Progressive World Review

Obama signs health insurance reform into law

For more than a year now we’ve watched Congress debate healthcare reform, or more accurately, health insurance reform, with all its fits and starts, twists and turns with increasing frustration regardless of which side you’re on.  For those on the left the aggravation has been particularly acute with the one system, single payer, whose success worldwide at providing comprehensive healthcare to the most people at the least cost has been completely ignored by those charged with reforming our current system.  This debate has also demonstrated beyond any doubt just how broken our democracy is when a minority of senators can effectively block any real change, and where even one senator’s ego can thwart the reform that working Americans so desperately need.

So it’s no great surprise that healthcare reform has devolved into heath insurance reform and while there are many good aspects to the final legislation, rather than breaking the strangle hold that health insurance corporations have over our healthcare system, their power has only increased.  Not only was single payer off the table from the start, people were actually arrested for daring to suggest that it be part of the discussion.  And even the milquetoast alternative, a public option, failed to make it in the final bill, for now at least.  The fact that a public option which would have only been available to the relatively small number of individuals buying their insurance from an exchange was considered such a threat to the insurance giants and therefore excluded in the final bill demonstrates both the power and influence corporations have over our government, and the absurdity that the free market is superior to, and more efficient to any government program.  If that were actually true then the public option would be no threat to private insurance.

So in light of the weakness of the legislation signed into law, is there any reason to be optimistic about our future?  I believe the answer is yes.  The corporatist Republicans threw absolutely everything they had to defeat any type of reform from passing and they failed.  Some may see that because the outcome was far less than what Obama’s base wanted, it was a victory for the right but if that were true Republicans would now be sighing with relief rather than vowing to overthrow this bill in any way possible.  Former Bush speechwriter David Frum was recently fired from the conservative think tank, American Enterprise Institute for criticizing the GOP’s over the top opposition to healthcare reform.  It was Frum’s position that Republicans should have negotiated with Democrats rather than simply attempting to obstruct anything Democrats proposed.  Frum noted that the final bill wasn’t much different than previous GOP healthcare proposals and that by going for “all the marbles,” “[w]e ended up with none.”  Frum declared, “Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s. It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster.” 

Was Frum correct, about compromising I mean?  Should Republicans have accepted their minority status and tried instead to negotiate an outcome more in line with their beliefs rather than “go for all the marbles?”  I believe the answer is no.  I believe the Republicans were terrified of any type of reform, if only subconsciously, because they understand, again if only subconsciously, that the Reagan revolution is finally over and their influence over American politics has finally come to an end.  For thirty years now Americans have bought into the conservative meme that greed is good, that if you get government out of the way of the wealthy that we all would prosper.  But we didn’t prosper, not most of us anyway.  Before Reagan we were the largest creditor nation in the world, now we’re the largest debtor.  Before Reagan our manufacturing industry was the envy of the world, now that envy goes to China.  Before Reagan an average single earner family had more disposable income than the average dual income family has today.  After World War II, and until the folly of Viet Nam, we had a strong, stable economy.  After Reagan, we’ve had a series of boom bust cycles culminating into the worst collapse since the Great Depression.  After the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, after the smoking ruins the GOP has left this country, any change in direction, no matter how slight, would give lie to the Republican orthodoxy we’ve been subjected to over the last three decades.  They knew that reforming healthcare, or anything else for that matter, would be a net benefit to working Americans and a net loss to the right’s corporate masters and they had no choice but to fight it with everything they had.  It may take a little while, but Americans will see that “Obamacare” won’t usher in Armageddon or that none of the other ridiculous hyperbole emanating from the right wing noise machine will turn out to be true either.  In fact, the health insurance reform just passed will actually have a positive effect if only slightly and may very well lead to actual healthcare reform.

We’ve reached a turning point in this country’s history.  The recent spate of violence may be a harbinger of worse things to come or it may just represent the last throes of the evil influence that has dominated our culture for the last thirty years.  I believe the latter.  I believe the Republican’s defeat is America’s victory.

–Paul Wilden

I only managed to catch a relatively small part of the debate as well as some of the “expert” commentary afterwards but there were a couple of standout points I wanted to comment on.  First, Palin will mostly likely be declared the winner by virtue of the fact that she didn’t embarrass herself the way she did in the Couric interview.  It’s pretty sad that not making a complete ass of yourself like you did only days earlier is seen as winning but that’s what passes as expert analysis these days.

Also, Palin tried labeling Obama as wrong on Iraq and the surge while the magnificently prescient McCain got it right but when Biden pointed out each and every error that Bush made regarding the war and how McCain marched in lock step with the president virtually the whole way, all of a sudden examining past errors became “finger pointing” according to Palin.  She’ll no doubt be heralded as a “maverick” for throwing Bush under the bus by pointing out all the “blunders” that were made but somehow pointing out that McCain agreed with those blunders is unworthy of someone campaigning for change.  Palin remarked on how they would learn from past mistakes but failed to mention how that would be achieved without actually admitting to any.  According to Palin, change is about looking to the future, a nice sounding phrase but completely without meaning.  How can you possibly change anything if you’re not willing to examine what it is you want to change?  In fact, this is nothing more than the classic hypocrisy that has marked the entire McCain campaign.  McCain has agreed with Bush on every major issue even to the point of contradicting himself like with the Bush tax cuts, while simultaneously distancing himself from Bush and selling himself as an agent of change.  It would be comical if it didn’t appear to be actually working.

The last point I wanted to bring up was how, after Biden attempted to spin his vote authorizing the Iraq war, Palin remarked how she didn’t quite understand how Washington insiders worked, specifically how those like Biden were “in favor of the war until they were against it.”  But in fact Palin has demonstrated that she knows exactly how it’s done when she was in favor of the “bridge to nowhere^W” until she was against it.  I have no problem with Biden being taken to task for voting for the war, everyone who voted for the war, especially Democrats, need to be held accountable but for Palin to claim the moral high ground is absurd to the extreme after repeatedly lying about opposing the bridge, even after her lies were exposed, not to mention that she took the money even after the bridge project went down in flames.  Actually, Palin would fit right in with the Beltway political class.

–Paul Wilden

With the economy tanking and the financial sector in meltdown the discussion has focused, rightly so, on which candidate, Obama or McCain is the right person to clean up the mess.  Regulation, or more accurately, re-regulation has become the buzzword of the day and McCain has taken to selling himself as a strong proponent of using regulation to restore order and integrity to the financial sector.  It’s a dubious claim at best given that he’s historically supported deregulation including this recent gem published in the current issue of Contingencies where McCain argues that the best way to reform our healthcare system is through deregulation so that the healthcare industry can perform as well as, get ready for this, the financial industry,

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation. (emphasis added)

That John McCain would say one thing one day only to completely contradict himself the next comes as no surprise to anyone actually paying attention.  But in an economy facing its worst crises since the Great Depression, where Americans are genuinely worried about their futures, as troubling as McCain’s double talk on the economy, one would at least expect some connection between his actions as president and his rhetoric as a candidate.  With the entire country clamoring for the reigning in of Wall Street even a deregulation robot like McCain has to concede that something has to change.  So, as disturbing as his two-faced talk of financial regulation is, what is far more disturbing is where McCain’s words and deeds are in agreement.

Of all the crimes and improprieties of the Bush administration, and there have been numerous, the worst of all has been Bush’s utter disregard for the rule of law.  As bad as it was for Bush to lie us into a war, or his warrantless spying on Americans, his most un-Constitutional acts have been his attempts to circumvent the investigative authority of Congress.  Arguably the most important function of Congress is to keep the Executive branch in check by investigating any potential improprieties that may surface.  Integral to this function is the power of the subpoena.  Without the ability to compel witnesses to testify under oath as well as to produce any pertinent documents, Congress’ ability to reach the truth is effectively nullified which is precisely what has happened under this administration.  Bush’s refusal to allow Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten to comply with Congress’ legal subpoenas in the federal attorneys firing scandal has not only thwarted Congress’ investigation into the politicization of the Justice Department, the department charged with enforcing all of this country’s laws, it has sent the clear message that this administration considers itself above the law, and Congress’ acquiescence in the matter has made it a reality.  If Congress is unwilling or unable to conduct investigations, that leaves the Executive branch free to do as it pleases without regard for the Constitution, the rule of law or the wishes of the American people which is exactly what the Founding Fathers set out to prevent.  They were well aware of dangers of an unchecked monarchy which is precisely the reason they drafted a Constitution which empowers the Congress to conduct investigations.

When the McCain camp announced that Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin would not comply with any subpoenas issued by the Alaskan state legislature regarding the “Troopergate” investigation, McCain was signifying that he has no more respect for the Constitution or the rule of law than Bush does.  McCain’s transparently ludicrous rationalization for this was that the investigation, conducted by three Republicans and two Democrats was “tainted.”  How nice it must be to decide which investigations are worthy of your acknowledgement.  What if every citizen had that power?  Of course that’s what the rule of law is all about; everyone is responsible for complying with law, nobody gets to decide which subpoenas they’ll honor and which ones they won’t, no exceptions, not even the president.  Bush has already thumbed his nose at this concept and now McCain has followed suit demonstrating exactly how hollow his promises of “change” really are.  Republicans love to paint Democrats as elitists but how elite must you be to decide which laws you’ll obey.

* * * * * 

Unrelated to today’s topic but too compelling to pass up is Glenn Greenwald’s post where he aptly summarizes what the AIG bailout really says about how this nation operates.  The entire post is worthy of reading but there’s one point I wanted to highlight here,

Can anyone point to any discussion of what the implications are for having the Federal Government seize control of the largest and most powerful insurance company in the country, as well as virtually the entire mortgage industry and other key swaths of financial services? Haven’t we heard all these years that national health care was an extremely risky and dangerous undertaking because of what happens when the Federal Government gets too involved in an industry? What happened in the last month dwarfs all of that by many magnitudes. (emphasis added)

When it comes to healthcare, something every American needs but few can fully afford, any suggestion of a national health insurance plan is met with cries of socialism from the right but hardly a peep is heard when the nation’s largest insurance company is nationalized in order to bailout a relative handful of greedy investors.  Wealthy Wall Street investors took extremely risky gambles with the market but as it turns out, it wasn’t their money they were risking, it was ours.  We had no chance whatsoever of reaping the rewards of taking such risks but was there ever any doubt we’d be on the hook for the losses when the risks no longer paid off?  Moreover, will any of the millions “earned” by these investors be returned to help offset the losses?  Don’t count on it because just like lawbreaking by the political elites there’s virtually no chance of them being held accountable for their actions.

–Paul Wilden

For anyone familiar with the Atwater/Rove school of campaigning, all of the fuss over Barack Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” remark comes as no surprise.  In what was a clear reference to McCain, Obama’s comment was a harmless phrase meant to point out that no matter how much McCain dresses up his policy proposals as “change” they are in fact, just more of the same tired Republican talking points.  The McCain camp immediately seized upon the remark accusing Obama of making a sexist slur against Palin based on the slim, overreaching connection to a Palin comment, “‘What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”  Palin’s reference to lipstick may have indeed put the bug in Obama’s mind to use the “lipstick on a pig” remark but only those with little regard for the truth would suggest that Obama’s target was Palin rather than McCain and the Republicans in general.

This scenario of Republicans diverting attention away from actual issues and on to meaningless “scandals” has repeated itself so many times, for so many years, that the only thing surprising is that anyone still falls for it.  For decades the Republicans have had nothing of value to offer working Americans, supply side economics-cutting taxes for the rich, deregulation and free trade-have failed to keep the promise of prosperity, for those other than the wealthy that is.  So, when truth is not on your side, that leaves you with, well, everything else.  Palin loves to call herself a reformer even if she has to lie to sell it.  The “bridge to nowhere” boondoggle she likes to tell everyone she opposed, “thanks, but no thanks,” when in fact she was strongly in favor of it until it was clear it wasn’t going to happen.  Nor did Palin have any problem spending the money that was “earmarked” for the bridge.  When Palin says she’ll help reform Washington and bring and end to earmarks, apparently she just meant for everyone else.

Little wonder then why McCain picked Palin for his running mate, being no stranger to hypocrisy himself.  There’s the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy that McCain called “irresponsible,” only now he’s in favor of them.  McCain once described the religious right as “agents of intolerance” but that didn’t stop him from seeking out the endorsement of one of their standard bearers, Pastor John Hagee, a man that is the very embodiment of intolerance.  There is virtually nothing in McCain’s message that represents the kind of change that middle and lower class Americans are desperate for but that doesn’t stop him from endlessly using that word in his campaign speeches.  Again, when the truth doesn’t sell, then sell the lie.  When attention towards your policies reveals only that you have nothing to offer, redirect the focus to cheap and tawdry scandals that, true or false, have no bearing on the lives of the electorate.  The Iraq war, the tanking economy, sky high prices for food, fuel and healthcare, these are some of the real issues on the minds of Americans but far from having any answers for these problems, Republicans are mostly responsible for them, so therefore it is imperative that they divert the national discussion to meaningless clichés, tie pins, bowling scores and false accusations over patriotism and religious affiliation.  That is the real pig here, the pig in a poke that is the McCain platform for change.

–Paul Wilden

In what can only be seen as a rather pathetic attempt to win over some of the Clinton supporters, McCain has chosen for his running mate, a woman by the name of Sarah Palin.  The reasons this is so pathetic are several.  McCain has continued to slam Barack Obama for his lack of experience and yet his choice for Vice President is someone who has an embarrassing lack of experience herself.  Before governing one of the least populated states in the union, Palin was mayor of a town of about 6000.  Palin has no foreign policy experience and, unlike Obama, has shown nothing in the way of vision for this country beyond spouting the same tired talking points coming from the religious right for so many years now.  Conservatives are quick to point out that she still has more experience than Obama but for McCain, a 72 year-old man who’s had two bouts of cancer, to criticize Obama’s lack of experience and then choose for this country’s second in command someone with as little experience as Palin, is hypocritical to say the least.

