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.

Net Neutrality: We're Safe for the Moment

2006-06-29T11:57:00.000-04:00

The Snowe-Dorgan Amendment to Ted Stevens' telecom bill tied 11-11 in committee, with all the Dems on the Senate Commerce Committee, plus Olympia Snowe, voting for. That means the amendment's not part of the bill. Then the bill itself passed the Commerce Committee by 15-7, without the amendment, of course.

But Ron Wyden's put a 'hold' on the bill, and has vowed to filibuster. And Stevens doesn't think he's got the sixty votes to break a filibuster, so he's decided to wait until Congress reconvenes in September, after its summer recess, to try to win over some more Democrats.

That's fine with me - that'll be more than two months closer to running out the clock on a telecom bill this year.

And in the meantime, we get a couple months to relax on this one before resuming the battle.

The Washington Post's Richard Morin Lies About His Poll Results

2006-06-27T17:45:00.000-04:00

In a Tuesday 6/27 WaPo article subheaded, "Poll shows growth in support for Bush," it turns out that only three of the six poll results cited as evidence for that are statistically significant.

And digging deeper into the poll results, which contained a few dozen comparisons that could have potentially supported or contradicted that headline, I found only a half-dozen or so that supported the headline, and four that contradicted it, but the vast majority of the results were not statistically significant either way.

That means that, if the poll results changed from one month to another, the change was too small to be able to say that popular sentiment changed.

A few things you should know about standard errors (SE's) and margins of error (MOE's), before we start.

1) The MOE is just a constant multiple of the SE. Using a 95% confidence interval, which is what the WaPo seems to be using, the MOE = 1.96 * SE. Morin says his poll was based on a sample of 1,000, and has a 3% MOE; actually, the MOE is between 3% and 3.1% in most full-sample cases.

2) The SE of a difference between two numbers or percentages x and y is sqrt(SE²(x) + SE²(y)). If you don't like formulas, don't worry about it: if the two quantities have the same SE, what is means is that the SE of the difference is 1.414 times the SE of either quantity. That applies to the WaPo poll numbers. And the same multiple applies to the MOE. The MOE for a difference would be between 4.25% and 4.4%.

3) If you cut the sample size in half, the SE and MOE also go up by a multiple of 1.414, the square root of 2. So a difference between two half-sample results would have a MOE between 6% and 6.2%.

4) (2) above applies to statistically independent quantities. Some numbers move in parallel, and others move in opposite directions. For instance, when Bush's approval numbers go up, his disapproval numbers, big surprise, go down.

The SE of a difference between pairs of numbers like this - that move about the same amount, only in opposite directions - is twice the SE of either of the quantities, for obvious reasons: if Bush's approval changes by 5 points (say from 33% to 38%), then (approval - disapproval) changes by 10 points, in all likelihood, as his disapproval number goes from 65% to 60%, with the difference going from 32% down to 22%. It's the same thing, just expressed in a way that makes it look twice as big. Ditto the MOE, which would be between 12% and 12.4%.

Oh: Morin didn't tell you that, did he?

Sorry to have let the cat out of the bag.

Morin cites six trends to bolster the claim that Bush's support is growing, but only three are statistically significant, and you have to look at two of those just the right way in order to call them for Morin. Here's the breakdown:

1) Increase in overall Bush job approval, from 33% to 38%. Significant: MOE is 4.25%. (Poll Q.1)
2) Which party best able to handle Iraq: From 50-36 Dem to 47-41 Dem. Not significant: MOE is 12.1% on difference of spreads for half sample. (Q.6a)
3) Which party best able to handle terrorism: from 46-41 Dem to 39-46 the other way. Just barely not significant - same MOE as (2). However, the drop from 46% to 39% in Dem support is significant (6% half-sample MOE) so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Significant. (Q.6b)
4) Which party best able to handle the economy: From 52-34 Dem to 52-39 Dem. Not significant: Same MOE as (2). (Q.6d)
5) U.S. making significant progress toward civil order in Iraq: from 43-56 Y/N to 48-49 Y/N. Just barely not significant - same MOE as (2). However, the 7-point drop in the percentage of people who think Iraq isn't making significant progress IS significant, since the half-sample MOE on that is 6%. So, just like with (3), we'll give Morin the benefit of the doubt and call this significant. (Q.13)
6) Increase in approval of job Bush is doing in Iraq: from 32% to 37%. Not significant: 6% MOE, half sample. (Q.2a)

I emailed Morin on Tuesday inviting his comments, but since I haven't heard back yet, I'm posting. If my analysis is wrong, he can correct me after the fact, rather than before.

Morin should clearly state which margins of error apply to which comparisons he uses in his article. And it would be a good idea if, in the poll results themselves, he indicated which comparisons with previous months' results are significant, and which ones aren't. Casual readers are going to think the 3% margin of error applies to everything, and it doesn't. That's practically begging for people to draw the wrong conclusions from your polling.

Why a Min-Wage Hike, in Three Sentences

2006-06-25T20:52:00.000-04:00

The minimum wage bill currently being pushed by Senator Kennedy would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 by 2009. By comparison, the minimum wage was almost $8.00 an hour (in 2006 dollars) in the late sixties. This means that if Kennedy’s bill were approved, the real value of the minimum wage in 2009 would still be more than 10 percent lower than it was in the late sixties, even though productivity will have increased by more than 120 percent over this period.
- Dean Baker

(Courtesy of Max Sawicky, h/t to Brad deLong)

Net Neutrality: The Senate Vote Is Probably Tuesday

2006-06-25T15:58:00.000-04:00

Kinda important to mention that. Like it says below, contact your Senators.

One additional thought: I started off in life as a conservative, and part (though hardly all) of the reason I'm not one anymore is that conservatism itself has changed. I'm very much an 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' guy, and even if it IS broke, fercryinoutloud, don't monkey around with things unless you really can make them better.

The Net has been neutral. It ain't broke. Hell, if there's any part of our society that's thriving, growing by leaps and bounds, producing more cool innovations in a day than you could try out in a year, it's the Web.

Getting rid of Net Neutrality is fixing what ain't broke. The risk is in changing the system, and the upside of that change is vague at best. Why should we take a chance of screwing up the amazingness of the Web, just on the off-chance that the telcos can pipe a few extra goodies to us?

It isn't worth the risk. Not in a million years.

Net Neutrality: Push v. Pull

2006-06-25T15:40:00.000-04:00

Unlike the newspaper business, the television business, cable TV, satellite, which all involve pushing content out to consumers and ultimately allowing them to choose what to read in the newspaper, what channel to watch on their cable TV, the Internet is all about consumer choice, them being able to pull whatever information out unimpeded or un-discriminated against by their phone company or cable company network operator.

That model is about to change, unless Congress acts to reinstate the nondiscrimination rules that were removed last summer.
-Paul Misener, Amazon.com

As Misener says, traditional media (radio and TV in its broadcast, cable, and satellite manifestations, and I'd say effectively newspapers too nowadays, though that's more debatable) operate on a 'push' model: there are a limited number of choices that are constantly being pushed through a broadcast or cable pipeline at us. We can choose among those choices, but the one thing we can't choose is 'I want other choices.' Except we might have some slender hope that the marketplace will eventually evolve to give us choices more to our liking, but that generally takes years and costs thousands of lives, as the guy in Animal House said.

The Internet is just the opposite - from the first days of FTPing files via Gopher and the like, it had a 'pull' model: a file was out there on a server somewhere, but it didn't move through the pipeline until an end user sent a message asking for that file. Anyone could put files on a server, so the end user's choices of what files to ask for were theoretically infinite.

