Sex on the City

The name nails it, her, him . . . whatever.

Voter fraud snipe hunt

"Everytime someone says, 'Show me the fraud,' there isn't any," said Coleman.

Get mad. Again.

Heard this morning on Air America:

Brad on the Stephanie Miller Show This Morning, Discussing the Sibel Edmonds Case... - 11/23/07

More background:

What The Heck is the Sibel Edmonds Case Anyway? And Why Should You Care About It? - 11/20/07

EXCLUSIVE: Daniel Ellsberg Says Sibel Edmonds Case 'Far More Explosive Than Pentagon Papers' - 11/19/07

EXCLUSIVE: FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Will Now Tell All - and Face Charges if Necessary - to Any Major Television Network That Will Let Her - 10/29/07

EXCLUSIVE: FBI WHISTLEBLOWER SIBEL EDMONDS IS READY TO TALK! - 3/3/06

Vanity Fair, An Inconvenient Patriot - 8/15/05

Polterzeitgeist

This piece first appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on November 11, 2007.

Flipping through channels last week, I caught the tail end of the 1982 movie, “Poltergeist.” It’s still unnerving decades later. Childhood terrors come to life: monsters in the closet, outside the window, under the bed. In one scene, JoBeth Williams runs to her screaming children, but in helpless slow motion as their bedroom door recedes impossibly before her.

Watching the rerun of the Bush administration’s war-starting strategy — this time featuring Iran — feels like those slow-motion nightmares.

We charge Iran with interfering in Iraq. They’ve supported fellow Shiites there since the days when the United States supplied Saddam Hussein with chemicals, but no matter.

We charge Iran with smuggling weapons across their border with Iraq. The U.S. smuggled Stinger missiles to mujahideen halfway around the world in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, but no matter.

Determined hawks

One influential hawk among many, National Review’s Michael Ledeen, insists a state of war with Iran has existed since 1979. Ledeen helped the Reagan administration transfer weapons to the Iran he repeatedly claims we were at war with, but no matter.

In “The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know” in the recent Esquire, two former Bush State Department Middle East policy experts outline their post-Sept. 11, 2001, discussions with Iranian diplomats. “Iran was ready to cooperate unconditionally,” Esquire reports. The Bush administration was not — is not — interested in diplomacy, but no matter.

The executive branch players reprise roles they made famous, pre-Iraq. President Bush warns of “nuclear holocaust.” Vice President Cheney threatens Iran with “serious consequences.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accuses Iran of “lying” to inspectors about its nuclear programs.

It doesn’t take a quarterback to see that the administration is running the same play again. Against Iran and against us.

Trumping up a case

They’ve been wrong about everything from weapons of mass destruction to Iraqi “dead-enders” to de-Baathification, Hurricane Katrina and Harriet Miers, but no matter. Regimes must be changed. Wars must be started. Reasons will be found.

In February, a story in London’s Telegraph newspaper reported that more than 100 .50-caliber Steyr-Mannlicher sniper rifles had been captured during American raids in Iraq. The weapons shipped to Iran in 2005 were now in use against U.S. troops, claimed the Telegraph’s anonymous source.

These formidable-looking Austrian weapons can take off a man’s head at a mile. Austrian native Arnold Schwarzenegger might wield one in the movies. What a jim-dandy backdrop for a press conference 100 would make, a picture worth a thousand words.

But no photos of the captured weapons appeared in any newspapers — only shots from Steyr’s online catalog. Skeptics asked if the serial numbers matched the weapons shipped to Iran, and the tale of the unseen rifles died overnight.

“Explosively formed penetrators” (EFPs) star in this year’s sequel too. Military briefers told reporters that the armor-piercing roadside bombs require machining too sophisticated for Iraqis. They had been manufactured in Iran.

“We have no evidence that this has ever been done in Iraq,” a senior U.S. military official told the New York Times in February.

Days later, a Los Angeles Times op-ed article cited a November 2006 raid on a Baghdad machine shop producing EFP components. Earlier reports of Iraqi EFP factories surfaced, and more questions. Military spokesmen backed away from earlier claims, prompting suggestions that the allegations against Iran had been manufactured. Bush called those suggestions “preposterous.”

Congress can stop this

These anecdotes don’t disprove Iranian weapons are reaching Iraq. Some indeed may. But these examples cast a cloud over tales — especially regarding Iranian nuclear programs — used to justify a disastrous new “preemptive” war by the same people who produced the last one.

Congress has the power to stop it. But despite receiving the voters’ mandate last November — to exercise its duty to flex its own constitutional war and oversight powers — Congress shies like an abused child who fears slaps and name-calling for doing so.

Hoping to wait out a reckless and power-hungry White House until November 2008 is itself reckless, as it is unconscionable.

Presidential spokesmen and candidates warn that a nuclear-armed Iran will destabilize the region. But that mission is already accomplished. Another American pre-emptive war will destabilize it further, and quicker.

Like a slow-motion nightmare, we watch it unfolding just as it did in 2002 and 2003. We scream warnings, but our leaders do not hear us.

Water Woes

Uptown Ruler takes note of the Southeast's water woes, highlighted in Orme, TN. (Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

The Associated Press reports “As twilight falls over this Tennessee town, Mayor Tony Reames drives up a dusty dirt road to the community’s towering water tank and begins his nightly ritual in front of a rusty metal valve.

With a twist of the wrist, he releases the tank’s meager water supply, and suddenly this sleepy town is alive with activity. Washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run.

About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town’s 145 residents.

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.

The mayor wonders what the 4.5 million people in Atlanta will do. I had my own perspective on the problem:

As Dreyfuss once said, “Well, this is not a boat accident! And it wasn’t any propeller; and it wasn’t any coral reef; and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper!” But for Atlanta, anyway, it wasn’t a shark or the drought either. It was overdevelopment.

The drought just precipitated the crisis that’s been a long time coming. Atlanta’s been sucking hard on the Flint River Aquifer for years without regard to what sprawl was doing to the water supply.

“Heavens, we can’t tell developers no. That would interfere with their personal freedom and right to put their land to its ‘highest and best use’.”

In 1998, I put in a wastewater neutralization system for a lens coating operation in an office park in Alfalfa-retta, north of Atlanta. I asked what the small out-building was at the edge of the parking lot. The Culligan rep told me it was a well house (in an upscale office park!).

He knew clients (including hospitals) drilling wells all over Atlanta because the Metropolitan Sewer District wouldn’t let people use all the water they wanted (both because of the MSD infrastructure capacity and water source limits, I think). So they were drilling their own wells to get unmetered water.

I was on the edge of another client’s lawsuit in Duluth Buford, GA, in 1999 when the county Fulton reneged on its water contract to supply the water needed for a new, water-heavy manufacturing operation we helped design.

The drought is just the straw that’s broken the camel’s back. The Flint River Aquifer has been under strain for a decade as Atlanta keeps growing, the developers keep developing, and the water supply keeps shrinking.

It was only a matter of time before the taps started running dry. Nobody listens. Nobody cares. Anyone who raises the alarm is an anti-business kook.

For years, I’ve wondered when we’d start seeing bumper stickers that said, “Suppose they gave a subdivision and nobody came?”

Maybe soon, now.

Then from today's LA Times:

But experts say the Southeast’s struggles over water resources are far from over.

“What was not on the table, and what has got to be on the table, is Atlanta’s unrestricted growth and cavalier attitude to water use,” said Sally Bethea, executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a watchdog group.

