March 19 Blogswarm, Part One

Scenes of a broken nation:

- A doctoral candidate can't get her thesis examined because there is no one to do it.

Widespread threats against Iraqi university staff have all but stripped the country of its intellectual core, particularly in Baghdad.

According to the country's higher education ministry, 240 lecturers were killed from 2003 to October 2007.

Approximately 2,000 academics have fled the country, according to Tariq al-Bakaa, a former minister of higher education who served under the 2004 government of the then prime minister Ayad Allawi.

- A family waits in line all day and even longer for gasoline.

Iraqis are once again facing days of power outages and queues hundreds of meters in length at petrol stations in parts of the capital, Baghdad, as well as in some of the country's provinces. . ...

The Iraqi electricity ministry has blamed the oil ministry for not providing sufficient fuel to run its generators. The oil ministry has blamed the electricity ministry for failing to provide its refineries with an uninterrupted power supply.

- Another family learns that eating by candlelight is not romantic.

In many areas of Baghdad, electricity is only available for a couple of hours a day.

Iraqi officials usually blame the electricity shortages on disruptions in fuel oil supplies or sabotage at power plants. Now, officials are confirming that corruption and intimidation are sometimes factors in who gets electricity in Iraq's capital.

- A sick man can't get care because it's too dangerous to get to the hospital.

Because of poor security conditions in much of the country, the sick and injured are often cut off from access to medical care. In some areas, it has become extremely difficult to provide emergency medical services, supplies or equipment....

- A sick child can't get care because the family can't afford it.

Some people go to private clinics, which are safer but also more expensive – so much so that a large part of the population could never afford them. A private-sector consultation typically costs between two and seven US dollars, depending on the quality of the service. It is not at all clear how people earning less than five dollars a day could ever pay so much.

- A sick woman can't get care because there is no one to provide it.

Hospitals and health-care centres often lack drugs and other essential items. There are not enough functioning emergency rooms and operating theatres to cope with mass casualties. There are currently 172 public hospitals with 30,000 beds – well short of the 80,000 beds needed – plus 65 private hospitals [for a population of 27 million]. ...

Like many other Iraqis, medical doctors, nurses and their families are in danger of being kidnapped or killed. Some have received threats against them. According to official Iraqi sources, more than 2,200 doctors and nurses have been killed and more than 250 kidnapped since 2003. Of the 34,000 doctors registered in 1990, at least 20,000 have left the country. The Iraqi health-care system is now in worse shape than ever.

- Poor families face the choice of doing without enough water...

Many Iraqis can no longer rely on public services for clean water. Left to their own devices, many people, especially the poorest, struggle to find what they need. The estimated average monthly salary in Iraq is now around 150 US dollars. As the cost of drinking water is roughly one dollar for 10 litres, each family has to spend at least US$ 50 per month on water alone.

...or drinking what may be disease-carrying filth.

Sewage systems have often deteriorated to the point that there is a real danger of drinking water being contaminated by untreated sewage.

- A man makes his living as "body contractor."

A 38-year-old Shiite who sports a thin beard and a checkered black-and-white kaffiyeh, [Jabber] Sowadi charges clients $300 to $500 to track down missing relatives, or more often their corpses.

- Then there are the walls...

Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.

...and the silences...

It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. ... Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

...interrupted by the sounds of death and the wails of the survivors.

The death toll from a bomb attack near a revered Shiite shrine in the central Iraqi city of Karbala has risen to 52, a health official told AFP Tuesday.

A bomb exploded near the shrine of Imam Hussein, a pilgrimage destination for Shiite Muslims in the centre of the city, on Monday.

Karbala police chief Brigadier General Raed Shakir said the bomb had been planted in the area by insurgents, although other police and health officials said the attack was carried out by a female suicide bomber.

On Tuesday, Salim Kadhim, spokesman of the Karbala health directorate said the death toll from the attack was now at 52, while 75 others were wounded.

Let's make no mistake.

We did this.

It's our fault.

Our fault.

Our fault.

The blood is on our hands. And it will not wash off.

Point of personal privilege

This is an expanded version of a comment I left at Crooks & Liars.

I've written very little about the presidential primaries; in fact I think the only times I've even mentioned them were to consider the New Hampshire results in light of my concerns about electronic voting machines and to comment on the exclusion of Dennis Kucinich from the debate before the Nevada primary. This is another one of that sort of post, one that relates to the primaries but isn't about them.

It's about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's "controversial" pastor.

There are all kinds of videos of Wright's "inflammatory" statements floating around, almost all of which recycle the same few quotes. Because of my disinterest in the campaign, I'd paid little - okay, no - attention to them. But I saw a compilation of three quotes on "Countdown" this past Friday and I have to say that my reaction was rather different than that of Jonathan Alter, who called Wright, if I remember correctly, "hysterical." So I spent some time this evening on YouTube looking at videos of Wright, including those avowedly used to charge him with "hate speech" and "hating America." At the end of it all, I came away with the same feeling I had Friday: I just don't see what the big deal is supposed to be.

Consider that in one clip shown on "Countdown," Wright, during a sermon preached the Sunday after 9/11, said in essence that the attack was blowback from US policies in the world, including the Middle East and Africa. Bluntly, that doesn't strike me as a statement that should be the least controversial with any but the "they did it because they hate our freedoms" ignoramuses. (He reaches back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples, which I doubt are on the minds of more than a few of those regarding the US angrily today, but it doesn't detract from the point.) Rather, it is, I say, the truth and I have thought so since the beginning. Just two days after 9/11, I was emailing friends, decrying "the cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation" in which everyone claims to be the innocent victim and saying we were in for "hard times" during which suggesting a motive for the attack other than "irrational hatred" or being "uncivilized" would brand you a terrorist-lover.

Three weeks after the event, in an unpublished op-ed, I said that our problem in answering the plaintive question "Why did they attack us?" lay in the fact that we insisted on seeing Muslim, particularly Arab Muslim, concerns through American eyes. So, I said, "just for a moment, try to see the world through the eyes of an average person on the ground in the Middle East." After laying out how that world might look, I asked:

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.

And three months after the attack, with the war on Afghanistan well under way, I wrote to "Mother Jones" in response to a militarist article by Todd Gitlin to say that

[a]s deeply as I mourn the victims of the World Trade Center attacks ... I still insist that the question for us as Americans is not, cannot be, what Osama bin Laden could have or should now think or do differently, but what we could have or should now think or do differently. The clock of history did not start on September 11 and refusing to face our own complicity in creating and maintaining the conditions of desperation-driven fanaticism in which such as al-Qaeda can take root and grow (and continue to recruit) is the surest way we as a nation can guarantee a continuation of terrorism directed against us.

The precise language Wright used may have been a little over the top - but the content of what he said was true.

In another clip, Wright said Hillary Clinton can't truly understand the problems and concerns of black people because she isn't black, doesn't have that experience. That conviction - that is, that true cultural understanding is only available to those with direct personal experience - is not one universally shared, but it's hardly uncommon, hardly outlandish, and by no means limited to blacks: Some women, for one example, have maintained the equivalent about men, arguing than men can't understand what it's like to be a woman in society. In that same segment, he said that the US is dominated by "rich white people." And this is supposed to be controversial on exactly what basis?

In the third clip, he said, as near as I can quote from memory, "God bless America? No, God damn America! It's there in the Bible: the destruction of innocents." That is, damn America for the murder of and mayhem against innocent people for which it is responsible. The language ("God damn America") may be, again, rather over the top, but is the sentiment that drives it really questionable? Yes, I can see why this one could be "controversial" in that it expresses a truth that most Americans do not see and do not want to see; I have mentioned before my old concern about

the most dangerous of all our cultural notions: the myth of American innocence. We as a people still tend to believe that we always act out of the highest ideals, that our motives are always pure, our intentions always honest, our honor always intact.