The era of Web browsers hasn't changed that fundamental architecture one whit. Amazon's Web pages sit on a ginormous server, and Joe Blow's Bookstore's web pages sit on another server, and neither flows over the pipeline until someone requests them. When they do flow over the pipeline, the users at both ends pay bandwidth costs: Amazon and Joe Blow pay more, depending on how much they use and how big a pipeline they pay for; at the consumer's end, the telcos and cable companies find it easier to charge us strictly by how big a piece of pipeline ( = speed of download) we want to buy: smaller fees for dial-up, larger fees for various speeds of broadband. But in between, all packets are treated equally.

What the broadband providers want to do is at least partially to a 'push' model - to have advanced content that would be streamed to you whether you wanted it or not. Some of it would surely be nice - interactive games, new movies, and whatnot - but by 'pushing' their premium content (or content that other users paid to have 'pushed'), it would slow down other content, the 'pull' content. Also, they'd change the rules for the 'pull' content as well - packets from certain providers (generally those who paid for the privilege) would be sped up, and others would be slowed down. Google, Amazon, eBay and the like would have to pay (on top of what they're already paying) to keep their pages showing up quickly when you download them, and they don't want to have to pay a second time for the privilege, but they can afford to. However, Joe Blow's Bookstore would likely find the fees too steep, and would be relegated to the slow lane. And if the slow lane is slow enough, people won't wait for Joe's web page to load, so they won't buy his books.

The Web has become a wonderfully competitive free-for-all because we have had a neutral Net all this time. I believe, and I think it's supported by the evidence, that a free market needs a certain minimum set of rules to keep competition as wide-open as the nature of the industry in question will allow for. Keeping the pipeline itself neutral is in my opinion the essential piece of architecture in the case of the Web.

Needless to say, my main concern is about news and political sites being treated equally, not just with each other, but with commercial sites. The traditional media has played a 'gatekeeper' role for too long, deciding what's news and what isn't, what news to front-page and what to bury on page A16. Similarly with the keepers of our discourse: screw David Broder, George Will, Richard Cohen, Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and all their ilk. Who decided they were the people whose opinions counted, let alone Ann freakin' Coulter? Non-expert but intelligent opinion is an incredibly abundant resource, and a neutral Web enables me to read a considerable array of commentary. (And one function that commentary plays is pulling out those stories that are buried on page A-16, or even stories appearing in the Sydney Morning Herald, but not in the US papers at all.) I worry that the next DailyKos or FireDogLake will find itself in a v-e-e-e-r-r-y s-l-l-o-o-o-o-o-w-w lane if a few big corporations get to decide what to push, how much pipeline is left for user pull, and which sites get sped up and slowed down over that bit of remaining pipeline.

One more rumination, then I'll quit. Saturday's WaPo has a front-page article about online music, and how all sorts of impromptu networks have given us listeners a much greater abundance of ways to become exposed to new music, or even old music for that matter, rather than our having to choose from the limited quantity of music that's marketed over the airwaves, be they the handful of broadcast FM stations, or Sirius or XM's hundred channels. The fundamental goodness of being able to choose amongst however many offerings people want to put out there, rather than a much smaller number of offerings coming over a limited handful of distribution channels, is beyond debate. I'd hate to see all these new networks getting slowed down; a world where Neutral Milk Hotel can gain a following well beyond their backyard without having to sign a contract with a major record label is my sort of world.

That's just a few reasons why Net Neutrality is important. If any one of them applies to you, contact your Senators and let them know how you feel.

Vacation, Time To Get Away

2006-05-18T07:03:00.000-04:00

I'm getting away from it all for a week or so - probably won't even have Web access more than once or twice between now and Memorial Day. So if anybody's reading ;-), don't expect any posting between now and then.

I'm hoping to come back to find Rove's been indicted, but I'm not counting on it. Don't let them sell the Net while I'm gone, OK?

Estate Tax Bullshit

2006-05-15T12:41:00.000-04:00

An open letter to Jeffrey Birnbaum, WaPo Columnist ("K Street Confidential"):

In today's column, you claim that auto dealer Jack Fitzgerald's chain of auto dealerships "is too large for him to pass easily to his heirs without their being crushed by the estate tax," and "the estate tax has for years forced owners to sell to corporate giants, which often stifles innovation, expansion and good feelings between workers and their bosses."

You substantiate none of these claims.

First, you fail to mention that the estates of people like Fitzgerald can take up to 15 years to pay off the Federal Estate Tax (FET). In 15 years, a profitable business should be able to pay off the tax out of revenues.

Second, you give no figures to explain just how Fitzgerald's heirs will be forced to sell the business under current law, nor do you even indicate that he provided any such numbers to you.

Third, you don't give any for-instances of private businesses that had to be sold in recent years to pay the FET.

Fourth, you don't substantiate your claims about the adverse effects of sales of private businesses to corporations.

You say that Fitzgerald "makes a compelling case against the estate tax on policy grounds." I don't see any case at all. The only compelling thing about this column is the evidence it provides that you're in the tank on this issue.

McCain and Falwell

2006-05-13T07:38:00.000-04:00

As pretty much everyone in the world already knows, Sen. (and Presidential candidate) John McCain is making the commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University today.

That McCain's making some sort of rapprochement with the 'Christian' Right isn't too surprising, even if it is a bit two-faced. What is surprising is that that's pretty much the extent of how it's playing in the press.

What's missing, you ask.

What's missing is that, even by Religious Right standards, Falwell is a freaking nutcase. One could fill volumes - and they have - with the number of totally insane things Falwell's said over the years. For instance, there's the video, The Clinton Chronicles, which accused President Clinton of running a cocaine-smuggling ring and having people (including Vince Foster) murdered. As reporter Murray Waas documents at the link, not only did Falwell publicize the 'findings' of the supposed investigation on his "Old-Time Gospel Hour" show (there's a little old-timey gospel for you - bearing false witness...doesn't one of the Ten Commandments say something about that?), but he helped raise money for the making of the video, and helped decide what would be in it.

And of course, he's the guy who made the infamous statement, two days after 9/11, that

The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

And he's one heckuva Christian too, having said of Jimmy Carter:

His message of peace and reconciliation under almost all circumstances is simply incompatible with Christian teachings as I interpret them. This 'turn the other cheek' business is all well and good but it's not what Jesus fought and died for.

But that's almost beside the point, which is that Falwell's not just an influential conservative Christian preacher; he's a nutcase, pure and simple. The real story here is that McCain's lending his credibility to a freakin' whacko. It doesn't matter what constituency Falwell has; that's what he is, and that's the sort of person McCain's willing to climb into bed with, in order to further his Presidential ambitions.

Darfur: My Solution

2006-05-10T16:24:00.000-04:00

Kevin Drum was just saying that we'd need something on the order of 30,000 troops in Sudan to stop the genocide in Darfur. It's not going to happen, he says, because where are those troops going to come from? Nobody in the world is prepared to volunteer troop strength of anywhere near that magnitude.

He's right that it's not going to happen, but it should, and we should be the ones to provide the troops. Whatever it is that our troops are doing in Iraq, they're really not doing that much good. So the next 30,000 troops that rotate out of Iraq, don't replace them with fresh troops - send those fresh troops to Darfur, where they will save tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives.

That'll leave our people spread a bit thin in Iraq, but I've got a solution for that too. We're building - or really 'have built,' by now - four huge 'enduring bases' in Iraq, with tens of thousands of troops doing nothing but run each base. For instance, the Washington Post reports of one of the four bases,

Of the 20,000 troops at Balad, only several hundred have jobs that take them off base. Most Americans posted here never interact with an Iraqi, and some never see one, said Army Lt. Col. Larry Dotson, who is effectively the city manager.

Sounds like we could shut down an 'enduring base' or two, reassign the troops running those bases to more mission-critical roles, and the Iraqis wouldn't be able to tell that there'd been any change in troop levels.

Why not?

Heckuva Job, Gen. Mikey! (Our next CIA chief in action)

2006-05-10T11:54:00.000-04:00

If TPM Muckraker isn't one of your bookmarks, take care of that right now, OK? Because in its few brief months of existence, it's become indispensable.

