radio·free·donia

An Electoral College Tie at 269: Who Wins? Us!

2006-11-21T09:28:00.000-05:00

One of my occasional hobbyhorses over the past few years is how close we came in 2004 to a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College (just a few thousand votes each in Nevada, New Mexico, and Iowa), how little good it would have done us, and my concern that it could happen for real in 2008.

You see, in event of neither candidate getting a majority of the Electoral College's 538 votes, the House of Representatives chooses the next President, and the Senate chooses the Veep. Obviously, in 2004, that would have done us no good at all: the House would have returned Bush to the White House, and the Senate would have continued Cheney's portfolio as Vice President.

But the House side of the equation isn't just a majority-rules situation - it's worse than that: if the Presidential election winds up in the House, per the 12th Amendment, each state delegation gets one vote, with a majority (26 states) required for a win. Since, in the current Congress, the GOP has the majority in 29 state delegations, the Dems in 18, and three tied, I didn't have much hope that that would change, even if the Dems won back the House.

It's changed. Not by quite enough to win outright, but enough not to lose.

As a result of the recent elections, the Dems went from a minority to a majority in the delegations of New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Iowa, and Colorado. And they went from a tie to a majority of the Minnesota delegation, and from a minority in the Arizona delegation to a tie. So now the Dems have a majority of 25 House delegations, a minority of 22, and are tied in 3.

So what would happen in a tie election if it were held a year early? The election would go into the House, which (at first) wouldn't yield a majority for either candidate. But meanwhile, the Senate (51-49 Dem) would elect the Dem Veep candidate as Vice President, who would (per the 20th Amendment) act as President until the House settled on a candidate.

In a perfect world, that alone should suffice to convince a tied delegation to throw in the towel and vote the Dem candidate in as President. If not, the Veep/Acting President could officially appoint the Dem Presidential nominee as his advisor, and treat him like the President, giving him the Oval Office as his own, letting him live in the White House while the Veep/Acting President lived in the Vice Presidential residence on Observatory Circle, and so forth.

After a while of this, the Congressional opposition could either throw in the towel, or be irrelevant. Their choice.

Of course, if the 2008 election ends in an Electoral College tie, it'll be the Congress elected that year that decides the issue. But barring a reversal of fortune in 2008, we're far better situated to 'win' a 2008 tie now than we were a month ago.

We won! Cool. Now the real work begins.

2006-11-21T05:08:00.000-05:00

If anyone's actually stopping by, my apologies for the lack of posts recently. Life's been busy, and the big things lately have been Iraq and the election, which you didn't need my help to follow.

The Dems won, which is of course a Good Thing. Just for the heck of it, here's the updated, consolidated scorecard:

House of Representatives: we picked up 29 formerly GOP-held seats, at last count, and lost none, with 5 GOP-held seats still being contested in one way or another. (I'll get back to that in a minute.) So the Dems will have, at a minimum, a 232-203 edge in the House in 2007.

Senate: As everyone knows, we picked up 6 GOP-held seats, and lost none. Webb, Tester, McCaskill, Sherrod Brown, Casey, and Whitehouse in VA, MT, MO, OH, PA, and RI, respectively.

Lieberman (CFL) beat Lamont (D) in CT, but he'll caucus with the Dems, despite veiled threats to do otherwise: the day after he goes over, he becomes irrelevant, and he knows it. All he's got is bullshit. Main thing is, he's in the Senate as a sorta Democrat, but as a marriage of convenience all around. He's not there by dint of the support of actual Democrat voters.

Governorships: picked up 6 and lost 0 here, too. Beebe, Ritter, O'Malley, Spitzer, Strickland, and Deval Patrick in AR, CO, MD, NY, OH, and MA, respectively.

State Legislatures: we picked up control of nine state legislative chambers, with control of two (MT House and PA House) still pending final results in local races. This gives us at least 56 of the 98 state legislative chambers. (Nebraska has a technically nonpartisan unicameral legislature, which is why only 98 rather than 100.)

This is almost as big a deal as everything else here, for several reasons: (1) it shows that people liked us better than the GOP at the state level, as well as this just being an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq protest vote; (2) it adds a whole bunch of potential Dem candidates for House seats and governorships; and (3) these are the folks who control redistricting, which the GOP has famously gone out of its way to game in their favor in the past few years. The more state legislatures where we control at least one house, the fewer states where the GOP can pull that sort of stuff.

Getting back to those still-pending House races:

There are two runoffs pending. One of them is between two Dems (LA-02, where William ($80K in the icebox) Jefferson is in a runoff with Karen Carter) so we hold that seat either way, but hopefully Carter will emerge victorious over one of the few genuinely sleazy Dems of note. The other is in TX-23, between GOP incumbent Bonilla and Dem challenger Ciro Rodriguez. Don't know what our prospects are, but apparently it ain't over, because the DCCC is putting money and staff into that one. So that's a chance for a pickup.

There are four GOP-held seats where the Election Day results are either still being tabulated or being contested. Larry Kissel in NC-08, Dr. Vicki Wulsin in OH-2, and Mary Jo Kilroy in OH-15 all trail, but by substantially less than the number of absentee and provisional ballots still to be counted. The odds are against any of these three becoming a pickup, but you never know.

And Christine Jennings in FL-13 is legally challenging a loss by only a few hundred votes on account of an astonishingly high number of voters in Sarasota County, where she won a majority of the voters, who failed to vote in the House race. Many people reported problems with the House race not appearing on the electronic ballot, and there were about 12% fewer votes in the House race in Sarasota County than in the Senate and Governor races, while the difference was more like 2% in the rest of the district. This one may be decided by the House of Representatives, which could either seat Jennings or keep the seat open pending a revote. So this one's very much in play.

Now that the scorecard's over, the reason why I'm not jumping up and down with joy is that this is only a first step. The point of winning these races is to actually do stuff. Iraq's gone from quagmire to disaster, we're still doing nothing about global warming, and average Americans still aren't sharing in the nation's economic gains.

But now we can at least try to start addressing these issues. When the GOP controlled Congress, we couldn't even get our legislation considered, let alone passed. So it's a big first step.

Military's Short On Equipment, Too

2006-10-15T15:51:00.000-04:00

Britain's short on helicopters in Afghanistan, and we don't have any to lend them:

Britain is so short of helicopters in Afghanistan that military chiefs are being forced to scour the world for civilian aircraft to support its troops after the US rejected a plea to help plug the shortfall.