Palin is unlikely to win over many Clinton supporters either because unlike Clinton, who has been a champion for women’s rights for years including fully supporting a woman’s right to control her own body,  Palin has emphatically come out against women’s right to abortion even in cases of rape and incest.  This no doubt will please many on the right but Clinton supporters are looking to increase women’s rights not decrease them.

Palin bills herself as a reformer, willing to take on large corporations and corruption in politics but the reality may be less inspiring.  Palin is currently under investigation for abuse power for allegedly attempting to have a state trooper, her sister’s estranged husband, fired and when that failed, firing his boss for refusing to fire the trooper.  Palin is intricately linked to Senator Ted Stevens who happens to be under indictment for taking bribes from oil pipeline company VECO, a company that has donated to Palins campaign as well.  There’s currently nothing to suggest that Palin has been involved in anything improper here but her strong connections to Stevens hardly qualifies her as a champion against corruption.  And then there’s the infamous “bridge to nowhere,” a pork barrel project that would have cost $398 million and served about fifty people, that Palin bragged to Congress she opposed, saying “thanks but no thanks.”  Except that she was in favor of the bridge until it became clear that it wasn’t going to happen.

And now, Palin, who opposes sex education for our young people and is a tireless defender of “family values,” has just revealed that her seventeen year-old, unmarried daughter is pregnant.  Republicans of course are crying foul now that Palin’s pregnant daughter has become a big story but what goes around comes around.  Ordinarily I would consider this to be no ones business.  I for one, would love to see a complete end to stories of flag pins and bowling scores, sexual scandals and religious affiliations but the Republicans just won’t let this stuff die, just ask McCain about the “black baby scandal” pushed by none other than Karl Rove, king of the dirty tricks campaign.  If you’re going to campaign on “family values,” it’s probably a good idea to actually live them.  But even beyond the obvious hypocrisy is the fact that Palin’s daughter is living proof of the failure of the very policies Palin, McCain and Republican Party expound.  Even worse, Palin’s daughter no doubt, will still have the opportunity to finish school and with the support of her family, go on to do whatever she wants to do with her life.  But what of all the pregnant teens who lack that kind of support structure?  It’s easy to tell others how to live when you are one of the ones with choices but those who’s options are limited need just the kind of education that Palin opposes.  The hypocrisy of Palin and her ilk is obvious but what is far more troubling is her lack of support for those needing it the most.

–Paul Wilden

First the good news, Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was a truly inspirational address that’s certain to rally his supporters as well as win over many of those on the fence, including many of the hold out Clinton supporters, the so called PUMAs.  While it takes a lot more than good speeches to change the direction of a country, it’s vital that before you can change the course of a nation you must first change the national conversation.  The tired rhetoric of defense and patriotism has been replaced with talk of jobs and hope.  Calls for tax cuts for the wealthy and privatization of Social Security have given way to demands for the expansion of the middle class and universal healthcare.  These are the issues that need our attention.  If we hope to have this country work for us again then the focus must be on the issues that affect our lives rather than lapel pins and pastors, patriotism and bowling scores.

Obama took it squarely to McCain, accusing him of being out of touch with working Americans while backing the same stale policies that Bush and the Republicans have been pushing for years,

And next week, we’ll also hear about those occasions when he’s broken with his party as evidence that he can deliver the change that we need.

But the record’s clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time.

Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but, really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than 90 percent of the time?

I don’t know about you, but I am not ready to take a 10 percent chance on change.

The truth is, on issue after issue that would make a difference in your lives — on health care, and education, and the economy — Senator McCain has been anything but independent.

He said that our economy has made great progress under this president. He said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong.

And when one of his chief advisers, the man who wrote his economic plan, was talking about the anxieties that Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a mental recession and that we’ve become, and I quote, “a nation of whiners.”

The last part is particularly significant because it’s an outlook you’ll hear echoed over and over in the weeks to come by pundits, McCain supporters and Washington insiders alike.  The denial that the economy is in freefall and that working Americans are struggling is directly tied to the desire of the powerful to maintain the status quo, something Obama clearly understands,

For over two decades — for over two decades, he’s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy: Give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.

In Washington, they call this the “Ownership Society,” but what it really means is that you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck, you’re on your own. No health care? The market will fix it. You’re on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don’t have boots. You are on your own.

Well, it’s time for them to own their failure. It’s time for us to change America. And that’s why I’m running for president of the United States.

Also reflected in Obama’s speech were his centrist or moderate views such as his position on healthcare.  Clearly Obama supports serious reform in healthcare but still favors a system that utilizes a useless and counter productive private insurance industry that not only needlessly drains off healthcare dollars that could be better spent elsewhere but is so often at odds with healthcare consumers.  Obama doesn’t mention private insurance specifically but it can be inferred by what he did say,

If you have health care — if you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don’t, you’ll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves.

And — and as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.

Preventing insurance companies from denying coverage to those with preexisting conditions is a nice sentiment but doing away with private insurance altogether would eliminate the problem completely.

The bad news however, goes deeper than Obama’s willingness to appease those who prey upon working people, though that is part of it.  In an email newsletter published by author and populist advocate David Sirota, he talks about how even when things change they still remain the same.  While dining with some progressive activists friends after Wednesday’s convention activities, Sirota made this observation,

Over the course of about 10 minutes, a few Obama advisers trickled into the restaurant, followed by a flood of some of the biggest sharks that swim in the murky delta where money and Democratic politics meet. Among others, Bob Rubin (Citigroup chair), Larry Summers (former Treasury Secretary), Jim Johnson (political rainmaker) and Laura Tyson (former Clinton economic adviser) filed in and sat down at a long dinner table – clearly some kind of economic pow-wow with Obama officials, leavened with other political celebrities like former-vice-president-turned- corporate-board-member Walter Mondale and journalist Al Hunt. (emphasis added)

Real change will not come to this country until the power structure changes.  As long as the golden rule still applies-those who have the gold make the rules-nothing is ever really going to change.  And no matter what actually resides in Obama’s heart, so long as power is derived from the wealthy, as evidenced by Sirota’s dinner observations, and not the people, we can expect Washington to operate in the same manner that it has for decades.

Additionally, in the same email, Sirota makes another troubling observation,

Perhaps most troubling has been the involvement of government security agencies in trying to repress those protesting and reporting on the corruption. During a walk through downtown at lunch today, the police were (as they have been all week) patrolling the street in full riot gear.

While I understand the need for security at events like this, the visual expression of force – the billy clubs, armor, helmets, and military-style patrols – are clearly designed to intimidate anyone from raising any kind of uncomfortable questions in any kind of public way. And that intimidation includes jailing reporters.

ABC News reports that just yesterday, “Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.” ABC caught the whole thing on tape – and it perfectly captures the obscene use of Denver’s municipal government to trample the First Amendment and cover-up brazen corruption.

There’s a long history of using the police to suppress dissent and protest, even when conducted peacefully and legally.  As much as we want to believe the authorities exist only for our protection, from union busting to infiltrating law abiding protest groups, law enforcement not only protects life and property but also the existing power structure as well.

In fact it gets worse.  Reported in Glenn Greenwald’s column are events far more troubling than those seen at the Democratic National Convention.  This is what’s going on in preparation for the Republican National Convention,

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

This is an example of the blatant use of power to intimidate those who want only to exercise their constitutional right to assemble freely and protest.  And while the greatly increased severity of this intimidation occurring at the RNC over the DNC was certainly no accident, the fact remains, no matter where you are any real attempt to topple the existing power structure in this country is going to be met with fierce resistance.

This resistance has been emboldened by Bush’s lawlessness and disregard for the Constitution.  From warrantless spying on Americans to the suspension of habeas corpus, the powers that be now have the legal ability to peek into anyone’s private life and to imprison indefinitely anyone deemed undesirable.  These un-Constitutional powers were enacted ostensibly to keep us safe from terrorism but will ultimately and inevitably be used against Americans desiring only to make their government work for them rather than just the privileged few.  After witnessing the overwhelming use of power against those who’ve done nothing, can anyone deny this?

Speaking truth to power has always been challenging, not to mention dangerous, and it will be even more so now.  And while there’s absolutely no question that putting Obama in the White House is far superior to allowing McCain to perpetuate the same failed policies that have all but destroyed this country, don’t forget that the police state we now live in came to be with the full support of the Democratic Party.

–Paul Wilden

The expectation was for Hillary Clinton to call for, in no uncertain terms, her supporters to pledge their support for Barack Obama and in an impassioned speech before the Democratic National Convention; Clinton delivered, in no uncertain terms.  Wasting no time, within the first few minutes, Clinton made it clear why she was there, “Barack Obama is my candidate, and he must be our president.”

Hillary Clinton talked at length about what was at stake, the souring economy, endless war and a government that served the privileged few over the needs of the many, and, speaking directly to those diehards reluctant to switch allegiances to Obama, she reminded everyone what it really is all about,

Tonight, I ask you to remember what a presidential election is really about. When the polls have closed and the ads are finally off the air, it comes down to you, the American people, and your lives, and your children’s (sic) futures.

[...]

I will always remember the single mom who had adopted two kids with autism. She didn’t have any health insurance, and she discovered she had cancer. But she greeted me with her bald head, painted with my name on it, and asked me to fight for health care for her and her children.

I will always remember the young man in a Marine Corps T-shirt who waited months for medical care. And he said to me, “Take care of my buddies. A lot of them are still over there. And then will you please take care of me?”

And I will always remember the young boy who told me his mom worked for the minimum wage, that her employer had cut her hours. He said he just didn’t know what his family was going to do.

[...]

I want you — I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me, or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him?

Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids?

Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage?

Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

We need leaders once again who can tap into that special blend of American confidence and optimism that has enabled generations before us to meet our toughest challenges, leaders who can help us show ourselves and the world that with our ingenuity, creativity, and innovative spirit, there are no limits to what is possible in America. (emphasis added)

These are words that all Americans should heed, Clinton and Obama supporters alike.  There’s an all too common trait in this country to put unreal expectations on our elected leaders, especially the president.  And when those expectations go unmet we take the cynical attitude that “they’re all the same” and “nothing ever changes.”  This is largely due to a political structure, fed by corporate America, that’s highly resistant to change.  The political orthodoxy that calls for moderation and bipartisanship is ultimately to guarantee that the powers that be remain the powers that be.  So, any real change will not come about through a single election of one person, but rather from a concerted effort to make all public offices accountable to the people they’re meant to serve.

After sewing up the nomination Obama made a predictable, though apparently unexpected, turn to the right which had many of his followers disillusioned to the point of reconsidering their willingness to vote for him.  I too was surprised by some of his actions, especially his about face on FISA.  The point being, not only should this have been expected from someone who considers themselves a centrist to begin with, but also, by putting all your hopes on one person without taking on the system as a whole, you’re bound to be disappointed in the results.

The same applies to Clinton supporters.  It’s certainly understandable that, for instance, women who had hoped to shatter the one last great glass ceiling would be reluctant to give up the dream but, even as important as breaking this barrier would be, women’s rights and opportunities will not be fully realized through this one election.  More importantly, now that it’s clear that we won’t have a woman as our next president, what’s next, what’s plan B?

Personally, neither Obama nor Clinton was my first choice.  I respect both as individuals but I always felt that both were far too dependent on the existing political machine to be real agents of change.  But either one would be a much better choice for America than John McCain.  Many would call this choosing between the lesser of two evils but neither Obama nor Clinton are evil, just ill equipped to take on a power structure that has in fact put them both in the positions they currently hold.  McCain on the other hand has absolutely no desire bring about any change at all.  McCain will happily pursue the same radical policies of George Bush, his imperial presidency, the endless war brought about through the insatiable desire for world hegemony, and the unrestricted capitalism that is destroying the middle class.  And it’s for this reason that party unity among the Democrats is so important, far more important than which of these candidates gets the nod because neither of these people will be capable of returning America to Americans by themselves.  It’s going to take all of us to do that, working at all levels of government.

So to the Clinton supporters, the PUMAs, I understand your pain, my candidate didn’t get the nomination either but the stakes are far too high to bicker over who ultimately sits in the oval office.  Your substantial efforts would be far more effective in grass roots organizing than they will be in a fruitless effort to nominate Clinton, an effort that may very well turn back the clock for all women if McCain gets elected.

–Paul Wilden

If there was still any doubt that a John McCain presidency would mean four more years of Bush’s disastrous economic policy, a recent interview with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham should serve to quell any lingering uncertainties, (h/t Think Progress) (emphasis original)

INGRAHAM: And now look: the dollar’s weak, we have serious competition from abroad, government is running a deficit. … What are the Republicans going to do if China ultimately overtakes us economically and does that matter?

MCCAIN: I still believe the fundamentals of our economy are strong. We’ve got terribly big challenges now, whether it be housing or employment or so many of the other – health care. It’s very, very tough times. It’s very tough. But we’re still the most innovative, the most productive, the greatest exporter, the greatest importer.

You don’t need to be an economist to see through the ridiculous assertion that our economy is fundamentally strong, as the same Think Progress story demonstrates,

- Inflation is rising. The U.S. economy is currently experiencing “the worst 12 months of inflation in almost three decades.”