Yesterday, for instance, Muckraker Justin Rood rescued some overlooked reporting by Siobhan Gorman of the Baltimore Sun, which found that, under GEn. Hayden's watch at the NSA:

NSA bungled two key technology programs and an important oversight effort. As a result, "The agency has been gradually 'going deaf,' as unimportant communications drown out key pieces of information," an official told Gorman. Meanwhile, the secretive agency has been burning through billions -- billions -- of dollars.

"Nearly 4 1/2 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the NSA lacks a system to comprehensively evaluate all of the communications collected by its vast networks of high-tech ears," Gorman concluded.

"Agency computers have trouble talking to each other and frequently crash, key bits of data are sometimes lost, and vital intelligence can be overlooked."

Here's the kicker: Because of the failures under Hayden, the NSA actually lost authority. Congress was so upset by these techno-screwups and cost overruns that it stripped the agency of the power to sign its own big-ticket contracts -- and gave it to the Department of Defense. This is the guy who's going to strengthen the CIA's hand against the Pentagon?

IOW, this guy's another Bush Administration world-class fuckup.

See the header link for a quick summary of the details. See the Baltimore Sun for the complete details.

Truth and Reconciliation

2006-05-09T17:27:00.000-04:00

I'm delighted to say that the Dems are actually starting to put together an agenda for 2007, on the chance that they might regain one or both houses of Congress. It's not only good to be ready, but also the best way to convince people to put you in charge - if you actually belong in charge - is to tell people what you'll do with your newfound power once you get it. And things like a minimum wage hike, governmental authority to negotiate better Medicare drug prices, protecting our ports and chemical plants, and fiscal responsibility are things we can all get behind.

Hell, a conservative libertarian I often debate with over at my favorite political message board said he could get behind all of those except the min-wage hike, and conceded that even that was good politics.

Another thing that the Dems want to do is launch investigations. According to the WaPo (link above),

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said in an interview last week that a Democratic House would launch a series of investigations of the Bush administration, beginning with the White House's first-term energy task force and probably including the use of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

I've got one of them 'framing' ideas: why don't we say we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

The Dems damned well ought to investigate the hell out of Bush if they win back a house of Congress this fall. But they could seize the moral high ground by calling for a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" in the style of South Africa.

Of course, they need only promise amnesty to the lower-level appointees - those that almost never exchanged words with a Cabinet-level Administration official - in return for their complete and unperjured testimony. Prez, Veep, Cabinet, and those who conferred frequently with the principals would still be fair game.

And if questioned about it, Dems could say, "unlike Abu Ghraib and related GOP scandals, we're going after the big fish and let the little guys go, not the other way around like the GOP does."

So let's frame this right from the get-go.

Besides, I don't know about you, but I feel that Bush and Cheney have fully earned impeachment, from lying us into war, to illegal wiretapping, to torture and secret prisons. But if we're going to impeach them next year, the time to start mentally preparing the public is now. Truth and Reconciliation conveys the gravity and enormity of the offenses committed, and indicates that we're going to handle this in a sober and serious manner. As we ought to.

It prepares the ground.

Net (Non)Neutrality: "the Senate just needs to pass 'anything to get us into conference,' where the real decisions will be made"

2006-05-08T17:30:00.000-04:00

Ain't this swell? The Republican majority in Congress has completely abandoned the pretense of legislating openly, where the public can see what's happening:

WASHINGTON — The House and Senate are preparing to vote on telecommunications legislation that could affect every American who surfs the Internet, watches cable TV or uses a phone.

But no one should waste much time watching the floor debates on C-SPAN. The lawmakers admit their goal is not to pass definitive legislation in public in the coming weeks.

Instead, they want to pass separate bills, regardless of how different they may be. The final version would be negotiated, largely in private, by about a dozen senators and representatives on a conference committee.

The Senate just needs to pass "anything to get us into conference," where the real decisions will be made, House telecommunications subcommittee chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said Tuesday at a telecom forum hosted by National Journal's Technology Daily.

"It's not supposed to work like this," said Celia Wexler, vice president for advocacy for Common Cause, a government watchdog group. "It's appalling that you can hear a member (of Congress) say that in public."

While most conference negotiations are closed to public view, lobbyists continue to influence the members and their staffers.

In the case of telecom, the groups say, so many well-financed lobbyists are involved that they may battle themselves to a standstill, leaving Congress flush with campaign contributions but unable to agree on a final bill before adjournment.

The stakes run into the billions of dollars for the central players, including cable operators and regional phone giants, such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., as well as Internet companies, including eBay Inc., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

The telecom legislation is following a well-worn path that Congress often takes to craft spending, tax and other bills out of public view.

Government of the people, by the lobbyists and for the lobbyists. With the future of the free Web at stake.

WaPo: Blame the Democrats

2006-05-05T17:12:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure how real it was, but the WaPo claims there was a moment on Wednesday when the House had a chance to enact genuine lobbying reforms. Whether real or not, the reforms the WaPo liked lost on a 216-213 vote.

The GOP opposed the measure by a 212-16 margin.

The Dems voted for it, by a count of 197-4.

So who killed it, the Democrats or the Republicans?

The WaPo titled their piece, The Feckless Four: How a small group of Democrats helped the GOP kill real lobbying reform. And put the focus (and the onus) squarely on the four Democrats, rather than the 212 Republicans.

'Nuff said.

Goss, HookerGate, and the WaPo

2006-05-05T17:00:00.000-04:00

The WaPo (link above) characterizes Porter Goss' resignation as "the latest in an administration shake-up during Bush's second term."

As if this had anything to do with the game of musical chairs in the White House.

Not a word about HookerGate at the Watergate. But TPM Muckraker readers have been seeing this coming on for over a week.

What a bunch of worthless bozos. (The WaPo, not TPM. The WaPo would be greatly improved if they put Josh Marshall in charge.)

Net Neutrality

2006-04-23T17:22:00.000-04:00

I'm still reading up on this issue, but Net neutrality proponents and opponents alike agree that without Net neutrality,

broadband providers will be free to design their networks as they see fit and enjoy the latitude to prioritize certain types of traffic--such as streaming video--over others.

The problem is not that Verizon's streaming video will get priority over other Web traffic; the problem is that there'd be essentially no further limit to their use of their gatekeeper role in deciding whose voice gets priority, who gets heard through a small pipe, and -potentially - who gets shut off altogether.

This is about as fundamental a small-d democracy issue as you can get. Here on the Web, you can say anything you like, and how much you get heard (not very much yet, in my case :)) depends only on whether people like what you have to say, and link to you. It's a democracy of ideas, and the best ideas can win out.

This is very much unlike anything we've had in the media age, where broadcast and cable TV and radio offer only a limited number of alternatives, and many worthwhile and popular voices can't get on the air. The media gatekeepers decide whose ideas get play, and whose don't.

The Internet has been different, so far at least. It's time to fight to keep it that way.

That Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) was one of the Dems arguing for Net neutrality gives it a great deal of additional cred with me. Boucher's a very centrist sort of Democrat (he has to be; his district is in far southwest Virginia, which isn't exactly a hotbed of liberalism), but he's one of the most knowledgeable persons in Congress with respect to telecom issues. If he thinks this is important enough to fight for, it almost certainly is.

Click the link for a short animation explaining why this is important.

Sign the petition.

Email your congressperson.

The proposed legislation that would kill Net neutrality. (WARNING: big-ass PDF.)

(Additional warning: I can't make head or tail of the legislation, so far. But supporters and opponents of the legislation agree on what it would do.)

Burns-Inouye Principles proposed to protect Net neutrality. (Much smaller PDF.) See last paragraph, especially.

Shame on you, Washington Post, for publishing Melvin Laird's op-ed

2006-04-19T12:35:00.000-04:00

Dear Fred Hiatt: I'm just wondering, do you guys vet pieces like this before you publish them, or does any Big Shot get unfettered access to your op-ed page anytime they ask?

