Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

Left Side of the Aisle #40

2012-01-20T16:25:00.003-05:00

This week:

- Lies about Social Security
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/01/13/ponzi-scheme-or-not-social-security-cant-keep-up-the-pace/
http://www.aarp.org/work/social-security/info-08-2010/social_security_75th.html
http://www.cbpp.org/research/?fa=topic&id=38

- Outrage of the Week: Occupy protesters charged with felony for mic-checking speech
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/16/sergio-ballesteros-occupy-la-arrest_n_1208985.html
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/17/10177446-prosecutors-aim-new-weapon-at-occupy-activists-lynching-allegation
http://www.care2.com/causes/ows-protesters-charged-with-felony-for-mic-checking-mayor.html
http://obrag.org/?p=52601&cpage=1
http://forums.cannabisculture.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1057450
nationalparalegal.edu/slides_new/Criminal/SH/New/Print_Lecture4.doc

- Bigotry is alive and well in the US
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/02/islamic-group-condemns-ny_n_1179427.html
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2012/01/new-york-arson-investigated-hate-crimes.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/13/synagogue-attacks-new-jersey_n_1202933.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/08/examples-of-slavery-in-school-worksheet_n_1192512.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/07/lady-chinky-eyes-papa-johns-store-uses-receipt-to-call-woman-racial-slur_n_1191434.html
http://autos.aol.com/article/microsoft-avoid-ghetto-app/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/06/newt-gingrich-naacp-food-stamps_n_1189005.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/12/some-stuff-i-didnt-have-time-for-2.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/03/rick-santorum-entitlements-black-people_n_1181212.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/rick-santorum_n_1185033.html
http://religions.pewforum.org/maps
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/17/newt-gingrich-juan-williams_n_1209657.html
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-presidential-primary/204457-ron-paul-booed-over-proposed-golden-rule-of-foreign-policy
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2048/polls-are-republicans-ready-for-a-mormon-president-romney-huntsman

Going "dark" tomorrow

2012-01-17T21:44:00.004-05:00

As you likely know, a number of websites, in a campaign sparked by Reddit, are going dark on Wednesday as a protest against the reprehensible PIPA and SOPA.

The list includes some big names, such as Reddit, Mozilla, Wikipedia, Wordpress, MoveOn, Tucows, and BoingBoing as well as at least hundreds of smaller sites. Google will not go dark but says it will have a protest banner on its home page.

I think I've made it clear - at least I have on my cable show - what I think of these bills - but I'm not enough of a tech geek to know how to make this blog literally go dark for the day. Which is why the word "dark" is in quotes in the headline: The site will be up but there will be no posts on Wednesday.

I know that my not posting for a day is hardly unusual, which is why I'm posting this now: I want to make it clear that the lack of posts on January 18 is not just my usual slacking but a deliberate, conscious decision.

The pressure on Congress is building and there is now a fair amount of foot-shuffling and harrumphing about delaying the votes until after "more study" going on, even among the bills' supporters. But PIPA and SOPA don't need to be delayed, they need to be killed - and as of now, the Senate is still scheduled to vote on PIPA on January 24.

So keep it up. We can win this one.

Left Side of the Aisle #39

2012-01-13T18:13:00.006-05:00

Topics this week:

- It shows what shape the economy is in when 8.5% unemployment is good news
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/06/jobs-december-2011-bls_n_1189058.html
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/business/for-2012-signs-point-to-retreat-in-consumer-spending.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/13/chuck-e-cheese-child-labor_n_1145891.html
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/12/fact-4-job-seekers-per-opening-in-u-s/
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2011/0909_jobs_winship.aspx
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57343397/census-data-half-of-u.s-poor-or-low-income/?tag=strip
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2011/12/less-than-a-quarter-of-companies-to-hire-in-2012-careerbuilder.html
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html
http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/10/us-usa-markets-stocks-idUSTRE7B904720111210

- Outrage of the Week: tasers
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2004/03/shocking-developments.html
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/277047/20120105/jamie-gonzalez-8th-grader-shot-killed-texas.htm
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-01-01/news/ct-met-taser-use-increases-20120101_1_tasers-electroshock-weapons-doubts-surface

- January 11 was the 10th anniversary of the opening of Gitmo
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/06-1195.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram_torture_and_prisoner_abuse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
http://www.lectlaw.com/def/h001.htm
http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/faqs%3A-what-habeas-corpus
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2037444.stm
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/08/the_evils_of_indefinite_detention_and_those_wanting_to_de_prioritze_them/singleton/
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/01/10/hunger-striking-is-the-only-hope-guantanamo-prisoners-have-for-release/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/09/guantanamo-bay-figures_n_1195068.html

And Another Thing...: Why is January 1 the first day of the year?
http://wilstar.com/holidays/newyear.htm
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/newyearhistory.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Day
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/111336
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1

Another reason tasers should be banned

2012-01-08T21:20:00.004-05:00

Jaime Gonzalez, an 8th grade student in Brownsville, Texas, was shot three times and killed by police on Wednesday after he refused when - I love this description - he was "asked" that he put down what later proved to be a pellet gun.

[T]he two officers fired three shots, and hit Gonzalez at least twice, once in the back of the head.

I'm not going to judge the cops here: The gun supposedly looked real, they could have felt genuinely threatened, and reports say that on the emergency recording they can be heard several times demanding that he drop the gun before they fired. So while there are still several questions, such as the possibility of excessive force (how did he wind up getting hit in the back of the head, for example) and the severity of the perceived threat (was the gun pointed up or down toward the floor, for one example; did the boy take an "aggressive stance," for another), I will withhold judgement on that score.

But I am going to insist that this is just more evidence of why tasers should be banned.

Why? Because why the fuck wasn't one used? Dammit, this is exactly the sort of situation for which they were supposedly designed, exactly the sort of case for which they were intended. And yet we get a dead kid instead.

Nearly eight years ago, I wrote here that

With the increasing availability of tasers, especially combined with repeated assurances that they are safe and even "humane," will come the increasing temptation to use them routinely, no longer in lieu of lethal force but in lieu of persuasion and patience, no longer against someone posing a physical threat but against someone giving "a hard time," no longer for protection but for dominance.

The intervening years have proven the accurary of that prediction. And now, it appears, they're not only being used for things they supposedly are not for, they're not being used for what they supposedly are for.

Ban them. Now.

Footnote, I Don't Think You Quite Get It Div.: At a memoral service for Gonzalez, the Rev. Jorge Gomez said

"I implore you young people, learn from this experience. ... Young people, I invite you to get out of trouble. Don't get lost."

There is no indication Jaime Gonzalez was involved in gangs or any sort of trouble beyond the usual teenager crap like staying out too late. If he was "lost," it wasn't due to the sort of "trouble" Rev. Gomez meant.

Everything you need to un-know in one headline

2012-01-08T19:46:00.003-05:00

Venezuela's Chavez welcomes ally Ahmadinejad
- Reuters headine, January 8

It's a two-fer! Apparently happy to cooperate with the on-going (and largely successful) campaign to demonize Hugo Chavez, Reuters links him to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even as Iran continues to be the focus of US war fever.

However, the article itself does not say a single thing about Iran and Venezuela being "allies." Rather, it describes Ahmadinejad as making a tour of Latin America in order to "shore up support from the region's leftist leaders." Which you would hardly expect to need with an "ally."

Footnote: Bearing in mind that "leftist" is a pejorative term to many, does Reuters ever talk about any region's "rightist leaders?" Is any US-supported government ever called "rightist" (as opposed to, say, "conservative")?

Everything you need to know in one headline

2012-01-08T19:25:00.001-05:00

Investors in Murdoch's News Corp forgive hacking
- Reuters headline, January 8

Footnote: A total of seventeen people have now been arrested in the UK over the phone hacking scandal

Passing thought #5: The power of one

2012-01-08T17:03:00.009-05:00

Never underestimate the power that can be wielded by one person who is in the right position at the right time.

The SEC has had a notorious practice of shielding corporations with which it reaches some settlement from further exposure to civil suits by allowing the company to "neither admit or deny" any actual wrongdoing - even in cases where the same corporation has been convicted of criminal violations for the same behavior.

This past November, Judge Jed Rakoff of US Court for the Southern District of New York, just wasn't going to go for that. He refused to accept a proposed settlement in a case involving Citibank, calling it "neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest."

More to the point here, he also said that the practice of allowing the "neither admit nor deny" business

deprives the court of even the most minimal assurance that the substantial injunctive relief it is being asked to impose has any basis in fact.

Rakoff is having what several people are calling a ripple effect. In December, for example, a New York state Appellate court cited (in a footnote) Rakoff's criticism of SEC boilerplate in an earlier case as it dismissed a suit by JPMorgan against its own insurers. What happened was that in 2006, Bear Stearns entered a $250 million consent agreement with the SEC which included the boilerplate "neither admit nor deny" language. Bear and its successor, JPMorgan Chase, went to their insurers to cover the settlement, even though penalties are not covered. The insurers refused. JPMorgan sued on the basis of the no-admission language - and lost.

“Read as a whole,” the [Appellate Court] decision said, “the offer of settlement, the SEC Order ... and related documents are not reasonably susceptible to any interpretation other than that Bear Stearns knowingly and intentionally facilitated illegal late trading for preferred customers, and that the relief provisions of the SEC Order required disgorgement of funds gained through that illegal activity.”

That is, the Appellate Court ignored the boilerplate as not affecting the overall reading. It was, in effect, irrelevant.

And this week, the SEC changed its policy on the boilerplate.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a fundamental policy shift, said Friday that it would no longer allow defendants to say they neither admit nor deny civil fraud or insider trading charges when, at the same time, they admit to or have been convicted of criminal violations.

The change is the first time that the S.E.C. has stepped back from its longstanding practice of allowing companies to settle fraud charges by paying a fine without admitting wrongdoing.

The impact is smaller than it might seem at first because the agency said it would continue to use the language where the agency alone reaches the agreement with the accused and there is no associated criminal case; such individual agreements make up a large majority of SEC settlements - and are the kind that draws Rakoff's particular ire.

But despite the SEC's CYA claim that the change had been under consideration for several months, I don't see how it can be denied that Rakoff's raising of the issue to the level of broader awareness (along with the efforts of others :cough: OWS :cough:) has played a key role in pushing things as far along as they have gone.

Footnote: The identity of the man in the linked video is still unknown. Rumors abound but evidence does not.

Passing thought #4: Coming attractions

2012-01-08T16:00:00.005-05:00

Yet another thing of which I'm sure you're aware is how GoDaddy stumbled all over itself, reversing its support of SOPA and PIPA in the wake of over 70,000 of customers moving their websites to a different domain. (An amusing sidebar was one "expert," not linked here, who insisted it wasn't the boycott that caused GoDaddy to double back, it was the "public outcry." Right, like corporations have not long shown that they don't give a shit about "public outcries" that do not affect their bottom line.)

You may also know that the Heritage Foundation, in one of those left-right-overlap-in-odd-ways things, has come out against SOPA, arguing that it

enforces private property rights at the expense of other values, such as innovation on the Internet, security of the Internet, and freedom of communication.

So this post is really just an excuse to remind you that

the U.S. Senate will debate a controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill as soon as senators return in January.

A vote on the Protect IP Act, a close cousin of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, will be held January 24, thanks to a last-minute push by Majority Leader Harry Reid,

who called PIPA "extremely important" and hoped it would be passed in "a productive couple of days" (translation: can be rushed through).

Uh-huh. So on this he decides to be Mr. Tough Guy. Terrific.

Footnote, It Would Be Funny If It Wasn't So Serious Div.: A new free app for Android allows users to scan the barcode of a product to see if the manufacturer has endorsed SOPA.

Passing thought #3: Is that all there is?

2012-01-08T14:24:00.004-05:00

So many people, it seems, were almost beside themselves with joy over PHC* actually going to the Pentagon for a presser to announce a new military strategy that would include cuts in military spending! Hooray! Second Nobel Peace Prize coming!

Um, I wondered, were these cuts more than the $400 billion over 10 years already announced months ago?

Turns out, no, not really. It's $487 billion over 10 years. And it's still not clear, at least to me, if these are cuts in DOD spending or in all "defense" spending.

With the 2012 DOD budget request set at $553 billion and allowing for the fact that the budget is expected to grow in current dollars despite the cuts - that is, the "cuts" are actually "smaller increases" - it winds up giving the gun-wielders about 8% less over the next decade. And if the cuts are to apply to all "defense" spending - $881 billion requested for 2012, it becomes just a five or six percent smaller increase.

Not insignificant, granted, but hardly let-out-a-cheer stuff, especially when there are proposals already out there to cut such spending by 25% (The 25 Percent Solution), by $1.2 trillion (The Cato Institute), and by $2.3 Trillion (The House Progressive Caucus), all over 10 years, and another to cut 40% over just three years (Ret. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor). And especially not when "defense" spending has gone up by a whopping 70% over the last decade.

Footnote: The NY Times is already starting with the articles about the supposedly devastating impact these smaller increases will have on companies and their employees who depend on military contracts. That there will some sort of impact is undeniable; I just wish such things were a matter of concern to our source of "all the news that's fit to print" when it involved cuts in spending that are about actual human needs.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

Passing thought #2: "Boat" joins "gate"

2012-01-08T14:13:00.004-05:00

Politico recently reported that Newt Grinch is suffering from buyer’s remorse about Citizens United, which at the time he hailed as a great victory for free speech. Politico said that after seeing his Iowa poll number plummet in the face of weeks of what he claimed were false attacks,

Gingrich won’t stop talking about the injustices of unchecked spending — specifically the $3 million spent attacking him. He even coined a name for it, saying he got “Romney-boated” by his chief opponent’s “millionaire friends.”

Oh, so terrific: Now the right-wingers are going to adopt the term "fill-in-the-blank-boated" as shorthand for the experience of "being overwhelmed by a massive campaign of falsehoods?" Is Grinch now going to apologize to John Kerry?

Sorry for making you spit out your drink.

Passing thought #1: One is not the same as the other

2012-01-08T13:47:00.005-05:00

I'm sure that you're already aware that the Montana Supreme Court recently upheld a 100-year-old state law that limits corporate donations to political campaigns, thus directly rejecting the notorious Citizens United decision.

A number of observers have praised the decision as demonstrating the depth of public opposition to Citizens United while insisting that the legal result will simply be that SCOTUS will strike down the Montana decision on appeal, leaving that legal landscape unchanged.

The thought here is that while I think that more likely than not, I'm not as convinced of the zero effect as some other are. The Montana case can be differentiated from CitUnit on at least two grounds: One is that this case refers to a state law, not a federal law, and the general tradition (which I emphasize for what I hope would be obvious reasons) has been to let states regulate their own elections, with the feds generally stepping in only when some identifiable group of voters was being denied access to the ballot box. (That being the legitimate part of the reason why SCOTUS said that its other notorious decision of recent times, Bush v. Gore in 2000, was not to be used as precedent.)

The other, though, is the more important one: Part of the, um, "logic" of CitUnit was the claim that evidence of the corrupting influence of money was lacking. The Montana decision was evidence-based, citing the history of mining interests in Montana, the interests whose actions lead to the ban, as proof. To overturn the ruling, SCOTUS would have to either deny that history or deny the relevance of facts - not that either of those is beyond this Court.

So while I don't see the Court reversing itself on CitUnit, as lovely as that would be, I do see some chance of the decision being in some way modified to allow some controls and or least a requirement for transparency.

Footnote A: As I again expect you know but is still worth pointing out, the dissenters in the Montana case agreed with pretty much everything the majority said, holding only that CitUnit unhappily required the law be overturned. One of them, Justice James Nelson, called corporate personhood "an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species."

Footnote B: I've written some stuff on corporate personhood, including these two on Glenn Greenwald's seriously wrong endorsement of CitUnit.

Some stuff I didn't have time for #4

2012-01-07T23:35:00.003-05:00

This is what Sharia law looks like. Well, not Sharia law, no, but something that smells just as bad.

Beit Shemesh, Israel — A shy 8-year-old schoolgirl has unwittingly found herself on the front line of Israel's latest religious war.

Naama Margolese is a ponytailed, bespectacled second-grader who is afraid of walking to her religious Jewish girls school for fear of ultra-Orthodox extremists who have spat on her and called her a whore for dressing "immodestly."

She is not the only one; the other children going to the school are also targets. Beyond them, their parents, escorting them as protection against the mob, have also been accosted and spat on and journalists trying to cover the story have been the targets of eggs and rocks.

The ultra-Orthodox are only about 10% of Israel's population but they are a rather privileged 10%, and I don't mean financially but in terms of power.

The ultra-Orthodox are perennial king-makers in Israeli coalition politics – two such parties serve as key members of the ruling coalition. They receive generous government subsidies, and police have traditionally been reluctant to enter their communities. ...

[T]hey have become increasingly aggressive in trying to impose their ways on others, as their population has grown and spread to new areas.

In Beit Shemesh, a city of about 100,000, these radical-Islamist-wannabes who make up about half the local population have

erected street signs calling for the separation of sexes on the sidewalks, dispatched "modesty patrols" to enforce a chaste female appearance and hurled stones at offenders and outsiders. Walls of the neighborhood are plastered with signs exhorting women to dress modestly in closed-necked, long-sleeved blouses and long skirts.

To the credit of the Israeli public, when Naama's story and through her the story of the conflict in Beit Shemesh got media attention, the response was shock among the public and expressions of outrage from some political leaders, who have generally turned a blind eye to the treatment of women within the ultra-Orthodox community.

However, that outrage is by itself not enough.

"It is clear that Israeli society is faced with a challenge that I am not sure it can handle," said Menachem Friedman, a professor emeritus of Bar Ilan University and expert on the ultra-Orthodox, "a challenge that is no less and no more than an existential challenge."

Put another way, Israel as a whole has to decide what it will be. Even if it is determined to remain an avowedly Jewish state despite the limitations that automatically and of necessity places on its Arab and Palestinian citizens, even then it has to decide if it is to be a modern, pluralistic state or if it is to be an expression of its most reactionary, extremist, hating elements. It's a question Israel has ignored throughout its history; it is rapidly coming to a time when it can do so no longer.

Some stuff I didn't have time for #3

2012-01-07T21:13:00.005-05:00

Because South Carolina has a history of discriminating against minority voters, it is one of several states that are required under the Voting Rights Act to obtain federal approval for any changes in its voting laws. Just before Christmas, the DOJ blocked a new law that would have required voters to present photo identification at the voting place on the grounds that the law would disproportionately suppress turnout among eligible minority voters.

The justification for the move was the "significant racial disparities" revealed by state's own data, which showed that minority citizens are significantly more likely to be disenfranchised by the change than white voters are - as if that wasn't the intention all along.

Current rules in the state allow people to vote with a voter registration card and a signature. The state tried to justify the photo ID requirement on the grounds of preventing fraud, but the DOJ found that

the state failed to point to "any evidence or instance of either in-person voter impersonation or any other type of fraud that is not already addressed by the state's existing voter identification requirement and that arguably could be deterred by requiring voters to present only photo identification at the polls."

It was the first time since 1994 that the department has blocked a voter ID law, and comes at a time when stories - I should say more stories - are emerging of cases where photo ID laws have prevented registered voters from casting ballots.

It has allegedly happened twice in Tennessee alone, including a 96-year-old woman who could not locate her marriage license, and a 93-year-old woman who had cleaned the state Capitol there for some 30 years. The latter woman, Thelma Johnson, was born in Alabama via midwife and was never issued a birth certificate.

It's possible the good news out of the DOJ may yet continue: Texas has enacted a similar voter ID law which could very well be next to face action by the department.

Speaking on behalf of the Attorney General of Texas, spokeswoman Lauren Bean said any such move would be fought in federal court, a sentiment already expressed by South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who echoed Gov. Nikki Haley pledge to "protect our 10th Amendment rights" - all of which statements are revealing in that they don't actually deny a racially disparate impact of these laws; they don't actually deny they will suppress voting among minorities, the elderly, the poor; they in essence claim rather that states are free to suppress the vote of certain groups if they want.

The future of these cases in the courts is up for grabs. SCOTUS has already disgraced itself on the issue, having upheld Indiana's photo ID law; still, that case was different in two ways: First, the suit was brought on behalf of people who feared the law - not yet in effect - would disenfranchise them and the Court found that they hadn't actually been discriminated against, at least not yet (and so left open the possibility of a subsequent suit). And second, Indiana's law did not require federal approval, which somewhat shifts the burden of proof.

In a South Carolina or Texas case, the Court would either have to find that the state had met the legally-required burden of proof to justify the change or it would have to find the section of the Voting Rights Act requiring federal approval of changes to be unconstitutional - which by leaving the feds with only limited and cumbersome enforcement mechanisms, would effectively invalidate the entire law, and I'm not sure even this Supreme Court would be willing to go that far.

Footnote: In one of those bizarre, artificial balance things that major media seems to feel obligated to invoke, the New York Times notes that examples of the type of fraud that voter photo ID laws supposedly combat - voter impersonation at the polling place - "have been few and isolated." (In fact, the numbers are vanishingly small.) However, it then adds that "there is greater evidence that absentee ballot fraud has been used" - and then had to go back to a single incident on a mayoral race over 14 years ago to find an example.

Footnote again: The DNC has a website called ProtectingTheVote.org. Being a party outlet, it obviously skews the story in a party-oriented direction (complete with donation pitch) but I'd still recommend giving it a look.

Some stuff I didn't have time for #2

2012-01-07T18:18:00.004-05:00

According to an article in the Huffington Post the end of December,

Maryland is one of 38 states that allows murder charges to be brought against someone accused of killing a viable fetus. The 2005 state law has so far only been used for cases in which defendants were accused of assaulting or killing pregnant women.

Now, however, Maryland has used it to charge two doctors with multiple counts of murder of fetuses.

The case appears to have arisen over a "botched" abortion in August 2010, but the police investigation supposedly turned up a number of late-term aborted fetuses in a freezer. As a result,

[Dr. Steven] Brigham, 55, is charged with five counts of first-degree murder, five counts of second-degree murder and one count of conspiracy. [Dr. Nicola] Riley, 46, faces one count each of first- and second-degree murder and one conspiracy count.

When these laws were first proposed and passed, there were those of us who predicted that they would be used against abortion providers because they legally established a fetus as a separate individual with its own rights to legal protection - so anyone aborting a "viable" fetus could be charged with murder. Proponents of the law, denying their true intentions, insisted that would never happen. Now, however, it appears their actual wish, the one denied by their words, has come true.

But for pure shake-your-head and quality of unintended revelation, nothing could beat this statement:

"We are in uncharted territory," [Cecil County State's Attorney Ellis] Roberts said. "At some point in time," he added, "you will hear our explanation" of the charges.

Um, what? You had a 16-month investigation, filed a total of six counts of first-degree murder, six counts of second-degree murder, and two counts of conspiracy - and you can't offer an explanation of the charges? What, do you still have to make one up? Maybe you haven't focus-group tested the alternatives yet?

And we take one more step back toward the days of the coat hanger.

Some stuff I didn't have time for #1

2012-01-07T18:15:00.001-05:00

Of course it wasn't ethnically or religiously motivated. Who would ever have thought?

A police security tower rose into the sky [over New York City] Monday, keeping watch over a globally prominent Islamic cultural center that was firebombed amid a handful of attacks being investigated as possibly linked bias crimes.

Possibly? At about 8 pm Sunday evening, a possible firebomb was thrown at a counter of a corner convenience store. Ten minutes later, a nearby home was firebombed. About a half-hour after that, the Imam Al-Khoei Foundation was hit with two Molotov cocktails. Eighty people were gathered inside for a dinner. Forty-five minutes later, a private house used as a Hindu house of worship was similarly attacked.

It's unclear if the attacks are related.

Unclear? Four firebombs within two and a-quarter hours of each other and we are supposed to think this could just as easily be coincidence? Just how common are firebomb attacks in New York?

Happily, although one of the homes was extensively damaged, no one was injured in any of the attacks. Sadly, it reminds us that, contrary to the claims of some, hate crimes are not "just crimes," but something much more and whose effect is more pervasive.

Left Side of the Aisle #38

2012-01-06T00:52:00.005-05:00

Political crisis in Iraq
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204058404577108803828592794.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/nuri_kamal_al-maliki/index.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/201211104749950522.html
http://www.alsumaria.tv/en/Iraq-News/1-71860-Iraq-VP-bodyguards-arrested-for-terrorist-activity.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-iraq-a-return-to-old-enmities/2011/12/20/gIQAtIxz7O_story.html
http://www.alsumaria.tv/en/Iraq-News/1-72360-Higher-Judicial-Council-of-Iraq-denies-transferring-Hashemi-case-to-Kirkuk.html
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/12/21/iraq-vice-president-denies-charges-running-death-squads/
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/12/2011122881820637664.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/world/middleeast/explosions-rock-baghdad-amid-iraqi-political-crisis.html?ref=nurikamalalmaliki
http://www.alsumaria.tv/en/Iraq-News/1-72279-Iraqiya-List-warns-against-dismissing-ministers.html
http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Fearful-Iraq-s-Sunnis-leave-mixed-neighborhoods-2435693.php
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-20/troops-are-gone-but-iraq-war-is-not-over-meghan-l-o-sullivan.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/world/middleeast/iraqi-sunnis-and-shiites-clash-over-regional-power.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/26/baghdad-bombing-iraq_n_1169745.html
http://www.alsumaria.tv/en/Iraq-News/1-72138-Iraq-State-of-Law-Coalition-criticizes-calls-to-dissolve-Parliament.html
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle08.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/2012/January/middleeast_January88.xml&section=middleeast
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/15/world/la-fg-iraq-withdrawal-20111216

Outrage of the Week: Drug tests for public benefits
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/29/welfare-drug-testing-michigan_n_1174643.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/16/unemployment-drug-test-republicans-jobless_n_1153877.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/09/nikki-haley-drug-test-exaggeration_n_955900.html
http://www.stormfax.com/dickens.htm

Some updates on Occupy
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2011/1227/Putin-belittles-protesters-as-aimless-but-promises-transparency
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/12/occupy_wall_street_what_is_the.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/02/us/occupy-migration/?hpt=us_c2
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120102/NEWS01/301020070/Occupy-Louisville-protestors
http://watchdog.org/12640/occupy-hawaii-island-protesters-gather-near-pelosis-vacation-resort/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-01-01/occupy-wall-street-arrests/52320900/1
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/01/occupy-protesters-ring-in-the-new-year-with-largest-demonstration-since-eviction/
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/02/MN041MK1EG.DTL
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2012/01/westboro_baptist_church_and_oc.php
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/31/occupy-protests-iowa-caucuses-2012_n_1177997.html
http://www.jdjournal.com/2011/12/30/occupy-wall-street-protests-intensify-at-campaign-headquarters-many-arrested/
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-occupy-protests-iowa-20120102,0,4262216.story
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/democrats-become-target-of-occupy-protests/
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/12-arrested-at-occupy-the-caucus-protest/

It's just another night

2011-12-31T23:03:00.003-05:00

Wishing all of us a peaceful and joyous New Year.

Like the man said, "Let's make it a good one." Occupy the year!