- Real wages are declining. Americans are experiencing a “de facto pay cut.” “Almost everything costs more, even as [Americans] have less money to pay for it.”

- Unemployment is increasing. Americans have experienced “seven consecutive monthly declines in employment.”

- Cost of food is rising. Food prices are quickly increasing and even school lunches across the country will be more expensive in the coming year.

- Optimism about economy is declining. “Optimism in the U.S. economy among CEOs of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies” is at a 16-year low. Americans are similarly pessimistic.

- Foreclosures are still increasing. Home foreclosures were up 55 percent over last year in July and “17 [percent] of all homes for sale in the U.S. are repossessed properties.”

The economy has trumped terrorism, national security and the Iraq war as one of the top issues concerning Americans and yet McCain appears to be unaware that families are hurting and frightened that things will only get worse before they get better. 

The fact that we’re facing what may the worst economic period since the Great Depression spells only bad news for Republican prospects, McCain’s included, given that it’s their failed policies of excessive tax cuts, free trade and deregulation that have precipitated this mess.  Yes, Democrats bear their share of responsibility too but it’s the Republicans who are trying to perpetuate this failure so it’s hardly surprising that McCain would attempt to paint a rosy picture of our current outlook by saying the fundamentals are still strong.

Not only is McCain trying to ignore just how deep our troubles are, his prescription for what ails us is to do more of the same.  The Republican mantra that raising taxes on the rich and regulating markets will only result in job loss has been repeated time and again over the past three decades but it’s precisely these policies that have resulted in a spiraling deficit and the current Wall Street meltdown that threatens to bring our whole economy down with it.  But rather than abandon the failed policies of the past, McCain insists that we stay on the same course, all the while parroting the same misleading talking points as Dean Baker’s article, Swift Boat Economics points out,

Senator McCain now faces a similar situation in this election. He is stuck running on the record of a president who is presiding over an economy that is sinking into recession and is facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. By contrast, Senator Obama can claim the legacy of the strong economy of the Clinton years.

Tarred with the most dismal record of job creation and income growth of any president since the Great Depression, it would be reasonable to expect that Senator McCain would be defensive on the economy; but not in Swift Boat America.

Instead Senator McCain is filling the airwaves with commercials telling the public that Obama’s tax increases will slow growth and cost the economy jobs. It’s pretty scary stuff to anyone who takes it seriously.

Of course, there’s no truth to Senator McCain’s Swift Boat economics. During the eight years of the Clinton administration, when rich people paid the same tax rates proposed by Senator Obama, the private sector added 15.8 million jobs. By contrast, in the seven years and six months of the Bush administration, when rich people paid the Bush-McCain tax rates, the private sector has added just 3.5 million jobs. And, it is losing jobs at the rate of almost 100,000 a month as President Bush prepares for retirement.

Baker goes on to point out the reasons behind economic success or failure go beyond simple tax policy but the fact remains that not only do higher taxes not automatically result in slow growth but in fact the economy can, and has, thrived while everyone pays their share of the tax burden.  And adequate regulation does not have to impede growth but rather, can reign in the kind of greed that led to the housing bubble, Wall Street’s problems and the oil bubble that has lined the pockets of a few while wreaking havoc on the economy in general.

America has, more or less, followed these economic policies for over thirty years now and the result has been not only financial uncertainty in our own lives but also to mortgage our children’s futures.  It’s time to say no to McCain and his failed supply side economics and to begin crafting policies that make sense for working Americans.

–Paul Wilden

I didn’t watch the Rick Warren Saddleback forum.  I’m not exactly sure why Barack Obama agreed to do it in the first place.  Obviously Obama would like to get a piece of the Evangelical vote and he certainly would like to shed the image that he’s a Muslim, a mischaracterization that many still believe.  But what really did he expect to gain from appearing before a group of people that aren’t going to vote for him anyway?  By all accounts, the perceived winner was the candidate you supported to begin with.

McCain supporters liked his short, quick answers, often delivered before Warren had finished asking the question.  Op-ed columnist Michael Gerson predictably picked McCain as the clear winner,

What took place instead under Warren’s precise and revealing questioning was the most important event so far of the 2008 campaign — a performance every voter should seek out on the Internet and watch.

First, the forum previewed the stylistic battle lines of the contest ahead, and it should give Democrats pause. Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral — the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. Obama took care to point out that he had once been a professor at the University of Chicago, but that bit of biography was unnecessary. His whole manner smacks of chalkboards and campus ivy. Issues from stem cell research to the nature of evil are weighed, analyzed and explained instead of confronted. (emphasis added)

Gerson’s anti-intellectualism is showing.  In a society where education is supposedly valued, Gerson’s most stinging jibe is that Obama “smacks of chalkboards and campus ivy.”  Many, if not most, American parents aspire to send their children to college but to Gerson, apparently a college education is a liability in a president, or at least acting like you have one.  Moreover, in Gerson’s world, understanding a problem and confronting it are mutually exclusive activities, “Issues from stem cell research to the nature of evil are weighed, analyzed and explained instead of confronted.”  As if it’s not possible or desirable to analyze a situation before acting on it.  To conservatives like Gerson, nuance is a sign of weakness while bold action based on instinct is a sign of strength.  Bush is famous for this, “we don’t do nuance,” of course his approval ratings are so embarrassingly low that even McCain has tried to distance himself from him.  It’s Bush’s lack of nuance, his lack of respect for intellectualism that has caused him all of his troubles.  Bush was warned by many bright and talented people not to invade Iraq but he refused to listen, instead, trusting his instincts, he decided on a course of action that now, most Americans agree was foolish but don’t try telling that to either McCain or Gerson.

For Obama’s supporters, McCain’s answers were seen as “canned,” as quick sound bites designed to score points rather than illuminate.  Obama was seen as “thoughtful” and as even Gerson admits, “Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral,” again, apparently undesirable qualities in a president.  In Sally Quinn’s column, she summed up Obama’s performance like this,

That kind of nuance is hard to understand sometimes — it’s unclear, complicated. Obama’s world can be scarier. It’s multicultural. It’s realistic (yes, there is evil on the streets of this country as well as in other places, and a lot of evil has been perpetrated in the name of good). It’s honest. When does life begin? Only the antiabortionists are clear on that. For the majority of Americans (who are pro-choice), it is “above my pay grade,” in Obama’s words, where there is no hard and fast line to draw on what’s worth dying for, and where people of all faiths have to be respected.

I would rather live in McCain’s world than Obama’s. But I believe that we live in Obama’s world. (emphasis added)

And that’s what it’s really all about.  We all want to live in that fairy book world where good and evil are clearly defined, where all the answers are easy and unambiguous.  But wishing doesn’t make it so.  Our world is complex, our actions often have unanticipated consequences, and it’s not always easy to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys.  And it’s in this world where we need the best and the brightest to lead the way.  The ones who understand the nuance, who can distinguish between the shades of gray, will be the ones providing the answers we seek in this dangerous and confusing world.

–Paul Wilden

When former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales resigned in disgrace last year, it was hoped that his successor, Michael Mukasey would return professionalism to the Justice Department.  The Department of Justice traditionally sidesteps the partisan politics that plague other departments.  Charged with enforcing the laws of the land; their duties can and sometimes include prosecuting the very people responsible for appointing them.  Which is why the politicization of the Department under Gonzales’ direction (who most likely was taking orders from Karl Rove), was viewed so harshly, ultimately leading to his resignation.

Originally, Mukasey was seen as a staunch conservative with essentially the same worldview as Bush but still, a man that could act independently enough to do the job he was appointed for.  This is what Glenn Greenwald wrote when Mukasey’s name first surfaced as Gonzales’ replacement,

There is no question that Judge Mukasey, a Reagan appointee who served as the Chief Judge for the Southern District of New York before retiring recently, is close to the far right on the judicial spectrum. He undoubtedly holds many legal and political views which most Democrats would find objectionable, perhaps even intolerable. But that will be true of any nominee Bush selects, and it is true of the current Acting Attorney General, Paul Clement, who will remain in place if no nominee is confirmed.

I want to highlight one extremely relevant consideration concerning Judge Mukasey — the impressive role he played in presiding over the Jose Padilla case in its earliest stages. After Padilla was first detained in April 2002 and declared an “enemy combatant,” he was held incommunicado, denied all access to the outside the world, including counsel, and the Bush administration refused to charge him with any crimes. A lawsuit was filed on Padilla’s behalf by a New York criminal defense lawyer, Donna Newman, demanding that Padilla be accorded the right to petition for habeas corpus and that, first, he be allowed access to a lawyer. That lawsuit was assigned to Judge Mukasey, which almost certainly made the Bush DOJ happy.

But any such happiness proved to be unwarranted. Judge Mukasey repeatedly defied the demands of the Bush administration, ruled against them, excoriated them on multiple occasions for failing to comply with his legally issued orders, and ruled that Padilla was entitled to contest the factual claims of the government and to have access to lawyers. He issued these rulings in 2002 and 2003, when virtually nobody was defying the Bush administration on anything, let alone on assertions of executive power to combat the Terrorists. And he made these rulings in the face of what was became the standard Bush claim that unless there was complete acquiescence to all claimed powers by the President, a Terrorist attack would occur and the blood would be on the hands of those who impeded the President.

Unfortunately, Greenwald’s optimism proved to be unfounded.  The first cracks in Mukasey’s “independent” façade occurred with his confirmation hearing when he refused to declare the interrogation technique of waterboarding as illegal.  It only went downhill from there.  Included among his exploits are, his apparent lie in support of Bush’s blatantly un-Constitutional and illegal spying on Americans, and his refusal to enforce the Congressional subpoenas issued to White House aides, Harriet Miers, Joshua Bolten and Karl Rove.

And now, if there was any doubt left that he’s no more than a Bush loyalist, eager to do Bush’s bidding, Mukasey has publicly announced that he won’t pursue the prosecutions of Justice Department officials that were guilty of politicizing the department, the very scandal that removed Gonzales as Attorney General.  Unbelievably, Mukasey’s explanation, in a speech before the American Bar Association, was that the people involved have suffered enough, (h/t Think Progress)

That does not mean, as some people have suggested, that those officials who were found by the joint reports to have committed misconduct have suffered no consequences. Far from it. The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the Department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity. … To put it in concrete terms, I doubt that anyone in this room would want to trade places with any of those people. (emphasis added)

Since when is it the Attorney General’s job to decide exactly what punishment lawbreakers deserve?  That’s supposed to be the job for a judge not the prosecutor.  His rationalizations only get more confused,

I am well aware that some people have called on me and on the Department to take even more drastic steps than those I have described. For example, some commentators have suggested that we should criminally prosecute the people found in the reports to have committed misconduct. Where there is evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we vigorously investigate it. And where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute. But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws. (emphasis added)

“Not every violation of the law[] is a crime?”  From which parallel universe is that true?  A violation of the law is the very definition of a “crime,” and it certainly can’t be argued that these “violations of the law” were too minor to be concerned with; this scandal is one of the biggest to hit this country in recent memory.  That it isn’t the biggest scandal is only because of the unmatched lawlessness of the Bush administration overall.  Clearly it’s to Bush that Mukasey’s loyalties lie, rather than to the Constitution, the rule of law or the very people he’s sworn to serve.  Mukasey has yet to show any of the independence or integrity his position deserves.  In fact, Mukasey has proven to be no better than his disgraced predecessor.

–Paul Wilden

In an article buried on page A15, the New York Times reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has admitted to improperly obtaining the phone records of certain reporters.  The records reportedly were acquired as part of a “terrorism investigation” but it wasn’t revealed what the records and terrorism had to do with each other,

F.B.I. officials said the incident came to light as part of the continuing review by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into the bureau’s improper collection of telephone records through “emergency” records demands issued to phone providers.

The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.

This would be disturbing in any case but particularly because this isn’t the only incidence of impropriety by the bureau recently,

An initial report by the inspector general last year found that the F.B.I. had violated its own policies in tens of thousands of cases by obtaining phone records in terrorism investigations through what are known as national security letters, without first getting needed approval or meeting other standards. In some cases, the F.B.I. used a whole new class of demands – emergency or “exigent” letters – that are not authorized by law. The emergency records were used in the Indonesian episode.

The FBI has apologized to the affected reporters but has not addressed the serious questions surrounding this episode, namely, what do reporters’ phone records have to do with terrorism and, if there was a legitimate reason for wanting the records, why then the secrecy?

It has become far too easy to use “terrorism” as an excuse to circumvent the Constitution and disregard the rule of law.  From involving us in an unnecessary war to spying on Americans to the suspension of habeas corpus, terrorism has literally been this administration’s get of jail free card.  Now, the FBI is trying to play that same card.  This can no longer be tolerated, this culture of secrecy and anything goes in the name of fighting terrorism has to end now and full disclosure of what the FBI was doing with the phone records of journalists is a good place to start.

–Paul Wilden

In a verdict that surprised no one, Bin Laden’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan was convicted of providing material support to terrorism.  Hamdan was however, acquitted on the more serious charge of conspiracy to kill Americans, apparently because, even in a kangaroo court, they couldn’t produce anyone he might have actually conspired with.  From a New York Times editorial,

The rules of justice on Guantánamo are so stacked against defendants that the only surprise was that Mr. Hamdan was actually acquitted on the more serious count of conspiring (it was unclear with whom) to kill Americans during the invasion of Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001.

Predictably, the administration has claimed victory despite the fact that many are calling the trial and verdict a disaster for Bush and a “rebuke of the White House“.