Because that sure was a clinker.

More than anything else, I’m embarrassed on behalf of your paper. I feel a certain loyalty to the Washington Post, which I’ve been reading for over four decades, so I wince when it prints tripe like this.

Let's just look at that concluding paragraph:

We do not advocate a silencing of debate on the war in Iraq. But care must be taken by those experienced officers who had their chance to speak up while on active duty. In speaking out now, they may think they are doing a service by adding to the reasoned debate. But the enemy does not understand or appreciate reasoned public debate. It is perceived as a sign of weakness and lack of resolve.

Even a junior high school newspaper editor should be able to spot the contradiction between “the enemy does not understand or appreciate reasoned public debate. It is perceived as a sign of weakness and lack of resolve,” and “We do not advocate a silencing of debate on the war in Iraq.”

So if “reasoned public debate” undermines the war effort (which is what Laird and Pursley are saying), what sort of debate on Iraq is OK - unreasoned, hysterical debate?

That sure seems to be the only, erm, reasonable conclusion.

On Anti-Americanism

2006-04-17T12:31:00.000-04:00

On a message board I've frequented for the past several years, [Poster K] recently asked:

[Poster S] sincerely seems to think you just like to blame America for various things, as some sort pf personal entertainment. You gonna set the record straight or what?

I thought this would be a good place to re-post my answer. If anyone ever gives me any BS here about hating America, I want the record to state just where I'm coming from.

Well, y'know, some people watch American Idol, and some of us sit at our computers and think of new things to blame America for.

Getting past the kidding, though:

I have, for all of my life, assumed America was the Good Guys in the world. My worldview in this regard was formed before Vietnam took center stage in our foreign policy in the mid-1960s, in a time when we were the country that won WWII (I'm talking about my perceptions as a kid, here, so no need to talk about Russia's role) and WWI before that, and was now protecting the world from the evils of totalitarian Communism.

And on account of that legacy, I expect America to live up to that sort of ideal, or at least give it its best shot. I demand of my country that it not be just strong, but to use its strength on the side of what is right and good.

That view of America has taken some hits over the years, of course. It's had to survive Vietnam, Nixon-Kissinger realpolitik, our support of numerous anticommunist tinhorn dictators like Marcos, Pinochet, Somoza, Saddam, and the Shah, and that flock of neocon surrogate wars during the 1980s: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola. I had to believe there was a better way of fighting Communism than by supporting 'authoritarian' (you're welcome, Jeane Kirkpatrick) thugs around the world: we got democracy; El Salvador got Roberto D'Aubuisson.

But I didn't think America was evil; America was good, but for often difficult to understand reasons, it was doing wrong. What do you do about it? You call a spade a spade: you say what's wrong and what's right, and you expect your country to get back on the right track.

And there were some positive developments along the way. Jimmy Carter, for all his other failings, insisted that we look at how all countries, not just Communist ones, were falling short on human rights, and take that into account in our foreign policy. The Helsinki Accords, excoriated by conservatives at the time, gave us some leverage to demand of the USSR that some degree of human rights be accorded to its Warsaw Pact vassals.

And while Reagan had far too many neocon nutcases running his foreign policy (Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams), Reagan's heart really was in the right place - he believed in freedom not just as a slogan but as a fundamental human right - and his policies gradually caught up. Along about 1983, he and his team came to the realization that D'Aubuisson was a murderous thug, and lined up behind Duarte instead; when crunch time came in the Phillippines in 1985, he helped nudge Marcos out; in 1987, he and Carter combined to hornswoggle Daniel Ortega into holding elections - and honoring them, when they didn't go his way [turned out that while writing from memory, I got this detail wrong; that election was in 1990, when Bush I was in office]; and, most significantly, when he finally had a Soviet opposite number in Gorbachev who actually believed Communism should benefit the people living under it, he had the right combination of willingness to take diplomatic chances while maintaining public pressure to hasten the moment when the Wall would come down - a moment that most of us who grew up during the Cold War weren't sure we'd live to see.

And then of course Clinton, without a Cold War foe to reckon with, gradually found his footing, and put the United States on the right side of things in Bosnia and Kosovo.

So I believe America can do great things in the world when it is good as well as strong. And I believe that when America is doing evil, and we call it by its name, America will eventually respond, and find its way back to the light.

So when America turns into a swaggering bully in the world, invading other countries without knowing WTF it's doing and what forces it's unleashing, let alone having a plan to deal with them, I will call it evil, and demand that America stop doing evil and do good. I will do the same when we imprison people for years when we have zero evidence that they've done anything hostile to us, and when we torture people, and send them off to other countries to be tortured. And when we bomb the shit out of civilians along with insurgents - insurgents who would have had little support for their insurgency if we simply weren't there. And when our government spies on its own people without any legal authority or oversight. I want the country I've lived in all my life to deserve to wear the white hat again, and I want leaders who believe in the goodness of America in a way that causes them in turn to demand the best out of America - rather than believing that whatever America does is automatically good because it's America that's doing it.

So if I'm critical of America, it's because I'm a fucking idealist, and for some reason, despite everything I've seen in my life where it's fallen short, America is still one of the things I'm an idealist about. It's totally irrational, and it makes no sense, but there it is.

The Week in Bush/GOP Apologetics, WaPo-Style

2006-04-12T21:16:00.000-04:00

I've already published this as a Kos diary (that's where the link goes, this time), but hey, this is my blog and I'll republish it here because I want to.

The WaPo has been getting a bit of heat lately for some of its bending backwards to be kind to the Bush Administration and the GOP, and it deserves every bit of it. However, some instances of such kindness, just in the past week, have slipped under the radar. I thought I could help by furnishing a more complete accounting of the past week in Bush apologetics, WaPo-style.

So down the page, I'll say more about:

1) DeLay Parting On Own Terms (Wednesday, April 5)
2) Obstructionist Dems Block Compromise on Immigration (Saturday, April 8)
3) 'A Good Leak' (Sunday, April 9)
4) Cheney Booed for Bad Throw (Tuesday, April 11)
5) WaPo Pretends That Bush Isn't Anything Like Bush (Wednesday, April 12)

1) DeLay Parting on Own Terms
Congressman Wanted to Win GOP Primary Before Announcing Resignation

As I mentioned at the time, this was the heading and subhead on the front page of last Wednesday's WaPo print edition. No, really.

The fact that DeLay announced his upcoming resignation on Monday, April 3, the primary had been on Tuesday, March 7, and DeLay's former deputy chief of staff, Tony Rudy, had pled guilty and turned state's evidence on Friday, March 31, should have at least somewhat aroused the WaPo's skepticism. You'd think they just might've mentioned that DeLay was on the run like a man with the sheriff on his trail, which was pretty much the case. But instead, they spun it just the way Tom DeLay would have liked them to. Mighty kind of them.

2) Obstructionist Dems Block Compromise on Immigration wasn't the actual headline of the WaPo lead editorial on Saturday, but it might as well have been:

THE SENATE COULD have left town yesterday with a workable, if imperfect, immigration bill that would have let millions of people living here illegally come out of the shadows. It had before it a deal that could have attracted 70 votes; it had the backing of the White House and the support of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), despite his previous, enforcement-only stance.

But after two weeks of slogging toward compromise, the deal blew up over a procedural standoff on whether to move forward with voting for amendments, as Republicans were demanding, and if so, for how many. Republicans blamed Democratic obstructionism aimed at keeping voters' attention focused on the punitive, Republican-sponsored House bill.

"It's not gone forward because there's a political advantage for Democrats not to have an immigration bill," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). Democrats blamed Republican bad faith and said Republicans refused to impose a reasonable limit on amendments. "The amendments were being offered by people who didn't want the bill," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Both of those assertions contain elements of truth. But Democrats -- whether their motive was partisan advantage or legitimate fear of a bad bill emerging from conference with the House -- are the ones who refused, in the end, to proceed with debate on amendments, which is, after all, how legislation gets made.