So words like Rev. Wright's always clang on our ears like jackhammers on metal. But seriously, seriously, is the assertion that the US has been responsible, whether directly or through surrogates, whether through action or deliberate inaction, for an appalling amount of death and destruction over, well, let's use Wright's timeframe and say over the last 60 years - but over any timeframe measured in years as opposed to months, is that a charge that can be legitimately questioned? How?

Jeremiah Wright surely has said and done some things that are wrong or foolish - embracing Louis Farrakahn ranking high on that list - but the attack dogs are not concerned with polemics but with politics and not with religion but with race, as the stunningly racist comments about both Wright and Barack Obama on some of the YouTube videos serve to emphasize. And there is one other thing with which they are not concerned: truth.

Footnote: All that said, I need to make clear that I did not agree with or approve everything Wright said on the clips I found. On one minor point, the clip where he is attacking Clinton's supposed lack of understanding of what blacks go through on a daily basis pretty much amounted to campaigning for Obama from the pulpit, which is a tax-exempt no-no. I'd be surprised that the fanatics aren't going after him for that if it weren't for the fact that it would distract attention from their real goal, which is to attack Obama by proxy.

On a more serious issue, in one clip he referred to AIDS as something created by the US government. He is hardly the only one to believe this, but it's still crap.

And in going after Hillary Clinton as someone who "fits the mold," he said three things that raised questions about his own ability to understand without experiencing. One was the statement that she doesn't know what it's like to have to try twice as hard to be accepted. Sheesh. She's a woman. Of course she knows. The simple fact that she's the first woman in our nation's history to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate should be proof enough of that. (And no, Obama is not the first black to be taken seriously in that role. Jesse Jackson was. On the other hand, he is the first to have a good chance of winning.)

He also said that, unlike Obama, she has never had to be concerned about being stopped by police because she was driving in the wrong neighborhood. Which is likely true. But I strongly suspect that, like every other woman, she has had to wonder if it was safe to go across that dark parking lot to her car and can probably name several places off the top of her head where she would not go alone if she could possibly avoid it.

Finally, Wright said of Clinton that, again unlike Obama, "She's never been called 'nigger.'" Which is obviously true - just as obvious as the fact that Obama has never been called "bitch" or "cunt." I'm not going to argue one is worse, the same, or not as bad as the other. I am going to insist that there is some degree of balance there.

Speaking of protests

This is a planned one that I stumbled across while scanning news reports for the protest news quoted in the previous post. Perhaps I should have known about it sooner, but I didn't. I do think it can be considered a sign of the times. The initial source is the Press-Telegram of Long Beach, California.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) represents about 25,000 dockworkers along the US West Coast and thousands more in Canada and Hawai'i. The contract it has with marine terminal operators allows the union to hold a monthly "stop-work" membership meeting. But there are meetings and then again, there are "meetings." And so

[u]nion delegates voted in February to hold the "stop-work" meeting on May 1 "in honor of labor history and to express our support for the troops by bringing them home safely," delegates said.

The plan, that is, was to shut down ports all along the west coast of the US for a period of eight hours to protest the Iraq war. Now, the truth is that it's hardly unusual for ILWU Local 10, which sponsored the resolution, to be involved in antiwar activities. Despite that, I have to admit that the vision of dockworkers staging what amounts to a strike against the war, even for just one shift, gives me the same sort of feeling that seeing hardhats marching in Central Park for a nuclear freeze in 1982 did.

Initially, the bosses didn't express any concern over the planned protest. Just over a week ago,

Steve Getzug, spokesman for the Pacific Maritime Association, a shippers’ group, said shipping company officials were too busy preparing for contract negotiations[, which are beginning now,] to pay much attention to the protest.

But by this past Friday they apparently had changed their minds, and are now trying to kill the plan by saying it violates the contract because it's to occur during the day shift and the contract, they say, allows such "stop-work" meetings only during the second shift.

"[W]e are not going to agree to it," [PMA President Jim] McKenna is quoted as telling the [Journal of Commerce]. ...

Representatives of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union said Friday they were reviewing their options.

Without prejudging or predicting the union's plans or intentions, the possibility has to exist that they will go ahead with it anyway. Contract negotiation time is touchy for all concerned, and while there is always a risk to a union of civil action for conducting an "illegal strike," even a specifically-limited one, it is equally true that the bosses may be reluctant to piss off the union with threats over what, if they plan for it, could be reduced to the level of an inconvenience - especially in the middle of negotiations to renew a contract that expires on July 1.

Although there is no way to know, I have a suspicion that the change in attitude comes as a result of getting the word from friends in high places back east that they don't wanna see no protestin', nohow. One thing that drives that suspicion beyond my normal levels of paranoia is that the plan was not for just dockworkers to protest. The actual text of the resolution says

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED:

That it is time to take labor’s protest to a more powerful level of struggle by calling on unions and working people in the U. S. and internationally to mobilize for a “No Peace No Work Holiday” May 1, 2008 for 8 hours to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U. S. troops from the Middle East; and

FURTHER BE IT RESOLVED:

That a clarion call from the ILWU be sent with an urgent appeal for unity of action to the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win Coalition and all of the international labor organizations to which we are affiliated to bring an end to this bloody war once and for all.

(The letter to the AFL-CIO was sent February 22; the text can be found at this link.)

“If we can do something so dramatic as to shut down the ports on the west coast, I think people will realize how important” opposition to the war is, said Jack Heyman, an executive board member of San Francisco’s ILWU Local 10, and prominent anti-war activist.

Especially if they are joined by other unions taking their own “No Peace No Work Holiday.” In that light, an attempt by the Shrub gang to "nip this thing in the bud" with a whispered word in the ear of some corporate cronies hardly seems far-fetched.

Don't forget

Updated My final weekly reminder of the protests against five years of war on Iraq, and more exactly of the blogswarm called for March 19. The total number of blogs committed to the March 19 blogswarm on Iraq is up to 250.

Although the big protests are sent for this week with the main rallies on Wednesday, some demonstrations have already happened over this weekend. This is a list of those I found after a brief news search, so I'm sure there are more.

- "Thousands" rallied in Portland, Oregon.
- Upwards of 2,000 marched in Hollywood.
- 600 turned out in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
- Some 300 attended a march and rally in Richmond, California, which combined a war protest with one against Chevron as a war profiteer and ended with civil disobedience, with 24 arrested.
- "Hundreds" took to the streets in Denver.
- Eureka, California also saw a weekend protest, a few dozen rallied on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, and even Myrtle Beach, South Carolina had a group turn out.

The US, of course, was not the only place where voices were raised.

-The UK saw 30,000 or so protesting in London, England, and another 1,500 in Glasgow, Scotland.
- Over 1,000 marched in Brussels, Belgium.
- Protests of sizes ranging from a few dozen to 1,000 were seen in Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden; Oslo, Norway; Aalborg, Denmark; and Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, Canada.
- A Saturday rally kicked off a week of events in Aukland, New Zealand.

This comes as the claims of success for the escalation aka "surge" continue to evaporate, as even David Patraeus is forced to admit that

"no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services,

even though providing an "opening" for such reconciliation was the supposed point of the escalation all along.

The fact remains: Five years is five years too many.

As always, this is not to be instead of anything else you do that day, but in addition to it.

