Uncle Funker's Neighborhood

Wish I'd said this.....

2011-05-05T15:45:00.000-07:00

John Yoo, Still A War Criminal

Not only do these war criminals and shoddy lawyers refuse to take accountability for their crimes, they tell clear untruths about how the capture of bin Laden was achieved and distort history.
So let us be very clear. The war criminal Dick Cheney presided over the worst lapse in national security since Pearl Harbor, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. This rank incompetent failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then dragged the US on false pretenses into a war in Iraq, empowering Iran's dictatorship, and killing another 5,000 more Americans on a wild goose chase. He presided over the deaths of more than 8,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis during his criminally incompetent years in office.
On the other hand, the man who abolished torture as soon as he took office, Barack Obama, captured and killed Osama bin Laden, and captured a massive trove of intelligence, more than two years later. No Americans died in the operation.
What on earth are we debating? How have these delusional maniacs managed to even get us onto this turf? Because they have to. Because when the full truth of these past years are fully in focus, they will be revealed as some of the greatest criminals ever to have wielded power in America.

Unclear on the concept

2011-05-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

John Ashcroft to advise Blackwater on ethics
John Ashcroft has been hired to work as an independent ethics advisor for Xe Services, the military contractor that used to be Blackwater Worldwide, the company announced Wednesday.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54283.html#ixzz1LWFr2IRg

The mind boggles.....

Big Oil

2011-05-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

Big Oil and your money

Americans spent 28 percent more for gasoline during the first three months of 2011 than the same period in 2010. Meanwhile, the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—made 38 percent more profit. The companies then used a major portion of these additional profits to enrich their board of directors, senior managers, and shareholders by purchasing shares of their stock.

Torture - the slippery slope

2011-05-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan discusses the changes in torture justification with the death of Bin Laden. Seems that the general view in GOP circles is that the end justifies the means no matter what. Once again, fear rules the day.

"Torture Creep"
Remember the days when Republicans only defended torture in the case of a ticking time bomb? Funny how now the debate on the right has moved - so quickly and without any evidence - to defending torture as a permanent policy to find small nuggets of information that could help in developing leads in anti-terrorism work. Those of us who warned of such slippery slopes are vindicated. And that the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden should immediately prompt unfounded Republican celebrations of torture reveals how morally degraded the discourse has become after the despicable policies of Bush and Cheney.

American Exceptionalism

2009-10-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan puts American torture in context.

America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not because Americans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because its founding somehow changed human nature—but because it recognized the indelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. It set up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches of government against each other and enshrined a free press so that evil could be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men. The belief that when America tortures, the act is somehow not torture, or that when Americans torture, they are somehow immune from its moral and spiritual cancer, is not an American belief. It is as great a distortion of American exceptionalism as jihadism is of Islam. To believe that because the American government is better than Saddam and the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Americans are somehow immune to the same temptations of power that all flesh is heir to, is itself a deep and dangerous temptation. The power to torture is a case in point. Because torture can coerce truth, break a human being’s dignity, treat him as an expendable means rather than as a fragile end, it has a terrible power to corrupt. Torture is the ultimate expression of the absolute power of one individual over another; it destroys the souls of those who torture just as surely as it eviscerates the dignity of those who are its victims. And because torture is so awful, it also often requires a defensive embrace of it, a pride in it, an exaggeration of its successes.

Got Perspective?

2009-09-08T10:15:00.000-07:00

Random thought;

You have to wonder what the right wing wingnuts would be saying if left leaning folks had pitched a fit about that war-mongering, torture supporting President Bush addressing our young impressionable school children.

Think they would have been calling them America hating traitors? Me too. I think the shoe fits...

Got Health Care?

2009-09-04T10:23:00.001-07:00

I found the opinion below posted on the Internet, on a music related forum no less. It is one of the most cogent discussions of the health care issues facing our country that I have seen. It's simple and direct, and speaks to folks in a way that does not use fear, nor drowns us in policy wonk speak. It's the discussion we should be having in this country. Unfortunately we aren't.....

For tens of millions of Americans, one illness, and one denial of coverage equals economic disaster. And guess what? For every one of those disasters the entire economy suffers. A house goes into foreclosure, bringing every house on that street down in value. High ticket items like cars, appliances, computers, aren’t even a consideration for these families, which means less of those items are sold, which equates into job losses for the companies that produce such things. And that medical care required to deal with that catastrophic illness? That goes unpaid due to a bankruptcy, which means you and I pay for it anyway in underlying costs. It's why a Tylenol costs $50 at the hospital.

For any American that finds the idea of a public option for health care to be distasteful, consider this: You already pay for every person who is currently not insured (1 in every 6) or is under-insured (an indeterminate number). You already pay for every person who is bankrupted by health system as it exists now. You already pay for every person (and that includes illegal aliens) that can’t pay their health care bill.

Without the public option, health care reform amounts to a huge bonanza of new customers for the current crop of for-profit insurers. Notice the “for-profit” part of that sentence. It is in the interest of your health insurer to prevent you from getting the health care you need because that's how they profit over and above the actuary tables that were once the basic premise of insurance. Why would we want to reward the companies that have bankrupted so many Americans by denying them the health care they paid for?

The arguments against a public option are without merit. Show me one good argument that has been presented against the public option. Death panels? A total lie. Why make something up out of whole cloth if you have a good argument?

How about abortion coverage? A lie. Everyone knows that a bill covering abortion wouldn't pass, so it's not going to be in there. Besides isn’t that a women's health issue? Shouldn’t that be between the doctor and the woman? I mean how can it be argued, on the one hand, that a public option will interfere with the relationship between a patient and a doctor, while on the other hand it's argued that the government should disallow payment on a procedure recommended by a woman’s doctor? If you want NO interference between that doctor/patient relationship, then technically there should be NO exclusions other than purely elective surgery. But remember, not all abortions are elective, and we shouldn't allow any insurance company, private or otherwise, to determine whether a particular abortion is elective thank you very much.

Paying for illegal aliens? We already pay for them!

Government takeover of your health? No. Even a single payer option, which is what medicare is, doesn’t take over a patient’s health. At most a public option offers a government run health INSURANCE program. In other words, it’s just another option.

But then the naysayers argue that the public option will put the private insurers out of business, because somehow everyone will want to jump ship from their insurance company to enter into the public option.

Why would people want to do that? I mean, if the insurance you have is so great, then why on earth would you want to jump into a government run insurance program which is supposed to be so bad for you/us? This defies logic. Is the argument against a public option because it’s bad? Or is it because it will be better than what we currently have and thus destroy our already existing quasi-capitalistic health care system? Please pick one.

It’s too expensive? Too expensive for whom? I don’t know about you, but I pay $14,500 a year in insurance premiums, and two years ago I was denied coverage on a "pre-existing" condition--a condition that cost me $15,000 for a one hour procedure, despite religiously paying my premiums. In this particular case, I was able to deal with the unexpected cost. But what if it cost me $150,000 or more? At some point, a denial breaks me. And I currently PAY a substantial monthly amount for insurance! What exactly am I being insured against?

Too expensive for America? We can’t possibly sustain our current system, so we’re going to just tweak it, leaving our premiums in the hands of companies who’s only interest is their own profits? How much are our premiums going to go up when the government tells insurance companies that they can no longer exclude preexisting conditions? You don’t think your premiums are going to increase substantially absent any real independent not-for-profit competition? Come on.

Breaking the state restrictions currently on health insurers, and allowing them to supply coverage on a national scale? Personally, I don’t think this is such a horrible thing, so long as there is a public option too. Otherwise we risk crushing competition even more by creating large monopolies that will do everything to prop up just enough competition to prevent antitrust lawsuits. Give us a public option, and allow the private insurers to operate nationally. That would make an even playing field, right? Let’s see who wins.

Health care companies like big pharma and insurance companies give large amounts of money to Senators in small states (both Republican and Democratic). Do you know why they do that? Because a Senator in a small state wields just as much voting power as one from a large one. Because these Senators are in less populous states, raising campaign money is far more difficult for them than say a Senator in New York or California. This means the “Blue Dog” Democrats who operate in small rural states are bought and paid for, and that’s why it's difficult for the Dems to come up with 60 votes. Not because it’s good for you, me, and your neighbor as Americans. But because it keeps those Senators in office.

These insurance and pharma companies also give large sums of money to Senators in charge of certain committees, like the Senate Finance Committee for instance (where the current Senate version of the health care bill sits). That's because committees are where potential bills go to die, and paying off Committee chairs only helps the cause. The term “blood money” comes to mind here, and I mean that literally and on a grand scale.

So please stop believing the lies and the false arguments. Start thinking beyond the rhetoric, and understand that a government run health insurance option has already been popular for decades now. It's called Medicare. Understand that there are many examples of systems that work far better than ours and which involve government. Nothing being proposed is new or untested elsewhere in the industrialized and capitalistic world.

The only way to push health insurers into competing is by providing some actual competition. And the only way to do that is to have a public option. If a public option turns into a single payer government run health insurance system ten to twenty years from now, then clearly, the public option proved to be the better one, and we can all continue to strive for the American Dream, whatever that is.

Tell me, why would anyone be afraid of that?

Our current state of political affairs

2009-09-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

A love note from writer Charles Pierce to Mr. Cheney and the current Republican party. What's sad is that his P..S includes some gazing into the future, and unfortunately I believe he has the gifts of a seer;

To every camel's back, there is a final straw. Sooner or later, we've taken all we can stand and we can't stands no more, and we pass over the Popeye Line. For me, it came sometime last weekend when I heard Richard Cheney, the pre-eminent moral and physical coward of the era, explain once again the Mulligan theory of national defense by which every president gets one free mass casualty attack that doesn't count toward "keeping us safe." (Note to Dick: by this standard, every two-term president kept us safer than you guys did. You were the worst at it. Scoreboard!) And I realized that, by all the standards of objectivity I was taught in journalism school--the most basic of which was that, if you saw a man walking down the street with a bird on his head, you could report it without finding someone else to tell you that, no, what you actually saw was a bird walking down the street with a guy on his ass--there is no longer any reason to take the Republican party seriously. It has become a festival for fruitcakes. The political movement that powered its ascension has become publicly demented. Sam Tanenhaus can plug his book all he wants, but the fact remains that it was American conservatism that spent three decades throwing open the doors to the monkeyhouse--starting with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, moving along through the Reagan campaigns of 1976 and 1980, the NCPAC campaigns of that same era, the marriage of convenience with theocratic crackpottery, the Buchanan campaign against the first President Bush, the various exercises in lunacy aimed at Bill Clinton, the half-mad banality of Newt Gingrich, and the cult of personality that sprang up around the second President Bush. It's a little late for delicate conservative intellectuals to ponder how it was that all that monkey poo ended up on the walls.

The serious people don't lead in that party any more, and the leaders of it -- Hello, Michael Steele -- are not serious people. It is a major political party run now as an elaborate radio talk-show and completely in thrall to the maniacs who run actual radio talk-shows. Goddammit, the Spartacists are more intellectually honest and the Hemp Party folks are a helluva lot more fun. Why do serious political journalists take this careering clown car seriously, ignoring the evidence plainly in front of their own eyes? Why does a Democratic president, and an overwhelmingly Democratic congress, both elected at least in part because the country had determined that the Republicans had gone completely mad, care what these people think about anything? Why does a party led by people who think the president is going to hypnotize schoolchildren with his magic Kenyan-Socialist spinning eyeballs scare the living protoplasm out of putative tough guys like Rahm Emanuel?

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good? Maybe not, but the good has many actual enemies. Evil is the enemy of the good. Greed is the enemy of the good. Ignorance is the enemy of the good. Cowardice is the enemy of the good. How's about, just once, somebody worries about those enemies of the good, all of which are amply in evidence in the campaign to make sure we never reform the criminally negligent and morally indefensible way we deliver healthcare in this country?

Instead, we get this. One thing we learned this week--Stephanopoulos is Greek for "Stockholm Syndrome". Jesus wept.

P.S. Oh, hell. They've even started selling their alibis already. Watch this unfold. The D's will sign off on some nutless POS and then have to run in 2010 on their support for a massive giveaway to the insurance companies, a group of institutions whom everyone I know hates. The elite press then will ponder earnestly whthe administration couldn't work with "serious conservative voices" on a "bipartisan" plan, as though any of the former even exist. The Beckite "Socialism! Fascism! Soup!" crazoids will go zipping down the memory hole.

Got Special Prosecutors?

2009-09-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

The New York Times, in an editorial today sums up my feelings;

The government owes Americans a full investigation into the orders to approve torture, abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured.

Got College?

2009-08-19T16:15:00.000-07:00

18 years ago my wife and I brought a cute little baby girl home from the hospital, both of us clearly befuddled as to why these competent nurses would let two foolish kids leave with this baby, without any type of directions or manual....

Today, my wife and I dropped off a beautiful 18 year old woman at college after helping her move into her dorm room. This confident young thing has great plans to become an elementary school teacher, and is looking forward to her first foray into living on her own (still with our checkbook however).

