a definition of when, shall it be now or 2010? (Hint: They say 2010.)

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Cliff's Notes

2009-02-17T05:57:00.000-08:00

Remember those? Before Wiki, before Google, before Ask Jeeves (ha! Remember him?), we had Cliff's Notes. It's how I got through most of my high school Shakespeare and some of that other dreaded "required reading" (Beowulf, Canterbury Tales), so don't laugh. Yes, they were pseudo-cheating, but they nevertheless helped.

We could have used a version of the oul' Cliff's Notes last week, for this mondo-giganto stimulus bill that just got passed in Congress. Why? Because not a single member of either chamber had a chance to read it. Or wanted to, apparently. Indeed, the 1,073-page document (admittedly full of legalese mumbo-jumbo) wasn't posted on the government's Web site until after 10 p.m. the day before the vote to pass it was taken. Shame, shame, shame; Congress has voted to spend almost $790 billion of our money on a stimulus package that no one has bothered to properly commit to the grey matter.

Democrats promised to post the bill a full 48 hours before the vote was taken to allow members of the public, as well as lawmakers, to see what they were getting for their money. Both parties voted unanimously to do this ... and both parties lied.

That Congress lies to the American people is not a surprise---it really ought to legally become part of a politician's job description---but methinks the reason for all this business-as-usual wrangling inside the Beltway is the noxious, internecine warfare between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

These two stalwarts represent exactly that which Obama is desperately trying to fight: status-quo and "good ol' boy" mentality and fraternity, which seem to have thoroughly ensconced themselves into Washington culture, thus rendering all aspects of visionary lawmaking impotent.

It's really a shame President Obama couldn't figure out a way to boot these two brats (along with a few handfuls of their Republican counterparts). The Associated Press called the stimulus bill "sausage making" in the best tradition of Washington politics as usual.

Personally, I'm holding my breath---we need some sort of a chance, but the skeptic/cynic within me is wincing just a wee bit. I cannot help it; I've seen these games for far too long.

TPM: Bye-Bye, Norm!

2009-02-13T15:42:00.000-08:00

Since I'm new to SEI, I've tried to spend more time posting full pieces instead the little jibs and jabs I throw up elsewhere.

But this one was too good to resist. Courtesy of Talking Points Memo:

The Minnesota election court has just handed down a very important ruling that will determine the entire course of the rest of this trial -- and it's very bad news for Norm Coleman, cutting off multiple avenues he was pursuing in order to get more votes for himself thrown into the count.

Yesterday the court heard arguments regarding the campaigns' positions on 19 categories of rejected absentee ballot envelopes, and whether the voters should be cut sufficient slack as to allow the ballot in. The court has now handed down a ruling on 12 of those categories -- and it's an emphatic No.

Hillary Is Good...

2009-02-11T09:59:00.000-08:00

Not too long ago, in the waning days of that "other" President, things were bad with Russia...and I mean, bad. Hell, we spent pretty much all of August shaking our fist helplessly at them as they invaded the Georgian Republic.

Then, we decided that it'd be a great idea to put elements of a missile shield (radar stations, I believe) in Poland and the Czech Republic.

This of course prompted a hostile reaction from the Russians, who were...you know...kinda threatening war over the missile shield. (Okay, just a Nuclear Strike on Poland, same diff.)

I wouldn't say that our relationship with Russia was on a war footing, but it wasn't far off. (By the way, thanks Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham for all the warm thoughts!)

Well, the new guys finally moved into the White house. And almost immediately, a frosty relationship seemed turn, uhhh...frostier.

On top of that, the nation of Kyrgyzstan terminated a deal allowing us to use their airbases to resupply our forces in Afghanistan, seemingly at Russian direction.

But then Joe Biden went to Europe and gave a little speech saying that we needed to hit the reset button on U.S. Foreign Policy.

And we let the Russians know that, while we're going ahead with our plans for the shield, we don't necessarily need the dang thing.

This apparently made the Russians feel better...

And then our new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added an interesting litle kicker. "Gee, of course, if we had help with the Iran-going-nuclear-problem, it'd make this whole missile shield thing go away even faster."

And on top of that, get this...now the Russians are talking about letting us use their airbases as a way for us to resupply our troops in Afghanistan. But, they still want that Missle shield outta there, and won't take any steps unless we physically deploy the dang thing.

See, Previous President? This is the power of talking...

Originally posted at Fort McHenry.