Considering that hearsay, secret documents and coerced testimony were allowed as evidence, the outcome should be seen as anything but a victory for Bush’s administration.  Moreover, the testimony of Colonel Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor in Guantánamo, exposed the proceedings for the sham they actually were,

Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor in Guantánamo, put the trial in a disturbing light. He testified that he was informed by his superiors that only guilty verdicts would be tolerated. He also said that he was told to bring high-profile cases quickly to help Republicans score a pre-election public relations coup.

The true motivation behind Hamdan’s trial had nothing to do with fighting terrorism or ensuring the safety of Americans, but rather was a shameless attempt to gain political traction by a deeply unpopular administration mired in corruption and malfeasance,

Colonel Davis gave up his position on Oct. 4, 2007. That, he wrote in The Los Angeles Times in December, was “the day I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system.”

In his article, Colonel Davis described a highly politicized system in which people who were supposed to be neutral decision-makers were allied with the prosecutors. According to Colonel Davis, Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushed out a fair-minded “convening authority” – the official who decides which cases go to trial, which charges will be heard and who serves on the jury.

That straight-shooting administrator was replaced by Susan Crawford who, Colonel Davis said, assessed evidence before charges were filed, directed the prosecution’s preparation and even drafted charges. This “intermingling” of “convening authority and prosecutor roles,” Colonel Davis argued, “perpetuates the perception of a rigged process.”

Nobody is suggesting that truly dangerous terrorists shouldn’t be caught, tried and locked away if they are actually guilty of harming innocent civilians, but the fact of the matter is this:  the prosecution of what is almost certainly a low level grunt in al-Qaeda’s employ using blatantly illegal tactics neither avenges the deaths of those lost on 9/11 nor makes America one iota safer.  The only result from this will be to further reduce America’s stock in the world community.  Only by setting a shining example of freedom and democracy can we expect to have the full and necessary support from the peace loving countries on this planet as well as provide an example for the struggling nations to aspire to.

–Paul Wilden

Republicans are often credited with their ability to stay on message.  Their capacity for presenting a united front is unmatched by the Democratic Party.  This is hardly surprising though when you consider the fact that when unconstrained by reason or reality the only requirement for agreement is loyalty to the party, something Republicans possess in abundance.  This is no better exemplified than in a recent Charles Krauthammer column, “Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let Someone Else Drill.”  Krauthammer repeats several recent Republican talking points despite the fact that they’ve all been thoroughly discredited.  To start with, Krauthammer points out the decline in domestic oil production as if it’s a Democratic plot, without actually attributing its cause,

Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it’s 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent.

The innuendo of course is that moratorium against offshore drilling as well as drilling in other protected habitats such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) region of Alaska is the cause.  The reality however is that peak oil production in the United States-the tipping point where it is no longer possible to increase the annual amount of oil produced–was accurately predicted in the mid fifties by oil analyst M. King Hubbert, hardly a leftist, tree-hugging activist.  Hubbert’s model continues to be used today to predict the peak and decline of limited resource commodities like oil.

The next debunked talking point concerns the safety of modern offshore drilling.  Several people from the right, including John McCain, have made the wildly inaccurate statement that hurricane Katrina caused no oil spills, a point Krauthammer faithfully repeats,

Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.

The reality is that Katrina caused extensive damage resulting in millions of gallons of spilled oil.  The oil slicks were so large they could be seen from space.  This myth has been widely repeated and thoroughly repudiated but as previously mentioned, it’s easy to repeat lies when one has little use for the truth.

Finally, Krauthammer accuses Democrats of NIMBYism (not in my backyard), by claiming calls for OPEC to increase oil production amounted to the same thing as drilling in the protected areas of the U.S.,

Democrats want no oil from the American OCS or ANWR. But of course they do want more oil. From OPEC. From where Americans don’t vote. From places Democratic legislators can’t see. On May 13 Sen. Chuck Schumer — deeply committed to saving just those pieces of the planet that might have huge reserves of American oil — demanded that the Saudis increase production by a million barrels a day. It doesn’t occur to him that by eschewing the slightest disturbance of the mating habits of the Arctic caribou, he is calling for the further exploitation of the pristine deserts of Arabia. In the name of the planet, mind you.

The flaws in this reasoning are several.  Comparing the increase in production from already producing oil fields to drilling in a pristine wilderness is disingenuous to the extreme, as is comparing that to offshore drilling where a relatively minor accident can cause devastating results as we’ve already witnessed.  Additionally, while it’s no longer clear that OPEC has the ability to increase their production to the levels we would desire, whatever increase in output that could be achieved could happen relatively soon, as opposed to the seven years or longer it would take to ramp up new production nationally.

But the most dishonest part of this argument is in the suggestion that increasing foreign oil imports represents the core of the Democratic plan to supply America with the energy we require.  In fact, Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama’s energy plan combines several factors from alternative energy sources to conservation.  Obama’s suggestion that every American check and adjust the tire pressure of their vehicles produced ridicule from John McCain, that is until he was forced to admit Obama’s proposal made sense,

“Obama said a couple of days ago says we all should inflate our tires. I don’t disagree with that. The American Automobile Association strongly recommends it,” McCain said.

It’s been estimated that drilling in the protected areas might reduce the price of gas by six cents a gallon-a decade from now-while if every American car and truck had their tires inflated to the proper pressure, it would lower the price of gas by twice as much-right now-and without releasing additional greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere that increased oil production, from anywhere, would.

Krauthammer’s OPEC argument is not one that I’ve heard from other Republicans, yet, but no doubt it will be if it gains popularity, regardless of how misleading it is.

A Republican talking point not mentioned in Krauthammer’s article but commonly forwarded by other conservatives is the absurd notion that the recent drop in gas prices is due to Bush’s proposal to end the moratorium on drilling.  Nothing could be more ridiculous.  Even if the ban on drilling had actually ended, rather than just proposed, it would have absolutely no effect on present gas prices.  Gas futures are traded based on trends over weeks and months, not years.  The drop in prices have to due with the fact that the sky high price of gas has forced Americans to drive less, consuming approximately two percent less fuel in recent months.  And the fact that such a small reduction could have such a significant effect is a testament to the role speculation plays on the price of fuel, speculation that due to deregulation, is done mostly in the dark.

This has been a short list of dishonest and misleading Republican talking points.  There have been countless more in the past and no doubt they will continue, all with one thing in common, their basis in fact will always be less important than their ability to prey on the fears and uncertainties of voters in order to garner support for whatever the Republican agenda happens to be.

–Paul Wilden

Back in 2004, Judith Miller was cited for contempt because she refused to name the source of the leak that identified Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative.  Miller ultimately spent nearly three months in a New York City jail until finally, after receiving permission from her source, revealed the name of the person who leaked the information to her-one Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff.

The story sparked quite a controversy due to the circumstances surrounding the case.  Many felt that Miller was correct to protect her source, citing the duty of a reporter to protect their sources as sacrosanct, while others argued that a reporter is under no obligation to protect someone who has deliberately lied in order to use the press to disseminate propaganda.  Complicating the issue further was Millers’ previous journalistic misconduct when she published stories regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs that proved to be utterly false.  Miller was clearly biased in favor of going to war with Iraq, causing her to regurgitate White House press releases as if they were in fact, independently investigated reports.  This didn’t endear her to many who might have otherwise been inclined to stand with her.

Fast forward to the present and we find ourselves entangled in the same controversy all over again.  In an apparent suicide, government scientist Bruce E. Ivins died Tuesday, just as the Justice Department was preparing to charge him with sending the anthrax laced letters that caused the deaths of five people back in 2001.  Or so we’re told anyway.  The case against Ivins may not be as open and shut as many would have us believe.  But there is one thing that happens to be perfectly clear-the anthrax laced letters were in no way connected to Saddam Hussein as was widely reported in the beginning.  Brian Ross of ABC News reported back in October 2001 that traces of the chemical bentonite, a signature element of Saddam’s weapons program was found in the anthrax samples.  From a Wikipedia entry on the attacks,

In late October, 2001, ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross several times linked the anthrax sample to Saddam Hussein; on October 26, “sources tell ABCNEWS the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite. The potent additive is known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons – Iraq…. it is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program…The discovery of bentonite came in an urgent series of tests conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and elsewhere,” on October 28, stating that “despite continued White House denials, four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica.”, and several times on October 28 and 29.

But if in fact the anthrax came from U.S. government labs as would have to be the case if Ivins was responsible, then the “source” of Ross’s story had to have been lying.  The reason for the deception is obvious, linking Hussein to the anthrax letters was arguably as important as any of the lies told to move public opinion towards going to war in Iraq.

And this is where these two stories converge.  In the case of Plame, an undercover intelligence operative’s identity was compromised while in the anthrax attacks, five people actually died, but in both cases the issue has morphed into something far more significant, that the media has been deceived and manipulated into spreading propaganda resulting in a war that has caused the deaths of literally thousands including more American lives lost than were killed on 9/11.

And this is why the question, when or if it is appropriate for a journalist to reveal their sources, must be visited.  It must be understood that the entire purpose of protecting sources in the first place is to serve the reader’s need for the truth.  Protecting a source after all is simply an inducement to have those in possession of important information to reveal what they know, safe in the knowledge that their identity won’t be revealed.  But the sanctity here isn’t in the hiding of a person’s name; it’s in bringing the truth to light.  And the moral and ethical imperative isn’t protecting the source but rather, informing the reader.  The journalistic vow to protect their sources is vitally important and is not to be taken lightly but not to the point of forgetting that it’s the search for the truth that is paramount.

In both of these cases the sources deliberately lied in order to manipulate the press into advancing their agenda.  When it becomes clear that the source is intentionally lying, particularly when high ranking government officials are involved, no longer can they be considered sources.  When it’s revealed that the government is in fact lying to those they’ve sworn to serve, that then becomes the story.  No longer are reporters obligated to protect their identities, their obligation is now to reveal their identity.  This is the nature of a transparent democracy as well as the profession of those entrusted to keep it transparent.

–Paul Wilden

King George’s realm is a little less secure today as a federal court has ruled that aides to the president must comply with Congressional subpoenas to appear before them.  Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten were compelled by Congress to supply testimony and documents to the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys-firings that appear to have been politically motivated.

Judge John Bates, an appointee of the elder Bush, said in his written opinion (.pdf) that there is nothing in case law to support the claim of absolute immunity offered by the Bush administration,

The Executive cannot identify a single judicial opinion that recognizes absolute immunity for senior presidential advisors in this or any other context. That simple yet critical fact bears repeating: the asserted absolute immunity claim here is entirely unsupported by existing case law.  In fact, there is Supreme Court authority that is all but conclusive on this question and that powerfully suggests that such advisors do not enjoy absolute immunity

It’s important to note that this is not a done deal as the administration is expected to appeal the decision.  Nor does this decision strip away all claims to executive privilege with regard to specific documents or conversations, only that the Bush aides must comply with the subpoenas and actually appear before the committee.  The decision does however apply to Karl Rove who in a separate incident has also refused to appear before Congress.

Whether or not any useful testimony comes from this remains to be seen but the real significance is in the fact that yet again the courts have ruled against Bush’s radical theories of executive power to go along with previous court decisions against his un-American and un-Constitutional opinions regarding habeas corpus and torture.

Bush has thumbed his thumbed his nose at the Constitution and to the rule of law, indeed the “unitary executive” theory his administration adheres to not only flies in the face of the American values of liberty and equality that we cherish, but Bush actually believes places him above the law, hence his notion that he has the authority to excuse his aides from complying with legally issued subpoenas, something that if anyone else did would quickly land them in jail.

So today’s ruling is a small but welcome chip in the crown of King George and his imperial presidency.

–Paul Wilden

In an unbelievable display of hypocrisy, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) expressed dismay over reports that foreign owned hotels in China faced severe retaliation if they refused to install Internet monitoring software that would allow the Chinese government to observe all of the Internet activity of the hotel’s guests. (h/t Think Progress) From a CNN broadcast, as quoted by Think Progress,

BROWNBACK: This is the public security bureau in China requiring the installation of hardware that they can listen to anybody and everybody’s and their communications and their recordings that are sent over the internet in a real-time purpose or over long-term. That’s spying, John. [...] Your internet communications can all be monitored in a real time basis by the public security bureau of the Chinese government. I think they’re clearly intent upon spying. they’re going to be spying. (emphasis original)

What makes this so outrageous is the fact that Brownback just recently voted in favor of allowing our own government the power to spy on its citizens.  When asked to explain the difference between the two spy programs this was Brownback’s response,

We don’t put the hardware and software on hotels. If there is a targeted individual that seems to be a likely prospect of terrorists, they must go through the FISA court and ask for a court to determine that there is probable cause to be able to listen in on that information.

But this is precisely wrong.  That’s the way FISA was originally written, and even then it was still controversial due to the secrecy that cloaked the FISA court and the fact that reportedly, only two warrants were ever refused.  But the FISA bill recently passed, with Brownback’s assent, doesn’t even require this minimal amount of judicial review.  Brownback is correct in stating that the hardware and software won’t be installed on hotels, because it doesn’t have to be, it’s already been installed at the offices of the telecommunications companies.  The government can and does have the ability to eavesdrop on virtually any electronic communication it wants regardless of where it takes place.

The Chinese government is unquestionably authoritarian and oppressive and I don’t support for one minute the monitoring of Internet communications or any other communications for that matter but at least in China you know you have no expectation of privacy.  In this country we do have that expectation that is until recently, making our own domestic spying program even worse than theirs.  For years we’ve been critical of China’s authoritarian government, vigorously condemning their human rights abuses only now to witness our own government sink to the same level and our leaders are too blind, stupid or dishonest to appreciate the comparison.