The intervening 18 years seem to be a bit of a blur now, but on the whole as I look back on it, it was an experience I would not ever trade. Each phase had it's unique challenges and rewards, and those memories will be among my most treasured.

To all who have survived this journey, I commend you. Cheers to that journey, and to the new ones commencing.

Got Wingnuts?

2009-08-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

How to properly deal with wingnuts? Clearly acknowledge them for what they are.......crazy.

Got Minority?

2009-08-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

Funny....

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Reform Madness - White Minority

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

Got Loans?

2009-08-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

The behavior of our entitled elite never ceases to amaze me.

Jon Carroll, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting take on the behavior of our bankers now that the U.S. taxpayer has bailed them out;

last week the New York Times had a story about how banks, having been given emergency bridge loans to tide them over after the unholy mess they made of the entire financial system with their greed-driven mortgage loans, are now reluctant to lend that money back to struggling small businesses.
Loans are not being made. Why? Let Paul Merski, chief economist for the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade organization, tell you why. "There's not a lot of profit motive in a $35,000 loan stretched over six years."

Profit motive? Profit motive? The American taxpayers came in and saved your sorry asses, rewarding your bad behavior because every other option was even less good, and now certain struggling American taxpayers are asking for five-figure loans, and you guys are whining about profit motive?

Time to fight back?

2009-08-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

Democrats never seem to learn that Republican leopards don't change their spots. Especially ones who have screwed up the last 8 years so badly that they feel cornered.

Liars lie and fear mongers lay on the fear. It's what they know and what they do. Partisanship is not in their vocabulary.

It's about time the Democrats figure this out and respond accordingly with accountability and outrage.

Paul Krugman has more.

Got WebMD?

2009-08-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

So, doctors must hate the Internet.

After tearing up my Achilles tendon, I naturally started to Google my brains out trying to get info on my injury and the proposed treatments. I was also looking for other folks who were blogging about this issue and documenting recovery times and the like.

Not surprising there was a lot of info out there, but it took some time to sort through it to find common themes and issues, as well as to sort through current studies along with older info.

To my surprise, there is a fair amount of controversy over the treatment of Achilles injuries, some doctors saying that non-surgical treatment is just as good and significantly less invasive than surgical treatments. Some very current studies also seem to support this.

Of course, armed with all this wonderful info, I attempted to have a conversation with my orthopedic surgeon about this. Have you ever seen folks get that tight little smile when you bring up an uncomfortable subject? Suffice it to say, he was not too keen on listening to my brilliant medical opinions based on a day of surfing the net. Now I don't necessarily blame him, and he was very professional about it, even strongly recommending that I get a second opinion to address my concerns, which I did.

Ultimately, because of the specific nature of my Achilles injury (it had detached from the heel bone), I selected surgery, and used this specific doctor because of his skill set in this area. Interestingly enough, he has been much more forthcoming and informational since my initial pushback on his treatment suggestions, and I feel that I'm getting the reasons behind things rather than just "orders from the doctor".

The bottom line is, you are the customer in this scenario and you should be as informed as possible when making decisions about your health and treatment. Doctors may or may not be appreciative of this, but ultimately it's your call. Use the internet. Talk to friends. Get a second opinion. Knowledge is power.

Got Crutches?

2009-08-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe I will be blogging a bit more now.

In an attempt to be somewhat athletic, during a scary electrical incident, I ruptured my Achilles tendon. It required surgery to repair and now I am looking at a month of time on crutches (no weight bearing on the injured leg), plus another month or so of being confined to a walking boot and a lot of physical therapy.

Oh, and I can't drive....for 2 months. Sigh......

Got Blog?

2009-08-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

It sure is hard to blog. I have a whole new appreciation for folks who dive into this and keep the ball rolling. There is a definite knack to doing this well and keeping it fresh and interesting.

For the last few months I've just been using this space as a way to get quick links to other blogs that I find useful or interesting. You can see the list on the right side of the blog under "Cool Places". Check them out, it's a nice mix of liberal discussion, gossip, and local foodie stuff.

Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes

2008-11-06T09:18:00.000-08:00

America spoke. In very large numbers.

A choice at the ballot box. Not by court order, not with the national guard, but by simple choice. America changed a bit today, and will continue to change tomorrow. Some will come along with joy, other will continue to drag their feet.

I don't go much for all the fancy rhetoric, the soaring imagery. My needs are simple;

Competent governance by responsible adults.
Transparancy
Respect for the Constitution

Let's see if we can make that work for awhile. Then we can go from there.

Remember To VOTE

2008-10-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

Make a Difference

Bring about CHANGE

REMEMBER TO VOTE THIS NOVEMBER 4TH

.

OK. Lets try again......

2008-09-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

So the 700 billion dollar bailout deal is dead. Republican lawmakers got their feelings hurt when big bad Nancy said mean things about them. (Plus, they are scared to death that they will get there butts voted out of office). So what do we do now?

Here's a pretty good idea from FireDogLake;

1) Buy up mortgages at a discount and give people new fixed rate mortgages. The government shares in further house appreciation (only fair since it bailed the homeowner out). This stabilizes mortgage prices and helps people and banks both. It is essentially identical to what FDR did with the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), and we know how to do it. Initial price tag? Probably around 20 billion.

2) Use the FDIC (the folks who take over failed banks) to take over failed mutual and money market funds, make sure the investors get as much money back as possible, liquidate the funds in an orderly fashion (or keep them operating if necessary) and if they are kept alive, kick the people who screwed them up to the curb and change how they do business.

3) Declare a national emergency, with judicial review (unlike Paulson's seizure of ultimate power) and use the authority to review all purchases of banks, to institute oil rationing if necessary (or simpler procedures like "every street now has a 55 mile an hour speed limit, if it is normally higher). Also allows release of oil from the reserve, if necessary.

4) Expand the safety net such as food stamps, employment insurance, welfare and so on. We know this is going to get worse no matter what we do, so why aren't we taking care of ordinary people?

Read the rest here.

Pay me to go away......

2008-09-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

Seems the new WaMu CEO made out like a ban....uh, typical golden parachuted CEO. Matt also makes the great point that the real way to control CEO compensation is to tax it accordingly.

From Matther Yglesias;

My understanding is that even for the super-elite it normally takes a couple of months to wrack up tens of millions of dollars. But Alan Fishman gets the job done with super speed:

But the seizure and the deal with JPMorgan came as a shock to Washington Mutual’s board, which was kept completely in the dark: the company’s new chief executive, Alan H. Fishman, was in midair, flying from New York to Seattle at the time the deal was finally brokered, according to people briefed on the situation. Mr. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus, according to an analysis by James F. Reda and Associates.

One friend suggests “Obama should suspend his campaign to go punch this guy in the kidney.” Indeed.

Part of what you’re seeing as some of this unfolds is that the idea of CEO pay controls specifically tied to the bailout, though good, is also a bit of a joke. A lot of the folks responsible for this mess left their jobs months ago and are current sitting in their multi-million dollar homes, wearing extremely expensive clothing, and laughing at you, me, Obama, McCain and all the rest. Laughing their asses off. You just need to have additional tax brackets for folks up at the millionaire and multi-millionaire level to make sure that the public gets a bigger slice of the pie. If that decreases the incentives for the sort of wild financial shenanigans that brought the country to this point, well, so what?

Trust Us...part duex

2008-09-22T10:18:00.001-07:00

Eric D. Hovde is chief executive of Washington-based Hovde Capital and Hovde Acquisitions. He has a nice assessment of the players to blame for our current financial mess.

Money Quote;

Looking for someone to blame for the shambles in U.S. financial markets? As someone who owns both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, I have sat front and center and watched as this mess unfolded. And in my view, there's no need to look beyond Wall Street -- and the halls of power in Washington. The former has created the nightmare by chasing obscene profits, and the latter have allowed it to spread by not practicing the oversight that is the federal government's responsibility.

I find it hard to stomach the fact that investment banks that caused this financial crisis immediately ran to the government asking for assistance, which Bear Stearns received and Lehman Brothers, thankfully, did not. This is one of many eerie parallels that the current meltdown bears to the Great Depression, when Washington and the taxpayers had to step up and take unprecedented action to stabilize the financial markets and the economy. Unfortunately, the government today has already put enormous taxpayer resources at risk -- bailing out investment firm Bear Stearns, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurer AIG, and proposing to buy risky assets from the banking system -- to stop the economy from plummeting into another depression. But these events only underscore the toxic relationship between Washington and Wall Street that has brought us to this point.

Read the rest here.

Third Time's the Charm?

2008-09-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

A little background on our current financial mess, and how it dovetails into the earlier S&L and Enron collapses. "Deregulation" just another word for "Trust me". And we all know what "Trust me" means in politi-speak.

Who Gets Help......

2008-09-19T10:28:00.001-07:00

OK. Let's make a deal. When this crisis is all said and done and all the bailouts have been created, defined, and put into action, let's circle back around and take a look see at how the taxpayer's money (which will be in the multiple billions of dollars) was used, and where it went.

Wanna bet the little middle class guy who lost his house, or his job, or his health care won't get squat? He'll be told to "pull himself up by his bootstraps" while the largest corporate welfare check in the history of the world gets written.

I'm just sayin......

The Blame Game

2008-09-19T10:28:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias sums this up pretty well I think. Regulation is only one piece of the puzzle. You can make all the rules and laws that you want, but the key peice is that you have to ENFORCE THEM.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the so-called Government-Sponsored Entities, really did have some serious problems that have contributed to the current financial crisis. They also really were, politically, generally closer to the Democratic Party. Thus it’s useful for Republicans to act, as John McCain did in his speech this morning, to focus on the tree GSE malfeasance rather than the forest of overall systemic failings. But it doesn’t really make sense. Consider the term “subprime mortgage” that you may have heard. Well, it turns out that what it means for a mortgage to be “subprime” is that it doesn’t meet Fannie or Freddie standards.

Beyond that, it’s impossible to say whether additional regulatory authority over the GSEs would have been necessary or sufficient to reduce the impact of this crisis because the existing regulators weren’t using their existing authority. Arguably, the authority they already had would have been sufficient had they used it. Indisputably, giving additional authority to people unwilling to use their existing authority wouldn’t have changed anything. And that set of regulators wasn’t the only set asleep at the switch — the Fed dragged its feet on the subprime issue despite Fed Governor Ed Gramlich’s warnings about problems here, and the SEC ignored the risks associated with the highly leveraged trades that were being made.

Problems existed with the regulatory oversight across the board. And of course part one crucial common thread here is that all of these agencies were headed up by conservative deregulators. The same people not enforcing environmental regulations and not enforcing civil rights law and not enforcing labor rights were also not doing their job at the financial regulatory agencies. Conservatives believe that the role of agency heads is to avoid using their regulatory authority in constructive ways.

I'll put my Social Security Money on 7...

2008-09-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

Trusting your Social Security money to Wall Street

...not that long ago we had a rare political moment in this country, a moment where the public sat up and took notice of economic policy -- and spoke out and made its voice heard too. When George W. Bush made it to term #2, he decided to try to privatize social security to reward his supporters on Wall Street with a new source of capital, customers, and fees. (Those would be the same people whose firms are now cratering under the weight of the bad debt they recklessly took on while Republican regulators looked the other way.) But as it turned out, we Americans were not about to let our elected representatives turn over our social security taxes to Wall Street financiers to gamble with if it meant losing the guaranteed income that has allowed millions upon millions of American seniors to live out their sunset years with at least a basic measure of dignity.
But while ordinary Americans spoke out, John McCain stood with Bush (hugged him awkwardly in public, even), against the American people. In fact, just six months ago, McCain again let slip his fondness for privatization.

You can fool some of the people....

2008-09-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

Despite an intense effort to distance himself from the way his party has done business in Washington, Senator John McCain is seen by voters as far less likely to bring change to Washington than Senator Barack Obama. He is widely viewed as a “typical Republican” who would continue or expand President Bush’s policies, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The Real McCain

2008-09-18T11:51:00.001-07:00

What Atrios sez;

The sad thing is that few of these people will acknowledge that they simply got played, and instead want to cast McCain as a character in a play about a man's tragic downfall. He was always an unprincipled hack, but for a very long time his political fortunes were the result of his understanding of and willingness to cater to the desires of elite Villagers. Now he has a different target.

The Point of No Return?

2008-09-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

"I fear the government has passed the point of no return. We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams. It’s pure crisis management. It’s the Treasury and the Federal Reserve lurching from crisis to crisis without a clear statement on how financial failures will be handled in the future. They’re afraid to articulate such a policy. The safety net they are spreading seems to widen every day with no end in sight," - Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian.

Hey Taxpayer, just shut up and pay your bills.....

2008-06-17T03:09:00.000-07:00

From the NY Times;

The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq
says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1
billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has
provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

Apparently you don't screw around with Dick's Halliburton $$$'s.