[. . .]

“Atlanta is a greedy, poorly designed behemoth of a city incapable of hearing the word ‘no’ and dealing with it,” said a recent editorial in the Valdosta (Ga.) Daily Times.

The editorial said Atlanta’s “politicians can’t bring themselves to tell their greedy constituents complaining about the low flows in their toilets this week that perhaps if they didn’t have six bathrooms, it might ease the situation a bit.”

There is sowing, and then there is reaping.

Sandbox Rules

Dave Neiwert of Orcinus began a series this week, "The Politics of the Personal," over at Campaign for America's Future. Part 1 describes his journey from growing up in Idaho in a Republican working class family, to rejecting that ideology. But there's enough caution to go around for all:

A basic realization took shape, perhaps typical of the age, but it has persisted: even though I had always believed (and still do to some extent) upper-class and urban liberals are prone to indulging a paper-thin compassion that more resembles a parlor game rationalized with a tortuous intellectualism, it was also clear that conservatives, conversely, were fond of wrapping themselves in my old-fashioned, working-class values (along with the American flag, of course) even as they systematically undermined the ability of ordinary, working-class people to make a decent living and obtain equal opportunity.

[. . .]

I simultaneously came to almost instinctively mistrust ideologues of all stripes because it seems that to them, ideas are more important than people. This observation arose first out of personal experience, since ideologues are often likely to reject friendships with those who don't think like them or fit their ideologies. I might be able to maintain a relationship with an ideologue (right or left) for awhile, but inevitably, they would reject me because I didn't fit the pure mold they had in mind. People who disagree with them or challenge them assault their egos and are placed out of their personal realms. This dynamic – valuing ideas above people -- played out on the larger stage as well; indeed, it’s virtually a guarantee that when ideologues act out their ideologies, in both national politics and everyday interpersonal dealings, ordinary people in real life are harmed.

You see it at both ends of the ideological spectrum, as I've written myself after encountering liberal activists who wouldn't give pro-life Democrats the time of day:

It has been obvious to me for some time that the further right and the further left one goes in the political spectrum, the more alike conservatives and liberals become. They don't think the same things, but they begin thinking the same way: rigid, dogmatic and intolerant. They just don't see themselves that way: "You must mean those people."

Dave, who has followed the "eliminationist" trend in America for some time, also wanders, as I have, into exploring the mindset(s) behind the American Right. Dave, Digby and others have been puzzling over the coverage of Hillary Clinton's appearance at Wellesley -- for playing the "gender card" -- by the boys' club that unashamedly gushes over their favorite candidates' manliness. As Digby puts it:

Indeed, the entire Republican campaign strategy can be said to be one big gender card --- the only people they believe matter in this country are delicate, insecure creatures who are so sensitive that they have to be pampered and pandered to like a bunch of overfed princes who like to play cowboy and don't want to share their favorite binky.

Even more fascinating is Orcinus' Sara Robinson's take on fundamentalist/Right Wing Authoritarian ideology that traps people "somewhere around the age of five or six":

They also have to give up on adult-level emotional functioning (which, as I mentioned, may be welcomed as something of a relief after adult life has blown up under you a few times). Authoritarian followers crave someone who will keep things ordered and safe, someone who will provide and protect and set firm rules and boundaries; someone all-powerful and all-knowing who can teach you right from wrong and keep the harsh parts of the world at bay. Someone, in short, who looks like Daddy looked when you were about five years old.

RWAs would far rather curl up in Daddy's lap -- even if it means abandoning reason and taking the occasional spanking -- than try to deal with the world by themselves, on adult terms. This is also why RWA family and community relationships (as Lakoff has explained) are necessarily hierarchical. These people still need parents around, because they don't feel emotionally safe without the presence of a strong authority figure. Egalitarian relationships terrify them, because there's nobody in charge to make the rules and set the boundaries that keep people from hurting each other. And that's damned scary, because (as masters of projection) they're quite sure that everybody else in the whole world is also still five years old and playing by sandbox rules. Without a playground supervisor in charge, they know for sure that somebody will get hurt.

It takes us full-circle to the Bush joke that went around the Net awhile back. As Digby put it:

Avedon Carol snares a great quote that finally cleared something up for me: why does Bush always sound like he's talking to five year olds?

"He speaks to the audience as if they're idiots. I think the reason he does that is because that's the way these issues were explained to him." - Graydon Carter

All well and good. Now, what do we do with this information that will help us set this country right again? How do we elect leaders who will lift us out of the sandbox in Iraq and the political sandbox Washington has become?

Why are we not surprised?

From this morning's WaPo:

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

Regarding the president's nominee for AG, Mr. Mukasey, today's NYT editorial weighs in:

Mr. Gonzales resigned after his extraordinary incompetence became too much for even loyal Republicans. Now Mr. Bush wants the Senate to confirm Michael Mukasey, a well-respected trial judge in New York who has stunned us during the confirmation process by saying he believes the president has the power to negate laws and by not committing himself to enforcing Congressional subpoenas. He also has suggested that he will not uphold standards of decency during wartime recognized by the civilized world for generations.

After a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Mr. Mukasey refused to detail his views on torture, he submitted written answers to senators’ questions that were worse than his testimony. They suggest that he, like Mr. Gonzales, would enable Mr. Bush’s lawless behavior and his imperial attitude toward Congress and the courts.

Just another day at the Ministry of Truth.

Blogging still slow

My other political project continues to consume much time.

Op-ed: Coming soon in the funny papers.

The Propagandists Next Door

The right-wing Pass-It-On e-mails that come to me (via friends and relatives who know I collect it) was were a source of amusement for years. But what with the machinations of this administration and its lackeys - and a pending attack on Iran - I've come to see them in a darker light.

Folks, you're not just forwarding e-mail from friends. You're being used as propagandists by propagandandists.

An old one from 2002 came around again last week, already debunked by Snopes.com. Among the lies it traffics in are:

Oliver North warned an unfriendly Senate inquisitor about Osama bin Laden during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings. "Quotes" are included.

North's inquisitor was Al Gore.

9/11 mastermind, Mohammad Atta, in prison in Israel for a bus bombing conviction, was released from prison in 1993 at the behest of the Clinton administration. This "fact" was reported in the U.S. press immediately after 9/11, but subsequently censored.

Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia.

Okay, that last bit wasn't really in there. But as is customary, the spam urges readers to pass it on (to everyone in your e-mail list).

All lies, of course. It was Abu Nidal, not Osama bin Laden. Gore wasn't on that panel. It wasn't that Mohammed Atta - different guy, same name. Ollie North even disclaimed the e-mail on his own site. Newspapers did report the Atta story after 9/11, but stopped after the Boston Globe discovered the error.

The disquieting thing is, these things continue to crop up - along with new ones - and fan out like a chain reaction. And they fly comfortably below the radar, day after day, passed from e-mail list to e-mail list. The mail I got had 75 e-mail addresses on it.

What makes Pass-It-On mail such an efficient conduit for spreading propaganda is that it arrives from a friend, colleague or relative - sources less impeachable, and much less likely to be challenged than the Mainstream Media. A 30-sec Google search would reveal the mail to be false, less time than it takes to attach dozens of your friends' addresses to the forward. Yet few bother. It reinforces existing prejudices. It came from a friend. Why inquire further?

What especially strikes me about this one is, it's not just one falsehood that slipped through the cracks, but many. The newspapers got the Atta story wrong. Okay. But Oliver North (Iran-Contra transcripts are readily available)? Al Gore?