Footnote: I will also include with each reminder links to my posts on the first, the second, and the fourth anniversary of the invasion in case you want to check them out. Lotus was on hiatus for all of 2006 and I was blogging very infrequently at another site during that time, so there is no third anniversary post.

Updated because I had to include this: Daisy's Dead Air noted a ceremony Sunday night in Greenville, SC attended by 65 people which featured 3,988 candles and roughly 750,000 strung beads to indicate US and Iraqi deaths in the war. She also has a link to a video about the event.

What is the sound one jaw dropping?

Whatever it is, mine made it when I read Glenn Greenwald reporting that

nobody expected, especially after the meek and incoherent appearance of Silvestre Reyes on CNN last weekend, that [the House Democratic leadership] would ignore the barrage of Terrorist-Lover accusations from the President and unveil yet another [FISA] bill that is actually decent and refuses to bestow lawbreaking telecoms with amnesty, but they now have.

The bill - which is now expected to be voted on tomorrow, i.e., Thursday - includes the to-be-favored provisions previously noted by Greenwald and TPMMuckraker's Paul Kiel, but improves on them in a couple of ways, including one fairly clever twist. Greenwald has a summary of the bill; this is my summary of his summary. The bill

- requires the FISC to approve procedures to ensure that Americans are not targeted and to minimize the inadvertent collection of data before surveillance can start, except in an emergency allowing for an immediate start to the spying, in which case the government has 30 days to get approval of the procedures.

- sets a standard of probable cause to get a warrant to conduct surveillance on Americans anywhere in the world and bans “reverse targeting.”

- establishes a National Commission, with subpoena power, to investigate and report on the Shrub gang's warrantless wiretapping.

These are in addition to requiring a DOJ Inspector General report on the warrantless spying program, declaring FISA "exclusivity," setting a sunset date of December 31, 2009 (the same date, Greenwald notes, as the TRAITOR Act sunset provisions), and provides prospective liability protection for telecommunications companies that provide lawful assistance - although why it's necessary to provide liability protection for legal actions escapes me.

The twist, one that Greenwald calls "shrewd," comes in the issue of retroactive immunity. The bill, Kiel reports,

would give the courts authorization to hear the classified material at issue in the case - in essence disposing with the administration's claim of the state secrets privilege.

The "state secrets privilege" - which I have noted before was codfied into practice as a result of deliberate lies to the courts by the Pentagon - enables the White House to keep information away from the courts by arguing that revealing it, even to the judge in chambers, would damage national security. The telcoms have been saying that the reason they need immunity against lawsuits is that the government has asserted that supposed "privilege" in these cases, making it impossible for the poor, beleaguered corporations to present a defense based on government assurances of the spying's legality. The bill would short-circuit Bushco's assertion of the state secrets privilege, removing the roadblock to the suits' continuing.

That is a prospect the Shrub gang will find very distasteful. All along, the bullshit claim has been that telcoms must be shielded from suits to ensure their future cooperation in the face of possible "crippling" lawsuits. However, this bill would enable the telcoms to get the existing suits dismissed by showing they had good reason to believe (or, more exactly, reason to allow them to claim) their assistance with the spying was legal. But it would not necessarily head off what I think the WHS* really fear: not "bankrupting" the telcoms, not damage to "national security," but the discovery process. Discovery that might reveal what the Bushleaguers really told the telcoms, discovery that might reveal what the White House was up to and just how big that "what" was.

So bottom line is that it's better than expected - better, in fact, than we had any reason to expect a week or ten days ago. Personally, I doubt that Pelosi and company suddenly grew backbones; I suspect it was some spirited (read "fierce and stubborn") resistance among the majority of the party caucus - including the statement by 20 members of the House Judiciary Committee rejecting retroactive immunity (full text here) - that produced the signs of stiffening resistance. No matter, be glad there is what opposition there is.

Still, as I said on Friday, this is no guarantee and there is still the business of "ping-ponging" bills back and forth and the opposition of Jay "I can bend over even more if you want me to" Rockefeller to a number of the provisions of the House bill. Meaning the good provisions, of course. That opposition will almost undoubtedly mean the House bill will not survive the Senate and the House will get back a bill with immunity and only pro forma oversight with the expectation the House would pass that on an up-or-down vote.

But maybe it won't work out that way. Greenwald gives voice to something I've been thinking for a while:

At the very least, the more resolution is delayed, the longer this drags on, the higher the probability that amnesty and warrantless eavesdropping can be blocked. ...

All other considerations to the side, the more time that elapses without smooth capitulation to the White House, the better. ... As Bush weakens further, as other issues arise which consume media attention, as House Democrats see that these fear-mongering campaigns no longer work, inertia alone can prevent this from happening.

Or, as I put it the other day,

I do still hold out hope for the scenario suggested by that anonymous Representative on Wednesday:

[I]t could be a long time, if ever, before the bill was brought for a vote [because]

“A lot of people think the politics of doing nothing on this issue are very good for both sides of the political spectrum.”

The GOPpers get to screech about national security, the Dims get to pretend to have backbones, the spooks continue with the tools they already had before last August, which they admit to being adequate, and everybody winks and smiles. The charges drone on, but people are less and less moved by them and each side uses the lack of action to appeal to their base. In short, I think the best-case scenario, and one there actually is a chance of coming about, is stalemate.

With the House misleadership showing at least some signs of being willing to go the mat on this one, that possibility, while still only that, has become somewhat more likely.

But still, again as I said, hope for the best but plan for the worst. Call! Now!

*WHS = White House Sociopaths

Besides, soon enough abuses will be unnecessary

Sometimes it seems the only thing George Orwell had wrong was the date. In a breathless, wide-eyed piece that just reeks with "Gee whiz!" the Washington Post recently reported that

[s]everal thousand law enforcement agencies are creating the foundation of a domestic intelligence system through computer networks that analyze vast amounts of police information....

The purpose, of course, is "to fight crime and root out terror plots." And my oh my, who could be against that?

It does on in more or less the same vein, about how local and state agencies are connecting to a new federal system called the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx, about how "It's going from the horse-and-buggy days to the space age, that's what it's like," about how easy it was for a cop in Tuscon to create a "visual chart" showing supposed connections between a fraud suspect in Arizona and people in southern California (including names and addresses), about how "searches that might have taken weeks or months" now take "seconds" - goes on, in fact for 25 more paragraphs before it even mentions privacy or civil liberties. And then it's to explain that authorities really are aware of such concerns and know that "all of this is unsettling."

Damn effing straight it is, especially when the article blithely mentions that much of these new abilities to poke and prod into our lives is being done via a commercial data-mining system called Coplink, now used by over 1500 jurisdictions, which puts connections among the mass of data inputted by police and gathered from other records by Knowledge Computing, Coplink's makers and marketers, into the hands of cops everywhere - and, of necessity, into the hands of Knowledge Computing.

And after the passing mention of deep official concern, the article goes on for a half-dozen more paragraphs before going into how police and the feds are striving to "allay the public's fears" with "guidelines" and "restrictions" to "prevent abuse." Finally, in the 37th paragraph of a 42-paragraph story, it gets around to actually, if briefly, addressing civil liberties concerns:

But even some advocates of information-sharing technology worry that without proper oversight and enforceable restrictions the new networks pose a threat to basic American values by giving police too much power over information. Timothy Sample, a former intelligence official who runs the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, is among those who think computerized information-sharing is critical to national security but fraught with risks.

"As a nation, our laws have not kept up," said Sample, whose group serves as a professional association of intelligence officials in the government and intelligence contracting executives in the private sector.