Fiddling while Rome burns......

2008-04-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

"There sure are a lot of issues out there. We’re fighting in two wars abroad, losing one for sure, and perhaps the other one, too. There’s a mortgage crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis, and a series of constitutional crises. There’s the fact that our government is torturing people contrary to international law. There’s the rise of China. There’s, well, you get the point.

“Good thing we’re about to have an election,” you might say, “so we can figure out what to do about all of it.” Well, you’d be right to say it, but wrong to expect it. George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, together with all the network honchos who helped choose the content of their questions for the final Democratic debate, don’t think any of these issues are as important as wearing flag pins, playing six degrees of separation with 1960s terrorists, or getting rid of that pesky capital gains tax on people making $200,000 or more—approximately four percent of the country."

Read the rest of Eric Alterman's article here...

Leavin' a bit of work for the next guy......

2007-11-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

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Joseph Stiglitz gives us the rundown on this administrations ruinous policies in "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush"

"In breathtaking disregard for the most basic rules of fiscal propriety, the administration continued to cut taxes even as it undertook expensive new spending programs and embarked on a financially ruinous 'war of choice' in Iraq. A budget surplus of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (G.D.P.), which greeted Bush as he took office, turned into a deficit of 3.6 percent in the space of four years. The United States had not experienced a turnaround of this magnitude since the global crisis of World War II.
"Agricultural subsidies were doubled between 2002 and 2005. Tax expenditures -- the vast system of subsidies and preferences hidden in the tax code -- increased more than a quarter. Tax breaks for the president's friends in the oil-and-gas industry increased by billions and billions of dollars. Yes, in the five years after 9/11, defense expenditures did increase (by some 70 percent), though much of the growth wasn't helping to fight the War on Terror at all, but was being lost or outsourced in failed missions in Iraq. Meanwhile, other funds continued to be spent on the usual high-tech gimcrackery -- weapons that don't work, for enemies we don't have. In a nutshell, money was being spent everyplace except where it was needed. During these past seven years the percentage of G.D.P. spent on research and development outside defense and health has fallen. Little has been done about our decaying infrastructure -- be it levees in New Orleans or bridges in Minneapolis. Coping with most of the damage will fall to the next occupant of the White House."

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It's About the Oil....Part 3......

2007-10-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

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Jack Miles sums it up;

Before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, media mogul Rupert Murdoch said, "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil." In the twenty-first century's version of the "Great Game" of nineteenth century imperialism, the Bush administration made a colossal gamble that Iraq could become a kind of West Germany or South Korea on the Persian Gulf -- a federal republic with a robust, oil-exporting economy, a rising standard of living, and a set of U.S. bases that would guarantee lasting American domination of the most resource-strategic region on the planet. The political half of that gamble has already been lost, but the Bush administration has proven adamantly unwilling to accept the loss of the economic half, the oil half, without a desperate fight. Perhaps the five super-bases that the U.S. has been constructing in Iraq for as many as 20,000 troops each, plus the ill-built super-embassy (the largest on the planet) it has been constructing inside the Green Zone, will suffice to maintain American control over the oil reserves, even in defiance of international law and the officially stated wishes of the Iraqi people -- but perhaps not.....

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I Want A New Drug......

2007-10-22T15:09:00.001-07:00

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Spineocrat!!

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It's About the Oil......Part Duex.....

2007-10-11T10:17:00.001-07:00

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Andrew Sullivan links to as clear and concise a reading of the real plan for the Iraq invasion as I've seen. Looked at from this perspective, all our actions start to make perfect, greedy sense.

Money Quote;

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.

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When They Tell You It's Not About Oil.....

2007-09-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

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....it's about oil.

Middle Eastern expert Dilip Hiro explains (money quote);

According to high flying, oil insider Falah Al Jibury, the Bush administration began making plans for Iraq's oil industry "within weeks" of Bush taking office in January 2001. In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program, which aired on March 17, 2005, he referred to his participation in secret meetings in California, Washington, and the Middle East, where, among other things, he interviewed possible successors to Saddam Hussein.

By January 2003, a plan for Iraqi oil crafted by the State Department and oil majors emerged under the guidance of Amy Myers Jaffe of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. It recommended maintaining the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company, whose origins dated back to 1961 -- but open it up to foreign investment after an initial period in which U.S.-approved Iraqi managers would supervise the rehabilitation of the war-damaged oil infrastructure. The existence of this group would come to light in a report by the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2003.

Anyone Seen My Nukes??

2007-09-25T07:23:00.000-07:00

So. How did those nuclear armed cruise missiles "accidentally" get to Barksdale AFB, LA? We either have an extremely corrupted nuclear missle tracking and moving plan, or it was done on purpose. Neither one of these options are good. Hang on gang, it's time for us all to don our tin foil caps......

Larry Johnson from TPM has an interesting and informative post on this.

Money Quotes;

Recently the news media reported a USAF B-52 taking off from Minot AFB, ND and landing at Barksdale AFB, LA with six nuclear weapons aboard. The big question is how or why this could happen?

First of all I have to say we are not privileged to all of the information and may never know the underlying circumstances of this occurrence. The Department of Defense declared this entire event was a mistake and would investigate what actually happened.

Obviously there are two possibilities: 1. this was an error and the events that occurred were a tragic mistake of far reaching proportions; and 2. the nuclear weapons were moved on purpose.

The United States has had nuclear weapons for over sixty years. Through out this time the tracking, storage and movement of these weapons has been performed without any type of security problem. The chain of custody procedures has been refined to the nith degree to insure that there will never be a mistake. The access to, movement of, and custody of these weapons is so tightly controlled, each serial numbered weapon has to be signed for when possession of it changes (from one person to another), then only after receiving a lawful order to do so. In order to load a nuclear weapon onto an aircraft the Weapon’s Depot Commander must receive a lawful order from above. The order is sent down (in writing) to one of the bomb shelter custodians and the weapon is signed out to a Loader. The Loader, loads the weapon onto an aircraft and will keep the weapon/aircraft under surveillance with the aircraft under armed guard by the Security Police in an isolated protected area until the Aircraft Commander performs his pre-flight inspection on the aircraft and signs a receipt for each of the weapons by serial number. Once delivered at their destination the Aircraft Commander would receive a receipt for the weapons by serial number from the receiving facility.

With all of the necessary orders and paperwork required just to move a nuclear weapon from one room in a storage facility to another, it can be stated with some sort of certainty that this was not a casual mistake as the Department of Defense has eluted to.

Then if the movement wasn’t a mistake, it obviously was done with some sort of purpose in mind.

The destination of the aircraft was Barksdale AFB, LA from which a number of the strikes on the Middle East have initiated. Speculation would lead us to believe the weapons were being stockpiled at this facility for a possible strike somewhere in the world. Additional speculation would also lead us to believe the strike was to occur in the very near future. Why else the need to forego the normal overland transportation procedures for nuclear weapons and risk flying them to their destination in violation of a treaty with the Russians. Also how is it the press was aware of this movement? After all who would be suspicious of a B-52 taking off from a B-52 base and a B-52 landing at a B-52 base. This event goes on many times each day for practice missions and training. Some one had to have leaked the information to the press that the U.S. was moving nuclear weapons by air in a treaty violation.

This leads us to two possible scenarios.
1. Whoever leaked the information would have been someone in a position of authority knowing what was going on and concerned the U.S. was actually attempting to use nuclear weapons somewhere in the world and wanting to stop it by exposing it. This someone would have had to have a security clearance of some kind and violated the trust under which it was issued thus being exposed to severe penalties and jail time for potential treason etc. Facing such severe penalties someone would have to be totally committed to his/her own conscience/moral beliefs. This preemptive exposure would put the U.S. on a difficult footing and loss of the surprise factor, thus potentially curtailing the mission.
2. The other possibility would be the information on the flight was leaked on purpose in an attempt to influence a foreign government, group or situation to move in a particular direction. That the U.S. was “Saber rattling” and the stakes were high enough to risk antagonizing the Russians to accomplish it. (With the possibility the Russians were supporting the action and willing to overlook the violation as exemplified by their lack of response in the entire situation.)

In either case we have only seen some minor actions taking by the Department of Defense in an attempt to say; well, by accident we left a few nuc’s laying around on some missiles we were going to destroy and they accidentally got loaded onto a plane that by some coincidence happened to be going to a base other than the one it was assigned to (we rarely fly B-52’s assigned at one station to another station). B-52’s usually take off from their home base, fly their mission anywhere in the world by aerial refueling and then return to the base from which they departed. Often these flights take over 20 to 30 hours. If this was a mistake what is happening to the general officers in the chain of command who would have had to issue lawful orders for the movement of those weapons and all those in the custodial chain who would have had to sign for each weapon as they gained possession of them? It just doesn’t add up. Especially when there is a line item in the budget before Congress to upgrade the missiles the Air Force says they were about to destroy. There appears to be too many loose ends still dangling. In addition to all of this did anyone notice how quickly this entire situation quieted down. Usually the press would play on such a world shaking event for months. They do for other things like the first birthday of Anna Nicole’s daughter. We’ve heard about that for weeks on end. But, for a world event with treaty violation implications, no protests from the other treaty signers or other major world players, we get about three days of news attention and it goes away. It seems the exposure has played its roles and has gone away with hopes all is forgotten.

In closing, again we are not privileged in knowing all of the facts and undercover goings on in this matter to be fully aware of what the real intent of this action, but it appears to be more than what the surface information appears.

More War, More Fear equals More Power....

2007-09-23T09:14:00.000-07:00

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Andrew Sullivan outlines the potential Republican strategy for holding on to power. Six years ago I would have thought this a crazy notion. Doesn't sound so crazy now considering what this administration has done so far.

The chances of national reconciliation in Iraq have gone backward, not
forward, this past year, and the U.S.'s empowerment of anti-Shiite propaganda in
Anbar will only isolate Maliki further. The best that can happen is an
indefinite occupation of a dismembered Iraq to slow down genocide and make
ethnic cleansing more orderly. But even that is a very risky proposition. And
the events of last week mean that the Republican party now owns the Iraq
occupation more exclusively and deeply than they ever had - and indeed intend to
maintain it for another decade.

One option: Change the subject by launching wars against Syria and Iran,
and so polarize the country that the choice is framed as: MoveOn or America?
That's much better than having, you know, an actual debate about the merits of
the war in Iraq and the war against Islamist terror. On that, Republicans lose.
If the war is far wider and more terrifying, if the enemies can be multiplied
and amplified, then the dynamic plays to the advantage of the GOP. It's for us
or against us again.
Remember it doesn't matter to the current Bush
Republicans if they cannot persuade a majority of thie necessity of extending
the war to Iran and Syria. They have dropped attempting to persuade a majority
on the war. They are concerned only with shoring up their own party, which can
enable them to launch new wars before the current presidency ends.

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The Road To Victory....er, Corruption.....

2007-09-21T07:54:00.000-07:00

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The Times reports that there might be a bit..oh, a few billion dollars worth....of contract irregularities. What a surprise. Tell me you didn't see this one coming.....

Military officials said Thursday that contracts worth $6 billion to provide essential supplies to American troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan — including food, water and shelter — were under review by criminal investigators, double the amount the Pentagon had previously disclosed.
In addition, $88 billion in contracts and programs, including those for body armor for American soldiers and matériel for Iraqi and Afghan security forces, are being audited for financial irregularities, the officials said.
Taken together, the figures, provided by the Pentagon in a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, represent the fullest public accounting of the magnitude of a widening government investigation into bid-rigging, bribery and kickbacks by members of the military and civilians linked to the Pentagon’s purchasing system.

Nothing up my sleeve.....presto....the road to Victory

2007-09-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

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What a sad state to which we have fallen. It's like we've given away our ability to deal with the truth.

Bush and his puppet general trot out a review of the surge that can't even pass the guffaw test, and we all settle down for another year of "This time for sure!".

Everyone but the "nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark" crowd knows that Georgie is playing out the string so he can hand this stinking dungball over to the next guy. All this so Republicans can point and say "You lost the war!!" Trust me, everyone will know that's bullshit as well.

But for some reason it does not seem that we can stop this. For some reason we will continue to sleepwalk through this nightmare. For some reason we will continue to allow this Kabuki theater to play out in front of us. For some reason we will continue to pretend that "it is what it is".

In the meantime, more US dollars and more US lives get flushed down the Mesopotamian toilet.

My question is why?

Short Answers to Long Questions.....

2007-09-14T12:28:00.001-07:00

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From the Times;

... [Bush's] only real plan is to confuse enough Americans and cow enough members of Congress to let him muddle along and saddle his successor with this war that should never have been started.

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New Orleans Today.....