As with other mailings in my collection, somebody went to a lot of trouble to assemble and distribute these lies with World Trade Center graphics and extra-large, extra-bold red, white and blue formatting - not uncommon for Pass-It-Ons. Given what we've seen from the administration and its supporters, it's not a stretch to assume that the authors already knew these things were lies ... and didn't care so long as they furthered the cause and poisoned the well of public discourse.

Such tactics filter from the top down. We shouldn't be surprised.

With evidence that the recent right-wing blogger smear campaign against twelve year-old SCHIP recipient, Graeme Frost, was orchestrated out of Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's office, one wonders if the persistent Pass-It-On spam has similar parentage, though perhaps not regularly originating in the Senate.

These things do their jobs discretely, quietly poisoning minds, breeding mistrust of the unpatriotic Others, laying a foundation of support - almost subliminal - for secret prisons, military tribunals, indefinite detention, kidnapping, torture of prisoners, and the next preemptive war.

As a child reared during the Cold War, I was cautioned what would happen to freedom-loving "trouble-makers" if the Communists ever took over: surveillance, imprisonment, show trials, friends and relatives informing on each other, secrecy and ubiquitous propaganda.

They just never anticipated talk radio and the Internet.

The Greatest Hits Party

At recent and not-so-recent Democrat events I've attended, invariably someone gets up to remind us what Democrats are all about. To cheers and applause they reel off a list of 40-to-70-year-old programs and policies of which Democrats are justly proud. Only it begins to have the air of a late-night K-tel commercial: Democrats' Greatest Hits - All your favorites from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.

Makes me want to put on some plaid golf pants, a white patent-leather belt, and dance the Shag with Mrs. Blue.

Folks, you'd better get off your widening rear ends and create some new hits if you want to remain relevant in the 21st century. This democracy may not survive your biding your time until the end of Bush's term.

Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions:

Restore habeas corpus.

Insist the Executive branch obey the law or impeach the blackguards.

Cut off the Boy King's war-waging allowance -- give him a G.I. Joe and send him to his room.

Demand an Attorney General who's not another presidential toady.

Need more ideas? You know where to find me.

Eliminationists United

This is a few days old, but worth reading in full.

Ezra Klein renders a diagnosis of the latest Malkin/wingnut crusade -- against 12-year-old Graeme Frost -- into plain English:

This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he “really” needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.

The shrieking, atavistic ritual of personal destruction the right roars into every few weeks is something different than politics. It is beyond politics. It was done to Scott Beauchamp, a soldier serving in Iraq. It was done to college students from the University of California, at Santa Cruz. Currently, it is being done to a child and his family. And think of those targets: College students, soldiers, children. It can be done to absolutely anyone.

This is not politics. This is, in symbolism and emotion, a violent group ritual. It is savages tearing at the body of a captured enemy. It is the group reminding itself that the Other is always disingenuous, always evil, always lying, always pitiful and pathetic and grotesque.

To punctuate the point, Klein cites a recent account by Jim Henley of road rage, threats and a near assault provoked by simply ... well, let him explain it:

I yell back when he stops for air, “What is your FUCKING problem? What did I do to you?”

He leans out to point at my car bumper. Which is entirely unadorned except for a Kerry-Edwards sticker from 2004.

“YOU FAGGOT YOU VOTED FOR THAT WAR CRIMINAL. I’M GOING TO BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU.” Guy is turning a shade of purple. I don’t think he’s just putting on a show. He actually sped up, nearly rammed with his car at high speed and is now seriously contemplating attacking me over a bumper sticker.

Liberal protesters may camp out in front of Nancy Pelosi's house, but that's about it. Malkin's mob falls into this disturbing brand of conservatism, the kind of insecure, easily threatened people who beat up guys with long hair in the 60s before wearing theirs long in the 70s.

There are plenty of sane people on the right, to be sure -- some of my relatives among them -- but for too many twisted individuals conservatism isn't a political philosophy, it's a personality disorder.

Dave Neiwert has the last say:

It's important to make an issue of eliminationist talk precisely because it is so poisonous to the national discourse. For starters, its innate divisiveness belies its practitioners' demands for "national unity." Moreover, its targets are in a lose-lose position: if they attempt to continue to practice the old-fashioned politics of traditional civility out of principle, they are doomed to be bulldozered; but if they stand up and fight back, they're accused of being uncivil. (It's funny how bullies act all wounded and picked on when somebody punches back.)

This is easily the ugliest facet of a conservative movement that doesn't have many attractive ones to begin with, and the more the general public sees it in all its mouth-foaming glory, the less they want anything to do with them. With polls a month ago showing something like 86 percent support for SCHIP, nasty attacks on 12-year-olds seem unlikely to change the public's mind. (A more recent Rasmussen poll showed 57 percent disapproved of President Bush's veto of the SCHIP bill.) More important, there's a growing consensus that, like the centrists at Poliblogger, we are "sick to death of these people and their views of both politics and public discourse."

Yet at the same time, eliminationist rhetoric creates a vicious upward spiral that inevitably expresses itself in violence: When its practitioners face the inevitable retaliation, their response always is to ratchet it up another notch, until the back-and-forth gets so ugly that hardly anyone can tell who is worse. This is not discourse; it's a recipe for the destruction of our democratic institutions.

[h/t Dave Neiwert/TomPaine.com]

A little history lesson

from "Last of the Mohicans," on cable tonight:

I believe if they set aside their law as and when they wish, their law no longer has rightful authority over us. All they have over us is tyranny, then. -- Jack, a militiaman

Wake up on the wrong side of the bed?

Every day for the last several decades?

Rick Perlstein (citing James Fallows)observes that Al Gore isn't the first Nobel winner to give conservatives a hissy fit.

For conservatives, everything is political war. Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize, reflecting the entire world's consensus that man-made climate change is a crisis? For conservatives, that means: time to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize itself as a pathetic racket—or, as National Review's Steven F. Hayward puts it, "a once-prestigious award," now suffering its "final debasement."

It raises an interesting question. When did conservatives first begin questioning the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize? Steve Benen and James Fallows point out that would be 1964, when the Prize was won by Dr. Martin Luther King.

[. . .]

As I wrote in an essay last January (subscription only; email me at rperlstein@ourfuture.org and I'll email you a copy), conservatives "hated King's doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism." Prominent conservatives even went so far as to blame him for his own death—for didn't the doctrine of "civil disobedience" mean you got to choose the laws you followed? Strom Thurmond: "[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case." Ronald Reagan: this was just the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break." Civil rights? That was just a front. A have here in front of me a slim 1965 pamphlet c0-authored by Lee Edwards, a present-day fellow at the Heritage Foundation, entitled Behind the Civil Rights Mask, whose cover features King's face as a mask, hiding their true goal: "revolution."

And they go after children the same way.

Separate and unequal

Glenn Greenwald opines today on the naked corruption on display in the Telecom Immunity law winding through Congress with bipartisan support. It's designed to exempt telecoms from lawsuits spawned by violations of communications laws, committed at the behest of the NSA for the White House's domestic surveillance program.

. . . these corporations are using their vast resources to give money to key lawmakers and pay huge lobbying fees to politically
well-connected former government officials to pressure the Congress to write a new law that has no purpose other than to declare that they are immune from accountability for their lawbreaking. They're conniving, literally, to be specially exempted from the rule of law.

[. . .]