–Paul Wilden

If you’ve ever wondered how conservatives can believe some of the ridiculous things that they do, how they can call themselves patriots while trashing the Constitution or talk about responsibility while blaming anyone and everyone for the problems they themselves have caused, one need look no further than Andrew Klavan’s Washington Journal column, “What Bush and Batman have in Common.”  Honestly, I could just stop here, the title says it all.  Only in the deluded world of a conservative authoritarian would anyone seriously compare the hapless yet dangerous Bush to a comic book hero, or want to for that matter.

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.

If this movie really is a tribute to Bush, then where are the record breaking crowds coming from?  Bush’s approval rating is at an abysmal 27% as measured by Fox News.  They must each be seeing this movie a multitude of times.

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

“[P]ush[ing] the boundaries of civil rights” is a laughable understatement, Bush is responsible for suspending habeas corpus, a power that kings have not possessed since the signing of the Magna Carta and not on a temporary basis as Klavan is claiming but permanently.  Additionally, Bush has been spying on American citizens starting before 9/11 to an extent we’re only just beginning to understand.  One has to wonder if it had been discovered that Bill Clinton had violated the Constitution the way Bush has, even after a terrorist attack, would Klavin be as unconcerned as he is now?  Hardly, they would have tarred and feathered him and rode him out on a rail.

This is classic authoritarianism, where they place a child like trust in their leaders to always do the right thing.  Not only do they forget that they can’t always count on having someone in office that they actually do trust but also, that trust can and will be betrayed.  As the saying goes, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  This is a concept that the Founding Fathers were well aware of, that’s why they designed our government with checks and balances but apparently the Klavans of this world think they know better than Thomas Jefferson or John Adams et al.  They may think they know better but the rest of us beg to differ.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right — only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like “300,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Spiderman 3″ and now “The Dark Knight”? (emphasis added)

Morality?  What kind of twisted mind does one have to have in order to think that Bush’s torture regime represents anything resembling morality?  Torture is immoral at any time, for any reason but especially when you consider the number of innocent victims there are of Bush’s “morality”.  And how about Bush’s lawlessness?  He’s admitted to breaking the FISA law–after he was caught.  Is thumbing his nose at the rule of law another example of morality?  No doubt Klavan defends Bush’s decision to break the law on the basis of fighting evil, but if Bush was acting so nobly, why then did he take such pains to keep it a secret?  Why indeed is his whole administration shrouded in secrecy?  Is this the kind of morality we should be teaching are children?  It’s okay to break the law as long as you think it’s necessary, just don’t get caught. 

There are circumstances where breaking the law really is necessary, that’s what civil disobedience is.  Martin Luther King Jr. broke the law many times in his life to protest unjust laws, but unlike Bush, King didn’t try to hide his actions like a sniveling coward, King did what he did in plain view and accepted the full consequences for his actions.  That’s a morality and integrity that neither Bush nor Klavan will ever know.

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them — when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love. (emphasis added)

That’s not complexity, that’s called hypocrisy, and it’s the battle cry of the truly deluded where the ends justify the means and anything goes as long as you’re on the side of righteousness, just ask Hitler.

–Paul Wilden

In 2004 John McCain was asked about the possibility of withdrawing from Iraq if requested by Iraqis, even if we weren’t happy with the conditions at the time, (h/t Think Progress) (emphasis original)

QUESTION: Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it’s a hypothetical, but it’s at least possible.

McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because – if it was an elected government of Iraq – and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.

However, since Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki’s unequivocal statement endorsing an Obama style timetable for withdrawal, conservatives are coming out of the woodwork claiming that’s not what he really meant, or that Americans aren’t concerned with what Iraqi leaders want, anything they can come up with rather than come out and tell the truth that it was never about the Iraqi people, or the American people either for that matter.

The latest comes from McCain foreign policy advisor Max Boot in a Washington Post column, Behind Maliki’s Games.  The entire article is one shameless straw man argument after another.  Boot starts off with an attack on Democrats, hardly surprising,

There is some irony in the fact that Democrats, after years of deriding Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a hopeless bungler and conniving Shiite sectarian, are now treating as sacrosanct his suggestion that Iraq will be ready to assume responsibility for its own security by 2010. Naturally this is because his position seems to support that of Barack Obama.

There’s no irony because the charge is completely false.  Nobody is saying Iraq is ready for anything, the damage done to that country will take years to fix and not likely by al-Maliki’s government.  The point is this, Bush and his supporters, including McCain, have repeatedly said that if we’re asked to leave then we’ll leave.  But now that we actually have been asked to leave, we show no signs at all of submitting to their request.  This has nothing to do with any sudden change of heart for al-Maliki or the future of Iraq, this has to do with holding the Iraq war cheerleaders to their word and finding their word lacking.

The article continues with accusations of al-Maliki playing politics and his lack of military experience.  Boot also takes al-Maliki to task for not properly appreciating the dubious value of the surge.  Considering that Boot’s advisee, McCain, mistakenly credits the surge with starting the “awakening,” where the Sunnis broke with al-Qaeda in Iraq and turned against them, it’s more than likely that al-Maliki’s assessment of what caused the reduction of violence in Iraq is more accurate than Boot’s.

Even now, when the success of the surge is undeniable, Maliki won’t give U.S. troops their due. In the famous interview with Der Spiegel last weekend, he was asked why Iraq has become more peaceful. He mentioned “many factors,” including “the political rapprochement we have managed to achieve,” “the progress being made by our security forces,” “the deep sense of abhorrence with which the population has reacted to the atrocities of al-Qaida and the militias,” and “the economic recovery.” No mention of the surge.

But it really comes down to the last paragraph,

Of course, if the Iraqi government tells us to leave, we will have to leave. But, the prime minister’s ambiguous comments notwithstanding, the Iraqi government is saying no such thing, because most Iraqis realize that the gains of the surge are fragile and could be undone by a too-rapid departure of U.S. forces.

Only in Boot’s fevered imagination was al-Maliki’s statement ambiguous.  It comes down to this, Iraq’s troubles are the direct result of the American occupation and they won’t end until we leave.

–Paul Wilden

The rationalizations for the Iraq war have been a moving target from its inception.  First Bush claimed a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, next, they were a threat to national security with their weapons of mass destruction and “mushroom clouds over New York City,” and when those justifications were shown to be without merit it became bringing democracy to the Iraqi people.

As time went by each rational for war fell by the wayside and more and more Americans turned against the war until being anti-war was no longer a “fringe” position, a clear majority of Americans turned against the war and wanted the U.S. to extricate itself from Iraq.  So why then do we remain?  The answer is, in part, because admitting failure is not in Bush’s playbook.  In some people denial is so strong that the more the evidence turns against them, the stronger their resolve becomes.  Bush, as well as Cheney who was likely the driving factor behind the war, are just such men.  But what was even more important than the denial however, is that the stakes are so high.  It’s important to understand that to men like Bush, the lies that were told and the manipulation of public opinion were just tools to be utilized to achieve the intended goal, and that goal was to gain a foothold in the Middle East.

Aside from all the talk of bringing peace to the region, the reality was that it was always about the oil.  According to the foreign policy “experts” of the neocon think tank, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), Iraq was the key.  Topple Hussein and bring “democracy” (read: pro American government), to Iraq and it would blossom throughout the Middle East thus guaranteeing the U.S. of a reliable source of oil to fuel its money making capitalist machine.  They can’t come out and say that because that would be to admit that thousands of young Americans will have died in order to line the pocket of the wealthy so the rationalizations continue even though, by now, we all know they’re false.

Which is why the latest from the McCain camp was so revealing.  The final rationalization for staying in Iraq was that we’ll go when they want us to go, a sentiment that McCain has agreed with.  From the Think Progress website,

QUESTION: Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it’s a hypothetical, but it’s at least possible.

McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because – if it was an elected government of Iraq – and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people. (emphasis original)

Well, they want us to go.  In an unambiguous statement, Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki has come out in favor of Barack Obama’s 16 month plan to withdraw from Iraq.  From another Think Progress post,

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.” [...] (emphasis original)

But just as all of the other rationalizations have proven to be false, so it would appear is the last one.  This is what a senior McCain official had to say,

In response to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s clear statement in support of a 16-month redeployment from Iraq, a senior McCain official tells Marc Ambinder “[V]oters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.”

So it wasn’t about 9/11, it wasn’t about national security and it certainly wasn’t about the Iraqi people.  It’s time to end the charade and get out of Iraq as soon as is practicably possible.

–Paul Wilden

Think Progress ran a story today highlighting Senator Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) habit of obstructing Senate legislation.  According to the article, Coburn currently has holds on 80 Senate bills. 

On Monday, the Wonk Room reported on Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) stubborn insistence that the bipartisan President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief bill (PEPFAR) include a wasteful earmark mandating that “55 percent of the money go to treatment programs.” Speaking on the Senate floor, Coburn suggested that his insistence on restoring the mandate saved the PEPFAR program.
…
But Coburn is no hero. Far from it. In his three years in the senate, Coburn has earned the reputation of “a fly in the soup,” abusing the senate’s hold privilege – a technique which allows senators to “object to bringing a bill or nomination to the floor for consideration” – to prevent “the Senate leadership” from bringing matters to a vote.
…
Currently, “Coburn has holds on about 80 bills” which are “non-controversial, bipartisan bills that he just doesn’t like.”

A hold is a little known parliamentary procedure that allows a Senator to prevent a bill from coming up for a vote, ostensibly to prevent legislation from being rushed through before allowing everyone a chance to thoroughly examine it but is frequently used to hold up votes on legislation that is seen as objectionable.

What is so disturbing about this, beyond the obvious, is how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has allowed a member of the minority party to exercise so many holds while simultaneously refusing to honor a hold from a member of his own party.  Late last year, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) tried to place a hold on the FISA bill that was working its way through Congress only to have Reid block his attempt, (h/t Glenn Greenwald)

Russ Feingold, today, on the effects of Harry Reid’s pro-administration dirty work:

This morning, the Senate starts debating legislation to expand the government’s surveillance powers.

Unfortunately, the bill we are going to be considering is the one reported out by the Senate Intelligence Committee in October, S. 2248. It did not have to be this way. Thirteen Senators joined me last week in asking the Majority Leader to instead bring up a bill that includes the changes approved by the Judiciary Committee last month. . . .

By choosing the Intelligence Committee bill over the Judiciary product, Senator Reid has made things much tougher for those of us who think the courts — not Congress — should decide whether the companies deserve immunity. He’s also made it an uphill struggle of those of us who want more court oversight of the broad new surveillance powers included in the bill. . . .

We have a big fight on our hands, and unfortunately, the deck is now stacked against us. (emphasis original)

All of this stems from Reid’s refusal to honor the “hold” placed on that bill by Chris Dodd, who has been in the Senate for 24 years. In fairness, though, there are some Senators whose “holds” are treated with great reverence by Reid. (emphasis added)

Begging the question: which side is Reid on?  The answer to that goes beyond traditional partisan politics.  While there is no doubt there are very real differences between Democrats and Republicans, both parties belong to the firmly entrenched Washington beltway political class making their similarities even more significant than their differences.

–Paul Wilden

When the shocking pictures from Abu Ghraib surfaced, high ranking officials in both the military and the administration tried to contain the damage by claiming the abuses were the result of just a few individuals that had run amok and were not indicative of our treatment of detainees in general.  President Bush even proclaimed to the country, “We do not torture.”  And the only convictions to come out of the scandal were of low ranking soldiers while the conviction of the only officer was eventually overturned. 

However, as time went by, a different picture began to emerge.  Reports of similar abuses were coming out of different detention centers such as Guantánamo, stories of rendition, the whisking away of detainees to foreign countries like Egypt, where torture is tolerated, were heard and finally, the torture memos, legal justifications for abandoning the Geneva Conventions and employing “enhanced interrogation” techniques were revealed.

It became clearer and clearer that these abuses were the result of high level policy decisions rather than just a matter of a few rouge individuals acting on their own so when Jane Mayer’s new book was released, The Dark Side, detailing the systemic abuses of detainees, many of whom are most certainly innocent of any wrongdoing, it came as little surprise.  I have yet to read the book but reviews and interviews with Mayer are enlightening, not so much for any new information revealed but because her book is more of a comprehensive compilation of the whole story.  From a Washington Post article which includes a transcript from a question and answer session hosted by the Post’s online Book World Live,

Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers. Under the guise of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in ‘making torture the official law of the land in all but name.’ Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.”

As Mayer has conclusively demonstrated, we do indeed torture.  And while the results of these “enhanced interrogations” are classified so we don’t really know exactly what came out of them, according to Mayer, probably not much,

Tampa, Fla.: Just how much actionable intelligence has been gathered as a result of torture?

Jane Mayer: FBI agents who are expert in Islamic terrorism have told me that the CIA’s program of “enhanced” techniques yielded little to nothing – but then – there is some institutional rivalry to consider here. A former top CIA officer who worked closely with George Tenet, however, told me very candidly that, “Ninety percent of what we got was crap.”

In fact, while listening to an interview on NPR, Mayer revealed that most of the interrogation techniques used came from a military program designed to teach soldiers how to resist Soviet torture techniques.  The remarkable aspect here is that the Soviets were much more interested in extracting false confessions to be used for propaganda purposes rather than to obtain any useful information.  Our government’s use of torture was clearly in the hope of getting good information so it would seem that this is as much a story of abject incompetence as well as moral repugnance.