2007-08-31T11:34:00.000-07:00

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The ever vigilant and direct Charles Pierce on the current state of New Orleans (and the U.S. as a whole);

....it should be noted Tom Joyner did a first-class radio broadcast from the Ninth Ward on Wednesday morning. Things got so heated about the presidential photo-op later in the day that Mayor Ray Nagin started to sound very uncomfortable. (He does, after all, still have to deal with this pack of thooleramawns for a living.) Excellent radio all the way around. Meanwhile, here's some of the latest from the indomitable Times-Picayune. The numbers are mind-blowing, at least to me -- I mean, 105,000 buildings lost -- most of them residential structures -- and $14 billion-with-a-B in damages. In an American city. In my lifetime. And not just any American city, but one that is more important to the cultural identity of this country than any other except (maybe) New York. My favorite word in all the world is "self-evident," as in, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Mr. Jefferson is saying that the monumental heresies to follow -- all men created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienables, etc., etc. -- are so obvious that they almost don't need to be explained, but that he will explain them anyway. That word set freedom itself free, which was the case in New Orleans more than it was in any other place I can name. An America without a New Orleans is just Great Britain with better beachfront property.
This, I believe, is in no small part why an administration with a cramped and vicious vision of the country, an administration dedicated to the depths of its rotted, vestigial soul to making this country less free, an administration that has us seriously debating how much torture is enough and whether the president should be forced to abide by the laws he signed, an administration that would sell the entire constitutional order down the river for a three-point bump in a poll full of fools, would allow this particular city to be so grievously wounded and then die in recovery. What are we to make of a country that allows these soulless, vacant fools to govern it with impunity? We are all in New Orleans, now, standing in the wreckage of a graveyard. The sun rises hot and merciless. The help never comes. And New Orleans, the birthplace of our national soul, just turns out to be the place where they took our national soul to die.

Cheney vs. Cheney

2007-08-16T15:20:00.000-07:00

Seems prophetic, huh. Asshat should have listened to his 1994 self.

The True Republican Agenda

2007-08-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

Matt has it right. Money quote;

The Republicans' strength as a coalition is that the movers and shakers behind it in the business community have a much more coherent agenda than does the interest-group coalition behind the Democrats. The formula isn't fool proof, and it can hit stumbling blocks every once in a while like a recession (1992) or a badly misfiring war (2006), but over the long run if you think of the modern Republican Party as an organized conspiracy for the purposes of concentrating America's wealth and income in the hands of the smallest possible number of people, it's been wildly successful for the past 30 years and we've yet to see any really clear evidence that the basic formula has stopped succeeding.

Rove

2007-08-13T09:14:00.002-07:00

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Andrew Sullivan sums it up.

The man's legacy is a conservative movement largely discredited and disunited, a president with lower consistent approval ratings than any in modern history, a generational shift to the Democrats, a resurgent al Qaeda, an endless catastrophe in Iraq, a long hard struggle in Afghanistan, a fiscal legacy that means bankrupting America within a decade, and the poisoning of American religion with politics and vice-versa. For this, he got two terms of power - which the GOP used mainly to enrich themselves, their clients and to expand government's reach and and drain on the productive sector. In the re-election, the president with a relatively strong economy, and a war in progress, managed to eke out 51 percent. Why? Because Rove preferred to divide the country and get his 51 percent, than unite it and get America's 60. In a time of grave danger and war, Rove picked party over country. Such a choice was and remains despicable.
Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times. He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war - and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term expediency. His divisive politics and elevation of corrupt mediocrities to every branch of government has turned an entire generation off the conservative label. And rightly so. It will take another generation to recover from the toxins he has injected, with the president's eager approval, into the political culture...

Don't be a lapdog....

2007-08-08T16:45:00.000-07:00

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Michael Bérubé has written a speech for our Democrat Congresswhimps. They should pin this to their lapels and attempt to read it or a appropriate facsimile out loud whenever confronted with any attempt by this president to obtain additional executive power ;

I come to you today to explain why I voted against the recent FISA bill. You may have heard some members of the press criticizing my vote; you may have heard members of the President’s party charging me with being “soft on terror.” I think that is a despicable charge, and I want to suggest to the President’s remaining supporters that their disdain for our nation’s civil liberties belies their claims to be defenders of “freedom.”

But I didn’t vote against the FISA bill only because I believe in Americans’ civil liberties. I also voted against it because I believe we have no reason to trust this President and his attorney general with any further expansion of executive powers. Their open contempt for Congressional oversight, for the American system of checks and balances, has been startlingly clear for years now. This is a President who simply does not believe he is accountable to anyone or anything– not even to the Constitution, which he is sworn to uphold but which he reads as a blueprint for simple executive fiat. And this is an attorney general who believes he can manipulate the judiciary branch for partisan purposes, and then lie gleefully to Congress about it– when, of course, he is not refusing to answer questions altogether.

I want to remind you all– and my colleagues in the President’s party– that whenever we have given this President the benefit of the doubt, the results have been disastrous for our country. Over four years ago, this President plunged us into a war that most Americans now recognize as one of the most militarily, politically, and diplomatically destructive wars this country has ever embarked upon. He justified that war, as he now justifies spying on Americans, as part of a “war on terror”; but the war in Iraq has been a terrible setback in our struggle against Islamic extremism, and the President’s domestic spying program, like his creation of secret detention-and-torture sites around the globe, has badly eroded our nation’s moral fiber. This President has shown time and again that he cannot be considered worthy of our trust; he has broken his vow to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and he has appointed an attorney general who believes, incredible as it may sound, that he himself is above the law. There is no reason whatsoever to give the President the powers he now demands.

The vast majority of the American people know this already. Less than thirty percent of them approve of the job this President is doing. To put this FISA bill in perspective, one would have to imagine Richard Nixon in 1974, with his 27 percent approval rating in the depths of the Watergate scandal, demanding from Congress the right to spy on his enemies– including his enemies in Congress. It would have been unthinkable for that Congress to give in to President Nixon’s demands, in order to help the President further undermine the Constitution and the rule of law; and it would be just as unthinkable today for this Congress to give in to President Bush’s demands, in order to help the President further undermine the Constitution and the rule of law. I will not be party to anything so foolish or destructive. I voted against this bill because I am loyal to this country and I do not trust this President– and I am proud of my vote.

The Executive "Get Out Of Jail Free" Card.....

2007-07-31T14:58:00.000-07:00

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From FireDogLake;

Donald Rumsfeld is evidently refusing to testify before Henry Waxman’s committee regarding the death of Pat Tillman. This comes on the heels of Fred Fielding refusing to release documents to the committee regarding Tillman’s death, citing “executive privilege:”

“There is no Executive Privilege claim that holds any water when the matter is the death of an American soldier - especially one who had been used by the Administration as a poster for the war,” said Jon Soltz, an Iraq War veteran who heads the group, in a statement sent to RAW STORY. “By refusing to release every pertinent document, the White House is fostering a climate of distrust among those in the military, hurting efforts to recruit new soldiers, insulting the memory of Pat Tillman, and causing undue pain to his family. Unless the President has something to hide, he should release all the documents requested by Republicans and Democrats on the Committee.”

As Jill recently mused, “Executive privilege now is defined as ‘Anything that would get us into trouble if released.’”

All this Tillman noise really sounds like a cover-up. I just wonder what they're really trying to keep from the public and the Tillman family.

Update: Apparently it's just a "perfect storm of mistakes". That sounds like a good definition of the whole Bush presidency. What it's really called is "more bullshit".

-UF

Who got da Money?

2007-07-31T11:14:00.000-07:00

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This post by Eric Alderman is so good I'm going to post it in it's entirety. It clearly encapsulates the real changes in wealth between the very rich, rich, poor, and very poor in this country over the last 25 years. It's well written, easy to understand, and backed up with facts. And it's scary. I don't think these changes have really sunken in to the public at large. The really rich, and the really poor stay hidden from the general public, for the most part. But the income disparity is real, it's effect on the middle class is growing, and the way it changes our democracy now and in the future should have us all concerned.

In the decade since the passage of NAFTA, labor productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector rose between 70 percent and 80 percent, while real wages rose only 6 percent. In Mexico, productivity rose 68 percent, while real wages rose 2 percent. In Canada, the numbers are 34 percent and 3 percent, respectively.[i] The question for any democratic society is how to address this. Alas, we in the United States have done so by conducting what one conservative writer terms "a massive social experiment" in economic inequality. Over the last quarter-century, the portion of the national income accruing to the richest 1 percent of Americans has doubled. The share going to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent has tripled, and the share going to the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent has quadrupled.[ii] For working people, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the process of collecting this data began more than 60 years ago.[iii] For the poor, just in the years since 2000, the number of Americans living below the poverty line has increased by nearly a third.[iv] Meanwhile, the average CEO of a Standard & Poor's 500 company took home $13.51 million in total compensation in 2005, a year in which the top 1 percent of Americans earned nearly 22 percent of all income.[v] Believe it or not, by 11:02 a.m. of the first workday of work on the first day of 2007, one of these average CEOs "earned" more money than the minimum-wage workers in his company will make for the entire year.[vi] The media tend to treat these trends as merely "the way the world works," but this is actually the essence of conservative ideology. As the political philosopher Michael Walzer pointed out in 1973:

At the very center of conservative thought lies this idea: that the present division of wealth and power corresponds to some deeper reality of human life. Conservatives don't want to say merely that the present division is what it ought to be, for that would invite a search for some distributive principle -- as if it were possible to make a distribution. They want to say that whatever the division of wealth and power is, it naturally is, and that all efforts to change it, temporarily successful in proportion to their bloodiness, must be futile in the end."[vii]

And yet, one cannot help but ask, why is this not the case in Europe or Japan?[viii] In fact, among major world economies, the United States in recent years has had the third-greatest disparity in incomes between the very top and everyone else; only Mexico and Russia are worse.[ix]

Only in the United States are the super-wealthy so powerful and their ideological interests so well tended and defended that their interests have come to stand as "principles" in our political discourse. As the historian Eric Foner notes in his history of "freedom," Franklin Roosevelt explained that "individual freedom" could not be said to "exist without economic security and independence ... for the average man which will give his political freedom reality." And his successor, Harry Truman, would use the phrase "economic freedom" in his 1950 State of the Union address to mean "a fundamental economic freedom for labor." But by the time of Ronald Reagan's second inaugural, the same phrase had come to imply not the right to organize or achieve economic security and independence, but deregulation, tax cuts, and an attack on unions on behalf of powerful corporations and their wealthy owners and investors.[x] By the second Bush presidency, following more than 20 more years of conservative agitation, the ideological demands of the super-rich had grown ever more extreme. For instance, Kenneth C. Griffin, who received more than a billion dollars in 2006 as chairman of a hedge fund, the Citadel Investment Group, could explain to a New York Times reporter in the summer of 2007, "The income distribution has to stand," adding, "I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard."[xi] Just what "principle" Mr. Griffin had in mind, he did not say. Meanwhile, this period in American history witnessed a pitched battle between members of the Democratic Congress and a Republican-supported group of private-equity billionaires fighting to retain their tax privileges. These included, as Warren Buffett explained, the right to "pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter." They insisted on this right, because to force billionaires to pay what bartenders must, would, according to wealthy Bush administration "pioneer" Wayne Berman, "disrupt thousands of partnerships around the country that provide the economic engine," and "punish innovators."[xii] In no other democracy in the world are the wealthiest members of society so generously indulged. This argument, so patently absurd from the standpoint of basic fairness, was nevertheless sufficiently respectable for its adoption by New York Sen. Charles Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate leadership, one of the key architects of the 2006 electoral victory, and a self-described "progressive" politician (though not, in his own estimation, a "liberal"). Of course, Schumer had good political reasons to go to bat for one of his most important sources of campaign funds, and one that happens to be located in the state he represents, but the mere spectacle of a prominent center-left politician fighting against a tax increase for plutocrats without shame or apology demonstrates just how influential the power of money has become in 21st century America.
[i] Jeff Faux, "Crashing the Party of Davos," Democracy, No. 3, Winter 2007
[ii] Jonathan Chait, "Freakoutonomics," The New Republic, November 6, 2006

[iii] Clay Risen, "Trading Stories," TNR Online, September 19, 2006

[iv] Figure is based on U.S. Census statistics, "Harper's Index," Harper's Magazine, June 2007

[v] The Corporate Library's 2006 CEO Pay Survey, September 29, 2006

[vi] The CEOs of America's largest corporations (the Fortune 100) make an average of $17.6 million per year. That is $67,692 per day, or approximately $8,461 per hour. At the beginning of this year, the federal minimum wage was set at $5.15 per hour, or $10,712 per year (for a 40-hour workweek). It takes the average CEO 2 hours and 2 minutes to earn $10,712. The CEO of Fortune 100 companies earn $10,712 in 1 hour and 16 minutes. It takes the average minimum-wage worker 52 40-hour weeks (2,080 hours) to earn $10,712. See "Survey of CEO salaries at companies with $1 billion plus of revenue," CNN.com Money Line, June 21, 2006; "Survey of CEO salaries at Fortune 100 companies," USA Today, April 11, 2006. See also David Cay Johnston, "Income Gap Is Widening, Data Shows," New York Times, March 29.