Left Side of the Aisle #37

2011-12-29T23:14:00.004-05:00

Update on National Defense Authorization Act
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70527.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57343287/wh-oks-military-detention-of-terrorism-suspects/?tag=pop;stories

Update on Bradley Manning
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-28/cowan-bradley-manning-bad-dream/3748968
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/15/us-targeting-assange-manning_n_1151010.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/26/bradley-manning-hero-or-traitor/

Outrage of the Week:Pentagon investigates itself, finds itself not guilty
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/us/pentagon-finds-no-fault-in-its-ties-to-tv-analysts.html

Some thoughts on the "end" of the Iraq war
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/kfiles/b24970.html
http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-10/politics/oneill.bush_1_roomful-of-deaf-people-education-of-paul-o-neill-national-security-council-meeting?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/09/23/new-documents-reveal-bush-team-planned-iraq-war-from-start/
http://downingstreetmemo.com/
http://downingstreetmemo.com/memoannote.html
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3062
http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/iraqchron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
http://vimeo.com/33755968
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=66515
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/19/panetta_iraq_war_was_worth_it/
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/15/world/la-fg-iraq-withdrawal-20111216
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/26/baghdad-bombing-iraq_n_1169745.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/world/middleeast/baghdad-hit-by-suicide-bombing.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/world/middleeast/explosions-rock-baghdad-amid-iraqi-political-crisis.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/15/world/la-fg-iraq-withdrawal-20111216
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-zogby/iraq-war-not-over-and-dan_b_1168737.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204058404577108803828592794.html

The TSA strikes again
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/23/rebecca-hains-tsa-frosted-cupcake_n_1168508.html

Left Side of the Aisle #36

2011-12-24T22:13:00.003-05:00

The topics:
Bradley Manning pre-trial
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/witness-describes-mannings-erratic-violent-behavior/

Iraq
http://www.salon.com/2011/09/12/obama_iraq_promise/singleton/

Outrage of the Week
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/19/392023/payday-lenders-pool-200k-against-missouri-ballot-initiative-compare-themselves-to-mlk-and-civil-rights-marchers/
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/second-group-raises-big-money-to-oppose-missouri-payday-lending/article_1403d056-20fa-11e1-852c-0019bb30f31a.html

Lowe’s
http://fayobserver.com/articles/2011/12/19/1144037?sac=Home
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/12/transparency-kayaks-all-american-muslim-apology/46207/
http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/12/09/ads-all-american-muslim/
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/11/14/2775066/lowes-profits-fall-by-nearly-half.html
http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/12/12/lowes-apologizes-muslim-reality-ads/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_States_by_circulation
http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2011/12/boycott_lowes_over_stores_anti.html

"War on Christmas"
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/erin-r-brown/2011/12/13/war-war-christmas
http://religions.pewforum.org/reports
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201112040005
http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofplimoth00braduoft/historyofplimoth00braduoft_djvu.txt
http://web.archive.org/web/20110430004539/http://www.bsu.edu/web/01bkswartz/xmaspub.html

And Another Thing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalis_Invicti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great_and_Christianity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Thessalonica
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/saturnalia.html

RIP

2011-12-16T17:39:00.002-05:00

Christopher Hitchens has died at 62 at the result of esophageal cancer.

There are, of course, the usual accolades, the tributes to his wit and his skill with the acerbic phrase, the "humanizing" anecdotes of kindness, and all the rest.

However, I have to say I lost interest in Hitchens some time back, even before his endorsement of the invasion of Iraq and subsequently of Shrub; those events merely put an exclamation point on the judgement I had previously rendered that he had become "increasingly incapable of stringing two coherent sentences together without someone or something to hate." The attacks of 9/11 just allowed him the opportunity to combine all his individual political and religious hates into one package of "Islamofascism."

There are those who will miss him; while I regret his death as I do that of anyone (as "any man's death diminishes me"), I confess I will not be among them.

For a couple of reasonable but less laudatory looks at Hitchens, try here and here.

Some stuff I didn't have time for #5

2011-12-16T16:59:00.003-05:00

Faced with the truly horrendous, horrifying vision of demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in September - especially the prospect of the presence of Old Scratch himself in the form of the Occupy movement - the host city of Charlotte, North Carolina is looking to enact laws based on the determination that insuring quietude for the delegates and power players is more important than Constitutional rights.

The city wants to makes tents in public spaces "a public nuisance," ban other camping equipment, and outlaw "noxious substances," whatever they are. It also wants to limit where protesters can demonstrate (Remember "free speech zones?") and ban overnight stays altogether. The result would be not only to ban Occupy from protesting the DNC but would make Occupy Charlotte's encampment likewise illegal - a nice little bonus.

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx said dubiously last month that the rule, which could be enacted in January, is not aimed at a specific group.

This despite the fact that a related memo says that "recent issues related to camping on city property" - that is, Occupy Charlotte - have raised the issue of "regulat[ing] this activity during the DNC."

Of course this is aimed at Occupy. Of course this is about looking to make sure all those Important And Serious People do not have to be exposed to the DFHs and the rest of the rabble. Of course this is about protecting business as usual.By attmpting to block Occupy, the city council of Charlotte has instead pointed up its necessity.

Some stuff I didn't have time for #4

2011-12-16T01:16:00.004-05:00

GOPpers are forever railing against raising taxes on the rich because it will hurt the "job creators." GOPper Sen. John Thune says "it's just intuitive" that the proposed surtax on millionaire incomes to pay for a further cut in the payroll tax would hurt the ability of businesses, especially small businesses and start-ups, to hire.

So NPR decided it wanted to talk to some of those whose ability to hire would be affected.

NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.

So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to.

So they put up a notice on Facebook and got several responses from some "millionaire job creators" who would be affected by this surtax. And what did they say?

"It's not in the top 20 things that we think about when we're making a business hire," said one.

"If my taxes go up, I have slightly less disposable income, yes. But that has nothing to do with what my business does," said another.

"I, like any other American, especially a business owner, I want to make as much money as I can and I want to keep as much money in my pocket as I can, but I also believe in the greater good," said a third.

Thune insisted those are "outliers" and that "most" small business owners agree that raising taxes hurts employment. It's just that, well, neither he not his business lobbyist friends can't actually produce any.

Footnote: I've mentioned this a couple of times on the show, but this seems a good spot to put it up here.

The notion that tax cuts reduce unemployment is thoroughly bogus. The thing - the only thing - that affects unemployment is demand. Demand for goods and services to be provided by government or the private economy. Not tax rates.

I know that seems counter-intuitive; it seems logical that cutting taxes, "putting more money in people's pockets," would increase demand and thus jobs to meet that demand. But the facts say otherwise. Just consider this:

The so-called "Bush tax cuts," the ones that were supposed to expire at the end of last year (and were intended, we were assured, to stimulate the economy), went into effect on June 7, 2001. At that time, unemployment was 4.5%. Since then, we have 125 months of data (July 2001 to November 2011, inclusive).

Across that time, the unemployment rate was below 4.5% precisely four times. Specifically, it was 4.4%. Never lower. It was at 4.5% just four more times. All eight of those occasions came in one nine-month period from September 2006 through May 2007. Every other month in the time, a total of 117 out of 125 months, unemployment was above where it was at the beginning. That's nearly 94% of the time. Indeed, unemployment has been at or above 5.5% - that is, a full percentage point above the beginning, for 76 of those months. Even if you were to ignore the last 35 months of data (i.e., all of 2009, 2010, and so far in 2011), there are still 41 months out of 90 at or above 5.5%.

Some stuff I didn't have time for #3

2011-12-16T01:03:00.005-05:00

New York Senator Charles Schumer and New York State Senator Michael Gianaris want the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland and the T&A to provide "passenger advocates" at airport screening sites in the wake of four elderly women complaining that they were "strip searched" at JFK Airport.

One said she had to raise her blouse and remove her undergarments so a T&A agent could check her back brace. Another was made to drop her pants to check a colostomy bag and a third was required to remove her pants so agents could be sure her diabetic insulin pump was not, I dunno, some kind of leg bomb. The fourth couldn't even get on the plane because her incontinence pad set off alarms.

On Sunday, the TSA denied on its blog that the women had been strip searched.

"TSA does not and has never conducted strip searches, and no strip searches occurred in any of these incidents," the official statement posted by TSA blogger Bob Burns said.

Which seems to depend largely on just how you define the term "strip search," which of course T&A did not do - although I have to wonder if anything short of being stripped naked right on the concourse would qualify in their minds. Maybe not even then, if it didn't involve a little finger-wave action.

Oh, but this is what really ticked me off, the little thing again:

"We truly regret these passengers feel they had a bad screening experience," the TSA said in its blog.

"Feel?" You "regret" that they "feel" they had "a bad screening experience?"

"We are the TSA. We regret that you think you had a bad screening experience. We regret that you imagine you had a bad screening experience. We're sorry that you fantasize that you had a bad screening experience. It disturbs us deep in our institutional soul, truly it does, that you are so out of touch with reality that you maintain this delusion that you had a bad screening experience. We hope you get the help you need. Have a nice day."

"Feel." Couldn't even say something like "we regret their screening experience was unpleasant," which at least would acknowledge the validity of their embarrassment without admitting any legal error. No, it had to be "feel," like "it's all in their heads, the poor dears."

Jeebus-effing-Christ.

Some stuff I didn't have time for #2

2011-12-15T21:57:00.003-05:00

I've remarked on a number of occasions that I often find that it's the little thing that gets me, the little thing that others don't seem to be pointing to.

An example of that is something I talked about on this week's show, the fact that the day before they moved in to break up Occupy Boston, the police barred food from entering the site. No one seemed to take notice of that - but I immediately thought "By what authority?" What empowers police to simply say "you can't bring food there just because we said so?" And why is that assertion of unfounded authority seemingly regarded as unworthy of comment? What does that say about our media and our society?

Here's another example I wish I'd had time for:

The audience at Saturday night's Republican presidential debate gave their loud seal of approval to the idea of removing restrictions on child labor.

For over a week, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has been suggesting that poor children should be in the workforce. He has said that janitorial jobs are appropriate for children, and has lauded the idea of 5-year-olds working.

"If you take one half of the New York janitors, who are paid more than the teachers. An entry-level janitor gets paid twice as much as an entry-level teacher. You take half those janitors, you could give lots of poor kids a work experience in the cafeteria, in the school library, in the front office, in a lot of different things. I'll stand by the idea young people ought to learn how to work."

With that, the Republican audience erupted with applause.

So why is the idea of revoking "stupid" child labor laws popular among GOP primary voters? Because of the adjective which they clearly hear but which has been overlooked in most commentary: "poor." They're not applauding the idea of children working, they're not applauding the idea of five year-old children working, they're applauding the idea of five year-old poor children working.

What's more, Grinch specifically referred to New York. You think that when he talked about "young people" learning "how to work" that folks in the audience were conjuring up images of the children of some white dirt farmer in Appalachia or Mississippi? Or even some down-on-their-luck white family in Indianapolis? You know damn well they weren't.

Because, y'see, it's them. It's those people. Those other people. The "not us." You know who we mean. They have no work ethic. They don't know how to work like we do. They are all shiftless, lazy. And so their kids are the same; they, Grinch claims, "have no habit of working ... unless it's illegal."

One of the few who I noticed addressing the "poor" aspect of this directly was Jesse Jackson, who pointed out that "83 percent of poor children live in households with at least one adult who works" and that poor working parents often work more hours than wealthier counterparts. Then there is the fact that according to David Cay Johnston, the average number of hours worked yearly by folks in the poorest fifth of the population has gone up by 26% in the past thirty years.

Jackson called Grinch's statements "ugly and stupid." I'm more than a little surprised that he didn't also call them what they were: transparently racist. And the response of the audience, the same.

Footnote: I expect the fact that Lizard Grinch's plan would also involve firing a lot of "unionized janitors" was icing on the cake for that audience.

Some stuff I didn't have time for #1

2011-12-15T21:52:00.002-05:00

As I noted earlier, in the interim between posts of shows I'm going to be posting some stuff about things I would have liked to have included but felt constrained by time. Here's one.

Joe "I just loves me some TV face time" Arpaio, the soi-disant "America's Toughest Sheriff," may be at overly long last facing the end of his ill-deserved plaudits.

The proverbial straw appears to have been the revelation that his office either botched or just didn't give flying damn about hundreds of alleged sex crimes, in more than two dozen of which the victims were children. Most of those complaints, revealingly, were in Latino neighborhoods.

There already has been an on-going criminal investigation of him and his department for felonious abuse of authority, centered on a bogus "anti-corruption" squad that by all appearances primarily existed to launch phony but intimidating investigations into anyone who got on Arpaio's wrong side.

Now there is what is described as a "scathing" report charging him and his office with a pattern of civil rights violations against Latinos and a “systematic disregard” for their Constitutional rights.

There's even an internet petition calling for his resignation.

John Doughtery, a Phoenix New Times investigative journalist, who launched the campaign against Arpaio, explained his reasoning in a press release.

“Joe Arpaio has already cost Maricopa County more than $100 million in misspent funds and $43 million in settlements for claims arising from abuse in the county jails,” said Dougherty. “Since 2006 Joe Arpaio has allowed child molestation cases to take a backseat to his publicity stunts, racial profiling based roundups, campaigning, and a reality TV show. This is a clear example of government waste and abuse of power that must not be tolerated.”

Arpaio is a sfaming scumbag racist who deserves - at best - to be treated as he treated many Latino prisoners: forced to wear pink underwear while housed in a tent, surrounded by guards speaking to him in a language he barely understands who punish him for violating orders he didn't comprehend. We are much better off without him.

Left Side of the Aisle #35

2011-12-15T19:32:00.002-05:00

The topics:

Update on voter suppression and photo-ID laws
http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/12/13/for-false-balance-wapo-cites-phony-report-on-vote-fraud/
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-holder-voting-rights-20111214,0,4981922.story

Update on National Defense Authorization Act:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/13/indefinite-military-detention-defense-bill-citizens_n_1146181.html

Update on Stop Online Piracy Act
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edward-j-black/stop-online-piracy-act-vote_b_1145949.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/european-parliament-8216opposes-sopa-copyright-law-in-new-resolution/992
http://www.scribd.com/doc/75153093/Tribe-Legis-Memo-on-SOPA-12-6-11-1

Update on Occupy Boston, plus other Occupy news
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/12/09/live-blog-for-occupy-movement-occupy-boston-eviction/
http://www.boston.com/Boston/metrodesk/2011/12/dozens-diehards-vow-stay/glonRuxIfnysnXhEfEBuxJ/index.html
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/12/12/occupy-boston-evicted/
http://www.occupyboston.org/radio/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/occupy-wall-street-is-bad-pr-for-police-videos/2011/12/12/gIQAzgRKqO_blog.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/APb28c89410c414543b991291f318f1ec2.html
http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_19528847
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h4hgOYZXVDDzMb5Uoo6LQfMCeiBA
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/12/us/occupy-ports/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy

And Another Thing: Search for the Higgs boson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientists-close-in-on-linchpin-of-physics-the-god-particle/2011/12/12/gIQAmk2cqO_story.html?tid=ts_carousel
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/science/tantalizing-hints-but-no-direct-proof-in-search-for-higgs-boson.html

Bradley Manning
http://www.bradleymanning.org/
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/vigil-for-bradley-during-pre-trial-hearing

Changes

2011-12-09T19:37:00.002-05:00

There are some changes here.

What they are ain't exactly clear.

Well, pretty clear, anyway.

I've been focusing more on my cable TV show, as the lack of posts here surely has made apparent. But I definitely don't want to drop this. So this is what I'm going to do or at least which I intend to do, my limits on Blogger space permitting:

Each week, I'm going to embed the YouTube video of my show. It should be up by late Thursday. (If I start to run out of available space on Blogger for video, I may have to switch to it being a link to the YouTube site.) With that video will be a list of subjects covered in the video plus a list of links to the info used in putting the show together. I won't guarantee an exact 1:1 correlation between the video and the link list, as last-minute changes may result in some links not being used or something being included for which a link does not appear in the list - although I will try to correct for the latter.

During the days between, I intend to post on things that I wanted to mention on the show but didn't/couldn't because of time constraints or some other cause. Just be aware that for that reason, those post may not be the latest, hottest thing - but I hope they will at least be relevant.

Left Side of the Aisle #34

2011-12-09T18:27:00.005-05:00

The topics:

- Good news on gay rights
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/06/obama-administration-gay-rights-foreign-aid-_n_1131564.html
http://www.pollingreport.com/civil.htm
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/28/MNVJ1LABRU.DTL
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/03/news/la-pn-pew-same-sex-marriage-20111103

- Dealing with the USPS fiscal crisis
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/04/us-postal-service-faces-b_n_1127989.html
http://www.wsbt.com/wsbt-bulkmailers-fear-proposed-mail-delays-could-hurt-business-20111206,0,3691570.story
http://www.myfoxwausau.com/story/16204025/possible-usps-changes-could-affect-newspaper-circulation

- Threat to freedom in the National Defense Authorization Act
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/29/senate-votes-to-let-military-detain-americans-indefinitely_n_1119473.html
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/senators-demand-military-lock-american-citizens-battlefield-they-define-being
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/196609-senate-rejects-amendment-to-limit-domestic-military-detention-
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/01/military-detention-us-citizens-senate-second-vote_n_1123929.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/01/military-detention-us-citizens_n_1124534.html

- Occupy news
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/06/occupy-our-homes-san-francisco_n_1132895.html
http://occupyourhomes.org/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/occupy-wall-street-police-response-should-be-investigated-by-doj-nadler-says/2011/12/06/gIQApt1FaO_blog.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/07/us-usa-protests-idUSTRE7B52M320111207
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/12/occupy_nola_ousted_later_reins.html
http://www.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/World/Story/A1Story20111207-314848.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/1206/Occupy-movement-s-last-big-stand-Boston
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2011-12-05/news/os-occupy-orlando-eviction-20111205_1_demonstrators-protesters-officers
http://www.boston.com/Boston/metrodesk/2011/12/menino-occupy-boston-pick-issue-washington/6Id0jViUUQDLmTwMAsOxaO/index.html
http://www.therolladailynews.com/mobiletopstories/x1856669689/Occupy-Rolla-holds-initial-meeting
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/01/occupy-protesters-raids_n_1122771.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/occupy-wall-street-un-envoy_n_1125860.html?ref=mostpopular
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45567182/ns/local_news-washington_dc/#.Tt8JR1aNOSo
http://correntewire.com/occupy_san_francisco_being_evicted

- Continue the payroll tax cut?
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-01/raise-taxes-on-rich-to-reward-true-job-creators-nick-hanauer.html
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/06/143211080/gingerly-gop-contenders-address-payroll-tax-cut
http://www.propublica.org/article/decoding-facts-the-payroll-tax-cut-and-how-well-it-works
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57337767/payroll-tax-cut-is-just-chicken-soup-for-the-economy/
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/11/payroll-tax-cuts-will-they-bankrupt-social-security/

You asked for it!

2011-12-01T21:37:00.003-05:00

Really. You did. Or a few of you, anyway.

I've mentioned a couple of times that I've been doing a weekly half-hour of commentary on my local cable access channel and a couple of folks have asked about seeing it. Well, I have finally - after first getting around to it and then dealing with a few hassles - done it. The show is called Left Side of the Aisle and now it is going to be on YouTube every week.

So here's the first one up, show #33.

Be careful what you ask for.

Oops - forgot one

2011-11-25T21:27:00.002-05:00

Some traditions are more important than others.

And another thing....

2011-11-24T12:30:00.002-05:00

One other thing for your T-Day pleasure, with thanks for Rumproast for the link.

Happy Turkey Day

2011-11-24T01:38:00.011-05:00

Gather 'round the campfire, kiddies: As a T-day present, I'm going to tell you the true story of the "First Thanksgiving." Now, there have been a number of places claiming to have had the first Thanksgiving, but when we say the phrase, we're all but invariably thinking of an event that took place in what's now Plymouth, Massachusetts in the fall of 1621. So that's what I'm referring to.

I'll begin by citing a book with the rather ponderous title of A Relation or Journal of the beginning and procedings of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth in New England, by certain English Adventurers both Merchants and others.

It's popularly known today by the less cumbersome name of Mourt's Relation. In that volume, published in England in 1622, there is a letter from Edward Winslow to a "loving and old friend" in England. Winslow was a Mayflower passenger, one of the original settlers of what is now Plymouth. The letter is dated December 11, 1621 (old style).

This is quoted from that letter:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Got that? The thing you need to know, friends, is that that is the only contemporaneous account of the event known to exist. The only other even near-contemporaneous account of which I'm aware was penned by William Bradford, another "first comer," who wrote in the early 1630s, ten or twelve years after the event:

They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl, there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned, but true reports.

That's it. That's all we know. Well, that and the fact that based on other references in those two sources, the 1621 feast took place after September 18 and before November 9. Mostly likely, it was in late September or the beginning of October, as that would have been shortly after harvest. Everything else is based on assumptions, interpretations, and guesswork - some of the latter informed, some (too much of it) not.

The first thing to realize is that this was not a "thanksgiving." In the period, a thanksgiving was a religious occasion, a day set aside to give thanks to God for some special and unexpected blessing. Such days would occur occasionally as the cause arose; to plan for one every year would be regarded as a gross presumption on God's intentions. What this was instead was a very traditional, very secular, very English, harvest feast. It was a tradition that if you had a good harvest, you would have a feast, to which you would invite everyone who had been helpful to you in your fields that year. As the natives had been helpful, they were invited.

True, the settlers didn't have a good harvest - Bradford describes it as "small" - but they had a harvest. At that point, they knew they were going to survive, they could feel confident they were going to make it. Reason enough for a celebration.

As for the eternal question of what they ate, we don't know for certain as nothing is specified. But based on the sources we can make reasonable guesses.

They surely could have had fish, specifically cod and bass. Waterfowl - duck and goose - seems likely and yes, they probably did have turkey (Bradford says "they took many" so they were certainly available). They may have had deer; Bradford mentions "venison," which at the time meant "hunted meat" - which of course includes deer. (The deer the natives brought may have been part of the meal, but it's unclear if they were brought in time to be butchered and prepared for the feast or were they a later thank you for having been "entertained and feasted.") Lobster and other shellfish is another possibility; elsewhere in the letter Winslow mentions that they are abundant in the area - as are eels, of which they could take "a hogshead" (a cask holding about 63 gallons of liquid) "in a night." (Yeah, that's likely an exaggeration: Winslow was like that.)

More tentatively, there could have been a sort of pie made from squash from their gardens, sweetened with dried fruit brought from England. Salads made from other stuff from the gardens is a fair bet, too.

To drink it was likely mostly water. In the same letter, Winslow says the barley grew "indifferent good" - i.e., it was a so-so crop - and there is no mention of hops. No hops, no beer. Not much barley, not much ale. So they might have had some ale, but again is was likely mostly water.

So that's pretty much it, kiddies. Not a lot to build a whole mythology on, is it?

Now for the reason I bring this whole story up: Every year around this time, unfailingly, I come across revisionist histories of the event. Years ago in grammar school I along with everyone else got fed tales that roused images of noble settlers and savage natives. Now, there are those who want to change that to a tale of savage settlers and noble natives - they want to simply flip who were the angels and who were the demons. We are regaled with tales of bloodthirsty settlers and how Massasoit brought 90 men to the feast because he was afraid that without a massive show of force he would be kidnapped or killed.

That's bunk, pure and simple.

In fact, relations between Plimoth (as it was often spelled at the time) and the neighboring natives were reasonably good for several decades. There were stresses and strains, yes, but for the most part they managed to keep intact the peace agreement they made in the spring of 1621. (See the Footnote for details.)

Things gradually got worse and I won't go into all the reasons why but the biggest single reason was disputes over land there were rooted in vast cultural differences between the natives (whose culture had no concept of land ownership) and the English (to who land ownership was an everyday concept). The peace finally, irrevocably, broke down - but that was in 1675, more than 50 years after the "First Thanksgiving." The point here is that at that time, in the fall of 1621, native-settler relations were good.

In fact, the very next sentences of the Winslow letter I quoted above are these:

We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us. We often go to them, and they come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them.

Winslow also says that all the other native leaders in the vicinity have made peace with Plymouth on the same terms as Massasoit, as a result of which, he asserts, "there is now great peace amongst the Indians themselves, which was not formerly." He goes on to say that:

We for our parts walk as peaceably and safely in the wood as in the highways in England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are a people without any religion or knowledge of God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just.

(Just to be certain you know, "quick of apprehension" does not mean quick to be afraid. It means quick to understand, quick to grasp the meaning of something.)

That does not sound either like bloodthirsty settlers eager to kill natives or like natives who feared contact with those same settlers or felt they had to display mass force to avoid being kidnapped or killed. If you're still not convinced, consider that in June 1621, three or four months earlier, the town felt it necessary to send a message to Massasoit requesting that he restrain his people from coming to the settlement in such numbers. From Mourt's Relation:

But whereas his people came very often, and very many together unto us, bringing for the most part their wives and children with them, they were welcome; yet we being but strangers as yet at Patuxet, alias New Plymouth, and not knowing how our corn might prosper, we could no longer give them such entertainment as we had done, and as we desired still to do.

Simply flipping who is an angel and who is a demon is trash: Neither of these peoples were either. Neither was a saint, neither was a devil.

So I reject the revisionist history, indeed I resent the revisionist history. I resent it first because it’s lousy history. It's based on ideology instead of information; it looks to satisfy demands of politics, not of history, and it is every bit as full of false tales and mythology as the nonsense and pap that we got fed as schoolchildren.

The "First Thanksgiving" was a moment of celebration when everyone on both sides believed this yes, was going to work out. That wasn’t going to happen; it was a false hope, even a foolish hope - but it did exist. And considering what Europeans of various sorts have inflicted on the natives of North America over the ensuing couple of centuries - well, that is more than bad enough to make exaggerations and false claims unnecessary.

So I quite frankly resent the attempts to strip away that one moment of hope in pursuit of a modern political agenda. And I decided to express that resentment by laying out what we do know.

So I hope you enjoy your Turkey day, I hope you have time to spend with your family or friends or better yet both and I hope you can understand why I celebrate the day as an expression less of thankfulness for the past (or even the present) than as an expression of hope for the future. That hope, too, may prove as foolish as that of 1621 - but the blunt fact is, hope is also the only thing that can make that future a better one.

Oh, and as a PS: You want to help build hope, and I mean real hope, not the phony manipulative "hope" proffered by those who want you to think that the political advancement of this or that politico's campaign is the be-all and end-all of the future of justice? Then Occupy!

Footnote: According to Mourt's Relation, this was the 1621 peace agreement:

1. That neither he nor any of his should injure or do hurt to any of our people.

2. And if any of his did hurt to any of ours, he should send the offender, that we might punish him.

3. That if any of our tools were taken away when our people are at work, he should cause them to be restored, and if ours did any harm to any of his, we would do the likewise to them.

4. If any did unjustly war against him, we would aid him; if any did war against us, he should aid us.

5. He should send to his neighbor confederates, to certify them of this, that they might not wrong us, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.

6. That when their men came to us, they should leave their bows and arrows behind them, as we should do our pieces when we came to them.

Expressed simply, it came down to "You won't attack us, we won't attack you. You get attacked, we'll help. We get attacked, you'll help. One of us does something wrong to one of you, they go to you for punishment. One of you does something wrong to one of us, they come to us for punishment. Deal? Deal."

Here are two more

2011-11-21T19:01:00.003-05:00

And for those of you old enough to be nostalgic or who would like a little historical perspective, try looking up some stuff about the Continental Walk for Disarmament and Social Justice. Just for the heck of it.

Here is a video that deserves to go viral

2011-11-21T01:28:00.004-05:00

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor. - Thomas Jefferson

Illegitimi non carborundum! Or, supposedly somewhat more correctly, Illegitimus non carborandum est! But what the heck, don't let the pedants do it, either. Just pick up the torch and carry it on.

Who are "they?"

2011-11-20T14:55:00.025-05:00

Okay, in the previous post I said the Occupy movement is something "they" don't know how to ignore so "they" want to crush it because "they" don’t know how to contain it. "So," I can hear some of you saying "Who are 'they?'"

It's a legitimate question so I'll answer it: "They" are the 1% who own 40% of the wealth in this county along with their minions, their bought-off enablers in government, media, and academia, their Walter Mitty followers filling their time with daydreams of how rich they will be someday, and the drooling mouth-breathers who populate most of the right-wing reaches of the Internet.

"They," in short, are the Empire and its foot soldiers, including the bought, the buffaloed, and the buffoons.

Various among them get their marching orders - rather, their thinking orders - from one of the three main Corps of the Army of the Empire, each of which has its own battle cry in the war against Occupy and all it stands for (like economic justice and fairness).

First is the Government Corps. Its battle cry is "Unsanitary Unsafe." Officials go on and on about how they "support free speech and the First Amendment" but they can’t allow the "unsanitary unsafe conditions" supposedly found at the Occupy encampments to "persist." One such example comes from Occupy Vancouver (Canada), where, tragically, a 20-year-old woman was found dead of a drug overdose. The mayor declared that proved the Occupy camp is "unsafe" and must be shut down. The question with the obvious answer is that if this same woman was found dead of the same cause in some alley or doorway, would the mayor have declared this proved the city is unsafe and must be shut down?

Several cities, including San Francisco, have now said that the camps have become a magnet for the homeless and people with drug problems, which is why, they say, the camps are "unsanitary unsafe" and must be emptied. Yet if that's true, another question with the obvious answer is that doesn't that mean by their own logic that they know their cities have problems of homelessness and drug dependency but are mostly concerned with keeping them invisible rather than doing anything about them?

