Yesterday there were caucuses in Nevada for both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as a Republican-only primary in South Carolina. The Democratic primary in South Carolina is next Saturday. I'll look at South Carolina later when there is more information.
In Nevada Mitt Romney walked away with the Republican delegates, while on the Democratic side Clinton and Obama split most of the Democratic delegates between them. Hullabaloo was in Nevada and made some interesting comments. Edwards essentially did not contest the caucuses strongly, while Hillary and Obama spent a lot of money to influence the national press. Let's look at the Democratic caucuses.
It was a beauty contest held for the national political press.
Nevada was a beauty contest. For the most part, the results of the Nevada caucuses are not much more significant nationally than a witch doctor killing a chicken and spilling the guts to divine the future.
Hillary's camp is claiming a win because she got 4% more Democratic caucus-goers to support her than supported Obama. Obama's camp is claiming a win because Obama gets 13 state delegates to the national convention while, because of the arcane weighting Nevada gives rural counties, Hillary only gets 12 national delegates.
Maybe. Those are "projected" national delegates, not selected delegates bound to a candidate. Those delegates selected yesterday were to the county conventions, not to the national convention. At the county conventions the parties will select delegates to the state convention, where delegates to the national convention will be selected. Delegates to the county and state conventions are not bound to a candidate. So there is no real telling who got how many delegates in Nevada.
Thus, yesterday was a beauty contest that has less real significance than a single, very local poll. Really, no one cares except the Nevadans and the national press looking for something to report before February 5th.
The rest of the Nevada Democratic delegates
Today's reports show that Hillary and Obama are splitting 25 delegates to the national convention between them, but as I posted earlier, Nevada gets 33 delegates to the national convention. That's eight missing. I just rechecked the New York Times, and 33 is what they reported. Where are the other eight?
Super delegates? That's my bet, but I don't know yet.
[Addendum #2 - 1/21/2008 12:39 PM - see Democratic Party superdelegates for a description of who the Democratic Party superdelegates to the convention are.]
Democrats showed they considered the 2008 election to be important.
There is one thing real about the Nevada caucuses. In 2004 about 9,000 Democrats came out to the caucus. This time more than 114,000 attendees showed up. That's more than a 1200% increase.
That means that more than a quarter of the number of Democrats who voted for Kerry in 2004 (397,190) came out to the caucuses, and it is harder and more time-consuming to caucus than it is to vote. Democrats are saying it is time for change in Washington. It is only the exact nature of the change and the person to make the changes that is still in question. [Michael Barone in his “Almanac of American Politics” describes Nevada as a basically Republican state, so comparing turnout across parties probably has little relevance for the national election.]
No evidence of voter suppression.
There were allegations that members of the Culinary Union were trying to coerce voters to support Obama rather than Hillary, but since Hillary got the majority at eight of the eleven special caucus locations on the Las Vegas strip, apparently if there was such an effort it didn't work. Prior to the caucus, but after the Culinary Union endorsed Obama, the educational unions that supported Hillary suddenly suspected that the Culinary Union would be in a position to herd an unrepresentative number of Obama caucus-goers to their "captured" caucus locations or to coerce caucus-goers at those locations step over to the Obama side. (No secret votes in a caucus.) So the educational union sued to prevent those caucus locations. They lost. The national Press loved it, though. It gave them something "sexy" to report. But the caucus results show that there was no "there" there.
Dday observed a lot of passionate disagreement on the candidates, but has no evidence that there was any voter suppression or manipulation . Such rumors make good, shocking news reports that will be widely printed, but those reports should be considered highly unreliable. Wait for any official investigations before they become believable.
It doesn't look like any investigations will occur. That's probably because there was no coercion. For someone with a conspiracy turn of mind an alternative explanation is that because the stakes in Nevada after the press leaves are so low that it isn't worth raising such very negative issues in what is an entirely internal Democratic Party process. My bet is that nothing remarkable happened. The Press hates that kind of result.
The Poor showing of Edwards.
Edwards got no projected national delegates at all. But as he points out, he did not advertise, while both other candidates spent heavily to get a good result that would influence the Press. Edwards didn't have the money to waste on a beauty contest.
If Edwards were to show a strong result on super Tuesday and after, nothing stops the Nevada Democrats from supporting him at the National Democratic Convention. So, except for the national press reports that Edwards did poorly, Nevada doesn't matter to Edwards. If his message starts resonating between now and the national convention, that won't matter, and Edwards has enough financial support to run all the way to the convention. His message should get more traction as the economy gets worse, and the Democratic Party is moving away from supporting corporations and towards supporting American workers largely because of Edwards. His message is the one that Democratic candidates running in Republican congressional districts in 2006 won on, and it is only because the national Democratic leadership and the national Press don't have a clue what his happening outside of Washington, D.C. that the Democratic generally are still running on the corporate K-Street dominated status quo. Edwards is changing that, and he is bringing his message at a time the nation is finding it appropriate.
Anything else?
The Nevada witch doctors have killed the chicken and spilled the entrails. This is as much as I can divine from the process so far, but I'm sure there will be more to read in the next few days.
Addendum 5:08 PM CST
dday has a good report on the accusations regarding voter suppression and vote stealing. This is not a definitive guarantee that nothing untoward actually happened, but it describes why such reports have been spread.
As I say, don't take any accusations seriously until a real investigation is started, and even then check to see of that is a PR move. So far there is nothing but a few unsubstantiated rumors caused by clearly understandable administrative errors and decisions that were perceived as unfair but were not. If Obama is half the politician I think he is, he'll have a statement out shortly that he has had the issue looked into and there was no significant problem.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Clinton took Nevada
The caucuses in Nevada were close, but Hillary took more than Obama. here are the results of entrance polling, and interesting they are.
I find it especially interesting that while Blacks did tend to vote more for Obama, it certainly was not a knee-jerk vote. The same is true for Hillary. Whites did tend to prefer Hillary, but the percentage of White voters for Obama was roughly the same as Black voters for Clinton. Essentially, while race was a factor, it was not a dominating factor.
Edwards, my preferred candidate, did poorly. In the entrance polls roughly 9% of the caucus-goers initially preferred Edwards, but Josh Marshall points out that, like Iowa, if there were not enough delegates at a given caucus to meet a minimum threshold, they were invited to support one of the other candidates, so Edwards ended up with only about 4%.
Romney won the Republican caucuses rather as expected.
The reports are not in from the South Carolina primaries yet.
I find it especially interesting that while Blacks did tend to vote more for Obama, it certainly was not a knee-jerk vote. The same is true for Hillary. Whites did tend to prefer Hillary, but the percentage of White voters for Obama was roughly the same as Black voters for Clinton. Essentially, while race was a factor, it was not a dominating factor.
Edwards, my preferred candidate, did poorly. In the entrance polls roughly 9% of the caucus-goers initially preferred Edwards, but Josh Marshall points out that, like Iowa, if there were not enough delegates at a given caucus to meet a minimum threshold, they were invited to support one of the other candidates, so Edwards ended up with only about 4%.
Romney won the Republican caucuses rather as expected.
The reports are not in from the South Carolina primaries yet.
Well Duh. Tell the Press. It's the delegates, stupid.
If you watch the TV pundits or if you are one of those retrogrades who actually reads the press, it is abundantly clear that the choice of the Presidential nominee for each party will be determined by which candidate comes across the finish line in each state winning and thus builds up "momentum" for further races. Second place is losing right? The horse race is everything!
So why does Mitt Romney have a strategy of collecting delegates? Matt Yglesias describes Romney's delegate strategy and points out that Mitt has the largest number of delegates right now of any of the Republican candidates?
Think the news boys and girls would bother reporting on that little detail?
So why does Mitt Romney have a strategy of collecting delegates? Matt Yglesias describes Romney's delegate strategy and points out that Mitt has the largest number of delegates right now of any of the Republican candidates?
Think the news boys and girls would bother reporting on that little detail?
Giuliani - worst Presidential campaign ever
I have to admit that Rudy Giuliani has absolutely amazed me.
Last November 28 I made a prediction that Rudy would be the Republican nominee for President. It is now slightly more than eight weeks later, and Josh Marshall has posted a comment which describes Rudy's effort to become the Republican nominee for President as
Of course, I had previously written off John McCain last summer when he went broke, too. Now he's back with a vengeance. The Republican candidates for the nomination may be drinking Zombie Water this year, so I'm not yet ready to simply ignore the end of the political candidate from the Mafia.
We need to watch him carefully to make sure he really is politically dead. Perhaps holy water and a stake through the heart will be required, but as good a job as Rudy has done committing political suicide, those items may just be wearing a belt with suspenders.
Last November 28 I made a prediction that Rudy would be the Republican nominee for President. It is now slightly more than eight weeks later, and Josh Marshall has posted a comment which describes Rudy's effort to become the Republican nominee for President as
Rudy’s collapse is the mark of the worst presidential campaign in history.Having watched the disastrous efforts of both John Connolly and Phil Gramm to become President, I thought I had seen the worst of the worst, but Rudy Giuliani has left them far behind in the dust of disaster.
Of course, I had previously written off John McCain last summer when he went broke, too. Now he's back with a vengeance. The Republican candidates for the nomination may be drinking Zombie Water this year, so I'm not yet ready to simply ignore the end of the political candidate from the Mafia.
We need to watch him carefully to make sure he really is politically dead. Perhaps holy water and a stake through the heart will be required, but as good a job as Rudy has done committing political suicide, those items may just be wearing a belt with suspenders.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Huckabee the Dominionist
Think that Huckabee is just a very friendly smiling Christianist? Here you go. He's a dominionist, out to create an American theocracy. Nope. He gave it away with his demand that the Constitution be brought in line with his Inerrant Bible, as you can see here in Holy Constitution. Not enough? Look at how his friends are at "Huckabee's radical religious friends".
Theocrats know they are right, so they cannot be argued or disagreed with. They just convert you or kill you. That's religion when it has the power of the police or the military under its control. Always. There are no exceptions, only delays.
Theocrats know they are right, so they cannot be argued or disagreed with. They just convert you or kill you. That's religion when it has the power of the police or the military under its control. Always. There are no exceptions, only delays.
Further ruminations on the idiocy of Libertarianism
Here is another really good point on Libertariamism, from What's wrong with libertarianism.
Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:There is no set of ideas that government can safely act on unless they come from a tradition of science, experiment, and falsifiability.Government acts on behavior, not on what people think. If there are no facts which can be established as "True" by using scientific methods, then government is demanding the right to tell you how to think. That is religious or ideological coercion by government. History has clearly demonstrated that such coercion of thought or belief always leads to rebellion, the cost of which exceeds the expected benefits of the government effort.As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.
Libertarianism and property rights
I discovered an interesting article entitled What's wrong with libertarianism which does a good job of debunking Libertarianism. Go read it.
The author points out that Libertarianism was essentially designed by the escapee from the Soviet Union, Ayn Rand, as the Uncommunism. This was quite interesting to me:
That's a pretty good summary.
Let me comment on just one small part of the post I referred to. Note the contradiction between the two parts of Libertarianism I placed in Italics. Those are Property is sacred and Any government is bad.
Libertarians make property rights into an unquestionable area of faith. That reminds me of a recent speculation regarding where the idea of property rights may have come from. Property rights may have been a side effect of the taming of wolves in north east Asia when they first became because dogs. But the idea of property was not that of the dog owner. It was the idea of the dog.
Dogs are hierarchical animals, and they adopt leaders. It is thought by some that when the the dogs first adopted their own people as leaders or Alpha dogs, then other people recognized that certain dogs belonged to certain people. As a result, the concept of property rights was born.
But the concept came from the dogs first. The dogs adopted leaders, people recognized that certain dogs belonged to specific people, and the concept of "Property rights" was born. Dogs first acted as property, people then recognized the dogs behavior as property, and people later adopted the idea.
It is clear, though that there is nothing natural or religious about property rights. Property rights are a social concept which do not exist unless society enforces them. Natural law is garbage until its supporters can demonstrate (scientifically) a mechanism by which it can be shown to be enforced in society. They've had a long time, and failed totally.
A person does not own land unless that ownership is recorded by the government and enforced in the courts. The same is true of a person's car, their wristwatch, or anything else. Not only must the ownership be recognized by others and recorded, there must also be socially accepted rules that determine how such ownership can be transferred from one person to another.
That makes Libertarianism quite contradictory. It makes an article of faith of property rights but also declares any government as bad. The two cannot coexist. It is really that simple. No government means no property beyond that which can be personally enforced using force. [Note - this is another basic belief of Libertarianism - no one can use force on any other person.]