An ageing fleet of just eight Chinooks is working around the clock to supply and reinforce soldiers in remote outposts facing waves of Taliban attacks. The only Chinook in the Falklands was taken away for use in the campaign.
...
The Independent on Sunday can also reveal that reconnaissance and intelligence missions in Afghanistan are being affected by the lack of smaller and more flexible helicopters. But senior military officials said that when UK commanders asked for temporary deployment of US helicopters in Afghanistan, they were told there were none to spare.

Instead, the MoD has been forced to seek out commercial operators for non-combat operations, to free more military craft for use at the front line. So urgent is the need that Britain is understood to be asking other nations that have ordered Merlin helicopters from Westland to allow the MoD to requisition them.

While Afghanistan is much more a joint U.S.-NATO operation than Iraq, invading Afghanistan was still our idea, in response to an attack on our country. I'd think it would be our responsibility to make sure there's enough materiel for the allied troops to do the work of securing the country.

Oh yeah, and enough troops, too. But that isn't gonna happen; we don't have any of them to spare either.

Meanwhile, if we needed to go to war in Korea, we'd be doing it with a shortage of bombing guidance systems, surveillance aircraft, and unmanned drones, because they're tied up in Iraq:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military's top officer said Thursday that the Pentagon would have sufficient forces to win if called on to fight a war in North Korea, but the conflict would be more difficult without the intelligence and guidance systems devoted to Iraq and Afghanistan.
...
Pace said a conflict with North Korea, which both he and President Bush have said is highly unlikely, would rely heavily on the Navy and Air Force because of the significant deployment of land forces in Iraq. In addition, such an attack would not be "as clean as we would like," he said, because guidance systems used to aim bombs were in use in the Middle East.

"You wouldn't have the precision in combat going to a second theater of war that you would if you were only going to the first theater of war," Pace told a group of military reporters. "You end up dropping more bombs potentially to get the job done, and it would mean more brute force."

Although Pace did not name specific guidance and intelligence systems, Air Force officers have said they do not have surveillance aircraft such as Global Hawk and Predator reconnaissance drones available for East Asia because of their heavy use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The unmanned aircraft are used to spy on enemy territory.

As Josh Marshall's weekend pinch-hitter DK over at TPM more or less said this morning, WTF are we doing, doing a lot of bombing in Iraq anyway? You can't beat an insurgency like that, because "collateral damage," i.e. people killed and wounded who had nothing to do with the insurgency, motivates a lot more people to join the insurgency.

But the Bush Administration has been oblivious to this throughout. No surprises here.

Pace said a war in Asia would further strain U.S. troop rotations.

No shit, Sherlock. We already don't have nearly enough troops for the war we're fighting, and Bush isn't planning to increase the size of the army. And (from the first link)

The Pentagon is planning to maintain US troop levels in Iraq at about 140,000 for at least four more years.

That'll strain troop rotations a bit, too.

If we haven't already evacuated the Green Zone by helicopter, that is.

Bush: Dishonestly Avoiding a Draft by Destroying the Army

2006-10-03T17:16:00.000-04:00

There's a certain political advantage to a President in being able to prosecute a war with an all-volunteer military. What it means for most Americans is that their kid (or their spouse, or parent) isn't at risk of being killed or wounded. And those that are undertaking that risk on our behalf, well, they signed up for it; they knew it came with the territory. The war can be at arms' length for most of us: something they report about, but that we're not connected to.

But a draft would be a whole 'nother thing. All of a sudden, the risk would be widely distributed. If it wasn't our friends and loved ones in Iraq before, it could be now. People would ratchet up the attention they paid to what's going on over there.

It's pretty clear that our military has exceeded its design specs some time ago in this war. There may or may not be actual military doctrine on the subject, but there's no question that there's a quantifiability to it somewhere: that our army is capable of providing X boots on the ground indefinitely in the context of a self-sustaining military. And whatever X is, we've exceeded it. We've typically had 138,000 troops in Iraq, plus another 20,000 or so in Afghanistan, and lesser commitments elsewhere. And it's tearing the army apart; we're having to do all sorts of tricks to keep up with it.

Tricks like this: we've made liberal use of stop-loss orders, routinely extended our troops' tours of duty, worn out the National Guard, sent our elite training unit to Iraq, called up the Individual Ready Reserve, we've shifted troops from South Korea to Iraq, we've put nearly 12,000 sailors from the Navy on the ground in Iraq, along with a lesser number of Air Force troops. Enlarging the volunteer army is out: we've allowed violent criminals, gangbangers, skinheads and neo-Nazis, high school dropouts and persons of low I.Q. into the Army, as well as raising the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 42, just to keep our troop strength where it is. He wouldn't have to use these tricks if our military was big enough for the job. Which it clearly isn't: it still isn't enough troops to reduce the violence, lawlessness and chaos in Iraq, Afghanistan's slipping away, and every month, our army's stretched thinner and more worn-out than it was the previous month.

It's put-up-or-shut-up time: if we're serious about staying in Iraq, we need a bigger military, which means we need a draft. If we're not willing to institute a draft, it's time to stop fooling ourselves and work our way towards the exit.

Bush claims that Iraq is the central front in that great existential conflict, the War on Terror. He says we can't leave until the job's done, and we won't be leaving while he's President. And his term has another two years and three months to run.

If he means what he says, then he's got to institute a draft. He doesn't have enough troops there to accomplish his goals. If he doesn't institute a draft, then he's saying that he's unwilling to run the political risk of getting the troops he needs to win, but he insists on sending our troops off to die in an exercise in futility, presumably because he doesn't want to have to admit failure.

How many of our men and women in uniform should have to die because Bush is afraid to ask the country for enough troops to win, and is equally afraid of admitting defeat? There is only one morally right answer: none.

Bureaucrats Get Emails: "Constitution Day"

2006-09-18T14:55:00.000-04:00

All Department of Commerce employees received this email on Friday, September 15:

MEMORANDUM FOR ALL COMMERCE EMPLOYEES

In December 2004, the President established September 17 of each year as a day in which we take time to celebrate the framing of our Constitution. On September 17, 1787, the U.S. Constitution was signed and the course of our Nation's history was changed. This year, our celebration will occur on Monday, September 18, 2006.

When delegates of the Constitution Convention met behind closed doors during a hot Philadelphia summer, their goal was to establish a new form of government that ensured justice and protection of all citizens from internal strife and outside attack. The framers wanted to create a national government that was effective, but that did not infringe upon the rights of the individual or the states. After heated debate, on September 17, 1787, 39 signers ensured the successful future of our country.