Certainly, there have been problems with sanitation and/or drug use at some of the sites and in many of those cases the Occupiers have tried to provide what help they can to those who need it, even as they lack the resources to do so effectively - but instead of dealing with such problems or trying to work with protesters to solve them, officials are using them as excuses to shut down the protests completely.

That was the tack New York took:

After weeks of fruitlessly trying to talk to the protesters through intermediaries, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, the mayor’s top political aide, said he was thrilled when he received a call in mid-October from Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein of Central Synagogue in Midtown Manhattan [who] had been approached by members of the demonstration’s “comfort working group” seeking the city’s permission to set up tents and portable toilets.

Mr. Wolfson agreed to a meeting immediately, but it took two weeks to arrange one with the demonstrators....

On Oct. 31, Mr. Wolfson sat down in a carpeted conference room owned by Trinity Church across a table from five members of the protest, an imam and the rabbi looking on.

Mr. Wolfson hoped to work through the Bloomberg administration’s problems with what it saw as an increasingly lawless and unmanageable campground in the pulsing heart of the financial district. The protesters only wanted to discuss the need for toilets and tents. Mr. Wolfson told them their requests for permits had been denied, and the negotiations were over before they had begun.

“The city was interested in engaging in a dialogue,” Mr. Wolfson said. “It was made clear that that was not something that Occupy Wall Street was willing to do.”

So a meeting is arranged to talk about tents and port-a-potties, the folks from Occupy come wanting to talk about tents and port-a-potties, the city dismisses the idea out of hand, and uses that as an excuse to claim that Occupy Wall Street refused to "dialogue." What really happened is that the NYC Division of the Government Corps refused to give up its battle cry.

Next, there is the Ideology Corps, the battle cry for which is "occupy a job." It's enough to make you laugh, the number of wingnuts who have used exactly that phrase. (Try doing a search on the phrase.) There's even a Facebook page with the name.

Not only does this harken back to the '60s, when no demo or picket line was complete without some one driving by and shouting "get a job," it's absurdity on top of absurdity when you recall not only that many of them are employed, but that unemployment is one of things people are upset about.

Of course, this is not surprising as the Ideology Corps is often confused: It in one breath declares the movement is composed of anarchists who want the government to control every facet of our lives (figure that one out) and in the next declares it's not a "real" movement because it was started by unions which since then have "hijacked" the "original" OWS.

Finally, there is the Media Corps, the enforcers of orthodoxy, the empire’s own Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It's battle cry now is "increasingly violent protests." Every fracas, no matter how minor, is played up. Every crowd scene that involves police shoving or hitting or tackling and striking protesters is described as protesters "clashing" with police. Every incident of vandalism or destruction is portrayed as being done by "occupy protesters." For one tragic and egregious example, the fact that those involved in the shooting in Oakland - one of over 100 murders in Oakland this year - had at some point been at Occupy Oakland was enough in some accounts to connect it to the movement.

This is an important point. On my show, I had previously mentioned the unexpectedly "respectful" media coverage I found early on, describing that as a sign of the movement's unexpected strength. I referred specifically to a protest in London where some trouble occurred which was described by the media as having been "infiltrated" by trouble-makers who tried to "hijack" a peaceful march. Now when it’s clear the protests are not just a cute fad, not just a 21st century version of phone booth stuffing or goldfish swallowing, not something that was going to fade quickly when the novelty and fun wore off, but a real, serious, movement reflecting real, serious, concerns about economic injustice and inequality, those distinctions between protesters and "hijackers" are no longer being made.

In fact, CBS News actually covered how so-called "black bloc" protesters can hijack movements by instigating violence and drawing the media’s attention away from less dramatic but more meaningful actions - and then they went ahead and did it anyway, letting black bloc protesters in Oakland commandeer media coverage. That is, CBS ignored its own reporting because it didn’t fit the script being written by the Inquisitors.

(Sidebar: My own opinion of black bloc protesters is that they are politically infantile egomaniacs wandering in revolutionary daydreaming who think that breaking the windows at a BoA branch is a significant political act. I also like the first two definitions here and would include the fifth if it was to be said in a sarcastic tone of voice.)

Unfortunately, as is too often true, The Inquisition appears to be having the desired effect, at least according to the linked survey from Public Policy Polling, which says while support for the movement's goals remains steady at 33-35%, opposition has risen to 45%. Considering that the same outfit says it has found overwhelming support on issues the movement by its very existence addresses (such as raising taxes on the rich), both the shift and the dichotomy itself can only be ascribed to how the movement is presented by the Media Corps. That is, the more The Inquisition focused and continues to focus on the cheaply dramatic as opposed to the substantive, the more its attention and description are based on the level of noise rather than the level of dedication, the more it issues its battle cry, the more likely that shift became.

But despite everything, protests go on and continue to spread. There is also some perspective to be had in the fact that during the dreaded '60s, anti-Vietnam and other protests were quite unpopular - even as their message penetrated and came to be adopted by clear majorities. The bottom line is that a lot of people may not like the Occupy camps but they like what we have to say. So carry it on - because the Army of the Empire is not invulnerable; it can be defeated.

Footnote: I have some doubts about the poll I cited, since PPP had OWS at the same level of support a month ago, at a time when other polls were showing majority support -besides which, it's done via automated phone interviews, which means landlines, something which itself could skew the results toward a less sympathetic pool. However, the immediate issue at hand is the shift in attitude rather than the actual numbers.

Threat #2

2011-11-19T17:21:00.039-05:00

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. - Thomas Jefferson

Updated On my weekly local-access cable TV show I had taken to referring to the official push-back against the Occupy movement as "the Empire strikes back." It turns out that I was righter than I knew.

Over the past two weeks, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict Occupy protesters from city parks and other public spaces using disturbingly similar claims and tactics.

An early case was the violent, unprovoked attacked on student protesters at UCal Berkeley on November 9. I won't bother with the particulars as I'm sure you've seen the video. Bottom line is that the students were standing with arms linked, just standing in one place, taking neither any aggressive action nor any aggressive stance whatsoever, when police suddenly began viciously ramming their nightsticks into the students' midsections - something which, in a bitterly amusing aside, some outfits such as AP referred to as "nudging" or "prodding" the students.

(Interestingly, it develops that in use of clubs the body is divided into three zones, designated green, yellow, and red. The abdomen is a yellow zone and close to two red zones: the groin and the solar plexus. Even by what are supposed to be the standards of police practice, this was an illegitimate attack.)

Creepily, Margo Bennett, the captain of the UCal police, justified the attack, describing the students as taking a violent stand against police.

"The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence," [she] said. ... "[L]inking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest."

UCal Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau agreed, saying in a statement that what the students did - that is, standing still in one place - "is not non-violent civil disobedience." Which leaves us with the image of heavily-armed police beating non-threatening students as an act of self-defense. Frankly, I don't think either Margo or Bobby have the philosophical or emotional maturity to be lecturing others on what constitutes nonviolence.

But that, in a way, set the stage for the wave of forcible closures of Occupy sites that took place starting over last weekend.

On Saturday, it was Occupy Denver (20 arrested), Occupy Salt Lake City (19 arrested), and Occupy St. Louis (27 arrests).

On Sunday, it was Occupy Portland (more than 50 arrested) while Occupy Philadelphia was faced with beefed-up police patrols amid ominous noises from the city about "dramatically deteriorating" conditions at the camp.

Over the weekend, Occupy Burlington (Vermont) was also shut down.

On Monday, Occupy Oakland got the hammer (33 arrested).

And on Tuesday, of course, it was Occupy Wall Street that got targeted with a military-style, middle-of-the-night assault. Nearly 200 were arrested, bringing to total number of arrests in NYC to that point to clearly over 1000. Mayor Michael "I'm just an ordinary, everyday, subway-riding billionaire" Bloomberg gave a nice surreal touch to events, saying that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters. In other words, "we came in the middle of the night, threw you out, arrested you, and destroyed your stuff - all for your own good." I'm sure that made them feel much better.

What makes this wave of attacks on the right of peaceful assembly extra disturbing is a report from Rick Ellis at the Minneapolis Examiner, who said he was told by a DOJ official that the actions were coordinated with tactical and planning advice from federal police agencies, including the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland and the FBI.

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear.

Attempts have been made to downplay or even dismiss the story, with one person at Salon.com claiming that "[c]iting the Examiner is the journalistic equivalent of saying, 'my friend Bob told me.'" However, Ellis's bio seems to indicate a pretty good background in journalism and the same original report noted that he had contacted the FBI and 14 local police agencies for comment, all of which declined to offer any. What's more, he followed up by talking to "several high-ranking DHS officials on background" and asking specific questions about support and advice DHS might have given to local police, questions the agency still has not answered.

It should also be noted that the main argument seems to be over if the feds "coordinated" the attacks on the encampments, with the DHS denying only that it is "actively" coordinating with local officials - which not only "leaves a lot of room for advice, both tactical and otherwise," as Ellis points out, but could in fact mean that the agency has done so in the past. Like, say, last week. Even more to the point, federal "coordination," active or otherwise, was not the issue. Even Ellis's original source said that

while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.

The coordination was in establishing a common set of strategies and tactics to undermine the encampments and then break them up with minimal press coverage. That sort of coordination also existed among the mayors and police forces of a number of cities with Occupy sites, with AP reporting that

officials from nearly 40 cities turned to each other on conference calls, sharing what worked and what hasn't as they grappled with the leaderless movement.

Beyond all that and perhaps more significantly, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a group with ties to various law enforcement agencies including the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland, has admitted to the group having coordinated of a series of conference-call strategy sessions with big-city police chiefs and mayors about dealing with Occupy protests, one of which took place on November 10 - shortly before the nationwide crackdown began.

But no no no, they cry, there was no "coordination." It was all just a big coincidence.

Really? Are we really supposed to imagine it was all a coincidence? It was just a coincidence that across the country, Occupy sites faced the exact same complaints from city officials and ultimately faced the same massive show of force directed against what officials and police had to know were non-resisting protesters? Really?

We're supposed to accept that the limitations on press coverage were all just coincidence? That is was just by chance that when attack on Zuccotti Park occurred the NYPD deliberately and aggressively kept press and legal observers, including a retired state Supreme Court judge and a member of NY City Council, blocks away from the scene? That when the city shut down the airspace over lower Manhattan that is was just gosh darn it bad luck that it blocked access to news helicopters? Really?

If so, instead of accepting it we should recall that Rick Ellis's DOJ source also asserted that

the FBI ... advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

And when the media are present at the evictions, they are often treated as criminals themselves: arrested and handcuffed despite having and displaying press credentials. The treatment of the media has been bad enough that Reporters Without Borders, which of necessity spends most of its time on places like Rwanda and China, denounced it:

"The attitude of law-enforcement officers supports the theory that not only the movement itself but also coverage of Occupy Wall Street is being obstructed."

So yes, when I used the phrase "the Empire strikes back" I was righter than I knew.

Coincidence? All by chance? Bullshit. What we are seeing is a coordinated, planned attack on the Occupy movement; a coordinated, planned attack on the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly. Trying to turn these evictions, all based on the same complaints, using the same tactics marked by the same massive police force, all in the same short period of time, into something just coincidental on the grounds that no one ever said "synchronize your watches" is a foul and transparent lie. The coordination lay in the overall agreement that "we want to break this movement, we want to do it now before it gets too strong, and this is how we can best do it."

The thing of it is, the Empire has learned how to ignore demonstrations. It's learned how to ignore single-day events, no matter how massive. (Just consider how literally millions of people around the world turned out in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, to no avail.) They've learned how to hunker down and let the storm pass.

The problem for them was that Occupy Wall Street, in fact the whole Occupy movement, is something they couldn't ignore and can't ignore. Something they don't know how to ignore. Because it was, it is, in your face, 24/7. That's why they want to crush it - because they don’t know how to contain it in ways that they know how to control and ignore.

So it can't be denied that the movement has suffered setback - but perhaps not in that this was not really unexpected; the Occupiers knew this sort of attack would happen eventually. But the movement will not be crushed so easily, despite the wishful dreams of the empire. Some encampments were re-occupied and thousands across the country and tens of thousands in New York turned out on Thursday for the planned day of actions.

Meanwhile, it's not all bad news on occupy front: Encampments continue in Boston, Washington DC, Albany, San Francisco, and a number of other places even as officials try to raise the pressure on some of those sites. Still, as officials - some of who may be honestly sympathetic - feel increasing pressure to act on the desires of their local power elites, more Occupy sites are going to be abandoned or destroyed. And the thing is, again, that the movement will not be able to sustain itself for the long term on the basis of one-off actions: The Empire has become too adept at controlling and directing them into "acceptable" - that is, non-threatening to the Empire - channels.

The silver lining is that occupations actually don't have to be 24/7: The issue is not and never was the physical occupation of a particular space. The issue is the visibility. The issue is being visible, persistently, insistently, in-your-face visible. That is what is important.

As one minor example, Occupy New Brunswick (New Jersey) felt it wouldn't be able to maintain a constant physical presence. So instead it "occupies" the city three hours a day. Every day. Each day from 4-7 pm there are marches or rallies or teach-ins or some kind of action. And at the end of that time, Occupiers gather on the steps of the local branch of the Bank of America to plan future actions.

The Occupy movement has become important not only to the cause of economic justice but by virtue of the attempts to undermine and repress it, it has become a canary in the coal mine for the rights of speech and assembly. If it is squeezed out of existence, we will know that we are in deep, deep trouble.

Go Occupy something!

Footnote: Mayor Mikey B., ever ready to add his surreal touch, dismissed the protests on Thursday because, he said, a lot of the protesters were not Occupy Wall Street activists. Rather, they were union members, so

"It was just an opportunity for a bunch of unions to complain or to protest or whatever they want to do."

Yup - Occupy folks have nothing in common with union workers, who just want to "complain or whatever," says the man with his finger on the pulse of the public.

Updated with the paragraph about the Police Executive Research Forum's role.

Threat #1.5

2011-11-19T03:49:00.002-05:00

It's very late now, I'm very tired. Threat #2, which has to do with the threat to rights of speech and assembly represented in the assaults on the Occupy movement, will have to wait until later today.

Threat #1

2011-11-18T17:50:00.040-05:00

In many more or less politically-free societies, including ours, that institutionalized counterforce to the power of elites I mentioned in the previous post is voting: the ability to to choose those who act on your behalf, people who by virtue of that election have, at least in theory, the power to balance and control that of the elites and so preserve the interests and freedoms of the broader populace.

That theory, quite obviously, has failed many times in actual practice as we discover that those we have chosen to represent us have more in common with the elites they are supposed to counter than with those who elected them. But the fact remains that the power of the vote does exist and can be - and at times surely has been - of use, as one source, one means, of progress.

It is that power - the power of the vote to represent, albeit it rather imperfectly, the will of people and the demands of justice and progress - that is under threat.

As, again, I said in the previous post, that threat is organized, it is coordinated, it is conscious, undertaken with knowing intent. It lies in the wave of new restrictive so-called voter ID laws, laws that are intended to make it harder for people to register to vote, harder for them to vote early, harder for them to vote absentee, and harder for them to vote when actually at polls, all by demanding the presentation of certain forms of government-approved ID, often enough photo ID.

How can know this is a campaign? First off, some 27 states now require some form of ID at the polls. Most of those laws were passed within the last year or two. Fourteen of those states require specific forms of government-issued photo ID; half of those did so just this year. At least a dozen more states considered restrictive ID laws this year.

I find it hard to chalk that up to coincidence, particularly when many if not most such laws are based on model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a consortium of large corporations and GOPper state legislators founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other reactionaries. It's purpose is to create model legislation to advance the corporate-rightwing agenda that those GOPper state legislators then can bring back home.

Why is this a threat? Beyond what I hope would be the obvious objections to any attempts to limit or frustrate access to the franchise for anything less than the clearest, most compelling reasons, the notable fact is that these laws disproportionately affect certain segments of the population, such as the elderly, the poor, disabled people, people of color, and students - groups that, significantly, on the whole are more likely to vote for liberal as opposed to conservative candidates.

In a recent report (the Executive Summary is here), the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law says that these new laws could block 5 million otherwise-eligible American voters from voting. An estimated 11% of eligible voters nationwide - over 21 million adults - do not have the increasingly demanded government-issued photo ID and the percentage is even higher for, again, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, people of color, and students.

Many of those lacking the newly-required IDs would find it hard to get them. First, the underlying documentation - the ID you need to get the ID, if you will - can sometimes be hard to come by and getting it can be expensive: A report in the Washington Post said the paperwork could cost as much as $200. Contrast that with the fact that when the poll tax was declared unconstitutional in 1966, it was $1.50 - the equivalent of a bit under $9.00 today.

In other words, this is a deliberate campaign to hinder liberal-leaning voters from being able to register to vote and from being able cast a ballot if they are able to register. It is a conscious plan to deliberately, permanently, tilt the electoral playing field in favor of right-wing candidates.

And how do I know that, how can I be so sure that this is not just a happy but unintended result for the reactionaries? One way is that the claim on which this whole effort is founded, the whole basis, is that it is necessary to protect the "integrity of the vote" against an "epidemic" of "voter fraud."

That claim is thoroughly, completely, absolutely, any other definitive term you care to use and the more definitive the better, bogus! It is a lie. A bold-faced, poisonous lie. The truth is that voter fraud is almost non-existent in this country and the kind of fraud that voter ID laws would address is even rarer.

Consider this: Starting in 2002, the Justice Department required every US Attorney to designate a district election officer, someone whose job it would be to investigate and prosecute electoral fraud.

These officers' attendance was required at annual training seminars, where they were taught how to investigate, prosecute and convict fraudulent voters.

Over the next five years, during which time a scandal broke out over the Shrub administration's pressuring of those US Attorney to initiate prosecutions of electoral fraud, there were only 86 convictions on related charges. That is over the entire country over a period of five years. That is 0.00007 percent - that's 7/100,000 of 1% - of the 122 million people who voted in 2004 presidential elections alone. (Note there were two other federal elections in that period, 2002 and 2006, plus numerous state and local elections.)

Consider this as well: This year, Kansas passed one of most restrictive voter ID laws in the country. The GOPper Secretary of State defended it on the grounds that over a span of 13 years (1997 - 2010), there were 221 instances of alleged voter fraud reported in the state. Now, 221 allegations in 13 years hardly constitutes a crime wave - but beyond that, those were allegations, not actual cases. In fact, only 30 individuals were prosecuted in that time and only seven of those were convicted. Remember, this is over a span of 13 years - which would make what we might call a "yearly fraud index" of something around 0.000025 percent, that is, 25 millionths of one percent. For this we will disenfranchise thousands or more in Kansas alone?

In fact, the Brennan Center has found that the accumulated rate of voter fraud in states with documented cases of such fraud is minuscule: 3/10,000 of 1% in Missouri; 2/10,000 of 1% in New Jersey; 9/1,000,000 of 1% New York, numbers that are vanishingly small.

Then consider this: An MIT study done last year found that problems with voter registration records kept up to 3 million registered and fully-qualified voters from voting. Which means that even if the cases of electoral fraud were 10,000 times greater than the number found by the US Attorneys who were under active pressure to find it, it would still mean that close to four times as many properly-registered, qualified voters were kept from voting as there were cases of fraud.

And remember those seven convictions in Kansas? One was for electioneering (campaigning too close to a polling place) and six were for double voting. Photo ID laws would not have prevented any of those. The truth is, virtually all cases of actual, proven, voter fraud involve electioneering or similar illegalities, not the sort of misrepresentation that a photo ID would address.

The arguments for voter ID laws are myths, they are fakery, they are bullshit, they are a "solution" in search of a problem. And when you have a "solution" in search of a problem, you should always try to determine what is the real "problem" being addressed. Sometimes that's hard to see, but in this case, it's easy: The "problem" is that too many of the "wrong sorts" of people are able to vote - too many, that is, who are not reliably right wing.

There is another way you can know this is a campaign: The arguments are all the same. All across the country, from all these supposedly independent voices, you get the same two arguments, generally in essentially the same words. (Remember ALEC?)

The first argument, as noted above, is to screech unrelentingly about "voter fraud" - and do it, incidentally without ever noting or admitting that the bills you are proposing (especially true with photo ID laws) will not actually touch the kinds of fraud you are screeching about.

The second argument runs along the lines of "an ID is required to board a plane or cash a check or check into a hotel - why not to vote?"

It sounds impressive at first hearing, but give it a moment's thought (which they are counting on you not taking the time to do) and it collapses. For one this, it is a true, classic, example of apples and oranges: two things that might very superficially seem the same but are actually different, as a number of editorial writers have pointed out. (This is one example.)

Cashing a check or getting on a plane are personal economic decisions - they are not basic rights enshrined in a number of state constitutions. Checking into a hotel is completely unrelated to your role as a citizen, completely unrelated to your role in the political process, completely unrelated to your right to vote. They are not cornerstones of representative democracy. And to suggest the ones can be equated with the other is an insult to the electoral process.

And, in fact, it might well be noted that many of the people most affected by these anti-voting laws are the very people less likely to be flying on a plane on any sort of regular basis, to be traveling around checking into hotels, or even in a number of cases to have a checking account.

Even right-wingers sometimes have had to recognize that simple fact. In 2008, Indiana's new photo ID law was under what proved ultimately to be an unsuccessful court challenge. At the appellate level, at the Seventh circuit Court of Appeals, Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee, wrote majority opinion upholding the law. He said in part:

No doubt most people who don't have photo ID are low on the economic ladder and thus, if they do vote, are more likely to vote for Democratic than Republican candidates.

That is, Posner (who also wrote that the "benefits of voting to the individual voter are elusive") acknowledged the discriminatory nature of the law, acknowledged the disparate impact on certain segments of the population, acknowledged the resulting bias in favor of one major political party over the other - and, more importantly, of one political ideology the another - and then blithely ruled none of that was a problem.

(Despite that acknowledgment on the appellate record, the Supreme Court upheld the law despite admitting in its lead opinion that there was "no evidence" of the type of fraud the law was supposedly designed to counter.)

The comparisons to cashing checks and the like are bogus. The right wing knows they are bogus. The right wing knows these laws disproportionately affect the poor, people with disabilities, the elderly, students, people of color, and so on. The right wing knows these laws disproportionately affect liberal voters as compared to conservative voters - and they just don’t care.

Or, more correctly, they do care because that is the purpose. That is the intent. That is the goal: to institute a permanent, structural bias in our electoral system, a structural bias in favor of conservative, right-wing voters and conservative right-wing government, a structural bias in favor of the haves over the have-nots, in favor of the needless over the needy, a structural bias in favor of greed and selfishness and the power of the elites and against any notion of progress or reform.

Make no mistake: That is what this is about. Power. It's all about power. About the power of the few over the many.

And if you doubt that, if you think your vote is safe because if you have all the government-issued photo IDs anyone could want, what in all that’s decent makes you think they will stop at this? Power by its nature wants more power; power is never satisfied.

Still unconvinced? Then think about this: Remember that just a few years ago, and you will remember this as soon as I mention it, and you’ll probably realize you haven’t thought about it for a while, but yes you'll remember how just a few years ago the big concern about voting was how few people were voting, about low turnouts, about how the level of participation in elections in this country was embarrassing, how even in presidential elections the turnout might only be 60% - and considering that only half of eligible voters were registered, in a close election that might well mean a president was elected with the support of less than 15% of the eligible voting population.

All the talk was about how we could get more people to the polls, how we could get more people registered, more people involved, how we could remove roadblocks between potential voters and the voting booth.

Now, just a rather few years of right-wing screeching and lying and media collaboration later, all the talk is about how many roadblocks we can put on that path, how hard we can make it to register and to vote. Or again more correctly, how hard we can make if for some people to vote.

And it's come to the point where the reactionaries are barely even trying to hide what they're doing. This year, Wisconsin passed a strict voter ID law. But supporters claimed this created no problem because the state would provide "free" state IDs to those without them. Besides the fact that you still need the documents to get the document, where did you have to get to to obtain one of these "free" IDs? State DMV offices. Right after the law was passed, Governor Walkalloveryou closed a bunch of DMV offices in largely Democratic districts while expanding the hours in ones in GOPper districts.

So if you think your vote is safe - well, if you reliably vote for the oligarchs it probably is. Otherwise, otherwise.

Now those skies are threatening

2011-11-18T17:12:00.010-05:00

Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation - James Madison

Let's start with a sort of technical definition: The US is not a democracy. It's a republic.

In a democracy, the people rule directly. In a republic, the people choose some to represent a greater number and those so chosen rule. Where those representatives are chosen by popular election, those republics are sometimes called representative democracies. To be even more technical, because it also has some facets of a direct democracy (i.e., initiative, referendum, recall), the US could be properly described as a democratic republic.

All that is largely irrelevant except to say that despite the turn of the past couple of decades and the associated assault on privacy which I have decried more than once here (Here are some recent examples that touch on the topic.) , the US remains a relatively politically free society.

But we are now facing two major threats to our continued survival as such. These threats are organized, coordinated, conscious; they are purposeful and focused. These are not foreign threats, they do not involve terrorism. They are purely domestic.

The thing is, just about every society has some form, some degree, of an economic and/or social elite - some portion of its population who have more power, more influence, than others, whose power and influence are out of proportion to their actual numbers. In the case of the US, our elites are big business and the rich, particularly (and increasingly) the super-rich, those now popularly identified as the 1%, those who, according to Joseph Stieglitz, control 40% of the nation's wealth.

That of necessity means that just about every society that wants to be and remain a politically free society must have countervailing force, an institutionalized counterforce, to the natural self-aggrandizement of its elites, that is, the tendency of power to become increasingly concentrated, turning what in structure appears to be (in our case) a representative democracy into what is actually an oligarchy, a government by and for the few, an oppressive government in which those countervailing forces either no longer exist or no longer function, existing only as a sort of morality play, a pretense of representation.

The ultimate force, of course, is the people as a whole: the people’s ability to resist and where necessary revolt, a notion enshrined in the Declaration of Independence:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

It is in order to avoid getting to that point, to the necessity of outright rebellion, that societies have established those formalized structure to counter the power of the elites, to provide, if you will, power to the people. Two of those formalized structures in our own society are now under attack. are now under threat of being rendered impotent, a mere pretense of power. It is those threats that are the subjects of the following two posts. Read on.

Veterans' Day Post #3

2011-11-11T23:32:00.001-05:00

In May 2002, someone on a mailing list I was on posted a message asking people to take a moment of silence on Memorial Day, saying "Let us ensure that those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom are not forgotten."

In response, I wrote:

And in that silent moment remember, too, the many nonviolent warriors who struggled, searched, sacrificed, for justice and freedom, who remain without songs or memorials to celebrate their lives or their passing, but who at some moment stood weaponless against the machinery of oppression and showed in their simple “No more” a force that can move history.

It is indicative of how we as a culture regard things that on the whole, we celebrate our soldiers while they are alive and our nonviolent warriors only when they are safely dead. Then again, I'm not so sure we're so different from others in that way.

Veterans' Day Post #2

2011-11-11T23:29:00.002-05:00

The first paragraph below was added to this post in 2009. The rest of the post is the original text as it was first posted in June 2008.

November 11 has become so well-known as Veterans' Day that not many people remember that it was originally called Armistice Day. It was intended to commemorate those who died in World War I by an observation of the end of the war, which ended, at least on the Western front, on "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month." But after World War II, the US changed its day to Veterans' Day and over time it's become not a commemoration of those who have died in war but a celebration of anyone who's ever been in the military. It has slid from a commemoration of the dead and of peace to a promotion of militarism, to the "nobility of sacrifice" of "true" - and apparently the only true, as they are given due unavailable to the rest of us - "patriots."

I've tried various ways to start this, wanting to make sure that I say what I mean and only what I mean. But I've come to realize that there is no way that will not be misunderstood, either accidentally or deliberately, by some. So I gave up trying to do anything other than say it outright.

