Republicans can't be honest and get voters to donate to them.

If you are a Republican and are having difficulty getting donations, what do you do? There are a lot of answers, but one that is characteristic of the Republican Party is that you lie to elderly people and try to frighten them into sending the Republicans money. Here is a report from Paul Keil at TPMMuckraker:

What 83 year-old William Sidwell of Queen City, Missouri found in his mailbox last week scared him. It was a letter from the Republican National Committee, but it seemed to bear grave news: "Our records show that you registered as a member of our Party in Schuyler County, MO," the letter said. "But a recent audit of your Party affiliation turned up some irregularities."

Audit? Irregularities? Was he in trouble? Were they threatening him? Sidwell went immediately to his ask his son, Dennis, a licensed public accountant, for advice. You can see the letter, and the accompanying "Voter Registration Verification and Audit Form," right here. Particularly puzzling to the both of them, Dennis told me, is that his father is a life-long Democrat.

[Go read the TPMMuckraker article to see an image of the letter.]

The letter, it turns out, is just a misleading pitch for a contribution to the RNC -- one of the "irregularities" cited in the letter is that "I cannot find a record of you taking a single action in support of the Republican Party -- not locally, not nationally!" A contribution, the letter suggests, would help set the record straight.

If this were a letter that frightened an elderly person into donating money to a religious organization it would legally be fraud. Legal or not, it is totally unethical.

Unethical as it is, it is also representative of the way the Republican Party of today operates.

Bush's true barbarity

The Bush administration has gone far beyond just its efforts to create an omnipotent "King George" in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. In foreign affairs Bush, Cheney and the CIA have practiced torture on a scale no modern American administration has ever even considered. Glen Greenwald provides a description.

Mr. Arar was sent by American intelligence officials in October 2002 to Syria, where he was tortured and jailed for a almost a year. Last September, an extensive Canadian inquiry concluded that the terrorism accusations against him were groundless.

[Snip]

The newly released sections indicate that neither the Syrian government nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation were convinced that Mr. Arar was a significant security threat. They also suggest that the investigation of Mr. Arar was prompted by the coerced confession of Ahmad Abou el-Maati, a Kuwaiti-born Canadian who was also imprisoned and tortured in Syria.

And despite claims by the United States government that Mr. Arar's removal to Syria was mainly an immigration matter, the new material suggests that the Central Intelligence Agency led the action.

But this is only the torture which was outsourced. Look at the torture program operated by the CIA itself in its black sites outside the United States:

"The C.I.A.'s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It's one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you've heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling'" . . . .
[Underlining mine - Editor WTF-o]

This is not a rogue operation like the one alleged to have occurred in Abu Ghraib with no knowledge of the chain of command.

...the treatment of high-value detainees has been directly, and repeatedly, approved by President Bush.

The program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers, and supervised by the agency's director and his subordinates at the Counterterrorism Center. While Mohammed was being held by the agency, detailed dossiers on the treatment of detainees were regularly available to the former C.I.A. director George Tenet, according to informed sources inside and outside the agency. Through a spokesperson, Tenet denied making day-to-day decisions about the treatment of individual detainees. But, according to a former agency official, "Every single plan is drawn up by interrogators, and then submitted for approval to the highest possible level -- meaning the director of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan -- even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added -- was signed off by the C.I.A. director."

We are learning more about what George Tenet did to earn his "Medal of Freedom." Besides telling Bush what he wanted to hear to justify the invasion of Iraq and then shifting the blame to the CIA he also operated this massively detailed torture program and kept day-by-day, tortured-prisoner-by-tortured-prisoner control of the torture process. Meanwhile Bush has been thoroughly informed and has personally approved of the requirement to torture individuals detained by the CIA.

Glenn Greenwald points out

As always, it is vital to underscore that there is much of what we have done -- likely the most extreme and criminal aspects -- which remain undisclosed. But based solely on what we do know, we have become a country that not merely in isolation, but as overarching policy, embraces some of the most grotesque human rights abuses in the world. That is a difficult fact to acknowledge, but documented reports of our conduct make it inescapably true.

This is not a rogue operator or someone acting desperately because they feel there is some specific "ticking bomb that must be defused." This has been carefully planned, researched, choreographed and practiced as a matter of government policy. And that's just the elements of the torture program that we know about!

Glenn ends up making this point:

While American citizens inside of the U.S. still enjoy robust civil liberties as compared to most other countries around the world -- certainly nobody rational would compare the tyranny of a country like Libya to the state of domestic political affairs inside the U.S. -- one cannot say the same for our behavior as a world actor. In that regard, such comparisons are not only plausible but indisputably valid.

Could the Bush administration have possibly done any more to inflame public opinion - especially in the Middle East - against the rogue state, America?

This is far beyond stupidity. It is utter depraved intentional viciousness clothed as a set of government programs. It is worthy of Argentina's Gen. Galtieri and Chile's President Augusto Pinochet.

Bush has done bin Laden's work for him. Can anyone honestly stand up now and ask "Why do they hate us so?"

Credit crunch spreads outside U.S.subprime markets to the rest of the world.

The politically-inspired Bush-Greenspan housing bubble and the corrupt sub-prime mortgage market designed to create that bubble (and reelect Bush in 2004 along the way) has not only collapsed, it is starting to take worldwide credit markets with it. A lot of midnight oil is being burned and a lot of caffeine being drunk by very bright men and women whose personal wealth is wrapped up in the current system. If they succeed the degree of the disaster can be limited. But they won't prevent the disaster. It has already happened. At best they will keep it from spreading too much more.

So where are we now, and how did we get here? Politics was the cause. Economics is the symptom. We'll start with the symptoms and work back.

From Bloomberg this morning:

Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Deutsche Bank AG's DWS unit, Germany's biggest mutual fund company, said the assets in one of its investment funds have fallen by 30 percent since the end of July as sub prime mortgage losses roiled credit markets.

Assets in the DWS ABS Fund fell to 2.1 billion euros ($2.9 billion) from 3 billion euros, mostly as a result of client redemptions, DWS spokeswoman Anke Hallmann said today. The fund, registered in Luxembourg, has no investments in U.S. subprime- related debt and hasn't halted withdrawals, she said.

Investors are shunning bonds backed by home loans after late mortgage payments by U.S. borrowers with poor credit histories rose to the highest since 2002. BNP Paribas SA, France's biggest bank, contributed to financial market turmoil yesterday by halting withdrawals from three investment funds because it couldn't value their holdings.
[Underlining mine - Editor WTF-o]

The fact that the fund has no investments in the U.S. subprime-related debt and yet has lost 30% of its value means that the problem has spread from sub-prime loans to the general credit markets. People with money to lend are delaying lending it because they are concerned about losing what they lend. Then people in the sub-prime market are having to sell investments to cover losses. This is a reasonable and expected reaction when the underlying asset (homes) is declining in value. Hedge funds which borrowed money at lower interest rates to lend in the riskier subprime markets are being battered by their leverage as they lose lots of money on the way down.

The problems in the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market are important because the amount of money involved is extremely large. The problems in the U.S. has spread world-wide. From Market Watch:

By Simon Kennedy, MarketWatch
Last Update: 10:45 AM ET Aug 10, 2007

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Central banks in Europe, Asia and the U.S. injected billions of dollars into banking systems Friday, moving to further boost liquidity in markets suffering the ripple effect of the subprime-credit crisis and saying they stood willing to provide more cash.

The European Central Bank said it had provided 61 billion euros ($84 billion) to banks in a three-day tender offer, and the U.S. Federal Reserve carried out a $19 billion three-day repurchase agreement.

In Asia, the Bank of Japan supplied 1 trillion yen ($8.48 billion) after a rise in the overnight call rate. And The Reserve Bank of Australia added A$4.95 billion ($4.17 billion).

The Fed said it will provide reserves "as necessary" to promote trading in the federal funds market at rates close to 5.25%, the base rate. Other central banks made similar pledges about being willing to lend more.

The overnight rates at which banks lend money to each other rose again Friday, with the dollar-denominated rate hitting 5.96% from 5.86% the previous day, according to data from the British Bankers' Association.

The loans by the ECB follow the roughly 95 billion euros it handed out in its biggest-ever cash injection Thursday, in the aftermath of overnight interest rates spiking.