Is property ownership an innate characteristic of human society? No. It is a good idea, enforced by society through government. Ask the dog who owns you. Or the cat who owns both of you. They know that they only own you while they have you in sight and under their paw.
The author points out that Libertarianism was essentially designed by the escapee from the Soviet Union, Ayn Rand, as the Uncommunism. This was quite interesting to me:
| Communism | Libertarianism | |
| Property is theft | Property is sacred | |
| Totalitarianism | Any government is bad | |
| Capitalists are baby-eating villains | Capitalists are noble Nietzchean heroes | |
| Workers should rule | Worker activism is evil | |
| The poor are oppressed | The poor are pampered good-for-nothings |
Let me comment on just one small part of the post I referred to. Note the contradiction between the two parts of Libertarianism I placed in Italics. Those are Property is sacred and Any government is bad.
Libertarians make property rights into an unquestionable area of faith. That reminds me of a recent speculation regarding where the idea of property rights may have come from. Property rights may have been a side effect of the taming of wolves in north east Asia when they first became because dogs. But the idea of property was not that of the dog owner. It was the idea of the dog.
Dogs are hierarchical animals, and they adopt leaders. It is thought by some that when the the dogs first adopted their own people as leaders or Alpha dogs, then other people recognized that certain dogs belonged to certain people. As a result, the concept of property rights was born.
But the concept came from the dogs first. The dogs adopted leaders, people recognized that certain dogs belonged to specific people, and the concept of "Property rights" was born. Dogs first acted as property, people then recognized the dogs behavior as property, and people later adopted the idea.
It is clear, though that there is nothing natural or religious about property rights. Property rights are a social concept which do not exist unless society enforces them. Natural law is garbage until its supporters can demonstrate (scientifically) a mechanism by which it can be shown to be enforced in society. They've had a long time, and failed totally.
A person does not own land unless that ownership is recorded by the government and enforced in the courts. The same is true of a person's car, their wristwatch, or anything else. Not only must the ownership be recognized by others and recorded, there must also be socially accepted rules that determine how such ownership can be transferred from one person to another.
That makes Libertarianism quite contradictory. It makes an article of faith of property rights but also declares any government as bad. The two cannot coexist. It is really that simple. No government means no property beyond that which can be personally enforced using force. [Note - this is another basic belief of Libertarianism - no one can use force on any other person.]
Is property ownership an innate characteristic of human society? No. It is a good idea, enforced by society through government. Ask the dog who owns you. Or the cat who owns both of you. They know that they only own you while they have you in sight and under their paw.
The primaries as America's Rorsach test
The many candidates for nomination for President represent a breakdown in what had been an American consensus about what problems America faces and what the best solutions were for those problems. Each of the Parties and each candidate represent definitions of what the problems are, and each candidate is offering himself, with his or her view of what those problems are and his or her solutions, to the public in an effort to convince enough voters that they should be given the power of government to try to solve those problems.
This started out as an effort to answer dday's question at Hullabaloo, and this analytic approach seemed like it would tell us a lot about the Republican candidates also. So what problems, with their solutions, are being presented? Let's look at them, first withing each party and then between the parties. The approach is to take the Democratic candidates first, Then the Republicans, then compare across parties.
The Democrats
dday at Hullabaloo poses this description of what the top three Democrats appear to stand for.
dday's description suggests that Hillary is a old line politician who knows how to both get elected and how to work the levers of power, while Obama represents a unique breakthrough for America in our long battle to overcome the American disease of racism. That would imply that both Hillary and Obama offer excellent candidates who are at the top of our political class, but are still trapped by the existing political system. Hillary can do what good politicians can do and can hold the nation together, while Obama offers a great deal less in policy terms but also offers a great breakthrough in dealing with the American problem of Racism. He is vague on policy but implies that his very candidacy for the Presidency is America's solution.
Which leaves Edwards as the candidate who recognizes that America is in the middle of unparalleled changes. Edward's rhetoric is that he is the only candidate who really recognizes those changes and that he is prepared to deal with them. All of this is implied in that three sentence description of the images of the campaigns.
If Edwards is correct about the fact of the need for structural changes and that there is a great deal of strong resistance to those changed in powerful corners, then the next question is whether Edwards' proposed solutions will deal effectively with the problems America rather clearly has. Of those two issues, the first is the more important, because the government will be better able to deal with big changes if the public has been prepared in advance during the political campaign and shows they agree with and support the candidate they elect.
If America really is in a situation that requires significant changes and new initiatives, then the image that Edwards has developed will make it easier for him to actually accomplish anything. His specific solutions proposed now are less important than the fact that he is preparing the American public to accept the need for changes. That's going to undercut the defensive moves from Wall Street and the economic conservatives when the time comes to make changes.
This is the description of problems and solutions as seen through the Democratic candidates. This "compare and contrast" for the Democratic candidates appears to have clarified what the issues really are, so let's expand the analysis and compare the images of the Republicans to each other.
The Republicans
In contrast to the Democrats who are running on the need for changes, the Republicans are all running by offering proposals from the Republican past. The consensus they have is that America's problems cannot be rooted in the America's existing social or economic structures and that something general and unspecific called "conservatism" is the answer. It is when they try to get at the specifics of what conservatism demands that they have no consensus. The variety of solutions the various candidate offer show they to not agree on what the problems are. The varied positions of the candidates shows that.
McCain and Giuliani agree that all of America's current problems can be described as being attacked by enemies, and they both offer to fight those enemies. Both are offering militaristic solutions. The distinctions between the two is that McCain focuses on enemies outside the U.S. and he appears competent to apply those militaristic solutions and maybe with less corruption. Rudy sees enemies everywhere, and will apply military and police solutions to immigrants and minorities as rapidly as to terrorists. I expect to see a Rudy slogan of "America uber Alles!" at any time. Rudy appears to be the least ethical Republican running for the nomination, and he is certainly the most likely to be influenced by organized crime.
Fred Thompson is running on a campaign of "Elect me. I'm the REAL conservative." He doesn't describe America's problems, but suggests that whatever they are, conservative ideology is the solution and he will apply it. Other than that, he has no real policy. He simply offers himself, the new Reagan, as the solution. He is also, as Reagan did and Nixon before him, catering to the Republican Racists and Nativists. Fred is also more low key (lethargic even) than Rudy, or any other Republican candidate is.
Huckabee is offering the Bible as the solution to all our problems. He identifies America's problems as resulting from the rejection of Biblical Truth, and he proposes solving those problems by enforcing the prescriptions that he reads from the Bible.
Ron Paul is running on the platform that the very existence of government, including most use of the armed forces, is the source of America's problems, and he will solve America's problems by eliminating most government services. The idea is that every individual is so limited by the controls placed on him that he cannot be fully productive, so the problem is the controls. Remove those controls to achieve greater social and economic productivity and freedom. His literal, nonhistorical , and extremely limited view of the U.S. Constitution attracts a lot of people but would certainly do away with the Common Law and stare decisis in the Supreme Court.
Which brings me to Mitt Romney. Mitt recognizes that the modern Republican Party has been a coalition of the Wall Street Free marketers and Libertarians, the evangelicals, and the militarists and Nativists. That coalition has broken up, and the problem Mitt is trying to solve is reconstructing the Republican coalition. The evangelical Republicans have gotten very little back from the Republican Party, making Huckabee very attractive. The other problems Mitt doesn't face up to include growing economic disparity because the government has been redistributing American income from the middle class to the wealthy and failing to act on the export of middle class jobs or on the failure of the health care system to protect so many Americans, it is going to be hard to sell conservative free market solutions to the evangelicals. Then the failure of the militarist Republicans to resolve anything with the invasion of Iraq, leaving the American military stuck there while both Afghanistan and Pakistan fall apart, Mitt is going to find it difficult to sell a return to the failed Republican coalition. So Mitt's problem, the one he is trying to solve with his candidacy, is nothing more than the collapse of the Republican coalition. He offers nothing beyond possibly getting him elected President as a solution.
So having looked at the individual candidates, what can we tell about the two parties and their view of the problems and solutions?
The Party differences
The Republicans now face the collapse of the Republican Party consensus on both problems and solutions. The Reagan Revolution was based on a shared consensus (at least in the Republican Party) that if government planning, controls and limitations were removed, then private enterprise consisting of individual corporations and people, all led by "The Right People" using the social and economic institutions of free enterprise and wealth accumulation, could solve all the problems America faced. They sold this to America, and they have tried it for thirty years with disastrous results.
Yet the Republicans never saw or acknowledged the real problems (terrorism, globalism and its rejection, Peak oil, the hollowing out of the American productive economy and its replacement by a largely financial economy in which the middle class is of much less importance, and now Global Warming just for a start) of the 21st century coming, and when those problems became too obvious to overlook, the Republicans had no tools with which to solve those problems other than military invasion, replacing the court powers of warrants and habeas corpus with police power unified in the Department of Homeland Security and directed by intrusive spying on everyone, all linked together with a corrupt form of unplanned and uncontrolled free enterprise to hopefully solve them.
The result of the Reagan Revolution is an economy that is rapidly eliminating much of the middle class by remaking America socially and economically along the Latin American model (Mexico and Brazil especially) while miring America in the same boom-and-bust process that existed from the end of the American Civil War until the Great Depression. That's not the worst of it.
Since the Reagan/Libertarian/Free enterprise model allows government no power to act outside of the military and police, we have become enmeshed in a series of expanding wars in the middle east while at home we find expanded police powers, elimination of the protections provided by the courts and the Rule of Law, and the growth of secret government run by a society of spies and spy-lovers.
The only response the Republican Party offers to this set of conservative-caused or accentuated problems is to accuse the Bush administration of not being real conservatives, because if Bush had been a real conservative, America would not be having the problems that we all recognize we are having. The Republican mantra is that Conservatism never fails. Only people fail by being insufficiently conservative.
The Democrats, on the other hand, recognize that there are problems which are big and growing bigger. Barack Obama seems to have the least understanding of the general magnitude of those problems. He is a product of America's greatest and longest running problem, Racism, and sees that if America elects him President that action will signal that American is overcoming the Race problem. He is right.
But Obama's solution to the rest of the problems America faces today is to try to stop the bickering with the conservatives, listen to them and honor their input and work out a set of consensus solutions to those problems. It's not clear that he even understands the problems America faces. He clearly does not understand the health care crisis. He offers himself as someone with the abilities to make a problem solving process that removes the "bickering" that has paralyzed Washington and thus lets both Republicans and Democrats come together and solve the real problems. The recent racial flap between Obama and Hillary showed he is fully capable bickering with the best of them, but he and Hillary have worked to quickly tamp down that bickering. But was the solution an example of Obama's Kumbaya politics, or of Clintonian triangulation? And how does Obama's promise to eliminate bickering in Washington differ from Bush’s promise in 2000 to being a kinder and gentler tone to Washington? Obama is repackaging the same old promises and selling then as “New and Improved” as far as I can see.
Edwards has expanded the message that America's problems are structural and now Obama has expanded the message that bickering between adults can be resolved. I agree with Edwards, but I simply don't believe that the Republicans can afford to give up their obstructionism in the Senate. They have nothing positive to offer as solutions, but they still have the old guerrilla tactics of preventing the government from functioning and thus challenging its legitimacy, then offering themselves to the public as the solution to getting a government that works. I don[t see how Obama can get around that Republican dynamic. They HAVE to obstruct government if they have any hope of retaining power at all.
So that's Obama and Edwards. How about Hillary? Is Hillary too mired in the corporate-dominated past that she and Bill Clinton had to live in during the 90's? That’s a part of her image I’m sure she would get rid of. It’ll be hard to do while she is collecting corporate money to run on, though. I don't know if that really is the modern Hillary or just the image she is stuck with.
Conclusion
Personally I prefer Edwards among the three Democratic candidates. I suspect that the Press is ignoring him in large part because he does not have a machine that can compete with the machine Hillary has built over the last eight years and the one that Obama has been building. The difference that large sums of money have on the Press is obvious. Maybe he’ll break out in the next six or so weeks. UNfortunately, it's probably between Obama and Hillary, and I am moving to choose Hillary. Obama is too insubstantial as a candidate. He clearly has no clue on health care, and he has tried to run on positions that are the the right of the DLC even. Still, I'd sure rather have any of the Democrats over the pack of blind and ignorant men who are offered by the Republican Party.