I am deeply disturbed by the increasing tendency among "progressives" to adulate all things military, and particularly disturbed by the practice of referring to soldiers routinely as "our heroes" or some similar formulation. Let me be clear here: Soldiers are not "heroes." A "hero" is by definition someone who is in some way extraordinary, remarkable, worthy of emulation. It is at best a risky business to define someone as "extraordinary" simply by virtue of wearing a uniform and in fact it is potentially dangerous as it makes it too easy to slip into the militaristic attitude that what soldiers do goes beyond "necessary evil" or just necessary, beyond even honorable, to admirable, to something to celebrate, an attitude that makes it all to easy to promote additional enlistments, additional weapons, and even additional wars.

The root of this, I'm convinced, is that after years of the constant drumbeat from the right that those on the left are "soft" on "national security," that we aren't "tough enough," not ready enough to "do what's necessary" to "protect our way of life," we increasingly have decided to, if you will, fight on those terms; that is, we have absorbed the idea that we have to prove ourselves on "security" issues by proving that we're "tough."

Our means of doing this, a means that first appeared during the Gulf War, was to declare loudly that "We support the troops!" That was our way into the national security debate, a way to (supposedly) oppose the war while, we declared, supporting the men and women sent to fight it. We would prove that we were as committed to the military and national security as the right, just, well, in a sorta different way.

One less important but still revealing example came on Monday during Jon Stewart's interview with Senator Jim Webb. Most of that interview was a discussion about Webb's bill to expand veteran educational benefits, under which, in return for three years in the military, soldiers would receive four years' tuition at their best state college plus the cost of books, plus a monthly stipend. At one point, when Webb said that the least we can do for our soldiers is give them the chance for "a first-class future," the audience burst into loud applause.

And I thought then, as I have before when this bill was being discussed, would there be any chance, any chance at all, of that same sort of reaction if the same proposal was made on behalf of any other group? What if someone proposed paying for four years of college for, say, firefighters? Or cops? How about volunteers in VISTA (now AmeriCorps VISTA)? Or the Peace Corps? The latter two provide some educational benefits for those who put in their time, but nothing vaguely approaching four fully-paid years of college.

What about publicly-funded continuing education for doctors and nurses? Such continuing education is not only a good idea for health care professionals, it's often a requirement for maintaining their licenses to practice. And certainly having doctors and nurses who are up to date on the best knowledge and practice is beneficial to the public. So why not have public financing of that continuing education?

When it comes down to it, why not have public education, tuition-free, taxpayer-supported public education, right up through four years of college for anyone who can show themselves capable of meeting the educational standards for a college degree? Can you seriously imagine a studio audience bursting into spontaneous, enthusiastic applause for someone seriously proposing such an idea?

Why only soldiers? What does it say about us that the idea of paying soldiers' way through college gets ovations while the idea of anyone else getting the same benefit gets at best quizzical stares if not overt sneering rejections? It says that we regard the work of soldiering as inherently more important, inherently more deserving of praise and reward, than the work of others - and the lives of soldiers as inherently more valuable than the lives of the rest of us. That is the attitude we are buying into.

But if it was only things like veterans' benefits, it might not seem particularly important. I say that despite the fact that the amount of money involved in such benefits is not trivial and Webb's argument that his bill just provides the equivalent of educational benefits given to veterans of World War II is quite misleading: For one thing, many of those soldiers had been drafted "for the duration," so it wasn't automatically a matter of three years and out. For another, the avowed purpose of those World War II benefits was to make up for what those soldiers had lost in regard to their civilian careers as compared to those who had not been in the military. That is, they were to insure that soldiers did not wind up being penalized for having been soldiers. They were not intended to give soldiers a leg up over others (or "a first class future") and they most definitely were not presented as being a reward for military service. But that's what they have become over the years and that's how Webb's bill treats them.

I also want to make abundantly clear in case it's not or is willfully ignored that the benefits being questioned here do not include such as medical care, rehabilitation, and counseling for vets wounded either physically or psychologically. But, yes, veterans benefits are too generous to the extent that they become a reward for being in the military. So I am against Webb's bill and I don't give a damn whether it will affect retention rates or not. I am opposed to it so long as soldiers get singled out for an opportunity for higher education that is becoming increasingly financially impossible for many people.

Even so, again, if that's all there was to it, it might not seem like a great big huge deal. But that's not all there is to it, not when we are trying to lay claim to national security chops by out troop-supporting the right, insisting that we're the ones who really support the troops, we're the ones who really support their brave courageous efforts and we prove it by undaunted adulation, blandly treating, with no hint of hesitation, the phrase "have a lot of courage" and the word "soldier" as synonymous.

So we were the ones who loudly decried the lack of body armor and the lack of reinforced plating on military vehicles, accusing the right of "not supporting the troops" as much as we do because of that failure. But as Mark Twain pointed out in "The War Prayer,"

[i]f you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

In war, in combat, as long as the soldiers are there, there is an unavoidable trade-off: The more you wish for them to remain safe, the more you are wishing for them to kill others. That is what safety in combat means. The more you wish for them to return safely, the more you are wishing for Iraqis not to. The more you wish life for them, the more you are wishing death for others. The more you wish that American mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, don't suffer the loss of a family member, the more you are wishing that Iraqi mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, do.

So when we express "support for the troops" by demanding we "give them the equipment to do the job" and "then come home safely" rather than simply and solely saying "get them the hell out," we are offering a tacit - and sometimes not so tacit - endorsement of the killing. For the sake of the blessing of safety and life for our soldiers, we are calling down the curse of risk and death on Iraqis. When we declare support in terms of equipment rather than withdrawal, that is what we are endorsing. In war, there is no other way.

Undoubtedly, there are those who are prepared to declare American lives are worth more than Iraqi lives. I am not among them.

The emotional embrace of "our heroes" as some sort of disembodied ideal has policy implications beyond the immediate ones. Within that embrace, and the effects can already be seen in various interviews and commentaries, it becomes easy to absorb, absorb so deeply that one is unaware of it, the idea that a veteran's take on the Iraq war - and by extension, all things military - is inherently more valuable than that of others not by virtue of knowledge or logic or informed comment but simply by virtue of being a veteran. We regarded it (correctly) as a scandal when media outlets used retired generals who were actually Pentagon-trained PR flacks as "experts" on military and foreign policy questions in the runup to the Iraq War - but an overlooked point is that the reason retired generals were so prominent in that number was that their status as military people gave them added credibility in the eyes of many viewers and listeners. In our pursuit of "support the troops," we have fallen prey to that same attitude, one that regards the statements of Iraq War veterans as more valuable, more telling, than those of non-veterans. It even has become fairly common to hear dismissive references to those who "never saw combat." At first, that was a legitimate argument, directed as it was against chickenhawks, those rightwingers who were eager for fights, ready for wars, provided they did not have to take part in them. But increasingly it has been used as an all-purpose putdown, even against those on the left who have criticized soldiers - as, I imagine, it would be directed against me (a non-veteran and a Vietnam-era draft resister) were my voice loud enough to attract the attention.

But the real danger is that as the attitude persists, it distorts our way of thinking, drops a magnet on our moral compass. In a bizarre mirror image of the fanatical right, we refuse to blame soldiers who commit atrocities, or, more exactly, we refuse to acknowledge them. We refuse to blame those who shoot civilians even when the attacks are clearly acts of vengeance; we downplay the war crimes and the routine cruelties; we make excuses for those who shoot the wounded or torture prisoners; even when official Pentagon reports casually mention how a US soldier summarily executed a wounded fighter and shot another wounded, unresisting fighter twice in the back, we pay little notice - and if we do, it's usually to brush off complaints with that all-purpose "you've never been in combat" defense. "These things happen in war," we say.

Yes, they do. And "our heroes" are doing them. Which is, even as the deniers seem incapable of recognizing it, the point. Just as the right tries to blame the individuals and exonerate the hierarchy, we want to blame the hierarchy and exonerate the individuals, to remove all their responsibility for their own actions. That is an idea we were supposed to have rejected nearly 60 years ago; apparently, we haven't.

Soldiers are not heroes. They can be heroes, they can act heroically, they can do heroic things - but the act of putting on a uniform and agreeing to put your conscience in a lockbox for the next so many years does not make your life more important than others, it does not make your opinions and insights more worthy of respect than others, it does not exempt you from moral judgment. It does not make you a hero.

And we should not fall prey to hero-worship.

Veterans' Day Post #1

2011-11-11T23:16:00.002-05:00

So Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann have gone after nutbag GOPper Jim DeMint because he was the only Senate vote against a new proposed tax credit for hiring veterans. Rachel wouldn't even have it when Chris Hayes said DeMint at least should be given credit for ideological consistency; to her, the very idea of voting against something to benefit veterans - who Maddow spent quite some time literally gushing over at the opening of the segment, going on about their "amazing" skills and "amazing" deeds - anyway, the very idea of voting against something to benefit veterans was too much for her to take.

Well, sit down for this: I'm on DeMint's side on this one - that is, on the same side of the vote and on that side to the extent that I do not believe veterans should be singled out and even more to the extent that I reject the view championed by both Maddow and Olbermann that veterans, for no other reason than that they are veterans, deserve to have jobs more than those who are not. And yes, dammit, that is exactly what they were arguing, although I doubt either would be honest enough to say it that directly.

Now, it is quite true that veterans have a higher unemployment rate than the labor force as a whole, although the figure is 9.8% rather than the 12% Maddow claimed. However, the unemployment rate among teens is 25%. In seven states and in DC it is above 30%. Should there be a special new tax credit for hiring teenagers? The unemployment rate among people with disabilities is nearly 17%. Should there be a special new tax credit for hiring folks with disabilities?

But if the unemployment rate, then, is not itself the real driving force here, what is? It must be said again: It's that they are veterans and therefore are more deserving of having a job than the rest of us.

And that simply is not true; in fact, I find it ethically offensive. Vets, like everyone else, deserve to get the help they require - but they should not be singled out for a benefit unavailable to everyone else. I will add that anyone who responds by saying if I object to "singling out" vets, I must also oppose, say, affirmative action programs or set-asides, I will answer that if you can show me how military veterans have faced a centuries-long pattern of active discrimination, you will have a point. Which you can't, so you don't.

I do want to emphasize here that the issue at hand, the one Maddow and Olbermann both addressed, was this proposed tax credit, which was just one part of the overall bill. Many, perhaps most (I haven't read the whole thing) parts of that bill are worthy proposals, including one to improve transitional assistance and training for people re-entering civilian life. They are not at issue here.

(By the way, this does go back to Maddow's effusive praise of vets' "skills." Part of the problem vets face is that many military skills have no, or very limited, civilian applications. So after, say, two years in the military, a vet comes back to civilian life in essence two years behind in education and/or experience non-vets of the same age - which would seem to explain a fair amount of the higher unemployment. In fact, Sec.222.(a)(1) of the bill calls for a study "to identify any equivalences" between skills obtained in the military and "the qualifications required for various positions of civilian employment." Apparently, at least some are aware of precisely that problem.)

One good thing about this is that it reminded me - I almost forgot - to put up the following two posts, which I now put up every Veterans' Day. The first is, I think, especially apropos since the title of the bill in question is the Pledge to Hire Heroes Act, a title which, for reasons which the following post I hope will make clear, I find at least disturbing if not offensive. It was first posted under the title "Heroics" in June 2008 and has been re-posted every Veterans' Day since. The second was originally for Memorial Day but I think it fits here as well. It, too, has been re-posted on previous Veterans' Days.

Elect this!

2011-11-09T23:49:00.002-05:00

Updated I haven't been around much lately, I know, but I had to drop by to celebrate some of the good news that came out of Tuesday's elections. I particularly wanted to do it because I'm a lot more used to being on the losing end of things so this really did cheer me up some.

First, though, a bit of good news on a different front:

You likely have heard about the Keystone XL project, the plan to build a pipeline across the plains states in order to transport tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to a refinery in Texas. You also likely know that tar sands are about the dirtiest, most environmentally-destructive ways of getting oil that there is and that the project is opposed both by environmentalists and by people living in the region to be affected.

Well, three things have happened recently on that front:

First, TransCanada, the company behind the project has been forced to admit that its projections of the number of jobs that would be created were seriously inflated and even misleading: It develops that the "jobs" were measured in "person-years" - so that if, for example, one of the construction jobs lasted two years, the company counted it as two jobs. The predicted jobs have shrunk to less than half the original number. What's more, according to an independent study, the project may destroy as many jobs as it creates.

Second, it turns out that a consulting company involved in the environmental review of the project listed TransCanada as a "major client" - and a lobbyist for TransCanada worked on Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. The questions raised are serious enough the that the State Dept to say it will have to re-examine the procedures it followed in handling consultations because of the possibility of wrongdoing.

And third, on this past Sunday some 12,000 people formed a human chain around the White House, calling on Barack Obama to refuse to approve the project, backed up by another thousand or more people at support actions around the country. The thing to remember in this regard is that this is totally an executive branch decision; Congress is not involved. So if PHC* capitulates to the oil industry, he gets the blame; if he stands up to it and blocks the pipeline, he gets the praise.

The target date for a decision is December 31 but it may not be met.

Okay, on to the elections.

The first piece of good news was, I'm tempted to say of course, the rejection of Proposition 2 in Ohio. Had it passed, it would have confirmed the notorious SB5, the bill stripping collective bargaining rights from public employees that former FauxNews host and all around right-wing flake Gov. John Kasich pushed through the conservative-dominated legislature in the spring. With the failure of Prop2, the union-busting bill goes poof.

While the result itself was not a surprise, the margin of victory - a whopping 22 percentage points - exceeded expectations and was a wonderful thing to see.

On the other hand, the second good news was a surprise. A ballot measure in Mississippi proposed to amend the state constitution to declare that "personhood" began at the moment of conception. So it's not even a fetus that's being called a "person," not even an embryo, but a zygote, a single fertilized egg cell.

This insane notion would not only ban all abortions for any reason (which was of course the point), it would also ban some methods of birth control, make in vitrio fertilizations for practical purposes impossible, halt all stem cell research in the state, and even would have made having miscarriage into manslaughter - because the woman would have, after all, caused the death of a "person," with the only question being if it was voluntary or involuntary manslaughter.

Because several other states and Congress have similar proposals percolating, the vote was watched rather attentively, especially since polls indicated it was too close to call.

But when the votes were counted, I am delighted to say, opponents of the measure won going away: Nearly 60% of the electorate said that even if they are opposed to abortion rights, this just goes way too far.

The third good news comes from Arizona. You may not remember the name Russell Pearce, but you should: As president of the state senate of Arizona, he was the author of that state's notorious anti-immigrant "papers please" law. Unexpectedly, he found himself facing a recall election. Even more unexpectedly, he lost. He has been booted from office, kicked out on his bigoted can, and kicked out by a man who compared that law to something from Alabama in the days of Jim Crow.

Finally, knowing no good news can go unsullied, there was a sort of split decision on the issue of voter suppression, the various moves by the right wing to make it harder for people, especially the poor, the elderly, and people of color, to vote.

On the down side, Mississippians approved an amendment that would require voters to display a state-issued photo ID in order to cast a ballot. Such IDs are something that many residents do not have and a good number of those would find it a financial burden to obtain the documentation needed to get the ID. Which is, you surely realize, the whole point.

On the up side, the race for secretary of state in Kentucky turned to a fair extent on the proposal by one of the two candidates to require a photo ID to vote. He lost by over 20 points. And in Maine, voters overturned a new law that had put an end to the state's decades-old practice of same-day registration, i.e., being able to register and then vote on election day - and did it by a healthy margin despite the best efforts of Maine GOPpers to employ homophobia as a campaign tactic.

So not a perfect day - what day ever is - but still, enough good news to brighten a few mornings. And notice I didn't have to bring up a single "The Democrat won! The Democrat won!" example in order to do it.

Updated with the news that the State Department has announced that it is going to be considering alternative routes for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project that avoid a very environmentally-sensitive area in Nebraska. The result of this new review - which is expected to take over a year - is that the decision has been pushed back to beyond the 2012 elections.

A representative of the State Dept. said the White House has nothing to do with the decision, which is not only quite hard to swallow, it's also hard to reconcile with the fact that Obama was quoted as saying the decision came because "a number of concerns have been raised through a public process, [so] we should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed" - which seems an odd thing for him to say if he really had no part in the decision.

Anyway, the question then becomes what happens in 2013 (assuming O. gets reelected, which considering the quality of the field the GOPpers are dealing out, seems a reasonably safe prediction). At that point, Obama could say "Hey, I can't run again - I don't need you anymore," but the question is to who would he say it: his high-roller donors in the oil business or the pro-environment part of his political base. History says it would be the latter, since he's been ignoring and even dissing his supposed base for some time now.

However, the other thing history says is that the longer a project like this is dragged out, the less likely it is to come to fruition, that opposition tends to build over time and if the plan is not pushed through quickly before that opposition can form and start to grow, the plan is in jeopardy as both the political cost to government officials and the financial cost to the developers continues to grow.

So while this is clearly short of what should have happened - an outright rejection of the pipeline - I still call it a victory. Not a final victory, but a victory nonetheless.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

Return on value

2011-10-17T12:56:00.013-05:00

Okay, here's something else that really yanks my chain. The so-called "Values Voter Summit" that took place in Washington, DC a week and a-half ago is this wacko confab sponsored by groups like the Family Research Council, the American Family Association (both ranked as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center) and the Heritage Foundation. It's a required stop on the GOPper presidential trail, one where the candidates pitch their woo, hoping to win the hearts of the fringe of the fringe.

What really angers me about this is that they are called - not only by themselves but more importantly by much of the media - "values voters." That is, they are the ones who are "voting their values."

So what the hell are the rest of us voting? Are we voting our shoes? Our yard sale? Our yesterday's lunch? What the hell can they mean?

Moreover, the "values" they proclaim are sick. The ones they are best known for are being anti-choice and anti-gay rights - that is, against freedom of choice and against human rights (except, of course, for the choices and rights they would have for themselves). But it goes well beyond that.

The conference was a days-long cavalcade of bigotry, of racism, of homophobia, of xenophobia, of Islamaphobia, of hatred for the poor and the struggling - of hatred for anything and anyone different, of anything and anyone who is "other." It was a festival of celebrations of putrid paranoia and insouciant ignorance coupled with, as they often are in such people, appalling arrogance about their own moral superiority over anyone who is not them.

Just for the heck of it, I looked up the word "value" in an online dictionary. The first definition referred to "relative worth, merit, or importance." That is, to be of value, something must have some worth - but what these people offer is worthless. What they offer, what they hold, what they promote, are not values. They are crap, indeed such vile crap that it's like pond scum that mosquitoes wouldn’t deign to lay their eggs in.

Even as a political category, even in the purely political sense, they don’t deserve the title "values voters." Because, again, if they are “values voters,” what are the rest of us? What, does this mean we don’t have values?

Actually, they would respond, yes, that's exactly what it means: They have "values" and the rest of us don't. But as columnist Joel Connelly, who called the conference "a cacaphony of discord and false witness," wrote at Seattlepi.com:

Others among us have values, too. My values leave me unsettled that wealth and power are, increasingly, concentrated in an elite. My values tell me that is wrong when there are no jobs and people are losing income, when ordinary Americans' homes are foreclosed while Vanity Fair showcases the monster houses of hedge-fund billionaires. My values recoil at the despoiling of God's earth, and changing its climate by recklessly burning fossil fuels.

Values of community, so essential to America, get trashed if we shut down homeless shelters, lay off thousands of teachers, and slash social programs for mothers and babies. The value of "life" does not begin at conception and end at birth.

And in fact those, not the bigotry and fear that fire up the fringe, are closer to the real values of the American people. Consider this: The 2004 presidential election was described in the media as the year of the "values voter," that it was "values voters" - understood then as now and even defined as the anti-choice homophobe crowd - who "put Bush over the top." But a post-election survey of actual voters undertaken by three liberal Christian groups found that moral values held by most Americans range far beyond the handful emphasized by the right wing and religious conservatives

In that survey, and remember this is a survey of people who actually voted,
- 33% said the nation's most urgent moral problem was "greed and materialism."
- 31% said it was "poverty and economic justice."
- Only 28% mentioned either abortion or same-sex marriage.

When they were asked what "moral issue" - and that was the term used in the question - most influenced their vote,
- 42% cited the war in Iraq.
- Only 22% referred to either abortion or same-sex marriage.

(And as a sidebar, I think it can safely be said that the vast majority of that 42% consisted of war opponents since it was and still is that camp, rather than war supporters, who were most likely to address the issue in moral terms.)

Getting back to the boiler room of bigotry, to give you an idea of how bad it was, one of the speakers - in fact, the one who followed Twit Romney - was one Bryan Fischer, who is the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association. That is, he is a top honcho in one of the sponsoring organizations. Among the things he has said (not that he said these at the conference, but has in the past) are these:

- Muslims have no First Amendment rights. In fact, no non-Christian has First Amendment rights: "The purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the free exercise of the Christian religion."

- The US should have "no more mosques, period," because "every single mosque is a potential terror training center." Muslims are to be barred from immigrating and ones here should be deported.

- Oh, and in case you're wondering: No, Mormons are not Christians, which means they have no First Amendment rights, either.

- The US should impose "legal sanctions for homosexual behavior" including sending gays and lesbians to prison for "therapy." "Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews." What's more, Hitler used gay soldiers because they "had no limits to the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after."

- Even Native American get the treatment: "In all the discussions about the European settlement of the New World, one feature has been conspicuously absent: the role that the superstition, savagery and sexual immorality of Native Americans played in making them morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil."

That is the heart of the American Family Association, laid bare.

Why do people swallow this sort of bilge? Why do they not only swallow it but enjoy the taste? It can't be that the whole audience was as bad as the speakers. Consider, for example, that a coalition of atheist groups set up a table outside the hall where the conference took place and reported having had "mostly respectful" discussions with attendees.

So why do they swallow it? Why do they cling to - the phrase is used deliberately - their narrow-minded views? I say it's because they’re scared. They find the world as it is confusing, overwhelming, their place in it uncertain; they see it changing in ways they can't understand and can't control. (I've addressed this in several guises before, including considering the effect of the constant economic stress of the past decades in ways I'm not including here.) They can’t deal with the world as it is and so they embrace what one psychologist called "a black-and-white certitude" and fasten on to an image of how - or, more correctly, how they imagine - it "used to be."

The truth of the matter is that on the whole, conservatives are far more nostalgic for a dimly-remembered but still shining past than the most cliched gray-haired hippie in sandals and love beads.

I've maintained for some time that the great emotional attraction of conservatism in all its forms is its certainty: You don't have to decide if something is fair or unfair, right or wrong, good or bad. You just have to know what someone else told you. It's already been decided. The doubt, the fear, the questions, the responsibility are all gone.

On the other hand, those on the left, particularly the more radical parts of the left, have most often at some point in their lives experienced what for lack of a better term I'm going to call a crisis of confidence. A moment when what you had believed no longer seemed sure and (and this is the important point here) you had to make your own way through to a set of values - ethical, moral values - that made sense, that worked for you.

Bluntly, this is why being on the left is a more emotionally mature position than being on the right and why the left is more moral than the right: Because we have had to think it through for ourselves and so deal with changes in the world rather than simply absorbing ancient prejudices. As a direct result, it's the left, not the right, that declares the existence, the importance, of community, of people having a mutual responsibility each to the other for their welfare.

The fact is, it's the right that says "I," the left that says "we." It's the right that says "gimme," the left that says "we'll give." It's the right that says "compete," the left that says "cooperate."

Where the left says "us together," the right says "me first." Where the left says "hope," the right says "fear." Where the left says "you can come for help," the right says "you can go to hell."

Barring violent insurrection, minority political movements gain political power in one of two ways: either by speaking the truth (as least as best as they understand it) over and over again, trying/hoping to convince enough people with facts, logic, evidence, and moral persuasion of the correctness of their position - or by playing to people's prejudices, telling them what they want to hear, and giving the truth a twist (and sometimes a wrench) that works to their immediate advantage. When political issues arise, which side is it, the left or the right, that will challenge the prejudices and widely-shared assumptions of the audience and which side is it that plays to them? (Speaking of the "Values Voters" Summit....)

The simple truth is, the advances we've seen over the last century that have benefitted the poor, the elderly, women, blacks, working men and women, and on and on have come at instigation of the left over resistance of the right. Even now-familiar things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child labor laws, anti-monopoly legislation, civil rights laws, and more were all originally regarded as the wild-eyed ravings of a lunatic left out to destroy the "American Way of Life." Just a few decades ago, even something as obviously and universally-beneficial as environmental regulation was being denounced by corporations as a communist plot intended to destroy our economy. It has been the left, not the right, that has been on the side of morality in all these cases.

Another way of judging this same same question is to ask: Who benefits?

When the left argues for national health care and the right proclaims the glories of "free choice," who benefits from having their side of the argument prevail? Whose motives appear the more selfish? When the left argues for housing for the homeless and the right spins tales about "voluntarily" living on the streets, who benefits from having their side of the argument prevail? When the left pushes for more social spending and the right pushes for cuts in welfare and taxes, who benefits? When the left demands action on global warming and the rights screeches "hoax" and wails about "unwarranted government intrusions into the economy," who benefits?

Time after time after time, the left argues for choices that primarily benefit the needy. Time after time after time, the right argues for choices that primarily benefit the needless.

Time after time after time, when folks on the left benefit from their proposals it's because they're part of a broader community. Time after time after time, when folks on the right benefit from their proposals it's because they're part of a narrow clique.

So yes and yes again, the left is more moral and more emotionally mature than the right. Because it is the left, not the right, that knows that the real answer to Cain's question is "Yes."

Mailing it in

2011-10-16T21:17:00.004-05:00

I was going to write this post about the troubles facing the US Postal Service before I became computerless, but it didn't get done in time. Happily for me, the National Association of Letter Carriers just announced it is hiring its own financial consultants to consider the longer-term finances of the agency, giving me a hook to post this now.

You may well have heard about the problems of the mail service and if you have, you know that, as per usual for media accounts of such things, it has been described in apocalyptic terms.

The Postal Service is going broke! is the cry. It can’t make a required payment coming due! By the end of winter, it won’t be able to put gas in its trucks, much less pay its employees! In the words of our supposed “paper of record,” the New York Times,

[t]he United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today.

Edge? Precipice? Omigosh, this is serious! We have to do something! We have to save the postal service!

And what is the first option that springs to mind, the first option that always seems to spring to mind in cases like this?

Cut services and fire workers.

That’s it: The proposals advanced by Postmaster Patrick Donahoe involve ending Saturday mail deliveries, closing hundreds of mail-processing facilities, and laying off, that is, firing (Remember when “layoffs” were called that because they were supposed to be temporary? I do.) some 120,000 people, a full fifth of the entire work force.

This is a “solution” that even its advocates admit will result in less service, fewer deliveries, and slower deliveries (because the loss of those processing facilities will cause it to take longer for mail to get from A to B).

The “logic” of this escapes me. Suppose you had a mechanic you went to when you needed work on your car. The place was open on Saturdays so you could bring the car in on your day off. One day, the owner says to you that what with the economy and all, the shop will no longer be open on Saturday - so you’ll have to bring you car in on a work day - and there will be fewer mechanics, so it will take longer to get the work done. Fewer options, slower service. This, you’re told, is how they intend to keep your business.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, then neither should the proposed “solutions” to the problems of the USPS.

So why is the postal service in trouble? Two reasons are usually given: One is email. “No one writes letters any more! It’s all email! Who still uses [sneer] snail mail?”

The other claimed reason, it should be no surprise, is labor unions. “Yeah, those greedy, lazy, good-for-nothings! Selfish layabouts! Overpaid feather-bedders! It’s all their fault!”

Well, the claims are bogus. The economic crisis faced by the system is quite real, but its causes, as is often true in these matters, are far removed from the claims.

Email first. The Postal Service has been around 236 years now. In all that time, the busiest year, the year with biggest volume of mail, the greatest number of pieces of mail handled, was in 2006. The second busiest year was 2005; the third busiest year was 2007. The popularity of email clearly predates that, one indication being that while the term "snail mail" has been around in various guises for some time, its use to denigrate regular mail as opposed to email dates as far back as 1981.

The naysayers respond by pointing to the drop-off in mail traffic since the peak five years ago. And it’s true, there has been a rather significant decline. But what they don’t mention is that the real decline began in 2008 - that is, when the economy tanked. When that happened, there was a large scale drop in business mail, which makes up a considerable part of the total volume of mail. So of course the total dropped. Blaming that drop on email is crap.