History has proven that our Founding Fathers were successful. Our Constitution remains the oldest written national constitution still in effect. Unlike most national constitutions that define the rights of the people, our Constitution is a document in which "We the People" define the role and limits of the government. The powers not expressly given to the Federal Government are reserved for the people and the states.

Our 219 year-old Constitution continues to work well today, even though many signers had some doubt. While more than 11,000 amendments to the document have been proposed by Congress over the last two centuries, only 33 amendments have gone to the states to be ratified. To date, our Constitution has been amended only 27 times. And the first ten of these amendments became known as our "Bill of Rights." We continue to benefit from the far-seeing wisdom of the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the access to our courts, our right to criticize, and our right to freely practice our religious beliefs.

With the recent marking of the tragedies that occurred on September 11, 2001 – this is a perfect time for us to stop and celebrate the precious freedoms that this document and this country provide all of us. To celebrate Constitution Day within the Department of Commerce, a broadcast e-mail will identify additional informational sources available to you regarding the history of our Constitution. Please take a moment of your time to review this information, become more familiar with this important document, and share this information with your co-workers, friends and family.

As Federal employees, we should set an example by being among the most knowledgeable individuals on the history of our Constitution. We should appreciate the role the Constitution has played in our history, providing us with the freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Through political change, social transformation, and economic challenge, this document is a reminder of the power of ideas, and how "We the People" can make a huge difference.

Bolding mine.

I agree with this email wholeheartedly. The importance of the Constitutional guarantees of our rights is more important than ever in the wake of the attacks on that clear blue Tuesday five years ago.

This Administration would further erode the Fourth Amendment's "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" with its attendant requirement that "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Not being satisfied with the FISA law that gives it the authority to wait until after the wiretapping has been done before obtaining the warrant, it has defended what it regards as its authority to abandon warrants entirely. It seeks laws that would give it "program warrants" to authorize such surveillance for an entire program at once, with no 'particular description' of what it is looking for, and where.

It has long since abandoned any pretense of honoring the Sixth Amendment's protection of the right to a speedy trial, and has done its best to hide trials of suspected terrorists from public view, to deny the defendants access to the evidence against them, and so forth.

And we know how this Administration feels about cruel and unusual punishment.

And rather than defending the idea that "unlike most national constitutions that define the rights of the people, our Constitution is a document in which 'We the People' define the role and limits of the government," this Administration clearly believes that the Executive Branch can do pretty much what it wants, running roughshod over even the specifically enumerated rights of the people.

Ho Hum, Redux

2006-09-08T13:19:00.000-04:00

"Another terrorism speech by the president is sort of like reruns of Seinfeld. It's on every night and we've memorized most of the lines."
---Congressional Quarterly's Craig Crawford on Countdown
(h/t DailyKos' Bill in Portland Maine)

Lieberman's Blog: "Help, help, I'm being repressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system!!

2006-09-06T12:18:00.000-04:00

We're talking serious whining, crybabying, and pre-emptive victim-card playing here.

And the blog's only five posts old.

The highlight is their commentary on this letter by Lamont's communications director. They say its writer is clearly "blinded by her angry partisanship." Here's the letter:

Dear Senator Lieberman,

We were pleased to learn you are interested in a debate. Ned has long been willing to engage in an in-person discussion of the issues, and in fact we have been accepting invitations since August 9.

Live exchanges between the candidates are crucial to the Democratic process. In addition to traditional debates between the two major parties, we believe minor parties, such as Connecticut for Lieberman, should participate as well, and we will fight for your inclusion.

Please urge Sherry Brown to contact Tom Swan, our Campaign Manager, at (203) 634-6601 to ensure that you, and other minor party candidates, can be part of the debate.

Sincerely,

Liz Dupont Diehl
Communications Director

Can't you just feel the anger? I tell ya, if they think this is "angry," these guys should check into a room where there are no loud noises, and nobody ever raises their voice. Because they aren't ready for everyday life, let alone the rough-and-tumble of politics.

Of course, their real goal is to make people think Lamont's a practitioner of the politics of anger and polarization. Politically speaking, Lamont comes across as a James Stewart-type innocent, a genuine Mr. Nice Guy, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't do attack ads. It's going to be a hard stunt to pull.

In addition, in the very first post on the blog, Dan Gerstein, Lieberman's campaign chief, says this:

we are going to use our free speech to point out any of the blatant lies or crude insults the Lamonsters post [in this blog] to call attention to the kind of negative, destructive politics that Ned and his followers like to practice.

Don't you just love it? They're playing the victim card over purely hypothetical attacks - potential attacks that couldn't have even happened yet at the time of that post, and might never happen. But they're calling these nonexistent attacks "blatant lies," "crude insults," and "negative, destructive politics."

That's our Joe: the voice of civility.

So, when are we going to invade Pakistan?

2006-09-05T22:17:00.000-04:00

As everyone knows, Bush has repeatedly said things like:

I made it clear that if you harbor a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorist, and you're an enemy of the United States, and you will be held to account. The Taliban didn't take our word seriously. And thanks to a fantastic United States military, along with allies, we removed the Taliban.

Now we find out:

Osama bin Laden, America's most wanted man, will not face capture in Pakistan if he agrees to lead a "peaceful life," Pakistani officials tell ABC News.
The surprising announcement comes as Pakistani army officials announced they were pulling their troops out of the North Waziristan region as part of a "peace deal" with the Taliban.

If he is in Pakistan, bin Laden "would not be taken into custody," Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan told ABC News in a telephone interview, "as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen."

Bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border, but U.S. officials say his precise location is unknown.

In addition to the pullout of Pakistani troops, the "peace agreement" between Pakistan and the Taliban also provides for the Pakistani army to return captured Taliban weapons and prisoners.

"What this means is that the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership have effectively carved out a sanctuary inside Pakistan," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism director.

The agreement was signed on the same day President Bush said the United States was working with its allies "to deny terrorists the enclaves they seek to establish in ungoverned areas across the world."

Actually, the U.S. government has known for quite some time that Pakistan was less than enthusiastic about bringing bin Laden to justice. It's been reported in the press, usually buried on page A17 if it appears in an American paper. But this is the truth of it: Osama bin Laden, the killer of 3000 Americans, is comfortably hiding in Pakistan, and as long as he doesn't cause any trouble in Pakistan, he is completely safe. Bush isn't going to demand to Pakistan that they let our troops in to capture Osama, and he isn't going to apply any sanctions to them because they've cozied up to bin Laden and the Taliban.

But Bush is the one who's tough on terror...