What may be the most disturbing part of all this, other than the torture itself is the complicity of those that you would hope would at least attempt to stop these kinds of activities.  While there’s little doubt that these plans were hatched by the more radical elements in the Republican Party, certain key Democrats have been aware of this almost from the beginning.  That’s disturbing in its own right, but even more so when you consider that Democratic knowledge of torture programs may very well prevent the perpetrators of these crimes from ever being held accountable,

New York, N.Y.: In your interview with Harper’s yesterday, you said that this about why war crimes prosecutions are unlikely: “An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.”

What did you mean by that? Who specifically is compromised ” who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised” — Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, Jay Rockefeller? — and how are they “compromised”?

washingtonpost.com: Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side (Harpers.org)

Jane Mayer: The ranking members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were briefed dozens of times about the CIA’s interrogation and detention program over the past seven years – so any member who has held one of those posts has arguably been complicit. Some say they tried to object, internally. But either because of the threat of violating national security, or, because of the fear of the political price of dissent, these figures in both parties would find it very hard at this point to point the finger at the White House, without also implicating themselves. (emphasis added)

So there we have it.  Once considered the moral beacon of the world we have now sunk to the depths of depravity once reserved for the worst nations on earth by employing the despicable and illegal techniques of torture.  This would still be deplorable even if it had worked but it didn’t work and as many in the military will tell you, it can’t work.  Useful information is rarely if ever obtained because its victims will simply tell you what they want to hear.

But beyond the moral arguments against torture it’s important to note that the victims are not just those individuals subjected to such inhumanity, nor are they limited to those who lose their own humanity by employing such tactics, the fact is, the whole country loses.  It’s no coincidence that the same administration that has encouraged the use of torture also feels no compunction against spying on its own citizens because once you consider yourself above the law, once you decide that the ends justify the means, literally anything goes.  What moral, ethical or legal limit could there be on someone who’s willing to resort to torture or has no qualms against violating the Constitution, the very same document they’ve sworn to protect?

–Paul Wilden

In a recent column, Jonah Goldberg lectures Barack Obama on his “patriotism problem.”  As he sees it Obama’s “problem” goes far deeper than lapel pins,

He sees an America in which the cup is half-empty. Is his America the same one most Americans think of as they wave flags and celebrate the Fourth of July?

But is that what patriotism really is, an unflagging, cup half full, optimism?  I have nothing against optimism but what does that have to do with patriotism?  To some, patriotism means the desire to make your country the best it can be but to Goldberg, beyond minor policy changes we needn’t concern ourselves with that,

Definitions of patriotism proliferate, but in the American context patriotism must involve not only devotion to American texts (something that distinguishes our patriotism from European nationalism) but also an abiding belief in the inherent and enduring goodness of the American nation. We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is. (emphasis added)

No doubt this sounds reasonable to many but what this really describes is group think or herd mentality.  To Goldberg, patriotism means believing his country is superior to all others for no other reason than he was born in it.  He doesn’t explicitly state America’s superiority in his article but is there any doubt to his opinion?  If asked “are there any other countries in the world today that are better than America?” would you expect his answer to be “yes,” regardless of whatever the truth might be?

What if your country isn’t “fundamentally good” or what if your country has lost its way and no longer abides by the principles it once did?  The definition Goldberg offers could be applied by the citizens of any country and no doubt is but what if it isn’t true?  This is clearly the case with many nations around the world.  How many women for example would like to live in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan where women are second class citizens?  Apparently Goldberg doesn’t realize that there are “patriots” just like him living in those countries who feel the same about their country as he does about his.

The problem with the Jonah Goldberg notion of patriotism is not only does he consider issues such as slavery, civil rights or women’s suffrage to be essentially minor issues that don’t actually reflect on the “inherent and enduring goodness of the American nation,” his kind only sees these as problems after the fact, if ever, but never while the nation is actually going through them.  Years from now it’ll be common knowledge that we’re experiencing an extreme low point in this country, the Iraq war, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, warrantless spying on Americans, all of these, with the possible exception of the first, go completely counter to the ideals this country was founded on.  There is simply no way the Founding Fathers would agree with any of it regardless of the justification because these were overarching principles that are just too important to ignore.  But it’s “patriots” like Goldberg who do just that because their “abiding belief in the inherent and enduring goodness of the American nation” blinds them to the reality virtually every time.

Rather than “hating America” as many are so often accused, only those who are willing to face reality and demand that their country live up to its promise can consider themselves American patriots while the Goldbergs are merely members of the American herd.

–Paul Wilden

Wasting no time, the ACLU has filed a law suit over the new FISA legislation.  While the primary complaints from civil libertarians are that the new law clearly violates the fourth amendment by allowing illegal, warrantless searches, as well as defying the rule of law by giving telecoms legal immunity without even knowing exactly what they’ve been up to, the ACLU has used as grounds for their suit, the fact that eavesdropping without warrants or any oversight at all, potentially violates privileged communications such as phone calls and emails between attorneys and clients,

The case was filed on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose ability to perform their work – which relies on confidential communications – will be greatly compromised by the new law.

Additionally, the ACLU is calling for all proceedings pertaining to the scope or constitutionality of FISA be open to public scrutiny,

In a separate filing, the ACLU asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to ensure that any proceedings relating to the scope, meaning or constitutionality of the new law be open to the public to the extent possible. The ACLU also asked the secret court to allow it to file a brief and participate in oral arguments, to order the government to file a public version of its briefs addressing the law’s constitutionality, and to publish any judicial decision that is ultimately issued.

Glenn Greenwald raised two particularly salient points that have been mostly overlooked while the discussion has focused mostly around the very important telecom immunity aspects.  First, the new law goes beyond simply legalizing Bush’s blatantly illegal spying on Americans, it actually allows for spying on Americans not even suspected of engaging in terrorists activities or any criminal behavior at all,

In the podcast, Jaffer details exactly what warrantless surveillance powers the new FISA bill vests in the President, along with the reasons they are so pernicious. He underscores the extraordinary fact that the surveillance program implemented by Congress yesterday does not merely authorize most of the President’s so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program” that gave rise to this scandal in the first place, but is actually much broader in scope even than that lawless program, because there is not even any requirement in the new FISA law that the “target” of the surveillance have any connection whatsoever to Terrorism, nor is there any requirement that the Government believe the “target” is an agent of a foreign power or terrorist organization, or even guilty of any wrongdoing at all. (emphasis original)

This is extraordinary.  The whole point of FISA in the first place was to stop the kind of abusive surveillance that we’ve discovered has already occurred.  This isn’t some kind of abstract concept we’re talking about, we know the government has engaged in unconstitutional activities in the past and FISA was enacted to prevent future occurrences.  For example, the government conducted extensive espionage operations against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., wiretapping his phones and bugging his hotel rooms and this is a man that could hardly be considered a terrorist or even subversive considering we celebrate his birthday as a national holiday. 

The whole point of our system of checks and balances is that government is not to be trusted without oversight.  History is replete with examples of unchecked government power resulting in tyranny including examples from our own not too distant history.  Can anyone honestly say that the Founding Fathers would agree to this level of unchecked power?

The second point Greenwald brings up is just how disingenuous defenders of the new legislation are when they claim that this is all much ado about nothing.  The fact is; nobody knows what the real affect of this law will be because nobody knows exactly what Bush has been up to, nobody except a handful of Senators who are legally required to remain silent,

The most overlooked fact in the entire FISA debate — the aspect of it that renders incoherent the case in favor of the new FISA law or even those who dismiss its significance — is that virtually nobody knows what the spying program they’re immunizing entailed and towards what ends it was used — i.e., whether it was abused for improper purposes. Even those who acknowledge that the warrantless spying program was illegal like to assert that it was implemented for benign and proper counter-terrorism purposes (see Kevin Drum making that claim here) — but they have absolutely no idea whether that is true. None. Zero. To assert that is simply to make assertions with no basis whatsoever.

There has been no Congressional investigation into the NSA program — meaning an effort to compel the Bush administration to turn over to Congress information about who was subjected to the illegal, warrantless spying and towards what purposes. Back in March, 2006, even the Senate Intelligence Committee — the core function of which is “to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States” — voted along party lines against conducting hearings into the NSA spying program. (emphasis original)

This is the state of affairs today.  Our government is supposed to be transparent, citizens are supposed to know what’s going on or how else can they be expected to make informed decisions about who they want representing them?  Yet our political class, the so called “experts” are ready to trust the government with virtually unchecked power without having any idea of what’s really been happening.  It’s impossible to overstate just how un-American this attitude is.  This is authoritarianism at its finest, just trust the government to do the right thing and always act in our best interests with little or no checks on their power.  And it’s this same crowd that usually complains about how we’re turning into a welfare state, how we shouldn’t expect government to “take care of us,” and yet we’re supposed to allow government to peek into our most private communications and just trust them not to abuse this authority.  Simply astounding.

This is what Russ Feingold, one of the Senators that does know what Bush has been up to, had to say about FISA, (h/t Glenn Greenwald) (emphasis original)

I sit on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and I am one of the few members of this body who has been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program. And, based on what I know, I can promise that if more information is declassified about the program in the future, as is likely to happen either due to the Inspector General report, the election of a new President, or simply the passage of time, members of this body will regret that we passed this legislation. I am also familiar with the collection activities that have been conducted under the Protect America Act and will continue under this bill. I invite any of my colleagues who wish to know more about those activities to come speak to me in a classified setting. Publicly, all I can say is that I have serious concerns about how those activities may have impacted the civil liberties of Americans. If we grant these new powers to the government and the effects become known to the American people, we will realize what a mistake it was, of that I am sure.

Needless to say that it’s imperative the ACLU’s efforts are not in vain.  Don’t look for anything to change if the Democrats take the oval office in the next election.  It’s the Democrats who are responsible for this travesty along with the explicit approval of the Democratic candidate for president.

–Paul Wilden

In an ironic twist of fate, a long time public servant was recently forced into early retirement for refusing to lower the flag to half-mast in honor of his state’s deceased senator, Jesse Helms,

This is in no way a political decision. I simply do not feel it is appropriate to honor a person whose epitaph of government service was to have voted against or blocked every civil rights issue that came before the US Congress. His doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice cost North Carolina and our Nation much that we may never regain.

What makes this ironic is, the flag should be lowered, not in deference to a racist bigot but in memoriam to our Constitution which was dealt a serious blow today.

The controversial update to FISA was passed by the Senate today in a 69 to 28 vote.  Three amendments designed to mitigate some of the worst aspects of this bill were all defeated so the bill moves, intact, to a gleeful president eager to sign it into law.

Theoretically, when it’s discovered that the president has broken the law heads roll, especially when the law in question is as serious this.  Violating FISA was not only a felony; it violated the fourth amendment to the Constitution that prohibits unwarranted search and seizure.  When a president commits this level of lawlessness, impeachment is in order, especially given that we impeached a president for lying about an extra-marital affair, something that wasn’t anybodies business to begin with and had absolutely no effect on the American people, whereas Bush’s crimes were in direct violation of the Constitution and the rule of law in general.  So what are the consequences for this egregious breach of the public trust?  The oppositional controlled Congress passes legislation that not only legalizes his actions after the fact, they provide full, retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that helped Bush violate our rights.

Is it any wonder that Congresses approval ratings are even lower than the president’s,

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

It would be bad enough if this was simply another example of cowardice from the Democratic Party, but even worse, rather than passing this legislation to avoid accusations of being weak on terrorism, it seems that they actually agree with this bill.  The Republican brand is in the toilet, voters gave control of Congress to the Democrats in protest of the Republican style of governing, Democrats recently won three special elections in districts that normally go to Republicans, all of this demonstrates rather clearly that voters are no longer buying the Republican scare tactics so why then are the Democrats so eager to capitulate to Bush?  Fear may account for a small portion but with no real price to pay, (Democrats are poised to pick up Congressional seats rather than lose them), the only logical conclusion is that many Democrats actually wanted this bill to pass.  It’s not as if the tremendous grassroots opposition to this bill went unnoticed in the Senate.  This is what Chris Dodd, one of the most strident opponents, along with Russ Feingold, of this bill, (h/t Glenn Greenwald)

Lastly, I want to thank the thousands who joined with us in this fight around the country — those who took to the blogs, gathered signatures for online petitions and created a movement behind this issue. Men and women, young and old, who stood up, spoke out and gave us the strength to carry on this fight. Not one of them had to be involved, but each choose to become involved for one reason and one reason alone: Because they love their country. They remind us that the “silent encroachments of those in power” Madison spoke of can, in fact, be heard, if only we listen.

And for all those who have pinned their hopes on Obama to bring about change to Washington, Obama has proven yet again he’s a part of the problem rather than the solution.  Obama did vote in favor of the amendment that would have stripped telecom immunity from the bill but he did so with the certainty that it was going to fail anyway.  And if he was so genuinely opposed to this why then did he vote in favor of the bill’s passage.  And even more telling, prior to the vote on the bill, Obama voted in favor of cloture thus ending all debate on the floor and shutting down the possibility of a filibuster, a filibuster he once unambiguously pledged to support.  This is from an Obama spokesperson, (h/t Glenn Greenwald) (emphasis original)

To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.

As hopeless as it may seem, now is not the time to give up the fight.  The ACLU has vowed to bring this to the courts as soon as it’s signed into law and they’re soliciting signatures for a full page ad they’re planning to take out in protest.  Additionally, money is being collected to help challenge the Democratic candidates who have been so eager to trash our Constitution.  “Now is the time for all good men [and women] to come to the aid of the party [and the Constitution]” so please help support this cause, there may be none more important.