That's pretty much all of it. This despite the fact that, as the article itself had already noted,

[t]hree decades ago, Congress imposed limits on domestic intelligence activity after revelations that the FBI, Army, local police and others had misused their authority for years to build troves of personal dossiers and monitor political activists and other law-abiding Americans.

Since those reforms, police and federal authorities have observed a wall between law enforcement information-gathering, relating to crimes and prosecutions, and more open-ended intelligence that relates to national security and counterterrorism. That wall is fast eroding following the passage of laws expanding surveillance authorities, the push for information-sharing networks, and the expectation that local and state police will play larger roles as national security sentinels.

That is, we are forgetting all the lessons painfully learned about what happens when you turn cops, prone to think every non-cop person is a suspect and every non-cop thing is a threat, loose with virtually unsupervised abilities to collect and collate personal data. And we are apparently not only supposed to embrace this amnesia, we are supposed to do it with a "Wow! Way cool stuff!" grin.

Yes, I find that very "unsettling."

Footnote the One: The police chief of Tucson praised Coplink to the skies

[b]ut he too acknowledges that such power raises new questions about how to keep it in check and ensure that the trust people place in law enforcement is not misplaced. ...

"If there's any kind of inkling that we're misusing our power and our technology, that trust will be destroyed."

Funny, Robert Mueller said much the same thing: "We are committed to ensuring that we not only get this right, but maintain the vital trust of the American people."

The more these people talk about "trust" the creepier I feel.

Footnote the Two: Regular readers know that privacy is a big issue with me. This particular one of police using linked databases to obtain a wide range of information about individuals who may have done nothing wrong is one I was talking about here more than three and a-half years ago.

But so what?

So what if the spooks have all this authority? I mean, they'd never go so far as to abuse their authority, would they? Just consider that the Washington Post reported a few days ago:

[FBI Director Robert] Mueller said a forthcoming report from the Justice Department's inspector general will find that abuses recurred in the agency's use of national security letters in 2006, echoing similar problems to those identified in earlier audits.

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine reported a year ago that the FBI used such letters - which are not subject to a court's review - to improperly obtain telephone logs, banking records and other personal records of thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005. An internal FBI audit also found that the bureau potentially violated laws or agency rules more than 1,000 times in such cases.

But so what? After all, that, Mueller insisted, was old stuff, history, not to be counted, because it was from before the FBI put in its own "reforms" to avoid such "lapses" in the future, reforms which clearly and of course obviate any need for any actual oversight by Congress or any court. The FBI is handling it. Really.

And Mueller is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men.

Footnote: I quickly ran down that earlier report here; the full report can be found here.

Well, this is another FISA mess

Something to add to my post the other day about last week's FISA developments is that it turns out that tapping telephones may not even be the real issue to the spooks. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that at a Monday breakfast meeting, Kenneth Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security, said that

FISA's current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because "essentially you don't know where the recipient is going to be" and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States.

Ryan Singel at Wired.com's Threat Level blog, Kurt Opsahl at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Christopher Soghoian at the Surveillance State blog at CNet.com all spotted the revelation and its significance. It has also served to point up a misunderstanding on my part which doesn't affect the overall issue but does affect my understanding of some of the arguments.

This whole business supposedly started with a FISC decision that warrants were required to wiretap foreign-to-foreign calls which passed through the US. I had assumed all along that the decision referred to wiretapping done inside the US because the reason the issue ever arose was the changes in telecommunications technology which resulted in calls which previously would not have passed through the US, now doing so. Which means in turn that earlier on, listening in on foreign-to-foreign calls would require the listening post to be outside the US. My understanding was that the spies started tapping those calls as they passed through the US and it was that which the court said could not be done without a warrant.

Apparently, however, the actual claim of Pah! supporters has been that the court required warrants for all such calls no matter where the tapping was done - and unless directly pressed on the matter, the administration was happy to let that false impression persist. Thus, for example, Singel could report this exchange on February 28:

Today, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence spokesman Ross Feinstein told THREAT LEVEL bluntly that the court made the big ruling:

"If a communication touches a U.S. wire. you need a court order," Feinstein said. "If it comes through the U.S., you need a court order."

When THREAT LEVEL expressed dismay, Feinstein put the phone on hold and returned shortly, with a different explanation.

"Due to rulings from the FISA court, in a significant number of cases, the government had to get court orders for purely foreign-to-foreign communications that touched American wires," Feinstein said.

Which, as Singel notes, is quite a different statement and in line with the narrower ruling that the FISC only placed warrant requirements on spying done within the borders of the US.

Getting to Wainstein's statement, in a later entry Sengel noted that it reaffirmed the contention that the ruling was actually a narrow one, which

means all the hysterical screaming and the dire scenarios constructed by right-wing spying proponents based on very thin evidence of what the secret court actually ruled - all of it is just wrong.

And more to the point, the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence allowed them to be wrong for months. They allowed and facilitated their supporters to scare freedom loving people with phantoms of lost wiretaps.

DNI Michael McConnell, the serial exaggerator who claims to be a non-political straight shooter, himself kept saying the NSA lost 70 percent of its capabilities after the ruling.

If that's the case, that means that 70 percent of what the NSA does is collect emails inside United States telecom infrastructure and service providers.

Either that or McConnell was just lying through his damn teeth. Which I have to admit I think is the more likely alternative.

Opsahl noted that by Wainstein's assertion, neither FISA nor the FISA court in any way

impede the interception of foreign-to-foreign emails, VOIP calls or other communications, so long as you know both ends are foreign.

This is a critical admission because it puts the lie to talking points made all over by supporters of the wiretapping legislation.

But it was Soghoian who directly took up the issue of the emails.

According to the relevant Wikipedia page, the Internet backbone (commonly understood to mean the collection of Tier 1 internet Service Providers) is made up of: AOL Transit Data Network, AT&T, Global Crossing, Verizon Business (formerly UUNET), NTT Communications, Qwest, SAVVIS, and Sprint.

From numerous press reports, we already know that AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint are involved in the shady NSA wiretapping program. Furthermore, we also know that Qwest refused to participate as the government would not provide a FISA warrant.

That leaves AOL, Global Crossing, NTT Communications, and SAVVIS as other potential participants in any NSA effort to sniff email communications. ...

The Protect America Act of 2007 permitted intelligence agencies to force Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to hand over a copy of every email passing through their systems which lists one non-US recipient. While the law expired in February, any orders initiated under the act can continue until August of this year.

It is unclear what the major email providers could have been forced to do before the Protect America Act. However, if email communications are the most important issue in the telecom immunity debate, we should certainly be looking carefully at these and other email providers. As other bloggers have previously discussed, the proposed legislation would provide immunity for all companies that assisted the administration in its illegal spying, not just AT&T and the other 2 telcos.

A copy of every email passing through their systems which lists one non-US recipient. That's the real issue here, the real power that the spooks are afraid of losing, one that involves a lot more of corporate America than three telcom firms - and one rarely addressed but which must be, and right now.

Make that call. This is a deal-breaker.

Don't forget

The total number of blogs committed to the March 19 blogswarm on Iraq is up to 190.

With the claims about the success of the escalation - excuse me, "surge" - proving to be the myths we have suspected all along, an escalation that after the "drawdown" will leave 8,000 more US troops in Iraq than there were a year and a-half earlier, an escalation undertaken to secure a city, Baghdad, which just saw its deadliest attack in nine months, it continues to become clearer by the day:

Five years is five years too many.

As always, this is not to be instead of anything else you do that day, but in addition to it.