And:

The measure wasn't perfect, and certainly there are risks in going to conference with the House and its enforcement-only approach. But Democrats putting political self-interest over solving a serious policy problem ought to worry that their actions will backfire with the very people whose interests they are purporting to protect.

'Risks' in going to conference? Risks??

Excuse the fuck out of me, Washington Post, but isn't it part of your basic job description to know how politics is played these days? We know what happens in conference, because it's happened so many times already: an OK bill from the Senate and a horrid bill from the House collide; the House bill wins, plus a few nasty amendments get added in conference that were too rank to have even gotten through the House the first time.

Plus the GOP-run Senate gets to unilaterally amend the bill before it even gets to conference. First we compromise; then we get to turn the compromise bill into whatever we want.

But the Dems are somehow the bad guys here, for wanting some modest assurances that the compromise they agreed to would survive in some recognizable form.

Not only are the WaPo editors pandering to the GOP, but they apparently still think Congress works the way it did in 1986. Can anybody wake up Rip van Hiatt?

3) A Good Leak: this is the one where the WaPo said it was a good thing that Bush declassified parts of the NIE which Libby then clandestinely shared with Judith Miller. Since everyone from Jane Hamsher to DailyKos' georgia10 has already teed off on the WaPo over this one (and did they ever deserve it), I don't feel a deep need to say anything but: what they said.

4) Cheney's Muffed First Pitch Draws Boos, said the WaPo, when actually he was booed from the moment he started onto the field. Again, this one's been done; nothing to add; just wanted it in the list.

5) WaPo Pretends That Bush Isn't Anything Like Bush wasn't the title of this morning's lead editorial, but it might as well have been.

The subject of the lead editorial in this morning's WaPo was how Bush can rescue what’s left of his term in office. Before getting to the meat of it, the editorial talks about:

the poisonous partisanship in Washington, with Democrats united in their desire to see Mr. Bush fail while his erstwhile Republican allies scurry for cover.

That’s right - according to the WaPo, the Dems are viciously spouting venom, while the poor, innocent, helpless GOP runs for cover. Maybe they live in an alternate universe.

And then the piece discusses what Bush might actually do to save his Presidency. Here’s what they recommend he do:

1. Actually do something about global warming.
2. Get behind “comprehensive, generous” immigration reform.
3. Become a champion of lobbying reform.
4. Do something real about poverty in the U.S..
5. End Iraq/GWoT detainee abuse.

I know you’re ROFL by this point, but no, really - that’s what the WaPo suggested! Serious alternate universe, huh?

They’re saying, in effect, “If Bush wasn’t really Bush, but was instead some completely different person with much more reasonable goals and motivations than he actually has, he might do one or more of these five things to save what’s left of his Presidency.”

And if a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his tail. Sheesh.

When you put it all together, it's a picture of a newspaper that's decided whose side they're on - and it's not ours.

The supposedly liberal Washington Post - consistently whoring for Bush and the GOP.

And this was all just in the past week.

Employment: Keeping Score

2006-04-12T15:35:00.000-04:00

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 2.5 million more jobs last month than there were in January 2001, when Bush took office.

That's not very good. First of all, the economists say that the economy has to create between 130,000 and 150,000 new jobs a month, just to keep up with population growth. If we take the lower end of that range and multiply, the U.S. economy needed to create over 8 million new jobs in the past 62 months.

Obviously 2.5 million is way short of that.

But it gets even worse. Only 1.4 million of those jobs have been generated by the private sector. The other 1.1 million are new state and local government jobs, mostly local. (Federal employment has declined slightly since January 2001.) So nearly half the already paltry number of jobs created since Bush took office have been your tax dollars at work.

Sixty-two months into Bush's Administration, with tax cuts and corporate subsidies galore that were supposed to generate new employment, and all this activity has only created 1.4 million private-sector jobs. Pretty sad.

Obviously the Bush economic theory isn't working. (Well, maybe it's working just fine, but I'll leave that for another post.)

By comparison, 62 months into Clinton's presidency, the private sector had created 14 million new jobs. No decimal point. Fourteen million, not one point four million. Ten times as many. And that's after an upper-bracket tax hike that was supposed to choke off investment and cause the economy to do a belly-flop.

As The Onion satirically 'quoted' Bush as saying back in January 2001, "Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over." Who knew they were prophesying?

NOTE: to obtain the referenced stats for yourself, click the post title, which will take you to a BLS page with a bunch of check boxes. In the right-hand column, click the top two boxes, and the one about tenth from the bottom, in the row that says "Government." Then click the "Retrieve data" button at the bottom. That'll give you the number of people employed in every month for the past ten years, in three compact tables: one for overall, one for private sector, and one for government.

Once you get those tables, at the top of that page you can change the years so that it covers the Clinton years too. Do that, and click 'Go.' Getting BLS labor statistics is easy once you know how.

U.S. as Great Power: Iraq and Iran as a Case Study

2006-04-09T14:01:00.000-04:00

Besides power, one trait of a Great Power is a willingness to think, plan, and act with the long term in mind. A Great Power that doesn't do this, isn't likely to remain a Great Power very long.

For instance, let's talk about the U.S. in the Cold War. For all the abuses that we used that conflict to excuse (the removal of left-leaning but noncommunist leaders like Allende and Mossadegh; our support of strongmen from Somoza to Marcos to Savimbi, as well as dozens of others), the fundamental strategy of containment was a good policy in service to a good end - confining the reach of the Soviet Union's power. It was a policy we pursued across the decades. It worked, and we ultimately won.

Once upon a time, we also pursued a long-term policy with respect to nuclear proliferation. The point of this is clear: one can kill hundreds or thousands at a time through conventional, biological, or chemical weapons. One can kill hundreds of thousands at once with just one nuclear bomb in just one city. And the more nations that have nukes, the more likely it is that eventually nukes will fall into the hands of a leader that doesn't give a whit about the balance of power or the effects of retaliation on his country. (We'll pretend we're the Bush Administration and stick to rogue states as our threats, ignoring terrorists except for occasional use as a boogeyman.) So there are damned good reasons why we don't want nukes to fall into the hands of an Iran or a North Korea - and why nukes in the hands of Pakistan should make us lose sleep at night.

President Bush and his crew are worried (sort of) by the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and are contemplating air attacks on Iranian facilities, possibly including the use of tactical nuclear weapons, on account of that. But there's only one problem: we're bogged down next door in Iraq, which is a majority-Shi'ite country.

Iran and Iraq are closely connected here in two important ways:

1) Right now: if we attack Iran, as the guy quoted in Sy Hersh's story says, "the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle." We're fighting a slo-mo losing battle against the Sunni insurgency as it is; if we get the Shi'ites mad at us, it'll be time to have those helicopters ready to evacuate the Green Zone.

We'll lose Iraq, and we'll lose most of our residual support in the Arab Middle East as well. BIG strategic blunder. For what? A temporary setback for Iran and its nuclear program.

We aren't going to force regime change on them, not without troops on the ground - which we don't have. And we won't be able to do this twice; if we do it once, nobody in the region will be letting us base there, or letting us put aircraft carriers in their territorial waters.

2) Three years ago: our invasion of Iraq made explicit Iran's and North Korea's need for nukes. We created an environment where any country that the U.S. regards as hostile will want nukes if they can get 'em.

Up until 2003, we lived in a world where countries like the United States didn't just go around invading other countries out of the blue. Then with Iraq, we went from their not being publicly on our radar as a concern, to being the biggest threat in the world, in fourteen months: the time from Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech, and the beginning of the Iraq invasion. And we did so on the basis of a U.N. resolution that only we and Great Britain regarded as any sort of authorization to act. We went in essentially on our own, with no clear threat to quash, with no international consensus that this needed to be done.