[vii] Michael Walzer, "In Defense of Equality," Dissent, 1973, reprinted in The New York Intellectuals Reader, Neil Jumonville, editor, (Routledge, April 2007)

[viii] Kurt Andersen, "American Roulette," New York magazine, January 8

[ix] Jonathan Chait, "Freakoutonomics," The New Republic, November 6, 2006

[x] Quoted in Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, (W.W. Norton, 1999), Page 269

[xi] Quoted in Louis Uchitelle, "The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age," The New York Times, July 15
[xii] Evan Thomas and Daniel Gross, "Taxing the Super Rich," Newsweek, July 23

Today's DoubleTake.....

2007-07-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

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The fox who was responsible for the large mess in the henhouse vows to stick around to fix things up, and restore the henhouse to it's former glory, honest. The idiot farmer who hired him agrees, however, the chickens are less than convinced.......

Gonzales to stick around.

I believe very strongly that there is no place for political considerations in the hiring of our career employees or in the administration of justice. As such, the allegations of such activity have been troubling to hear. From my perspective, there are two options available in light of these allegations. I could walk away or I could devote my time, effort and energy to fix the problems. Since I have never been one to quit, I decided that the best course of action was to remain here and fix the problems. That is exactly what I am doing.

What a load of crap.....

.

'Cause I Said So, Part II

2007-07-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

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David Kurtz takes a closer look at the real need for Executive Privilege;

Money quote;

As long as we're going to be discussing the parameters of executive privilege in the weeks and months ahead, can we start by revisiting the now commonly accepted notion that the President can only get free and unfettered advice if those giving the advice know it will remain confidential?
Presidents do have a strong interest in this principle. But the President's interest, in this instance, is not in line with the public interest. In fact, executive privilege offers the President and his advisers a perverse disincentive to look after the public interest. Isn't the prospect of public exposure of hare-brained ideas, controversial proposals, and malfeasance and misdeeds the very sort of incentive the public wants looming over the President and his advisers, a dagger of accountability?

The concoction of cover-ups, frauds, and misadventures in the White House over the last 35 years is precisely what should be exposed to public scrutiny. The logic, such as it is, for executive privilege would apply equally to governors, mayors, and officials at all levels of government. Yet we don't usually grant such broad privileges to other government officials.

'Cause I Said So.......

2007-07-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

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Well, that's a bit more polite than what those in this administration really are thinking. It has now reached a point where "executive privilege" really means "Fuck you, I can do whatever I want, whenever I want". Not really surprising coming from a spoiled little rich kid used to always getting his way, and surrounded by people who labor intensively to clean up his messes. Daddy must be proud. Conservatives must be proud.

So, having stacked the U.S. Justice Department with lackeys (especially in D.C.), and having had the good fortune to replace 2 Supreme Court Justices with strong executive advocates, Georgie Boy can pretty much stonewall his way till the end of his term. Now if he can just figure out a way to cancel the next election, we can officially become a Banana Republic.

Executive Privilege - Bush's New Twist

Bush administration officials introduced a bold new assertion of executive authority Thursday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

"A U.S. attorney would not be permitted to bring contempt charges or convene a grand jury in an executive privilege case," said a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity and said his remarks reflect a consensus within the administration. "And a U.S. attorney wouldn't be permitted to argue against the reasoned legal opinion that the Justice Department provided. No one should expect that to happen."
Mark Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration's stance "astonishing."
"That's a breathtakingly broad view of the president's role in this system of separation of powers," Rozell said. "What this statement is saying is the president's claim of executive privilege trumps all."

Accountability

2007-07-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

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Why can't we hold this administration accountible for their crimes. Enough talk, talk, talk. It's time for do, do, do.

Mr. Rove should be in jail for the overt politicization of federal employees.

Partisan campaign or electoral activities on federal government property are illegal.

Money Quote From ThinkProgress;

This week’s report that officials in the Office of National Drug Control Policy made politically motivated appearances in the months leading up to the 2006 elections are only the latest example of the Bush administration’s misuse of federal employees.

For example, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2003 that Karl Rove or his top aide, Ken Mehlman, “visited nearly every agency to outline White House campaign priorities, review polling data and, on occasion, call attention to tight House, Senate and gubernatorial races that could be affected by regulatory action.”

The Obscenity Prayer

2007-07-16T11:39:00.001-07:00

Seems I'm in a video mood today.

Here's a timely video with music by one of my favorite artists; Rodney Crowell.

Enjoy......

Feel Good....not

2007-07-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

From the Houston Chronicle;

Strange Bedfellows......

2007-06-21T10:17:00.000-07:00

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Andrew Sullivan and Glen Greenwald come to a consensus.

This Administration has done more damage to this country than I could ever have imagined.

The Bush Paradox

Glenn Greenwald sees it in his new book, "A Tragic Legacy":
The president who vowed to lead America in a moral crusade to win hearts and minds around the world has so inflamed anti-American sentiment that America's moral standing in the world is at an all-time low. The president who vowed to defend the Good in the world from the forces of Evil has caused the United States to be held in deep contempt by large segments of virtually every country on every continent of the world, including large portions of nations with which the U.S. has historically been allied. The president who vowed to undertake a war in defense of American values and freedoms has presided over such radical departures from the defining values and liberties of this country that many Americans find their country and its government unrecognizable. And the president who vowed to lead the war for freedom and democracy has made torture, rendition, abductions, lawless detentions of even our own citizens, secret "black site" prisons, Abu Ghraib dog leashes, and orange Guantánamo jumpsuits the strange, new symbols of America around the world.
And yet this tale of Manicheanism gone awry, of a utopian vision ending in a dystopia, of the terrible dangers of any moral crusade that sanctifies "any method necessary" (in Giuliani's language) in its well-intentioned pursuit of evil is not a new story. It is one of the oldest stories human beings have told to themselves. Human beings seem to need to relearn it with each generation; and I can only express remorse that, in my time, I needed a lesson as well.

The genius of the American constitution, however, is that it provides the framework for such immoral moralism to be checked and moderated. Alas, we have also seen these past few years how dependent such a system is on the integrity and courage of the people in it.

It depends on an elite willing to stand up against their own power, and it depends on a people alert to the erosion of their freedom. Today, both guardrails against tyranny appear weakened, and the pushback against a radically authoritarian executive has been weak. We have an elite class in Washington either too cowardly to stand up to the power grab or too co-opted by the perquisites of power to care. And we have a people seemingly content to watch freedom being stripped from them - because, right now, it's mainly people with brown skin and funny names being railroaded by the executive branch. Al-Marri and Padilla can be distanced. And the Hollywood fantasies of Jack Bauer can distract from an honest moral assessment of how far we've degenerated in so short a time.

There is still a chance to repair the damage - but given how much we have lost since 9/11, the constitutional consequences of another major attack are likely to be terminal to the American experiment in liberty. If a Giuliani or a Cheney is in power on such a day, we can kiss goodbye to the constitution. If I sound overly alarmed by what has happened to American liberty, it's because I honestly didn't expect to see habeas corpus, the most basic freedom we have, so casually thrown away and torture so casually enshrined in the American system. I never believed an American president would not only claim but exercise the power to detain any person in America and jail and torture them with impunity - indefinitely. But these are the facts; and my own book was an attempt to account for them within the conservative philosophical tradition. Glenn Greenwald comes from a very different place, but we have sadly come to the same conclusion.

America has exchanged some if its basic freedoms for the patina of phony security - and so easily. The Republican party, to its historic shame, has been the main vehicle for the replacement of doubt, empiricism and calm judgment with certainty, fundamentalism and raw force. We have terrible enemies abroad, seeking to destroy our way of life. But this truth should never blind us to the danger within as well. Al Qaeda can only give us death. It is up to us to surrender the liberty they despise. In so many ways, we already have.

Plausible Deniability......

2007-06-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

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How can we, as a country, purport to be the beacon of democracy when our leaders willfully ignored the lawless actions at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that defied the Geneva conventions and our own military regulations?

The general who headed the military's own internal investigation now states that the torture and mistreatment of prisoners was not the act of a few renegades, but was tacitly supported by the top levels of this administration, who even now continue to hide behind a farcical shield of "plausible deniability".

May their lawless actions be subjected to the full light of day, and may they be held acountable and prosecuted to the full extent of our judicial system.

"Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, "Is it abuse or torture?" At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet."

Is this what our country now stands for?

Quote of the Day

2007-06-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

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Nice rebuttal to any concept of "democracy building strategy" in our invasion of Iraq on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

"We tried to construct a constitutional order [in Iraq] for a non-dictatorial, national political settlement."

We did what, exactly? Here's what we did. We disbanded the army, throwing thousands out into the street with no pay, no pension, no way to support their families. We shut down the state-owned industries that produced goods and services basic to the national infrastructure, throwing thousands out into the street with no pay, no pension, no way to support their families. And then we expected investors to line up while we threw reconstruction dollars at Halliburton and KBR and other American firms under no-bid loopholes in U.S. Government Procurement Law. Worse still, we eviscerated the civil service by purging it of Baath party members (who wasn't a member of the Baath Party? The cleaning crew?) thus ripping out the bare bones that would have supported the construction of constitutional order. Never mind throwing thousands out into the street with no pay, no pension, no way to support their families. We sat back while all these constitutionally and economically disenfranchised people looted what remained, said "stuff happens" and then proudly we pointed to purple fingers and claimed victory.

We burned down the house, that's what we did.

Saying of the Day....

2007-06-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

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Sometimes in this hectic world it's important to take some time to evaluate one's behavior. Many times we are quick to anger and quick to focus only on one's personal needs. I read this quote today and it seemed to resonate with me;

Try to have a large radius of tolerance and a small radius of entitlement.

Words to live by.

-UF

The "We Don't Torture" Lie.....

2007-06-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

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We do torture. Specifically by the order of this administration. And we modeled our torture based on what we learned from our worst enemies. Sad and sick.

It goes without saying that these atrocities should be investigated and the people responsible for these sorry decisions should be placed on trial.

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were modeled on techniques the U.S. feared that the Communists themselves might use against captured American troops during the Cold War, according to a little-noticed, highly classified Pentagon report released several days ago. Originally developed as training for elite special forces at Fort Bragg under the "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" program, otherwise known as SERE, tactics such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists.

The report, completed last August but only declassified and made public on May 18, suggests that the abusive techniques stemmed from a much more formal process than the Defense Department has previously acknowledged. By 2002 the Pentagon was looking for an interrogation paradigm to use on what it had designated as "unlawful combatants" captured in the "war on terror." These individuals, many taken prisoner in Afghanistan, were initially brought to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo, although others were subsequently hidden away in CIA secret prisons or turned over to U.S.-allied governments known to practice torture. That same year, the commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo began using the abusive "counter resistance" techniques adopted from SERE on prisoners at the base, and according to the Pentagon report SERE military psychologists were on hand to help.

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More DOJ troubles brewing......

2007-05-31T13:14:00.000-07:00

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The Bush Administration: Turning Justice into “Just Us,” since 2001.

From Think Progress;

Yesterday, the DoJ announced that it was expanding its investigation of Goodling’s partisan hiring practices to include “scrutiny of hiring in the Civil Rights Division, which oversees voting rights.” A central figure in the expanded probe is Bradley Schlozman, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division currently serving in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. He is set to appear next Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Schlozman is reported to have repeatedly inquired about applicants’ political affiliations

Update: More smoking guns here;

The Los Angeles Times looks into why Thomas Heffelfinger, the former U.S. attorney for Minnesota, was targeted for removal and finds circumstantial evidence that Heffelfinger might have made himself a marked man by raising objection to the implementation of a voter ID law in the state. Some familiar characters crop up -- namely Bradley Schlozman and Hans Von Spakovsky, the two Republican lawyers who reigned over the Civil Rights Division's voting rights section.

A Thorn By Any Other Name......

2007-05-30T11:41:00.000-07:00

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From Talking Points Memo;

"Enhanced interrogation", the Bush administration's preferred newspeak for torture, appears to have been coined by the Nazi Party in 1937.

There are way too many facile comparisons of whatever group or individual we dislike to Nazis. But when the shoe fits.

And this shoe fits like a finely designed Italian leather loafer.

And to make things worse, it doesn't even work....

As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.
The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects...
In a blistering lecture delivered last month, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “immoral” some interrogation tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon...
...some of the experts involved in the interrogation review, called “Educing Information,” say that during World War II, German and Japanese prisoners were effectively questioned without coercion.
“It far outclassed what we’ve done,” said Steven M. Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator and trainer, who has studied the World War II program of interrogating Germans. The questioners at Fort Hunt, Va., “had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the language flawlessly,” and prepared for four to six hours for each hour of questioning, said Mr. Kleinman, who wrote two chapters for the December report.

Mr. Kleinman, who worked as an interrogator in Iraq in 2003, called the post-Sept. 11 efforts “amateurish” by comparison to the World War II program, with inexperienced interrogators who worked through interpreters and had little familiarity with the prisoners’ culture.