Footnote: I will also include with each reminder links to my posts on the first, the second, and the fourth anniversary of the invasion in case you want to check them out. Lotus was on hiatus for all of 2006 and I was blogging very infrequently at another site during that time, so there is no third anniversary post.

Comment comment

I heard from one of my regular readers that he tried to post a comment only to get a message "Banned by siteowner. Your comment will not be added."

I can only wonder how many other people have gotten the same message and left in a huff or were left hurt and wondering what they had done. But in all the time I've been doing this, I have actually banned precisely one person.

The problem arises because of the way Haloscan manages bans. A while back, there was someone trying to harass me by posting a series of comments consisting of attempts at vile (but ultimately sophomoric) personal attacks with some "I know who you are!" hints sprinkled through. Not surprisingly, this person lacked the guts to use their real IP address. It was always a phony address or it came through an anonymizer.

He hasn't been around for a while; it might be because in his last comment he slipped up and revealed a little too much (which is I say he: I have a pretty damn good idea who it was) or, more likely, he just got bored because I simply deleted every comment immediately upon seeing it without offering a reply and banned the IP address from which it appeared to come.

That's where the problem arises. Haloscan gives you the option of banning a range of addresses. For example, several of the comments came from a domain in the Netherlands whose IP addresses begin with 195. So to save time and effort, or so I thought, I banned the whole range 195.*.*.* - only to discover later that doing it that way resulted in anyone whose IP address had 195 anywhere in it was also banned. It also meant that those using dynamic IP addresses, such as AOL subscribers, might be able to post a comment one day only to find they were supposedly "banned" the next time they signed on - and perhaps "unbanned" the time after that.

I have deleted almost all the bans. Hopefully, people will not have a problem commenting here. If you do, please let me know ASAP.

FISA Week

There's been a lot of confusing news and rumors surrounds the, um, "modification" of FISA known as the Defective America Act, otherwise known as PAA or "Pah!." There have been some twists and turns of late but with, I believe, a common thread, so let me run down that was the week that was for FISA.

Last week, in what I suspect was a trial balloon, the story started circulating that the House Democratic misleadership was looking for a way out, a way to give the White House what it wanted while giving liberal members a way to say they fought against immunity down the line. The idea was simple: Take up the Senate bull (that's not a typo - well, actually it was but it seemed so appropriate I decided to leave it) but break it into two parts: one on wiretapping powers, the other on immunity. If both parts passed, they would be recombined into a single bill.

The sad part is that immunity likely would pass - but doing it this way would give Dims more interested in political posturing than personal privacy some CYA material by being able to vote against the immunity provision while allowing the whole bill to pass. Writing at CBSNews.com, Kevin Drum called the proposed process "finally decid[ing] to do the obvious" before saying the "whole thing" was a "charade from the beginning" and adding that

[t]his is nothing for us anti-immunity folks to be happy about, but the votes are what they are. If there's a majority in favor of immunity, then they should call the roll and let 'em vote.

So hey, just like on Iraq, it's the "we don't have the votes" whine, in this case the votes to prevent corporations from being handed Get Out of Jail Free cards and the White House from being able to conceal, perhaps forever, its own criminality. The Dums spent years in the minority blubbering "We can't do anything, we don't have the votes." Now they're the majority and, if you didn't actually do a head count, you'd swear they are still the minority because they keep singing the same song. Well, Dims, perhaps on this those among you who actually care about things like Constitutional rights and civil liberties are the minority. But what you have now that you didn't before are the levers of power in Congress - and you refuse to use them.

(You'll notice, by the by, that Drum doesn't seem too upset by the prospect of immunity. That's perhaps to be expected, as he was the one who said last month that he was opposed to immunity but wasn't "hellbent" on it because he really didn't care if the preznit broke the law so long as it was "an emergency" and he didn't do it for "too long." This is what passes for "realism" among "liberal" circles these days.)

This rumor was followed shortly by House Intelligence Committee chair Silvestre Reyes saying on Sunday that he expected there would soon be a compromise bill. He didn't say the "compromise" would include immunity provisions but said he was

open to that possibility after receiving documents from the Bush administration and speaking to the companies about the industry's role in the government spy program.

"We are talking to the representatives from the communications companies because if we're going to give them blanket immunity, we want to know and we want to understand what it is that we're giving immunity for," he said. "I have an open mind about that."

Reyes, let's remember, was the one who just three weeks ago wrote what I called a "blistering" letter to Bush in which he declared that "I, for one, do not intend to back down - not to the terrorists and not to anyone, including a President, who wants Americans to cower in fear." But that was then.

The reaction to these feelers among immunity opponents - who just might possibly actually think immunity is of more than symbolic importance, more than a matter of what might be in campaign commercials - was, it appears, not favorable and the predicted compromise didn't appear immediately. So on Wednesday Politico said Congress

remains deadlocked on the issue, with a divided Democratic caucus scrambling to find a solution and Republicans once again boycotting talks

on developing "compromise" legislation to determine just how much more power is to be given to the WHS* beyond that already conceded in the past. Just how pathetic the Dims are can be seen in the response to the GOPpers refusing to even talk about the bill. Instead of blasting them as narrow-minded obstructionists who regard Bush quite literally as a king and who are disgracefully eager to run away from their responsibilities as legislators, we get this mewling whine:

“It is very sad, because the Republicans and the White House are refusing to participate,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.). “We need to know what they think.”

You already know what they think, fool. They say flat out that there is "no give" in their position; poster girl for dumb blondes Dana "Cuban missile crisis? Was that the Bay of Pigs thing?" Perino even said she didn't see the point of such a meeting. That is, they think "You know you're going to wimp out eventually, sucker, so why not just shut up and do it now and stop wasting our time?" And too many Dems seemed determined to find a way to do that so long as they didn't actually have to admit it's what they were doing.

But not all of them, which may have been a good part of the reason for Wednesday's statement by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer that

the House will not take up an electronic surveillance measure this week, further delaying any decisions on the controversial measure.

Hoyer said in his weekly press conference that he hoped to wrap up work on an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; “towards the end of this week or the beginning of next week.” ...

Although Democratic leaders insist they are working feverishly to iron out their differences, one House member - speaking on the condition of anonymity - suggested it could be a long time, if ever, before the bill was brought for a vote.

“A lot of people think the politics of doing nothing on this issue are very good for both sides of the political spectrum,” they said.

Which brings us to Thursday's interesting developments.

For one thing, Arstechnica.com reported that a computer security analyst named Babak Pasdar had gone public with whistleblower accusations that

a major mobile telecommunications carrier has a built-in backdoor that provides an undisclosed third-party with unfettered access to its internal technical infrastructure, including the ability to eavesdrop on all calls through its network. In an affidavit that describes the circumstances and basis for the allegations, Pasdar provides evidence which could indicate that the FBI is on the other side of the secret line, engaging in warrantless surveillance of mobile communications.

Pasdar discovered the backdoor when he was brought in to help with a large-scale network security hardware migration. He was told to not touch a so-nicknamed "Quantico Circuit" which had no firewalls and no access controls - a degree of freedom even the internal offices and systems of the carrier don't have. When he pressed the matter, he was threatened with loss of his contract if he didn't just shut up about it.

Pasdar won't name the company, but the article adds that Wired magazine notes that one telcom lawsuit charges that Verizon

has engaged and maintained and still does maintain a high speed data transmission line from its wireless call center to a remote location in Quantico, Virginia, the site of a U.S. government intelligence and military base

as well as being the home of the FBI Academy.