All of this was started by the slow (and continuing) collapse of the U.S. housing bubble. So where did the housing bubble come from?

The housing bubble was a creation of the Bush administration and Fed Chief Alan Greenspan. As I wrote previously, The Bush administration needed an adequate economy for political reasons, yet their taxing, borrowing, war spending and anti-Union policies did not provide it. The economy is run based on demand, and consumers needed money to buy the products and services produced.

The money that consumers needed to spend wasn't there in wages (there has been no increase in real wages since 2000) and in spite of the tax cuts there has been no significant increase in national investment, so where could it come from? The answer was home equity loans and real estate speculation. But this only worked if the Fed lowered interest rates a great deal and convinced banks to be willing to loan money to anyone, no matter how poor their credit was. That's what happened.

What the Bush administration has done is to deregulate home mortgages to the extent that the most recent ones are called "NINJA" mortgages. That is, a person could get one with No Income, No Job, No Assets.

That was intended to boost the economy. About two-thirds of American Gross Domestic Product is bought by consumers. Essentially the U.S. economy has operated on government spending and consumer spending since 2000, with consumer spending being the more important. Since Bush took office those consumers have not gotten an increase in after-inflation pay, but they had to get money to spend from somewhere. It has come from refinancing and second loans on the value of the homes they have title to, which required ridiculously easy lending policies and ever-increasing home prices.

This couldn't go on forever, but it really only needed to last beyond the 2004 Presidential election. It did.

By late 2004 the housing bubble was dangerously stretched. Financial bubbles break when someone seriously questions whether to gamble on buying an asset - in this case a home - at a ridiculously high price on the assumption that some greater fool will pay even more for it later, or when they can't get a loan to buy the home at the higher price. Home prices topped out after the federal reserve tried to bring the bubble down softly by a long series of small interest rate increases.

Starting about February 2005 the fed increased the federal funds interest rate by 1/4% per month for 17 months, ending at an interest rate of 5 1/4% in June of 2006 (from BBC News.) The increase in speculative housing prices could not survive this increase in interest rates. But it was more than just higher interest rates.

To get enough people to buy, sell and refinance more homes the banks needed to drop credit standards. Along with poor credit standards the mortgage industry pushed riskier types of mortgages from Adjustable Rate Mortgages with ridiculously low teaser rates at the beginning into interest only mortgages where the borrower paid only the interest and no principle. A large number of the people with poor credit who were induced to gamble in the market could not survive both the higher interest rates and a lackluster economy. People with those risky mortgages suddenly faced higher payments as the new, higher interest rates kicked in and many had to sell at a loss - if they could. An increasing number of individuals just stopped paying on houses they could no longer afford the payments for and let them be foreclosed.

When enough people have those problems then the sub-prime mortgage markets themselves became damaged seriously. It takes a lot of financially strapped people all at once to create major problems for a large market, but that point was reached and recognized in early 2007.

I am not sure exactly why the Federal Reserve started moving the interest rate back up, but the timing of their actions suggests that it probably had to do with the fact that the 2004 election was over. Greenspan worked hard to reelect Bush. At the same time the extremely low interest rates in the U.S. economy were causing the value of the dollar against the EURO, Yen and Pound to drop too much. This led to real concern that inflation would begin. The $70 per barrel price of oil has also remained consistently high and was a key element threatening new inflation. Inflation frightens the bond market. For good reason.

The Bond market had not been pricing the money they lent out to include estimated future increased inflation. Presumably they kept the interest rates they charged low because they depended on the Federal Reserve to prevent future inflation. Lenders felt that they could offer lower interest rates by eliminating the inflation premium because Greenspan promised that at any hint of inflation the Federal Reserve would step in to stop it.

If the Fed reneged on its promise to the bond market to restrict inflation, a lot of money would be lost. So the Fed had to act. It looks like the Fed did not recognize how the sub-prime mortgage market had been growing more unstable in the previous years. The instability crept up slowly as interest rates went down, credit standards were reduced and types of mortgages got more risky.

The problems did not occur overnight and without warning. But any action to stop the growth of the problems was going to cause some trouble in the markets somewhere. Bush's reelection depended on those problems not happening until he was reelected. That meant that the Fed could not act on the housing market problems before the Spring of 2005. Beginning the 17 month slow increase in interest rates in February of 2005 shows that the election was the reason for not acting sooner.

That explains how we got to the present set of financial problems. Now we have had the (long-predicted and continuing) drop in housing prices that started in 2005. Next followed the near collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the U.S. which became obvious late this Spring with Countrywide Mortgage Company's announcement of problems. Now we have the spread of the American sub-prime mortgage problems to the general credit markets world-wide.

Where is it going next?

Good question. No one knows. The current economic situation is one that has never occurred before. Every economic reporter I have heard in the last few days has ended his report saying something like "We expect conditions to get better tomorrow."

Even Bonddad is optimistic this morning, but his optimism is more realistic than that of most economic reporters (who, I suspect, are saying what they are told to say.) Here is what Bonddad said today:

The point is Wall Street and the central bands [banks, obviously] around the world are on the job. And these are some really smart and capable people who will get the markets through this mess. That does not mean it will be easy. In fact, the news will continue to be bad for awhile. But the markets and the economy will get through this; it will end at some point.

Bonddad recognizes that economic commentators have to appear optimistic right now but his optimism is at least realistic. He doesn't know what will happen next either, but he has faith that a lot of very smart people are working very very hard to keep disaster at bay. And what he says is true. The U.S. and the world did (finally) pull out of the Great Depression - after more than a decade of bad economic performance. If there is anything humanly possible to keep the mismanagement of the American economy by Bush and Greenspan from causing a world wide disaster, they will. That's a big IF.

The point is, none of the commentators are providing news. They are speaking optimistically in order to prop up the market long enough for something to happen to keep things from getting worse. Economic news reporters do this every time a financial market is having problems. If they don't, then there is a real danger that the market will simply stop working. Here's why. The problem is perceived risk and the behavior of lenders.

The estimate of how risky it is to lend money is subjective. If knowledgeable people don't say positive things, then that subjective estimate of the risk of loss of money will increase to where no one will dare to lend. If you have money, you lend it only to get a return on the principle. If the chances are high you will not even get the principle back, you do not rationally lend it out. You slide it under the mattress or something.

If that negative feeling takes hold, the markets themselves will collapse. No one in the financial community dares even whisper a word of negativity for fear of that collapse. A financial asset is worth only what it can be sold for, and if the market collapses, it cannot be sold. That means what was an asset becomes worthless.

I don't write this because I expect the markets to fall out of bed. I write that because no one knows what they will do. Any statements to the contrary presented as news simply ignore the fact that no one knows where the markets are going.

At the moment, prayer and good luck charms are at least as useful as knowledge of the markets.

That's why at the top of this article I emphasized that the problems in the sub-prime mortgage lending market had spread to the credit markets in general. This problem consists of the housing bubble and a myriad of bad mortgage loans, It was created by Alan Greenspan for political reasons. The economy had to be propped up to reelect Bush.

Now it has spread from the mortgage markets into the entire investment community and gone worldwide. Presently it is spreading like a forest fire and a lot of people are trying hard to put it out, but like stopping a forest fire, success is far from certain.

Politics matter, and bad politics comes back with really bad results. If you haven't suffered from the Bush-Cheney war of choice in Iraq or the Bush-FEMA failures on the Gulf Coast after Katrina-Rita hit, just wait. You will soon have a chance to suffer from the Bush-Greenspan economic mismanagement. If you aren't already.

Oh, and if you are a Republican, you are in political trouble too. The problems are hitting too soon for you to be able to blame the Democrats. You did this, and there will be political accountability.

Problems, decisions, boundries, and best practices

There are effective ways to sharply improve the outcomes from an organizational process or processes. The free market ideologues would lead you to believe that the only way is to let private business operate completely free from any and all government interference, and that somehow the magic of the market will provide great products and services at the lowest possible prices. There are elements of truth to that, but the idea is more flawed than accurate. Let’s look at how a process can be made to provide sharply improved outcomes over those it provided earlier.