By definition, our Beltway establishment does not believe in the rule of law -- at least not for them. They are creating a completely segregated, two-track system where high Beltway officials and their corporate enablers arrogate unto themselves the power to decide when they can break the law. They are thus literally exempt from our laws, even our criminal laws, while increasingly harsh, merciless, and inflexible punishments are doled out for the poorest and least connected criminals -- who receive no consideration of any kind, let alone presidential commutations or special laws written for them by Congress retroactively rendering legal their patently criminal behavior.

The Telecom Immunity law that Congress seems well on its way to enacting is one of the most conclusive pieces of evidence yet not only that our Royal Beltway Court is corrupt and decayed at its core. It also proves that they no longer care who knows it.

This weekend, the WaPo reported allegations by former Qwest Communications CEO, Joseph P. Nacchio, that "the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal."

Per Nacchio's lawyer:

"Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request," Stern said. "When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."

Granted, Nacchio is appealing convictions for insider trading, and the substance of his allegations could be suspect, but company records of the alleged Feb. 27, 2001 meeting with the NSA could easily confirm whether the NSA was working on a domestic surveillance program six months before September 11, 2001.

What will Fox News say?

Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

First Jimmy Carter, now Al Gore. Clearly, the Nobel committee is weak on defense and hates America. They don't even have a Nobel Belligerence Prize do they?

Those socialists are as crazy as Gore is.

More from the Times

Today's editorial:

Is this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters?

Uh, "B"?

And worse. These "leaders" are giving license for their followers to behave likewise.

“Surprise, surprise, surprise."

"That ain’t my finger, neither.”

From this morning's New York Times:

Tens of thousands of Medicare recipients have been victims of deceptive sales tactics and had claims improperly denied by private insurers that run the system’s huge new drug benefit program and offer other private insurance options encouraged by the Bush administration, a review of scores of federal audits has found.

The Road to Damascus

experience -- circa 1st century A.D. -- is what America needs: scales falling from eyes. Courtesy of Glenn Greenwald, evidence that that's happening from John Cole at Balloon Juice:

Seriously- what does the current Republican party stand for? Permanent war, fear, the nanny state, big spending, torture, execution on demand, complete paranoia regarding the media, control over your body, denial of evolution and outright rejection of science, AND ZOMG THEY ARE GONNA MAKE US WEAR BURKHAS, all the while demanding that in order to be a good American I have to spend most of every damned day condemning half my fellow Americans as terrorist appeasers.

And that isn’t even getting into the COMPLETE and TOTAL corruption of our political processes at every level.

Follow the link above and this one. I was only vaguely aware of the Siegelman case in Alabama. The article in Time should change that for a lot of people.

Round-a-view with destiny

Slate's Fred Kaplan uses a recently released transcript of a pre-Iraq invasion conversation between President Bush and Spain's then-Prime Minister José María Aznar to give advise on picking the next president. The critical exchange is:

AZNAR: The only thing that worries me about you is your optimism.

BUSH: I'm an optimist because I believe that I'm right. I'm a person at peace with myself. It was our turn to face a serious threat to peace.

Here, in three sentences, is the first lesson on how to assess the current crop of presidential candidates: Don't pick anyone who utters, or seems capable of believing, those three sentences.

"Beware the politician who sees his life as an appointment with destiny," Kaplan writes. "Ditto a president who thinks it's his 'turn' to do anything, much less to go to war and save civilization."

Amen to that.

Holding up a mirror, Pt. 2

Rick Perlstein and I seem to be on the same page. He shows how far we've come. We once welcomed the leader of the USSR with salutes and state dinners -- back when the US of A's "manliness" wasn't so easily threatened.

I'm working on an op-ed on a very similar topic: the over-the-top reaction to dissenting voices and the hair-trigger on the use of force. This atmosphere is coming from the top down. Can you tell?

A cascade of recent events showed how far things have deteriorated. At the recent B-52s concert at the Biltmore House, security guards manhandled some concert-goers in front of the stage. A prankster creating a scene at an appearance by John Kerry was dragged to the ground and tasered by campus police, as he yelled, “Don’t tase me, bro!” When another protestor (a woman) began yelling at an NRA event (according to Roll Call), members of the crowd began chanting, “Tase her! Tase her!”

And a flake like Ahmadinejad? Nuke him before he calls us names again.

But it's hi-ho, hi-ho time, so Perlstein speaks. You listen:

Bed-wetter Nation

Here's a big question that I want to start addressing in upcoming posts: what is conservative rule doing to our nation's soul? How is it rewiring our hearts and minds? What kind of damage are they doing to the American character? And can we ever recover?

[. . .]

But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.

Holding up a mirror

Reading Slate this morning, it seems this guy has a future in our office of faith-based initiatives:

Most of the papers front Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University, where he was met by protesters and an audience that was anything but friendly. Having faced lots of criticism for even inviting Ahmadinejad, Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, gave Ahmadinejad a strongly worded introduction where he said, "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator." He went on to criticize several of Ahmadinejad's views, "You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated." The Iranian smiled during the introduction but then called it "an insult to the knowledge of the audience here." Ahmadinejad then "offered evidence of why he is widely admired in the developing world" as he criticized the Western world, and especially the United States, says the NYT. Everyone notes the biggest laugh of the day came when Ahmadinejad said that "in Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country."

Like others we could mention, Ahmadinejad too is not stuck in the reality-based community.

Now even God hates America!

Still locked in my lab-or-a-tory working on "Project X."

Meanwhile, Digby wonders why the GOP can hop about the media altar, slashing themselves and crying out like the prophets of Baal over MoveOn's "Betray-us" ad. Their own America-loving (hating?) acolytes from "Faith to Action" who sponsored a debate for second-tier GOP presidential candidates wonder aloud why God should give a rat's patootie for America.

Why should God bless America?
She’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back
On everything that made her what she is

Why should God stand beside her
Through the night with the light from his hand?
God have mercy on America
Forgive her sin and heal our land

The courts ruled prayer out of our schools
In June of ‘62
Told the children “you are your own God now
So you can make the rules”
O say can you see what that choice
Has cost us to this day
America, one nation under God, has gone astray

Why should God bless America?
Shes’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back on everything
That made her what she is

Why should God stand beside her
Through the night with the light from his hand?
God have mercy on America
Forgive her sins and heal our land

In ‘73 the Courts said we
Could take the unborn lives
The choice is yours don’t worry now
It’s not a wrong, it’s your right

But just because they made it law
Does not change God’s command
The most that we can hope for is
God’s mercy on our land

Why should God bless America?
She’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back on everything
That made her what she is

Why should God stand beside her
Through the night with the light from his hand?
God have mercy on America
Forgive her sins and heal our land

(Reading from 2nd Chronicles 7:14) If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land

God have mercy on America forgive her sins and heal our land

So does that make George Bush into Job, and Osama bin Laden into Satan's agent? Was Al Qaeda doing the smiting so Satan could win his bet with God, all the while doing God's work in imparting a lesson in humility to America?

Somehow I don't think that question will be resolved in the voting booth on Nov. 4, 2008.

Even more daunting, how is a left-leaning blogger even supposed to be able to see such things in Biblical terms?

I need an Advil.

This is the last stall

Once again, the last stall in the men's room yields blog fodder. No Bible tracts or printouts from NewsMax this time, but the August 2007 issue of "The Phyllis Schlafly Report."