Killin' for the Children......

2007-05-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

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You know you've reached the bottom of the barrel when all you have to trot out is fear mongering "they're coming for your children" line. Well that's all the President had at his news conference yesterday;

President: I would hope our world hadn't become so cynical that they don't
take the threats of al Qaeda seriously, because they're real. And it's a danger
to the American people. It's a danger to your children, Jim. And it's really
important that we do all we can do to bring them to justice.

Yes, it's all about the children. If we don't fight those nasty islamofacisterroristerriblebadarkskinneduglynastyguys they will come here and kill our children.

Well, I agree with Charles Pierce and his response to this pandering;

Look, sport. I'll take care of my kids. One of the ways I'll do it is to make
sure that you and your creepazoid vice-president don't send them off to be
killed on the basis of lies, trickeration, and the fact that you never flattened
Daddy on the front lawn that night you were sockless. Another of the ways I'll
do it is to make sure they fight as hard as they can to recapture the
constitutional rights -- and the culture of civil liberties -- to which they are
entitled by nature and by nature's god, to make sure they never again have to
live under a government staffed by legacy idiots and the products of fourth-rate
right-wing diploma mills. The last way I'll do it is to make sure they recognize
and appreciate those things about this country that actually are worth fighting
for -- most of which you wouldn't recognize if they fell off a shelf onto your
head. Protect my kids? Ace, I wouldn't hire you to mow my lawn.

It's time to call a spade a spade.

72%

2007-05-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

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That's how many Americans think this country is on the wrong track. That's what we call a landslide.....

So, in a democracy this should matter......why does it feel like it doesn't?

Analysts? Who needs analysts.....

2007-05-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

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Documents released as part of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation show that the Bush administration was warned by U.S. intelligence analysts about the challenges it now faces as it tries to stabilize Iraq.

They don't believe these realities when it's right in front of their eyes, why would they have believed a report that objected to their forgone conclusions.....

Highlights from the reports;

_ Establishing a stable democracy in Iraq would be a long, steep and
probably turbulent challenge. They said that contributions could be made from 4
million Iraqi exiles and Iraq's impoverished, underemployed middle class. But
they noted that opposition parties would need sustained economic, political and
military support.
_ Al-Qaida would see the invasion as a chance to accelerate
its attacks, and the lines between al-Qaida and other terrorist groups "could
become blurred." In a weak spot in the analysis, one paper said that the risk of
terror attacks would spike after the invasion and slow over the next three to
five years. However, the State Department recently found that attacks last year
alone rose sharply.
_ Domestic groups in Iraq's deeply divided society would
become violent, unless stopped by the occupying force. "Score settling would
occur throughout Iraq between those associated with Saddam's regime and those
who have suffered most under it."
_ Iraq's neighbors would jockey for
influence and Iranian leaders would try to shape the post-Saddam era to
demonstrate Tehran's importance in the region. The more Tehran didn't feel
threatened by U.S. actions, the analysts said, "the better the chance that they
could cooperate in the postwar period."
_ Military action to eliminate Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction would not cause other governments in the region to
give up such programs.

The Path to Barbarism....

2007-05-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

Digby today, while discussing the recent stoning of an Iraqi girl, focuses on the slippery slope of authoritarianism and fundamentalism, and how, no matter the level of sophistication, these traits lead to the same results;

This is why I have contempt for tribalism, fundamentalism and authoritarianism. When it gets right down to it, it's always, in the end, about mob rule. A gang of violent bullies, often at the behest of some authority figure, "sends a message" by publicly humiliating, maiming or killing one of their own who had the temerity to fail to properly conform. Whether for God or country or tribe, it's always some poor victim, lying on the ground, covering his or her head, surrounded by people who have turned into animals.

There are a lot of manifestations of this particular human organizational style, some much more sophisticated and stylized. The violence becomes more ritualized and the humiliation takes other forms but underneath it all, the same impulse to dominate drives a fair number of people of all cultures. It's just a matter of degree.

This is the reason why it's so important to preserve our secular, reason-based constitution and fight against this horror of government endorsed torture and indefinite imprisonment. It is a very, very thin line between civilization and barbarism and every step we take away from the rule of law is a step toward becoming that primitive mob of killers. After all, I'm sure they felt justified too.

.

From Bad to Worst......

2007-05-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

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From Tom Schaller;

Sadly, it's official: With eight days still to go, May 2007 caps the deadliest six-month period for America of the entire Iraq war -- 540 dead, and counting. May also ends the first six-month period during which at least 80 American service personnel (never mind contractors) died every single month.

Kicked To The Curb.....

2007-05-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

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So Paulie Wolf reaches out and tries to score his sweetie a plumb gig at the joint where he works. What does he get for his troubles? He loses his job over it, and his squeeze, now realizing he's unemployed, gives him the boot.

Mmmmm, boy. Are you tasting the Schadenfreude?

Reason.....

2007-05-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

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Al Gore's new book, "The Assault On Reason" has some interesting things to say about our abilities to use reason to self govern, and how we may be abandoning the very thing that makes our country unique. (hattip to Andrew Sullivan)

Money quote:

For the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy — and too partisan — to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned?

Faith in the power of reason — the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

The 28%ers

2007-05-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

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Keep feeding the base that reality free red meat.....

From Paul Krugman;

What we need to realize is that the infamous “Bush bubble,” the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar.

.
-UF

Troop Support??

2007-05-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

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In the watch what they do not what they say department;

Bush Threatens Veto Over Troop Pay Raise, Military Widow Benefits

-UF

Impeachment?

2007-05-18T11:46:00.000-07:00

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I don't know how much more info we need to assign a Special Prosecutor to the warrant less wiretapping scandal. Each day there are new, more damning revelations. These clowns utter disregard for the rule of law and our constitutional guarantees make it imperative that we take these actions as seriously, and I don't think impeachment should be off the table.

Of course, when your personal butboy Fredo is running the DOJ you can certainly play the stall game.

Charles Pierce writing in Altercations sums it up;

OK, I'm convinced.

Impeach him. Impeach them all. Start chucking people into the hoosegow for contempt, and as material witnesses. Stuff this White House so full of subpoenas that it bursts. Blow this government apart.

I held off on this because I thought the process was both legally unjustifiable and politically futile. I believe it is still the latter. The difference is I don't care any more that it is. The Comey testimony -- coupled with the astonishing arrogance it takes simply to ignore congressional subpoenas as though they were something someone slipped under your windshield wiper -- pushed me all the way over the edge. The president spied on Americans and thereby broke the law. Repeatedly. The president was told he was breaking the law by members of the Department of Justice who had no reason to lie to him on the subject. (John Ashcroft noticed, for pity's sake.) The president knew he was breaking the law so he sent the White House chief of staff and the White House counsel out to behave like Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction. (Sorry, Andy Card. I liked you when we were both young and ambitious in Massachusetts, but it's off to Allenwood for a spell until you come clean.) The clean-up crew failed, and he kept breaking the law anyway. Repeatedly. They spied on their political opponents. They used their steroidal view of executive powers to justify it in their tiny little minds. That's what they're hiding. I have no doubts any more that the administration has committed more crimes than we know. And every day they remain unpunished -- hell, every day they remain in office -- we become more deeply complicit in their offenses. It's time to govern ourselves again.
This can't be a matter of political calculation any more. It simply can't. It's a fundamental question of what kind of government we want to have. Yet nobody of any clout in the Democratic Party wants any part of it. ...And the Republicans -- as demonstrated by the performance of the Ten Little Idiots trying to out-butch each other the other night -- are utterly hopeless. Look, Brainiacs, when John McCain tells you that torture doesn't work, take his bloody word for it, OK? Move along.

I get it!

2007-05-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

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Just like Tony Soprano in the desert this week, I've had an epiphany!

Our current administration is modeling itself after the Godfather movies. Deep down you know exactly what I'm talking about, the corollaries are obvious and the players...right out of central casting. Fredo, Sonny, the Consigliari......Of course, I'm not very original and this is not new thinking. A quick google shows that it's been discussed in depth at various web sites.

But, while it used to be a fun joke, I'm beginning to think there are clear signs of a Mafia ethic to the way these clowns are working Washington DC.

-Former Deputy AG Comey testified this week on the strong arm tactics used against John Ashcroft, while he was in the hospital for God's sake, to attempt to get DOJ sign off on the administration's domestic serveillance initiative. You've got to be quite the lowlife dirtbag to make John Ashcroft look like a constitution loving stand up guy.

-Subpoenas? What subpoenas. This group will just ignore subpoenas.

A complete contempt for the rule of law. It's time to cook these guys.

-UF

Habeas Corpus back in the Saddle?

2007-05-09T12:51:00.000-07:00

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Now is the time for our Democratic Representatives to step up and demand that we restore Habeas Corpus. Call your Congressperson and tell them it's important that this main tenant of our Constitution should be restored.

The Times says; Bring it back.

Glenn Greenwald sums it up;

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is, without question, the single worst law enacted during the Bush presidency, and is one of the most destructive laws passed in the last several decades. It is not merely a bad law. It vests in the President the power to detain people indefinitely with no meaningful opportunity to contest the government's accusations. That is the very power the Founders sought first and foremost to prohibit......

Inmates and Asylums....

2007-05-09T08:48:00.000-07:00

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Geez..... Remember when we used to just ignore the batshit crazies on either side of the political spectrum. Sure, we'd casually laugh when we saw one babbling incoherently on a street corner. But now, the nutcases on the right are actually written about, quoted, given air time, and generally treated as if their opinions are something more than the inane spoutings of ideological gasbags. From Ann Coulter to Michael Savage, it's just amazing to me that we pay any attention to them what-so-ever.

The AP really needs to ignore this drivel.

-UF

Anybody Home? Nope.........

2007-05-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

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So. What happens when you try to wage a war with insufficient personnel, planning, or any type of coherent organized strategy?

This.

The government's response to the disaster was undermined by ongoing National Guard deployments to the Middle East, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said.
"I don't think there is any question if you are missing trucks, Humvees and helicopters that the response is going to be slower," Sebelius said. "The real victims here will be the residents of Greensburg, because the recovery will be at a slower pace."

It's called the "Law of Unintended Consequences". You see, incompetent stumblebums re-deploy National Guard troops and equipment, that were intended to provide support for natural disasters in this country, off to the never ending war in Iraq. So when a disaster hits in a place like Greensburg, Kansas, - well, what a surprise - we don't have the National Guard infrastructure to effectively provide necessary support.

Your tax dollars at work......

Mission Accomplished.....

2007-05-01T17:18:00.000-07:00

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Four years and counting. A look at the numbers.

-UF

This Dog Won't Hunt....

2007-04-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

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Richard Clarke chief counterterrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush lays some serious smackdown on Georgie's current Iraq stratergery.....

By RICHARD CLARKE

Be Our Guest

Does the President think terrorists are puppy dogs? He keeps saying that terrorists will "follow us home" like lost dogs. This will only happen, however, he says, if we "lose" in Iraq.

The puppy dog theory is the corollary to earlier sloganeering that proved the President had never studied logic: "We are fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we will not have to face them and fight them in the streets of our own cities."

Remarkably, in his attempt to embrace the failed Iraqi adventure even more than the President, Sen. John McCain is now parroting the line. "We lose this war and come home, they'll follow us home," he says.

How is this odd terrorist puppy dog behavior supposed to work? The President must believe that terrorists are playing by some odd rules of chivalry. Would this be the "only one slaughter ground at a time" rule of terrorism?

Of course, nothing about our being "over there" in any way prevents terrorists from coming here. Quite the opposite, the evidence is overwhelming that our presence provides motivation for people throughout the Arab world to become anti-American terrorists.

Some 100,000 Iraqis, probably more, have been killed since our invasion. They have parents, children, cousins and fellow tribal clan members who have pledged revenge no matter how long it takes. For many, that revenge is focused on America.

At the same time, investing time, energy and resources in Iraq takes our eye off two far more urgent tasks at hand: one, guarding the homeland against terrorism much better than the pork-dispensing Department of Homeland Security currently does the job; and two, systematically dismantling Al Qaeda all over the world, from Canada to Asia to Africa. On both these fronts, the Bush administration's focus is sorely lacking.

Yet in the fantasyland of illogic in which the President dwells, shaped by slogans devised by spin doctors, America can "win" in Iraq. Then, we are to believe, the terrorists will be so demoralized that they will recant their beliefs and cease their terrorist ways.

In the real world, by choosing unnecessarily to go into Iraq, Bush not only diverted efforts from delivering a death blow to Al Qaeda, he gave that movement both a second chance and the best recruiting tool possible.

U.S. military raids in Iraq have uncovered evidence that Iraqis are planning attacks in America, perhaps to be carried out by terrorists with European Union passports that require no U.S. visas. But such attacks here over the next several years are likely now no matter what happens next in Iraq - and that is because of what Bush has already done, not because of any future course we choose in Iraq.