In order to improve a process, a decision-making person has to have feedback on the quality of the results of what was done earlier, and that must determine which efforts succeeded and which failed. Then they must learn the “best practices” which can increase the number of successes and reduce the number of failures. This requires a thorough understanding of the process that provides the outcomes and very careful measurements of the most important aspects of that process. The very striking example Dr. Atul Gawande presents in his book "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance" (Metropolitan Books, 2007) is the way the military has measured emergency medical care for injured soldiers and improved that care so that deaths have been reduced from 25% of causalities down to 10%, not by breakthrough new medical methods as just by applying best practices to the points in the process with the highest death rate.

The key is to isolate a process, or even a segment of a process, and then measure everything that is happening in that process and also to measure and rank the outcome of the process according to its degree of success or failure. Then focus on what elements of the process contributed to the failed outcomes and determine how those elements can be changed. The process must be thoroughly understood. I am not sure whether Dr. Gawande realizes that this is an application to battlefield medicine of the ideas called “Best Practices” in business quality control, but it is.

One very important point to keep in mind is that after a change in the process outputs will often degrade for a while until the newer process becomes established. This temporary period of degradation must be accepted if the overall process to become better in the long term.

Another very important point is to consider how the process is isolated. There has to be an organization that is inside those boundaries and which encompasses the problem that is to be improved. Those boundaries are of critical importance. People outside those boundaries must not be allowed to interfere with the decisions taken by the qualified decision-maker who is working to improve the process.

Andro Linklater reported on an interesting historical experiment in allowing individuals set up relatively autonomous organizations, measure their success and improve them in his book "The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity" (Walker, 2007.) He contends that it was not just the frontier that made America such a successful nation. It was also the fact that Americans applied the latest survey techniques to the older common law ideas of private property as Americans moved west into new frontier areas. By use of the latest surveying technology and by having the government record who owed each parcel of land American ranches and farms became independent little organizations, each managed by its owner.

These individuals then had their own personal property with which to make economic decisions. Output could be measured in terms of amount of a crop or number of cattle, and using markets to put prices on those outputs, prices could be used to compare relative outputs between farms and ranches. This allowed each farmer or rancher a sphere of independence in which no one else could step in and make decisions for him. The most successful farmers and ranchers were those who learned and adopted the best practices.

This isn’t really a new idea. It was, in fact, the reason for the state agricultural extension services and the agricultural schools in America. What it was, however, was unique in world history up to that time. The very economic success of this process is largely the basis of the free market ideologists in politics today.

There are a number of problems with this model, however. First, and most important, markets only provide a limited measure of economic success or failure. Productivity matters – a lot – but so does quality of life for people in and around a business. The sawmill up river from the town I grew up in threw its chemicals into the river for over half a century. That lowered their costs, increased their profit and destroyed the fishing (among other noxious results) for nearly 100 miles downriver. Market-based economic decisions could not, by themselves, measure all of the costs of the lumber produced because there is no connection between the market transactions for land, labor and capital inputs and the resulting corporate revenue accept the (self-serving) assertions and estimates of business management in their financial statements. Government has to provide additional measurements for such otherwise unmeasured things as environmental dumping. This always creates major political issues around what should be measured and published as measures of the real costs of input and output.

This becomes an even greater problem for organizations that are not economic in nature. Schools are an example. In spite of all efforts we have yet to develop comprehensive effective and informative measures of the important characteristics of the most important inputs to a school, especially the characteristics of students and teachers. On top of that, there are no markets that create a semblance of comparable measures of student outcomes. Grades at best record the opinions of teachers about short-term progress, or the outcome of very limited written tests. Nor do we understand the educational process well enough to describe it, let alone comprehensively measure the most important elements in it. The result is that every attempt to apply objective measurable standards to inputs and outputs of schools is met with political cries of outrage by those who don’t like the results of those measures.

Justice Roberts recently solved that problem very neatly in the question of determining the effects of Racism in schools. His decision was that measuring race is, itself, Racist, so it was forbidden to measure race or racial outcomes of schools. The American problem of Racism is one that he and four of his colleagues do not want solved, so they have the power to prevent measurement of the problem. They used that power.

Another problem is that as the American economy has become more interlocked both internally and internationally, the level of problems to be resolved has grown larger. The decision domain of the solution to a problem must be as large as the problem itself for any solution to work. Larger organizations exist to control larger (mostly economic) processes.

Also, as economic processes get larger, they begin to have to differentiate between those controlled by markets at each stage of production or by common ownership, which allocates resources administratively, rather than by free markets. A steel company that owns the iron and coal mines, the foundries, and the steel fabricators will rarely resort to using markets between the mines and foundries and again between the foundries and fabricators because the information collection costs of markets is very expensive. The overall cost of the final product can be greatly lowered by using administrative means to determine how much coal and iron is mined and shipped to foundries and how much steel is shipped to fabricators. However, the increase in efficiency is attained at the expense of flexibility, so that such a large organization cannot be innovative the same way smaller ones can be. The strategic requirement for such a large integrated company to compete on the basis of cost per unit means that major changes in the product cannot be made without losing market share during the period of the time in which the changeover is being made. (See Oliver E. Williamson and in particular his book “Markets and hierarchies : analysis and antitrust implications : a study in the economics of internal organization”)

The limited decision domain around the problem must be large enough to encompass the problem. If the problem is that trains do not leave a given station on time and the decision domain is established at the level of the station master, he can keep the trains from sitting at the station too long but he has no control over whether they arrive at the station late. A decision maker cannot completely deal with problems from outside his area of control. That is a major reason why economic organizations get larger. But the managers who work closer to the economic processes make only those decisions delegated to them from higher management.

The American agricultural economic experiment breaks down as businesses get larger and decisions are centralized further away from the individuals who physically work with the core productive processes. Government has always existed to solve society-wide problems, but as economic processes get larger, the organizations that control them get larger. But like government, top managers in larger organizations make their decisions primarily on the basis of political power of the decision makers, since they cannot have direct experience with all the processes they manage. Direct experience is possible only in small organizations.

The American agricultural economic experiment applied historically to decisions made in the limited domain of relatively small family farms, which is why the idea of establishing boundaries and measuring processes and outcomes carefully within those domains is important. Problems that are too large to be dealt with effectively within a given set of borders require that larger borders be drawn. But what happens when the decision is too large for any individual to handle by himself. The decision-makers in such very large and complex organizations require staffs of specialists to assist in decisions in their respective areas.

Decisions in such an environment cannot be made by a single all wise individual because individuals are limited in how much each can rationally decide. That is why the decisions made at the central core of every large organization will always be political. That is, the decision-maker with the greatest level of power will choose which of the alternatives will be implemented. But since the decision is based on political power, any negative outcome of that decision will cause the decision maker to lose power. Any measurement of negative results will either not be measured or the measurements will be spun to provide good results. It is impossible to improve processes when the outcome measurements are not honest, but no political decision maker dares honestly report negative results. Improved outcomes result only from determining what processes cause negative results, and that is impossible for a political decision maker to permit.

It is because of this process that rational decisions in an organization must always be made at the direction of a politically powerful individual.

Problems that are too large to be solved within any given organization normally have to be excluded by the decision maker instead of solved. As an example, when Racism is a major problem in society that problem will cross over any decision borders that are defined for groups smaller than a state or nation, and will often cause problems within the smaller decision domains. Racism, being a social problem, cannot be solved in each of the set of limited domains. The minority Race can, however, be excluded and this will often lead to better outcomes for those limited decision domains because of reduced conflict within each domain. As the American experiment with segregation proved, such problems grow larger in society if they are not solved. The social conflicts and the waste of productive resources limit both the economy and society, so a larger entity with more than just economic power will have to establish Race-neutral best practices and enforce them on the more limited domains. Only government can make such social changes, and the otherwise economically independent (but smaller) business groups have to be changed whether they like it or not.

Like any change in the process intended to improve the outcomes, such an edict will have the effect for a while of reducing preferred outcomes until it is fully established. Only after it is fully accepted will the better outcomes become apparent.

The advocates of totally free market solutions will not allow each employee of an organization to make their own independent decisions, but they have to let trained individuals work as professionals. A nation or society must also have the same flexibility with respect to the economic organizations within it. Social problems have to be solved just as well as economic ones do.

Clinton is wrong to take lobbyists' money

Sunday Edwards and Obama went after Hillary for taking campaign money from lobbyists. Clinton defended the practice by saying (in effect) that lobbyists do important work for all of us by bringing our issues to the attention of the politicians holding office.