A Modest Labor Day Agenda

2006-09-04T10:50:00.000-04:00

As you'll notice, my list is, in good part, about time rather than money, unions, or any of that. There's two reasons for that: first, most workers are either parents of children, or have aging parents to look after. This is a pro-family thing: if a worker's time is a free resource for the employer, the employer will eat up all the time it can get, and leave the worker with little left over for raising his/her children, looking after infirm relatives, or simply living his/her own life.

Second, if a worker's overtime hours aren't a free resource, then an employer will likely have to hire more workers, rather than paying overtime to its existing workers, which tightens the labor market and helps put upward pressure on worker compensation.

And finally, it's a good thing for the worker to simply have the free time. So ending the availability of overtime in particular as a free resource for employers does positive things for workers in three ways, rather than just one.

Anyhow, here's the list:

Increase the minimum wage to at least $7/hour.
Make time and a half for overtime mandatory for everyone under, say, $50,000, and for persons with base salary up to 3 times that amount, pay them for overtime at the $50K rate.
Put some teeth into enforcement of OT laws. There's a hell of a lot of anecdotal evidence that more and more employers are putting pressure on employees to work OT 'off the clock.' This has to end.
Make ten days of annual leave and five days of sick leave a year a legal minimum, and forbid employers from penalizing workers for using those days of leave.
Union organizing via card check.
Single-payer universal health care. When employees are afraid to leave a job because they might lose their health benefits, it really weakens an employee's bargaining leverage. Then notice that this isn't happening to one or two workers here and there, but all across our economy.

Long Hours: Not Exactly a Paradox

2006-09-04T09:57:00.000-04:00

From this morning's WaPo:

For years, economists have taught their students a simple maxim: As employers hunt for workers, they want to get the best talent at the lowest price.
According to this theory, whether employees want to work long hours or short hours, employers have an incentive to accommodate them, because asking people to do something they don't want to do raises the price of labor -- workers demand more compensation.
On this Labor Day, consider a paradox: Millions of Americans say they feel overworked and stressed out. Many say they want to work fewer hours and find a better balance between responsibilities at home and work. Given that people have been saying this for quite a while, employers should have figured out by now that they can save money by being more flexible in workplace arrangements.
Decidedly, however, this has not happened. The number of people who work more than 50 hours a week has steadily grown in recent decades -- in concert with complaints about long hours.

This is a paradox how?? Workers can only demand more compensation to the extent that they're bargaining from a position of strength, and over the past three decades, that has been an increasingly rare situation.

And let's look at what sort of worker the writer is talking about:

In a growing number of professions, especially those that involve thinking and social skills, managers and owners find it difficult to measure the day-to-day performance of employees.

And:

For partners at big law firms, the simplest way to track the performance of junior lawyers is to see who bills the most hours above and beyond what is officially required, leading to what Case Western Reserve University economist James B. Rebitzer calls an "arms race" of hours.

In other words, we're discussing salaried professionals, a classification that sounds better than the reality. While it includes the junior lawyer striving for partner at a major law firm, it also encompasses most of the cubicle-dwellers who are, for all practical purposes, the line workers of the knowledge economy. They're 'professionals' exempt from the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and they make decent but hardly dazzling salaries, but their overtime hours are a free resource.

Let me say that again: their overtime hours are a free resource.

This means an employer has no incentive to minimize his use of those hours, and every reason to use as many of them as he can get away with. An hour of overtime, for such workers, costs the company nothing in the way of pay, benefits, or anything else - unless we're going to cost the slight increase in the electric bill for having lights on and computers running later into the evening.

Sure, asking employees to work 50-60 hours a week instead of 40 probably raises the total cost of that labor by some minuscule amount - but the employer gets a big extra chunk of extra labor in return.

How, exactly, is this a bad deal for the employer? How, exactly, is this a paradox?

It's a paradox only if one ignores the fact that for those employing these workers, their overtime is a free resource.

The WaPo article never mentions or even hints at this fact.

How clueless can they get??

Wasn't Zarqawi's Death Supposed To Make a Difference?

2006-09-03T14:23:00.000-04:00

As my grandfather used to say, another perfectly good theory ruined by the facts.

ETA: Now they're making a big deal over the capture of the supposed #2 man in AQ in Iraq. Zarqawi-lite, anyone?

Needless to say, his capture will make even less of an impact than Zarqawi's death. Assuming it's possible to make less of an impact than 'none whatsoever.'

Bush and Iraq: Truly and Completely Delusional

2006-09-03T09:48:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, in his Saturday radio address, Bush said:

A vital part of our strategy to defeat the terrorists is to help establish a democratic Iraq, which will be a beacon of liberty in the region and an ally in the global war on terror.

It's hard to understate the complete absurdity and preposterousness of the notion that we can enable Iraq to become "a beacon of liberty" anywhere. Puh-leeze.

He went on:

The terrorists understand the threat a democratic Iraq poses to their cause

None. Zip. Nada. To constitute a threat, a prospective event has to be possible.

Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war.

That's just definitions and semantics. The reality is that Sunnis are attacking Shi'ites and vice versa - and in the south, different Shi'ite groups are fighting each other. Call it what you will. How about 'uncivil war'?

They report that only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, while the overwhelming majority want peace and a normal life in a unified country.

And when Saddam ruled Iraq, only a small number of Iraqis wanted a Saddamite dictatorship. Yet he killed a lot of people. And over the past few months, far more Iraqis have been killed in this uncivil war than Saddam killed in a typical year.

This has come about after we'd already occupied the country for three years. Under our occupation, the situation in Iraq has gotten steadily worse. A year ago, we were still trying to subdue the Sunni Triangle, albeit with little hope of success. Now we're trying to prevent Baghdad itself from descending into chaos.

Working side-by-side with Iraqi forces, we recently launched a major new campaign to end the security crisis in Baghdad. This operation is still in its early stages, yet the initial results are encouraging.

Early stages?? This operation began on June 14, nearly twelve weeks ago. There's a limit to how long U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces can overconcentrate on Baghdad, even if it were working.

The people of Baghdad are seeing their security forces in the streets, dealing a blow to criminals and terrorists. According to one military report, a Sunni man in a diverse Baghdad neighborhood said this about the Shia soldiers on patrol: "Their image has changed. Now you feel they are there to protect you."

Here's what Riverbend has to say about it:

Residents of Baghdad are systematically being pushed out of the city. Some families are waking up to find a Klashnikov bullet and a letter in an envelope with the words “Leave your area or else.” The culprits behind these attacks and threats are Sadr’s followers- Mahdi Army. It’s general knowledge, although no one dares say it out loud. In the last month we’ve had two different families staying with us in our house, after having to leave their neighborhoods due to death threats and attacks. It’s not just Sunnis- it’s Shia, Arabs, Kurds- most of the middle-class areas are being targeted by militias.