It’s hard to avoid the fact that the Republicans are so heavily mired in the past and in conservative ideologies that they can't even recognize the seriousness of modern problems or accept that the solutions will require abandoning the failed Reagan Revolution. (Huckabee is really mired in the past - two thousand years ago.) America's current problems have grown out of the past, and the answers that supposedly worked before will not solve them, even if they are mixed with unrestrained militarism. The conservative ideology is a major barrier to even recognizing what has caused current problems, as well as a barrier to determining what the solutions need to be. To rephrase St. Ronnie, Government is not the Problem. The conservative movement is the Problem.
The Democrats do recognize that there are real and modern problems, with, I think, Obama being the least publicly aware of them. But Obama may also be the least tied to his own past. I don't know, because he has only come on the scene nationally in the last two or three years and I can't say that I know enough about him to trust his reactions or abilities. Unfortunately, all three Democrats come out of legislatures, so there is less clarity in their images. Legislators simply cannot be held accountable for government actions the way executives can. But all three Democrats are looking towards the future, not the past.
This next six weeks is going to be especially interesting as all these contrasts play out against each other.
Caveats
The initial statement by dday appears to me to be framed in a pro-Edwards context. That doesn't bother me much because I had already come to much the same conclusion about Edwards and I do prefer him as a candidate.
I am describing my reactions to the carefully crafted public images of each of the above candidates. Such crafted images are designed to conceal more than they reveal. Only Giuliani and Thompson seem to have lost control of their public images so that we have a better view of the flaws of the individual behind the image. McCain, interestingly enough, appears to have minimized the constructed image and redefines the flaws thus exposed as an advantage he calls "Straight-talk." The rough edges exposed now have become a sort of image of no-publicly-crafted image for him. It is, of course, carefully crafted.
I am then comparing those carefully crafted images with the public descriptions of America and the world that have been presented by the Press and those descriptions that I can find on the Internet. Overall, most of the data is of doubtful reliability, but it is the best I can get. This is my attempt to pull those disparate sources of data together into some form of rational structure that I feel comfortable with. The structure should then show what data is good and what does not fit. To pull it all together, I have made a lot of judgments about what to accept and a lot more judgments about what to ignore. So be it.
This analysis applies to the current situation. I am not trying to predict the future.
Given those caveats, I do not offer this as "The Truth." Any reader should look at it, see if it contains anything that resonates with them positively or negatively, and then accept or reject part or all of what I have written. I'm betting that this is worthwhile. It's up to the reader to decide if they agree or disagree.
This started out as an effort to answer dday's question at Hullabaloo, and this analytic approach seemed like it would tell us a lot about the Republican candidates also. So what problems, with their solutions, are being presented? Let's look at them, first withing each party and then between the parties. The approach is to take the Democratic candidates first, Then the Republicans, then compare across parties.
The Democrats
dday at Hullabaloo poses this description of what the top three Democrats appear to stand for.
Hillary Clinton is running to change the President; Barack Obama is running to change our politics; John Edwards is running to change the country.This is the image each has acquired, and as image goes, seems to carry some truth. It encapsulates the rhetoric each candidate has been running on, together with the public response to that rhetoric. At the same time, it seems accurate for any one of the candidates in part because of the contrast with the other two. Does it really describe how each would act as President? Or is it establishing artificial distinctions between the individuals in order to try to impose some clarity on the race? I think it is more of the latter, but it's the best we have.
dday's description suggests that Hillary is a old line politician who knows how to both get elected and how to work the levers of power, while Obama represents a unique breakthrough for America in our long battle to overcome the American disease of racism. That would imply that both Hillary and Obama offer excellent candidates who are at the top of our political class, but are still trapped by the existing political system. Hillary can do what good politicians can do and can hold the nation together, while Obama offers a great deal less in policy terms but also offers a great breakthrough in dealing with the American problem of Racism. He is vague on policy but implies that his very candidacy for the Presidency is America's solution.
Which leaves Edwards as the candidate who recognizes that America is in the middle of unparalleled changes. Edward's rhetoric is that he is the only candidate who really recognizes those changes and that he is prepared to deal with them. All of this is implied in that three sentence description of the images of the campaigns.
If Edwards is correct about the fact of the need for structural changes and that there is a great deal of strong resistance to those changed in powerful corners, then the next question is whether Edwards' proposed solutions will deal effectively with the problems America rather clearly has. Of those two issues, the first is the more important, because the government will be better able to deal with big changes if the public has been prepared in advance during the political campaign and shows they agree with and support the candidate they elect.
If America really is in a situation that requires significant changes and new initiatives, then the image that Edwards has developed will make it easier for him to actually accomplish anything. His specific solutions proposed now are less important than the fact that he is preparing the American public to accept the need for changes. That's going to undercut the defensive moves from Wall Street and the economic conservatives when the time comes to make changes.
This is the description of problems and solutions as seen through the Democratic candidates. This "compare and contrast" for the Democratic candidates appears to have clarified what the issues really are, so let's expand the analysis and compare the images of the Republicans to each other.
The Republicans
In contrast to the Democrats who are running on the need for changes, the Republicans are all running by offering proposals from the Republican past. The consensus they have is that America's problems cannot be rooted in the America's existing social or economic structures and that something general and unspecific called "conservatism" is the answer. It is when they try to get at the specifics of what conservatism demands that they have no consensus. The variety of solutions the various candidate offer show they to not agree on what the problems are. The varied positions of the candidates shows that.
McCain and Giuliani agree that all of America's current problems can be described as being attacked by enemies, and they both offer to fight those enemies. Both are offering militaristic solutions. The distinctions between the two is that McCain focuses on enemies outside the U.S. and he appears competent to apply those militaristic solutions and maybe with less corruption. Rudy sees enemies everywhere, and will apply military and police solutions to immigrants and minorities as rapidly as to terrorists. I expect to see a Rudy slogan of "America uber Alles!" at any time. Rudy appears to be the least ethical Republican running for the nomination, and he is certainly the most likely to be influenced by organized crime.
Fred Thompson is running on a campaign of "Elect me. I'm the REAL conservative." He doesn't describe America's problems, but suggests that whatever they are, conservative ideology is the solution and he will apply it. Other than that, he has no real policy. He simply offers himself, the new Reagan, as the solution. He is also, as Reagan did and Nixon before him, catering to the Republican Racists and Nativists. Fred is also more low key (lethargic even) than Rudy, or any other Republican candidate is.
Huckabee is offering the Bible as the solution to all our problems. He identifies America's problems as resulting from the rejection of Biblical Truth, and he proposes solving those problems by enforcing the prescriptions that he reads from the Bible.
Ron Paul is running on the platform that the very existence of government, including most use of the armed forces, is the source of America's problems, and he will solve America's problems by eliminating most government services. The idea is that every individual is so limited by the controls placed on him that he cannot be fully productive, so the problem is the controls. Remove those controls to achieve greater social and economic productivity and freedom. His literal, nonhistorical , and extremely limited view of the U.S. Constitution attracts a lot of people but would certainly do away with the Common Law and stare decisis in the Supreme Court.
Which brings me to Mitt Romney. Mitt recognizes that the modern Republican Party has been a coalition of the Wall Street Free marketers and Libertarians, the evangelicals, and the militarists and Nativists. That coalition has broken up, and the problem Mitt is trying to solve is reconstructing the Republican coalition. The evangelical Republicans have gotten very little back from the Republican Party, making Huckabee very attractive. The other problems Mitt doesn't face up to include growing economic disparity because the government has been redistributing American income from the middle class to the wealthy and failing to act on the export of middle class jobs or on the failure of the health care system to protect so many Americans, it is going to be hard to sell conservative free market solutions to the evangelicals. Then the failure of the militarist Republicans to resolve anything with the invasion of Iraq, leaving the American military stuck there while both Afghanistan and Pakistan fall apart, Mitt is going to find it difficult to sell a return to the failed Republican coalition. So Mitt's problem, the one he is trying to solve with his candidacy, is nothing more than the collapse of the Republican coalition. He offers nothing beyond possibly getting him elected President as a solution.
So having looked at the individual candidates, what can we tell about the two parties and their view of the problems and solutions?
The Party differences
The Republicans now face the collapse of the Republican Party consensus on both problems and solutions. The Reagan Revolution was based on a shared consensus (at least in the Republican Party) that if government planning, controls and limitations were removed, then private enterprise consisting of individual corporations and people, all led by "The Right People" using the social and economic institutions of free enterprise and wealth accumulation, could solve all the problems America faced. They sold this to America, and they have tried it for thirty years with disastrous results.
Yet the Republicans never saw or acknowledged the real problems (terrorism, globalism and its rejection, Peak oil, the hollowing out of the American productive economy and its replacement by a largely financial economy in which the middle class is of much less importance, and now Global Warming just for a start) of the 21st century coming, and when those problems became too obvious to overlook, the Republicans had no tools with which to solve those problems other than military invasion, replacing the court powers of warrants and habeas corpus with police power unified in the Department of Homeland Security and directed by intrusive spying on everyone, all linked together with a corrupt form of unplanned and uncontrolled free enterprise to hopefully solve them.
The result of the Reagan Revolution is an economy that is rapidly eliminating much of the middle class by remaking America socially and economically along the Latin American model (Mexico and Brazil especially) while miring America in the same boom-and-bust process that existed from the end of the American Civil War until the Great Depression. That's not the worst of it.
Since the Reagan/Libertarian/Free enterprise model allows government no power to act outside of the military and police, we have become enmeshed in a series of expanding wars in the middle east while at home we find expanded police powers, elimination of the protections provided by the courts and the Rule of Law, and the growth of secret government run by a society of spies and spy-lovers.
The only response the Republican Party offers to this set of conservative-caused or accentuated problems is to accuse the Bush administration of not being real conservatives, because if Bush had been a real conservative, America would not be having the problems that we all recognize we are having. The Republican mantra is that Conservatism never fails. Only people fail by being insufficiently conservative.
The Democrats, on the other hand, recognize that there are problems which are big and growing bigger. Barack Obama seems to have the least understanding of the general magnitude of those problems. He is a product of America's greatest and longest running problem, Racism, and sees that if America elects him President that action will signal that American is overcoming the Race problem. He is right.
But Obama's solution to the rest of the problems America faces today is to try to stop the bickering with the conservatives, listen to them and honor their input and work out a set of consensus solutions to those problems. It's not clear that he even understands the problems America faces. He clearly does not understand the health care crisis. He offers himself as someone with the abilities to make a problem solving process that removes the "bickering" that has paralyzed Washington and thus lets both Republicans and Democrats come together and solve the real problems. The recent racial flap between Obama and Hillary showed he is fully capable bickering with the best of them, but he and Hillary have worked to quickly tamp down that bickering. But was the solution an example of Obama's Kumbaya politics, or of Clintonian triangulation? And how does Obama's promise to eliminate bickering in Washington differ from Bush’s promise in 2000 to being a kinder and gentler tone to Washington? Obama is repackaging the same old promises and selling then as “New and Improved” as far as I can see.
Edwards has expanded the message that America's problems are structural and now Obama has expanded the message that bickering between adults can be resolved. I agree with Edwards, but I simply don't believe that the Republicans can afford to give up their obstructionism in the Senate. They have nothing positive to offer as solutions, but they still have the old guerrilla tactics of preventing the government from functioning and thus challenging its legitimacy, then offering themselves to the public as the solution to getting a government that works. I don[t see how Obama can get around that Republican dynamic. They HAVE to obstruct government if they have any hope of retaining power at all.
So that's Obama and Edwards. How about Hillary? Is Hillary too mired in the corporate-dominated past that she and Bill Clinton had to live in during the 90's? That’s a part of her image I’m sure she would get rid of. It’ll be hard to do while she is collecting corporate money to run on, though. I don't know if that really is the modern Hillary or just the image she is stuck with.
Conclusion
Personally I prefer Edwards among the three Democratic candidates. I suspect that the Press is ignoring him in large part because he does not have a machine that can compete with the machine Hillary has built over the last eight years and the one that Obama has been building. The difference that large sums of money have on the Press is obvious. Maybe he’ll break out in the next six or so weeks. UNfortunately, it's probably between Obama and Hillary, and I am moving to choose Hillary. Obama is too insubstantial as a candidate. He clearly has no clue on health care, and he has tried to run on positions that are the the right of the DLC even. Still, I'd sure rather have any of the Democrats over the pack of blind and ignorant men who are offered by the Republican Party.