Mark Kleiman makes the very important point that since the lobbyists are giving money to the politicians and at the same time asking that the politicians do something for them, the distinction between a campaign contribution and a bribe is nothing more than the belief in the politician's mind whether he or she has been bought or is actually just using another source of information to come to an unbiased decision.

Are we challenging the politician's personal integrity when we disagree that they took money from a lobbyist, clearly returned what the money-giving lobbyist asked for, and thus the politician was bought no matter what they say? Of course we are, and if the politician thinks he or she was not bought, she is simply fooling herself.

Sure we are challenging their integrity - but they are politicians, after all. Who are they to get all huffy about it? Unless they totally personally finance their campaigns out of inherited money from an old fortune, they were bought and paid for the day they started to run for their first office. The only way to avoid the challenge to her integrity is to simply refuse to take money from any lobbyist. Period. Full stop.

The lobbyist may be doing nothing more than merely buying face-time so that they can make their case to the politician, But Hillary's argument was that we are all represented by lobbyists who try to convince her, and it is only right that they should be allowed to represent various parts of the public.

OK, but is it right that some lobbyists get more attention because they bought it? Money-for-access is another way a politician is bought. If a lobbyist for my cause gets second-rate access because I do not provide a budget that allows my lobbyist to buy face-time with a politician, that politician is NOT representing me. She is representing those who buy her time.

Clinton is playing politics in the big league, and politics there are played dirty. She has decided that to win she has to play dirty with the rest of them, rather than to attempt to change the dirty system. It may make her a winner, but it certainly makes her no better than Sen. Stevens of Alaska or Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California. She is wrong to take contributions from lobbyists.

The Democratic FISA cave-in

I don't really know what the technical need for the FISA bill was, but I do know that nothing that comes out of the Bush administration can be trusted. Even if they can demonstrate a valid need for a piece of legislation, they will use that as a cover to use it to pervert the functioning of the American Constitution.

America would be better off if Congress would simply refuse to approve a single further incompetent offered to the Senate as a nomination for any office, and if they would refuse to pass a single piece of legislation requested by the administration or by any Republican. The one thing the Bush administration should have taught us all is to never trust a Republican in government under any circumstances. Even the apparently decent Republicans are just very good at concealing how they plan to screw us all over. So I was, obviously, shocked and saddened by the passage of the FISA bill the other day.

But the shut down of government through lack of trust in all things Republican and conservative simply is not practical. So I didn't really know what to believe about the FISA bill.

Then Digby clarified it for me. Go read it.

She makes more sense than anyone else I have read, but I am not sure I am convinced.

Edwards - through the fire before the race started

Name the candidate for the nomination for President who was Bill Clinton's lead attorney in Clinton's Senate impeachment trial, whose oldest son was killed in a freak car accident and whose wife is currently fighting breast cancer. The media don't like him, so they only story they have reported on him is that when he had a barber visit and cut his hair in advance of a major campaign function, he paid the man $400.

Yeah, John Edwards, the man who understands "All right we are two nations."

The Press doesn't like him, so they miss the real story of Edwards. But Charles P. Pierce gets him, and writes of the campaign by his fellow members of the Press who are working to destroy his candidacy in Equire Magazine:

the political culture seems to be determined to fag-bait John Edwards out of the race this time around. Channeling the conservative id from the swamps of its birth, as always, Ann Coulter flatly called him a "faggot" at a conference of conservative activists, and Rush Limbaugh regularly chaffs him as "the Breck Girl." From there, apparently, the affair of the haircuts has mainstreamed Coulter's position into more polite precincts. In April, Maureen Dowd wrote a column in The New York Times that speculated that the country was not ready for a "metrosexual in chief," comparing Edwards unfavorably with her dear departed Irish-cop daddy, who used to get his hair cut at the Senate barbershop for fifty cents. You could almost hear the gentle ringing of sputum in the spittoons. Thus are the issues. Thus are the watchdogs. Thus are the politics while people are dying.

But what can we expect from the American hack media who are still proud of the way they derailed Nixon's 1960 effort to become President when they focused on Nixon's heavy beard and poor makeup during his TV debate with John Kennedy? It has taken them a while, but the media has been able to shift all consideration in the election of the President way from the competence and demonstrated ability to the fantasy views of the candidates provided by his art directors and set designers.

What do we get now? Whatever it is, it is NOT an evaluation of competence and leadership ability. In a recent debate

John McCain pointed out that in his experience, which is considerable, torture doesn't work. On this, he was disputed by a former mayor of New York, who once was tortured by the thought that his second wife would not vacate the mayoral digs in favor of his second mistress, and the former governor of Massachusetts, who once was tortured by the fact that gay people were getting married. Toughness was now a performance skill in a cowardly country taught to fear the best things about itself.

A candidate's actual biography doesn't matter; George H. W. Bush flew fighter planes when he was a teenager, and he couldn't overcome the "wimp factor" against Ronald Reagan, whose primary combat experience was battling his way to the bar at the Brown Derby. In the three major national elections of his life, George W. Bush, who couldn't find Alabama while he was serving in the National Guard, defeated three men -- Al Gore, John McCain, and John Kerry -- who had volunteered to go to Vietnam, and he did so by out-butching them. Kerry's awkwardness in hunting clothes somehow trumped Bush's fear of horses.

Thanks to the American political media we get candidates who in real life would be considered more worthless than cardboard cutouts of candidates, but our media proudly puts these cutouts into office.

Then they take stenography of the lies the cardboard cutouts they set up on stage in front of them and give us things like a war in the Middle East built on fantasies of bloodless Republican Rambos and incompetence such as that demonstrated by Michael Brown and his destroyed FEMA which couldn't even find New Orleans right after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

But don't count Edwards out yet.

The numbers are good for him in Iowa, but the numbers are always good for him in Iowa. In 2004, it was his surprising second-place finish in Iowa that catapulted Edwards into the top tier of candidates and, eventually, made his selection as John Kerry's vice-presidential nominee possible.

Iowa is still the first place where real voters will tell us who they want. If the failed hack media can't totally hide him behind their fake cardboard cutouts and other media lies the voters have a real opportunity to bring sanity and a good man back to the White House for the first time since the Republicans bought and stole the office in 2000.

The Republicans have already demonstrated what they can do - not just nothing, but less than nothing. They destroy everything they touch, and they have spent nearly eight years now demonstrating how truly bad their sick, unrealistic and Un-American beliefs can be when put into practice. Someone has to come in, take over government and start to repair the damage done by Bush, the Republican Party and the failed American political media.

America needs John Edwards.

Impeach Bush, Cheney; that will Elect Giuliani President

Is it possible that Bush and Rove are intentionally committing "High crimes and Misdemeanors" in order to bait the Democrats into impeaching Bush and Cheney? Here's why the Bush people would do that.

Not only is the Bush Presidency the Presidency of a criminal organization, it consists of failed criminals. When Bush leaves office in January 2009 he will leave behind an eight year Presidency that lacks any single significant success at all. Bush's signature action is not going to be his effort to track down the terrorists who attacked America on 9/11. It is going to be his too-smart-by-half misdirection in which he tried to overreach and totally reform the Middle East into his vision (and that of the free market oil-besotted Republicans) by attacking Iraq, the weakest Middle Eastern country he could attack. Iraq was the one major oil supplying Middle Eastern country Bush's father had already proven the American military could easily defeat. The result, through what Rumsfeld called "Shock and Awe," was suppose to be a new Middle East consisting of a set of peaceful modernized market-based Middle Eastern states ready to sell oil to the U.S. and recycle the resulting petrodollars by buying American consumer goods and services, all while leaving Israel alone.

Bush's God-given genius was going to create a miracle in the Middle East, and no one else had even thought to try it. The September 11 attacks opened the opportunity.

The many levels of stupidity built into the preemptive attack on Iraq will be studied for decades. Now sometimes even a stupid move can be carried out so that the end results look at least acceptable. Because of Bush's complete lack of any semblance of leadership skills and his inability to select and use competent subordinates that has not been a possible outcome of the abysmally stupid invasion and botched occupation of Iraq.

The American public is sick of Iraq, and Bush refuses to face reality and get us out of there. In so doing, he is destroying the Republican Party as a national party for at least a generation. (The really good part is that Bush has discredited the conservative movement so badly that it can only be replaced. It will never recover.)