Along with the conspiracy talk about NAFTA and a North American "union," there was a report on some moves in Congress to bring U.S. patent law into greater "consistency" with Europe and Japan. Schlafly paints the Democrat-sponsored and Bush administration-supported Patent Reform Act of 2007 as another pro-corporate effort by " 'world is flat' globalists" to make it easier for corporations to secure and/or violate patents and tougher on the little guys to secure and defend their intellectual property.

The common thread in the changes to be made by the new Patent bill is that they favor big companies like Microsoft and hurt individuals and small-entity inventors. (emphasis in original)

I must admit this one was below my radar and the blogs are unusually silent on it. One blogger(?) posted the same piece to John Edwards' and Barack Obama's sites raising red flags on this one as well, as did a poster on Daily Kos, joining the AFL-CIO, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), and the United Steelworkers. Still, the bill passed the House on September 7 (220-175), with Democrats voting 3 to 1 in favor and Republicans voting 2 to 1 against. In NC-11, Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) voted against the bill.

If what Schlafly wrote was accurate, then I found myself agreeing with her. The anti-corporatist tone coming from an old-line conservative like Schlafly struck me as signaling an area where conservatives and liberals can find common ground. The virtual takeover of the U.S. government by corporate money is something we all have reason to mistrust and oppose. Democracy of, by, and for those able to buy influence is no democracy at all, but something far less wholesome.

In The America Prospect this week Robert Kuttner wrote of Wall Street's partnering with the Chinese government's domestic surveillance operation:

More Like Us, or More Like Them? The New York Times' Keith Bradsher reported today in a fine piece that U.S. hedge funds are bankrolling Chinese high-tech surveillance operations. What a perfect marriage of capitalism and totalitarianism! What a perfect symbol of the weird permutations of globalization. Capitalists, of course, are famous for getting along with almost any brand of dictator. German industry coexisted nicely with Hitler and had many American business partners such as DuPont and Standard Oil, right up until the United States entered World War II. U.S corporate interests likewise had congenial relations with despotic regimes in Iran, Iraq, Cuba, the Dominican Republic -- and often influenced American foreign policy to keep these regimes propped up.

[. . .]

This globalization stuff gets curiouser and curiouser. Not so long ago, many writers were claiming that we would soon see a happy convergence, in which formerly communist nations would become more capitalist. And as they became more market-oriented, they would also become more democratic. However, recent history suggests the possibility of a rather darker convergence. Nations like China remain repressive one-party states, enabled by American multinationals. Far from creating a pro-worker communist society, the current Chinese mandarins actually help foreign capital get access to a cheap and docile workforce. Meanwhile, the western democracies become more despotic themselves, and the convergence is in the direction of a universal security state in league with global finance.

Imagine liberals and conservatives wondering, just what kind of democracy have we become anyway? Think we can put our other differences aside and work together to contain a common antidemocratic foe?

If "victory" has become "success"

what is "dead"?

From today's L.A. Times:

WASHINGTON -- -- For more than four years since the invasion of Iraq, President Bush most often has defined his objective there with a single, stirring word: "Victory."

[. . .]

But this week, the word "victory" disappeared from the president's lexicon. It was replaced by a slightly more ambiguous goal: "Success."

Listen to the last installment of Iraqi dentist Dr. Hassan's journal on NPR's Morning Edition site later this morning and the entire series. It's an unambiguously chilling account of the reality of life in Baghdad.

Profile of Josh Marshall

and Talking Points Memo in the Columbia Journalism Review.

A good read on an important site(s).

[h/t atonemusic]

Odds & Ends

Glenn Greenwald's Thursday appearance in Asheville, NC has been postponed.

The neocon apporoach to all human interaction

They believed cooperation and compromise signaled weakness . . . they viewed every encounter outside the innermost core of most trusted advisers as a zero-sum game that if they didn't win they would necessarily lose.

And in "power as the absence of constraint," as Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel from October 2003 to July of 2004, writes in The Terror Presidency. Excerpted this week and next in Slate.

Psychologists are going to have years of fun analyzing this administration.

Battle of the statistics

What you'll hear on the Iraq situation depends on who's mining the statistics? Go figure. From this morning's WaPo:

The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease.

Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers -- most of which are classified -- are often confusing and contradictory. "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree," Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq.

NPR's Morning Edition just ran a piece (available online later) on the Iraq lies, damned lies, and, well, you know.

Sometime around February 2004, a top military official in Iraq estimated that there were about 15,000 total insurgents. About a year later, U.S. military leaders in Iraq announced that 15,000 insurgents had been killed or captured in the previous year.

In private, a skeptical military adviser pointed out to commanders that the numbers didn't make sense. "If all the insurgents were killed," he asked, "why are they fighting harder than ever?"

Are we fighting the Un-dead?

When steadfast goes bad

In the aftermath of the Utah mine disaster, after several more minors died in the rescue, the mine owner halted digging operations, eventually deciding that there was no hope left for rescuing the lost miners.

If President Bush had been in charge, would he have adopted "a failure is not an option" stance and continued throwing men into the effort? Would Fox & Co. called naysayers defeatists. Would Bush have argued that not to continue would be to dishonor the sacrifice of the men who had already lost their lives in the rescue?

That's why the military has Supply Companies

Intermittent blogging continues as my other project consumes my time.

Meanwhile, at the LA Times:

"Is it wise to use civilian contractors in a war zone? Was it wise to send the convoy along the route [to Baghdad airport] on April 9, 2004?" Miller wrote. "Answering either question and the many questions in between would require the court to examine the policies of the executive branch during wartime, a step the court declines to take."

On Good Friday, 2004 KBR, the prime defense contractor in Iraq, sent out a convoy of 19 trucks -- driven by civilians -- to the Baghdad airport with an emergency supply of fuel. Only 6 trucks made it.

The final tally was grim. Six KBR drivers were dead. Most other drivers were wounded. Besides the kidnapped Hamill, another was missing. Tim Bell now is presumed dead. Two soldiers were killed. A third, Matt Maupin, was captured by insurgents and is still listed as missing. Hamill escaped after nearly three weeks and is back in the U.S.

Only six of the 19 KBR trucks reached the airport. Across Iraq, all 122 convoys sent out by KBR on April 9 were attacked, according to KBR.

"When we say 'progress'

it means just what we choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

From this morning's WaPo:

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.

[. . .]

The draft provides a stark assessment of the tactical effects of the current U.S.-led counteroffensive to secure Baghdad. "While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."

Trust Begins with Honesty

. . . seen last night on a church billboard in Greenville, SC, the epicenter of church marquee wisdom.

Amen.

Welcome back to Whose War Is It Anyway?

. . . where everything's made up and the facts don't matter.

Responding to President Bush's latest rewrite of history, Mahablog has an incisive post on how the right prefers mythology to facts anyway. Someone after my own heart, Maha draws from sources as varied as Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian, and Star Trek: The Next Generation to paint a picture of a group who speaks in archetypes rather than information. Or, as Greenwald put it last week:

Love war? You are Churchill, a noble warrior. Oppose war? You’re Chamberlain, a vile appeaser. And everyone else is Hitler. That, more or less, composes the full scope of “thought” among this strain on the right.

Maha elaborates:

In the rightie mind, any attempt to avoid war is “appeasement.” In his new book A Tragic Legacy, Glenn Greenwald writes (p. 177) that when Ronald Reagan signed the INF treaty with the Soviet Union in 1988, rightie editorialists everywhere evoked Neville Chamberlain and accused Reagan of “appeasement.” Earlier, in 1984, Newt Gingrich scorned Reagan’s rapprochement with Gorbachev as “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolph Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich.”