That’s especially true because, as others have pointed out, if you buy something online - from Amazon.com, from eBay, from a catalog, whatever, and you choose to have it shipped to you by the cheapest means (which almost invariably will be regular mail) your use of on-line commerce will actually have served to increase the volume of mail the USPS handles. As union official Chuck Zlatkin noted, “I’ve yet to see anyone figure out how to email a shirt.”

Email has had an impact, yes, but it’s biggest impact has been in personal letters, the kinds of things one individual would send to another. The point is that the impact is not nearly as severe as is claimed and does not account for the problems the USPS faces.

So what does have an impact?

The impacts start with the observation that the USPS is a quasi-governmental agency, run independently but still subject to certain legal restrictions set down by Congress.

(At this point it’s important to point out that those ads you may have seen claiming that the USPS gets no taxpayer money are true. The Postal Service is entirely self-funded through the sale of postage and gets not a penny in public funds.)

One restriction the agency faces under the law is that it cannot raise postage fees faster than inflation. This creates a problem in raising additional revenue. In basic capitalist economics, a business has two ways to increase revenue: Increase the amount of business you do or raise the price of each unit of that total business. The idea is that a business will keep tweaking those two - price per unit vs. number of units - to find the combination that maximizes income.

But the Postal Service, by law, cannot use one of those options. Which means the only way it can increase its real revenue (and actually improve and expand service) is to increase its volume of business - even do it even as a variety of voices now are talking about changes that would very likely decrease that volume.

Face it: Mail is a bargain. You can mail a letter anywhere is the US, you could send one from Key West to Point Barrow, for 44¢ - an amount that otherwise might get you half a candy bar.

And when I say anywhere, I do mean anywhere. The USPS is legally required to provide universal service and it makes deliveries to 150 million individual addresses nationwide every week. It has to make mail service available to everywhere - you may have to travel a bit to get to a post box or to where a whole group of mailboxes stand at the end of some rural byway, but mail must be available to everyone. Even if you are way out in the country, even if you are in some neighborhood deemed "too dangerous" for services like taxis, the mail still must be available. That is a requirement which does not exist for the Postal Service's private competitors like UPS and FedEx. They don’t have to do that: They think your address is too inconvenient or otherwise not profitable, they just don't do it.

Which means, in turn, that there are millions and millions of people who need, who rely on, the USPS's services, including poorer people, folks in rural areas outside the usual delivery areas, people who use post offices boxes, and many more, including some small-scale entrepreneurs who often find - as I noted above - that the USPS is the cheapest way to ship goods. Which means in its own turn that the people who do not depend on the USPS tend to be the rich, the powerful, the connected: people who for their own selfish reasons often are more concerned - despite their smiling assurances to the contrary - with bringing the system down than with preserving it.

One solid basis for that assertion is the federal Postal Accountability Enhancement Act, passed in 2006. That bill, among other things, mandated that the Postal Service fully fund retiree health benefits for future retirees out to 75 years in the future. That is, Congress was requiring universal health care coverage - and yes, I do note the let's be polite and call it irony here - for all Postal Service retirees for the next 75 years. And what's more, the agency had to establish the fund to do that within 10 years. Put another way, Congress was requiring of the USPS that within 10 years it be able to fully fund health care benefits for future retirees who hadn't even been born yet. That is a requirement of, a task taken on by, no other agency, corporation, or organization in or out of government in the US.

The cost of that requirement is running to $5.5 billion a year, a major part of the $8 billion projected shortfall.

So is the talk now about relieving the USPS of that idiotic requirement? Nope. It's about cutting services and firing workers.

That’s one solid basis; here’s another: It was recently realized that by some serious accounting screw-up, the USPS has been overpaying into worker pension funds. The Postal Service's Office of Inspector General estimated that the overpayments now total about $75 billion; the independent Postal Regulatory Commission came up with a figure of $50 billion in overpayments. Even accepting the lower figure makes the projected shortfall in the agency's budget look like chump change.

So is the talk now of letting the USPS recover those overpayments or at least move them from one account to another to cover the health care pre-funding requirements? Of course not - it's about cutting services and firing workers.

And the talk of firing workers persists despite the fact that there is a no-firing clause in the union contract. But the determination to go that route is so strong that Donahoe even asked Congress to write a new law voiding the contract to empower him to dispose of people at his own whim.

And it is here where we come to the crux of it all: the workers. The USPS has a strong union which is also one of the largest unions in the US, with something approaching 600,000 members. So let's be clear here: That's what the attacks on the Postal Service are about. They are about destroying the union.

All the usual claims about the supposedly evil union are being thrown about, with the usual idea that if enough tar gets slung, some will stick. Oh, they have such high pay! Oh, they have such high benefits! Oh, they get so much more than others! Oh, they are so demanding, so selfish!

Well, bluntly, postal workers do have good pay, they do get good benefits, and they do have good job protection.

Good! That’s what unions are for, dammit!

I am just flaming sick to death of hearing people gripe about how union workers, especially public employee union workers, "have so much." I am flaming sick to death of people who have swallowed the corporate line. Get a clue, people! The issue here is not why they - union members - have "so much," it’s why you have so little. This threatens to become a leitmotif here, but I will say it again: Make sure you are angry at the right target! And unions are not your enemy.

But that, ultimately, remains what all the attacks on the USPS are about: breaking the union and undermining idea of government services whose primary beneficiaries are not, again, the rich, the powerful, the connected.

How bad is it? Rep. Stephen Lynch has sponsored a bill to allow the USPS to shift the overpayments in the pension fund into the fund for future retiree health benefits, relieving the agency of the yearly burden of filling the latter and thus eliminating the need to terminate Saturday mail delivery or to close down mail processing centers while saving the jobs of 120,000 workers. In response, Darrell Issa, the GOPper who, unhappily, chairs the House Oversight Committee, called the proposal "a bailout" - a bizarre claim even for him, considering that it would not involve the expenditure of a single public penny - and has used the current (and quite possibly temporary) financial crunch as an excuse to introduce a bill to create an "emergency oversight board" which would have to authority to slash services and tear up any union contracts.

Now, even if it passed the House, Issa’s plan would face opposition in the Senate, including from some GOPpers who understand how popular the mail service is among their rural constituents. But still, the bottom line here is that while the problems of the Postal Service are real, the focus of the right wing and its corporate cronies (with the expected cooperation of a compliant media) is not on solving the problems (even when easy solutions are staring them in the face) but on destroying the service.

Then again, that should be no surprise: As Allison Kilkenny wrote at Truthout:

So, here we have a service that caters primarily to the economically disadvantaged and employs over 574,000 union members.

And, I would add, a successful government service and a popular government service. No wonder the reactionaries want to destroy it.

Touching base

2011-10-03T00:59:00.004-05:00

This is just to let folks know that I have been away for a bit and will be away for a bit longer still.

I was actually working on three posts, hoping to get at least one of them finished before I am computerless again, but no such luck.

But just to give the flavor and to indicate I have not completely abandoned things here:

- One was on the financial problems facing the USPS and how they are not, contrary to claims, caused by a mass switch to email and are decidedly not caused by "selfish unions." Rather, they are rooted in unrealistic fiscal demands placed on the agency, demands that seemed more aimed at undermining it than securing it.

- A second was on the latest attempts by the wingnuts in Congress to attack the science of global warming, this by accusations of a "shadow organization" within NOAA.

- The third was on the Wall Street protests and their expansion to other places in the US and the crappy media coverage they've gotten - along with some thoughts on a philosophical common ground shared among recent protests faced by at least nominally democratic governments around the world: Despite the surface differences in the issues addressed, the protesters here, just as those protesting in Spain, in Greece, in Israel, in India, express a loss of faith in government. Not in the ability of government to deal with problems, but in the desire of government to do so. Not in the ability of government to respond to the needs of the mass of the populace, but in the desire of government to do so. And what are the implications of that (and noting that the natural response among a lot of us of "Well, duh" is wholly inadequate to the task at hand).

To those of you who still check this thing out from time to time: Bear with me, please. I will be back, I promise.

Time of death: 11:08

2011-09-22T02:43:00.004-05:00

Troy Anthony Davis has been legally murdered by the state of Georgia.

I was going to write something about the death penalty, this badge of brutality, this symbol of savagery, which has stayed with us even as most of the world has long since left it behind - but I find I'm too depressed.

Depressed not only by the whole enterprise of officially-sanctioned murder, not only by the particulars of this case, where there is at least a fair chance that the man who was killed tonight was innocent, but right now perhaps most of all by the sheer banality of how it was done, the emotionless announcements that "the execution is in progress" and later of "time of death," that being followed - literally immediately - by an explanation of where media interviews would be conducted. All of it presented as equally routine, equally everyday, equally unremarkable.

It was all so neat, so tidy, so clean, so antiseptic, so proper, all according to procedure as we satisfy our blood lust vengeance while doing our best to eliminate any actual blood so we can pat ourselves on the back about how "civilized" and "humane" we are.

That is where the Fellowship of Reconciliation's old line of "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong," as pointed and poignant as it is, fails: The death penalty is not about showing that killing people is wrong. It's about "getting back at them," about violent revenge, about the emotional satisfaction of causing pain to those you think did you wrong.

"Justice was served," some said tonight. No, it wasn't. Certainly not in Georgia and not even in Texas, where convicted murderer and white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer was killed by the state. There is never justice where the death penalty is concerned.

It seems I have written something; more than I thought I would at the top, less that I would have under different conditions. Whatever; it will have to do for now.

Getting jobbed

2011-09-18T22:20:00.011-05:00

So Barack Obama has announced his jobs program. There are, let it be said right at the top, some good things about it. Unfortunately, there are also some really sucky things about it.

The good parts involved extension of unemployment insurance ($49 billion) and federal investments in school modernization ($30 billion) and infrastructure ($50 billion), the latter of which would involve at least some direct hiring of workers to do the jobs. Another good feature is extending $35 billion in aid to states, which, while it will not create any new jobs, is intended to prevent the loss of some which would otherwise vanish in the midst of state attempts to balance budgets.

The sucky part is most everything else: The bulk of the proposal, some $240 billion, more than half, is made up of tax cuts - or, as they are nowadays rebranded by PR outfits and focus groups, tax "relief." And I expect they will work the same as they have in the past - which is, generally, "not."

Economists estimate the plan, which would cost about $447 billion if fully adopted, could create anywhere from 500,000 to nearly 2 million jobs next year. At least one progressive economist said the plan was bolder than he expected.

Maybe so, maybe it is "bolder" than we've come to expect from President Back-Down-Before-the-Battle-Even-Begins, but how good is it really? How much will it do for average schmucks like us?

Before the speech, lots of folks were wondering what direction PHC* would take: Would he get tough on the GOPpers, slam them for their obstructionism, demand that they shut up and get in line? Or would he, as his political advisors were reportedly pressing him to, go "pragmatic" by proposing stuff that was more likely to pass even if it didn't do much because getting something, anything, passed would look better for him in 2012?

Well, it appears he managed to do both. He talked tough, said some version of "pass this bill right now" more than a dozen times, setting the hearts of his adoring fans all a-flutter - but the things he proposed are small and will do little, even if they all get passed, which they won't.

In fact, related it this, the plan contains one really odd thing: He proposed to pay for it by some tax increases on the rich. Now, that is a definitely good thing and good for him for proposing it, but he knows, just like everyone else knows, such a plan has no chance in the House and maybe not in the Senate. Since I for one do not think this represents a brand new and genuine populism on O.'s part and really doubt he plans to fight for this (I notice he didn't say "Tax the rich!" a dozen times in his speech, or even once for that matter), why did he propose it? Was it for the PR effect? Just red meat to his base? Or so he can later use it to run against GOPpers on it? (Maybe - the GOPpers are certainly concerned about that prospect.)

Leaving that aside to get to the program proposals themselves, I seems to me that they are diddly-squat. Remember, for example, that the claim is that their effect could be to create nearly two million jobs next year. But it will take 2.7 million new jobs just to drop the unemployment rate by a single percentage point. By a very crude calculation, that means that the most optimistic forecast is that next year will see an unemployment rate of about 8.4%.

What's more, I don't have a lot of faith is those optimistic predictions. One reason is that the biggest part of the plan is, again, tax cuts - which always seem to be the first resort in such plans. The problem is, they don't work as serious stimulus except under special circumstances, ones which do not exist now. Tax cuts can provide a big stimulus if you have an economy that is ready to go, operating a new full capacity, ready to take off with just a nudge. What we have now is not like a horse straining at the bit, where you can let up on the reins a bit and let it run; we have an economy more like a horse that is sound asleep and we're trying to wake up. Easing up on the reins is not going to get that horse moving.

In fact, over the past couple of years, there have been several hiring tax credits as well as some 16 small business tax cuts measures, all aimed at getting businesses to hire. And they have failed.

You want a longer-term example? Here's one: The Bush tax cuts, the ones that were supposed to be temporary but were extended last December, went into effect on June 7, 2001. At that time, the national unemployment rate was 4.5%. (The good old days.) Since then, through August 2011, we have had 122 months of unemployment data. In all that time, unemployment never went below 4.4%. In fact, it was at 4.4% or 4.5% in a total of eight of those months, all of those is one nine-month stretch from September 2006 to May 2007. That is, for 114 of those 122 months, over 93% of time, unemployment was above where it was when these "job-producing" tax cuts went into effect.

Just recently, the New York Times had a big article on the possible real-world effect of the Obama plan, and in it, stated the obvious:

The dismal state of the economy is the main reason many companies are reluctant to hire workers, and few executives are saying that President Obama’s jobs plan — while welcome — will change their minds any time soon. ...

[M]any employers dismissed the notion that any particular tax break or incentive would be persuasive. Instead, they said they tended to hire more workers or expand when the economy improved.

All the blather about "job creators" and "improving the business climate" is utter crap. These people, these corporations, have as their prime concern maximizing their profit. They are not going to take the lead. They are going to follow.

As that same article points out, there is in the White House plan a $4,000 tax credit for employers that hire people who have been out of work for six months or longer.

To the extent these measures could be used, many employers said they would most likely support people whom companies were planning to hire anyway.

That is, all the proposal does is increase profits of companies by handing them $4000 for what they would have done anyway without creating one extra job or doing one thing to reduce unemployment.

But why in all that's rational would anyone think it would be otherwise? Corporations - I've said this before - are already sitting on over $2 trillion in ready cash reserves thanks to record profits. They already have more than enough money to invest, to expand, to hire if they were going to do that. But they're not and they won't and putting more money into the hands of people who already have more than enough is not going to change things.

That because of something else I've said before and will say it as many times as necessary: Corporations do not create jobs. The rich do not create jobs. There is only one thing that creates jobs, and that is demand. Demand, demand for goods and services to be supplied in the economy is only thing that creates jobs. Corporations are all about profit. Rich investors are all about return on investment. Businesses are not going to hire people they don’t need to make more profits.

In an economy like this one, there is only one agency that can effectively spur creation of demand, and that is government. It can do it by, essentially, taking money from people who have it, don't need it, and aren't spending it and giving it to people who don't have it, do need it, and will spend it - spend it on goods and services the private economy can supply, creating greater demand for those goods and services, sparking the hiring of people to meet that demand, people who will then have money to spend, creating more demand.

But still, still, what we keep hearing about is how we should - must - cut costs for corporations even though we have already done that repeatedly to no avail, even though it will accomplish nothing except make the filthy rich filthier and richer, and even though cutting corporate taxes is one of the worst ways to stimulate demand. And the latter is not just a philosophical statement, it's a mathematical one.

For example, just last month, Mark Zandi, who is the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, released an analysis of how well various government measures work as economic stimulus. Zandi, it should be noted, is by no means some sort of lefty; in fact, he advised John McCain's campaign in 2008. Even so, his study showed that government spending is a much better economic stimulus than tax cuts.

Indeed, the single most effective form of stimulus, he found, is increased outlays for Food Stamps: Those expenditures produce $1.71 in economic activity for each dollar in federal spending. It provides that greatest bang for the buck. Rounding out the top three measures were spending on unemployment benefits and on infrastructure. And this is no outlier; earlier studies, including on by the CBO, have found much the same thing. As economic stimulus, spending beats tax cuts hands down.

But the fact remains that the biggest part of O.'s program is, again, tax cuts. According to the Moody’s study, each dollar lost by the Treasury due to the kinds of tax cuts for workers the White House proposes will create just $1.27 in new economic activity. The cuts for employers fare even worse, creating just $1.05 in economic activity for each dollar lost - essentially a wash.

Another important point here is the kinds of tax cuts envisioned: They are cuts in payroll taxes, the taxes that go to support Social Security and Medicare. The proposal is to cut payroll taxes for employees in half next year and trimming employer payroll taxes as well. That is, Barack Obama is looking to stimulate the economy by draining away money that should have gone to the trust funds backing those programs. In the midst of increasingly-shrill claims that the programs are going bust, Obama is proposing to make their long-term financing worse by over $200 billion.

That actually answers a question some people were asking in the wake of his speech: Why did he bring Medicare into it?

The thing is, why wonder? Barack Obama wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. He's made it clear, he's even said it out loud: At a town hall meeting in Illinois on August 11, Obama said he would personally push for such cuts as part of any deal for deficit reduction or job creation.

He wants to cut them. So he's only doing what he said. So why the surprise? (Unless it's surprise that in this case he actually is doing what he said he would.)

Another part of all this is calls to lower the corporate income tax, which, again, seems always to be part of the first resort. But, getting back to the Moody’s study for one more mathematical moment, it found that such a tax cut would create a mere 32 cents of economic activity for each dollar spent. It's a net loser economically. Which only goes to show one more time that cutting taxes to corporations is one of worst ways to stimulate demand, one of the worst ways to stimulate the economy. Federal spending is, simply, factually, mathematically, a much better option.

And what's even better than federal spending on the top two stimulative programs (Food Stamps and unemployment)? Why, direct public jobs programs: the government directly hiring people and paying them to do needed work.

In a recent study, economist Philip Harvey modeled the effects of spending $100 billion on direct job creation versus the same investment in Food Stamps and unemployment. He found that that amount of federal spending on those two programs would create nearly 570,000 jobs. (Note that is within the range of predictions for the White House's program at less than a quarter the cost.) On the other hand, spending that amount on direct hiring would produce over a million jobs plus another more than 440,000 private sector jobs due to the in-direct stimulus effect: over 1.5 million overall.

This would not even be the first time we've done something like this. As just one example, my father was in the Civilian Conservation Corps - the CCC - during the Depression. Part of the WPA, this was a direct federal hiring program for unemployed, single young men who were set to work on a large variety of conservation projects. During its lifetime, it provided 2.5 million men with work for anywhere from six month to two years. So a direct public jobs program is not even a new thing.

But all the exact numbers of employment totals and relative stimulative effects and all the rest are not important. What’s important is the relations among them. And what they come down to is that the single most effective thing the federal government can do to get people back to work, the single most effective thing it can do to get unemployment down, to spur economic activity, is to hire people and pay them to do needed productive work. Period. And if getting the economy moving is what you are actually concerned about rather than ideological rigidity or election-year posturing, that is what you will advocate.

The second best way is to support Food Stamps and insure getting them to everyone legally entitled to them. However, that's going to be a minority of people, sort of a limited universe, so you can go on to include the next best ways: extending unemployment assistance and supporting infrastructure programs.

What you will not do, because it is one of worst, if not the worst, way to advantage the economy, is to push for tax cuts to the rich and the corporations.

So why are those sorts of tax cuts always high on the agenda? How can it be that they don’t understand, that they don't understand the plain, repeatedly found, facts, facts based on both studies and actual experience, facts staring them right in the face?

Don't let your head explode, rather realize that the question has already been answered: They do understand. They do know. It's just that when the choice comes down to the vast majority of us or the handful of the powerful who pay the campaign bills and hire the armies of lobbyists to make sure it's known among those writing and signing the laws what side that handful is on, it's no contest. So instead of thinking about how can they do this, think instead about what this reveals about who is in charge, who makes decisions, who is really in control, who is really responsible for the mess we are in.

Yet something else I've said before: Make sure that you are angry at the right targets.

But there is a lot of anger around, a great deal of angry frustration, and, as is usual, it reveals itself in amoral callousness. I know you've heard about the moments at the GOPper presidential debate when Ron Paul was asked a hypothetical question about a healthy 30-year-old man without health insurance who goes into a coma and requires intensive care for six months. Paul was cheered for his answer that it's not the government's responsibility - and when he was then asked if "society should just let him die," there were shouts of "Yeah!" followed by laughter from the audience.

I expect you also heard about the crowd that cheered Rick Perry’s record of having executed more people than any other governor, any time, anywhere.

It's easy to condemn people like that, and such moral condemnation would certainly not be undeserved. But as I said something over a year ago, I have a certain sympathy for these people, many of who are - like too many Americans - not very well informed and thus easily manipulated into blaming the wrong people - into being angry at the wrong targets.

What's more, they are under stress, constant stress, and it shows, as stress usually does, in anger and coldness and indifference to others.

What stress? To begin with, I know you heard about the poverty numbers: According to the Census Bureau's annual report, a record 46 million Americans suffered in poverty in 2010, more than in any other year since the Bureau started making the estimate. The poverty rate rose to 15.1%, the third consecutive increase; it is now as high as it was in 1993 - and you would have to go back another 10 years, to 1983, to find one higher.

The poverty rate for children under 18 was 22% in 2010, making them more likely than any other age group to be poor. For children under the age of six, the poverty rate is a shocking 25.3%.

(The fact is, the US has long had one of highest poverty rates in developed world. Among 34 industrialized nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only Chile, Israel, and Mexico have higher rates of poverty. But that this is not a new problem only adds to the economic stresses involved.)

Now go beyond that to remember that the broader economy sucks: For one thing, there was a net gain of zero jobs in August and the official unemployment rate persisted at 9.1%.

Signs of sluggish (at best) growth abound. In August, the average workweek for all employees edged down, as did the average hourly earnings for private employees. At the same time, the number of involuntary part-time workers, those who are working part-time only because they can't find full-time work, swelled by 400,000 to 8.8 million - meaning the total un- and under-employment rate went up.

More than six million of the officially unemployed have been out of work for at least six months - some 42.9% of the total number, tied for the record high. And an additional roughly 30,000 people reached 99 weeks without work, up to 2.04 million.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans with no health insurance is at 49.9 million, up nearly 2% from the year before.

And the real point here, the important point, is that this is not just now, this is not just the economic crunch of the past couple of years. This has been going on for decades. Lost decades - literally - of no gains, only the struggle to keep up.

In 2010, working Americans saw the annual median income decline 2.3% percent to $49,445. That was the third year in a row that the median income dropped. Adjusted for inflation, it is now roughly where it was in 1996: Fifteen years of getting nowhere.

Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted household income is now down 7.1% from its peak in 1999. Twelve years down the road and if you're an average family you are worse off than when you started.

Here's a stunner: Adjusted for inflation, the average male worker, that is, one at the median level, now makes less than he did - is worse off than he was - in 1968! Back then, the median income of male workers was $32,844. In 2010, it was $32,137, or $607 less. That's 43 years of work to wind up with no gain.

For all too many among us, our hopes are shriveling; worse, our hopes for the future of our children are seeming to evaporate. Under that kind of stress, it is natural to look for someone to blame, to look for someone who "did this to you." And the unfortunate, the sad, but the true fact is that it is easier, it is always easier, to blame those weaker than yourself. Prejudices and fears emerge easily.

So a lot of these folks are angry, frightened, frustrated, economically stressed people who have been manipulated by powerful voices around them into being angry at the wrong targets. At the poor, at the unemployed, at undocumented immigrants, at unions, at public employees, even at teachers.

So who should they be angry at? Here are a few ideas:

How about the 25 of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs who earned more last year than their companies paid in fed. income tax?

How about the companies that spent more on lobbying than on taxes?

How about the companies that have decided that “labor is just too expensive," and want to move to “a labor-less society," because as their profits increasingly come from overseas they have decided they damn well can do without you altogether?

How about the politicians in DC who, analysts say, just don’t care about poverty-related issues?

How about the business leaders and former government officials who wrote to that super committee, that select committee to find ways to slash budget - aptly dubbed the Joint Select Committee on Human Sacrifice by Lambert Strether - calling on it to "go big" and cut far more than the $1.5 trillion in cuts it’s tasked with finding?

How about Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, a member of that committee, who threatened to in effect blow up the whole process if the committee considered a single dime in additional cuts in military spending?

How about those - mostly but not exclusively GOPpers - who are willing to let the economy go to hell and your life into the trash in order to protect their fat head, fat ass, fat cat cronies from having to pay a single extra penny in taxes?

Or how about the economic system itself, one that celebrates selfishness and applauds amorality? Now, there is a target worthy of our concentrated anger - and while it surely is for the vast majority of our fellow citizens not a visible target, it just as surely is the right one.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

9/11 - 3

2011-09-11T11:17:00.005-05:00

This third panel of the triptych is based on what I said about 9/11 on my weekly cable TV show.

It starts by saying I grew up in New Jersey and worked in New York City for several years. I remember when the World Trade Center went up. And, as I remarked to a couple of people in the wake of the attacks, now I can remember when and how it came down.

When the towers were being built, they were actually somewhat controversial. Most of the space to be available was not pre-rented so the buildings, when completed, would be pretty much empty shells. Because of that there was a fair amount of feeling that the height of the buildings was pure ego - that it was being done not because of demand for that much office space but just to to be taller than the Empire State Building. A bitterly ironic note, considering how events turned out, is that there was concern about the possibility of a misguided plane crashing into one of the towers: The site was, after all, pretty close to the flight paths of three major airports - Newark, Kennedy, and LaGuardia.

I was driving down to New Jersey a few weeks after the attack and going down the Turnpike, there is an area where you can seen the skyline of southern Manhattan. I have to confess I felt a real wrench when I looked in that direction and saw sky where the towers should have been.

But I said then and I say now that as deeply as I mourned the victims of the attacks, as much as I admired and still admire the dedication and courage of the first responders, of the police and firefighters, the rescue workers, the EMTs and RNs, who rushed to get to the place everyone else was rushing to get away from, I still have to insist that the question for us as Americans is not, cannot be, what Osama bin Laden could have previously thought or should have then thought or done differently, but what we could have previously or should have then thought or done (or should now think or do) differently.

As hard as our misleaders try to tell us otherwise, the fact is that the clock of history did not start on September 11, 2001, and refusing to face our own complicity in creating and maintaining the conditions of desperation-driven fanaticism (because that, again, is what terrorism is), refusing to face our own criminal complicity in creating and maintaining the conditions in which such as al-Qaeda can take root and grow and recruit, refusing to face our own share of responsibility, is the surest way we as a nation can guarantee a continuation of a legitimate threat of terrorism directed against us.

“Nine-eleven changed everything,” we were told (over and over, particularly by those who wanted to exploit if for their own political ends). We still hear that cry sometimes.

No, it didn’t.

The world did not change. Maybe our awareness of it did - or more exactly our conscious awareness of parts of it did - but the world didn’t. Although there doubtless are those to who it would come as a surprise, the fact is that there are nations, peoples, cultures, all over the world who can deal with their lives, their highs and lows, their hopes and fears, their pains and joys, who can deal with the problems involving their neighbors down the block or their neighbors across the border without always thinking "How will this affect the US?"

On the other hand, there was one change: In the wake of the attacks, I remarked to more than one person that Osama bin Laden had done something that would have seemed impossible just days earlier: He had turned the US into the victim in the eyes of the world. In that moment, we had become the wronged innocents in the eyes of the world, including much of the Muslim world. Did we take advantage of that opening? Did we take advantage of the opportunity that the outburst of sympathy provided to chart new courses, set new patterns, mend our ways, whatever cliché you might prefer to describe repairing our relations with much of the world by saying "We're grateful for your sympathy and we pledge to do more to deserve it?" Of course not. Instead, we doubled down on the same damn fool and damned immoral courses we had already pursued.

Albert Einstein once said of atomic bomb that it had changed everything except our way of thinking. It might be said that 9/11 changed nothing except our way of thinking. That's because 9/11 affected how we thought about the world and our place in it as a country and as a people and in so doing revealed something about us as a people, something about our nature as a society. And what it revealed was, to put it mildly, not very complimentary.