Is there anything that could possibly reverse the unparalleled disaster that the Bush administration has perpetuated on America and on the Republican Party? Something that could be done now so that the Republicans could - somehow - retain at least the White House in 2008? Yes, there is, but it is nothing the Republicans can do themselves. They have to get the Democrats to do it for them.

To win or, more realistically, even limit the severity of the Republican losses in the 2008 elections the Republicans have to force the Democrats to impeach Bush.

God only knows that America has never had a President who deserved impeachment more. Even the two other Republican Presidents who well deserved impeachment (Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon) did not deserve impeachment as much as Bush does. Justice demands, even screams, that Bush and Cheney must be removed in disgrace immediately. Justice literally screams for impeachment!

But look at the argument Michael Tomasky of the Washington Post made yesterday regarding the political effects of impeaching Bush and Cheney.

Impeachment is not merely a bad idea, but the single worst course of action that Democrats could possibly undertake -- the only thing they could do that might, in one stroke, convert Bush from the figure of contempt and mockery he is now into one of vague sympathy. Just as bad, it's the one move that would definitively alienate nonideological voters and, therefore, harm the Democrats' otherwise excellent chances for winning congressional seats and the White House in 2008. And that's just what impeachment would do to the Democrats. Even worse is what it would do to liberalism and to the country.

You don't have to be as expert a nose counter as Lyndon B. Johnson to know that impeachment wouldn't succeed. You'd have to get both Bush and Cheney to make any difference, which makes it a heavier lift. Even if the articles of impeachment somehow got through the House -- a stretch, because 61 Democrats represent nominally "red" districts and thus may feel compelled to vote nay -- conviction would require 67 votes in the Senate. That means at least 18 Republicans would have to vote to remove a Republican president and vice president. (I'm assuming that Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent, would vote no.) Of course, new bombshells could change all that. But for now, impeachment advocates are urging Democrats to start a fight they'd lose.

[Snip]

Republicans would be far more adept at turning a failed impeachment effort to their advantage in 2008 than the Democrats were in 2000. Back then, Al Gore, his handlers and Democrats in general sought to run from Clinton and push the conversation back to that bland terrain to which defensive Democrats always scamper: "the issues." Republicans, who aren't usually defensive and don't generally scamper, would make impeachment the issue, and by Election Day 2008, the GOP would have millions of Americans believing that -- get this -- the really merciless partisans of the Bush era were the Democrats.

One of the Democrats' strongest arguments for 2008, regardless of their nominee, will be that it's time for the country to set aside rampant partisanship and ideologically driven government. Impeachment would take away that argument.
[Highlighting mine - Editor WTF-o]

Let me briefly summarize the clear outcome of any effort to impeach Bush - Cheney.

1. The impeachment effort will fail. Senate conviction is impossible.
2. Any impeachment effort will shut down the Congress for all other actions. The Republicans don't even have to be obstructive to create the "do-nothing Congress" issue.
3. An attempt to impeach Bush Cheney is the only action that could possible make the Republican Party competitive in the 2008 election by shifting the onus of "Partisanship above the countries' business" onto the Democrats - and it would.

Karl Roves signature strategy for winning difficult elections has always been to convert the opponent's strength into a weakness and to convert his candidate's weakness into a strength.

Bush is so far down in the polls that he has no political strengths of any significance, and he has led the entire Republican Party into the same ditch he is in himself. That is the major weakness of both Bush and the republicans generally - only slightly ahead of the abysmal choice of candidates they have attempted to field to run for President, but that is another issue. How might Karl Rove apply his signature election strategy to the rapidly approaching 2008 election?

He might have Bush make a series of very provocative acts which are clearly high crimes and misdemeanors, tied into alleged efforts to fight the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism.) The effort would not be to create an impregnable Unitary Executive Presidency, since a Democratic President and Congress can reverse those actions starting in 18 months. The intent would be to bait the Democratic Party into attempting to impeach Bush and Cheney.

Mix a Democratic effort to impeach Bush and Cheney with the still very powerful and dangerous Republican propaganda machine and Rove would convert Bush's biggest weaknesses into strengths while converting the Democratic strengths going into the election into weaknesses.

Do you think that Bush and Rove would risk destroying America simply to ensure a Republican election victory (or reduce what is shaping up into a party-destroying loss) in 2008?

Sure they would. Wearing pleased smirks on their faces all the way.

Democrats need to resist the bait. Much as I hate deferring gratification, impeachment must remain off the table.

Who or what do the participants at the Yearly Kos represent?

Digby is in attendance and provides the definitive answer:

The netroots as a whole don't normally organize ourselves around the normal social signifiers or political alliances. We can't. Online identity is a strange and amorphous thing anyway, and the desire to participate in politics doing it cannot be easily analyzed by the usual human shorthand. We just don't know enough about why and how people really use this thing to make sweeping judgments about what we really "mean," certainly not based upon a conference that only a very small segment of the netroots attended, (many of whom are paid political professionals of one kind or another.)

That conference, fun as it might be, is a tiny, tiny corner of the netroots universe and I don't think should be used as a proxy for anything in the larger movement. The only way I can see that the netroots really organize at this point, is around a common world view. It's not policy or personality or even party. It's about how we see our role as citizens and how we think our society and government should work. Wonk work is necessary to sort all that out into coherent programs and political agendas, of course. Real life organizing is required to turn this energy into votes. Communicating ideas and critiquing the political scene is necessary to educate and learn. But none of those things defines what's going on here in any precise way. The best I can do is say that it is (for most people outside the professional political sphere anyway) an empowering, social and political movement that has the potential to rearrange the way we normally build coalitions. (Not exactly a bumper sticker, is it?)

So what or who is represented by the group of individuals who are attending yearly Kos? The Press is using it almost as a Rorschach Test. It means whatever the observer wants to read into it.

That's not surprising. It is a brand new phenomenon, and no one has yet offered an evaluation that everyone recognizes is so accurate that it must be the true one. I suspect that Digby's idea that it is a bunch of people who all have a similar world view will ultimately be a part of the answer. But at this time I think that if anyone does try to apply a single label to what yearly Kos means will simply prove the truth of the General Semantics concept that labels do not change, even when the phenomenon to which the label is applied undergoes radical change.

To use Hayakawa's "The map is not the Territory" analogy, people tend to continue to use the old, comfortable map even after the mapped river has changed courses. Ask any Mississippi riverboat pilot. The nature of the netroots changes at least as rapidly as the course of the Mississippi River does. [*]

An answer, but not really "the definitive" answer, right? That's because there isn't any.

[*] Since conservatives, by their own admission, demand certainty, a lack of change, and a maximum of control, it is obvious that conservatives can never use the netroots approach successfully themselves. Since it will be a source of power that they cannot use, they will find it necessary to control it.

That's why right-wing websites almost never permit comments, especially uncontrolled comments, and it is why they will attempt to regulate the netroots in harsh ways. Bill O'Reilly is attempting to do so by demonizing Daily Kos and the yearly Kos convention as extremists. There will also be efforts to pass laws controlling websites and their content, and those effort will steadily become more draconian as they repeatedly fail to control the threat to the right wind world views.

---

I can't pass this up without comment on the extremism with which Bill O'Reilly has attempted to apply very negative labels to both yearly Kos and to Marcos's site, Daily Kos. Bill's over-the-top rhetoric simply point out how much he feels that this group of people threaten him and his lofty and powerful perch on FOX network.

O'Reilly is right to feel threatened. The world view of the yearly Kos participants is one that is growing rapidly, and it leaves no room for the mixture of lies, propaganda and manipulation that has been his stock in trade. The growth of the Kossite world view will soon relegate him to a backroom where he will reside, a sad, sick, forgotten old man angry that his glory has been taken away.

Good riddance.

How conservatives have made Black into White

Rick Perlstein explains how Chief Justice Roberts was able to justify his decision which causes continued segregation in schools by claiming that merely measuring the percentage of participation by race was itself "Racist." It wasn't something that just came out of the blue.

Amazing - the Libertarian goldbug Ron Paul is the ONLY Republican making sense.

Ron Paul ...is an advocate of states' rights, free trade, fewer taxes, smaller government, strong national sovereignty, and non-interventionism. Paul supports reduced government spending and reduced taxes. As congressman, he claims he has never voted to raise taxes or to approve an unbalanced budget. He has called for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the federal income tax. He also voted against the USA PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War Resolution, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

He also supports a return to the Gold Standard and since he considers spending on the Space Program to be unconstitutional, he always votes against it.