Got that? All “enemies” are Hitler (whatever you think of Gorbachev, he’s hardly Hitler). So much as meeting with “enemies” is Chamberlain and Hitler at Munich. So how do we deal with nations whose interests don’t harmonize with ours? Rightie mythos leaves us with no option but war.

Those who after WWII swore, "Never again" have been pretty slack, I guess. Gorbachev was Hitler. Bin Laden is Hitler. Saddam was Hitler. Kim Jong-il is Hitler. Ahmadinejad is Hitler. Even Markos Moulitsas is Hitler. Throw in Dick Shawn and you've got a casting call for Springtime for Hitler.

There is some reason to the right's reflex for reference, I grant you. There's an economy to speaking in archetypes. I prefer using images from popular film. For a columnist, it's cheap shorthand that allows you to cram more message into limited column inches. It has its place. For a White House in which message discipline is the one thing at which it excels, speaking in commercials comes naturally, but it's no substitute for effective governance. Katrina proved that graphically and tragically.

Democracy works best when the electorate can make informed decisions. Rhetoric -- especially from our leaders -- designed more for conveying impressions than information doesn't serve citizens or democracy well. Salesmanship is no substitute for leadership.

Read the whole post over at Mahablog to get the significance of:

“Sam Waterson and John Malkovich in Phnom Penh! FDR at Yalta!”

Tired of the medicine show

In today's L.A. Times Newt Gingrich challenges presidential candidates of both major parties to new "Lincoln-Douglas" style debates -- nine 90-minute debates on Sunday nights in the nine weeks leading up to the 2008 election:

Our system to elect a president is not working for the American people. The big-city-machine bosses of the past have been replaced by professional political consultant bosses. Sadly, the role of the candidate -- the man or woman who would lead the most powerful nation on Earth -- largely has been reduced to raising the money to hire consultants and then reading what the consultants scrawl on 3-by-5 cards. It's a stunningly dangerous development for a democracy.

We don't really have presidential debates today; we have a kind of meaningless political performance art: a recitation of talking points choreographed to avoid any risk.

Agreed. Sounds good, Newt. But is the current, consultant-driven "debate" format the cause of political malaise, or merely a symptom? Will your proposed solution remedy "news media coverage that is narrow, negative and so short in its attention span that no serious idea gets full consideration." And by the time we get there, will anyone be left watching? Or will they instead go to bed on Sunday nights to prepare for their 50+ hr weeks at multiple jobs they hold to keep their financial lives afloat?

Glenn Greenwald coming to Asheville

The good doctor is bringing Glenn Greenwald to town:

Glenn Greenwald coming to Asheville

Posted by: ecthompson

Glenn Greenwald

The Errington Thompson Show is bringing Glenn Greenwald to Asheville. September 13th. He will be lecturing on UNCA’s campus at 12:30. A book signing is planned and a trip to Drinking Liberally that evening at 7 pm. He will be doing an interview for the Errington Thompson Show.

Mark your calendars!!

Another project

Weekends are when I normally get in some more lengthy, thought-out pieces. Right now, however, I'm trying to get a non-blogging political project off the ground. It's threatening to rust on the launch pad for lack of attention.

The ten-day forecast calls for heavy project work with intermittent blogging.

State secrets and the secret secrets that hide them

Trying to get at the truth in the domestic surveillance lawsuits is tough when anything you say can or even remember may be declared a state secret in the wiretapping lawsuits:

“Is it the government’s position that when our country is engaged in a war that the power of the executive when it comes to wiretapping is unchecked?” Judge Harry Pregerson asked a government lawyer. His tone was one of incredulity and frustration.

Gregory G. Garre, a deputy solicitor general representing the administration, replied that the courts had a role, though a limited one, in assessing the government’s assertion of the so-called state secrets privilege, which can require the dismissal of suits that could endanger national security. Judges, he said, must give executive branch determinations “utmost deference.”

“Litigating this action could result in exceptionally grave harm to the national security of the United States,” Mr. Garre said, referring to the assessment of intelligence officials.

That is, when we say "terrorist," you say "case dismissed." It's a patriotic Pavlovian imperative.

Terrorist -- salivate -- take a pellet.

The New York Times reports that all three judges were inclined to hear "one or both" of the cases at issue.

But to sue, you must have standing. To have standing, you must have proof you've been targeted, and that's a state secret.

“Whether plaintiffs were subjected to surveillance is a state secret,” the Justice Department said in a recent brief ... “and information tending to confirm or deny that fact is privileged.”

In a the case brought by an Islamic charity, the plaintiffs had mistakenly received a government document the charity claims proved they had been subjected to surveillance. It has since been reclaimed by the government. Even their memories of the document are secret.

Judge Pregerson, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, appeared irritated with the government’s arguments, and he became frustrated when Mr. Garre said he could not provide simple answers to questions about the scope of a recently amended 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Mr. Garre said it was a complicated law.

“Can’t be any more complicated than my phone bill,” Judge Pregerson said.

Can't say. It's a state secret.

Another day, another recall

Will someone please get the government off Chinese manufacturers' back? The Los Angeles Times explains the recent trend:

First it was tens of millions of containers of pet food recalled because of tainted ingredients from China; then it was 1.5 million of the popular Thomas & Friends wood trains, made in China, recalled for lead paint.

Two weeks ago, El Segundo-based Mattel Inc., one of the most trusted names in playthings, jolted consumers with warnings that 1.5 million of its Chinese-made Fisher-Price toys also could contain lead paint.

And on Tuesday, Mattel recalled more than 18 million more toys worldwide because of new worries about lead paint and, because of design problems, magnets that can come loose and cause serious health problems if swallowed.

Parental responsibility is the answer here, clearly. Responsible parents teach their children not to put things in their mouths. It's not toy manufacturers' job. Business Week explains that while Mattel works hard to ensure product safety, even a minimum of parental responsibility could minimize ingestion risks:

Not all recalls are due to suppliers cutting corners. In the case of the recalled magnetic toys, technology advanced faster than toymakers' perceived risk. Mattel's quality guru Walter noted in an interview with BusinessWeek in late July that the company puts products through rigorous stress tests. The industry didn't anticipate, however, that if two or more of the high-powered magnets were ingested at once they could close off the intestines of small children. In newer versions of the toys the magnets will be locked into the products in such a way that a child cannot break them free.

See, parents? Keep your child from ingesting more than one magnet and there's no problem.

Just now on NPR, a Mattel spokesperson noted that each year the multinational has many recalls, so this one, while regretable, is nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

Nothing a tax cut wouldn't solve.

Hell, yes!

Just watched Markos (Daily Kos) on Meet the Press with former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN), Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. Markos, who has been hard on the DLC as right-leaning "centrists," was critical again with Harold Ford sitting beside him. He and SusanG wrote this about the DLC in today's Washington Post:

Last week, at the YearlyKos convention . . . [t]he DLC was nowhere to be found -- unless you looked in Nashville, where its members continued to preach, in empty halls, about the "vital center." Even the Democratic presidential candidates have figured out where the heart of the party now lies: with the new, unashamedly progressive movement.

The DLC had two decades to make its case, to build an audience and community, to elect leaders the American people wanted. It failed.

Its members number in the hundreds, compared with the millions that the people-powered movement can claim, and they are reduced to attacking our movement from the studios of right-wing Fox News and pleading that in the next election they'll really prove that the mushy, indistinguishable "middle" is where the American people want to be.