I mentioned two posts down a couple of emails I sent two days after the attacks. In them I made a prediction about questions about the motivations behind the attack that went beyond notions of unreasoning (and of course entirely unjustified) hatred: I said that raising them would get you branded a terrorist-lover - a prediction that proved prophetic in short order, as just a week later, on September 20, 2001, George Bush told a joint session of Congress that you “are either with us or you’re with the terrorists.”

As I expect you remember, there were massive arrests of Muslims in the US in the wake of the bombings, arrests of people charged with no crime, questioned, arrested, detained, often held incommunicado, solely on the grounds of being Muslim.

And less than a month after the attack, the so-called "Patriot Act," which I dubbed the "Traitor Act" for its effects on civil liberties, was passed, passed with a complete lack of any Congressional debate worthy of the word. It expanded government power to invade our privacy, to restrict our freedoms, to track our movements; expanded the ability to substitute suspicion for proof - and did it while reducing any form of judicial oversight.

Well, if you raised questions about the civil liberties impacts of any of that, you were, in the words of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2002, “aiding terrorists,” "eroding our national unity," and “giving ammunition to America’s enemies.”

We were cowed into silence, cowed into carefully measuring every word, every expression, for fear of what it would suggest about us.

And the sad part, the revealing part, is how easily we were cowed. How little opposition, how little resistance, was raised to the stripping away of freedoms and rights -even as it became obvious in the months after the attack that the failure to stop 9/11 was not because of lack of police powers but due to a lack of using those that were already there.

You want a recent example of that last point? I'll give you one. A few weeks ago, it was revealed that in 2009 former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who worked in that capacity in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, said in a radio interview to be aired as part of a 10th anniversary documentary on 9/11 that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were in the US, two men who went on to be among the hijackers. The CIA knew the two were here, knew they had attended a so-called "terrorist summit meeting" in Malaysia (a meeting the CIA monitored) just days before coming to the US.

Clarke speculates that CIA withheld the information because the agency had been trying to recruit the terrorists, who were living in San Diego, California under their own names, to work as CIA agents inside Al Qaeda. Clarke admits he can’t prove this, but says a cover-up is “the only conceivable reason that I’ve been able to come up with” as to “why, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism,” he was never told about the two. He said it is fair to conclude “there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information.”

The former FBI director of the San Diego field office doubts the "trying to recruit them" idea but confirms that he was never informed of the presence of the two. Even so, no matter the cause, the fact remains that the CIA knew these guys were in the US and never told anyone, which if they had, might - we can't of course be certain, but might - have prevented 9/11.

But it didn't happen that way, so instead we were told that police and government had to have more power and we had to surrender civil liberties and we had to accept all of it unquestioningly or risk being thought "objectively pro-terrorist." We fell silent.

The left, to its shame, was not immune.

Within weeks of 9/11, leading voices on the left were on the offensive (in both senses), talking about how an ill-defined (actually, undefined) “Hate America left,” composed of those who dared to speak out with any energy, should be “rejected.” How questioners were "reflexive anti-Americans" who were to be dismissed as "a vocal minority." How, when the attack on Afghanistan began, those who opposed it had “lost their moral compass” and constituted a “blame America first” crowd.

While certainly not true of all the left, it is still a fact that a significant part of it went running around, waving its arms about, and shouting of war opponents and civil liberties advocates “Oh no no no, they're not with us!” They were, that is, cowed.

Over the last 10 years, even as some of the passion has died down and even as some of those supposed lefties who condemned opponents of our wars now sort of mumble and shuffle and try to change the subject, what has been revealed about us as a people remains, a revelation made plain by the overt changes:

We have seen the Traitor Act repeatedly renewed, we have seen the “temporary” parts of it, the parts to be sunsetted, made permanent. We have seen increased police powers to poke, prod, and pry into our privacy, we have seen increased powers to suppress and limit dissent such as the notorious "free speech zones," better called "silenced speech zones" - and no, that is not an "old" issue. We have seen warrantless wiretapping made legal, no longer even requiring the rubber stamp of the FISA court.

This has become accepted, routine, a "new normal." We have gone from a nation of people who pat themselves on the back for their traditional independence and individuality to one where it is not just accepted, it is advised to submit to authority no matter how arbitrary it may be and if you don’t passively submit and something happens to you - like the 72-year old woman who got tasered because she mouthed off to a cop - you can be damn sure that there will be a chorus saying it’s your own damn fault. Submission to arbitrary, even illegal, authority becomes not even advisable, it becomes laudable.

We have gone from a nation that at least respected its whistleblowers to one that sets new records for prosecuting them.

We have gone from a nation that rejected entrapment - that is, of officials encouraging someone to commit a crime in order to arrest them - as illegal and immoral to one where it is just another tool in the law enforcement kit, a tool where government informants actively encourage acts of terrorism and then report back when they convince someone to go along so that person can be busted.

From a nation that put "trial by a jury of one's peers" in a well-deserved place of honor, a nation that declared "justice delayed is justice denied," to a nation that tolerates, even urges, detention, imprisonment, without time limit, without trial, without even charge, sometimes even in the admitted absence of any evidence, as soon as some official invokes the magic phrase "suspected terrorist."

From a nation that prided itself on its morality, a nation that condemned torture and prosecuted war criminals to a nation that embraces torture to the point where Dick Cheney’s open admission that he personally approved of waterboarding - that is, torturing - prisoners gets a collective yawn. A nation where a clear majority of teenagers say that torture can be okay. And prosecute war criminals? Hell, we re-elect them.

From a nation that proudly proclaimed "the rule of law" and "no one is above the law" to a nation that added the phrase "except the president."

We tell ourselves tales of our daring, our resourcefulness, our courage, on how we braved oceans in search of freedom and a “new world” - tales of how we crossed mountains and plains and stared down deserts as we expanded westward, a people too vibrant to be contained.

(Yes, I know, I'm omitting native culture - I'm talking about the dominant US culture.)

But now we will stand in line, shuffling along like sheep into the fold, stripping off our shoes and our belts, dumping our gels in small plastic bags, powering up our laptops to prove they aren't bombs, and surrendering our privacy and our dignity as we get scanned and groped in ways once reserved for suspected criminals, all just to get on a damn airplane.

That is who we have become - or, perhaps more accurately, who we were beneath the surface until directed, unreasoning fear brought it out.

And the fear merchants, those who profit by power by keeping us in fear, continue their work, continue broadcasting their message of “be afraid, be very afraid,” a message designed to keep us in a state of sufficient fear that we will continue to be cowed into silence as our rights are gradually eroded away.

On September 3, the FBI and Homeland Security issued a nationwide warning about a supposed al-Qaeda threat to undertake attacks using small airplanes loaded with explosives. They admit there is no specific or credible threat and later called the warning just a normal bureaucratic bulletin - but you should just go ahead and be scared anyway, scared now of any small plane you might see flying over any populated area.

Then, the middle of this past week - Omigosh omigosh omigosh! - there was a "specific and credible" threat of a terrorist attack to coincide with 9/11, a threat involving "a vehicle" and aimed at New York. Or maybe Washington, DC. Maybe involving a bridge. Or a tunnel. Or something.

And just like before, the threat, having done its work, seemed to dissipate like a mist on a sunny morning.

A possible Al Qaeda plot to launch an attack during the 10th anniversary weekend of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is "looking more and more like a goose chase," a senior U.S. official told Fox News on Saturday.

Federal authorities have been questioning all day the credibility of a tip from a previously reliable source that Al Qaeda had planned to attack Washington or New York, putting though both cities on high alert. ...

"The threat is looking less and less credible," the official said, adding that the entire plot as outlined by the source "doesn't seem feasible."

None of this, of course, should be taken to say that there is no such thing as terrorism or that the threat of an attack somewhere, sometime, in the US is nonexistent. It is, however, to say that the fear of terrorism has been actively manipulated in the service of expanded government power over our private lives and that our shameful, cowering submission to that fear has done more damage to our political and personal freedoms than actual attacks ever could - and that the revelation of how easily and how far we could be manipulated and cowed by that fear is the real, lasting, legacy of 9/11.

One last thing: It wouldn't surprise me if you didn't know - I didn't until just recently - that the Traitor Act created a new government body as a means to ensure that the government didn't go overboard with its new terrorism-fighting powers and stomp too hard on civil liberties. It's called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. It has no members, no staff, and no office.

Footnote, Unintentional Humor Div.: Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland, said that by publicizing the "credible" threat,

DHS has added millions of potential tipsters who can help confirm the information....

"There is a sense of empowerment that the public is being used," said Kayyem....

Yup, I feel so empowered!

On the other hand, she is right: We are being used.

9/11 - 2

2011-09-10T22:45:00.004-05:00

The second part of my own observance of the anniversary of 9/11 is quoting an unpublished op-ed I wrote, dated October 2, 2001.

In the wake of September 11, a blunt truth: Barring divine intervention, and I for one do not count on that, we will never “rid the world of terrorism.” As long as there are people there will be those, both individuals and governments, prepared to commit the most venal cruelties against innocents to gain political ends. What we can hope to do is control terrorism, limit it, minimize it.

But if the history of the Middle East over the last 30 years proves nothing else, it proves beyond question that neither terrorism nor “counter”-terrorism, neither retaliation nor counter-retaliation nor counter-counter-retaliation will stop the circle of death - particularly not so long as those on each side insist on seeing themselves at the wronged innocents only defending themselves against unreasoning violence or oppression or exploitation (or all three) while viewing their adversaries as evil brutes fully aware of their own brutality. Another cycle of mayhem is simply not an answer.

If we want to limit, to minimize, terrorism, we have to understand the roots of it, understand what produces it, understand what moves people to embrace such desperation-driven fanaticism, because that it was terrorism is.

And that in turn requires seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, which is where most of the commentaries attempting to answer the now-popular question “Why do they hate us?” have failed. The authors have projected themselves into the Muslim world and tried to think of what they might resent about the West in general or the US in particular. That is, they have changed their imagined location but not their eyes, still seeing the world through the filter of their own perceptions and desires. So they wind up producing answers like “They hate us because we’re rich” or “They hate us because we’re modern” or “They hate us because we support Israel.” Such answers are so removed from context that even to the extent they’re right, they’re useless, the more so because they add up to the unintentionally-revealing “They’re backward, jealous, anti-Semites who hate us because we’re better than they are.”

So for a moment, just for a moment, try to see the world through the eyes of an average person on the ground in the Middle East. This is how the world might look to you:

For centuries the West has looked down on you, regarding you, your culture, and, if non-Christian, your religion as inferior. (There is a reason bin Laden keeps referring to American “crusaders.”) They think of you as “ragheads” or “towelheads."

Every time a strong Arab leader rises and tries to become independent of the West, they get slapped down. The only regimes that survive are those too weak or too corrupt to threaten Western interests. (One such “threatening” government was that of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, who was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 after he attempted to nationalize oil reserves. The result was the 26-year reign of the Shah, whose army was practically stamped “Made in the USA.”) Yes, you resent the West’s wealth but it’s not so much that they’re rich and you’re poor, it’s that they’re rich because you’re poor, that their wealth is built on exploitation and economic domination.

In just the past 20-plus years, you’ve seen the US pick a fight with Libya in the Gulf of Sidra, bomb Tripoli, openly try to kill Moammar Qadaffi, bomb a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan on the spurious claim it was a chemical weapons factory (leading to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of deaths due to inadequate supplies of medicines), stand by along with the rest of the West while Muslims were slaughtered in Bosnia (stepping in only when European interests were threatened), shell Beirut, shoot down a civilian Iranian airliner, and fire cruise missiles into Afghanistan.

Then there’s Iraq, it’s infrastructure systematically destroyed in a war which it seems to you had nothing to do with the West except to humiliate another strong Arab leader. In the run-up to that war you saw foreign troops stationed near the holy sites of Islam at the insistence of the US despite Saudi Arabia’s reluctance and warnings that doing so would be deeply offensive to conservative Muslims - which it was. (One thus offended being Osama bin Laden.)

For 10 years you have seen the bombing of Iraq continue, so much so that a few months ago a Pentagon press representative referred to one such raid as “routine.” Sanctions imposed by the West have cost the lives (by UN estimate) of 500,000 Iraqi children over the last 10 years, a death toll which then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright described in 1996 as “worth it.” Worth it, yes, you say - as long as it’s Arab children who are doing the dying.

And you see the US justify both the bombing and the sanctions on the grounds that Iraq “defies UN resolutions” while at the same time it pours billions of dollars in economic and military aid into Israel despite the fact that for 30 years Israel has openly defied UN resolutions about Palestinians and the occupied territories. It’s not even so much that the US supports Israel, it’s that the US does it to the detriment, the denigration, the denial, of the Palestinians.

If that was your world, what would the West, what would the US, look like to you? Like a noble friend? Or like a selfish, conceited, arrogant bully which figures it can do as it damn well pleases without cost to itself? And amid all this, what is the only force that has offered you hope, offered you help, offered you a model that has defied the West, offered you self-respect? Islamic fundamentalism. Seen through such eyes, the question “Why do they hate us?” answers itself.

This doesn’t mean excusing the terrorists who brought such ruin and pain to the streets of New York on September 11. We are all responsible for what we do and their acts deserve nothing but condemnation: Understanding does not mean approving.

What it does mean is that our best targets for “attack” in this “extended campaign” are not the actual terrorists (who likely number no more than a few thousand) but the tens of thousands, the millions, among who they recruit and from who they draw their strength. Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism. The best way to minimize terrorism is to ensure that the dispossessed have a genuine stake in the world and don’t see us as grasping bullies - and the best way not to be seen as a grasping bully is not to be one.

I freely admit that one reason for posting this piece and the previous one is ego: I think the analysis I made at the time has stood up pretty well from the vantage point of 10 years down the road.

9/11 -1

2011-09-10T22:13:00.006-05:00

So the 10th anniversary of 9/11 is upon us. And we will be awash in touching stories of loss and daring and a plethora of reminders from officialdom that "we live in a dangerous world" and how "we all must remain vigilant" and how civil liberties and privacy rights must be "balanced" against "security" but not to worry because, they'll say although not in so many words, "we're protecting you - but be afraid - but we're protecting you - but...." and so on.

So herewith my own observance of the date. This first is actually a mashup of two emails dated September 13, 2001 sent in response to two friends, one in the UK and one in Australia, who had asked if anyone I knew had been hurt. The answer to that was no, no one I knew personally. They also asked how I was doing.

I’m hanging in there. Stressed and sad like most, I expect - and fearful of what happens next, afraid of what this could mean to the future, wondering what’s going to be the next loop in the cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, a cycle in which everyone (including us) views themselves as the wronged innocents. And, as the reports of attacks on, harassment of, and threats against Arabs and Muslims in the US begin to come in, as people equate Arab with Muslim and Muslim with fanatic (much as if they equated American with Christian and Christian with the KKK) and as cries of, in one form or another, “kill them all” start to rise, reminded of the dictum that those who deal in vengeance tend to become that which they say they oppose.

“We will never be the same” is an instant cliche. And like all clichés, there is some degree of truth to it - but the question for us as a people now is what the change will be. I’ve been thinking of the last verse of “There But For Fortune” by Phil Ochs:

Show me the country
Where the bombs had to fall.
Show me the ruins
Of the buildings once so tall,
And I’ll show you a young land
With so many reasons why
There but for fortune may go you or I.

We have indeed been fortunate, as a people and as a nation, and still are. A good question now is when faced with misfortune (not in the sense of bad luck but of bad events) will we as a people act as mature adults who will think about what we do and what it will accomplish or will we act as spoiled brats flailing wildly at any convenient target within reach?

I am not confident that it will be the former. The White House is promising an “extended military campaign” without being clear against just who or where. We may be in for hard times, times which will not include asking any questions about why 9/11 happened that don’t involve “security lapses.” Even wondering about motivations of the attackers beyond “unreasoning hatred” and being “uncivilized” simply won’t be allowed and risking such a thought is liable to get you branded an apologist for terrorists.

We’re headed, I fear, for more of those cycles of retaliation and counter-retaliation, everyone insisting their enemies are subhuman devils and they themselves are the offended innocents. It could get worse.

Which, if course, it did.

Still here

2011-09-05T21:32:00.002-05:00

I mentioned a while back that I was starting to do a show for the local cable TV outlet. It's a weekly show consisting of a half-hour of commentary from yours truly. To give a sense of it, each week I introduce myself as "your host, ranter, and raconteur" and I have - rather flippantly - described the show as "a lefty Glenn Beck minus the chalkboard and the paranoia." (Which, Daisy reminds me here, may guarantee a small audience because the chalkboard and paranoia may be "the whole reason those looney tunes watched him in the first place.")

Anyway, I have two reasons for bringing this up again.

One is that I'm finding doing the show (I've done 20 now) is interfering with blogging because now I read the news with an eye to what would be good for the show rather than what would be interesting for the blog - the difference lying to a fair degree in the fact that I fully expect the cable TV audience to be less politically sophisticated than those who would seek out an overtly lefty blog like this one and so I feel a need to keep hammering on a few basic themes.

If anyone out there has experience with this sort of thing and has some good advice on how to not have one screw up the other, please give it!

The other is that I wanted to put up a video of one of the shows to give a sense of what it's like and how it goes - but I can't figure out how to take what's on the DVDs the station gives me (which will play in Windows Media Player) and turn it into a form I can upload.

If anyone knows how to do this or can point me to a source that can help, please tell me!

I guess there's a third thing: I haven't abandoned this thing here, although it may look like I've got one foot out the door. I just gotta make the necessary mental adjustments.

Oh, and Happy Labor Day! Even though a lot of us still have to work. And even though a lot of us who don't have to work, don't because we don't have work to do. And even thought it ain't gonna get better any time soon. Try to enjoy it anyway.

Libya here

2011-08-27T17:40:00.006-05:00

In the wake of the Gulf War, that is, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, there was a lot of right-wing triumphalism, going after war opponents who had predicted the conflict would be longer and bloodier than it was. (Full disclosure: I was among those opponents.) "Whaddaya think now, huh? Still think it was a bad idea now? Huh, huh?" The underlying claim, of course, was that the war's success (which was never in any real doubt) and relative ease (for a war) provided a retroactive justification for it to which, they were insisting, opponents were now obliged to admit.

Ignore for the moment who was proved right about both the logic and justice of the war by later events and consider just the mockery. It was simply an example of the age-old practice of mocking a (supposedly) defeated enemy, expressed in ways as major as desecrating the bodies of enemy dead, as brutal as seizing women as "prizes" for victory, and as childish as an ass-wiggling touchdown dance. In all instances, they represent the emotional maturity of a six- year-old sticking out their tongue and going "nyah-nyah."

Despite that long and very human, um, "tradition," it still was disturbing to see liberal (or, to put a finer and more accurate point on it, Obamabot) triumphalism in the wake of the fall of Muammar Qaddafi's regime.

A few days ago, ThinkProgress, one of that whole range of "the answer to every question is 'more better Democrats'" outfits, tweeted this:

Does John Boehner still believe US military operations in Libya are illegal?

The chuckling sneer being audible right through the screen.

Well, I can't speak for Sir John of Orange, but I do!

A quick re-hash of the arguments I laid out over the course of this war in posts in February, April, May, and June:

Initially, PHC* offered no real legal justification either for a US-imposed "no fly zone" over eastern Libya nor for the bombing of Libyan forces on the ground. He talked about a "humanitarian response" to prevent a "slaughter" in Benghazi - a response whose necessity was proved more by assertion than by evidence - but not about his own legal power to take military action. He sought no authorization from Congress even though everyone agrees he had it for the asking, preferring to assert he didn't need one. Hillary Clinton went so far as to tell a group of House members that Obama would simply ignore any attempts by Congress to assert its Constitutional authority.

Then he cited the War Powers Act, which allows a president to use US military forces for 60 days without Congressional authority. Unfortunately for Mr. O's claims to rationality, that is only allowed in the case of, quoting the Act,

a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

No one but no one claimed any such attack had occurred or would occur; Obama did not even claim a threat to a single American citizen. What's more, it almost immediately became clear that he had lied about the extent and purpose of the bombing as it quickly moved from "defending unarmed civilians" to open support of the rebel drive, with Obama openly saying that the mission could not stop so long as Qaddafi remained in power.

At the 60-day limit set by the War Powers Act, the White House was unable even to offer a legal theory as how continued involvement was within the power of the President - even as the Pentagon announced that US participation in the Libyan mission was going forward unchanged, a "participation" that at the time included the use of armed Predator drones targeting Tripoli. This despite the fact that at that limit, again quoting the act, "the President shall" - notice the word is "shall," not should or can or might or anything else, but "shall" - "terminate any use of United States Armed Forces" involved unless Congressional authorization has been obtained. The only exception in the Act is an additional 30-day window specifically to allow for the safe withdrawal of forces, which obviously was not a factor in Libya.

At the 90-day limit, things passed from bizarre to surreal. At that point, the White House PR flaks asserted that the War Powers Act - the very same act Obama had asserted as providing his authority - does not apply to Libya because the US was not involved in “hostilities.” The situation, they said, does not involve

sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.

In other words, the Barack Obama team (I used to say that Bill O'Reilly had the world's most perfect initials; I'm no longer so sure he can hold the title) rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon, the DOJ, and the Office of Legal Counsel and instead asserted that he was free to use whatever military force he wanted, however he wanted, for as long as he wanted, because the Libyans were unable to shoot back. And therefore this president and all future presidents have unrestrained authority to launch US military attacks on any people, any movement, any nation, anywhere, any time, provided only that those people or movements or nations are incapable of defending themselves.

In April, I wrote this:

Barack Obama, the supposed Constitutional scholar, has shit on the Constitution and disgraced himself, the office of the presidency, and the best principles of the nation. And instead of the condemnation such arrogance, such centralization of power, deserves, it has in too many cases been ignored, downplayed, or worst cheered by people who damn well should know better but are just so happy to have a "liberal" war president ("We're not weak! We're not weak!") that they lose - or rather willingly abandon - the capacity for rational thought.

When George Bush raised the notion of "preemptive war," a policy of, as it was described, attacking real or imagined enemies before they became serious threats and so supposedly preventing such threats from arising, it was quite properly met with a chorus of condemnation from the left. But not this time. Not when PHC - excuse me, GHC - is in charge. Rather, a distressingly, depressingly, large number of ostensibly liberal or left voices have instead been a hallelujah chorus: "He's gone to the UN! He's working with NATO! That is just so totally different from Bush that it's just, just awesome! Thank you, sir, may I have another?"

And the fall of Muammar Qaddafi, as welcome as it is to anyone who retains hopes for justice, does not change a single word of that.

Self-Congratulatory Footnote: Noted for no particular reason beyond the fact that it's one of those round numbers we love so much is the fact that this is the 4000^th Lotus post.

Libya there

2011-08-27T00:49:00.003-05:00

So at this point, as of this writing, Muammar Qaddafi is nowhere to be found - he may be in hiding, in flight, he may have already left the country, or he may be surrounded and trapped. Whichever, in a very real sense it doesn't matter: The regime of dictator Muammar Qaddafi is over. And none too soon.

Now comes the real battle.

Before getting to that, however, I want to point out that this is not the first time Qaddafi has been in our (that is, US) gunsights. We have bombed Tripoli (killing Qaddafi's daughter in the process) and twice have shot down Libyan fighter jets in the Gulf of Sidra.

On the other hand, as I wrote in February,

Qaddafi ingratiated himself with a West addicted to oil when he withdrew his support for various revolutionary (or "terrorist") groups around the world and shut down his nascent nuclear weapons program. But those same Western nations turned a blind eye to his continued violent repression of any opposition. And here, once again, our preference for stability over justice, for convenience over conscience, may well come around to bite us on the ass.

As in so many other cases, our view was based far more on our interests than those of the people of Libya, whose subjection did not end at those times. Even as Qaddafi was described, just as Saddam Hussein often enough was, as "taking steps in the right direction" and maybe he really wasn't such a bad guy after all, the fact remained that his doing what we liked did not change the character of the regime, a regime now happily ended.

The question now is what happens next and are Libyans going to, as a good many Iraqis did, wind up looking back with nostalgia on "the old days" of dictatorship that at least offered some stability. A senior American military officer was quoted as saying "There [is] no clear plan for a political succession or for maintaining security in the country. The [African and Arab] leaders I have talked to do not have a clear understanding how this will play out."

The immediate and perhaps biggest problem is that in the course of the months-long stalemate that preceded the collapse of the regime

three distinct rebel factions developed – all with disparate identities and different tribal roots.

There were the originals in the east, drawn largely from a rebellious middle class; a second group in the centre, who fought the war's most intense battles; and the mountain men from the west who saw getting to the capital first as their higher calling.

The government established by the rebels centered in Benghazi in the east calls itself the National Transitional Council. It's authority has been recognized by 32 countries, but it has yet to gain the full support of other factions. The members of the NTC apparently realize that time is critical: They have announced intentions to move to Tripoli as soon as possible and have already drafted a constitution.

The question is if such moves will be enough: Libya is a fiercely tribal nation, one where ties to family and clan can easily outweigh ties to the nation as a whole. And with some 140 tribes and clans, each of which wants to lay some claim to a role in the new Libya, producing a unified government will take more than good intentions or even good ideas.

As just one example of the conflicts,

[r]ebel forces in the western city of Misrata, Libya's third-biggest, have gone out of their way to register their contempt for the transitional council with foreign reporters, insisting that they refuse to take instructions from Benghazi.

A potentially even more serious one relates to the suspicious death of rebel military commander Abdel Fattah Younis. In late July, he was taken for questioning by his own side - and was killed. The NTC investigated and now says it knows who is guilty but won't immediately name them for fear of hurting the revolution; the fear probably is of sparking tribal divisions.

That doesn't sit well with leaders of the Obeidi tribe, of which Younis was a member. They are demanding that the killers be brought to justice by the NTC and say their patience is limited.

“If we [need] to take our justice by ourselves, we will do it,” [Obeidi leader Ali Senussi] says in a tent surrounded by fellow tribesmen in Benghazi, after breaking the Ramadan fast. A nearby tribal leader adds: “Tribal law is stronger than government law.”

But just raising Younis's name raises another question: The nature of the NTC itself. Back in April I noted how the emerging leaders of the NTC were not the students, professors, and so on who sparked revolution, but often were former supporters and even members of the Qaddafi regime from business and the military who saw which way the wind was blowing and switched sides with the intention of trying to preserve whatever part of their influence they could. I wondered just what they understood the word "freedom" to mean.

I still do - especially in light of the fact that the rebel cabinet was dissolved earlier this month and there has been no move to appoint a new one.

Well, Abdul Fatah Younis is a good illustration of those doubts: Before defecting to the rebels, Younis had been in charge of Libya's special forces for the past 41 years. He had served Qaddafi ever since the 1969 coup that brought the dictator to power. Despite the claims he made to the contrary, he seemed poor material for a devotee of democracy and political freedoms.

The truth is, whether we are actually seeing the emergence of a "new" Libya or just the layout of a new playing field on which competing tribal blocks are eager to test their relative strengths remains to be seen. We (and to be clear, I mean us as individuals, not as the US) have to keep watching, hoping to be of good aid where and how we can while knowing there may be nothing we can do.

But pay attention we must because it is too easy to lose the thread of a matter. Consider Egypt.

After the victory of what was not entirely but still essentially a nonviolent revolution, the media was drowning in stories about the "new, free" Egypt. Then, they essentially stopped paying attention except for the coverage focused on the trial of Hosni Mubarak. That he is getting a public trial - as opposed to just being put up against a wall and shot - is being trumpeted as a great proof of the success of the revolution.

But at the same time that media ignored - or mentioned only in passing - a more important, much more ominous, development: On August 1, police and the military forcibly removed democracy activists from Tahrir Square, the square famous as the focus, the epicenter, of the protests that lead to Mubarak's downfall. The square is now occupied by military and police and

[a]rmed forces now surround the central square area, literally taking up the space occupied by the democracy movement only a few days ago.

Even more ominously, a few days later, on August 5, the military made an unprovoked attack on a group of a few hundred unarmed, peaceful protesters. They were on a traffic island off the square, where they broke their Ramadan fast and held a brief rally. They had made it clear they inteded to demonstrate and then leave and had no intention of trying to re-occupy the square itself. No matter: They were attacked by the soldiers carrying clubs. In the words of an eyewitness:

The soliders beat dozens of protesters indiscriminately, most of whom were simply trying to escape. I repeatedly saw groups of five to ten soldiers chase down boys who couldn’t be any older than ten years old and beat them with yard-long sticks. The soldiers chased protesters many blocks from Tahrir Square, all the way to the Kasr-al-Nile Bridge half a mile away, for the purpose of beating them.