–Paul Wilden

In a recent column, David Brooks tries to make the case that the problem with conservatism and the Republican Party is that they’ve strayed from their roots and are more representative of the “country club” over “Sam’s Club.”  Citing a book entitled “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” written by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam,

They open the book with a working-class view of recent American history. Douthat and Salam write admiringly about the New Deal. They mention Roosevelt’s economic policies, but they also emphasize the New Deal’s intense social conservatism. Self-conscious maternalists like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins ensured that New Deal programs were biased in favor of traditional two-parent families.

This passage is remarkable for two reasons.  First is the all too common trait of conservatives ignoring the obvious.  The New Deal represented exactly the kind of socialistic redistribution of wealth that conservative heroes like Ronald Reagan spent their lives trying to destroy.  One of the most popular and successful programs to come out of the New Deal was Social Security, but apparently Brooks and these two authors forgot that their latest messiah, George Bush, tried unsuccessfully to privatize and thereby dismantle this program.  Leading to the second point, which is the propensity of conservatives to claim as their own that which they cannot defeat.  The latest example of that being how Bush as well as some other GOP members took credit for the GI bill they tried so desperately to defeat.

It boggles the mind that anyone would try to link the New Deal with conservatism.  I don’t know anything about the Roosevelt’s “social conservatism,” whether it’s even true or if they really did make a concerted effort to bias the programs towards two-parent families but even if true, that would hardly make the New Deal a conservative program especially given that it’s universally reviled by conservatives.  Even today social programs are often geared towards families and children and back then, as Brooks points out, there weren’t nearly the number of divorces there are today, nor was there much in the way of single parenting and gays were pretty much completely in the closet so it’s hardly surprising that social programs favored “traditional two-parent families.”

As I mentioned, Brooks likes to point out that divorce used to be much less common,

In the 1950s, divorce rates were low and jobs were plentiful, but over the next few decades that broke down. The social revolutions of the 1960s and the economic revolution of the information age have emancipated the well-educated but left the Sam’s Club voters feeling insecure.

Trying to connect divorce to job loss is absolutely absurd.  As I’ve , Stephanie Coontz’s essay, What We Really Miss About the 1950s points out that the social values, not to mention divorce laws at the time, that kept marriages together were a source of unhappiness for women,

Nostalgia for the 1950s is real and deserves to be taken seriously, but it usually shouldn’t be taken literally.  Even people who do pick the 1950s as the best decade generally end up saying, once they start discussing their feelings in depth, that it’s not the family arrangements in and of themselves that they want to retrieve.  They don’t miss the way women used to be treated, they sure wouldn’t want to live with most of the fathers they knew in their neighborhoods, and “come to think of it” – I don’t know how many times I’ve recorded these exact words – “I communicate with my kids much better than my parents or grandparents did.”  When Judith Wallerstein recently interviewed 100 spouses in “happy” marriages, she found that only five “wanted a marriage like their parents.”  The husbands “consciously rejected the role models provided by their fathers.  The women said they could never be happy living as their mothers did.” (emphasis original)

And of course this had nothing to do with jobs, which were the result of the overall prosperity of the time due to the war having recently ended resulting in an enormous pent up demand with all the soldiers returning home.  Brooks is correct that the fifties were happy times but not for the reasons he thinks,

   Contrary to widespread belief, the 1950s was not an age of laissez-faire government and free market competition.  A major cause of the social mobility of young families in the 1950s was that federal assistance programs were much more generous and widespread than they are today.

     In the most ambitious and successful affirmative action program ever adopted in America, 40 percent of young men were eligible for veterans’ benefits, and these benefits were far more extensive than those available to Vietnam-era vets.  Financed in part by a federal income tax on the rich that went up to 87 percent and a corporate tax rate of 52 percent, such benefits provided quite a jump start for a generation of young families.  The GI bill paid most tuition costs for vets who attended college, doubling the percentage of college students from prewar levels.  At the other end of the life span, Social Security began to build up a significant safety net for the elderly, formerly the poorest segment of the population.  Starting in 1950, the federal government regularly mandated raises in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation.  The minimum wage may have been only $1.40 as late as 1968, but a person who worked for that amount full-time, year-round, earned 118 percent of the poverty figure for a family of three.  By 1995, a full-time minimum-wage worker could earn only 72 percent of the poverty level.

     An important source of the economic expansion of the 1950s was that public works spending at all levels of government comprised nearly 20 percent of total expenditures in 1950, as compared to less than 7 percent in 1984.  Between 1950 and 1960, nonmilitary, nonresidential public construction rose by 58 percent.  Construction expenditures for new schools (in dollar amounts adjusted for inflation) rose by 72 percent; funding on sewers and waterworks rose by 46 percent.  Government paid 90 percent of the costs of building the new Interstate Highway System.  These programs opened up suburbia to growing numbers of middle-class Americans and created secure, well-paying jobs for blue-collar workers.

And in yet another astounding display of delusion, Brooks, like virtually all conservatives, tries to peg liberals as elitists and cites the “education gap” as the reason,

Gaps are opening between the educated and less educated. Working-class divorce rates remain high, while the mostly upper-middle-class parents of Ivy Leaguers have divorce rates of only 10 percent. Working-class kids are unlikely to complete college, affluent kids usually do.

Completely ignoring the record number of vets who used their GI benefits to fund a college education, which is exactly what the aforementioned GI bill that conservatives tried to defeat is trying to replicate.

I could go on and on but you get the point.  I’m certainly not going to try and defend every liberal program ever presented but the history is clear, liberals have always fought not only for equal rights for all Americans, gay, straight, black, white, single parent or not, liberals have also championed workers causes such as union representation, health care and the forty hour work week just to name a few.  That Republicans are the party of the working class is delusional to the extreme and only exists in Brook’s fevered imagination.

–Paul Wilden

The Senate is set to vote next week on, and most likely pass, an update to FISA that shreds the fourth amendment and is a slap in the face to the rule of law.  President Bush has been wantonly breaking the law by spying on American citizens without warrants or any oversight whatsoever since 9/11 at least.  And once this became public knowledge, instead of immediately commencing impeachment proceedings, Congress’ Constitutional duty, they’re poised to make Bush’s blatantly un-American activities legal.

Sold to voters as a “compromise,” Democrats instead have given in completely to Bush and the Republican’s demands.  And as if this wasn’t bad enough, Barack Obama, the candidate for “change,” has given his approval to this travesty.  This is from a statement posted on his website,

This was not an easy call for me. I know that the FISA bill that passed the House is far from perfect. I wouldn’t have drafted the legislation like this, and it does not resolve all of the concerns that we have about President Bush’s abuse of executive power. It grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that may have violated the law by cooperating with the Bush Administration’s program of warrantless wiretapping.
…
But I also believe that the compromise bill is far better than the Protect America Act that I voted against last year.

But on closer inspection, Obama’s reasons for supporting this bill don’t hold up.  First he claims that he’ll work to eliminate the provisions granting immunity to the telecoms, knowing full well it won’t succeed,

That’s why I support striking Title II from the bill, and will work with Chris Dodd, Jeff Bingaman and others in an effort to remove this provision in the Senate.

But is there any reason to trust his sincerity on this?  This is one of the two glaring faults with this bill, why support a bill with this kind of problem with it as if it’s a mere afterthought?  Granting retroactive immunity to the telecoms goes against everything this country stands for.  If they did nothing wrong then let them plead their case in a court of law but the reality is; they did break the law, they know it as do their defenders.  The “conventional wisdom” is that if the president asks for your cooperation, you give it, and the FISA extension essentially says the same thing, if the telecoms can demonstrate that they acted at the president’s request and were assured that the requests were legal then they’re off the hook.  But at the risk of repeating myself, this is precisely what our system of government was set up to prevent.  Immunity from the law because the president says it’s okay is virtually the same as the president writing his own laws, completely bypassing the checks and balances that are the hallmark of our government.  We all learned about checks and balances in school, how they exist to prevent the tyranny the Founding Fathers were all to well aware of, why then are we so eager to toss them aside.  The fact is, it’s ridiculous for Obama to support a bill that includes provisions that are clearly in contradiction with the founding principles of this country.  If that’s not a reason to reject a bill, exactly what is?

The other “compromise” that Obama cites as a reason to accept this legislation is that it is specifically stated that FISA will now be the exclusive means for the president to conduct warrantless spying.  This is absurd on two counts.  First, FISA already contained this exclusivity clause.  This is from a recent federal court ruling regarding FISA,

Of special relevance to the court’s present inquiry, Congress included in the FISA bill a declaration that the FISA regime, together with the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 codified at chapter 119 of Title 18 of the United States Code, 18 USC §§ 2510-22 (“Title III”), were to be the “exclusive means” by which domestic electronic surveillance for national security purposes could be conducted. (emphasis added)

To cite something we already possess as a reason to accept a law that by his own admission “is far from perfect,” and that he “wouldn’t have drafted” himself represents either the height of ignorance or the depths of dishonesty, either way, hardly qualifies him as a defender of the Constitution.

The problem obviously goes far deeper than the lack of integrity of one candidate.  Indeed, even with Obama’s reversal over FISA he still is far and away the better choice for president over McCain.  No, the problem began with a president that has nothing but contempt for the rule of law, helped along by a rubber stamp Republican Party more concerned with power and loyalty to each other than they are to the Constitution.  And finally, an “opposition” party that hasn’t truly opposed anything that Bush has desired.

This is the State of the Union on the day we celebrate its birth, habeas corpus already a distant memory, torture, an accepted part of our culture, the rule of law all but abandoned and the fourth amendment to the Constitution declared null and void.

–Paul Wilden

Digby has an excellent post today that explains a lot about the behavior of the Democrats.  Following up on Glenn Greenwald’s post, ‘The baseless, and failed, “move to the center” cliché‘ where Greenwald lays bare the absurd notion that Democrats have to play follow the leader to the Republicans over “security” and “terrorism,”

In 2006, Rep. Johnson was challenged by a 31-year-old Democrat, Chris Murphy, who ran on a platform of, among other things, ending the Iraq War, opposing Bush policies on eavesdropping and torture, and rejecting what he called the “false choice between war and civil liberties.” Johnson outspent her Democratic challenger by a couple million dollars, and based her campaign on fear-mongering ads focusing on Murphy’s opposition to warrantless eavesdropping
…
The result? Johnson was crushed
…
Johnson’s final margin of defeat was 12 points. Despite continuing to represent a tough, split district, Rep. Murphy — as he runs for re-election for the first time — recently voted against passage of the FISA/telecom amnesty bill, obviously unafraid that such Terrorism fear-mongering works any longer.

That pattern has repeated itself over and over. In the 2006 midterm election, Karl Rove repeatedly made clear that the GOP strategy rested on making two National Security issues front and center in the midterm campaign: Democrats’ opposition to warrantless eavesdropping and their opposition to “enhanced interrogation techniques” against Terrorists. Not only did the Democrats swat away those tactics, taking away control of both houses of Congress in 2006, but more unusually, not a single Democratic incumbent in either the House or Senate — not one — lost an election. (emphasis original)

So why then, do the Democrats repeatedly capitulate to the Republicans?  “Conventional wisdom” has it that the Democrats need to distance themselves from their fringe base and “move to the center” in a bipartisan effort to “get Washington working” again.  But what moving to the center really means is giving in to the right.  The vast majority of Americans feel this country is moving in the wrong direction so how does it make any sense for Democrats to move at all to the right?  American voters have rejected Republican “values” and have handed over the reins of Congress to the Democrats, Bush’s approval ratings are at an all time low, clearly voters want change and yet with this mandate Democrats have yet to accomplish a single significant thing.  The war rolls on, impeachment is off the table, warrantless eavesdropping on Americans and retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecoms is poised to become law, the Democratically controlled Congress is hardly any different from the Republican one.  And that, as Digby points out, is essentially the point.

Once considered the party of the working class, Democrats have been successfully labeled as elitists by the Republicans.  It’s extraordinary that the party of the ultra rich has managed to sell themselves as the party of the people but that in fact, is what has happened, beginning with Nixon and reaching full force with Reagan. Democrats have been on the run ever since and in a desperate and self loathing attempt to reestablish themselves as “regular people” have managed to repudiate the liberal ideals that once defined them,

Repudiating liberalism is a symbolic gesture required of Democrats by the political establishment to prove that they are not elitists. And it goes beyond mere posturing on gay marriage or abortion. The national security challenge is always not to appear to be “an appeaser.” The way you prove that is by refusing to appease the Democratic base. The economic challenge is to walk very carefully on taxes because it “costs jobs” for the hard working man and the struggling businessman alike who are in this thing together against the liberal elites. The cultural challenge is to not appear to be too friendly to blacks or too unfriendly to socially conservative religion in order to prove that that you are not beholden to the “extremists.” The entire construct is based upon Democrats distancing themselves from their most ardent supporters (which is quite convenient for Republicans.)

What Democrats have completely failed to understand however, is while people may have bought into the Republican’s smoke and mirrors for a time, the complete failure of the Republicans to effectively lead this country has, momentarily at least, broken the spell.  Voters may not be jumping on the liberal bandwagon as yet but if the Democrats were to truly lead this country instead of playing into the Republican’s hands, Americans would give them the chance to prove that their vision for America can work.  That is if they still have the vision.

–Paul Wilden

I’ve written previously how foolish it is to count on any of the candidates from the two major political parties to bring about any real change in this country, and, as if on cue, Barack Obama has proven my point with his recent flip-flop on telecom immunity as a part of the FISA bill currently working its way through Congress.  At first, Obama vowed to support a Senate filibuster blocking attempts to pass a bill that includes immunity but this is what he had to say about the recently passed House version that does include immunity,

It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives – and the liberty – of the American people.