Other areas are being overrun by armed Islamists. The Americans have absolutely no control in these areas. Or maybe they simply don’t want to control the areas because when there’s a clash between Sadr’s militia and another militia in a residential neighborhood, they surround the area and watch things happen.

Since the beginning of July, the men in our area have been patrolling the streets. Some of them patrol the rooftops and others sit quietly by the homemade road blocks we have on the major roads leading into the area. You cannot in any way rely on Americans or the government. You can only hope your family and friends will remain alive- not safe, not secure- just alive. That’s good enough.

Pardon me if I take Riverbend's word over Bush's. She's there, for one thing, and for another, she's been writing about the war from her perspective since it began. She's been writing the truth. Bush wouldn't know the truth if it walked up to him and punched him in the nose.

Back to Bush's words:

If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.

There are certainly a small number of foreign terrorists in Iraq. But the bulk of the fighting is between Iraqi and Iraqi. If we leave, the Sunni insurgency won't follow us home, like a stray cat; it will continue to fight the Shi'ites for dominance in Iraq. Nor will Moqtada al-Sadr's thugs come to America; they'll be too busy alternately combatting the Sunnis and their Shi'ite rivals.

For Bush, it's all about us; for the violent factions in Iraq, it is all about Iraq. Iraqis will be the ones to pay the price if we leave, but they're already paying the price. I'm sympathetic to the argument that we can't just suddenly pull out because things will quickly get worse, but if pulling out means that what would happen in 2008 or 2009 if we stay, will happen in 2007 instead, you'll have to excuse me if I find that less than compelling.

If there's really something we can do to arrest the bleeding, we should do it, but I don't see that anyone has any brilliant ideas as to what that might be. And Bush isn't interested in them anyway, because it would admit that 'victory' is out of reach. And victory, astonishingly enough, is what he's after:

The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq, so America will not leave until victory is achieved.

Anyone who thinks we will achieve anything remotely resembling 'victory' in Iraq is either on some powerful drugs, or is an incredible mixture of dumb and delusional.

Yet this was no offhand remark. He said the exact same thing two days earlier to the American Legion:

The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq. So the United States of America will not leave until victory is achieved.

The night before that (August 30), in Utah:

We will stay the course, we will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed, and victory in Iraq will be a major ideological triumph in the struggle of the 21st century.

And it isn't just Bush. Vice President Cheney, to the VFW on August 28:

We have only two options in Iraq -- victory or defeat.

And:

When it comes to our own troop levels, the President will listen to the recommendations of commanders on the ground. And he'll make the call based on what is needed for victory...

They obviously are saying we will emerge victorious from Iraq. Over what? Over whom? How? It hasn't been just about the Sunni insurgency in quite some time now - the Shi'ites are fighting among themselves, and the Kurds are still trying to cleanse Kirkuk. There are at least four sides to this uncivil war at the moment. How does one win 'victory' in such a multidimensional underground conflict? We don't even know where to start. Or if we do, we've certainly done a great job of showing it.

I don't know whether we can do anything to stop the bleeding in Iraq. But I do know that we won't win a 'victory' there. That's not rocket science; even Bush should be able to get his few brain cells around that.

Fifth anniversary of 9/11 coming up (yawn)

2006-09-01T13:12:00.000-04:00

It's not that I don't take terrorism seriously. And what al-Qaeda did to us on 9/11 was absolutely horrible.

But in BushWorld, every day is 9/11 Day. And when every day is 9/11 Day, and you're not allowed to forget about it for an instant no matter what day it is, then the actual anniversary of 9/11 is just another day.

I've said elsewhere that the Bushies strike me as a crew of people frantically pushing the same buttons over and over again, hoping they'll work this time like they used to work: terror! gay marriage! ~~WMDs!~~ 9/11! Except that they've pushed all the buttons until the connections got worn out, and now they don't work anymore. But they keep on pushing the buttons, thinking they might just work one more time.

They've pushed the 9/11 button so often, there's no button left, just a hole in the control panel where the button used to be. So when they try to push the button again a week from Monday, it won't work, just the same as on all the other days.

So, have we brought bin Laden to justice yet?

2006-09-01T13:06:00.000-04:00

Just wondering. After all, it's been nearly five years since he killed nearly 3000 Americans. We ought to take a crime like that seriously, and pursue the perpetrator to the ends of the earth.

Where in the world is Osama bin Laden? And why isn't the answer, "in lifetime solitary confinement in a supermax prison"?

Salt Lake City Mayor: Bush a "dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights violating president"

2006-09-01T06:25:00.000-04:00

A crowd of thousands cheered Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson for calling President Bush a "dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights violating president" whose time in office would "rank as the worst presidency our nation has ever had to endure."
The group - including children and elderly and some hailing from throughout Utah - then marched to the federal building Wednesday to deliver a copy of a symbolic indictment against the president and Congress for abuse of power and failure to uphold the U.S. Constitution.
With their signs labeling Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the "axis of evil," calling the Iraq war a "mission of lies" or comparing the invasion of Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, to invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor, the estimated 1,500 to 4,000 protesters hoped their demonstration at the Salt Lake City-County Building sent a message about the reddest state in the country.

When the mayor of Salt Lake City is willing to speak words like that in public - and a crowd of thousands of Utahns cheers him when he says it - there is no reason why any Democrat, anywhere, should be the least bit timid or cautious in their criticisms of Bush. It's time to let him have it with everything we've got. This man has wrecked practically everything he's touched - Iraq, Katrina, the War on Terror, our nation's economic foundations, our middle class' security - and everybody knows it, except of course for the D.C. pundit class.

Stick a fork in him, he's done.

Now Bush and his crew are desperately trying to play the terror card one more time, but it's like a man pushing over and over again on a button that got pushed once too often and no longer works.

It's time for the Dems to say it loud, though probably not with this exact word: Bush is a total fuckup, and the Republicans they're running against supported Bush in practically everything he did. It's time to vote them out, so that a Democratic Congress can prevent Bush from doing this country any more harm.

ETA: Video of Rocky Anderson's speech here, if you'd like to watch it. (Probably not a permanent link, though.) Prepared text of speech here, courtesy of Anderson.

Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005

2006-08-29T11:04:00.000-04:00

The Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage report (BIG pdf) is up. Short version is that median household income has gone up for the first time since 1998-99, by about $500. In real dollars, the hypothetical average American family is earning about what it was in 1998. Which means that the typical American family has seen none of the payoff from the rather remarkable productivity gains since 1998.