Many dozens of bullets were fired as the soldiers chased the protesters through the streets, presumably into the air. Though there haven’t been reports of anyone being shot, though many protesters were hospitalized from their beating injuries.

Clearly, the purpose of the attack was not just to clear that little island of the square. The level of brutality suggests that its true purpose was to strike fear in the hearts of anyone who wants to make public political expression in the main town square of Egypt.

That eyewitness said these events meant that the members of the ruling Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Hey, have we forgotten that the military is now in charge in Egypt?) "don’t understand the importance of that place for the democratic development of Egypt." On the contrary, I'd suggest that it means that they do understand its importance and intend to redefine that meaning - as well as the meaning of "freedom" - on their own terms.

It is always vital, absolutely vital, to remember, in Libya just like in Tunisia and in Egypt: The battle doesn’t end with the end of the battle.

Winning and losing and winning

2011-08-14T20:43:00.031-05:00

An observation sparked by the Wisconsin recalls: Not everything comes down to being either total victory or abject defeat. There are, as it were, way stations en route from the latter to the former.

That would seem to be so obvious as to be utterly banal, and yet based on a number of the reactions I've seen over the past few days, it's still something that has to be pointed out, because at some point we have to recognize and embrace that "utterly banal" observation in a way all too many of us have not. The alternative, ultimately, is cynicism and despair.

To put this in the immediate context, the first thing to say is that Wisconsin was, quite obviously, not an outright victory for the more liberal wing of Wisconsin politics: The hope had been for a net gain of three seats, thereby giving control of the state Senate to the Democrats as a means to create a bulwark against the further ambitions of Governor Walkalloveryou and his reactionary allies. They got two. However, even as they came up short, the practical, political, fact remains that the Wisconsin Senate had been split 19-14 in favor of the right wing and now it's 17-16 - which means it now takes only one GOPper to be sufficiently spooked by what they have seen and are seeing to throw a roadblock in front of Gov. Walkalloveryou's plans.

In fact, there is a further, potentially important, point to be made: One of those 17 GOPpers voted against the bill to strip away collective bargaining rights and has been, according to John Nichols at The Nation, a moderate on education and labor issues - so there could be an effective, a working, 17-16 pro-labor, pro-education majority in the Senate. (This, obviously, assumes that the Dems being recalled will both win their elections, which I do predict.)

That won't undo what's been done (that would require passing new legislation and overcoming the inevitable veto) but it can, again, block any further advances by the right wing.

Partly because of that, it's been easy for some to overplay the significance of the result, as Nichols clearly does. He not only makes the valid point about the possibility of a working "anti-the-worst-excesses-of-the-reactionaries" majority in the state Senate, he goes on about how all these recalls were in staunchly GOPper districts, some of which had been Republican-held for over a century, and all but says it was a remarkable achievement and proof of The Solidarity Of The People that the recalls occurred at all.

Which would be a little more convincing as an argument if he hadn't been on MSNBC the day before the balloting, openly raising the possibility of a net gain of four seats.

Greg Sargent also goes with the too-amazing-for-words view:

Wisconsin Dems and labor ... reminded us that it’s possible to build a grass roots movement by effectively utilizing the sort of unabashed and bare-knuckled class-based populism that makes many of today’s national Dems queasy.

Which, again, would be more persuasive if it weren't for published reports - which I can't find now to provide links, dammit - that the Dems in those races were "downplaying" and "de-emphasizing" their pro-labor stances for fear of, you got it, "alienating moderates."

The problem with trying to label failing to achieve your goal as actually a smashing victory is that a lot of people simply won't buy it and there are only so many times that high hopes can be dashed, only so many times that you can fall short, particularly if that is combined with after-the-fact insistence that the goals were unrealistic in the first place, before people get discouraged and cynical about campaigns and come to think there is no point in hoping (and therefore working at change) at all. (To cite an immediate example: Just how deflated will a lot of folks feel if one of the two Dems being recalled on Tuesday loses?)

Even so, overplaying the results still may well be preferable to the alternative, which was to turn the result into a crushing loss that only proves the hopelessness of our situation. That attitude was generally summed up in the assertion that the results were a mere and pointless "moral victory."

Truth be told, only in the world of the already psychologically defeated would picking up two seats in a 33-member legislative body be regarded as only a "moral" victory. (Just consider: If the same result had been achieved in a regular legislative election, would it then be regarded as pointless?) Rather, the outcome was, in fact, a good example of what I have called a "successful loss," one in which you do not actually win but you do make progress. Because, no, this was not, by its own terms, an outright victory - but it did represent a gain, a measurable gain, against the forces of reaction. Even if that gain is only to slow the advance of the enemy, it is still a gain. Even if that gain is only to make the enemy more vulnerable while it remains in at least nominal control, it is still a gain.

I suppose I have to make it clear here that I am addressing this in the context of the situation at hand. I do not think that "more and better Democrats" is or can be the goal on anything other than a short-term, reality-of-the-moment tactical basis, that it can be anything more than one of those way stations on the path from defeat to actual victory, an actual victory meaning - and I have said this before in different ways - a society of justice, a full justice: economic, social, and political. A justice that rejects the ascendency of bombs over bread, of private greed over public good, of profits over people. If you want that in a condensed form, try victory being democratic socialism attained through nonviolent revolution.

Which, in a way, brings me to the final thing I wanted to address here, which is that the moaning about mere "moral victories" was often enough tied to some form of the dismissive claim that "moral victories don't build movements," that they are mere feelgood events that accomplish nothing except to ease the agony of defeat even as they, in the words of one, "strengthen the enemy's ability to consolidate its power."

"Moral victories don't build movements?" Bullshit! Moral victories are the only thing that ever has. No movement starts out winning - it takes years, even decades, of "moral victories" (that is, again, "successful losses") to build winning movements.

Let's not forget that the recent advances of the right wing do not start from some hypothetical pure zero baseline; rather it is a drive to undo what it took those on the left several decades to build, build over active and often enough violent opposition. The New Deal legacy that so many of us are focused on defending did not appear with FDR, it was the outgrowth of agitation and organization extending back well before 1900 (efforts often lead by socialists). And even after that, civil rights laws, anti-poverty programs, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental programs, all of that and much more took another 30 to 40 years of work just to get as far as we have, and we are still short of our goals another couple of decades beyond that.

On the other side, the current power of the right did not appear out of nothing and nowhere but rather out of decades of effort, effort which at times seemed to many to be utterly pointless, even ridiculous, because it was so extreme, so "out of the mainstream." At times it looked so bad - such as after the 1964 Goldwater debacle (which supposedly put a permanent end to the political power of the right wing of the right wing; we can see how well that worked out) and again after the disaster of the 1974 post-Watergate Congressional elections - there was serious talk about if the Republican Party itself could survive.

Of course movements are built on moral victories, on successful losses, on incremental gains that sometimes appear as small as "a shift in the wind." As Margaret Mead is supposed to have said, "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."*

What's more - and this is a good reason why the Democratic Party, devoted to short-term election victories rather than advancing principles, cannot be the vehicle for actual progressive change on anything more than an ad hoc basis - movements are not built by, as far too many would have it, "appealing to as wide a populace as possible." Instead, they are built by aggressive advocacy for what you believe in, by arguing for your convictions, and doing it without backing down or up. You don't build movements by joining the mainstream, you build them by moving the mainstream closer to where you are. The essence of political change lies in shifting the consensus, that is, not by appealing to as many as possible but by convincing as many as possible.

I won't take the time or space here to go into my own approach to activism in general and to electoral politics in particular, but if you're curious you might try this on the power of the individual in protest or this on constructing a "counter-narrative" on the theme of "Justice, Compassion, Community" or this on "Why should I ever vote for someone?" or this on the role of independent and third parties or the link at "successful losses" above.

And as for the general issue of "moral victories," even though I now wish I had been more explicit in saying what I was writing about was the whole scope of activism, not limited to electoral politics and especially not to DemParty politics, I think you might want to read my post "On the duty of defiance."

*While commonly attributed to Mead, the statement appears nowhere in any of her published works. However, her family has said they believe the quote to be authentic because it accurately reflected her views and they figure it was probably said during a Q&A after a speech or in some unrecorded interview.

The Geekian Chronicles

2011-08-06T03:17:00.004-05:00

Hey! Wow! We've found water on Mars!

Um, wait, haven't we known that for some time?

Well, yes - for one thing, it's been known for some time that the Martian polar ice caps are water ice (a lot of it) and there's ample evidence that at some point in the past Mars was much warmer and wetter than it is now (the Mars rovers showed that) and there very likely were large seas. More recently, upon examination some features of the planet's landscape can best be explained by flows of water in the "recent" past - "recent" in quotes because what was meant was geologically recent, which could be 100,000 years ago or more. (Hey, when you're used to talking in terms of tens of millions or even billions of years, 100,000 years just ain't that long.)

So what's so cool about this latest news? Because a)we're not talking about ice, we're talking about liquid water and b)we're not talking about 100,000 years ago, we're talking about now. We're talking about seasonal flows of liquid water on Mars, now.

To be more precise, not exactly water but salty mud. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is so low that any water that actually was free on the surface would boil away to vapor vary quickly, so this is likely water mixed with soil - that is, mud. And it's likely salty because the freezing point of salty water is below that of fresh water and Mars is so cold that the difference matters.

Scientists, of course, are not claiming this is absolute, rock-solid proof - only that present-day seasonal flows of salty mud are the best explanation anyone has come up with of the observations. But that doesn't change two facts: One, this is about the strongest evidence to date that liquid water is to be found on present-day Mars and two, that first fact increases the chances that there may be something alive there. It would be unlikely in the extreme to be anything more than microbes - but it would be life on another planet.

And that is just damn cool.

I love science.

Just to take a short break

2011-08-06T00:24:00.001-05:00

A new species of butterfly has been found flying around Northern Ireland.

Sealing our fates one last time

2011-08-03T23:40:00.010-05:00

Updated Everyone else has chimed in on it, so I suppose I feel obligated to offer my take on the debt ceiling deal. So here it is.

The debt ceiling deal is hideous, a disgrace, a monstrosity; it's an affront to justice, an insult to our intelligence, and above all a clear demonstration of on whose behalf "our" government actually works.

It is capitulation camouflaged as compromise; it is a right-winger’s wet dream, with all of the burden placed on the poor and what remains of the middle class, while the rich and the comfortable and the corporations and their paid-for flunkies go untouched. Listening to wingnuts grouse and gripe about how the deal "betrayed their goals" (I originally wrote "principles" but I didn't like the implication that they have any) is like listening to a whining two-year old throwing a tantrum because they got only nine of the ten pieces of candy on a plate.

Very briefly, here's what is in the deal: An immediate increase in the debt ceiling of $400 billion with another $500 billion in September, which latter amount hypothetically could be blocked by Congress but won't be. This is coupled with $917 billion in spending cuts over the next 10 years. Certain programs, including Social Security, Medicaid, WIC, veterans’ benefits, and some others are exempt, which just means deeper cuts everywhere else: SNAP (i.e., food aid), housing aid, LIHEAP (i.e., heating assistance), TANF (i.e., welfare), jobs programs, unemployment assistance, education, infrastructure, science, environmental protection, transportation, and more. What it does not involve (of course) is any tax increases of any sort.

It also sets up a “Super Congress” or "super committee" of doubtful Constitutionality. (But who's going to challenge it and if they did and if the courts accepted the challenge, itself a questionable proposition, what are the chances a decision could be rendered in time?) It would include three Dims and three GOPpers from each house (independents, it seems, need not apply) for a total of 12.

This Super Congress - or, by appropriate abbreviation, the SuperCon - is to identify at least $1.2 trillion in additional deficit reduction. Nothing is exempt. Everything, including "the big three" of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, can be targeted. Hypothetically, targets could also include “revenue enhancements,” but beyond the possibility of limitation or elimination of tax deductions most useful to the middle class, such as home mortgage interest and medical expenses, I expect the chances of any such "enhancements" being included are just a tiny fraction this side of are you kidding.

The SuperCon reports by November 23; its proposals, which cannot be changed, amended, or filibustered, are fast-tracked to an up-or-down vote by December 23. If they are passed, there is a dollar-for-dollar increase in the debt ceiling. If they are not or if the SuperCon can't reach an agreement, a likely possibility, the debt ceiling can be raised an additional $1.2 trillion but that triggers automatic across the board dollar-for-dollar cuts in federal spending. Again, no tax hikes.

(It also requires both houses to have a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, which will give some people the opportunity to strut and posture for the benefit of their Toilet Paper - excuse me, Tea Party - constituency, but means little beyond that.)

Oh, and something else: Rep. Barney Frank said that he had planned to vote yes until he learned more about some of the details, including that cuts in military spending are only guaranteed for the first two of those 10 years and that none of the cuts can come from expenses for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which continue to drain hundreds of billions of dollars annually even as increasing majorities of Americans oppose them.

What does all of this mean? It means that, in thrall to their banker masters and cowed by the bluster of the ratings agencies (in fact, of only one such agency; Standard & Poor's was the only one to make a big fuss while the other two of the big three just muttered a little), the leaders of "our" government agreed to spend less at a time when they need to spend more and invest less in the economy at a time they need to invest more. What they did, in short, was good for the banks, good for the investment houses, good for the bond-holding rich, but destructive for the rest of us.

The fact, which will come as no surprise to you, is that we still live in a depressed economy: Only 18,000 jobs were created in June. Eighteen thousand! During the first six month of 2011, the economy grew only as fast as the population - in other words, it essentially went nowhere. And now the feds are going to spend even less than they would have. Which is incredibly stupid and will only depress the economy further.

"But oh no, that's not true!" cry the slick and the sycophants. "This will show The Market (pbiu) that we are Serious About Controlling Spending (on things important to you, not to us, they add under their breath)! That will give businesses Confidence! The Confidence needed for them to invest! To create jobs! To grow the economy! Confidence, we say, Confidence!"

Which only goes to prove we have a government full of confidence men.

Look, I've noted this before: Corporations are now sitting on record amounts of cash and raking in record levels of profit. That should give them all the confidence they need - especially since, hey, isn't profit supposed to be the reward for risk? Why should we have to assure them there is no risk before they'll get off their cash-soaked butts and do something? (Or does that answer itself?)

Claiming all businesses need is "confidence" flies in the face both of the historical record and of plain logic. If they were going to invest, they already have the means and they clearly have the opportunity. What they don't have is the desire.

Because the simple fact is, businesses are not going to hire people they don’t need. If you have a job, great, I'm happy for you. But you need to understand that the owners of the business you work for don't see you as a benefit, they see you as an unhappily necessary cost, one that they would just as soon be rid of if the bottom line allowed for it. Businesses, to put it differently, are not going to hire you unless they think that the benefit to their profit outweighs the cost that you represent.

To put it a third way, they are not going to hire you to produce goods and services no one is buying.

The simple fact is that the claim that "business creates jobs" is utter bullshit. Complete malarky. Thoroughgoing crap. No matter what you've been told, no matter what you think, with the possible exception of some sort of goddam lefty do-gooder outfit, no business has ever created a job. They haven't. Period.

At the same time, let it be said that one way the right wing is correct is that it's also true that, at least for the most part, government does not create jobs.

Demand creates jobs! The demand for goods and services which government can supply or private businesses can sell. And while the government can't create jobs, what it can do, and do it in a way and to a degree of which private industry is simply incapable, is create demand.

Government can create demand by spending, by spending money on goods and especially on supplying services which people need. It can do it by putting money into the hands of people either by social programs or by direct employment on government projects. It can do it by redistributing income from people who won't spend it because they have more than they can use, to people who will spend it because they need the goods and services which that money can obtain. And it can do that by raising taxes on those who dammit have the money to redistribute.

But instead, government is going to shrink, is going to do less. And in so doing, "our" government is denying, betraying, repudiating, one of the basic reasons for its existence. (Governments are instituted among men to secure the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Sound familiar?) And so it is denying, betraying, and repudiating us.

The result for you? Richard Eskow ran down some of it at a Campaign for America's Future blog:

- If you're out of work, you’re less likely to find it. If you've got a job, you're less likely keep it. if you do manage to keep it, you’re less likely to get a raise.

- If you have a house, you’re more likely to lose it because help for distressed homeowners is off the table, so foreclosures will continue unabated. If you have a house and manage to keep it, its value is more likely to go down as communities continue to have local values depressed.

- Your social security benefits will be lower. I've mentioned this before; it's the plan to switch methods of calculating the Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs) for Social Security from CPI to "chained-CPI" a change that will guarantee (yes, guarantee) smaller COLAs in the future, creating a stealth benefit cut, stealth because since you'd still get an increase, the hope is you won't notice it's less of an increase than it would have been otherwise - and that difference, of course, is a benefit cut.

Eskow also raises the possibility of a large tax increase via eliminations of middle-class-friendly deductions. That certainly is a possibility, as I mentioned above - but I have to say I think it's unlikely. The GOPpers are rigidly committed, politically and ideologically, to the idea of "no tax increases" (and no matter how many times they intoned "revenue enhancements" instead of "tax increases," their TPer base, with its tax radar always on full alert, would not be fooled) so I don't see that coming out of the SuperCon. In fact, I predict that group will, absent another Dummycrat capitulation (which is always a possibility) deadlock. That would lead to the triggered cuts - which again do not involve tax hikes. So I don't expect any significant tax increases.

What I do expect, however, and something Eskow doesn't mention, is that your Medicare costs will go up, perhaps by 15% or more. Part of the debt ceiling agreement is that Medicare is supposed to be cut by no more than 2% and the cuts will be directed against “providers,” not beneficiaries - the cuts will come from reducing the amounts paid to doctors and hospitals. Doctors and hospitals, that is, who already complain about the low rates which Medicare pays.

Cutting payments to providers, quite bluntly, will lead to fewer physicians accepting Medicare patients and fewer of those who do accepting assignment, with the net result for you of higher out-of-pocket expenses and fewer doctors from which to choose.

What will be the overall result? A good summary, oddly enough, came from Mohamed El-Erian, the CEO of a bond investment firm called Pimco, who said:

Unemployment will be higher than it would have been otherwise.... Growth will be lower than it would be otherwise. And inequality will be worse than it would be otherwise.

The honor of the best description of the deal, however, goes to Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, who called it a "sugar-coated Satan sandwich." In fact, I very much think he wanted to use a different s-word, but he was, after all, on television at the time.

Still, I suppose in one sense, the deal should not be surprising: It's just another front in the on-going, ugly war being waged against the middle class and the poor, a decades-long attack that no longer resembles class war so much as it does class annihilation, as a century of slow aching progress toward justice is beaten back and the gap between rich and poor - indeed, between the rich and the rest - now yawns as widely as it did more than 80 years ago, a chasm that "compromises" such as this, delivered by "our" government, will make even wider.

It's past time for anger, even for outrage. It's time for cold fury, the kind of focused rage that spends itself neither in the perhaps momentarily satisfying but still pointlessness of violence nor in directionless emotion but which drives concentrated, conscious action. Yes, petition, talk to neighbors, write letters to the editor, call your representative, lobby, vote (if you still can with all the roadblocks being erected), do all that stuff.

But face a hard fact: We've been doing that. focusing on that. We've been doing it for how long? Since at least Bill Clinton, when the Kewl Kidz decided that stuff like demonstrations were icky and uncool and like, so, y'know, so '60s 'n' stuff and how they weren't going to waste time on that sort of stuff, that they were going to be Serious People. And where has it gotten us? It has gotten us recession, an increasing economic divide, and our big success, a president who thinks being "the adult in the room" means repeatedly rolling over in the face of an opposition that has come - with good cause - to count on him caving. Watching Barack Obama "negotiate" and "stand firm" is like watching a parent who has forgotten who the parent is, being worn down by a foot-stomping brat screeching "No!" and "I don't wanna!" and "Gimmie!" It has gotten us failure and betrayal.

So yes, absolutely: Write letters. Make phone calls. Petition, lobby, vote, do all of it. Yes.

But face the fact that that will not be enough. It never was. It never has been. It can get you some short-term victories, win you some elections, but it can't sustain a drive for real progress - that is, measurable, meaningful, and instituted progress of a sort that can't easily be undone. Not as long as there is no penalty for those we elect, for those we pinned our hopes on, when they ignore us, which they will as long as they know we will continue to vote for them even in the face of their betrayal because after all, god forbid a GOPper should win!

So no, it's not enough. We need to be angry and more importantly to be visibly angry. We need to be on the streets, dammit. We need to generate the sort of social disruption that characterized the '60s, yes, the dreaded '60s. We need to take those forces, economic and social and political, that have turned their backs on us, on justice, on fairness, on equality, on what is right in order to curry favor with (and sometimes become) the aristocracy which we deny we have, and we need to make their lives miserable. We need to harass them, embarrass them, mock them, ridicule them, picket them, protest them, wherever they gather whenever they gather. We need small groups picketing, we need mass numbers marching in the streets, we need guerrilla theater, we need civil disobedience, we need it all.

Do not underestimate the difficulties here; I don't: Police and other forces of repression have become much more adept at achieving the goal of providing a quiet life for the elites, a life untroubled by any noise from the riff-raff. Determination is vital and courtesy may sometimes be a (temporary) victim of circumstances.

But what's even more important in the face of that possibility is creativity. I was recalling earlier today an incident back in the day when the Air Force parked a Minuteman ICBM at a local shopping mall as part of an exhibit. A small group of us made a plan to protest the display (and nuclear arms) by having a couple of us rush at the missile (which was surrounded only with theater stanchions and velour rope), taping "Practice Nonviolence" cards all over it, while a few others passed out leaflets designed for the occasion, after which we'd take off. It was supposed to be over in less than five minutes - and in thinking about it now, I thought of it as being kind of like a politically-oriented flash mob. That kind of action - show up, do it, and go - may become more important if cities continue to increase efforts to prevent any sort of mass rallies. The important thing is that they are visible. And that, more than anything else, is what we have to be now.

Because we have been ignored and we have been betrayed. Forty-five Dummycrat Senators voted for this hideous deal, including a number of liberal heroes like Barbara Boxer, Sherrod Brown, Sheldon Whitehouse, John Kerry, Ron Wyden, and Al Franken. In the House, 95 of the "We're on your side! Really!" party voted Aye, including, again, several liberal heroes, like James Clyburn, Luis Gutierrez, Nancy Pelosi, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. I'm sure that some of them echoed Cleaver's description of the bill - Pelosi, for one, did - but the way you deal with a shit sandwich is not by eating it but by stuffing it back in the face of the person who pushed it on you. And that they utterly failed to do in an act that revealed when push comes to shove which side they are on and which should, if justice is ultimately done, see them on the dustbin of political history.

And if that sounds like I am willing to see, would even like to see, some "good people" lose elections, yes, I am. Because the way - the only way - to win is to be willing to lose. That's what we haven't been but what we need to be. I suspect that over the next several months we're going to find out if we are willing. And if we're not - we have already lost.

Updated with a Correction: The original version of this post said that credit ratings agency Moody's was "the only one to make a big fuss" about the US credit rating; in fact it was Standard & Poor's. The post has been corrected to reflect that.

Interestingly, S&P started mouthing off about reducing the US's credit rating shortly after the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in July 2010. That bill subjected the credit ratings agencies to a bit more oversight and a slightly-higher standard of conduct. S&P has renewed the threat to downgrade the rating several times since, although the justification has varied. And now they have, of course, downgraded the rating despite having offered a variety of shifting explanations and despite having made a whopping $2 trillion error in their projection of future deficits.

S&P, by the way, is being investigated by the SEC for possible civil fraud in its ratings of mortgage debt leading up to the blowup of the housing market in 2008 and the question is being raised if the threat of rating downgrades is being used to pressure the government to drop the case.

(Thanks to Firedoglake for the above.)

Yet one more thing noted in passing

2011-07-28T23:43:00.009-05:00

So Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, rambles on in the Washington Post about how

We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money.

Now, that last part is complete bullshit: While some people do just overspend, the way most people get into a "debt crisis" is a sudden emergency or turn of events, such as loss of a job, health issues, divorce, and so on. (In fact, health care costs are the single most common factor in personal bankruptcies, cited in 62% of cases.) Only the comfortably unafflicted such as Phillips who have never had the experience of daily calls from bill collectors or of having the idea of bankruptcy move out of the merely theoretical could continue to make the smug, condescending, and full of crap claim that he does.

But what I actually wanted to note was something else: The deceptive use of sources.

For one example, he cites a GAO report from March which he claimed showed

billions of tax dollars that were being squandered in duplicative, wasteful programs or ones that had completely failed or were fraudulent.

Um, not really, no. The primary focus of the report was on waste, yes, but it was on waste due to inefficiency resulting from programs being scattered across various agencies, leading to duplication of efforts. Not that the programs themselves, i.e., their purposes and goals, were wasteful, but that the way they functioned was. The focus, that is, was not on the programs but on efficiency.

What's more, "failed" programs and "fraud" were mentioned neither in the cover letter attached to the report nor in its summary. In the body of the report they were mentioned only in passing as among possible causes of some cases of "improper payments."

Of course, Phillips would claim he'd been accurate because the word "fraud" did appear in the report, but clearly that is not what he expressed, which was that the report gave equal stress to "failed" programs and "fraud" as it did to inefficiency and laid equal blame on them for waste - which it flatly did not. Put another way and bearing in mind my definition of a lie is "a statement made with the intent to deceive," Phillips lied.

(Interestingly, Phillips in his "we're spending too much" fury doesn't get around to mentioning that the GAO's analysis also revealed duplication and inefficiencies in so-called tax expenditures - that is, it included means of "revenue increases," higher taxes, in its proposed fixes. I wonder how he missed that.)

Piling on the "I'm citing this source thinking you won't look closely at it if at all" bullshit, Phillips doubles down with this:

The GAO found in 2008 that more than 40 percent of the purchases made with government cards were improper, fraudulent or constituted embezzlement. These credit cards are being used to purchase Xboxes, lingerie and more.

Again, a serious distortion of what the report actually says. What the GAO did was to test the internal fiscal controls of various agencies by asking for documentation that purchases had been properly authorized and that someone other than the cardholder signed for them when they came.

Using a statistical sample of purchase card transactions from July 1, 2005, through June 30, 2006, GAO estimated that nearly 41 percent of the transactions failed to meet either of these basic internal control standards.

Note well: It doesn't say a damn thing there about fraud or embezzlement; it doesn't even assert the purchases were improper. Only that they weren't properly documented.

Again, Phillips would defend himself by noting that the GAO did go on to say that the lack of proper controls had lead to "examples of fraudulent, improper, and abusive purchase card use" and mentioned some specific cases. But again, that's not the essence of what he expressed, the impression he meant to give, which rather was that the GAO found that fraud and embezzlement make up 41% of government credit card purchases. That is, he lied.

His use of sources was thoroughly if unsurprisingly dishonest.

What was I just saying about Rule #13?

Footnote: The term "improper payment" was defined by the GAO as "any payment that should not have been made or that was made in an incorrect amount (including overpayments and underpayments) under statutory, contractual, administrative, or other legally applicable requirements. Reported improper payments also include payments for which insufficient or no documentation was found."

Which means "improper payments" can be a measure of government efficiency but not as the basis for a claim that government is "spending too much." That's not only because some of the payments may have been proper but just lack documentation, but because if the government underpays, the amount of the underpayment still gets added to the total of improper payments.

Just by way of example to make that clear, leave aside cases of inadequate documentation and just think of over- and underpayments, if the GAO had found $25 billion in overpayments and $100 billion in underpayments, it would record that as $125 billion in "improper payments." But instead of meaning the government spent $125 billion too much, it would actually mean it spent $75 billion too little.

Noted in passing again

2011-07-28T01:59:00.002-05:00

As I expect you're aware, Bill O'Reilly, the man with the perfect initials, has been frothing about how it's so, so, really really evil and wrong and just so damn liberal media protecting Islamist terrorists and attacking Christianity for that media to be calling right-wing Christian terrorist Anders Breivik "a Christian" even though that's exactly how he described himself.