In response, three powerful members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee - John Dingell, chair; Ed Markey, who chairs its Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet; and Bart Stupak, who heads the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations - sent a "Dear Colleague" letter noting Pasdar's revelations and how they "echo" the charges by former AT&T technician Mark Klein, who earlier described a "secret room" in an AT&T facility. The three wrote that members of the House must not "vote in the dark" on immunity. They also said, interestingly, that

Mr. Pasdar's allegations are not new to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, but our attempts to verify and investigate them further have been blocked at every turn by this Admnistration.

Surprise, surprise. It does indicate, though, that Pasdar has been vetted by Committee staff and is a reliable source, not just some conspiracy-loving flake. By the way, Dingell, Markey, and Stupak are the same three who sent another "Dear Colleague" letter opposing immunity a month ago.

Also on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi threw another little twist into the saga. Paul Kiel, writing at TPMMuckraker, said that in a conference call with bloggers on that day, Pelosi insisted that "exclusivity is the issue," that is, any final bill must contain a provision that FISA is the "exclusive means" by which the government spies on electronic communications. That is, doing it any other way would be illegal.

Pelosi says that she "absolutely" opposes retroactive immunity for the telecoms, but that she "didn't want the fight to be so focused there that we neglect exclusivity."

(Sidebar: She also said that the House leadership was "at the mercy of the 17 or 18 Democrats in the Senate who are voting with the Republicans on this." Another chorus of the "We don't have the votes" song.)

Kiel wonders if the GOPpers would support a bill with exclusivity and if Shrub would sign it. But considering that the Bush gang has already at the very, very least evaded if not outright ignored FISA in order to conduct illegal surveillance and since it's easy to see Bush just issuing one of his infamous "this law doesn't apply to me" signing statements, the better question is - here's that common thread coming up again - if this is just a different way for the Dems to back down while trying to claim it's actually a victory.

Glenn Greenwald certainly thinks so. He wrote on Friday that

[a]s has been expected for a week now, the House Democratic leadership has prepared and is now currently circulating (while trying very hard to keep it confidential) their so-called "compromise" FISA bill. Their soon-to-be-unveiled bill, unsurprisingly, is designed to give the White House exactly what it has demanded, with only the smallest and most inconsequential changes

such as a somewhat shorter sunset time; an audit by the DOJ Inspector General; the inclusion of Pelosi's "exclusivity," about which Greenwald has the same thought as I do; some sort of 2009 review; and a few definition changes.

Greenwald, who based his description on Congressional sources, notes that the proposal does not include immunity, but suspects the idea is that when the bill goes back to the Senate, immunity will be added back in, after which the bill goes back to the House for an up-or-down vote - after which the everything-Bush-wanted bill goes to our only president for his signature.

That was hinted at Thursday night, when, according to Politico, Pelosi

signaled ... that she is ready to fall back on the strategy of “ping-ponging” alternatives back and forth between the two chambers. This risks more stalemate but also could provide a path for a final resolution of the issue before lawmakers go home for their spring recess next Friday.

The first title of the modified bill is expected to reflect proposed compromises already reached with Senate negotiators regarding the surveillance program. But the second seems sure to reflect continued differences over liability for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the surveillance program the president approved in the wake of 9/11. ...

However, with the immunity issue still unresolved, no one expects the House proposal to be the final word. One possibility is that the Senate could give its blessing to the first title and then insist on concessions in the second. That could set up a situation making it easier for the House to claim a partial victory and allow final passage.

In other words, a variation on the original rumor, a way - again - for the Dums to lose while claiming they won. I admit the process outlined raises a number of questions for me, among which is the obvious one of why, apparently, the Senate gets to make amendments to the bill but the House doesn't. I'm sure I'd be told that was part of the deal. (I'd then like to ask why the House leadership would agree to such a dumb deal that makes them a subservient body to the Senate and also why the House never said to Bush and his Senate ass-lickers - with Jay Rockefeller among those with his tongue furthest out - "What do you mean, we have to take up the Senate bill? We passed a bill months ago. You take up our bill." But those clearly would brand me unserious in the extreme so I won't dare ask.)

Back at TPMMuckraker, Paul Kiel, relying on his own sources, says the provisions of the still-secret draft are somewhat better than what Greenwald describes: an even shorter sunset timetable, a ban on "reverse targeting" (where it's claimed the foreign side of the conversation is the target of surveillance but the American side really is), and limitations on "blanket warrants" (where an entire group or internet domain is subject to surveillance rather than a particular individual or email address) - that in addition to the DOJ audit and "exclusivity" provisions Greenwald mentions.

The [senior House] aide [who was Kiel's source] also stressed that the bill "is in the exact same ballpark" in terms of civil liberties protections as the RESTORE Act, the bill which the House passed last year

and which is far better than the Senate bill. Whether Greenwald's or Kiel's version is right - assuming either is, since much of this appears to be going on behind very tightly closed doors and Jay "May I have another, Sir?" Rockefeller is saying he could not support a bill such as Kiel describes - will be seen early next week.

Greenwald argues that the best-case scenario is that

the House will end up marginally improving some of the surveillance provisions in the Senate bill, but still give telecom amnesty and needlessly gut many of the key protections of FISA.

I'm not as pessimistic as that; although I don't see any of the improvements on Pah! contained in the still grossly inadequate bill the House passed in November to survive the combination of gutlessness on one side and petulance on the other (the "sides" not demarcated by party) I do still hold out hope for the scenario suggested by that anonymous Representative on Wednesday:

[I]t could be a long time, if ever, before the bill was brought for a vote [because]

“A lot of people think the politics of doing nothing on this issue are very good for both sides of the political spectrum.”

The GOPpers get to screech about national security, the Dims get to pretend to have backbones, the spooks continue with the tools they already had before last August, which they admit to being adequate, and everybody winks and smiles. The charges drone on, but people are less and less moved by them and each side uses the lack of action to appeal to their base. In short, I think the best-case scenario, and one there actually is a chance of coming about, is stalemate. That would effectively, once existing warrants issued under Pah! expire, leave us with the old FISA law. That law had a lot of shortcomings and the FISA Court is little more than a joke but it's still better than anything before us now.

But as the saying goes, hope for the best but plan for the worst. Call your Congress critters. And Pelosi. And Reyes. If you're feeling bold, call Jay Rockefeller and tell him to stop being an ass and support the House bill. This should be a deal-breaker. I have told my Rep and I will tell him again: Fail on this and I will not support you, I will not contribute to you, I will not work for you, and I will not vote for you. Ever. Period.

Yes, I think it's that important. For privacy, for unfettered speech, for upholding of the rule of law, for upholding of the Constitution, of Constitutional processes and freedoms, yes. It is that important.

Footnote: Just in case you need to be reminded who we are ultimately dealing with.

President Bush said Monday that telecommunications companies should be thanked, not sued, for helping the government conduct warrantless wiretapping in the U.S. after the Sept. 11 attacks. ...

"Should those who stepped forward to say we're going to help defend America have to go to the courthouse to defend themselves, or should the Congress and the president say thank you for doing your patriotic duty? I believe we ought to say thank you," he said.

Yes, thank you. Thank you for breaking the law. Thank you for helping with illegal spying. Thank you for helping to undermine the Constitution. Thank you for helping along the creation of a police state.

Oh, and one other thing: Thank you for cutting the spooks off when they didn't pay their bill, clearly demonstrating the relative importance you place on upholding the law and the Constitution as compared to your bank accounts.

*WHS = White House Sociopaths

Well said

August J. Pollak of Some Guy With a Website apparently had the same sort of reaction I've had to certain pieces of news recently, but he had a sharp way of making the point:

Rated to a monthly average, the following countries have a Gross Domestic Product of less than $55 million:

Liberia, Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, Comoros, Vanuatu, Samoa, East Timor, Gambia, The Solomon Islands, Guinea, Kiribati, and Tonga.