The DLC believes the country is more conservative than it is, Markos contends. Ford cautioned this week against pushing the party too far left and ignoring the "vital center."

Every four years, in the heat of the nominating process, liberals and conservatives alike dream of a world in which swing voters don't exist. Some on the left would love to pretend that groups such as the Democratic Leadership Council, the party's leading centrist voice, aren't needed anymore.

More to the point, it's the DLC that finds itself out of the mainstream. The Beltway-centric group is too inclined towards a politics that goes along to get along, instead of standing on principle. Standing for something. Anything, besides behaving like a battered wife. "Centrist" accommodation of this administration brought us the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act and last week's FISA bill. If that's all Democrats have got, we don't deserve to lead the country. That's why there is a progressive movement.

As I have written before, the electorate (from left to right) wants to vote for candidates who are unapologetic about what they stand for and govern like they mean it. They voted for the Mayberry Machiavellis, so skilled at posturing about principle, but whose "principled" leadership brought us Iraq, domestic surveillance, waterboarding, Alberto Gonzales, the U.S. attorney firings, voter caging and the Katrina debacle.

Voters got burned. They want and deserve the real deal.

NBC's David Gregory (sitting in for Tim Russert) kept pushing Markos about whether he and the netroots were pushing the Democratic party to the left. As in his WaPo piece, Markos made the case that the progressive grassroots/netroots movement isn't about him, or who's liberal or conservative -- progressives supported a slew of candidates last fall with some fairly conservative views. Unlike the more diffident DLC, the progressive movement is about reclaiming the Democratic wing of the Democratic party and making no "triangulating" bones about it.

I'm reminded of a tale by Decatur, Georgia's Roy Blount, Jr. As I heard him tell it, he was miffed to read a national story about Southerners eating kaolin (clay) for settling stomachs. (A traditional remedy, kaolin is a principle ingredient in Pepto-Bismol and Kaopectate.) An educated man hoping to overcome negative southern stereotypes, Blount found himself facing questions from uppity Yankees: "Do you eat dirt?" Blount said (as I recall),

Now there are only two ways to answer a question like that. One, you can deny you eat dirt. They won't believe you. They know you come from dirt eaters and will think you've gotten too good for your upbringing. Or else you say. "Hell, yes, I eat dirt! I understand you people up here eat cold soup and raw fish!"

Right back at you.

In spite of Markos' stinging critiques, DLC chair Harold Ford ended the MTP interview saying he expects to attend next year's YearlyKos convention. Harold, welcome to the "Hell, yes, I'm a Democrat" wing of the Democratic party.

Conformity and Despotism?

"In any game where the rules have been abandoned, those with the fewest scruples win." -- Daniel Brook, "The Trap"

Brook was talking specifically about the rise of lobbyist influence in Washington, but the sentiment applies to much of what's gone on in D.C. in the last decade. Andrew Sullivan has described the impulses driving American politics as "scruple-free." Corporate American has both enabled and followed its Washington misleaders, reaping economic windfalls, but those rewards have not trickled down to Average Joe.

"The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America" deals with the corporatization of America and the loss of freedom Americans face as a consequence. He profiles working people who feel they've sold their souls for economic security, stifling their urges to serve their communities in order to finance middle class homes and families once attainable on teachers' and firefighters' salaries.

Yet even while New Deal policies were building a powerful, more egalitarian American middle class, Barry Goldwater warned that:

Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Goldwater said that on the heels of the conformist, red-scare 1950s, and (ironically) on the cusp of a radically nonconformist decade. Goldwater conservatives advocated smaller government and free markets as the means for unleashing individual talent and avoiding the bogeyman of creeping socialism. But were their fears justified? The conservative policies begun under Ronald Reagan and accelerated under George W. Bush have left Americans with fewer choices, not more, Brook argues:

A free-for-all society does not set people free. Instead it sets in motion a moral race to the bottom reminiscent of the savage state of nature described by seventeenth-century British political theorist Thomas Hobbes in which simply surviving becomes the overarching goal of human life and all higher aspirations must be stifled. "No Arts; no Letters" was Hobbes's stark phrase. Yet any civilization worth living in depends on having some talented people who opt not to maximize their earnings potential and instead pursue less lucrative creative and service professions.

For all the promises of greater freedom, conservative economics has delivered wealth for a few and insecurity for many. Freedom, as Goldwater understood it, meant freedom to spend more of your money as you see fit. That you'd be free to determine how you spend your life was assumed. "The Trap" examines how, whether they want to or not, more Americans -- including her best and brightest -- are compelled into serving corporate interests at the expense of their own. Necessity, not choice, is keeping them out of lower-paying public service jobs, from teaching to the Peace Corps. Many who can still afford college graduate with loans nearing six figures -- conservatives having worked to eliminate state funding for college tuitions in recent decades. Saddled with debt, with pay scales stagnant, unions under assault, and private health care costs skyrocketing, Americans who hope to cling to a middle-class lifestyle are finding themselves limited, not emancipated.

And while conservatives talk a good game on supporting entrepreneurship, Brook says:

A 2005 survey showed that 28 percent of Americans have considered setting up their own businesses, compared to only 15 percent of Europeans. Yet the employment statistics reveal that Americans are far less likely to actually do it -- 14.7 percent [pg. 66] of the European workforce is self-employed, compared with only 7.3 percent of Americans.

National health care in EU countries explains that discrepancy, Brook suggests. In 2006 the Financial Times (Britain's Wall Street Journal) found less entrepreneurial inhibition in Europe:

With its low [real estate] costs and generous welfare net, Berlin is a entrepreneurs' heaven, where barriers to entry are low and failure rarely entails personal ruin. In the past two years, twenty-seven thousand companies have been created.

Brook cuts the quote too short, however. The Times continues: "... and they are overwhelmingly one-person businesses."

Conservative pro-big business policies and anti-government orthodoxy here made things even worse with the recent bankruptcy "reform" that makes individual entrepreneurship that much more risky. Brook laments:

America is thwarting the very ambition that has long defined its people.

And under conservative economic policies, are we coming closer to realizing Goldwater's feared conformity and despotism?

Your Values at Work

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer is back with lengthy piece on the CIA's "black sites" and procedures used in "extraordinary rendition."

... A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the “takeout” of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

A secret government document, dated December 10, 2002, detailing “SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” outlines the advantages of stripping detainees. “In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.” The document advises interrogators to “tear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” The memo also advocates the “Shoulder Slap,” “Stomach Slap,” “Hooding,” “Manhandling,” “Walling,” and a variety of “Stress Positions,” including one called “Worship the Gods.”

[. . .]

According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”

Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.

In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that “longtime standing” was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, “A Question of Torture,” he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”

Torture is like sexual relations (as in Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"). Define torture in narrowly enough, as John Woo did for the Bush administration, and -- voila -- it disappears. A president can look into the cameras and say with a straight face, "We do not torture."

A bumper sticker puts it in a more commonsense way: You'd know it was torture if it happened to you.

Our heroes

This morning's New York Times editorial says it all:

It was appalling to watch over the last few days as Congress — now led by Democrats — caved in to yet another unnecessary and dangerous expansion of President Bush’s powers, this time to spy on Americans in violation of basic constitutional rights. Many of the 16 Democrats in the Senate and 41 in the House who voted for the bill said that they had acted in the name of national security, but the only security at play was their job security.