It’s hard to avoid the fact that the Republicans are so heavily mired in the past and in conservative ideologies that they can't even recognize the seriousness of modern problems or accept that the solutions will require abandoning the failed Reagan Revolution. (Huckabee is really mired in the past - two thousand years ago.) America's current problems have grown out of the past, and the answers that supposedly worked before will not solve them, even if they are mixed with unrestrained militarism. The conservative ideology is a major barrier to even recognizing what has caused current problems, as well as a barrier to determining what the solutions need to be. To rephrase St. Ronnie, Government is not the Problem. The conservative movement is the Problem.
The Democrats do recognize that there are real and modern problems, with, I think, Obama being the least publicly aware of them. But Obama may also be the least tied to his own past. I don't know, because he has only come on the scene nationally in the last two or three years and I can't say that I know enough about him to trust his reactions or abilities. Unfortunately, all three Democrats come out of legislatures, so there is less clarity in their images. Legislators simply cannot be held accountable for government actions the way executives can. But all three Democrats are looking towards the future, not the past.
This next six weeks is going to be especially interesting as all these contrasts play out against each other.
Caveats
The initial statement by dday appears to me to be framed in a pro-Edwards context. That doesn't bother me much because I had already come to much the same conclusion about Edwards and I do prefer him as a candidate.
I am describing my reactions to the carefully crafted public images of each of the above candidates. Such crafted images are designed to conceal more than they reveal. Only Giuliani and Thompson seem to have lost control of their public images so that we have a better view of the flaws of the individual behind the image. McCain, interestingly enough, appears to have minimized the constructed image and redefines the flaws thus exposed as an advantage he calls "Straight-talk." The rough edges exposed now have become a sort of image of no-publicly-crafted image for him. It is, of course, carefully crafted.
I am then comparing those carefully crafted images with the public descriptions of America and the world that have been presented by the Press and those descriptions that I can find on the Internet. Overall, most of the data is of doubtful reliability, but it is the best I can get. This is my attempt to pull those disparate sources of data together into some form of rational structure that I feel comfortable with. The structure should then show what data is good and what does not fit. To pull it all together, I have made a lot of judgments about what to accept and a lot more judgments about what to ignore. So be it.
This analysis applies to the current situation. I am not trying to predict the future.
Given those caveats, I do not offer this as "The Truth." Any reader should look at it, see if it contains anything that resonates with them positively or negatively, and then accept or reject part or all of what I have written. I'm betting that this is worthwhile. It's up to the reader to decide if they agree or disagree.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Congress had approved torture for interrogation
Laura Rozen points out that although Congress has been quick to have hearings on the destruction of the interrogation-by-torture tapes in Thailand, the focus has been on the destruction of the tapes, not what was on them. Why?
Because Congress knew that torture was being used to interrogate prisoners, and approved of it. They're as guilty as the the Bush administration. Investigating torture would mean that Congress would have to investigate itself as well as the Republican administration.
That's sick. Our government, in its entirety, has abandoned American principles. The Republicans led the way, but the Democrats have gone quietly along with the crowd.
Because Congress knew that torture was being used to interrogate prisoners, and approved of it. They're as guilty as the the Bush administration. Investigating torture would mean that Congress would have to investigate itself as well as the Republican administration.
That's sick. Our government, in its entirety, has abandoned American principles. The Republicans led the way, but the Democrats have gone quietly along with the crowd.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
CNN's John King is a subservient bootlicker, and doesn't want it recognized
Glenn Greenwald reported earlier [*] on the extreme adulation demonstrated by CNN's John King in an interview was broadcast on "Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer. The transcript of the interview was presented in its entirety with out any part of it being left out.
King is pissed at how Glenn interpreted his fawning report on St. McCain, and sent Glenn an email, which Glenn has published, also in its entirety.
If you want to see what is wrong with TV political "journalism," go read Glenn's article.
There should be a psychiatric name for John King's behavior, but I don't know what that form of denial and insanity really is called by the professionals who work with psychiatric patients.
[*]Sit through the advertisement for the day-pass. The ad is short, 15 seconds or less, and it's worth it.
King is pissed at how Glenn interpreted his fawning report on St. McCain, and sent Glenn an email, which Glenn has published, also in its entirety.
If you want to see what is wrong with TV political "journalism," go read Glenn's article.
There should be a psychiatric name for John King's behavior, but I don't know what that form of denial and insanity really is called by the professionals who work with psychiatric patients.
[*]Sit through the advertisement for the day-pass. The ad is short, 15 seconds or less, and it's worth it.
Onion "report" on Romney's tolerence - No! Wait! It's Cnn!
It's horrible. Horrible, I tell you. Just how utterly tolerent can Mitt Romney really be??
Mitt Romney Defends Himself Against Allegations Of Tolerance.
[h/t to Atrios.]
Mitt Romney Defends Himself Against Allegations Of Tolerance.
[h/t to Atrios.]
Why is the best Democratic candidate ignored by the media?
Greg Sargent at Talking Points Memo Horsed Mouth documents the strange blackout of coverage of the Democrat's best possible candidate for President. There is no rational explanation even attempted to explain the problem.
When there is no rational systemic explanation for such a clear aberration in coverage, the logical explanation becomes some kind of powerful conspiracy. Who's afraid of him that also has the power to limit coverage of his race for the nomination? The answer is more likely to be a small group than any single individual, of course.
I suspect that public financing of political campaigns would eliminate this kind of apparent conspiracy.
[I DON'T LIKE CONSPIRACY THEORIES! What is an alternative that passes the laugh test?]
When there is no rational systemic explanation for such a clear aberration in coverage, the logical explanation becomes some kind of powerful conspiracy. Who's afraid of him that also has the power to limit coverage of his race for the nomination? The answer is more likely to be a small group than any single individual, of course.
I suspect that public financing of political campaigns would eliminate this kind of apparent conspiracy.
[I DON'T LIKE CONSPIRACY THEORIES! What is an alternative that passes the laugh test?]
The Republican nominee for President will be Mitt Romney
We now know that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for President Why? See Kevin Drum.
Kevin explains clearly why the nominee cannot be John McCain. Fred Thompson peaked when he announced his (long anticipated) run for the nomination. Rudy Giuliani has collapsed, and his fantasy of a win in Florida is unsustainable. Mike Huckabee? No chance he will get any support outside the Evangelical Republicans (Thank God!!) And Ron Paul? He, too has his loyal supporters, and everyone else (according to the polls) has good sense. Newt Gingrich realistically recognized that he has no chance. That leaves Mitt Romney and Bart Simpson, and Bart won't be age 35 by January 2009.
So - the answer is Mitt Romney. The question is "Who will be the Republicansacrificial lamb Presidential nominee for President in 2008.
Any questions?
Kevin explains clearly why the nominee cannot be John McCain. Fred Thompson peaked when he announced his (long anticipated) run for the nomination. Rudy Giuliani has collapsed, and his fantasy of a win in Florida is unsustainable. Mike Huckabee? No chance he will get any support outside the Evangelical Republicans (Thank God!!) And Ron Paul? He, too has his loyal supporters, and everyone else (according to the polls) has good sense. Newt Gingrich realistically recognized that he has no chance. That leaves Mitt Romney and Bart Simpson, and Bart won't be age 35 by January 2009.
So - the answer is Mitt Romney. The question is "Who will be the Republican
Any questions?
Huckabee's "fairtax" destroy's retirees 401(k)s
Kevin Drum points out that under Huckabee's 30% national sales tax, all the money that was taxed and then put into retirement savings plans becomes again taxed at 30% when it is withdrawn by the retirees. Double taxing aimed at retirees so that investors don't have to pay any taxes at all.
Once again we see the Republican idea that the average people live only to make the rich get richer.
Once again we see the Republican idea that the average people live only to make the rich get richer.
The torture tapes: a history
Credit where credit is due. The Washington Post has a good article (informative and plausible) explaining why the torture tapes were made and what happened to them.
Worth reading.
Worth reading.
American ignorance enforced by religious beliefs
Too many people believe that Creationism and enforced ignorance of Evolution and the Big Bang Theory, the organizing principles of modern biological science and modern physics, are things that exist only in small towns in Tennessee and the Appalachian mountains. Not true. Here is a story from Fort Bend County, Texas, which is a large portion of the Southeast part of the Houston Metropolitan Area, and not coincidently, includes the people who have sent both Representatives Tom DeLay and Ron Paul to Congress. From Nancy Hentschel in Sugar Land, Texas Fort Bend Now:
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) as an approval process for textbooks that are used in Texas Public Schools, and the state of Texas will not pay for textbooks which are not approved. Currently the TEA is considering the content of science textbooks for Texas schools. The textbooks that are printed for the massive Texas market are then also sold to school districts across the United States, because it is a lot cheaper to print only one version of a textbook.
But the members of the TEA are elected, in down-ballot but statewide elections that are of interest only to a few very committed political junkies and a whole lot of Texas religious nuts and Creationists. (Think Mike Huckabee, thought he comes from that small and mostly rural state north of Texas.) The Press does not cover elections to the TEA, so the candidates are not questioned regarding their policies or beliefs. also, the religiuos fundamentalists took complete control of the Texas Republican Party over two decades ago.
The result is that as long as the Press does not find a smoking gun issue that is can report on, the religious fundamentalists effectively appoint the members of the TEA, who then carefully craft the Texas textbooks to meet the demands of their religion. That means anti-science science textbooks, as well as pro-free market nationalist and nativist history texts. And remember, these same textbooks are offered cheap around the U.S.
That's the background behind the recent firing of the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer. What did she do to get fired? She emailed - without recommendation - information to likely participants regarding time and location of a talk to be given by a highly respected science educator who was also known as an opponent of Intelligent Design.
The TEA religious yahoos do not want good science information to be presented to children, because when they are ignorant they are easier to convert to Yahooism. They want the government to forbid science and teach only religion.
Mike Huckabee is a supreme religious Yahoo - with a great smile. He's a Dominionist This is another part of the Constitution that he wants to change because it conflicts with his definition of "God's standards."
I taught sixth grade in Texas for three years 2001-2004. During that time, I was absolutely warned to not begin to say the word “evolution” or we would have every preacher in the district, as well as the media, breathing down our necks, and then there would truly be no teaching or learning. Sadly, I needed the position, so I played the “hide the issue and hide the learning” game.This isn't some backwoods rural small town. This is the public education system of part of the Houston, Texas metropolitan area. But it spreads through much of Texas politics, supported by Texas' current governor, Rick Perry.
Every time I tell this story, usually at a dinner party, people look at me like I am reliving some ancient past. I remind them that this policy ruled only two years ago – and in their progressive community. Like many issues that are easier to disbelieve than to address, people inevitably choose disbelief.
It is more difficult for me to choose disbelief, but over time, even I can begin to question my experience. So several weeks ago, I decided to test the continued use of this policy. I interviewed with a high school in Fort Bend and asked if I could use current events in the English classroom to explore why real evolution education is often an inoculation against racism and eugenic posturing. The interviewer quickly replied, “We do not challenge the sensitive “beliefs” of our student community.”
Too bad, … our most ill-informed students fall easy prey to eugenic manipulation, intolerance, and gangs because they do not understand real evolution. As can easily be seen in our prisons, it is the most ignorant of our population who are the most susceptible to a twisted understanding of evolution and racism. In more affluent areas, evolution ignorance is commonly twisted into lame justification for oppression.
God forbid that we should teach knowledge over “beliefs.” No wonder our politicians keep repeating the mantra “I believe …this and I believe …that” The “belief” word demands free reign to twist reality without being questioned. It is a true tragedy when believing trumps thinking, especially in our schools.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) as an approval process for textbooks that are used in Texas Public Schools, and the state of Texas will not pay for textbooks which are not approved. Currently the TEA is considering the content of science textbooks for Texas schools. The textbooks that are printed for the massive Texas market are then also sold to school districts across the United States, because it is a lot cheaper to print only one version of a textbook.
But the members of the TEA are elected, in down-ballot but statewide elections that are of interest only to a few very committed political junkies and a whole lot of Texas religious nuts and Creationists. (Think Mike Huckabee, thought he comes from that small and mostly rural state north of Texas.) The Press does not cover elections to the TEA, so the candidates are not questioned regarding their policies or beliefs. also, the religiuos fundamentalists took complete control of the Texas Republican Party over two decades ago.
The result is that as long as the Press does not find a smoking gun issue that is can report on, the religious fundamentalists effectively appoint the members of the TEA, who then carefully craft the Texas textbooks to meet the demands of their religion. That means anti-science science textbooks, as well as pro-free market nationalist and nativist history texts. And remember, these same textbooks are offered cheap around the U.S.