He ran for President in 1988 on the Libertarian ticket, and has not changed his views significantly since that time. He is a doctrinaire free market supporter, opposing any government intervention in the economy at all, to include the minimum wage. He wants to return health care to being paid for by the individual rather then government. He is, as nearly as I can tell, totally ideologically driven, with no consideration given to practicalities. If it is not consistent with his very limited set of ideologies, he opposes it.

Wikipedia lays out his political positions rather clearly, but here is a summary.

"The Ron Paul Freedom Principles" as follows: "Rights belong to individuals, not groups; Property should be owned by people, not government; All voluntary associations should be permissible -- economic and social; The government's monetary role is to maintain the integrity of the monetary unit, not participate in fraud; Government exists to protect liberty, not to redistribute wealth or to grant special privileges; The lives and actions of people are their own responsibility, not the government's."

Wikipedia has a special article just on Ron Paul's political positions. I don't think it would misrepresent his views too much to say that he takes a 19th century pre-Civil War, pre-Industrialism position on Government for America, considers Friedrich Von Hayek,, Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard as his economic guides, and takes a Republican social conservative position on values.

In short, Ron Paul, M.D. is no doubt a charming and interesting individual, but he is the quintessential crackpot. He is the kind of charming eccentric individual that the British have been famous for producing. He starts out from a set of assumptions that a great many of us would agree with, but then carries them to extreme, even irrational positions which he tries to get the government to adopt.

So what does it say about the Republican Party when everyone says he is the only person running for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination who makes an sense at all on the subject of Iraq?

From Talking Points Memo:


When every leading Republican candidate for the 2008 Republican Party Presidential nomination is a great deal more irrational and extreme than Ron Paul, then the Republican Party has completely gone off the rails.

---

Paul Berman writes in his excellent book Terror and Liberalism, that the many wars of the twentieth century have been one long battle between the freedom of Liberalism and a series of irrational, even insane, organizations which all take on totalitarian methods to enforce their forms of insanity. Those insane organizations arose in Europe many years ago as a reaction to Liberalism, and spread to the Muslim world.

It looks to me as though the American Republican Party has been taken over by one group which is insanely reacting to Liberal freedoms. It consists of economic free traders who detest any government enforcement of their responsibilities to society, allied with fundamentalist religious extremists who want to gain control of government to enforce their religious beliefs on everyone in the nation.

The free traders consist of two largely corrupt sets of business people, one group which sees government as a large pot of money to be skimmed from for their own benefit while the other is a group of business persons who consider society to be best served if it is nothing more than a set of commodities (land, labor and financial capital) which they are totally free to exploit is whatever ways make them more wealthy and powerful. Any restriction on their absolute Right to pay as little as possible for commodities and charge as much as possible for their products prevents the best of all people, Entrepreneurs, from ruling society as they properly should.

The financial Entrepreneurs demand the greatest freedom from government control, since frequently the products they create and trade in change extremely rapidly, and the first to market during each change makes the largest amounts of money. These financial Entrepreneurs, like the bankers, high interest lenders and owners of payday loan operations, want to be left alone to farm consumers of their cash. The latter groups are perfectly happy, however, to get the government certify their products like insurance so that customers have less fear of being ripped off, and to let government enforce their usurious and misleading contracts while passing laws that make it difficult for defrauded customers from suing over the fraud.

The current crop of potential Republican Presidential nominees are the most recent and most blatant examples. They are the modern "movement conservatives."

Congressman and Dr. Ron Paul fails to join the rest of the so-called movement conservatives who have taken over the Republican Party because they are outcome driven. They will for the most part take any position, idea or action that will lead to the destruction of Liberalism's government-enforced freedoms and protections against personal exploitation. Thus the movement conservatives could advocate reducing the size of government in the past while lauding the way their party has presided over the largest expansion of the Federal government ever seen during the Reagan - Bush 41 - Bush 43 years. Contradictions? Not a problem as long as they change society to increase their own wealth and power.

Dr. Paul, however, demands consistency with his ideology above all else. His set of positions is ideological rather than outcome based, and his methods of decision demand logical and rational consistency with the ideologies he starts from. The result is that while the rest of the Republican Party repeatedly demonstrates its insanities, Dr. Paul comes across as a very rational and (in comparison) sensible man.

Movement conservatism is pushing America rapidly towards being an authoritarian nation run as a plutocracy. The fact that Dr. Ron Paul can stand up in front of America and appear to be the most sensible man running for the nomination for President in the Republican party demonstrates how very UnAmerican and dangerous the Republican Party has already become.

Guiliani will raise government revenue by cutting taxes

The main bridge in Minneapolis over the Mississippi river just collapsed during rush hour traffic because the Minnesota Governor, Tim Pawlenty, took the "No new Taxes" pledge and specifically vetoed a 5 cent per gallon increase in the gasoline tax two years ago. The tax increase, the first in 20 years, was specifically intended for Minnesota highway repair. Last week we saw the result of VooDoo economics again.

Now here is Rudy Giuliani promising that he will increase government revenue by raising taxes.

Word has not been released on which asylum Giuliani was released from to speak to the reporters.

What do each of these people have in common?

• Vince Foster


• Media Whores online.
  Wikipedia has an article on the watchdog site which closed in 2004. The right-wing Wurlitzer went after them when they exposed the arrest of Bush's daughters, Jenna and Barbara Bush, for underage drinking at Chuy’s in Austin.


• Jamil Hussein


• Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp Private Beauchamps' stories have been completely confirmed. Doesn't matter. The Wurlitzer still is out to destroy him.

What do they each have in common? Each told the truth when the right-wingers preferred a lie. So in each case the right-wing Republicans set out to destroy each of them.

Go read the story written by Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake.

Bone and blood is the price of "No New Taxes."

Digby pretty much says what is really important.

...you cannot look at something like this and not wonder if the years and years of infrastructure neglect at the hands of GOP propagandists who have been starving government for decades now is finally coming back to haunt us. [Snip]

I have to wonder if any Republicans were on that bridge last night. If there were, they must have realized that sometimes we really are all in it together.

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is a Republican social conservative who

... signed a no-new-taxes pledge and has been a proven leader in previous tax battles," says Gessing. "His signature achievement as governor was closing a $4.5 million budget gap during the 2004-05 cycle, without raising taxes,... (That was From "Oval Office 2008".)

Isn't that great? Pawlenty refused to raise taxes. Keep government small. I'm sure Grover Norquist is very proud of Pawlenty.

The Huffington Post presented previous reports on the bridge:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said the collapsed bridge was inspected by the Minnesota Department of Transportation in 2005 and 2006 and that no immediate structural problems were noted.

The 40-year-old bridge was rated as "structurally deficient" two years ago and possibly in need of replacement, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. The newspaper said that rating was contained in the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Bridge Inventory database.

Let's see. Pawlenty is the man specifically responsible for maintaining the bridge and the highway. Can we believe him when he says there were no structural problems reported? He is also a "No new taxes" politician. Would he ever accept a report that said the bridge needed to be replaced? That would force him to break his pledge, and risk his reelection. Much cheaper just to gamble that nothing would go wrong on his watch, of course. Unless he loses his gamble. Looks like he lost. It's a shame he wasn't on the bridge himself, along with Grover Norquist.

The Bridge Inventory database costs $25 per state, so we will have to take secondary reports of what it says. No doubt the Minnesota Department of Transportation expected that people who might disagree with their report would not spend the $25 just on speculation that they were feeding their boss, Pawlenty, what he wanted to hear instead of the Truth. But I'm sure the Minnesota Department of Transportation employees wouldn't lie. They just hired a consulting engineer, and with a wink-and-a-nudge made sure he knew was kind of report was acceptable if he every wanted another contract with them.

This morning's take on the collapse of the IH 35 W bridge over the Mississippi River at Minneapolis in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is:

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It's been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase - the first in 20 years - last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

Taxes really should not be too high. But at the same time, they should provide financing for the essential functions of government. Anyone think that a 5-cent gas tax increase after 20 years would have been too much if it could have prevented the collapse of that bridge? Before you say "yes," imagine yourself sitting on that bridge yesterday.