The amounts of money raised every month, month after month, for political campaigns is just obscene. And the only news coverage is about who raised how much more than who and is that more or less than last month and all rest of this variation of the horserace crap and not one of them seems to ever say "S/he raised $50 million in one month? Holy fucking crap, this system is just bananas."

It can't be all bad news

Via Daisy's Dead Air comes a little bit of good news for the practice of simple, quiet dissent.

Back in August, a man named Jonas Phillips held a sign reading “Impeach Bush/Cheney” on an overpass on an Interstate highway in Asheville, North Carolina. He was arrested, charged with obstructing the sidewalk and endangering traffic. On Thursday, the Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC) brought the news that he was acquitted by the judge in the case.

District Court Judge James Calvin Hill said that the prosecution had insufficient evidence to prove its case, as none of the arresting officers had observed any pedestrians being blocked by Phillips’ actions, and that he did not believe reactions from motorists who honked their horns was enough to prove his sign a dangerous distraction.

“I’ve been listening to both sides for clear signs that his actions were causing a significant problem for pedestrians and motorists,” Hill said. “Based on what I’ve heard, I can’t find that they did.”

The prosecution insisted that he was not targeted for the content of Phillips' message "but his method of delivering it." I find that quite unconvincing, since, as immediately occurred to me and defense counsel argued, lots of other things - such as billboards - are at least as distracting. (Yes, I know there are no billboards on Interstates; that doesn't take away from the argument that Phillips' sign was no more distracting, no more of a danger to auto traffic, than many other things that might be encountered while driving.)

[Phillips] said he intends to resume highway blogging in the future.

You go, guy.

Footnote: Just as a reminder, this kind of harassment did not being with the Bush administration. I recall from Vietnam days friends being arrested for "harassing" pedestrians "by attempting to give them leaflets they did not want," on a charge of "blocking traffic" on the grounds that passing cars slowed down to read the signs at a demonstration, and for - this is my all-time favorite and it is an exact quote from the arrest report - "doing certain things on Capitol grounds."

Again: And, of course, a reminder about the best-known freeway blogger of them all: The Freeway Blogger, who according to his own count has put up 4,000 signs against the Iraq war and in favor of impeachment on freeways in the western US. I don't know if he has updated the site recently, but his blog is current, as is his MySpace site.

Speaking of blogswarms

Updated Updated again Lots of other folks have chimed and still are chiming in on this, so I guess I can, too, even at this bloggy-world late date. On Sunday, the Washington Post gave a right-wing flake named Charlotte Allen a prominent space to assert that women are, in general and in a word, dumb, with "brains permanently occluded by random emotions [and] psychosomatic flailings" and who "always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental." The column apparently was prompted by some hyperventilating reports of women having "screamed" and even fainted during rallies for Barack Obama - something about which I hadn't heard before but apparently is big news at the predictable places like World Net Daily and the Wall Street Journal Online. And now the Washington Post.

Not surprisingly, it generated a good deal of response, a lot of it negative. (When I said lots of other folks, I meant it: The Post claims there have been over 1,000 comments and 10,000 related blog posts.) So much so that Post management had to issue a statement defending the decision to publish this piece of crap and the author had to take part in an online Q&A about it, published today (which I suppose gives me a hook to say I'm not so late after all), during which she tried to pass it off as just good-natured fun - and utterly failed.

Failed because first off, it wasn't the least bit funny. That she hoped to be seen as a wit is clear; that she made it half-way is equally clear. So sorry, no sale on the "I'm so clever" front. And no sale on the line proffered by some of her defenders, typified by one who called it an expression of "frustration" about how women are "feed[ing] negative ideas about themselves."

Bull. This was neither a lighthearted romp across the social landscape nor a frustrated call to stop feeding stereotypes. It was a complaint from an elitist right winger about why "other members of our sex besides us" - that is, the silly women lacking her and her friends' superior insight - "don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess," and doggone it, just be good wives and mothers and "not mind the fact that way down deep, we are ... kind of dim" in a way that insures that the "number of women in [male-dominated] fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason." That "reason," apparently, being that women's pre-frontal cortex is like "Cream of Wheat." (Ellipsis as per the original.)

Her argument is transparently vapid, but it might have had some facade of force if her own failings of the sorts she ascribes to other women weren't so profound. For example, whatever she may think about those "other" women, her own grip on facts is weak. For example:

No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin).

Morgellons is very controversial but it is simply untrue that "many if not all doctors" deny its existence. In fact, in January the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the launch of a study of this "unexplained skin condition." Moreover, I can find no indication either among believers or skeptics that it is a complaint solely or even largely of women.

Another example:

[F]emale fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. ... I predict that over the long run ... the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men.

I didn't find comparisons for the particular occupations she cited, but I do know of figures for another area where women were expected to "always lag behind" men, indeed for which not that long ago they were supposedly unfit: medicine. As recently as 1970, fewer than 8% of US physicians were women. By 2006, nearly 30% were. And that portion is sure to increase: In 2006, 42% of interns and roughly half of med students were women.

She also dipped into the realm of artificially-created, politically-useful fantasy:

[Hillary Clinton] has wept on the campaign trail, even though everyone knows that tears are the last refuge of losers.

Far be it from me to defend Hillary Clinton but this is bullshit. She has never "wept" on the campaign trail. The truth of the matter is that the day before the New Hampshire primary, which she was predicted to lose with the accompanying devastating impact on her hopes to be president, she was asked at a rally something like how she carried on. The mythologized "weeping" was a brief emotional catch in her voice which you could easily overlook in the video if you didn't know it was there. As for loser, she of course won in New Hampshire; some have even claimed her brief show of emotion was among the reasons why. Apparently not "everyone" thinks that such expressions are for "losers."

Then there are Allen's logical skills, which could also use some of "the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide." She says in reference to men not getting conditions like Morgellons,

[a]t least no man I know.

Now there's the way to really nail the logic of the argument. Not to be topped by:

[Clinton's debate performance] consisted largely of complaining that she had to answer questions first and putting the audience to sleep with minutiae about her health-coverage mandate.

So this dumb, complaining woman whose campaign has displayed "every stereotypical flaw" did poorly at a debate because she was too smart? What? But wait, Allen's not finished.

The theory that women are the dumber sex ... is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence.

Evidence which, she immediately goes on to say, shows that while men are better at spatial reasoning, men and women have essentially identical IQs because, as she says in the very next paragraph, women are better at verbal reasoning. So her conclusion follows from her data exactly how?

Now, it's true that in a neurological sense, men and women are different in terms of intelligence. For example, it’s pretty well established that men do have an edge in spatial/mathematical reasoning and women an equal edge in verbal abilities and memory. Significantly, those differences appear to persist across cultures, making a strong case for there being some biological basis for them. The case is strengthened by brain studies that show that men and women tend to process information differently - or, to be more exact, they tend to use different types of brain matter to achieve intelligence. It's a case where, if you will, separate but equal actually does mean just that.

(I should mention that while the differences appear to persist across cultures, the degree of the difference does not: To cite one instance, a 2004 study of Israeli children found that the pattern of sex differences was different for Israelis than for Americans and the differences between the sexes was smaller among children raised on kibbutzim than among those raised in cities.)