Others have effectively mocked BO's asininity, so I'll leave that aside, but on my own behalf, I feel moved to point out that while it's not a perfect example, this clearly does fall within the reach of Rule #12 of my list of rules for right-wingers to use in avoiding dealing with reality:

Rule #12: Whenever faced with the evil resulting from some other winger following or acting on your arguments, accuse those who point out that fact of "politicizing a tragedy." Never, never, never admit any responsibility for the meaning or impact of your own words.

Oh, and Rule #13 fits pretty well, too:

Rule #13: When all else has failed - and even when it hasn't - lie.

That one gets used a lot, I find.

Noted in passing

2011-07-28T00:49:00.004-05:00

So it develops that on Tuesday, Randi Zuckerberg, the marketing director for Facebook, told a panel discussion on social media that "anonymity on the Internet has to go away." Your real name should be attached to anything you say or do on the web.

Last August, then-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt said much the same thing. Their reasons were different: Zuckerberg claimed it would end cyberbullying while Schmidt fretted and fumed about a "world of asynchronous threats" where it's "dangerous" for governments to be unable to identify you.

Be that as it may, I find it let's say notable that these calls have come from high executives of corporations which have a clear financial interest in gathering increasing amounts of personally-identifying information about their users.

Footnote to the preceding

2011-07-26T23:16:00.006-05:00

As I discussed about 10 days ago, one of the cost-cutting (i.e., benefit-cutting) measures that PHC* wants to apply to Social Security is shifting the method of calculating cost of living adjustments (COLAs) from the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, to what's called a chained-CPI. Chained-CPI supposedly tracks how consumer behavior changes as prices change, particularly how they switch to cheaper alternatives in the face of rising prices. The classic example is dropping beef in favor of chicken.

As a result of this focus on the purchase of cheaper alternatives, chained-CPI will always, by its very nature, report a lower rate of inflation than the CPI will. So switching to chained-CPI would be a stealth benefit cut for people on Social Security because while they would still get COLAs, the increase would be less than it otherwise would have been. And the effect is cumulative so the longer you're on Social Security (i.e., generally, the older you are), the bigger a gap you'll experience.

That's bad enough, but writing in The Guardian on Monday, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has created an index to track the inflation rate experienced by the elderly, whose consumption patterns are not the same as those younger. (For example, health care takes up a greater portion of the income of the elderly than it does of those younger.) Although the index is considered experimental, and so, as an agency-produced description of the method says, "any conclusions drawn from these data should be treated with caution," still, as Baker says,

[t]his index actually has shown a somewhat higher rate of inflation than the CPI currently used to adjust benefits. In other words, it implies that the current cost of living adjustment is too low, not too high.

That is, despite the ranting and raving of the reactionary budget hawks and their Dimcrat echoers and enablers that the old geezers have it too soft, it is more likely that we have been short-changing them for years.

And you have about as much chance of seeing that become a topic of discussion as you have of seeing the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget get front page treatment from the New York Times, which has never printed a single word about it.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

De basement of debasement

2011-07-26T21:10:00.007-05:00

I really find this whole thing nauseating in the way it lays bare the utter moral corruption of our entire crop of national misleaders, but I do have to make this observation about the debt ceiling issue.

So right now we have come down to two major, pretty much last-minute, proposals. One, from Harry "Strong as a Single" Reed (not a typo) calls for raising the debt ceiling $2.4 trillion, enough to get through the 2012 elections, coupled with $2.7 trillion in program cuts over the next decade. Those cuts supposedly do not include the so-called "big three" (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) but the proposal also includes establishing a so-called "Super Congress," an above-both-chambers super-committee that would make recommendations for future cuts (which could include cuts in those three programs or any others), recommendations that could not be amended but would be guaranteed a fast-tracked up-or-down vote.

The other comes from John Boner (also not a typo), aka Sir John of Orange. It would cut spending $1.2 trillion while raising the debt ceiling $1 trillion, requiring another round of chicken in early 2012, just as the presidential campaign is getting into high gear. That round would involve an additional rise in the debt ceiling of $1.6 trillion, conditioned on that same Super Congress getting approval of at least $1.8 trillion in additional program cuts.

While the GOPpers rant and rave about how Boner's cuts are not cruel enough and the Dimcrats sigh with relief that Reed "protects" Social Security (for now) as if that made it acceptable, the thing I wanted to comment on is that besides the Super Congress, the proposals share one other common feature: They involve no tax hikes.

That is, they would involve no burden on the rich.

We're told we "all" will have to sacrifice - but not the rich.

We "all' will have to suffer some pain - but not the rich.

We "all" will have to tighten our belts - but not the rich.

So one thing that all our leaders - all of our national leadership - seem to agree on is that the people who have gained the most should give back the least. That those who possess the most should contribute the least. That those who caused our current straitened condition through their recklessness and greed, those who, as I said last week,

have eaten the meat and even the gristle and sucked out the marrow leaving us only the scraps they thought it too much trouble to pick up,

that those are the people too valuable, too important, too worthy, too deserving, to be expected to suffer a single scratch even as the rest of us continue to be mauled.

Nauseating may be too kind a description.

Footnote One: Several people have commented on the extra-Constitutional nature of that Super Congress, which according both proposals would consist of 12 members of Congress, six from each body and six from each party. Its extraordinary power to issue proposals that can't be changed but will be voted on would in essence, in practical if not technically legal fact, make its 12 members the equal of all 535 members of Congress (since one assumes members of the super-committee will be able to vote on their own proposals) - almost as if it were a fourth branch of government.

Which is really creepy.

Footnote Two: About 10 days ago or so I made mention of the budget plan from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which was released back on April 6. This, unlike the bullet points and bumper stickers we see even now from the Demopublican misleadership, is a real legislative proposal.

It would balance the budget by 2014, produce a surplus by 2021, reduce public debt as a share of GDP, and reduce the deficit by $5.6 trillion over 10 years, double what Reed and Boner are proposing. And it would do it without harming the interests of real people - protecting not only Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid but food aid, student loans, unemployment assistance and jobs programs, environmental programs, housing assistance, and much more.

I said then it wouldn't surprise me if you hadn't heard of it. It still wouldn't. Which makes the question of why you haven't even more significant.

Everything you need to know in one sentence...

2011-07-22T17:20:00.006-05:00

Updated ...about exploiting tragedies for ideological ends.

Norway was the site of what was certainly a terror attack yesterday, with a bomb going off in the capitol Oslo and a gunman shooting up a youth camp in what police believe are connected assaults. In covering the event, Reuters had this to say:

There was no clear claim of responsibility and while the attacks appeared to bear some, but by no means all, of the hallmarks of an Islamist militant assault, analysts said it was too early to draw any conclusions.

Um, then why mention it? Why couldn't it just say "Analysts said it was too early to draw any conclusions about who the perpetrators might be?" Why was it necessary to hint darkly about "Islamist militants" when there is "no clear claim of responsibility" and - weasel word on top of weasel word on top of weasel word - the attacks only "appeared" to have "some" of the "hallmarks" of Islamist extremist attacks? And what "hallmarks?" The use of bombs? "The attacks appeared to bear some, but by no means all, of the hallmarks of an IRA attack." That there may have been some coordination involved? "The attacks appeared to bear some, but by no means all, of the hallmarks of a US military operation."

More seriously, the use of guns in a shooting spree? "The attacks appeared to bear some, but by no means all, of the hallmarks of an attack by right-wing extremists."

Reuters doubled down later in the article:

Lilit Gevorgyan, analyst at IHS Global Insight, said the most likely suspects were al-Qaeda-linked or inspired groups, but added:

"As the news continues trickling in from Utoeya, however, right-wing extremist groups or even a lone perpetrator with army training or access to ammunition and weaponry could be behind the plot."

It's al-Qaeda! Except, um, maybe it's not. But it's al-Qaeda!

Eight graphs after that, eleven graphs after raising the looming specter of "Islamist militants," Reuters gets around to saying that

[t]he Oslo attacks, though hitting two targets, were not simultaneous and the delay between them left open the possibility of a single perpetrator.

But it's al-Qaeda! Run! Hide! They're everywhere! Surrender your civil liberties! And most important, be afraid!

Updated with the later news that the death toll has reached nearly 90, with seven killed in the Oslo bombing and 80 at the youth camp on Utoya Island. What's more,

[t]he Norwegian press say the man in custody for the terror attacks in Oslo and a nearby island today appears to have acted alone, and doesn't seem to have any links to Islamist militants.

He is, instead, a Norwegian national and a Christian conservative. That may be relevant to his motives, since right-wing extremist groups have cropped up in Scandinavia over the issue of immigration, but the fact is those motives are unclear. What is clear is the bogus nature of the rush to judgment that took place in the wake of the attack.

Footnote to the Update: Credit where it's due goes to the Christian Science Monitor, which in the second paragraph of the story linked in the Update says

there was speculation in this paper and elsewhere that Islamist militants could have been involved.

No ducking of the fact of the prior coverage. I like that. Quite unlike Reuters:

At 1:58 PM EDT on Friday, in a "snap analysis," a Reuters report raised the possibility of both Islamist and right-wing terrorism, but called the former "more likely" and went on to cite various prior threats to Norway over its involvement in Afghanistan.

At 7:15 PM, in the Reuters article linked at the top of the post, the idea of right-wing terrorism was clearly downplayed and at 7:52 PM the agency ran a story describing six Islamist militant groups as potential suspects on the grounds that they had "a record of links to plots in Europe." No right-wing groups were mentioned.

At 8:08 PM came the first story that identified the man arrested as an "ethnic Norwegian."

And at 11:09 PM comes the update, which now quotes a different "expert" saying he "suspected a right-winger, rather than any Islamist group" and that it would be "very odd for Islamists to have a local political angle." There were no references to "al-Qaeda-linked or inspired groups" - nor was there any acknowledgment of, or reference, to having promoted that spin earlier. It just has been disappeared.

What remained, however, was the (apparently now irrelevant) references to prior threats against Scandinavian countries from Islamist sources.

And so it goes in mediaworld.

Another reason to note July 21

2011-07-21T23:29:00.003-05:00

As I said in the previous post about the space program, Barack Obama doesn’t want to end the program, just redirect it along his preferred lines. He doesn’t deny knowledge, he just wants to decide what knowledge is most important for NASA to pursue. But there are too many people today who do deny knowledge, who do deny science, sometimes for the sake of profit and sometimes for the sake of ideology - but in either case it amounts to a celebration of ignorance.

Today is an appropriate time to take a look at one source of ideologically-driven celebration of ignorance that has persisted for a long, long time. Today, July 21, is the 86th anniversary of the end of the Scopes "monkey trial" - which means, of course, that the subject is evolution. Some people thought the debate ended with the ignominious conclusion of that trial, but it didn't - not by a long shot. So herewith, in note of the date, a post that sort of compiles and expands on some of my previous posts on the subject.

In the first three months of 2011 there were nine creationism-related bills introduced in seven states, more than in any year in recent memory. Those states were Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Happily, most of those bills died either in committee or on the floor - but not all: The Tennessee state Assembly passed a bill designed to get creationism into the public schools. The state Senate is not expected to act on the bill before next year, though.

Even though most of the bills failed, the events of this year still make clear that this is by no means a dead issue.

There have been battles in other states, as well. Both Kansas and Ohio, to cite two, have seen seesaw battles with attacks on evolution education in public schools followed by (for the moment, anyway, successful) counter-attacks in favor of science that have restored evolution to the public school curriculum.

On the other hand, in 2008 Louisiana passed a bill allowing for "nonstandard materials" to be used in science classrooms, opening up a gap for creationist materials to slide through. Last month, an attempt to repeal that law fell short.

And despite the failures of most of the bills introduced this year, two members of New Hampshire legislature - New Hampshire, the state that continues to embarrass the rest of New England - have filed plans to introduce creationism bills in the next session of the legislature. One bill would require teaching of evolution in public schools as "just a theory." The other would mandate the teaching so-called "intelligent design" in public schools.

"Intelligent design," what I call "creationism in its Sunday best," is the fall-back attempt to undermine the theory of evolution used by those who persist in considering the Bible to be a science textbook but know that their real belief - creationism - will not succeed. "Intelligent design" argues, at bottom, that life is so complicated that a "higher power" must have had a hand in its development - while at the same time disingenuously claiming it's not in any way religious because the nature of that "higher power" remains undefined. (Of course, by failing to address the question of the nature of the very driving force it identifies, it's also not in any way scientific, but leave that aside for now.)

Anywhere "intelligent design" has been introduced and subjected to legal challenge, courts recognized its religious foundations and struck it down as a violation of separation of church and state. So in a fall-back from the fall-back, the trick has becomes to hide its introduction inside "modern critiques of evolution," which are to be "debated" as an exercise in "critical analysis." Evolution - surprise! - is most commonly the only area to get this "critical thinking" treatment. The Tennessee bill, for example, would require state and local authorities to help teachers develop programs to encourage “critical thinking” about the “strengths and weaknesses” of "controversial" scientific theories. The only "controversial" ideas the bill mentions as needing this treatment are evolution, global warming, and human cloning.

The net effect and of course intent of this program, especially in any sort of "debate" format, is to set such "critiques" on an equal footing with the actual theory, whereby the theory of evolution becomes just one idea among many. As a supporter of the Louisiana creationism bill said “both sides, creationism side and evolution side, should be presented, and let the students decide what they believe." That is, scientific fact becomes a matter of personal opinion, kind of like who was the greatest left-hander of all time. (Sandy Koufax! Well, ya gotta admit he at least has a good claim.)

But note that when I say "theory" there, I'm using the term in the scientific sense. When someone says "evolution is merely a theory," the proper answer is "you're right, except there is nothing 'mere' about a theory." Observations obtain data. Take that data, use it to make an educated guess about the nature of what was observed, a guess that includes a prediction of future data, and you have a hypothesis. A hypothesis repeatedly and successfully tested by verifiable predictions can become a theory.

Put another way, in science, a theory is a hypothesis confirmed by observation and/or experiment to the point where it does not require further demonstration to be accepted as valid and the burden of proof is on those who would reject it. In the case of evolution it is no longer enough - and hasn't been for a century or more - to say evolution can be doubted because we don't know every detail of the process and we haven't found every transitional fossil. Both of those are true - but the basic principle of evolution, the principle of change over time in interaction with environment driven by natural selection stands unchallenged by anything but pure assumption. Saying evolution should be doubted or questioned because questions remain is exactly - exactly - like saying the existence of gravity should be questioned because scientists who are looking to unite gravity with quantum mechanics believe that the force of gravity should be carried ("mediated") by particles called gravitons, which no one has ever found.

Evolution is a theory. It is not a guess, it is not "just an idea," it is not a hypothesis. It is a theory. Not one easily tested in a laboratory, obviously, but one whose agreement with an enormous number of observations from biology, geology, and paleontology is overwhelming.

Yes, there are arguments about the details, about the exact nature of the process, was it incremental change or punctuated equilibrium for example, how much of a feedback loop is involved (that is, as organisms change, how much do they affect their environment, thereby creating additional pressure for more change); there is good healthy (and even sometimes acrimonious) debate about all that and more. But those, again, are the details, not the structure.

What's more, it's true that strict, classic, narrowly-defined Darwinism is no longer generally accepted - but that's because we’ve learned stuff in the last 150+ years. Among things we've learned about is genetics, which provides the thing that Darwin didn’t have, the lack of which troubled him: a physical mechanism through which natural selection can work to produce change. That knowledge didn’t exist in Darwin's time, but now it does - which means the stuff we have learned since Darwin has not denied or questioned the theory of evolution, it has strengthened it. The basic principle of evolution remains and has withstood every scientific assault on it, every scientific challenge to it.

And the more we learn about self-organizing systems - the tendency of any sufficiently complex system to spontaneously organize itself into patterns - and therefore the less evolution involves the "random change" and "random chance" on which its critics charge it depends, the stronger it becomes. Bluntly, while the details are still argued, evolution itself simply is no longer a matter of scientific debate and hasn't been for some time.

The drive to change the physical reality evolution represents, or, more accurately, to change our understanding of it, comes from a collection of scientific know-nothings backed by a handful of "scientists" - almost none from relevant fields - who have, sadly, allowed their personal ideologies to trump their science training.

Evolution is a fact. It's a physical reality. In fact, evolution is the basic bottom-line principle of modern biology. And anyone who tells you different is either lying to you or has no idea what the hell they are talking about.

Despite that simple fact and unhappily, Gallup polls since 1982 have consistently shown that somewhere around 45% of the US population believes God created humans in their present form sometime within the past 10,000 years. Believes, that is, in creationism.

This is really, really sad and disturbing. You don't have to be an evolutionary biologist, you don't have to have read the research papers yourself, to know if evolution (or, in fact, any principle in science) has evidence to support it. All you have to do is know if there is a general consensus on the matter. You simply have to pay some minimal attention, especially on a question that keeps coming up, like evolution. And on evolution, that general consensus is overwhelming. But still so many refuse to see.

Certainly the carefully-crafted PR strategies of the creationists, who claim that they are only striving for "fairness" or "balance" and who in some cases claim it's really a matter of "academic freedom," are part of the reason for this sorry state of affairs. Those are the strategies which they use because deception about the science and bluster about non-existent "oppression" are the only weapons they have, since any time they get into a forum where they have to defend their argument with facts and logic instead of sermonizing and bumper stickers, they lose.

Another reason is the corporate media, instinctively choosing conflict over resolution: The "controversy" of "intelligent design" versus "Darwin" is more attractive to, is just much more fun for, editors, publishers, reporters than the dull straightforward fact that "intelligent design" is trash, an anti-science pursuit that, whenever comes up against a question to which it does not already know the answer, throws up its hands, declares "God - excuse me, some intelligent and supremely powerful but (wink, wink) unnamed force - did it," and stops trying to learn. But even that doesn't change the underlying fact that scams like "intelligent design" succeed because people want to believe them.

Which raises something else: I've often wondered why the fact of evolution is so hard for right-wingers to accept. It can't really be just the bizarre notion of Biblical inerrancy, not when the number of such true believers is far outstripped by the number of those who deny the scientific facts. One reason, it seems to me, is that a lot of it is just an old-fashioned "ick" factor: Some people are so tied to the idea of a unique specialness in being human, so emotionally invested in the concept of our own completely separate and superior station, that they just can't abide the notion we are in any way connected to other animals, even if any direct link exists in pre-history. You could say it's a matter of "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"

On the other hand, it could be that they just can't help it, the poor dears. A study at University College, London, reported on in April, compared the brains of people who self-identified as liberals with those of people who self-identified as conservatives. The liberal brains, they found, tended to be bigger in an area that deals with processing conflicting information while the conservative brains tended to be bigger in an area that processes fear and recognizes threats. So all the rejection of evolution might be kind of like a grown-up - well, make that "older" - version of being afraid of the dark.

I've argued before that when people feel stressed, when they feel their personal world (i.e., the society around them) doesn't make sense or is changing in ways they don't understand, they tend to reach back for the seeming safety of old, familiar ideas, to try to recreate an imagined time when things were in what seemed to be their proper order. That is, they become conservative. And the more stressed, the more uncomfortable with the changes, they become, the more conservative they become, unwilling to face what I have previously called "the terrifying prospect of change."

Which means, sadly but not surprisingly, almost half of our population lives not only in a state of ignorance but in a state of willful ignorance, a deliberate rejection of science and knowledge. It's not often mentioned, but should be, that to embrace creationism is not only to reject evolution. It's not even to reject all of biology. It's to reject astronomy, which also posits an ancient Earth and an even older universe and depends for its findings on the accuracy of that fact. It's to reject archaeology, which uses dating methods which depend on radioactive decay, our understanding of which, again, depends on an old Earth. It's to reject chemistry and physics, which underlie the methods used by astronomy and archaeology to reach their conclusions. It is, that is, to reject the entire enterprise of science. To reject knowledge per se, to reject learning per se, to reject trying to understand the world.

So am I saying that half of my fellow citizens have been scared and confused into turning their backs on knowledge? Yes - that's exactly what I'm saying. And if you’re going to ask me what to do about that, the truth is I don’t know.

Footnote: They do try so hard to hide their real intent but it just keeps slipping out. The sponsor of one of the bills to be introduced in the next session of the New Hampshire legislature said his bill would include a “study of the proponents' [of evolution] ideology and position on atheism.” The sponsor of other said he opposed evolution because it was “a theory that we are here by accident, that there is no purpose” and having a "purpose" was necessary. That is, believing in evolution strips away your reason to live.

One reason to note July 21

2011-07-21T22:58:00.002-05:00

So at 5:57 AM Eastern Time on Thursday, July 21, just one day after the 42nd anniversary of the first Moon landing, the space shuttle Atlantis landed at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, bringing an end to the space shuttle program. Without it, the US will have no way of its own to send astronauts into space for at least several years.

It seems particularly correct to note this event about now because just a few days ago I was at a political gathering - maybe some of you were at similar ones; it was one of those MoveOn.org-type events supposedly about "getting input" but really more a way to expand their mailing list - but anyway, I was there and at the meeting the participants were asked to cite a moment they felt proud of their country or community.

For my part, I said I preferred to think of it in terms of hopeful rather than proud and I cited the example of a state legislator in Massachusetts who changed his mind about supporting an amendment to the state constitution designed to overturn the state Supreme Judicial Court decision allowing for same sex marriage on the grounds that in the year since, "nothing happened." Except for those directly affected, i.e., those who could now marry, life went on as before and all the social stresses and upheavals that had been predicted never materialized - in which case, he said, he could find no reason for the amendment. That, I said, made me hopeful because it was a demonstration of the fact that people can change for the better.

The point of raising this here, though, is that another man there spoke of the Moon landing and how he later saw a space suit of the type the astronauts used with a section cut out so you could see the multiple layers that made up the suit, each with its own purpose, each designed by a team to work with the rest. He said he was impressed with the teamwork that took and asked something to the effect of “Why can’t we still do that? Why can't we still cooperate as a nation on a big project like that?”

I didn’t say say this at the time because it wasn't relevant to the meeting, but I thought to myself "NASA still does that - all the time."

We have become rather blase about space travel; it no longer gets the headlines, no longer generates the excitement, it once did. And our whole attitude about NASA and the end of the shuttle program is frankly confused or at least a real mixed bag.

But even without the star-quality treatment space stuff got in the past, NASA has continued to do some really cool, high-level-of-cooperation-required stuff.

- In February 2001, NASA landed a spaceprobe on an asteroid. Yes, landed.
- In 2005, a NASA probe blew away a section of a comet so we could get a better sense of how and of what they - and other things in the Solar System - are constructed.
- In March of this year, another NASA probe went back to same comet to see how it had changed over the intervening years as a result of the 2005 impact.
- In fact, that probe, called Stardust-NEXT, had been launched in 1999 and by January 2006 had flown through the coma of a comet, collected samples, and flown back past Earth, dropping off a payload of those samples as it went by. It was then sent back out to that second encounter with a different comet.
- Just four days ago, a robot spacecraft went into orbit around an asteroid 117 million miles from Earth.
- And NASA is now planning a mission to fly to an asteroid, take samples from it, and bring them back to Earth.
- Two months ago, a NASA Earth-orbiting satellite confirmed a far-reaching prediction of general relativity, that of "frame-dragging," where a spinning body (such as the Earth) actually warps spacetime by "dragging" spacetime around with it.
- Go back in time: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in 1977, are now 9 billion miles and 34 years from Earth and they are still producing new data and new discoveries. Just last month, NASA reported that data from the Voyagers shows that the heliosheath, the area where the effect of the solar wind (the stream of particles emitted by the Sun) is being attenuated by interactions with interstellar space, is full of a "froth" of bubbles of magnetic energy - a very unexpected discovery, which is the best kind.

The Hubble Space Telescope, source of all those cool images (and just yesterday, discoverer of a fourth moon around Pluto) - that's NASA. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory - that's NASA. The International Space Station (the ISS) - our part of that, that's NASA.

And tomorrow, NASA is scheduled to announce the landing site for the next Mars rover.

Ah yes, the Mars rovers. On January 4, 2004, the rover named Spirit landed on Mars. It was supposed to operate for 90 days and to travel for up to a kilometer. It ran for more than six years and went nearly 8km; that is, 25 times longer and eight times further than it was originally designed to. In fact, it would have gone longer and further but over a year ago, one of its wheels broke through what looked like a firm crust and the rover got trapped in loose sand. Unable to recharge its solar cells, it fell silent. On May 25, NASA made a final and unsuccessful attempt to contact Spirit.

But that's not really the end of the story, because a few weeks after Spirit landed, its twin rover Opportunity landed on another area of Mars. Now, more than seven years and 30km later, Opportunity is still going strong.

All of this I find exciting and wondrous - because it seems to me that space exploration is one of the purest expressions of what it is to be most human, what is (if you'll pardon the bad grammar) most unique about us: The desire to know. The desire to learn, to understand; the need to have our curiosity satisfied.

And that more than anything is what space exploration is about: knowing, learning, understanding. Knowing what we didn't know before, learning what we hadn't learned before, understanding what we didn't understand before, about time, about space, about how things came to be as they are, about how they will be in the future.

Yes, there have been technological benefits, lots of them - not the least of which is that NASA's need to miniaturize components to save space and weight (and therefore fuel) was a driving force behind the development of integrated circuits. But even without those benefits, the sheer - and I use the word deliberately - glory of knowledge, of learning, would have made it all worthwhile.

But now the space shuttle program, the headliner of US space exploration for the past good number of years, is over. Shut down. Shuttered. For the next several years, the US is going to have to depend on Russian spacecrafts to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS.

Why is this happening? Because Barack Obama wants to impose his vision of space exploration on NASA.

His vision is one in which the space shuttle does not fit, a vision that wants to turn over the sort of missions the shuttles ran to private, profit-driven, corporations. So again, as has happened so many times before, the government (i.e., the public) pays for the research, pays for the development, pays the costs of ironing out all of the inevitable but unexpected kinks, does all the dirty work, and then turns over the whole thing to the same prophets of profit that brag about their derring-do and entrepreneurship and would have us bow down before The Market (pbui).

Now, let's be both clear and fair: Barack Obama is hardly the first president to do this, to want to see his personal vision of space exploration become that of the nation. Indeed, JFK's call to go to the Moon was just that. And Obama does not want to end the space program, he just wants it to focus on what he thinks it should.

But what angers me is that there is no indication that he, anymore than the others before him, went to NASA and talked to the astrophysicists, talked to the astronautical engineers, talked to the astronauts, talked to the people who know what the hell they are talking about, and asked them what they thought was most important, what they thought would be most productive. No, he just wanted his vision, the Big Dream, the Big Picture of "manned" landings on asteroids and then on Mars.

The vision of humans landing on Mars is not, standing alone, objectionable and indeed I have argued that human space flight should remain part of the space program because the idea of people actually going and seeing - even if it is only a select few who are able to physically do that - has a grandeur of its own. But as it stands now, it is a vision that substitutes grandeur for actual learning while making a greater place for the whims of private profit.

And that is why the end of the space shuttle program makes me sad and the day is worth noting.

Happy anniversary

2011-07-16T22:45:00.003-05:00

Today, July 16, is the 66th anniversary of the beginning of the nuclear age.

The first-ever explosion of an atomic bomb took place when the bomb, known as the "Gadget," was successfully set off at the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico on this day in 1945. It was the culmination of the super-secret Manhattan Project.

The nuclear age became the nuclear war age a few weeks later when Hiroshima was almost obliterated by a single bomb. And while we don't think much about nuclear weapons these days, and while the threat of nuclear war does not seem as great as it once did, that does not mean that either that threat or the weapons which create it have disappeared.

Everything you need to know in one phrase...

2011-07-16T01:50:00.000-05:00

...about the demonization of entitlements. It's a bit old, but I just came across it and it still fits. From the Huffington Post:

Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that are seen by most budget experts as long-term contributors to the nation's spiraling debt. The three programs will make up more than 40 percent of federal spending next year. If left unchecked, they will grow to more than 60 percent of federal spending by 2035, when baby boomers will be at least 70.

"Left unchecked?" "Left unchecked?" What are they, infectious diseases? A flea infestation? A toxic chemical spill? What the hell?

Everything you need to know in one sentence...

2011-07-16T01:48:00.001-05:00

...about what's important to The People In Charge.

At a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee about Social Security earlier this month, eminent economist Sylvester Schieber was asked to explain chained-CPI. He said:

"If the price of a Mercedes goes up … maybe you don't buy the Mercedes, you switch and you buy an Audi or something."

Or something.