Another example of government failure to adequately maintain essential infrastructure was the poorly funded levees that collapsed and allowed New Orleans to be flooded when Katrina hit that city. Makes you wonder what else the engineers haven't been able to afford to adequately maintain on the Mississippi River, just so politicians can make and keep their "No New Taxes" pledges.

Taxes are the price we pay to have a civilized society instead of living as hunter-gathers. Taxes should be high enough to pay for the critical infrastructure of society, and few would argue that roads and bridges frequently fit that category. (Sen. Ted Stevens' "Bridge to Nowhere" does not.) But the key is that the level of taxes is a balancing act. If taxes are too high, some businesses might be stifled. If they are too low, people die, people are not educated and jobs are lost. The level of taxes is a balancing act.

The "No new taxes" mantra removes the ability to balance what is needed from Sen. Stevens' pork. "No new taxes" leaves lawmakers trying to balance, but acting like a tightrope walker who can only move to a single side when he starts to fall. Balance under those circumstances is impossible.

I am reminded of the folk song The Springhill Mine Disaster." The refrain is Bone and blood is the price of coal. Bone and blood is also the price of the "No New Taxes" mantra.

Rumsfeld, Neocons laugh off death of Pat Tillman

M.J. Rosenberg points out the right-wing Neocon attitude towards the death of Pat Tillman:

I always thought that, for all their loathsomeness, the right cares about our men and women in uniform. Yes, I know that they are all too willing to sacrifice them on the battlefield. But that is war and these people believe that all wars are worth dying in.

But now I see that they even have utter contempt for the individual soldier who dies on a foreign battlefield. Donald Rumsfeld and his GOP allies chuckled their way through yesterday's hearing on the death (friendly fire, murder, whatever) of the most famous soldier serving in the 9/11 wars, Pat Tillman. This is the same soldier whose death they used to drum up support for the war, who they made a poster boy for it.

But then he was killed (somehow) and it came out that he opposed the Iraq war, was not a Christian, and, worst of all, came from a family of troublemakers who demanded to know what happened to their boy.

And now Pat Tillman is, in the words of an army chaplain, "worm dirt." And his death, which may have been a murder, is one big joke to these guys. Rumsfeld, leaving the Committee room, dodged Tillman's family, not offering a word of sympathy. They have none. Read the rightwing blogs on the Tillman case. The once fair-haired boy is now a joke, his death just one of those things, his family a bunch of liberals who should shut just shut the f--- up.

Even the Republican criminals currently in charge of this country don't have to also be loathsome gutter-slime, but Rumsfeld and crew work at it.

---

See also:

• Evidence suggests Pat Tillman was murdered
  July 26, 2007
  
• What is the Bush Admin hiding in the Pat Tillman case?
  July 15, 2007

Digby explains the Republican panic

Panic isn't too strong a word, either. Digby deconstructs a new whine from David Frum over at NRO about the huge advantage Democrats have with young voters. Frum points out that young white voters still prefer Republicans by about 2%, but that Hispanic and African-American young voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats. So what is the republican problem? According to Frum, not Bush's social policies. The problem is the failure of the Bush administration is

... the legacy of immigration non-enforcement.

Digby points out that the poll was not of new immigrants. It was of voters, most of whom are American born and educated. But this piece of right-wing Republican ignorance certainly explains why immigration reform and a fence across the border between Mexico and the U.S. are such great right-wing priorities.

Essentially Frum complains that young Hispanics and African-America voters detest the Republicans. Does he ask why? Of course not, because the only answer to that is the fact that the Republican Party is the party of institutionalized Racism in America today. Digby provides the evidence, as well as economic studies that show the reason why America does not have the social support system fitting to a modern industrial nation is that very Racism Frum so studiously ignores.

Essentially Frum is lamenting that the vote is not restricted to White Americans only. Digby points out that this very Racism is something that Bush and Rove have tried to wean the Republicans off of, but failed. So it is very likely that the alternative was the Attorney General's DoJ efforts to suppress likely Democratic votes in key states.

Go read Digby for the full details. As usual, her post is worth reading.

The delusion-based strategy for the Global War on Terrorism

The Bush-Cheney strategy to fight "Terrorism" is based on a delusion, and Digby pulls the data that shows it together. Here is the beginning of her post:

Bush (Cheney actually) based US strategy on the trash talk and recruiting fatwas of fundamentalist freaks rather than a real assessment of their capabilities and goals.

Either Bush is making strategy based on a delusional goal of his opponent, which is idiotic; or he's saying he believes his opponent has the capability of achieving this delusional goal, which is idiotic. Neither bodes well for the republic.

Well, Bush and Cheney are delusional themselves, in different ways, so we have been dealing with a triple whammy. And to make matters even worse, their strategy is based on a delusional goal of their opponents (which isn't even as delusional as they say it is) and they believe they are capable of it. Mushroom Clouds! Drone Planes! No wonder the whole world has a headache.

Why is the Bush administration so unsuccessful at foreign policy? Because it is all based on delusion. It has no connection to human reality. They pull imaginary levers, nothing happens, and they get frustrated and angry.

One obvious reaction many of the right-wingers suffering from these delusions will resort to is looking for scapegoats to blame. That's what the "We were stabbed in the back" rhetoric we are hearing from the dead-ender right-wingers is all about. There is also no limit to what they will do to create the society of their delusion. They are "true-believers" and consider it their mission to convert the deluded to the path of righteousness which only they, at this time, know and understand.

If you want to understand where the delusions delusions maintained by individual members of such a movement come from, that is the central idea of Paul Berman's book Terror and Liberalism. His key point is that there are delusional organizations, and those delusional organizations include Fascists, Marxist-Leninist Communists, Nazis and religious fundamentalists. The Moonies are another such delusional group. The core idea or "Ur-Myth" for each movement may be different from that of the others, but the groups all use such similar methods that they will work as allies. An example is the way the Moonies (owners of the Washington Times) are allies to the American conservative movement.

Each of the delusional organizations is built around the idea of a utopia of some sort. Berman calls those utopias "Ur-Myths." (They are also called "memes" by many of us, but "Ur-Myths" are memes with a specific function in delusional organizations.) The members of those movements design social systems to recruit new members and transmit belief in those "Ur-Myths" and the methods of maintaining and enforcing those Ur-Myths on the new members.

The most rigidly authoritarian of these organizations are strongly hierarchical and limit the permissible information available to their members. That can be done either by putting certain publications on a blacklist, by getting them removed from libraries and schools, or by training the group members to be extremely anxious when the start to get information that is forbidden to them, while providing approved sites for information that are "safe." FOX News, the Weekly Standard and National Review On-Line are all such "safe" sources of political news. In the religious organizations, the Bible and the Koran are safe sources because each has a massive educational organization behind them to explain to believers what those books really mean. The attacks on any book based on Evolution are a method of setting up personal anxiety in true-believers when they encounter books and ideas that are different (even if not directly opposed to) the accepted interpretations of the "Inerrant" Bible.

The logic of those attacks does not matter. What matters is the conflict and the resulting anxiety created in true believers when they encounter the forbidden ideas. Emotions trump logic every time. When a person become anxious every time they encounter an idea or a fact, they will avoid and dismiss that idea or fact out-of-hand. The few true believers who find themselves personally forced to overcome that anxiety cease to be true-believers, and if they allow the other group members to know of their change of heart, they will be one of the rejectees who provide examples of what is acceptable belief to the other true-believers. This is what happened to Trotsky when he rejected the beliefs Stalin deemed acceptable. He was expelled from the party and from the USSR, and when he continued to be a threat to Stalin, he was murdered.

A group defines itself by who it expels. Generally just expelling dissidents can solidify the group and harden the authorized beliefs of the individual members. The Amish practice this. One who abandons the Amish beliefs will be cut off from contact even with the closest family. Attacking non-believers, physically or otherwise, also works to solidify group cohesion and individual beliefs. Violence can be used, but is usually only necessary for those who fight back or who effectively oppose the group and its Ur-Myths. Then, like expelling the occasional dissident, violence is an example to the groups of what is acceptable. That is why it is rarely needed.