What potentially hostile nation could look at our actions in Iraq and conclude that the same thing wasn't going to happen to them? We gave the two other 'Axis' partners, Iran and North Korea, every reason to believe we could come for them next if we damned well felt like it. And especially after Saddam opened his nation to inspectors, which the U.S. chased out of there when they didn't turn up anything worrisome, we left them two safe alternatives: total submission - going well beyond what Saddam provided - or going nuclear.

If you're one of the world's bad actors, which would you choose?

No matter what else was or wasn't true about the justifications for invading Iraq, this alone makes our invasion of Iraq the U.S.' biggest strategic blunder of the nuclear era. We've opened the door to a dog-eat-dog world where nukes are the only proof against invasion, and as a result, all the wrong people feel a much greater need to have them than they ever would have felt otherwise.

By invading Iraq, we've created a far more dangerous world, just in this manner alone.

That's what happens when you lose sight of what your long-term objectives are. Or should be, since I'm not sure Bush & Co. really care about nonproliferation.

The United States as a Great Power

2006-04-09T07:07:00.000-04:00

Libruls like me, according to the caricature, really aren't supposed to value America's position as a Great Power in the world. I do. I don't know if that makes me an exception or not. Maybe it's all the years I played Diplomacy^TM.

But the U.S. can be a potent force for good in the world - at least, when Bush is not running the show - and quite often has been so. And that potential is worth preserving for the future.

So what defines a Great Power? Power, obviously. Our power to affect the larger world, and our relative immunity from the rest of the world's ability to make us jump at their command.

The problem right now is, we've got just one out of two. We've got plenty of power to make a difference in the world, but our immunity to the manipulations of other countries is increasingly an illusion, for two simple reasons: oil and debt. We're more dependent than ever on foreign oil, and we're more dependent than ever on a host of other countries' central banks continuing to buy U.S. treasury bills - to continue loaning us new money.

For oil, that of course means Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the other Middle East oil exporters, but also countries like Venezuela and Nigeria. World oil supplies are really tight these days, which is why crude is selling for $65 a barrel. (Remember back in 2000 when Bush complained about the price of crude, then $28, being too high, and how if he were President, he'd jawbone the Saudis into reducing prices? Har har! But enough about Bush, for the moment.) Any hiccup in the supply chain can send gasoline prices up.

What this means is that a number of countries - Saudi Arabia in particular - have us by the balls. We can talk all we want about democracy promotion in the Middle East, but when it comes to the House of Saud, we don't really mean it; we can't afford to. And everyone over there knows it too, which undermines our claims of 'promoting democracy' right from the start.

It also undermines our Iran saber-rattling. If we attack Iran, their annual 2.5 billion barrels of exported oil will go off the market, and we'll see $100/barrel oil, or close to it.

Similarly with debt. We have to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars each year to finance our budget deficits. The central banks of many governments are helping to prop up the dollar by buying our treasury bills as fast as we can print them. The Saudi equivalent in this sphere is China, which loans the U.S. huge quantities of money every year. They're joined by a number of the other East Asian economic powerhouses such as South Korea, and also by the Middle Eastern oil countries, which have even more money to lend than usual, with oil at $65 a barrel.

The problem is not that we have already borrowed money from these folks; the problem is our continuing need to do so in the future. We can't tell China what we really think of its policies because we need them to loan us more money next month, and the month after, and the month after that, and so on indefinitely into the future.

Right now we can buy a lot of stuff from the rest of the world because the value of the dollar is high, propped up by all that borrowing. If the dollar were worth less, Americans would suddenly have less buying power. A year ago, South Korea said they were reconsidering investing so much of their surplus in Treasury bills, and the value of the dollar dropped by about a European nickel overnight. Fortunately, South Korea's our ally, and they reconsidered their reconsideration, the dollar stabilized, and life was good again. But that's how vulnerable the dollar is.

In short, we're not so much of a Great Power as we used to be. A lot of countries have us over a barrel (or a T-bill). And we aren't doing anything about either of our two big vulnerabilities, by reducing our oil dependence, or reducing our deficits.

Even during those years when Bush looked like a strong leader, it was hollow underneath. Pray that we don't suddenly find out just how hollow.

Washington Post's Parting Gift to DeLay

2006-04-05T12:28:00.000-04:00

DeLay Parting on Own Terms, reads the WaPo headline in this morning's early edition.
Congressman Wanted to Win GOP Primary Before Announcing Resignation, reads the subhead.

I'm not sure the WaPo's even in the same universe as the rest of us. DeLay announced his resignation this Monday, April 3. The primary was back on March 7.

On the other hand, DeLay's former deputy chief of staff, Tony Rudy, pled guilty on Friday, March 31, and turned state's evidence. DeLay had three and a half weeks to resign between his primary win and Rudy's guilty plea, and didn't. But he announced his resignation on the first working day after Rudy's plea.

Primary, schmimary; this looks to all the world like a guy who's quitting before trouble catches up with him. The WaPo could have at least slipped in some skepticism about DeLay's alleged motivations, rather than taking his story at face value.

And it's not like they can claim that a bad choice of headline was made due to deadline pressure: DeLay resigned on Monday night, and this story was in Wednesday's paper. They had plenty of time to decide what their spin was. And apparently it was to unquestioningly accept whatever bullshit Delay fed them.

Sometimes the folks at the WaPo act like they were born yesterday - and not early in the day, either.

But I'm sure DeLay appreciated their putting the best possible face on his departure.

A-Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran

2006-04-04T17:35:00.000-04:00

Seems the U.S. and Britain are getting more serious about bombing Iran's nascent nuke program. Per the link:

It is believed that an American-led attack, designed to destroy Iran's ability to develop a nuclear bomb, is "inevitable" if Teheran's leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands to freeze their uranium enrichment programme.

....A senior Foreign Office source said...."If Iran makes another strategic mistake, such as ignoring demands by the UN or future resolutions, then the thinking among the chiefs is that military action could be taken to bring an end to the crisis. The belief in some areas of Whitehall is that an attack is now all but inevitable."

How stupid is attacking Iran? Extremely stupid.

If we attack Iran, we will almost certainly lose the tacit cooperation of Shi'ite Iraq.

Right now we can't even handle the Sunni insurgency. If we lose the Shi'ites, it's game over in Iraq. As in helicopters lifting the last Americans out of the Green Zone just ahead of the insurgents' moving in.

Our 'enduring bases' ought to hold out a little longer, but mostly because they're away from population centers and have runways for C-130 cargo planes.

But all in all, bombing Iran is pretty damned stupid. And that's if the Iranians themselves do absolutely zilch to retaliate.

And they can do a great deal in the way of retaliation. For starters, they can cease oil exports for a few months, watch the price of oil double to $130/barrel, and make out like gangbusters when they resume oil sales...at half their previous output. For seconds, they could send a good chunk of their army into eastern Iraq, on the pretext of restoring order to Shi'ite Iraq - and our scattered, overburdened military would have a much harder time responding than you'd think. For thirds, they just might be able to instigate some terrorist attacks.

When you add it all up, bombing Iran right now would be incalculably stupid; it would be stupid raised to the power of the cardinality of the continuum.

Sometime in the future, I'd like to live in a country that's run by people who have a clue or two to rub together.

Iraq: Denial and Deception

2006-04-04T11:13:00.000-04:00

Three years later, that's still the logo on all the White House webpages from the run-up to the Iraq war.

Truth in advertising. Sure, it's completely unintentional, but from this Administration, you take what you can get.

The effect of executing Islamic -->Christian converts on certain foreign interventions

2006-03-29T12:32:00.000-05:00

The right wing was recently all up in arms about Afghanistan's attempt to try and execute Abdul Rahman for having converted from Islam to Christianity 16 years ago. That's fair enough: I wasn't exactly happy about that myself. People shouldn't be killed simply for changing faiths - that's not the sort of thing that can be brushed off as a mere cultural difference. It's wrong, period. And apparently most of the Muslim world accepts death as the appropriate punishment for leaving the Islamic faith.