That's the background behind the recent firing of the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer. What did she do to get fired? She emailed - without recommendation - information to likely participants regarding time and location of a talk to be given by a highly respected science educator who was also known as an opponent of Intelligent Design.
The TEA religious yahoos do not want good science information to be presented to children, because when they are ignorant they are easier to convert to Yahooism. They want the government to forbid science and teach only religion.
Mike Huckabee is a supreme religious Yahoo - with a great smile. He's a Dominionist This is another part of the Constitution that he wants to change because it conflicts with his definition of "God's standards."
White House admits it violated law, destroyed emails
Facing a legal deadline, the White House finally, grudgingly, admitted to the federal court that it recycled the backup tapes of White House documents in a way that lost large numbers of documents forever. From the Associated Press via TPM:
The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages — including those pertaining to the CIA leak case — have been taped over and are gone forever.It is hard to conceive that this was just a stupid administrative error. Historians who study the Bush administration will need to be experts in criminal forensics.
The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.
Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any White House officials involved in discussions about leaking a CIA officer's identity to reporters. [Snip]
If the e-mails were not saved, the White House might have violated two laws requiring preservation of documents that fall into the categories of federal records or presidential records. [Snip]
"If the backup tapes have been erased or taped over or recycled, it's hard to imagine where we will find copies of many lost e-mails," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, said in an interview Wednesday.
"It appears that the White House has now destroyed the evidence of its misconduct," said Anne Weismann, the chief counsel for the ethics group.
"The White House declaration raises more questions than it answers, specifically the likelihood that for a very significant period of time — March 2003 to October 2003 — the White House recycled its backup tapes," said Weismann.
"As a result there may be no way to recover the missing e-mails from a period in which the U.S. decided to go to war with Iraq, White House officials leaked the identity of Valerie Plame and the Justice Department started a criminal investigation of the White House," the lawyer said.
The sworn statement by Payton did not say how early in the Bush administration the recycling of backup computer tapes began. The statement does not say why the White House stopped recycling backup tapes in October 2003.
In the period of July until October of 2003, the White House was dealing with the Valerie Plame leak controversy. In July, at least three presidential aides leaked Plame's CIA identity to the news media after her husband suggested the administration had manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq. The Justice Department began investigating the leak in September 2003.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Huck's theocracy demand
My, my. It seems that Huckabee thinks that the U.S. constitution has to be changed to agree with his view of what God requires. I've said before that he is a Dominionist, and here he admits it up front in a Presidential debate. All Hail the American Theocracy!
From his debate as reported by MSNBC in which he discussed at length two topics which regularly are discussed in his stump speech, but not with this degree of specificity. I'll skip his discussion of illegal immigration, but here is his discussion on "Christian values in which he is
History has clearly shown that what he proposes is a really, really bad idea.
It has been shown, over and over, that church government it bad government. Anyone who watches the recent Kate Blanchard film "Elizabeth" will recall that it starts in 16th century England with Queen Mary burning three people to death because they dared worship God the wrong way. The climax of the film was when Elizabeth sent people to kill or imprison a whole series of Lords whose crime was to try to assassinate Queen Elizabeth at the request of the Pope. The events portrayed in the film were not fiction.
Europe did not learn from Elizabeth's tolerance of religions other than the Church of England. The Thirty Years War was fought between 1618 and 1648 over much of Germany and parts of Italy and the Low Countries causing extensive death from war, famine and disease for no better reason than to determine which of several ways of worshiping God would monopolize each nation through its government. Theocracies fight wars over God.
The English were not immune to the call of theocratic war in the 17th century. They fought the English Civil War. The war was fought between the armies of the Catholic monarch and the Protestant Parliament and ended when King Charles I was decapitated, his son exiled, and the monarchy was replaced first by the English Commonwealth, then by the Protectorate under Cromwell. The Civil Wars were also about the power of the Parliament to restrict the actions of the Monarch, and established that the King could not "govern without the consent of Parliament." That made the Parliament into the equal partner with the King, something that became even more significant when Parliament overthrew King James II (because he was trying to force England back into the Catholic Church) and replaced him with the Protestant William of Orange.
Two centuries of wars and civil wars were fought over whether the monarch could enforce his religion on his people, and conquer others in the name of religion. Those two centuries have all the English-speaking peoples the tradition that 1. Religious leaders could not use the powers of government to enforce their religious doctrine and 2. the People of the nation were sovereign over the executive (King or President) through the democratically elected Parliament or Congress and the enforced Rule of Law in which no man was above the law.
Huckabee and the American Dominionists (as well as George bush) do not accept either lesson 1. or 2. Should Huckabee actually gain power nationally the result will be a police state that resembles Iran or Saudi Arabia. That's what Huckabee means when he says the Constitution should be changed to bring it in line with "God's values."
One of "God's values" - as expressed by Priests and Preachers - is that others should die or be imprisoned if they violate those people's religious pronouncements asserting "God's values." Huckabee is no better than any other theocrat. He doesn't belong in American government at any level.
From his debate as reported by MSNBC in which he discussed at length two topics which regularly are discussed in his stump speech, but not with this degree of specificity. I'll skip his discussion of illegal immigration, but here is his discussion on "Christian values in which he is
... elaborating on his belief that the constitution needs to be amended.He offers no secular reason for those amendments at all. He simply asserts that the basic law of America needs to be changed to meet the greater "Standards" of his God. The only apparent reason is that he reads the Bible (or his God whispers uniquely into his ear, who knows?)
"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
History has clearly shown that what he proposes is a really, really bad idea.
It has been shown, over and over, that church government it bad government. Anyone who watches the recent Kate Blanchard film "Elizabeth" will recall that it starts in 16th century England with Queen Mary burning three people to death because they dared worship God the wrong way. The climax of the film was when Elizabeth sent people to kill or imprison a whole series of Lords whose crime was to try to assassinate Queen Elizabeth at the request of the Pope. The events portrayed in the film were not fiction.
Europe did not learn from Elizabeth's tolerance of religions other than the Church of England. The Thirty Years War was fought between 1618 and 1648 over much of Germany and parts of Italy and the Low Countries causing extensive death from war, famine and disease for no better reason than to determine which of several ways of worshiping God would monopolize each nation through its government. Theocracies fight wars over God.
The English were not immune to the call of theocratic war in the 17th century. They fought the English Civil War. The war was fought between the armies of the Catholic monarch and the Protestant Parliament and ended when King Charles I was decapitated, his son exiled, and the monarchy was replaced first by the English Commonwealth, then by the Protectorate under Cromwell. The Civil Wars were also about the power of the Parliament to restrict the actions of the Monarch, and established that the King could not "govern without the consent of Parliament." That made the Parliament into the equal partner with the King, something that became even more significant when Parliament overthrew King James II (because he was trying to force England back into the Catholic Church) and replaced him with the Protestant William of Orange.
Two centuries of wars and civil wars were fought over whether the monarch could enforce his religion on his people, and conquer others in the name of religion. Those two centuries have all the English-speaking peoples the tradition that 1. Religious leaders could not use the powers of government to enforce their religious doctrine and 2. the People of the nation were sovereign over the executive (King or President) through the democratically elected Parliament or Congress and the enforced Rule of Law in which no man was above the law.
Huckabee and the American Dominionists (as well as George bush) do not accept either lesson 1. or 2. Should Huckabee actually gain power nationally the result will be a police state that resembles Iran or Saudi Arabia. That's what Huckabee means when he says the Constitution should be changed to bring it in line with "God's values."
One of "God's values" - as expressed by Priests and Preachers - is that others should die or be imprisoned if they violate those people's religious pronouncements asserting "God's values." Huckabee is no better than any other theocrat. He doesn't belong in American government at any level.
Bush has allowed Pakistan to go to Hell in a handbasket
It looks like while playing his idiotic games in Irag Bush has allowed Pakistan to become the most dangerous country in the world, and now will simply hand the problem off the his successor. From the New York Times Asia Edition:
Go read the entire article to see what a complex mess Pakistan is in, and don't forget - they have nuclear weapons ready to use.
Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.ISI ("Pakistan’s leading military intelligence agency — Inter-Services Intelligence") has admitted to rigging the election of 2002. They have been an extremely powerful force dominating much of Pakistan, and they have considered India to be Pakistan's greatest enemy, even as the terrorists in the Northwest provinces and Afghanistan have been causing problems.
As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.
The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so. [Snip]
The two former high-ranking intelligence officials acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, when President Musharraf publicly allied Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the militants it had nurtured for decades as a proxy force to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan. After the agency unleashed hard-line Islamist beliefs, the officials said, it struggled to stop the ideology from spreading.
¶Another former senior intelligence official said dozens of ISI officers who trained militants had come to sympathize with their cause and had had to be expelled from the agency. He said three purges had taken place since the late 1980s and included the removal of three ISI directors suspected of being sympathetic to the militants.
None of the former intelligence officials who spoke to The New York Times agreed to be identified when talking about the ISI, an agency that has gained a fearsome reputation for interfering in almost every aspect of Pakistani life. But two former American intelligence officials agreed with much of what they said about the agency’s relationship with the militants.
So did other sources close to the ISI, who admitted that the agency had supported militants in Afghanistan and Kashmir, although they said they had been ordered to do so by political leaders.
The former intelligence officials appeared to feel freer to speak as Mr. Musharraf’s eight years of military rule weakened, and as a power struggle for control over the government looms between Mr. Musharraf and opposition political parties.
The officials were interviewed before the assassination of Ms. Bhutto, the opposition leader, on Dec. 27. Since then, the government has said that Pakistani militants linked to Al Qaeda are the foremost suspects in her killing. Her supporters have accused the government of a hidden hand in the attack.
While the author of Ms. Bhutto’s death remains a mystery, the interviews with the former intelligence officials made clear that the agency remained unable to control the militants it had fostered.
The threat from the militants, the former intelligence officials warned, is one that Pakistan is unable to contain. “We could not control them,” said one former senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We indoctrinated them and told them, ‘You will go to heaven.’ You cannot turn it around so suddenly.”
Go read the entire article to see what a complex mess Pakistan is in, and don't forget - they have nuclear weapons ready to use.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Americans face a consumption-driven Recession by pulling back on consumption
Americans, staring a consumption-driven Recession in the face right after the last piggy bank they had to maintain spending was taken away with the collapse of the housing bubble, are doing the only thing possible. From the New York Times:
The fed has already announced informally that they will lower interest rates again, but the resulting inflation will shortly wipe out any gain because lenders will raise interest rates to counter anticipated inflation.
Paul Krugman points to both Edwards and Hillary for their fiscal stimulus plans. First from Edewards:
Right now it is enough just to recognize that the consumers, who have been the mainstay of the American economy since 2001, are now finally pulling back on their spending, there is nothing in place to replace them, and most of the politicians who are even slightly aware of the problem have no clue regarding what might work or why.
Strong evidence is emerging that consumer spending, a bulwark against recession over the last year even as energy prices surged and the housing market sputtered, has begun to slow sharply at every level of the American economy, from the working class to the wealthy.The perpetual Republican solution, Tax cuts for the rich, won't work to restore consumption. All they will do is hand more money to invest to the wealthy, who will invest where the returns are highest - outside the U.S. (Krugman points out that Obama's only prescription for the Recession is a tax cut. At least both Edwards and Hillary are economically competent, unlike Obama and the Republicans.)
The abrupt pullback raises the possibility that the country may be experiencing a rare decline in personal consumption, not just a slower rate of growth. Such a decline would be the first since 1991, and it would almost certainly push the entire economy into a recession in the middle of an election year.
There are mounting anecdotal signs that beginning in December Americans cut back significantly on personal consumption, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy.
The fed has already announced informally that they will lower interest rates again, but the resulting inflation will shortly wipe out any gain because lenders will raise interest rates to counter anticipated inflation.
Paul Krugman points to both Edwards and Hillary for their fiscal stimulus plans. First from Edewards:
last month, before the economic consensus turned as negative as it now has, he proposed a stimulus package including aid to unemployed workers, aid to cash-strapped state and local governments, public investment in alternative energy, and other measures.and then Hillary, in response to Edward's proposal came out with
a broadly similar but somewhat larger proposal. (It also includes aid to families having trouble paying heating bills, which seems like a clever way to put cash in the hands of people likely to spend it.) The Edwards and Clinton proposals both contain provisions for bigger stimulus if the economy worsens.As the economy continues to get worse and the election gets closer, this is going to become a larger and larger issue for all the candidates, and who ever become President is going to have to deal with this Republican-created and worsened Recession for quite a while.