All of these delusional organizations recruit individuals likely to be amenable to adopting the Ur-Myth of that movement and acting on it. People who reject recruitment are not required, and again, they help define the beliefs of the members of the group. Then, once inside the movement, promotions and rewards go to those who best display belief in the Ur-Myth (or ideology.) Free speech and free transmission of information is a major threat to such organizations. That is why neither was permitted in the USSR, why Putin is taking control of the major media in Russia, and why the Communist Party USA was placed on the banned list in the United States. It is the usual reaction of any organization when they feel under attack. But it is also the breeding ground for delusional authoritarian organizations like the John Birch Society, the American conservative movement and the protestant evangelists who adopted the doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy.

It is my belief that the American conservative movement is one such delusional organization, and that the John Birch Society was an earlier one. The similarity between the hierarchical structure and the authoritarian methods of those organizations and the structures and methods of their greatest enemies, Marxist-Leninist Communism and more recently the Islamic fundamentalist Jihadist organizations like al Qaeda is to be expected. The organizations have different Ur-Myths but they function socially the same way. Each is based on the same kind of group-induced delusion-based behaviors, and each either has become or is becoming a delusional authoritarian movement consisting of members trained to pass on the delusions.

The Ur-Myths behind each movement are very different, but that doesn't matter. Whatever the Ur-Myth, each Ur-Myth performs the same function for its respective movement. It really doesn't matter if the Ur-Myth a movement is based on is the Communist Utopia, the Muslim Caliphate, Free Market Capitalism (Ayn Rand provides the best myth of that type) or the Biblical God who is the Lord Jesus Christ and who speaks through the inerrant Holy Bible. It is enough that there is, in each case, a catechism for the members to recite to each other. After that, the authoritarian methods of maintaining the Ur-Myth and the methods of maintaining the movement based on it are the same. [*]

This is a rough summary of the group source and purpose of the delusions displayed by so many individuals in cult-like organizations or movements. Click through to Digby's post for more evidence of the individual behavior of the American conservative movement versions of this delusional set of group and individual memes.

[*][My apologies to Paul Berman if, in attempting to summarize his ideas and melding them with my own, I have severely misstated any of his concepts. I don't think I have, or I would have corrected them.]

NRO lauds Ron Paul for espousing the "Old Time Conservatism"

John Derbyshire at NRO boosts Ron Paul for his efforts to promote a conservatism that the young William F. Buckley would have very much agreed with.

Look at those policy positions! Abolish the IRS and Federal Reserve; balance the budget; go back to the gold standard; pull out of the U.N. and NATO; end the War on Drugs; overturn Roe v. Wade; repeal federal restrictions on gun ownership; fence the borders; deport illegals; stop lecturing foreign governments about human rights; let the Middle East go hang. What’s not to like?

We-e-ell. We all have nits to pick, though we wouldn’t all pick the same ones. The gold standard? Wasn’t it going off the gold standard that gave us full control over the wilder swings of the business cycle? Which was, like, a good idea? I am by no means as willing to surrender to the collective wisdom of modern economists as Bryan Caplan wants me to be, but — the gold standard? Come on. And stopping the War on Drugs? Where would that take us? — Philip Morris brands of crack cocaine available over the counter at Walgreens? You pick your own nits.

That’s not the point, though. Nits aside, the broad outlook there is conservative in a way we don’t often see from a presidential candidate. It is, in fact, conservatism of exceptional purity. Reading through those policy positions, an American conservative can hear the mystic chords of memory sounding in the distance, and hear the call of ancestral voices wafted on the breeze: Hayek, von Mises, Rothbart, Nock, Kirk, John Chamberlain... Unlike the product in that automobile commercial, this is your father’s conservatism — the Old-Time Religion. What is there among Ron Paul’s policy prescriptions that the young William F. Buckley would have disagreed with?

Go back to my earlier post showing how the Bush administration is enacting the core elements of the John Birch Society platform. The central beliefs they were pushing, and what Cheney has enacted are:

1. The abolition of the graduated income tax.

2. The repeal of social security legislation.

3. The impeachment of various high government officials,

4..The end to busing for the purpose of school integration.

5. The end to U.S. membership in the United Nations.

In other words, these are the people who want to take America back to the days of the robber Barons, segregation enforced by law and by KKK terrorism, and repression of labor. If they could, they'd go back to before the Civil War. Keep them in office and they will.

TPM covers that notorious "hate site" Daily Kos

josh Marshall, in response to the frantic warnings given by Bill "O'Goebbels" O'Reilly about the yearly convention of the extreme left hate site Daily Kos, offers to personally attend that convention in Chicago and expose all the viciousness that goes on there. Go watch Josh's video.

[I wonder if Josh will take his son to Chicago. Kos has a son only slightly older, and both look really cute in pictures. Maybe they can have a "cute-off?" Probably depends on whether Mrs. Moulitsas and Mrs. Marshall permit it, of course.]

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This, by the way, is my 2,000th post at this site since I started it in September 2004 under the name "Politics Plus Stuff." It's been fun, and very educational, although I have not yet learned to write short, pithy posts.

I will probably learn to write those short, pithy posts about the same time I get my life organized, and I realized a while back that will occur roughly three days after my funeral.

The Dead-ender American Right uses 1920's German rhetoric

I'm glad that Josh Marshall sees this also. When the Right-wing starts a war and it goes badly south on them, they can't just chalk it up as an effort gone bad and move on. They are really emotionally invested in their wars, and instead of admitting they are lost they have to find a scapegoat to blame. We are seeing this now with the Dead-ender Republican war-supporter right-wing.

What I'd like to focus on though is the increasingly clear and no less disturbing trend for the president's defenders to ape the tactics, rhetoric and strategy of the post-WWI German revanchist right, which laid the groundwork for and in many respects evolved into the Nazi party.

An inflammatory comparison? Yes. But the inflammatory nature of the comparison shouldn't scare us into ignoring how strong the similarities are. You see it in the explicit 'stab in the back' rhetoric and the effort to cover up their own authorship and prosecution of the role by blaming their own failures on the critics of the war.

And then perhaps the most telling sign, from an American perspective: As the dead-ender right's plans and dreams about Iraq come under greater and greater strain from the alternative universe of reality, and as the president's popularity wanes further and further, there's a growing tendency for them to think about and write about domestic American politics in terms of violence and extra-constitutional action.

Every proposal that might end the war in Iraq on a positive tone (there are none the offer to "win" the war there) depends on a successful Iraqi government taking control of Iraq and bringing peace and stability to that nation. Yet there is no hint that the Iraqi government will ever become the government of more than the "Green Zone." The Saudi Arabians have given up the expectation that the Maliki government will succeed.

The Dead-ender Right-Wing is refusing to recognize the reality in Iraq and instead trying to sell the fiction that the war in Iraq has been lost because of the powerless rhetoric of criticisms of the war here in America. This is the classic "We lot because we were stabbed in the back by the" Socialists Liberals rhetoric used by the German right wing and ex-military after WW I.

The fact is that the last two years of WW I were fought under the total command of Germany by Ludendorf and Hindenburg, they tried everything they could, and when the final, last-ditch effort in Spring of 1918 failed they realized that the war could not be won, so they (the Generals, not the government) surrendered.

Iraq is as unwinnable for the Americans today as was "The Great War" for the Germans in 1918. But the right-wing which in both cases was responsible for starting the two wars refuses to take any responsibility for their own actions. Instead the search for domestic traitors who stabbed the nation in the back was (and is) used to avoid responsibility by those truly responsible.

More from the John Marshall article:

As the war for faux-democracy looks more and more like a debacle, the lure of authoritarianism at home becomes greater and greater for the war's dead-end defenders. And as redeployment looks more and more likely, they have to keep raising the stakes on the consequences of doing so. Apparently our whole future, our honor, destiny, certainly our safety from the Iraqi insurgents who will restart the insurgency in the US -- all of this is in the balance. The stakes must keep rising because that is, paradoxically, the only way for them to avoid taking responsibility for their failures.

This is a fantasy, and like most right-wing political fantasies, it is nasty and self-serving. But like the similar right-wing inspired military fiasco in Vietnam, this one will ring through American politics for the next generation.

Where is Buffy the Vampire-Slayer? Now that her show has been canceled she should have plenty of free time. We need her and her stakes to impale in the hearts of the right-wing dead-ender "Undead" before they again rise up to try to kill everyone around the Hellmouth at Sunnydale and in the rest of America.