The percentage of housholds in poverty is statistically unchanged, but the percentage of Americans without health insurance has increased to 15.9%, representing 46.6 million uninsured people.

I'll be looking at the report in more detail later, but that's the short version.

Lieberman v. Lieberman on Iraq Timetables

2006-08-27T18:36:00.000-04:00

It all depends on who's proposing the timetable.

Lieberman, August 10, discussing Democrat Ned Lamont's proposal that we set a timetable to pull out of Iraq:

"I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us -- more evil or as evil as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet communists we fought during the long Cold War," Lieberman said.
"If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again."

Lieberman, August 25, discussing Republican Christopher Shays' proposal that we set a timetable to pull out of Iraq:

"It seems to me that Chris is saying, maybe we ought to set some goals for when we want to get out, and I'd like to see what he has in mind before I comment on it," Lieberman said while campaigning in New Haven.

"As I've said to you over and over again, the sooner we get out of Iraq, the better it's going to be for the Iraqis and us, but if we leave too soon for reasons of American politics, it's going to be disaster for the Iraqis and for us," he said.

Lieberman, August 27, discussing Democrat Ned Lamont's proposal that we set a timetable to pull out of Iraq:

I believe that Ned Lamont's strategy of pulling all our troops out by an arbitrary, politically determined date will lead to the collapse of Iraq, Iran surging in, and Iraq becoming a safe haven for al-Qaida and a launching pad for terrorist strikes against other countries in the region and the United States.

Obviously Lieberman didn't endorse Rep. Shays' proposal, but it seems that if a Republican proposes that we set a timetable to withdraw from Iraq, that's at least worthy of serious consideration - but if a fellow Democrat does so, then no consideration is needed: the Democrat is handing victory to the enemy.

Newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Hartford Courant love to speak of Lieberman's bipartisanship. I don't get it: how is it bipartisan to always be criticizing Democrats, and always cozying up to Republicans?

When Republicans do it, that's just run-of-the-mill partisanship; it's what one would expect. How exactly is it any different if Lieberman acts like a partisan Republican, but calls himself a Democrat? Changing the label doesn't change what is.

Bush "thinks he is playing in a longer-term game than the tacticians"

2006-07-23T11:16:00.000-04:00

In terms of scary, that isn't quite up there with, say, "bin Laden obtains tactical nuclear weapons," but it's still well up there. Our President may not be clinically insane, but he's at such a remove from reality that apparently he's thinking like a crazy man.

I mean, how exactly is that long-term thinking of his doing, so far, now that we've got over five years' worth of track record to judge it by?

Iraq: in the toilet. Civil war killing people faster than Saddam used to; the people you'd want to build a country around are all headed for the border; the country's now a training ground for terrorists. Even Zarqawi's death didn't slow the collapse.

Afghanistan: slipping away. Taliban resurgent in the south, warlords running things everywhere else, Karzai doesn't even control Kabul, great opium crop. And this is the country that actually wanted our help.

North Korea: still making nukes out of plutonium, just like it wasn't when Clinton was President. Good thing its long-range missile was a dud.

Iran: by destabilizing Iraq, we made Iran the big guy on the block. And by having our army stuck in Iraq, we limited our options with respect to Iran.

Islamic terrorism: Osama bin Laden's still on the loose. Al-Qaeda's methodology is being widely copied by other groups, as the residents of Bombay were recently reminded. And terrorists get to practice their skills in Iraq.

Pakistan: our 'ally' has shared nuclear technology with Iran and North Korea. It appears to be harboring bin Laden's organization, as well as whatever terrorist group was responsible for the Bombay bombings. (Good thing for the world that India is capable of the restraint that Israel and the U.S. lack, as India and Pakistan both have nukes, and a war between the two could easily go nuclear.)

So Bush is a terrible long-term thinker, by all evidence.

I remember how I was in my pre-teen and early teen years. I was very smart, but severely introverted and disconnected from reality. I'd read Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, and thought I knew all the answers. If Bush really sees himself as a chess player thinking several steps ahead, as Tony Snow said, then Bush reminds me far too much for comfort of the kid I used to be. And at least I actually was a chessplayer, and could think several moves ahead.

It gets better. Meaning, of course, "worse."

"The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. "He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived."
...
The president would say: 'You have an opportunity to really grind down Hezbollah. Let's take it, even if there are other serious consequences that will have to be managed.' "

This is where Bush sees himself as playing the long-term game. Here we move from the delusions of grandeur of a person completely cut off from reality's lessons, to the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting it to finally work this time.

Bush has a track record of focusing on some person, group of persons, or organization that can be taken out, and once we do so, the problem will be solved: Saddam. The Iraq "deck of cards." Zarqawi. His desire for photos of the al-Qaeda leadership so he could X them out as they were killed.

We know how well all of that worked out. Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe it should work any better here.

Dear Justice Scalia: 'Executive' =/= 'Legislative'

2006-07-17T14:52:00.000-04:00

In his Hamdan dissent, Justice Scalia says:

Of course in its discussion of legislative history the Court wholly ignores the President's signing statement, which explicitly set forth his understanding that the DTA ousted jurisdiction over pending cases.

Dear Justice Scalia: they call it legislative history because it's the history of what the legislative branch does on its way to passing a law.

The President is the Chief Executive. That means he's part of the Executive Branch, the branch that executes the laws that the legislative branch enacts.

I know this will come as a surprise to you, but the executive branch isn't part of the legislative branch, and no action by the executive branch is legislative activity. Specifically, a signing statement by the Chief Executive cannot be 'ignored' by the Court in "its discussion of legislative history" because the signing statement is not part of the legislative history.

If such a thing as the 'executive history' of a bill were to be defined, Bush's signing statement would be part of that history. But so far, the judicial branch (the branch you're in, remember?) hasn't defined such a thing. And it certainly hasn't explained what part of the Constitution would ascribe any weight to such a statement to begin with.

The Netroots in a Nutshell: Three Things the Netroots Want

2006-07-14T13:22:00.000-04:00

I've got no special expertise for making this post. But I read the major blogs regularly, and I came up with this list awhile back. Time has only reinforced its accuracy, in my opinion. So here goes:

1. We want Dems who are more apt to criticize the GOP and build up their own party, rather than the other way around.

Especially since it's the GOP that's running America, and doing a pretty wretched job of it. DLC Dems who say things like "far too many Democrats view George W. Bush as a greater threat to the nation than Osama bin Laden" aren't engaging in constructive criticism; they're doing Karl Rove's work for him.