Right now it is enough just to recognize that the consumers, who have been the mainstay of the American economy since 2001, are now finally pulling back on their spending, there is nothing in place to replace them, and most of the politicians who are even slightly aware of the problem have no clue regarding what might work or why.
Good news from a bad source - George Will
I really hope George isn't overstating the case so as to lull the Democrats into a state of complacency.
The old saying remains true that a week in politics is a long time and a month is forever. Nine months until the election is a really, really long time with a lot of possible events that could change things. For one thing, what does a self-financed Bloomberg campaign mean? Or a major attack on Americans by Bush's old friends, the terrorists? Bush still has Osama bin Laden in reserve, you know. Ever wonder why he never tried to catch bin Laden? And the Press still wants the Republicans back in office, if for no other reason than that they will have to develop all new sources when the Democrats get elected. Conservative Republican sources since Reagan was elected have been the basis for the careers of most top Washington journalists, and a Democratic executive branch is going to mean that most of them are starting over in competition with the new journalists. Expect the Press to fight against the Democrats and go easy on the Republicans.
But for the moment, except for a few clouds on the horizon, things look really good for the Democrats. Just ask George Will.
Today, all the usual indicators are dismal for Republicans. If that broad assertion seems counterintuitive, produce a counterexample. The adverse indicators include: shifts in voters' identifications with the two parties (Democrats now 50 percent, Republicans 36 percent); the tendency of independents (they favored Democratic candidates by 18 points in 2006); the fact that Democrats hold a majority of congressional seats in states with 303 electoral votes; the Democrats' strength and the Republicans' relative weakness in fundraising; the percentage of Americans who think the country is on the "wrong track"; the Republicans' enthusiasm deficit relative to Democrats' embrace of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, one of whom will be nominated.And this is only half way through January, with the election scheduled for November. I mean, the Recession hasn't even gotten well started yet, although Bank of America has has to bail out the nation's largest Mortgage Banker, Countrywide, while both Merrill Lynch and Citibank are trying to sell themselves to foreign governments (no one else has the necessary $ billions.) to avoid bankruptcy, while Iraq has pretty much dropped off the radar (American news only reports American casualties, not the nature or progress of the war.)
Iowa and New Hampshire were two of the three states (New Mexico was the third) that changed partisan alignment between 2000 and 2004 -- Iowa turning red, New Hampshire blue. This month, Democratic participation was twice the Republican participation in Iowa and almost 22 percent higher in New Hampshire. George W. Bush won Iowa by just 0.67 percent of the vote. Whomever the Republicans nominate should assume that he must replace Iowa's seven electoral votes if he is to reach Bush's 2004 total of 286.
Republicans try to take comfort from the fact that 61 Democratic members of Congress represent districts that President Bush carried in 2004. But 37 of those won with at least 55 percent of the vote. Furthermore, 14 Republican representatives won in 2006 by a single percentage point or less.
The old saying remains true that a week in politics is a long time and a month is forever. Nine months until the election is a really, really long time with a lot of possible events that could change things. For one thing, what does a self-financed Bloomberg campaign mean? Or a major attack on Americans by Bush's old friends, the terrorists? Bush still has Osama bin Laden in reserve, you know. Ever wonder why he never tried to catch bin Laden? And the Press still wants the Republicans back in office, if for no other reason than that they will have to develop all new sources when the Democrats get elected. Conservative Republican sources since Reagan was elected have been the basis for the careers of most top Washington journalists, and a Democratic executive branch is going to mean that most of them are starting over in competition with the new journalists. Expect the Press to fight against the Democrats and go easy on the Republicans.
But for the moment, except for a few clouds on the horizon, things look really good for the Democrats. Just ask George Will.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Neocons - who are they and how they think
If you keep hearing the term "NeoCons" or "Neo Conservatives" and would like to know who they are, where they came from, and why they matter, you might want to read They Knew they wer right: the rise of the Neocons by Jacob Heilbrunn.
If, like me, your stack of "to be read" already has become several stacks and another book added to it is unlikely to get read, then go check Timothy Noah's excellent review in the New York Review of Books. Here is a sample:
The review itself is quite interesting, and if I had more time, I'd love to read the book. But at the moment I am working on David Cay Johnston's new book Free Lunch about the details of the disaster that the Reagan Revolution has given the American economy. I'll report on Johnston's book when I have finished it.
If, like me, your stack of "to be read" already has become several stacks and another book added to it is unlikely to get read, then go check Timothy Noah's excellent review in the New York Review of Books. Here is a sample:
Neoconservatives don’t think small. They also tend to spurn empirical methods of inquiry, giving the lie to Kristol père’s famous aphorism that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. It’s truer to say that a neoconservative is a liberal (or, more often these days, just a plain old conservative) who has been seduced by the notion that America is in steep decline and must reassert itself as a moral and military force in an otherwise corrupt world. Neocons bear, Heilbrunn writes, “an uncompromising temperament” and a prophetic cast of mind, and they “use (and treat) ideas as weapons in a moral struggle.”Heilbrunn himself is a recovering NeoCon, so he has an insider's familiarity with his subject. Here is what attracted him to the group:
Did someone say “prophetic”? There’s no point denying it: neocons tend to be Jewish. There are plenty of prominent exceptions — William Bennett, the former education secretary, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late United States senator, diplomat, White House aide and sociologist, were both Roman Catholics — but neoconservatism’s priorities, which range from strong support for Israel to vehement opposition to affirmative action, are heavily influenced by the values, interests and collective historical memory of the Jewish people. Heilbrunn carries this conceit to the outermost boundaries of good taste by dividing his book into sections whose names are derived from the Old Testament: “Exodus,” “Wilderness,” “Redemption” and “Return to Exile.”
Heilbrunn confesses in the book’s prologue that he found neoconservatism “supplied me with a beguiling but ultimately artificial clarity about the world that was hard to shake.”Some of the history of the movement is explained in the review:
...we learn that neoconservatism was the final stop of an ideological journey for a group of New York intellectuals, typically the children of Jewish immigrants, that began during the early 1940s in Alcove 1 of the cafeteria at City College. Alcove 1 was the gathering place for a group of brilliant young Trotskyists that included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Melvin Lasky. Along with Irving Howe, who would later break with Trotskyism but not with the left, and Daniel Bell, who never accepted Marxist orthodoxies in any form, the Alcove 1 Trotskyists waged intellectual battle with the Stalinists in Alcove 2, who vastly outnumbered them.The end of the USSR clearly required retooling Neoconservatism, and that is briefly explained here, just before the reviewer discusses why Dick Cheney became so attracted to Neoconservatism:
Coaxed by a diverse group of thinkers that included Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr and Samuel M. Levitas, known as Sol, the veterans of Alcove 1 eventually drifted away from Trotskyism, becoming stalwarts of the anti-Communist left, where they were joined by Norman Podhoretz, then a young literary scholar. With the advent of the cold war, the proto-neocons pushed for a hard line against the Soviet Union, sometimes harder than that of anti-Communist liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and George F. Kennan; few if any of them expressed concern when they discovered that Encounter, a magazine that Irving Kristol co-founded in 1952, was secretly underwritten by the Central Intelligence Agency. The student radicalism of the late 1960s disillusioned proto-neocons about the left; George McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972 disillusioned many of them about mainstream liberalism and the Democratic Party; and after Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, a number of them stopped resisting the “conservative” label, joined the Republican Party and began to exercise power.
During the presidencies of Reagan and George W. Bush, neocon influence followed parallel arcs, gaining influence in the first term and losing it in the second. In Reagan’s case, the break came with the Iran-contra scandal, which dulled the White House’s enthusiasm for proxy wars against the Soviet Union, and the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev, in whose glasnost and perestroika many neocons did not believe.
It helped that as neoconservatism relocated from the Upper West Side to the Virginia suburbs, it had mostly abandoned the intellectual sphere for politics and journalism, where Bush felt more comfortable. No longer a lively debating society, by the 1990s it had become, Heilbrunn writes, “an echo chamber.” Probably the most significant factor was the presence of Vice President Dick Cheney, who helped Wolfowitz secure his berth with Rumsfeld, which in turn allowed Wolfowitz to install Feith. What transformed Cheney from a mild skeptic about Iraq intervention when he was defense secretary in the early 1990s (one “former colleague” informs Heilbrunn that in those days Cheney was “not in thrall” to Wolfowitz) to the unappeasable hawk he revealed himself to be after 9/11?Unfortunately, no one involved offers any support for my favorite speculation on Cheney, that he has become paranoid as a result of his heart problems. But they don't refute my idea, either.
On this, Heilbrunn is stumped, just like everyone else. Maybe an evil spirit terrorized Cheney while he slept. The ghost of Hitler, perhaps?
The review itself is quite interesting, and if I had more time, I'd love to read the book. But at the moment I am working on David Cay Johnston's new book Free Lunch about the details of the disaster that the Reagan Revolution has given the American economy. I'll report on Johnston's book when I have finished it.
When will the government investigate YOUR speech?
Think that Hate Speech laws are a good idea? Go read Glenn Greenwald to see just how good that idea really is - for tyrants of all kinds.
From the U.S. Constitution:
From the U.S. Constitution:
Amendment IThis is no less important today than it was two hundred years ago. Our freedom as individuals to speak out on any subject is immeasurably more important than your hurt feelings when we speak, and the government has no right to question what we think. Our thoughts are not to be subject to the government's control.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Bhutto assassination tied more closely to Musharraf.
As more details are revealed about the assassination of Benizar Bhutto, it becomes clearer that it was an elaborately planned and well-executed operation involving a large group of people, inside knowledge of Bhutto's anticipated movements and sloppy security conducted by the Pakistan Peoples Party. McClatchy Newspapers provides a more detailed report on what has been learned.
The two biggest questions right now are how much longer Musharaff will be President, and who will replace him.
By Saeed Shah and Jonathan S. LandayEven if Musharaff did not himself direct the assassination, it is clear that he and his government do not want the details of how it was conducted to be provided to the public or to the international community.
McClatchy NewspapersThe assassination
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Two new reports on the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27 suggest that it may have been an ambitious plot rather than an isolated act of violence and that the government of President Pervez Musharraf knows far more than it's admitted.
A police officer who witnessed the assassination said a mysterious crowd stopped Bhutto's car that day, prompting her to emerge through the sunroof. And a document has surfaced in the Pakistani news media that contradicts the government's version of her death and contains details on the pistol and the suicide bomb used.
The witness was Ishtiaq Hussain Shah, deputy superintendent of the Rawalpindi police. As Bhutto's car headed onto Liaquat Road after an election rally in Rawalpindi, a crowd appeared from nowhere and stopped the motorcade, shouting slogans of her Pakistan Peoples Party and waving party banners, according to his account.
Bhutto emerged through the sunroof of the bulletproof car to wave.
Shah's job was to clear the way for the motorcade. But 10 feet from where he was standing, a man in the crowd wearing a jacket and sunglasses raised his arm and shot at Bhutto. "I jumped to overpower him," he said later. "A mighty explosion took place soon afterwards."
Shah suffered multiple injuries and is recuperating in a Rawalpindi military hospital, guarded by agents of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.
Who organized the crowd is still a mystery. "I don't know who they were or from where they came," Shah told the Dawn newspaper. "They just appeared on the road."The investigation
The second report emerged in the Pakistani media, with detailed information about the pistol and bomb. It rejects the government's conclusion that Bhutto died when the force of the suicide blast threw her head against the sunroof lever of her car. Such an impact couldn't have fractured her skull, it said. The government would not confirm the report's authenticity, but a security official verified it to McClatchy. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity.
According to the report, which the paper described as a "top agency" preliminary report, a Chinese Norinco pistol, lot number 311-90, was recovered from the scene. An MUV-2 triggering mechanism for the bomb was also found; the same kind of mechanism, with the same lot number and factory code, had been used in 15 previous suicide bombings in Pakistan. [Snip]Bhutto's Security
Bhutto's own private-security arrangements seemed poor, chaotic and amateurish. Armored cars are not fitted with sunroofs. Hers was modified in Karachi against all safety advice, according to a security company that operates in that city but spoke only on condition of anonymity. After Bhutto's death, her husband made the startling revelation that she'd been guarded by men he'd met in prison.Government involvement before and after
Although she had escaped a suicide bombing attack Oct. 18, the day she returned to Pakistan from self-imposed exile, there was no security cordon around Bhutto as she left the park in Rawalpindi. The crime scene was cleared immediately and hosed down, destroying vital evidence. Doctors at the hospital where she was taken announced the night it happened that she'd died of bullet wounds to the head and neck, but they changed their story the next day. There was no autopsy.