The Western world's response should be: sorry, guys, but you've gotta change. Welcome to modernity, guys; part of the admission charge is that you don't kill people just for abandoning your faith. We consider choosing a new religion (or none at all) to be a fundamental human right, and we're going to be less than happy with you until you do too.

We've got a problem in that we're arguing from a weak position here, but I'll get back to that in another post. What I really wanted to talk about was how this episode has caused many on the Right to question their support for our endeavors in Afghanistan and Iraq. And at this point, I just want to say to them: why didn't you guys freakin' do your homework?? Shouldn't you have thought about - learned about - things like this up front, before pushing these wars??

Like many on the left, my position on the recent wars has been: Afghanistan yes, Iraq no. We were attacked on 9/11, and the Taliban government of Afghanistan was harboring bin Laden and al Qaeda. So we had to fight that war, period. And once we did so, we kinda owed it to them to help them patch their country back together: when the Soviet Union (or what was left of it by then) pulled out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s, we pulled out too, rather than helping them deal with the aftermath. We couldn't exactly do that to them twice in a row, no matter what they believed. We can do what we can to make sure they don't execute anybody else for abandoning Islam, but we can't pull out on account of their desire to do so. We're stuck. End of story.

Iraq, on the other hand: let's face it, apostasy isn't going to be any more popular in Iraq than it was in Afghanistan. But the difference is, we chose to intervene in Iraq. So if you're one of the people who was for this invasion, don't you think you should have known this sort of thing first?? If you're going to mess with the real world, you shouldn't do so on the basis of fairytales - oh, Iraq's really a secular country, they'll welcome us with flowers, and yada yada yada.

If you're second-guessing what we're doing in Afghanistan and Iraq on account of Rahman, here comes a point at which you've got to say: I should have known this was what Iraq was like, but I didn't, because I, and all my buddies, and all my leaders - we didn't do our freakin' homework. We, from George W. Bush on down to the lowliest Keyboard Kommando, didn't bother to learn much about Iraq ahead of time, and boy howdy, are our soldiers - and the Iraqi people - ever paying for our willful ignorance.

Because if this case would have raised some doubts with you, then ignorant you were. Which means you were treating the world like a frickin' Risk^TM game, rather than a place with real people who can be hurt and killed. People like you have a lot of nerve, showing your faces in public, let alone having the idea that anyone should still listen to what you think.

"War on Christians"? Gimme a break.

2006-03-29T12:18:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I know. This country hates Christians. Especially evangelical Christians. So much that if guys like James Dobson or Pat Robertson call up the White House, they may actually be forced to talk with George W. Bush - which must be hard for even their small minds to take.

It gets even worse. Did you know they're actually forced to live in a country - ours, shockingly enough - where not everybody is a Christian, some people don't even like Christianity, and millions of people fail to live up to their high moral standards?

"We are after all a society that abides abortion on demand, that has killed millions of innocent children, that degrades the institution of marriage and often treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition. Seen from this perspective, of course there is a war on Christianity," he said.

How do they endure this? God only knows.

An Open Letter to the WaPo's Jim Brady (post-Domenech)

2006-03-28T05:52:00.000-05:00

JFTR, nobody cares about Ben Domenech. OTOH, I do care very much about the integrity of the Washington Post, which I've been reading for four decades. I want them to journalism, rather than suckupitude. The WaPo's kinda schizophrenic these days - it's got some great reporters who aren't going to suck up to anyone, but it's got some reporters and editors who clearly do. People like me who care about the damned paper want to see it come down on the side of journalism. Hence the following, which I emailed yesterday:

Dear Jim Brady:

As a subscriber to the print version of the paper, and as a regular reader of the website, I have some thoughts about your continuing search for a specifically conservative blogger.

You seem to be convinced of the WaPo's need for such a blogger. Needless to say, many of your readers are wondering why a specifically conservative blogger should be elevated to such visibility, ahead of many quite possibly more accomplished bloggers of various political orientations. Honestly - why don't you just steal Kevin Drum from the Washington Monthly? He's a first-class writer, and he's got a track record for levelheadedness and backing up his ideas with factual cites.

But since you're not likely to do this, maybe you should give us Washington Post subscribers an idea of what's missing from WashingtonPost.com that only a righty blogger could provide. Here's how you might go about this:

1) Read a week's worth of posts on some of the major righty blogs, such as The Corner, InstaPundit, PowerLine, and RedState. [Doesn't have to be *you*, of course; that's what interns are for.)

2) In the Post.blog (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/washpostblog/), reprint, or link to, posts that you feel are the sort of thing you'd hope to see from a conservative blogger on the WashingtonPost.com site.

3) Stop and ask yourself - and your readers - how many such posts fly in the face of facts and logic. (I'm a more than occasional reader of such websites. They seem to suffer from a lot of this. Not to say it never happens on the left, but I'd say it happens to a much lesser degree on the lefty equivalent of the sites I mentioned above. Feel free to compare a week's worth of those four for factual accuracy and soundness of argument with a week's worth of the DailyKos main page, TalkingPointsMemo, Political Animal, and Firedoglake. No contest.)

4) What's left over is the maximum potential worthwhile output of a reasonable right-wing blogger. Note that any individual blogger will probably hit no more than 50% of the M.P.W.O. Note further that any blogger worth his pay will be posting a few times a day, and the remaining posts will not be part of that group of worthwhile posts. Think about the signal-to-noise, worthwhile-to-garbage ratio that implies.

5) Ask yourself, and your readers, if that ratio suggests that a conservative blog can make a positive contribution to the WaPo website.

I'm quite serious about this. Unless you've spent some time actually reading the righty blogs, you may have this idea that there's a pool of conservative blogging talent out there that is busily making strong, factual intellectual cases for socially conservative ideas. I can't say I run into anybody out there who's any more sound and factual than, say, Cal Thomas. I hope Cal's beneath the Washington Post's standards, and I expect that any socially conservative blogger you'd find wouldn't be any improvement over him.

Cheers,
[Rufus]

The new 'Saddam-bin Laden collaboration' memo

2006-03-26T12:02:00.000-05:00

Seems the guys at RedState have been at the KoolAid again. According to the New York Sun,

[former Senator Bob Kerrey] says a recently declassified Iraqi account of a 1995 meeting between Osama bin Laden and a senior Iraqi envoy presents a "significant set of facts," and shows a more detailed collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

RedState's getting all self-congratulatory about this: "the prowar folks were already aware of this and the antiwar folks...there's not a chance on Earth that the antiwar movement's going to admit that it got things as horribly wrong as they did."

The lefty blogsphere fully expected that the declassifications of Iraqi documents would be handled in the usual political manner - if it made the Bush Administration look better, it would be declassified, and if it didn't, it wouldn't. But still, if there was real evidence of Saddam-Osama collaboration, I'd have to say I was wrong about a great deal of stuff.

So what collaboration did this document provide evidence of? Gee, the RedState commenter forgot to tell you that - can't imagine why. Here's what the NY Sun article said:

when Saddam was informed of the meeting on March 4, 1995 he agreed to broadcast sermons of a radical imam, Suleiman al Ouda, requested by Mr. bin Laden.

Well then, we had to attack Saddam. No question. I've been wrong about everything.

Iraq in a Nutshell

2006-03-24T16:37:00.000-05:00

There are three key aspects of Iraq that must be included in any summary: Iraq as WMD threat, Iraq as humanitarian mission (and as massive post-invasion fuckup), and Iraq as colossal quagmire we can't seem to either remedy or abandon.