[ . . ]

Mr. Bush’s incessant fear-mongering — and the Democrats’ refusal to challenge him — has had one notable success. The only issue on which Americans say that they trust Republicans more than Democrats is terrorism. At least those Americans are afraid of terrorists. The Democrats who voted for this bill, and others like it over the last few years, show only fear of Republicans.

Our heroes.

Now excuse me while I go rend my garments.

We're worried about Iran supplying Iraqi insurgents?

Today's WaPo:

The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

The author of the report from the Government Accountability Office says U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops. The highest previous estimate of unaccounted-for weapons was 14,000, in a report issued last year by the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

How many thousand M16s did we leave behind in Saigon? Gotta look that up.

That's leave behind, not lose.

And the good news is?

[updated below]

Slate's Today's Papers provides the good news on House Democrats' caving to the Bush administration's demands for more latitude in evading FISA in conducting spying activities:

It was all about politics, says the NYT and WP, and the Democrats didn't want to spend their summer vacation "fending off charges from Mr. Bush and Republicans that they left Americans exposed to terror threats." The good news for the Dems is that the changes will expire in six months, giving them half a year to grow a spine.

Congress seems to have decided that letting the president play with matches has worked out so well that -- what the hell -- why not hand the most untrustworthy administration in American history a live grenade when it asks for one.

For all the Republicans' woes, with leadership like this and like this it stretches the immagination to think that the country will hand the Democratic party, or at least the congressional wing of the Democratic party, a presidency when it asks for one in 2008.

The people have wised up faster than their leaders.

Update

Enter Yearly Kos. It was great fun this week watching Bill O'Reilly inveigh against Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos ("this hate site") and the Democratic candidates who went to Chicago to speak to the Yearly Kos convention. As E.J. Dionne put it:

Democratic candidates know they owe a debt to Moulitsas. They're paying homage to him because he has started to beat Limbaugh and O'Reilly at their own game. No wonder O'Reilly is so annoyed.

But it's also no wonder that the DLC's own corporate-woman-tough-enough-to-be-president Sen. Hillary Clinton is no favorite of grassroots and online activists, who feel they've been ahead of the corporate wing of the Democratic party on Iraq and other policy matters. The House vote this weekend reinforces that mistrust.

Just as the candidates' appearance at Yearly Kos instead of the DLC convention reinforces the power of online activism in Democratic politics. Says Moulitsas,

“If the DLC had an e-mail list of 3 million people there’s no reason that the candidates would have skipped that convention . . . But they don’t. We have hundreds of thousands, millions, of committed activists that will work to have them elected.”

That's something no candidate can ignore. Having them work against you is even more reason to take pause.

Respect my authority!

The president demands Congress remain in session to pass an update to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) so his legal wiretapping activities will be legal again:

"So far the Democrats in Congress have not drafted a bill I can sign," Mr. Bush said at FBI headquarters, where he was meeting with counterterror and homeland security officials. "We've worked hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution, but we are not going to put our national security at risk. Time is short."

The president said lawmakers cannot leave for their August recess this weekend as planned unless they "pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States."

Or the terrorists win, we know.

Bush's demand echoes his insistence that Congress pass the Military Commissions Act last September. (The act undermined habeas corpus, in case you missed that.) "The need for this legislation is urgent," Bush said last September. The Congress passed the president's urgently needed bill on September 29.

While he was out fundraising and campaigning, the action-figure president let the Military Commissions bill sit urgently on his desk for two and a half weeks before signing it on October 17.

How many times will Democrats in Congress let this guy play them?

It's legal. Trust us.

That's why they're pushing so hard for legislation that says so:

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

This is the point at which bloggers on the right scream for loose-lipped heads to roll, right?

The WaPo report continues:

The decision was both a political and practical blow to the administration, which had long held that all of the National Security Agency's enhanced surveillance efforts since 2001 were legal. The administration for years had declined to subject those efforts to the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and after it finally did so in January the court ruled that the administration's legal judgment was at least partly wrong.

It's a dog bites man story at this point. When this administration starts getting things right it should be real headline news.

Progress in Iraq: Sunni bloc quits cabinet

BAGHDAD — Iraq's main Sunni Arab political bloc withdrew from the government Wednesday, blaming Shiite Muslim leaders for not addressing sectarian issues, as explosions in the streets killed at least 70 people around Baghdad.

That should improve chances of a favorable report in September from Gen. Patraeus. Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald speculated about what the report will tell us:

VandeHei's secret sources reveal that Petraeus is planning on reporting that the strategy he designed, advocated and implemented is, in fact, working. Who would have guessed? And the fact that Petraeus' happy report will be "tempered by continued political problems in Iraq" is supposed to show that Petraeus' report is balanced and candid, even though the actual formula -- the real purpose -- for this "tempered" report is clear:

"Significant military progress" = "the Surge is working."

"Continued political problems in Iraq" = "job not yet done; must stay longer."

Once again, it's "Bush-22." And the spinmeisters who cut their teeth advocating tax cuts as the response to whatever economic news we face -- good or bad -- are already laying the groundwork for spending more lives in Iraq. Steadfast leaders, ideologues or compulsive gamblers?

Don't walk away from that slot machine, boys. You just got her warmed up and she's about to pay off. Just keep shoving in dog tags.

I-35 bridge collapses into Mississippi River

CNN - At least three people were killed when an interstate bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, collapsed Wednesday evening, plunging cars and chunks of concrete into the Mississippi River below.

Remember the NYC steam main explosion last month? Rick Perlstein detects a pattern:

The ground opened up beneath a horse stall in Phoenix. An eighty year old sewer line collapsed in St. Cloud. In Tyler, Texas, the sinkhole was caused by crumbling drainage pipes. In San Antonio, "big chunks of rocks were falling off into into the abyss that used to be a street." In Vallejo, California, the pit split an underground gas line (no danger in that). In San Jose, a water main ruptured beneath a high school ("the water may appear dirty," officials assured residents, "but it is safe to drink"). In Sunnyvale, the burst pipe buckled 300 feet of road surface. In Greensboro the sinkhole swallowed a car ("Randy Delano Wood has seen a lot of accidents int he 20 years he has driven for a living. 'But the road falling out from under you is something you never expect,' Wood said.")

The good folks in Greensboro are fortunate enough to have a newspaper editorial writer who connects the dots: "It's like one of those Parade Magazine brain teasers. What do these have in common?"

Not enough money in people's pockets. Time for another tax cut.

And pronto. They'll be starting a betting line in Vegas.

Behind closed doors

Ethics bill passes overwhelmingly in the U.S. House. It's imperfect, but it's a start. The New York Times reports :

The new lobbying bill would, for the first time, require lawmakers to disclose small campaign contributions that are "bundled" into large packages by lobbyists. It would require lobbyists to detail their own campaign contributions, as well as payments to presidential libraries, inaugural committees and charities controlled by lawmakers. The proposal would also put new disclosure requirements on special spending measures for pet projects, known as "earmarks."

The Los Angeles Times concludes:

Democratic leaders, eager to complete work on the bill before breaking for their summer recess, decided to work out their differences behind closed doors and have each chamber pass identical versions.

Complaining about the way the Democrats chose to advance the bill after pledging to lead a more open and bipartisan Congress, Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas) said that he wasn't even able to get a copy of the bill until shortly before the vote.

"I got my first copy from a lobbyist," he said.

And they won't be packing up any time soon. It ain't over until the cowboy signs it.