[Titles added - Editor WTF-o]
The two biggest questions right now are how much longer Musharaff will be President, and who will replace him.
Bloggers win on retroactive telecom immunity!
Bloggers and Chris Dodd win a really big fight. Open Left has the story. Harry Reid has caved and is ready to protect the Rule of Law instead of the conservative Bush administration and the corporations who currently run and exploit America.
When Bush first took office in January 2001, eight months before 9/11, one of the first actions of his administration did in February was to go to the telephone companies and ask them to begin illegally wiretapping American citizens without warrants. This was criminal behavior on the part of both the Bush administration and of the telephone companies who acted as the new administration instructed them. Nothing in the FISA Act, which was the primary wiretapping law at the time, permitted that action. The phone companies who conducted the illegal telephone wiretaps can be sued for damages because they conducted those illegal wiretaps. Their lawyers knew that no law permitted their action.
The Bush administration pushed through the Protect America Act of 2007 that, among other things, provides immunity against lawsuits to phone companies who act illegally at the request of the government. What the Protect America Act did not do was make that immunity retroactive to relieve the phone companies from liability for their earlier clearly illegal actions.
For the last year the Bush administration has been demanding that Congress include retroactive immunity for the phone companies for their already conducted crimes. This is an issue of whether the government and the phone companies should be subject to the Rule of Law, but it is sufficiently technical to glaze over the eyes of most voters. Only policy wonks and bloggers recognize how totally Unamerican the actions by both the Bush administration and the telecoms were. Sen. Reid (Democratic Majority Leader) was ready to pass a renewal of the FISA Act that included a "retroactive immunity for telecoms" provision. Sen. Chris Dodd had placed a hold on the bill which prevented it from being considered by the Senate until that provision was removed. Harry Reid is known to have said that as soon as Sen. Dodd drops out of the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination he would quit grandstanding and the updated FISA bill with immunity for the telecoms would be passed.
Well, Sen. Dodd has dropped out of the race for the Presidential nomination, and apparently he was not grandstanding. Chris Bowers of Open Left quotes the Wall Street Journal:
This win is probably the most significant "flexing of the political muscles" by the blogosphere. It is another step forward as the blogosphere becomes a significant player in American politics. Since the blogosphere is the only institution in American politics which is NOT controlled by some form of small group of leaders. It is a place where anyone can throw out ideas, complaints and proposals and not be subject to arbitrary control by some gatekeeper. Instead with the blogosphere we get significant groups coming together around various issues, and now we see that those groups are beginning to show real muscle politically.
While this may be a new form of mass democracy, as the blogosphere begins to demonstrate political power, there will be currently existing institutions that try to get control of the blogosphere. So we need to watch both the growth of effective power in the blogosphere, and then we need to watch to see who pushes back.
Welcome to Terra Incognita. At least at the moment the direction of movement is correct.
When Bush first took office in January 2001, eight months before 9/11, one of the first actions of his administration did in February was to go to the telephone companies and ask them to begin illegally wiretapping American citizens without warrants. This was criminal behavior on the part of both the Bush administration and of the telephone companies who acted as the new administration instructed them. Nothing in the FISA Act, which was the primary wiretapping law at the time, permitted that action. The phone companies who conducted the illegal telephone wiretaps can be sued for damages because they conducted those illegal wiretaps. Their lawyers knew that no law permitted their action.
The Bush administration pushed through the Protect America Act of 2007 that, among other things, provides immunity against lawsuits to phone companies who act illegally at the request of the government. What the Protect America Act did not do was make that immunity retroactive to relieve the phone companies from liability for their earlier clearly illegal actions.
For the last year the Bush administration has been demanding that Congress include retroactive immunity for the phone companies for their already conducted crimes. This is an issue of whether the government and the phone companies should be subject to the Rule of Law, but it is sufficiently technical to glaze over the eyes of most voters. Only policy wonks and bloggers recognize how totally Unamerican the actions by both the Bush administration and the telecoms were. Sen. Reid (Democratic Majority Leader) was ready to pass a renewal of the FISA Act that included a "retroactive immunity for telecoms" provision. Sen. Chris Dodd had placed a hold on the bill which prevented it from being considered by the Senate until that provision was removed. Harry Reid is known to have said that as soon as Sen. Dodd drops out of the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination he would quit grandstanding and the updated FISA bill with immunity for the telecoms would be passed.
Well, Sen. Dodd has dropped out of the race for the Presidential nomination, and apparently he was not grandstanding. Chris Bowers of Open Left quotes the Wall Street Journal:
We're told that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is saying privately he now won't attempt to update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on the wiretapping of al Qaeda suspects. Instead, he'll merely support another 18-month extension of the six-month-old Protect America Act. Among other problems, the temporary bill includes no retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that cooperated with the feds after 9/11.This is a big win for America, for the Rule of Law, for Sen. Chris Dodd, and for Sen. Dodd's supporters in the Blogosphere.
This win is probably the most significant "flexing of the political muscles" by the blogosphere. It is another step forward as the blogosphere becomes a significant player in American politics. Since the blogosphere is the only institution in American politics which is NOT controlled by some form of small group of leaders. It is a place where anyone can throw out ideas, complaints and proposals and not be subject to arbitrary control by some gatekeeper. Instead with the blogosphere we get significant groups coming together around various issues, and now we see that those groups are beginning to show real muscle politically.
While this may be a new form of mass democracy, as the blogosphere begins to demonstrate political power, there will be currently existing institutions that try to get control of the blogosphere. So we need to watch both the growth of effective power in the blogosphere, and then we need to watch to see who pushes back.
Welcome to Terra Incognita. At least at the moment the direction of movement is correct.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Ambition in Presidential aspirants
Name the candidates for a Presidential nomination who are displaying a massive, achingly obvious ambition to become President, causing them to conduct carefully calculated and expensive campaigns that display their personal abilities for that office.
Hillary Clinton.
John Edwards.
Rudy Giuliani.
Michael Huckabee.
John McCain.
Barak Obama.
Bill Richards
Mitt Romney.
Name the candidates whose ambition for the job of President brings forth cries of personal hatred towards them from a lot of people.
Hillary Clinton.
Why is that happening? Easy. Strong ambition is an accepted part of the stereotypical male role, while it is specifically listed as a major negative characteristic of the stereotypical female role.
A lot of people get very upset when others fail to conform to their personal social stereotypical roles, especially gender roles. They try to enforce those stereotypes on people who defy them. The enforcement takes the character of ostracizing and expressions of hatred. Yet the twentieth century has not been kind to women who tried to become stereotypical wives and mothers, especially in Great Britain after WW I when there was only about one potential living husband for every ten women, or during and after WW II when women first had to enter the (stereotypically male) work force. Then the economy changed after about 1960 so that a single worker could no longer support a family on one job. Yet women were looked down on for breaking the stereotypical female gender role and going to work.
Now, almost fifty years and two generations after the two worker family has become the norm, a lot of people are really upset that at age 60 Hillary Clinton is violating the out-dated female role typified by June Cleaver as the Beaver's sweet den mother non-working housewife. Instead Hillary Clinton actually has the gall to try and compete with "the men", most of who in fact feel thoroughly threatened because they don't have the ability to compete with her.
That's what is causing all the expressions of Hillary-hatred. Chris Matthews is a prime example. Hillary could easily do his job better than he does, while he could not compete with her. On a gut level, he knows that, and it drives his misogynistic commentary.
America has a lot of men who depend on gender stereotypes to keep them from having to compete with more competent women. (Rachel Maddow could replace Chris Matthews in a heartbeat, and ratings would quickly rise.) There are also women who have so thoroughly adopted the passive, quiet, non-competitive female stereotype that they feel threatened when Hillary proves that stereotype is not necessary for a woman to be a good and competent person.
That's what all this rapid Hillary hatred is all about. It's basically frightened and conservative people who expect other individuals to adopt the gender stereotypes that those people assign to them, and when those others do not adopt those gender stereotypes on their own and prove successful without them, then such stereotype-breakers will be met with anger and will be ostracized.
But society has passed the frightened, angry people by, and their nasty tactics no longer work. Which, of course, will just make them even angrier. Watch Chris Matthews if you don't believe me. Barring a sudden insight into his own personal fears which I doubt he has the capacity to conduct, he has no choice except to get more and more rapidly anti-Clinton as he joins Bill O'Reilly.
Hillary Clinton.
John Edwards.
Rudy Giuliani.
Michael Huckabee.
John McCain.
Barak Obama.
Bill Richards
Mitt Romney.
Name the candidates whose ambition for the job of President brings forth cries of personal hatred towards them from a lot of people.
Hillary Clinton.
Why is that happening? Easy. Strong ambition is an accepted part of the stereotypical male role, while it is specifically listed as a major negative characteristic of the stereotypical female role.
A lot of people get very upset when others fail to conform to their personal social stereotypical roles, especially gender roles. They try to enforce those stereotypes on people who defy them. The enforcement takes the character of ostracizing and expressions of hatred. Yet the twentieth century has not been kind to women who tried to become stereotypical wives and mothers, especially in Great Britain after WW I when there was only about one potential living husband for every ten women, or during and after WW II when women first had to enter the (stereotypically male) work force. Then the economy changed after about 1960 so that a single worker could no longer support a family on one job. Yet women were looked down on for breaking the stereotypical female gender role and going to work.
Now, almost fifty years and two generations after the two worker family has become the norm, a lot of people are really upset that at age 60 Hillary Clinton is violating the out-dated female role typified by June Cleaver as the Beaver's sweet den mother non-working housewife. Instead Hillary Clinton actually has the gall to try and compete with "the men", most of who in fact feel thoroughly threatened because they don't have the ability to compete with her.
That's what is causing all the expressions of Hillary-hatred. Chris Matthews is a prime example. Hillary could easily do his job better than he does, while he could not compete with her. On a gut level, he knows that, and it drives his misogynistic commentary.
America has a lot of men who depend on gender stereotypes to keep them from having to compete with more competent women. (Rachel Maddow could replace Chris Matthews in a heartbeat, and ratings would quickly rise.) There are also women who have so thoroughly adopted the passive, quiet, non-competitive female stereotype that they feel threatened when Hillary proves that stereotype is not necessary for a woman to be a good and competent person.
That's what all this rapid Hillary hatred is all about. It's basically frightened and conservative people who expect other individuals to adopt the gender stereotypes that those people assign to them, and when those others do not adopt those gender stereotypes on their own and prove successful without them, then such stereotype-breakers will be met with anger and will be ostracized.
But society has passed the frightened, angry people by, and their nasty tactics no longer work. Which, of course, will just make them even angrier. Watch Chris Matthews if you don't believe me. Barring a sudden insight into his own personal fears which I doubt he has the capacity to conduct, he has no choice except to get more and more rapidly anti-Clinton as he joins Bill O'Reilly.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Class-based politics in 2008
An excellent post by David Sirota. He looks carefully at the forbidden facts behind the middle-class political turmoil.
He starts by making the point that class is something that American politicians don't normally discuss, but this year we have not one, but two "Huey Longs" funning for the Presidency - John Edwards and Michael Huckabee. One reason is that social mobility in the U.S. economy has come practically to a stop, while CEO's are making obscene incomes, even when they fail. Then he looks at how the Populist political message is being received by the electorate.
It is hard to watch the federal government approving corporate union-busting and refusal of managers to even deal with unions, let alone negotiate fairly, and the federal government refusal to act on the clearly needed increase in the minimum wage and not recognize that America is currently ruled by wealthy aristocrats who have no time for the peons who do the real work of the nation.
I am rather surprised to find how much the push-back against corporatism is effecting the election already - especially I am surprised by Huckabee carrying the message in the Republican Party. What does not surprised me is the angry antipathy that Huckabee's message has received from the Republican big-money classes.
2008 is going to be a very interesting year. In fact, it already has been.
[*] A term now made legal for political use by Jonah Goldberg.
He starts by making the point that class is something that American politicians don't normally discuss, but this year we have not one, but two "Huey Longs" funning for the Presidency - John Edwards and Michael Huckabee. One reason is that social mobility in the U.S. economy has come practically to a stop, while CEO's are making obscene incomes, even when they fail. Then he looks at how the Populist political message is being received by the electorate.
"Open attacks on the business elite are seldom heard from mainstream White House candidates in America," the news service reports, "despite skyrocketing CEO pay, rising income inequality, and a torrent of scandals in corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street."Beyond Republican nativism, militarism, and their fascistic[*] belief that action and violence matter while careful thought and the advice of experts is to be ignored, there is also the major problem that the corporations dominate the Republican Party along with many in the senior ranks of the national Democratic Party.