But those facts are grossly misapplied when they are used, as Allen does, to address the issue of fitness for certain occupations. There are two solid reasons for that:

First, the differences do exist but in each case the overlap far exceeds the difference, something that folks taking Allen's view never seem to remember. So the very most that could be claimed about fitness for jobs would be something like "As a very general rule, all else being equal, each sex might have a small advantage in a certain limited number of occupations that are heavily dependent on one of those skill sets as opposed to the other." In short, not much at all.

Second, all else is very rarely equal. Looking at innate differences is interesting in neuro-psychological and evolutionary terms but is not useful in sociological terms, especially in considering employment, where personality factors like drive, ambition, outside support, the baseline of having a genuine interest in the field, and more come into play; even family tradition can play a role.

Bottom line is that using innate psychological differences as a basis for predicting men will always outshine women in some lines of work, which is exactly what Allen did, simply will not wash. It is a falsehood born of either ignorance or bias or both. (I also find it worthy of note that she did not name a single occupation other than "the ability to make a house a home," i.e., be a housewife, at which by her argument women presently do, and will continue to, naturally excel over men.)

And what's more, Allen's math reasoning is no better than her logic. She says that

[w]omen really are worse drivers than men.

This is "proved" by a 10-year old study using data now 18 years old showing women having 12% more accidents per million miles driven than men. She presents her own conclusion - one not reached by the researchers, who made no judgment about "better" or "worse" drivers - as a flat fact despite her own admission that men are three times likelier to be in a fatal accident. And to show her own understanding of the figures she cites, she says the figures showing women have a higher accident rate are as they are "even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year." But since the comparison was accidents per million miles, that last part is utterly irrelevant to her argument, something of which she seems quite unaware.

(To be complete, the investigators said the difference in miles driven was relevant to the issue of fatal accidents, which had not been adjusted to a per-mile basis. They claimed that 40% of the difference in fatal accidents was due to the greater number of miles men drove. But even allowing for that, it would mean that men drivers get into fatal accidents at a rate 1.8 times that of women per unit of miles driven. So women get into 112% as many accidents as men but men get into 180% as many fatal accidents as women. Exactly how that proves that the members of either sex "really are worse drivers" escapes me. And the fact remains that the way she quoted the statistics shows that she doesn't understand what she quoted.)

Which leaves us with the original point about women fainting at Obama rallies, the cliché "hysterical female" image that prompted Allen's bilge and bile. Her source is "Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich." His Wikipedia entry describes him as "a self-labeled social libertarian and political conservative ... very conservative, pro-Iraq war, pro-military and anti-Democrat [sic] Party." Admittedly, Wikipedia is not the most trustworthy source on the planet when it comes to such judgments, but even if this is overstated by an order of magnitude, it still means the guy is a real right-winger and not what I would call a reliable source on anything to do with Barack Obama.

But hey, forget that; it doesn't matter except for what it reveals about Allen via her choice of sources. Grant what he says: Five women fainted at Obama rallies since September. (Apparently, the actual number is six.) So in how many rallies? involving how many scores of thousands of people? he managed to come up with five cases of a woman fainting. This is supposed to prove something - anything at all - not even about women Obama fans but women in general? Nonsense. Utter, complete nonsense. But then again, so what: The whole essay is.

In sum, after having for eight years been afflicted with an incompetent, egomaniacal, power-hungry jackass as president because enough guys thought they'd rather have a beer with him than with the other fella, as a result of which I don't think anyone is in a position to condescend to women who are excited by Obama, we are now (again) being told that it is women who are too illogical, too emotional. Charlotte Allen piled together a bunch of ignorance and illogic, glued it together with her own condescending, right-wing, elitist fantasies, and made a net of negative stereotypes to cast over the heads of ordinary women, the ordinary "emotional" and "dim" women who are not among her elevated friends.

Some have called this misogyny, some have called it hatred. I don't know that I would use those words, but the fact remains that she has taken the failings or shortcomings of some and used them to describe a group as a whole. That is a textbook definition of bigotry.

And that's what Allen's essay is: sexist bigotry.

Footnote: For anyone who doubts my description of her as a right-winger, you could google her and check some of her other writings if you're confident in the strength of your stomach - or you could take an easier, gentler course and just consider not only her choice of source about the fainting Obama fans, but some quotes from her Q&A:

- Women aren't a historically oppressed minority; they're half the population or more! What - are we women always supposed to portray ourselves as victims of patriarchy? That's absurd in 2008 when we have every conceivable opportunity.

- I said Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans because it finally opportunity [sic] to a huge number of New Orleans residents living in passive dependency on welfare to get out of New Orleans and change their lives for the better. ... New Orleans itself now has a chance to change into a more self-reliant city.

- I don't think that women are at all discouraged these days from careers in math and science

- I see the ERA as a constitutional club with which to beat down state and local laws. It has nothing to do with rights.

And finally, this lovely exchange:

Woodbridge, Va.: Congratulations on a hilarious article. Do you think the hysterical response to it provides further proof that feminists have no sense of humor?

Charlotte Allen: Is the pope German?

I'm of the mind that when someone engages in insults and put-downs and then responds to complaints by insisting your objections prove that you have no sense of humor - in other words, the only proper response was to endorse the smears by laughing along knowingly - you know pretty much everything you need to know about that person's intentions.

But just in case you're still wondering, this is, in full, what Kathryn Jean Lopez had to say at The Corner at National Review Online while linking to Allen's tripe:

Charlotte Allen eviscerates women. I love it.

So much for good-natured kidding.

Another Footnote: To be completely fair, I now have to add that not all the criticism came from the left. For example, faithfully right-wing Ed Morrissey, late of Captain's Quarters and now of Michelle "Internment camps are a great idea" Malkin's Hot Air, had this to say:

Rarely have I read a newspaper column that shocks me for its sheer breadth of nonsense, but today’s effort by Charlotte Allen in the Washington Post provides one of those I-can’t-believe-she-wrote-that moment. ...

Bobby Riggs during his intentionally provocative promotion of his tennis match with Billy Jean King couldn’t have written this with a straight face. ...

If Charlotte Allen wants to embrace her inner dimness, she is free to do so. After reading this essay, she has a lot to embrace.

Probably the best thing about this is the change it represents: Can you imagine any right-winger writing something like that as little as, perhaps, 20 years ago? We can't deny the continued existence of sexism - but neither should we deny that there has been progress.

Yet another footnote: I am glad of just one thing in the article: It introduced me to Hildegard of Bingen, who does seem to have been quite a remarkable person, all the more remarkable because of the special obstacles she faced as a woman.

Updated with the comments by Kathryn Jean Lopez and Ed Morrissey.

Updated again with the info that in its own post about the column, MMFA had a good chart from the Census Bureau's 2008 Statistical Abstract of the US showing more women than men employed in several tax and business-related areas.

Don't forget

A reminder, which I intend to give weekly, to take part in the blogswarm on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. That day is Wednesday, March 19. As of today, there are 170 blogs pledged to take part.

As one likely unnecessary reminder as to why, this if from the Gulf Daily News (Bahrain) via a link from the invaluable Juan Cole:

The number of Iraqis killed in February rose by 33 per cent over January, reversing a six-month trend of reduced violence, in a setback to the US military plan to curb the bloodshed ravaging the country.

The combined figures from the interior, defence and health ministries showed that the total number of Iraqis killed in February was 721, including 636 civilians, compared with 541 dead in January.

Five years is five too many.

Again, this is not to be instead of anything else you do that day, but in addition to it.

Footnote: I will also include with each reminder links to my posts on the first, the second, and the fourth anniversary of the invasion in case you want to check them out. Lotus was on hiatus for all of 2006 and I was blogging very infrequently at another site during that time, so there is no third anniversary post.