1) The WMD Threat

Since this was the justification the Administration gave to Congress, the nation, and the world for the war in the first place (see, for example, the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq, U.N. Resolution 1441, and Bush's speech to the nation on the eve of the invasion), this is what got us there. The claim was that Saddam had WMDs which would constitute a threat to us in terrorist hands. It turns out the Administration lied to us about the evidence supporting both the WMD claim and the terrorist-connection claim, which at this point should surprise nobody.

One could argue that despite the weakness of the evidence for WMDs, and the near-total absence of evidence for a Saddam-al Qaeda connection, the Administration believed the threat to be real, and deceived the American people so that they could dispense with the threat anyway. Unfortunately, our conduct of the invasion itself demolishes that myth.

As George Packer reminds us in The Assassins' Gate (p.134), during the invasion

the Third Infantry Division and First Marine Expeditionary Force were chewing up hundreds of miles of desert on their way to the Iraqi capital, leaving in their path liberated but unsecured territory.

A primary reason this territory behind our front lines was left unsecured was (p.118)

In planning for Iraq throughout 2002, Rumsfeld obliged General Tommy Franks of Central Command to whittle his invasion force down from an original half million...to around 160,000.

This wouldn't have been important if it hadn't been for the WMDs: as the Washington Post's Barton Gellman reported just ten days after the infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, the "liberated but unsecured territory" contained a number of prospective WMD sites. The absence of any attempt to secure the sites meant that they were looted to the ground in between the time our front lines liberated the sites, and the time when our Task Force 75, charged with finding which of these sites had in fact had WMDs or equipment to produce them, could inspect the sites.

In other words, if the sites had in fact held WMDs, they would have been looted, and nothing could have prevented terrorists from obtaining them from the looters. If there had been WMDs, our invasion would have accomplished the very thing it was supposed to prevent. It was a war plan that placed a low priority on securing the potential WMDs, and as such, it has to be regarded as the war plan of an Administration that had little concern about WMDs as a threat.

I am personally convinced that they expected to find token quantities of old nerve gas or mustard gas that they could exhibit as justification for the war, and were as surprised as everyone else by their apparent complete absence. But I am equally convinced that they did not expect to find biological or chemical weapons that could have been used by terrorists to kill thousands of Americans. If they did, their war plan was completely disconnected from their expectations. And in the end, I think we must regard their actions - their invasion - as the primary evidence of their beliefs and intent. Absent a mind-meld with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the other architects of the invasion, we must believe they didn't believe Saddam's WMDs constituted a meaningful threat.

2) Iraq as Humanitarian Mission

Saddam was a thug who ruled through violence and fear. Lord knows the Iraqis deserved something better than life under Saddam.

Unfortunately, that didn't mean we were capable of giving it to them.

Even if we'd run the ideal occupation - thoroughly planned, with three times as many troops as we went in with, stopping the looting before it started, keeping the bureaucracy of Saddam's government up and running through an efficient transition - the outcome still might well have been sectarian war. (David Wurmser, who was a player in the Administration's planning for this war, had written papers about this possibility back in the 1990s.)

But of course the Bush Administration was still at war with itself, even as our psy-ops people were pulling down the statue, about whether we should be doing nation-building in Iraq, let alone who should do it or how. There was no postwar plan whatsoever, as George Packer documents in The Assassins' Gate (pp.110-148). And to this day, there's no evidence of an Administration plan in all this. Hell, even our goals are unclear.

And so Iraq keeps sliding into chaos. Compare the news from Iraq at any time after the statue fell, to the news a year later. With the modest exception that the news in April 2005 wasn't as bad as that of the conflagrations of April 2004, the trend has been steadily down. Now the civil war is increasingly out in the open, and there seems to be nothing we can do to stop it.

There are things that are worse than all but the most hellish dictatorships, and chaos, anarchy, and civil war are among them. Saddam ruled through extravagant fear, but normal life went on: people had jobs, got married, raised families, and carried on. What they didn't do, unless they had a death wish, was suggest that Saddam was less than a perfect ruler. But that threat, real as it was, was open, and there were clear and obvious ways to minimize one's exposure to that risk. Now, the threat is from everywhere - sectarian violence, gangs, kidnappers, and of course Americans and mercenaries, who are free to kill any Iraqis that they perceive as a threat.

As a humanitarian rescue mission, this is already a failure, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

It eventually will get better, because it's unlikely that anarchy and chaos will last forever in Iraq. But that in no way justifies the invasion: if we hadn't invaded, eventually Saddam would have died of old age, or been killed, and the post-Saddam era would have arrived in a different way, which would have had just as much chance of working out for well or ill as the path that began with our invasion.

3) We Can't Fix It, We Can't Leave It

"Victory" is our goal, Bush says. Over whom? Iraq is falling into an increasingly open civil war, one in which we've played both a referee's role and a partisan role: we're the arbiter, but we've essentially sided with the Shi'ites against the Sunnis, which is why the Shi'ites haven't given us much trouble since Muqtada al-Sadr's rebellion of 2004.

But what are we going to do, now that our Shi'ite/Kurd client government is just as thuggish as the Ba'athists were? There doesn't seem to be much we can do. We have enough troops of our own to prevent an open civil war of massed armies, but that's not the civil war Iraq has - nor will it, since the Sunni insurgents are quite aware that they're outnumbered.

Our presence is doing a few things. It's keeping other countries from bringing troops across the Iraqi border. But we could do that from bases in a nearby country, or from the 'enduring bases' we have built away from the Iraqi cities. We're probably slowing somewhat the descent of Iraq into open civil war. But that descent is happening anyway. We're undoubtedly preventing the Sunni insurgents from openly running the Sunni portions of Iraq. The question there is, is that even something we should be doing?

At any rate, the best end-state we can hope for in Arab Iraq at this point is a stable Shi'ite theocracy, with enough power to suppress the Sunni insurgents. But even that's probably a dream beyond reach.

Given that, the question has to be asked: what are we fighting for? What do we still hope to accomplish in Iraq? How do we intend to do it, how much will it cost (in American and Iraqi blood, let alone treasure), and how long will it take? The time has long passed for vague goals of 'victory.' It's hard to have a clear idea of what's do-able when the Administration that controls so much of our information about Iraq is wrapped up in delusional thinking.

If I were asked what a Democratic alternative plan for Iraq should be, I'd say that by now, it's so fucked up that it's hard to imagine a plan that would un-fuck it. However, what we seemingly have now is no plan at all, and almost any plan that had some connection to reality would be better than that.

Introduction

2006-03-24T12:37:00.000-05:00

Hi, I'm Rufus. Or at least, I'm someone who is now blogging as Rufus.

I'm a middle-aged number-cruncher, a longtime political junkie, a born-again Christian, a fan of the Marx Brothers (of course) and off-the-wall humor of many sorts, and a proud liberal. I'm a Democrat, but more important, I'm a small-d democrat. I believe there's a constant tug-of-war, in American society (and probably everywhere else too), between political power residing with the people, and political power residing with the money.

Right now, the money's beating the people almost every which way. George W. Bush is the moneyed interests' man, and whatever one thinks of GWB's mental capabilities, he's won an impressive number of victories over the past five-plus years - for big corporations and for super-rich individuals alike. And these victories have usually been at the expense of some or all of the rest of us.

I'll be talking more about Bush in here. A lot more. That's inevitable: he's President, and he's a very effective one, measured in terms of progress towards what I see as his goals. He's about as easy to ignore as a Metallica concert in your next-door neighbor's backyard.

I'll also be talking about the Democrats, the 'Christian' Right, the media, the blogsphere, and the usual run of issues. I won't have an opinion on everything, because life's too short, and the day job which pays the bills means there's a limit to how much I can say anyway. Besides, there's a million blogs out there already, cranking out opinions on everything, and if I can, I'd like to try to add things to the discussion that aren't already being said on the front page of DailyKos or FireDogLake or AmericaBlog.

And I'd like to try to have some fun doing it. To paraphrase Groucho, "If you think the blogsphere's bad off now, just wait 'til I get through with it."