This reality exists because such full-throated populist politics is almost impossible in a campaign system that typically rewards candidates with the most money. It's difficult to indict corporate greed and the elite's war on the middle class, and then convince those same corporations and that same moneyed elite to contribute to your campaign. So, as I've said before, the fact that both Edwards and Huckabee are even competing for their parties' respective nomination in spite of such Establishment anger and financial disadvantage that comes with populism shows just how powerful their message is.
Some will cite Edwards' trailing his competitors as proof that his message isn't working. That's just silly. He's trailing for two reasons: 1) He's being grossly outspent by two corporate-funded candidates and 2) His opponents are starting to co-opt his message in an attempt to blur the distinctions between themselves and him. We have to look no further than Clinton's New Hampshire victory speech to see what I'm talking about. She is the top recipient of health industry campaign cash - a person who has publicly defended lobbyist influence in Washington. And yet, with a straight face, she is berating "the drug companies [and] health insurance companies." Similarly, even though he is the top recipient of Wall Street campaign cash, Obama has taken to railing on lobbyists and Big Money.
It is hard to watch the federal government approving corporate union-busting and refusal of managers to even deal with unions, let alone negotiate fairly, and the federal government refusal to act on the clearly needed increase in the minimum wage and not recognize that America is currently ruled by wealthy aristocrats who have no time for the peons who do the real work of the nation.
I am rather surprised to find how much the push-back against corporatism is effecting the election already - especially I am surprised by Huckabee carrying the message in the Republican Party. What does not surprised me is the angry antipathy that Huckabee's message has received from the Republican big-money classes.
2008 is going to be a very interesting year. In fact, it already has been.
[*] A term now made legal for political use by Jonah Goldberg.
Signs of the Economic times
When the economy goes really bad, large financial institutions find they have to either be bailed out or go bankrupt.
They don't come much bigger than Merrill Lynch. From the New York Times:
Merrill is America's largest stock broker. Now let's look at how America's largest Mortgage broker, CountryWide, is fairing. From Market Watch:
Keep in mind that this is still early in the Recession. The government is not yet ready to admit that there is a recession, and assures us that if there is, it will be over by late 2008.
Then we have the breaking economic news for today (January 11, 2008) from Bloomberg:
So let's check in with Nouriel Roubini
They don't come much bigger than Merrill Lynch. From the New York Times:
Merrill Lynch is expected to suffer $15 billion in losses stemming from soured mortgage investments, almost double its original estimate, prompting the firm to raise additional capital from an outside investor.Merril's surprise choice of John Thaine as their new CEO was advance warging of the severity of the crisis.
Merrill, the nation’s largest brokerage firm, is expected to disclose the huge write-down when it reports earnings next week, according to people who have been briefed on its plans. The loss far exceeds the $12 billion hit many Wall Street analysts had forecast.
To shore up its deteriorating finances, Merrill is now in discussions with investors in the United States, Asia and the Middle East, including American private equity firms, to raise about $4 billion in the coming days, these people said.
The developments underscore the rising toll that the mortgage crisis is taking on many once-proud Wall Street banks. In recent months Merrill and several other firms have grabbed financial lifelines from wealthy foreign governments. Further investments by so-called sovereign wealth funds could prompt scrutiny by Congress.
The latest moves at Merrill come as John A. Thain, who became the company’s chairman and chief executive in December, struggles to bolster the firm’s capital, burnish its reputation and avoid the toxic internal battles that have hurt the firm in the past.
Merrill is America's largest stock broker. Now let's look at how America's largest Mortgage broker, CountryWide, is fairing. From Market Watch:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Bank of America Corp. said Friday it's purchasing Countrywide Financial Corp. for $4 billion, effectively doubling down on a previous investment in the troubled firm and catapulting the buyer into the top spot among mortgage lenders and loan servicers in the U.S.So Merrill Lynch is looking outside the U.S. for funds that will permit it to survive, while CountryWide will cease to exist.
The stock-swap deal will put an end to the independence of the troubled California lender headed by Angelo Mozilo, and represents an increase from the Charlotte, N.C., bank's August investment of about $2 billion.
Keep in mind that this is still early in the Recession. The government is not yet ready to admit that there is a recession, and assures us that if there is, it will be over by late 2008.
Then we have the breaking economic news for today (January 11, 2008) from Bloomberg:
And then we have Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, making the very unusual action of warning in advance that the fed was going to lower interest rates more sharply than expected. The fed has finally decided that the immediate problem of economic slowdown is more important right now than the longterm problem of inflation. This action will cause further drop in the dollar, and thus increase the price of imports - first among imports being oil. Gold, the traditional hedge against inflation, has just topped $900 per ounce.
- Stocks in U.S. Tumble; American Express, Tiffany Fall on Profit Forecasts
- Soybeans Soar to Record, Corn, Wheat Rise After U.S. Report on Plantings
- Bank of America's Risk of Default Increases Following Countrywide Purchase
- U.S. November Trade Deficit Widens More Than Forecast on Record Oil Prices
- Bank of America Will Buy Unprofitable Countrywide for $4 Billion in Stock
- Merrill Writedown Pares Shareholder Equity to 12% Less Than Goldman Sachs
- MBIA Forced to Pay 14 Percent Yield on Bonds Being Sold to Bolster Capital
- Clinton Introduces $70 Billion Economic Plan, With Middle-Income Rebates
- China, U.S. Make Intervention Plans for North Korea Collapse, Reports Say
So let's check in with Nouriel Roubini
"We're facing the worst housing recession in U.S. history," according to Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University and co-founder of RGE Monitor, an economic research and analysis firm. He predicted peak-to-bottom national home price losses of 30 percent.The phrase "Whistling past the graveyard" comes to mind.
Roubini joined a group of three other real estate experts at the Real Estate Connect NYC 2008 conference in New York Wednesday for a discussion titled, "The Housing Debate: Bull vs. Bear."
"There will be 10 million houses with negative equity," he said, where the owners will owe more on their mortgages than the properties are worth, giving them less incentive to keep making payments. Many will walk away, he said, depressing markets further.
The housing turndown, according to Roubini, was the initial trigger for a broad economic decline. "We're in an economy-wide recession already, one that will be much more severe than those of 1991 or 2001," he said.
Although housing only accounts for 5 percent of the economy, he noted, the slump has already reduced consumption, which makes up two-thirds of it. Consumers are no longer tapping home equity, and they're cutting back on spending.
And credit problems are no longer confined to subprime loans, according to Roubini. They've spread to near-prime mortgages, prime, auto loans and junk bonds, with losses that could reach trillions of dollars.
Peace-making with Iran, American style
Why do Iranians fear, detest America? Experience, maybe?
This quote is from the book Web of Deceit by Barry Lando Via A Tiny Revolutions.
So, first Reagan supports Saddam as he attacked Iran, both militarily and logistically. Then, just for fun (No better reason has been presented) Bush 43 attacks Iraq and deposes Saddam, creating the greatest source of terrorists and terrorist training in the world, while killing at least 140,000 Iraqis (far more than Saddam ever did) and creating a Sunni Shiite civil war that has thrown the Shiites in Iraq into dependence on Iran. It is safe to assume that at least 2.5 times that number are severely wounded (another 350,000 people) and it is well known that there are at least 2,000,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan, and another 2,000,000 internal refugees inside Iraq.
Consider the fact that Iraq has 27,499,638 (July 2007 est.) So 490,000 dead and wounded is 1.8 percent of the population. Refugees amount to another 14.5 percent of the population. All because the American President panicked after 9/11 and had a whim that attacking Iraq might give him political cover for incompetence in protecting America.
Consider also that President Eisenhower and the CIA overthrew the elected government in Iran in 1953 and replaced Mosaadegh with the dictatorial Shah (Operation Ajax. Should the Iranians have been surprised that Reagan was supporting Saddam Hussein after he attacked Iran?
The most dangerous enemy that Iran has had in the world since WW II has been the singly most powerful military nation in the world, the United States. That has been especially true during Republican administrations. America was the cause of the Iranian Revolution (by placing the Shah on the Peacock Thrown and supporting him and the Savak and is directly responsible for creating the Islamic government in Iran.
The threats and bluster from Cheney, Bush and the radical Republican Party contributes to the problem rather than preventing it. No honest observer could see it any other way.
Anyone supporting the Republican Party is by definition not an honest observer. Conservative Republicans are the most likely cause of war in the world today. They work hard to antagonize other nations, even going so far (as Bush did) as supporting the coup plotters who attempted to overthrow the legitimately elected Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Then the Republicans blame the nations that they have threatened for attempting to defend their sovereignty, and declaring them the cause of the wars.
Conservatism is a dangerous disease that needs to be eliminated. The judgment on the entire Republican Party is still out.
This quote is from the book Web of Deceit by Barry Lando Via A Tiny Revolutions.
at the end of the Iran-Iraq war:Now, consider the rhetoric that is being pipelined from America into Tehran. The following clips come from Glenn Greenwald.
The Reagan administration, in effect, decided to undertake a secret war...Heavily armed U.S. Special Operations helicopters, stealthy, sophisticated killing machines that could operate by day or night, were ordered to the Persian Gulf. Their mission was to destroy any Iranian gunboats they could find. Other small, swift American vessels, posing as commercial ships, lured Iranian naval vessels into international waters to attack them...
Beginning in July 1987, the CIA also began sending covert spy plans and helicopters over Iranian bases. Several engaged in secret bombing runs...In September 1987, a special operations helicopter attacked an Iranian mine-laying ship...
The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency dispatched additional officers to Baghdad...they were planning day-by-day strategic bombing strikes for the Iraqi Air Force...in a twenty-four hour period, U.S. forces sank or demolished a destroyer and a couple of frigates, which represented half the Iranian navy.
If Saddam had not ultimately prevailed, the Pentagon had prepared an even more ambitious strategy: to launch an attack against the Iranian mainland. "The real plans were for a secret war, with the U.S. on the side of Iraq against Iran..." said retired Lieutenant Colonel Roger Charles, who was serving in the office of the secretary of defense at the time. This was confirmed by Admiral James A. "Ace" Lyons, who was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. As he put it, "We were prepared, I would say at the time, to drill them back to the fourth century."
Relatively cooler heads prevailed. According to Richard Armitage, who at the time was assistant secretary of defense, "The decision was made not to completely obliterate Iran...However, had things not gone well in the Gulf, I've no doubt that we would have put those plans into effect."
So, first Reagan supports Saddam as he attacked Iran, both militarily and logistically. Then, just for fun (No better reason has been presented) Bush 43 attacks Iraq and deposes Saddam, creating the greatest source of terrorists and terrorist training in the world, while killing at least 140,000 Iraqis (far more than Saddam ever did) and creating a Sunni Shiite civil war that has thrown the Shiites in Iraq into dependence on Iran. It is safe to assume that at least 2.5 times that number are severely wounded (another 350,000 people) and it is well known that there are at least 2,000,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan, and another 2,000,000 internal refugees inside Iraq.
Consider the fact that Iraq has 27,499,638 (July 2007 est.) So 490,000 dead and wounded is 1.8 percent of the population. Refugees amount to another 14.5 percent of the population. All because the American President panicked after 9/11 and had a whim that attacking Iraq might give him political cover for incompetence in protecting America.
Consider also that President Eisenhower and the CIA overthrew the elected government in Iran in 1953 and replaced Mosaadegh with the dictatorial Shah (Operation Ajax. Should the Iranians have been surprised that Reagan was supporting Saddam Hussein after he attacked Iran?
The most dangerous enemy that Iran has had in the world since WW II has been the singly most powerful military nation in the world, the United States. That has been especially true during Republican administrations. America was the cause of the Iranian Revolution (by placing the Shah on the Peacock Thrown and supporting him and the Savak and is directly responsible for creating the Islamic government in Iran.
The threats and bluster from Cheney, Bush and the radical Republican Party contributes to the problem rather than preventing it. No honest observer could see it any other way.
Anyone supporting the Republican Party is by definition not an honest observer. Conservative Republicans are the most likely cause of war in the world today. They work hard to antagonize other nations, even going so far (as Bush did) as supporting the coup plotters who attempted to overthrow the legitimately elected Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Then the Republicans blame the nations that they have threatened for attempting to defend their sovereignty, and declaring them the cause of the wars.
Conservatism is a dangerous disease that needs to be eliminated. The judgment on the entire Republican Party is still out.
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