2. We want 'fighting Dems,' Dems willing to fight for what they believe in, and take the battle to the enemy when they've gone off the rails, as they have during the Bush years.

The view from out here is that Dems are (a) happy to compromise on practically everything, and (b) too often afraid to criticize Bush head-on.

Compromise is good much of the time, but every Dem in Congress should be able to list a half-dozen things that he will fight for, and not back down on, because they're the sort of thing a Dem should never stop fighting for.

And given the depravity of the current Administration, the Dems should never let a speech, a public appearance, or a moment in front of a TV camera, go by without reminding listeners of at least one or two of Bush's many debacles: Iraq, Katrina, the attempted gutting of Social Security, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, appointing incompetent hacks to run most of the government, the failure to do basic homeland protection even after 5 years, our adrift foreign policy, no action on global warming, out-of-control budget and trade deficits, the mediocre job situation in what's supposedly a booming economy, people getting denied the right to overtime or union representation...you get the idea.

Pick and choose your slams, paying attention to who your audience is, but never stop reminding your audiences of how badly this Administration and the GOP have fucked up this nation and much of the world.

3. 'Centrism' means appealing to center-right voters, not kissing up to money. We can live with the former (especially for red-state Dems), but not the latter.

Be pro-gun (Dean, Schweitzer), be pro-life (Harry Reid), be pro-flag-burning-amendment if you must, especially if you're running in a conservative district. But don't support class action and bankruptcy 'reforms' and call that 'centrism'; you're not winning over any moderate voters by taking those stands. When the moneyed interests and the interests of average Americans collide, a Dem's place is with average Americans. This is why you have a Democratic Party. Always remember that.

And that's really it. The netroots, in a nutshell.

More Good News from Iraq

2006-07-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

Most of this is a few days old, but sometimes it's hard to keep up.

From the header link:

1) Formerly 'sleepy' Muthanna province goes kablooey.

This is important because this has not only been one of Arab Iraq's least dangerous provinces, but this is supposed to be the first one where Iraqi forces are supposed to completely take over security from Western forces when the Brits pull out at the end of the month. This was supposed to be a success story, the beginning of our being able to stand down as the Iraqis stood up.

Instead, we have fired police storming local government headquarters, the police chief resigning, and the governor quitting because he's afraid of violence once the Brits leave:

In southern Iraq, a provincial police chief resigned Tuesday and a governor said he would leave his post after coalition forces turn over security to Iraqi forces later this month, citing fears that violence will increase.
The decisions came after nearly 300 fired policemen stormed into the local government's headquarters in Samawah earlier in the day to protest their lost jobs, provincial council member Mohammed al-Zayadi said. Other former policemen also reportedly beat another council member after breaking into his house Monday night.
The panel accepted the resignation of Col. Mohammed Najim Abu Kihila, the chief of Muthanna police, "amid the deteriorating security, demonstrated by the assault on the provincial council's members and some citizens," al-Zayadi said.
He also said provincial Gov. Mohammad Ali Hassan offered his resignation and the council agreed to accept it as long as he stayed in his position until security was transferred from coalition forces to Iraqis later this month.

2) How many bodyguards do you need to be safe in Iraq?

At least a dozen, apparently.

Meanwhile, gunmen in camouflage uniforms kidnapped Deputy Electricity Minister Raed al-Hares, along with 11 of his bodyguards in eastern Baghdad, but he was released after several hours, officials said.

The gunmen stopped al-Hares' convoy in the Shiite neighborhood of Talbiya, then forced the Shiite official and his bodyguards into their vehicles, said police Lt. Ahmed Qassim. The Electricity Ministry said he was released in the evening but refused to give more details.

The kidnapping occurred three days after gunmen seized female Sunni legislator Tayseer al-Mashhadani in a Shiite area of east Baghdad. She and seven bodyguards are still missing.

3) Basra had also been relatively quiet until recent months, although it had been the quiet of a Shi'ite theocracy. Now it's blowing up:

Iraqi authorities, meanwhile, imposed an 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. car and pedestrian curfew in Basra to bolster a state of emergency that has failed to curb increasing violence in the southern city.

It seems that various Shi'ite factions are fighting one another for control of the city.

4) And neo-Nazis are infiltrating our military:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."
...The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."
Mr. Barfield said Army recruiters struggled last year to meet goals. "They don't want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military," he said, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."
...the report said Mr. Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, Wash., had said that he had provided evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year, but that only two had been discharged. He also said there was an online network of neo-Nazis.

Great: because we're having such a hard time recruiting a better class of people into the military, we're sending white supremacists to Iraq, where they can help win hearts and minds by shooting Arabs.

And, for comedy relief:

5) Joe Lieberman says things in Iraq are "a lot better" than they were a year ago.

Monthly Employment Stats

2006-07-07T08:49:00.000-04:00

BLS says we picked up 121,000 new jobs in June. Not quite the 130,000 or so we need to keep up with population growth.

The running totals since January 2001:

Increase in nonfarm jobs: 2,759,000
Per-month average: 42,400

Increase in nonfarm private-sector jobs: 1,627,000
Per-month average: 25,000

Increase in nonfarm public-sector jobs: 1,132,000
Per-month average: 17,400

Share of net new jobs attributable to private sector: 59%

Obviously, the Bush job-creation record still bites.

Some thoughts about patriotism and conservative v. liberal Christians

2006-07-04T07:11:00.000-04:00

I came to know the Lord back in 1970, in a time when Christianity wasn't strongly identified with a particular strain of American politics. Before any of us knew Jerry Falwell's and Pat Robertson's politics, back before Jimmy Carter gave born-again Christians a candidate they could identify with on the basis of their faith.

So I fortunately had lots of room to figure out God and country on my own, to draw my own conclusions before anyone came along to tell me what my politics had to be. And some things just seemed obvious.

For instance, God is bigger than country. There's really no getting around that one. God is bigger than the world He created, so He's bigger than America or (back then) the Soviet Union or whatever.

For a Christian, being patriotic in the standard sense is silly. If we are to be patriotic, what is our patrie, our fatherland? Well, we know who our Father is; presumably His land would be our Fatherland. We know from the Gospels that Jesus in His ministry spread the Good News of the Kingdom of God; if we have a true country, that would presumably be it. Certainly Jesus said his kingdom wasn't of this world, and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews said we are sojourners, passing travelers, in this world. And if our true country is outside of this world, that inherently limits the sort of commitment we can make to any of the countries in this world.