But we can be sure that when the next attacks come in the U.S., if Bush is down on the ranch cutting trees, he and whatever few followers he retains by then will blame his successor. You can almost hear them now: If only hissuccessor had left enough U.S. troops in the Iraqi shooting gallery to satisfy the blood lust of the enemy, as Bush did, then they wouldn't have come here.

The truth: If not for this administration's reckless steps to push America into war - and strategic blunder after strategic blunder that has satisfied the blood lust of the enemy - fewer evildoers would follow us home like the dogs that they are.

Clarke served as chief counterterrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He is now chairman of Good Harbor Consulting.

That thing got a Hemi?

2007-04-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

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My, my. From Lee Iacocca;

"I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions."

Read it all here.

RIP David Halberstam

2007-04-24T13:01:00.000-07:00

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Killed in a traffic accident here in the Bay Area. Mr. Halberstam was the role model for what a thinking journalist should be. He will be missed.

From Glen Greenwald today;

David Halberstam's death yesterday is certain to prompt all sorts of homage from our media stars describing Halberstam as a superior journalist, someone who embodied what journalism ought to be. And it is true that he was exactly that.

But modern American journalists -- as Halberstam himself repeatedly emphasized -- have become the precise antithesis of those values. The functions Halberstam and the best journalists of his generation fulfilled are exactly those that have been so fundamentally abandoned, repudiated and scorned by our nation's most prominent and influential media stars. And most legitimate media criticisms today are grounded in exactly that gaping discrepancy.

Read the rest here.

Then set your TIVO to watch this Bill Moyers PBS special on how our mainstream media failed in it's duty leading up to the war in Iraq.

-UF

Searching for Leadership.....

2007-04-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

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As I've stated before, I think the American people are miles ahead of our political leadership and pundits. Look at the polls. They are done with Bush, his administration, and they are done with his war.

We have a huge mess to clean up, and America is looking for new leadership. I think this is what is driving the fascination with Obama.

Andrew Sullivan expounds on this.

The interest in the candidacy of Barack Obama is at fever-pitch for a reason. The United States confronts a crisis in leadership, a paralysis not seen since the waning days of Jimmy Carter. Then the paralysis stemmed from almost pathological passivity; now it springs from almost pathological reliance on violence without order to impose values that can only be chosen. It is long past time to retire the idea that physical force alone - from bombs and bullets to torture - can solve the crisis of global Islamist terror, an ominously shifting climate, and the collapse of America's moral standing in the world. Neither extreme of Carter-style passivity nor Bush-style aggression works; neither reflects the core character of America. And yet America remains the indispensable nation. Without America's force, moral leadership, engagement and diplomacy, evil will win, as it is winning in Iraq and in so many places right now. The president, moreover, is partly responsible for the enemy's success. He has divided a country when it desperately needs uniting; he has misused military power; he has permanently stained the moral tradition of this country by the indelible evil of torture. And in all this, he has made the United States far weaker than it was seven years ago. We can and should debate how this came to be the case - whether tragedy or accident or deceit or incompetence or arrogance or some hideous, toxic combination of them all. But the first thing we have to acknowledge in looking for a new leader is the bankruptcy of the current one.

I Want My Money.......Or Else.......

2007-04-23T11:04:00.000-07:00

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From Paul Krugman today:

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

If this were a normal political dispute, Democrats in Congress would clearly hold the upper hand: by a huge margin, Americans say they want a timetable for withdrawal, and by a large margin they also say they trust Congress, not Mr. Bush, to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq.

But this isn’t a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn’t really trying to win the argument on the merits. He’s just betting that the people outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those innocent bystanders.

What’s at stake right now is the latest Iraq “supplemental.” Since the beginning, the administration has refused to put funding for the war in its regular budgets. Instead, it keeps saying, in effect: “Whoops! Whaddya know, we’re running out of money. Give us another $87 billion.”

At one level, this is like the behavior of an irresponsible adolescent who repeatedly runs through his allowance, each time calling his parents to tell them he’s broke and needs extra cash.

What I haven’t seen sufficiently emphasized, however, is the disdain this practice shows for the welfare of the troops, whom the administration puts in harm’s way without first ensuring that they’ll have the necessary resources.

Dumb Luck?

2007-04-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

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From Hullabaloo, this account of the idiot savant.......

by digby

In response to Steve Benen's post about Bush's rambling, incoherent answers at that Townhall yesterday, one of his commenters pithily replied:

Bush leveraged a national tragedy into reelection. He’s seeded the federal government with true believers, expanded executive authority while marginalizing Congress and appointing 2 radically conservative SC judges. He’s expanded government surveillance of our phones, e-mails, libraary borrowings, bank accounts and medicine cabinets. He’s stalled efforts to curb global warming, cut protections once provided by the EPA, FDA, and silenced scientists who dare refute the literal word of bible or the backward beliefs of those who claim to know the mind of the almighty. The US can now torture, imprision without providing cause and prosecute without allowing a reasonable defense. He’s built bases in the middle east, and fattened the bank accounts of those whose bank accounts were already obscene. The middle class — the masses — have not been so economically impotent in decades.

For such an idiot, this guy has been awfully successful.

That's worth thinking about. He's only been an epic failure in terms of keeping the nation secure, safeguarding our constitution and making America more prosperous and successful. When you look at it from Bush's perspective, however, he's done a heckuva job.

Boil the Frog Slowly

2007-04-18T12:30:00.000-07:00

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The phrase "boil the frog" comes from the old story of placing a frog in a pot and cooking him by turning up the heat slowly over time. The frog thinks he's got a nice hot tub going, and the one who controls the heat has dinner.....eventually.

That's the way Jack Balkin sees the recent Supreme Court ruling concerning the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. Slowly chipping away at Roe v. Wade, procedure by procedure, rather than getting it overturned on the whole, accomplishes three key things. It keeps moderates from leaving the Republican party, it provides fresh meat to the base, and it keeps the opposition from mounting a strong counterattack.

I still think "morning after" medical advancements will render this moot, but it's an interesting take on the subject.

A far more prudent strategy, and the one the President and his advisers will likely adopt, would be to appoint Justices who will preserve Roe but chip away at it slowly, for example, by devising new procedural rules that make it difficult to challenge abortion regulations in federal court, by upholding restrictions on particular medical procedures like partial birth abortion, and by further limiting abortions for minors and poor women. Moderates and independents may not like these changes, but such rulings will be much less likely to induce wholesale defections from the Republican coalition than wiping Roe v. Wade off the books. The latter is a simple, easy to understand result that people can get angry about and rally around. Procedural limitations on abortion, by contrast, are hard to explain to voters and therefore risk less political danger for the Republicans.

Chipping away at Roe slowly not only allows the party to keep moderates and independents from bolting, it also preserves a hated symbol for the party's base of religious conservatives to struggle against. As long as Roe remains law, religious conservatives can point to it as a example of what is wrong with America and with a liberal activist judiciary (which is, of course, increasingly staffed by conservative Republican Presidents!). Thus, the reverse litmus test not only holds the party's winning coalition together, it's also good practical politics.

Read the whole thing here.

-UF

Guns

2007-04-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

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Lt. Col. Bob Bateman is a frequent contributor to Eric Alterman's blog. He's done time in Iraq and Afghanistan and has an interesting perspective on current events from the eyes of a soldier. His post this morning, relating to the Va. Tech tragedy, caught my eye;

Name: Lt. Col. Bob Bateman
Hometown: Capitol Hill, Washington DC
I am sick of stories about guns, and how the blessed Founding Fathers wanted every little patriot baby to grow up with a Kentucky long-rifle over the mantle. It is a lie. It is a myth. The very idea is a concoction by people who want to believe something, regardless of the facts, and the fact that the lie has deep roots does not make it any more accurate.

I am sick of stories about people who claim that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Bullshit. You do not see 70+ people, or even 40, or 20 ... or, (you get the picture) randomly gunned down in any of the countries where the tools of violence are confined to the authorities.

I am sick of idiots with an agenda pretending that what happened at Virginia Tech is not because we have too many damned guns in this country. Muzzle-loading blackpowder rifles, single-shot breech-loading hunting rifles, and single-barrel breech-loading shotguns, and that is about it, are all that should be allowed. Those tools can be used, legitimately, to hunt. You want more, move. Leave the United States to those who know the difference between something that is useful for hunting, and something that replaces the manhood you never attained. If you want more, join the Army. If you can't do that, and if you still want something that reloads quickly and gives you plenty of shots, BUY A DAMNED BOW!

But what really puts me over the top is one particular brand of NRA stupidity. That is the myth of the Wild West. In other words, if I hear one more stupid gun-loving sonuvabitch talk about how, "Well, if they just had allowed all those students to have guns, this lunatic at Virginia Tech wouldn'ta got far," I am going to slap his dumb ass on the first plane smokin' for Iraq, where I would like to personally drop him off, with as many guns as he would like, in Dora (that's a particularly nasty South Baghdad neighborhood with which I am familiar).

Yes, Dora would be perfect. In my mind's eye I am imagining plopping said gun nut off outside the blue-painted major police sub-station, just about six or seven blocks from another walled-in compound which is now a police barracks (or, at least it was, last year.). As a microcosm, Dora should be the NRA's dream town, as it perfectly matches the NRA "Wild West" theory of what is needed in a society: honor is important to the individual; the family is the most important part of society; all of the inhabitants are very religious (except for when they are not); and absolutely everyone has at least one gun.
In fact, I would very much like to personally place the CEO of the NRA, Mr. Wayne LaPierre, there right now. What'ya say, Wayne? Want to experience a world where everyone has a gun?

Disconnected

2007-04-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

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It seems pretty clear to me that the general public is about a year ahead of our national political leaders and the pundits that spout the "conventional wisdom". Why is that? How are these guys missing the clear signs of the 2006 elections and the current polling?

Because they're not listening. They only talk among themselves and pat each other on the back. The Washington bubble, I believe it's called.

They do so at their own peril....

The majority of Americans are done with this war. They want out as soon as possible.
The majority of Americans are done with the Bush Administration. They want them out as soon as possible.
The majority of Americans want Congress to excercise their authority. They want this done as soon as possible.

Read the polling numbers and the hard facts from Glen Greenwald in another of his excellent posts on this subject.

-UF

Banana Republicans

2007-04-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

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Scott Horton explains the difference between Lincoln and Roosevelt and Bush and Rove.

I think this label will stick.

-UF

Wow, Time Flies.....

2007-04-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

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My apologies to the 3 regular readers of this blog. Look, I've been busy. Plus, I said I would post more music and food stuff and less politics. Well, the truth is, politics is what's happening right now. The Democrats have been in control of Congress for about 10 minutes and it seems that every rock they turn over has an overwhelming amount of slime underneath. So it just keeps getting more interesting. So, while I will try to be a bit more diverse, political blogging will be what you get for the most part.

Onward and Upward.

-UF

I love the Golden Globes.....

2007-01-16T10:48:00.000-08:00

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The Golden Globes, everyone agrees, is just more fun than any of the other awards shows. It's not stuffy, and has decent categories with semi-sane selections and winners. And everyone on the show gets to drink! This, I think, is the key that really makes it special.

So here's what we do in the Funker household at Golden Globe time. I get to sit with my 15 year old daughter, and my wife, and we just brutally slice and dice on everyone who appears. Even mo' better, with TIVO, we can freeze frame any particularly nasty fashion faux pas and spend extra time bringing the appropriate smack-downs. For instance, we spent a good 5 minutes with Cameron Diaz. I mean, what the hell was that? A white prom dress that would get you immediately kicked off of Project Runway, hidiously matched with the vampire lestat red lipstick. My God. And let's not forget the mousy brown hair. Well actually, lets. This woman barely held it together when she was working the "dumb blonds have more fun" look. Now? I'm talking total disaster. No wonder Justin Timberlake kicked her to the curb. In fact, what was he seeing in her in the first place. Speaking of Mr. Timberlake, how does this former manufactured boy band member, Britney Spears and Cameron Diaz dating, pasty white boy have any street cred what-so-ever? It boggles the mind.

Other TIVO stopping moments that spring to mind;

Is Will Ferrell doing a new movie as Richard Simmons? Nice hair-do.

My, my....serious grandma cleavage for Helen Mirren.

Every one of the skinny anorexic stars, who look like toothpicks with 2 waterballons attached, should study Salma Hayek. That is how a real woman is put together.

Leonardo DiCaprio is finally looking his age. Which may start making some of his movies believable, unlike "Titanic, the love story of a 12 year old".

Philip Berk is a very strange man, who should not be allowed on TV.

Maria Menounos is obviously an idiot.

Tim Allen wins the "Joe Namath" award for too many cocktails before a TV appearance.

Keith sums it up......

2007-01-11T17:28:00.000-08:00

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Keith Olberman gives us a nice little reminder of our fearless leader's plans and ideas. When you stack them all up on top of one another it really hits home. This guy is flailing and failing on a grand scale;

President Bush makes no secret of his distaste for looking backward, for assessing past results.
But in our third story on the Countdown tonight… too bad.

Any meaningful assessment of the president's next step in Iraq must consider his steps and missteps so far.

So, let's look at the record:

Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said he was no nation-builder; nation-building was wrong for America.

Now, he says it is vital for America.

He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control. Today, U.S. troops observe Iraqi restrictions.

He told us about WMDs. Mobile labs. Secret sources. Aluminum tubing. Yellow-cake.

He has told us the war is necessary…Because Saddam was a threat; Because of 9/11; Osama bin Laden; al Qaeda; Because of terrorism in general; To liberate Iraq; To spread freedom; To spread democracy; To keep the oil out of the hands of terrorist-controlled states; Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.

In pushing for and prosecuting this war, he passed on chances to get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Muqtada al-Sadr, Osama bin Laden.

He sent in fewer troops than recommended. He disbanded the Iraqi Army, and "de-Baathified" the government. He short-changed Iraqi training.

He did not plan for widespread looting, nor the explosion of sectarian violence.

He sent in troops without life-saving equipment.

Gave jobs to foreign contractors, not the Iraqis.

Staffed U-S positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.

We learned that "America had prevailed", "Mission Accomplished", the resistance was in its "last throes".

He has said more troops were not necessary, and more troops are necessary, and that it's up to the generals, and removed some of the generals who said more troops would be necessary.

He told us of turning points: The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam, a provisional government,the trial of Saddam, a charter, a constitution, an Iraqi government, ¤elections, purple fingers, a new government, the death of Saddam.

We would be greeted as liberators, with flowers.

As they stood up–we would stand down, we would stay the course, we were never 'stay the course',

The enemy was al Qaeda, was foreigners, terrorists, Baathists.

The war would pay for itself, it would cost 1-point-7 billion dollars, 100 billion, 400 billion, half a trillion dollars.

And after all of that, today it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Republicans, Democrats, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November, and the majority of the American people.

Happy New Year......a little late

2007-01-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

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Welcome to 2007. Where your Uncle Funker promises to post more interesting things (hopefully not all political rants, although that's some pretty low hanging fruit out there) and generally be a better blogger.

I spent New Year's Eve in downtown SF playing a gig right off of Union Square. What a zoo. I usually just stay at the pad and hit bed about 12:01 most New Year's eves. But it was fun to hang with the partying amateurs. Just proves I need to get out a little more often.

I know......

2006-12-12T08:58:00.000-08:00

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Too much politics, not enough music, food, and wine.

It's hard when we are continually bombarded with ugly news from Iraq, and an insistent "stay the course" President. But I will make a concerted effort to address other issues.

I promise.

Wrong from the start......

2006-12-11T15:58:00.000-08:00

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Boy, Atrios is on a roll today. With 20/20 hindsight it all, sadly, starts to come into focus;

What was so frustrating at the time was not simply that a bunch of otherwise intelligent people seemed to have come to the horribly wrong conclusion that invading Iraq was a good idea. What was more frustrating is that there was a collective blindness to the dishonest and destructive way the war was sold, that it seemed not to bother these people that the multiple and shifting dishonest rationalizations for war suggested that there was something deeply wrong with the whole endeavor. It was frustrating that people who supported the war were happy to climb on board not just with the war but with the truly awful people who were the architects of both the war and the propaganda war which, among other things, involved tarring war opponents as brutal-dictator lovers. It was frustrating that they signed up for the whole goddamn enchilada.

Frequently it's been pointed out that they shouldn't have trusted these people to "do it right." But more than that it should have been obvious that they shouldn't have trusted these people to "do the right thing." They made clear during that time that they were, in fact, very bad people.

The War on Christmas

2006-12-11T15:49:00.000-08:00

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How hard is this to understand.....really?? From Atrios;

The War on Christmas

Look, it's very simple. There are two Christmas holidays. One is the secular holiday, decreed by the federal government to be a national holiday, which is celebrated and marked with festive displays of trees, lights, fat guys with beards, and elves, along with lots of shopping and the giving of gifts. The other holiday involves a celebration of the birth of the Messiah, and is celebrated with religious rituals and displays of nativity scenes and other religious imagery.

Public displays of secular Christmas imagery? fine.

Public displays of religious Christmas imagery? less fine.

Christmas trees in airports? fine.
Baby Jesus scenes in airports? less fine.

The sad, sad truth.....

2006-12-11T15:18:00.000-08:00

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Joe Galloway says it better than I ever could;

"All the politicians paid the customary lip service in praising the troops and commending them for the terrible sacrifices they must continue to endure while the wrangling and dithering over a futile war goes on with no end in sight.

How can they look at themselves in the mirror every morning?

Some even suggest sending additional U.S. forces to Iraq -- 20,000 to 30,000 more to try to clean up Baghdad, or as Sen. John McCain suggests, 100,000 more to achieve a victory of some kind.

What are they thinking?

The time to use overwhelming force, according to the Caspar Weinberger-Colin Powell doctrine, is when you launch an invasion. Ratcheting up later is just so 1965, and so hopeless a gesture when the situation has already gone to hell.

Let's get a few more things straight right now.

There's no victory waiting for President Bush in Iraq, and nothing that his father's friends say or do can save him from an ignominious end to his presidency in two years and two months, or from the judgment of history.

There will be no convenient and successful negotiation of a "decent interval" with our enemies Iran and Syria to cover our withdrawal from a war that we should never have started.

There can be no successful Vietnamization in Iraq -- standing up more and better Iraqi army and police units and handing control over to them -- when all we're doing is arming and training more recruits for the civil war that clogs the streets of Baghdad with the corpses of the victims of a Sunni-Shia bloodbath.

What we need to do is what none of the commissions and their reports dared to suggest: Begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq right now. Not in 2008. Not after the American death toll has crossed 5,000. Not just in time for a presidential election.

If you worry about the future of Iraq, don't. It will remain what it's always been: a violent, angry land of warring tribes only occasionally beaten and bludgeoned into submission by a homegrown despot like Saddam Hussein.

If you worry about added turmoil and instability in the Middle East, pull some of those departing American forces back to Kuwait and leave them there on standby. Then redirect thought, energy and effort into salvaging Afghanistan, finding Osama bin Laden, saving Lebanon, negotiating peace between Israel and its enemies, rebuilding the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and, oh yes, ending the uncivil war between Republicans and Democrats.

There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there's only one way to leave Iraq: Load our people up on their trucks and tank transporters and Bradleys and Humvees and head for the border. Now."

We're not going anywhere.....

2006-12-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

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Want to know why "phased withdrawal" means "occupying permanent facilities"? Read Tom Engelhardt's Iraq analysis here.

Nothing like painting ourselves into a corner with the most toxic paint we could find.

-UF

How long in Iraq?

2006-11-17T13:39:00.000-08:00

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Here's a pretty depressing analysis of our potential future management of Iraq.

I think Tom is pretty much right on the mark. Between the large military bases we've built, and the massive embassy, it looks like we're going to be in Iraq in some capacity for a long while.

Colin Powell's original "You broke it, you bought it" assessment sounds pretty accurate right now. For something that the "conventional wisdom" pundits said would be nothing like Vietnam, it sure looks an awful lot like, uh, Vietnam.

Let's check back in a year, and see how much of this article rings true. Any betters?

-UF

Accountability.....

2006-11-10T11:58:00.000-08:00

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Can you spell "subpoena?"

Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight
Ridder newspapers, columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, and co-author of the
national best-seller We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young. Readers may write to
him at: P.O. Box 399, Bayside, Texas 78340; e-mail: jlgalloway2@cs.com.

Better late than never.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is gone, but there's little time
for celebration, even for those of us who long ago began calling for his
removal. The damage that men do lives after them, and it's time at last for an
accounting. The nation’s voters have spoken, and it's reasonable to expect that
the Congress finally will begin to exercise some oversight of the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan after five years of serving as rubber stamp and
doormats.

Can you spell "subpoena?"

For the Democrats who will soon take charge of the House of Representatives
and perhaps the Senate, too, here's a preliminary laundry list of some of the
things that need doing:
A comprehensive investigation of the pre-war
intelligence on Iraq and how it was perverted, how the mine was salted, and by
whom.

A thorough investigation of what pre-war advice was offered by senior
American military commanders on troop strength, equipment requirements and
strategy and tactics. Did even one general ignore the bullying from on high and
ask for more troops, and how did Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
respond?
Why did the Pentagon send American troops into battle without enough armored
vests, armored vehicles, rifles, ammunition, food and water? Who's responsible
for that debacle which cost so much in blood and money?
Where did our money go? Billions of dollars of taxpayer money disappeared
down various rat holes in Iraq, forked over to contractors without even so much
as a handwritten receipt. Who got the money? What did they do for it? This is a
fertile field that can be drilled for years, with a steady stream of
indictments, trials and prison sentences.
What about those no-bid Defense Department contracts that were parceled out
to the Halliburtons and KBRs and Blackwaters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other
more costly weapons and equipment contracts that went to big defense industry
conglomerates accustomed to writing very generous checks to the
Republicans?
Why did an administration that was hell-bent on going to war, with the
inevitable and terrible human casualties among our troops, consistently
underfund the Veterans Administration, which is charged with caring for our
wounded and disabled?
What's been the effect of the grotesque politicization of the selection and
promotion system for senior military commanders by the office of the Secretary
of Defense? What failures have resulted from that ill-conceived action? What
responsibility do those generals and admirals chosen by Donald H. Rumsfeld bear
for the failure to prepare for and conduct effective action against an
inevitable Iraqi insurgency?
Who at the top bears responsibility for the torture and mistreatment of
prisoners and detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and the Guantanamo detention camp?
A score of Pentagon investigations got to the bottom of the chain of command but
declared that the top, in Rumsfeld’s office and the White House, was
innocent.
Who's responsible for breaking our understrength Army and Marine Corps with
endless combat duty tours in Iraq and Afghanistan? Who refused all suggestions
that the force was too small for the mission, and that 50,000 or 100,000 more
men and women were needed in uniform? Who stubbornly refused even to consider
the inevitable consequences of an Army so tied down trying to man these wars
that it no longer could react to an emergency anywhere else in a dangerous
world?
Simply put, the jig is up. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick
Cheney and Rumsfeld have come to the end of their free ride. No longer can they
act without thought or ignore the boundaries of the Constitution, the law and
common sense.
Did they really think they could get away with all of this without ever being
called to answer to history and the American people?
They all deserve what's about to descend on their heads. They deserve every
subpoena. They deserve every indictment. Most of all, they deserve a reserved
place atop the ash heap of history.

Can I get an AMEN!

-UF

Buh, Bye....

2006-11-09T07:58:00.000-08:00

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Hit the road, Rummy.

It's amazing how a little bit of political strength from a functional opposition party can effect change. It's too bad it took 6 years of massive incompetence and arrogance to get to this point.

Of course, it will be interesting to watch how the Democrats question Rummy's replacement during the confirmation hearings.

It seems that some folks feel that Mr. Bush may be making the same mistakes over again with Robert Gates.

“This is not a person with a history of telling truth to power,” said a former subordinate, Melvin A. Goodman, a Soviet analyst from 1966 to 1990.

More analysis on Gates here.

-UF

A clear call for change....

2006-11-08T07:48:00.000-08:00

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I'm proud and happy that Americans remembered yesterday what this country stands for and demanded a change. It's how democracy works, and after an attempt at one party rule, it's heartening to see it still functions....

I think Glen Greenwall says it best;

This was a great victory.

(excerpts)

"Democratic candidates won -- in every part of the country and regardless of their ideology -- by committing themselves to one basic platform. They vigorously opposed what have become the defining attributes of the Republican Party and they pledged to put a stop to them: unchecked Presidential power, mindless warmongering, a refusal to accept or acknowledge realities (both in Iraq and generally), and the deep-seated, fundamental corruption fueling the Bush movement and sustaining their power."

"Democrats didn't win by pretending to be anything. Democrats won because they emphatically and unapologetically vowed to oppose what the Republican Party has become and to put an end to its deeply corrupt and destructive one-party rule -- and that is what Americans, more than anything else, wanted."

"But if nothing else, yesterday's results should galvanize everyone who recognizes the danger this country has been placed in by the radical, hate-mongering, deeply corrupt authoritarians who have been controlling (and destroying) it."

And on the local level. McNerney beats Pombo.

This really is unbelievable and speaks directly to a constituency that had reached a breaking point with the status quo in the House. McNerney is an unknown, untested Democrat that was completely obliterated by Pombo in the election just two years ago. Yet, the need for change resonated so deeply, and Pombo appeared so tied to the apparent corruption in the Republican House, that the folks of the 11th district have decided to give this political greenhorn a tumble, tossing out the powerful chair of the House Committee on Resources.

-UF

VOTE!

2006-11-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

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It's how we can make a difference. As you may have noticed, uh, single party rule has it's issues........