Which is important, because it would seem that anyone with a modicum of common sense - no deep theology or even book learning required - could see that God and country are going to ask very different things of us, and that there's going to be some conflict there from time to time. God is love, and He loves us all: God so loved the world, and He is no respecter of persons. Nations have strategic interests, for which God surely cares little; God cares about the people, not trade routes and resources. A nation might ask its citizens to bear arms against the citizens of a different nation, and a citizen who gives his allegiance to that nation will fight, kill, and die on its behalf. A Christian, in aiming his gun at the citizen of another country, has to ask, "Does God want that person dead? Am I called to kill that person?" If the answer to the first is No, or even I Don't Know, then the answer to the second question is No as well. (It could even be No if the answer to the first question is Yes: in the event that God wants someone dead, you may still not be called to be the one to kill him.)

Christians, in the true sense of the word, would make lousy soldiers. If you are serving God, then you must ask God what He wants you to do. In the military, they can't wait around for that. They have to know you will do what they want you to do.

Conservative Christians are generally quite patriotic. I have never understood this, and it's a fundamental part of my alienation from them. To be honest, I am not at all sure they believe in the God of the Bible, but rather in some tribal deity who blesses their tribe over against all the other tribes of the world, whether those other tribes be Communists, Moslems, or even American secular liberals, who they seem to view not as true Americans, but as a fifth column to be rooted out. (For the most part, I don't think they even believe in the existence of liberal Christians; I expect they think people like me are really secular liberals who are attempting to hijack their religion.) Certainly those I've talked to - a pretty large number, over the years - feel no tension between serving God and serving America, regarding potential conflict between the two as a rare and exceptional aberration that they're unlikely to ever have to deal with, if they think about it at all. And that's certainly symptomatic of a tribal religion. And if you were in an evangelical church this past Sunday, chances are excellent that you heard a lot of verbiage that wrapped God and America up together in the flag, with no caution that no man can serve two masters. That is also symptomatic of a tribal religion.

I don't know what to do about this. I feel some sort of need to call my more conservative brothers and sisters in Christ out of their tribalism, and into a deeper faith - for I believe many of the people in the pews have had genuine experiences with Christ, and have been led astray by the Falwell and Robertson wannabes in fundamentalist pulpits everywhere. But Lord knows I have no idea where to start.

But here and now, on the morning of July 4, I know that as a Christian, I cannot in any way, shape, or form be a patriotic American. I cannot pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands. That debt of loyalty and service to a liege lord that was the original meaning of 'allegiance' is already given; I already have a Lord. That doesn't bother me; I've known this for a long time now, and am quite comfortable with it. What I still find perplexing is that any Christian should see it another way.

The fake WMDs

2006-07-01T08:42:00.000-04:00

Here's the letter I just sent off to the WaPo. Since they get so many letters, it probably won't see print, but I think it's got a chance; we'll see.

Some opportunistic Republicans claim that the discovery of some mustard gas shells from the Iran-Iraq war means that the infamous WMDs have at last been found. This claim seems to rest on a term-of-art definition: that WMDs include any nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon, regardless of its lethality or destructive power.

This is a fundamentally dishonest rhetorical gambit. The Bush Administration and its supporters did not educate the public about term-of-art meanings of "weapons of mass destruction"; rather, they actively played up the vernacular meaning of the phrase - weapons that could wreak extraordinary death and destruction, well beyond the capability of conventional weapons.

For instance, just between March 15 and March 19, 2003, President Bush described Saddam's weapons stash as "the weapons of mass murder," "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," "biological and chemical agents...capable of killing millions of people," and claimed we were invading Iraq "to defend the world from grave danger."

The aging mustard gas shells bear no resemblance to the threat Bush described. Mustard gas isn't even particularly lethal, though it's still nasty stuff. It's a potent skin blistering agent that can incapacitate soldiers on the battlefield, thereby reducing the effectiveness of their combat units. If it gets into one's lungs in strong enough concentrations, it can be lethal, absent effective treatment. But a weapon of "mass destruction"? That's absurd.

Universal Overtime Pay: Pro-Family Labor Legislation Whose Time Has Come

2006-06-29T13:36:00.000-04:00

Time was that only an elite few didn't get paid time and a half after forty hours. Executives and professionals were salaried and didn't get paid overtime, but fifty or sixty years ago, those groups still constituted a small elite.

Nowadays, though, many millions of American workers are excluded from overtime pay, and the GOP would of course like to strip those protections from even more of us.

The Dems have been strictly playing defense on this one in recent years. Why not use this issue to go on the attack? Why not fight for overtime pay for practically everyone? I think it would be a big winner for two reasons: money, and family values.

The money issue is pretty simple: it would be like the minimum wage hike, only for the rest of us. There are tens of millions of Americans who are excluded from overtime pay because they are professional, administrative, or supervisory workers.

Practically all the non-secretarial denizens of Cubicle World are already professionals, and there are more of us all the time. We aren't any sort of elite anymore; we're just the line workers in the knowledge economy. But the Labor Department has changed the rules so that even a lot of non-degreed folks are 'professionals' under the regs. And many blue-collar workers are now exempt 'supervisors' even though they work side-by-side with those they supervise.

Well, nuts to that: it's time to give everyone a raise. No more free overtime!

What I suggest as part of a Dem agenda is this: mandatory time-and-a-half for everyone earning under some fairly high threshold, like $75,000. Exemptions only for part owners of a closely-held company, and teachers who get a couple months off every summer.

AND under my proposal, those making between $75,000 and $300,000 would get paid the OT rate of someone earning a $75,000 base salary. So you wouldn't lose your OT pay when you got a raise from $74,999 to $75,001. The value of that OT pay to you would gradually diminish as your base salary climbed into six figures, but it would still be there. Someone with a base salary of $112,500 would effectively get paid the same for overtime hours as for regular hours; someone making $225,000, half as much for overtime as for regular time. But there would be a cost to the employer to keep almost any worker working late.

And that's where the 'family values' part comes in: if an employee's overtime isn't a free resource, employers won't use it nearly as often. And this will make it a lot easier for working parents to juggle work and home, because work won't arbitrarily expand into evening and weekend hours, now that those hours aren't free. Most households with children don't have a stay-at-home parent, and if we're to consider child-rearing important in this country, then we must insist that employers not have the right to pull parents away from their children without even having to pay for the privilege.

So this would be good for workers' incomes, and it would be good for families. What's not to like? I think the Dems should run on this issue this fall, as a companion piece to a minimum-wage hike.

The min-wage hike and universal overtime: something for the working poor, and something for the rest of us, too.