The point is not to say that Obama is a liar or even that he’s no better than his Republican counter parts because he most certainly is.  A McCain presidency would be a disaster for this country, particularly after eight years of Bush, and should be avoided at all costs.  No, the point is that whatever kind of man Obama is, or any other Democrat for that matter, as a Democrat he is far to beholden to the current power structure that is tearing this country apart, the same power structure that involves us in war after war, none of which have served the American people or the people for which we were supposed to be fighting for.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have the will or the opportunity to break from the corporate interests that actually run this country so that is why I want to bring your attention to a different sort of candidate, someone who knows what is wrong with Washington politics and has a genuine desire to change the status quo and make this country work for us the real Americans to whom this country really belongs.

Michael Meo is running for U.S. Congress from the 3rd District of Oregon, as the nominee of the Pacific Green Party.  Meo, who once spent two years in a federal penitentiary for refusing the Viet Nam draft, stands for the real American values of democracy, equality and human rights.  From his website,

I am a high-school math teacher who served two years in federal penitentiary in 1970-1972 for refusing the military draft during the Vietnam War. I am running for Congress on the Green Party platform. I am committed to a platform of real democracy, of equality for all not only before the law but also in their human rights.

We are pledged, Green Party members, to work for sustainable local economic activity, for a culture that celebrates contributions from all of its members, of whatever group, and that honors nonviolent solutions which include responsible behavior by government agents.

We propose replacing the rapacious exploitation of the resources of the planet and its human population with an intelligent accommodation by the optimal use of technology for the highest quality of life for all. At a minimum, that requires health care as a human right.

Additionally Meo takes an unequivocal stand on FISA unlike most of our current government servants.

I haven’t yet used this blog to endorse any candidates because I’m far more interested in starting the kind of real discussion needed to break this country away from its corporate manipulators and its minions in both the government and the media who have sold us out.  And this post isn’t intended as an endorsement either, particularly as I’ve only just recently learned of Meo’s candidacy.  What I want to demonstrate is that there truly are real alternatives to the same old politicians that are paraded before us, election after election and it’s my sincere desire that you’ll take a serious look at what Michael Meo has to say as well as all the candidates we have to choose from.

–Paul Wilden

In one short statement, House Majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) summed up the reason why we can’t count on the Democratic party to stand up for either the Constitution or the American people.  While Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) characterized the recent passage of FISA “a capitulation,” Hoyer has declared it a “victory”.  From the Politico,

In an interview with Politico on Monday, Hoyer called the FISA legislation a “significant victory” for the Democratic Party – one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens. (emphasis added)

This is precisely the problem that plagues the Democratic Party.  Instead of providing true leadership they insist on licking the boots of the Republicans in the hope that they won’t get beat up.  Even from a position of power they continue to let the Republicans frame the debate by allowing them to play the “security” card.  Never mind that the Republican brand is positioned somewhere lower than Enron’s and that Americans are fed up with the direction they’ve taken this country, still, the Democrats insist on doing these closed door deals that play to the Republican strength rather than stand up for America.

This was Hoyer’s reason for making this “victorious” deal,

Hoyer said that if House Democratic leaders failed to reach a FISA deal with the White House and GOP leaders, as many as “30 Blue Dogs and another 20 to 30 members” could have signed onto a Republican discharge petition calling for a floor vote on the Senate version of the FISA bill, which was even more anathema to House Democrats than what eventually passed.

Apparently it didn’t occur to Hoyer to stand up to these “Blue Dogs” and expose them for what they are, instead, Hoyer cuts a deal that is virtually indistinguishable from the Senate version he was so desperate to avoid and declares it a victory.

Hoyer said that House Democrats succeeded in dialing back some of the provisions contained in the earlier, Senate-passed version of the FISA legislation. While the Senate bill provided retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that participated in President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, Hoyer noted that the House version mandates judicial review of the companies’ actions. Legal experts and congressional opponents argue that such review will ultimately be meaningless. (emphasis added)

So in fact, Hoyer won nothing, nothing except the hollow victory of taking bad legislation and calling it success.

This is exactly the kind of political maneuvering that Americans are so fed up with.  Even if conservative Democrats could have been successful in defeating an honest attempt at a FISA bill that makes sense, wouldn’t it be better to go down in glorious defeat rather than whimpering, meaningless victory?

–Paul Wilden

In a showdown between the Legislative and Executive branches, the House Judiciary committee is suing the Bush administration in an attempt to force the president’s chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, to comply with subpoenas requiring them to testify before Congress as well as turn over key documents concerning potential political meddling with the Justice Department.

This is the same scandal that resulted in the resignation of disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.  Gonzales was suspected of taking part in the firing of several federal prosecutors so they could be replaced with personnel loyal to Bush.  It’s not clear that anything illegal took place as federal prosecutors “serve at the pleasure of the president,” however; the Justice department is typically free from the partisan games normally played in Washington.  Moreover, if any obstruction took place through all of this, that could indeed be cause for legal action.

But the real issue is this; the American people deserve and are owed, a transparent government where all rules are followed.  Political gamesmanship belongs on the debate floor and not where the enforcement of our laws takes place.  And when Congress issues a subpoena, compliance should be considered mandatory regardless of political party.  That Bush and his minions consider themselves to be above the law is the defining characteristic of this administration and it is this, more than anything else that Bush has done, including lying to Congress to bring this country to war, that represents precisely the kind of tyranny that the Founding Fathers tried to spare us.  Bush’s presidency has been disastrous to this nation, his militant foreign policy, tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich, deregulation of the oil markets, all badly misguided policies but they are just the price we pay for electing such a man, the price of democracy.  But it is Bush’s lawlessness, his blatant disregard not only for the rule of law but for the very checks and balances that make our government work, that are actually threatening our democracy.

–Paul Wilden

It’s official, the deal has been struck and the hapless Democrats have caved in, for no discernible reason, on an update to FISA that gives Bush virtually everything he wanted, particularly immunity for the telecoms that broke the law when cooperating with the administration.  House Democrats are insisting the bill is a “compromise” but it is nothing of the sort.  This is what Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) had to say about the “compromise”,

The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation. The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home. Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity. And under this bill, the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power. Instead of cutting bad deals on both FISA and funding for the war in Iraq, Democrats should be standing up to the flawed and dangerous policies of this administration.

It’s really quite simple, if the telecoms didn’t break the law then they have nothing to worry about, and if they did, they need to be held accountable for their actions just as is expected of every other American.  The “compromise” merely states that if the president asserts that his requests for cooperation were within the law then the telecoms are off the hook.  But this goes against everything this country stands for.  Immunity from the law based just on the president’s say so is virtually the same as the president writing his own laws, completely bypassing the checks and balances that are the hallmark of our government.

Why the Democrats have folded so easily is something of a mystery.  Obviously they’re afraid of the Republicans accusing them of being soft on terrorism but they’re going to do that anyway.  Voters have made it very clear that they’ve had enough of the Republican’s lawless style of government, both in the 2006 midterm elections as well as in three recent special elections where Republicans lost their seats, so exactly what the Democrats are so afraid of isn’t clear.

Making matters worse Barack Obama has thrown his support for the “compromise” after having previously pledged to support Chris Dodd’s threatened Senate filibuster over this exact issue.  Here is Obama’s statement, (h/t Glenn Greenwald) (emphasis original)

Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. . . .

After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year’s Protect America Act. . . It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses.

It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives — and the liberty — of the American people.

The fact is, with some minor adjustments, the FISA we have been operating under has been perfectly fine, allowing the government to install wiretaps even before court authorization as long as they obtain the required warrants within 72 hours.

Obama is trying to win the White House on a platform of change but this statement is nothing more than the political gamesmanship that plagues Washington politics.  Much has been said of Obama’s recent flip-flop over taking public money for his campaign, but this is the flip-flop people should be focusing on.  I happen to agree with this statement from Glenn Greenwald,

There is a disturbing tendency on all sides to view Obama through a reductive Manichean lens — either he’s the embodiment of pure transformative Good who is going magically to cleanse our polity the minute he takes office, or he’s nothing other than a mindless, passive tool of the establishment whose pretty rhetoric masks a barren ambition for power and who is no better than McCain. Neither of those caricatures is remotely accurate, and a John McCain presidency would be an unmitigated disaster on every level.

But it’s critical to keep in mind that Obama is a politician and, like all people, is plagued by significant imperfections. He has largely entrenched himself in, and is dependent upon, the power structure he says he wants to undermine. Uncritical devotion to political leaders, including him, is destructive. Obama needs pressure, criticism, checks, and real scrutiny just like anyone else in power in order to keep him accountable, responsive, and faithful to the principles he claims are the ones driving him.

A John McCain presidency would be a disaster and Obama is the clear choice between the two candidates but it’s useless to expect any real change with Obama as president.

Elections are often characterized as “picking the lesser of two evils” but that’s an oversimplification that doesn’t apply here, Obama isn’t “evil” but he is far too dependent on the existing power structure to be an agent of change.

–Paul Wilden

In response to the astronomical price of gas that’s on everyone’s mind, Bush has started talking about repealing the ban on offshore drilling in places such as Florida,

First, we should expand American oil production by increasing access to the Outer Continental Shelf, or OCS. Experts believe that the OCS could produce about 18 billion barrels of oil. That would be enough to match America’s current oil production for almost ten years. The problem is that Congress has restricted access to key parts of the OCS since the early 1980s. Since then, advances in technology have made it possible to conduct oil exploration in the OCS that is out of sight, protects coral reefs and habitats, and protects against oil spills. With these advances — and a dramatic increase in oil prices — congressional restrictions on OCS exploration have become outdated and counterproductive.

Republicans in Congress have proposed several promising bills that would lift the legislative ban on oil exploration in the OCS. I call on the House and the Senate to pass good legislation as soon as possible. This legislation should give the states the option of opening up OCS resources off their shores, provide a way for the federal government and states to share new leasing revenues, and ensure that our environment is protected. There’s also an executive prohibition on exploration in the OCS. When Congress lifts the legislative ban, I will lift the executive prohibition.

On the surface, this might seem like a reasonable plan, especially if the price of gas concerns you more than the possible environmental effects.  But in fact, this is a bad idea on a several levels.  First, as much as Bush would like to think there are no environmental risks, it’s impossible to guarantee that.  An oil spill off the coast of Florida would not only be damaging to the environment, it would devastate Florida’s tourist based economy.  That hasn’t stopped conservatives from extolling the safety of modern drilling.  That latest claim is how Katrina resulted in only minor oil spills.  From the website of Think Progress, (emphasis original)

In a Tuesday speech delivered before an audience of oil executives, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) pushed to overturn the federal ban on offshore oil drilling. McCain claimed drilling is so “safe” that “not even Hurricane Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston.”

George Will: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs without causing a large spill.”

Wall Street Journal editorial: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn’t cause a single oil spill.”

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne: “When Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast where we have about 4,000 oil and gas platforms, 3,000 were in the direct line of the storms – the most significant storms we’ve seen ever – and 3,000 of those had to be shut down. We had no significant oil spill. The system worked.”

Fox News’ Dick Morris: “And by the way, the safety concerns, Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any leakage or any spill in the Gulf of Mexico oil wells.”

The truth is, Katrina caused major damage and resulted in millions of gallons of oil spilled,

The truth is that Hurricane Katrina caused oil spillage so significant it was clearly visible from space. It also wreaked environmental havock near the scale of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson explains the disastrous extent of Katrina’s wreckage of Gulf oil facilities.

The risk of spills may decrease with technology but there still remains a significant risk of devastating damage, and for what?  Most experts agree that retrieving this oil would not only have a negligible effect on the price of gas, it would also take as seven to ten years to start actually pumping any of this oil.  Compounding the usual time it would take to access offshore oil is the lack of necessary equipment needed to get to it.  From a New York Times article written by Jad Mouawad and Martin Fackler,

In recent years, this global shortage of drill-ships has created a critical bottleneck, frustrating energy company executives and constraining their ability to exploit known reserves or find new ones. Slow growth in oil supplies, at a time of soaring demand, has been a major factor in the spike of oil and gasoline prices.

Mr. Bush called on Congress Wednesday to end a longstanding federal ban on offshore drilling and open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration, arguing that the steps were needed to lower gasoline prices and bolster national security. But even as oil trades at more than $135 a barrel – up from $68 a year ago – the world’s existing drill-ships are booked solid for the next five years. Some oil companies have been forced to postpone exploration while waiting for a drilling rig, executives and analysts said.

Demand is so high that shipbuilders, the biggest of whom are in Asia, have raised prices since last year by as much as $100 million a vessel to about half a billion dollars.

“The crunch on rigs is everywhere,” said Alberto Guimaraes, a senior executive at Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company that has discovered some of the most promising offshore oil but has been unable to get at it.

But aside from the potential environmental damage and the probability that offshore drilling is unlikely to bring the desired relief in gas prices, this plan would almost certainly delay the switch to the alternative energy sources we so desperately need.  Bush gives lip service to the long term goal of moving away from oil but ignores the diversion of resources needed to get the offshore oil.  Proponents of drilling in protected areas like to present their case as if there’s no cost involved, that it would bring temporary relief while we work on the long range solutions but it just doesn’t work like that.  Salon’s How the World Works blog aptly exposes this fallacy,

It could happen. It’s certainly not impossible. The reason Republicans — including the likes of Crist, a one-time opponent of offshore drilling who has performed a truly dazzling flip-flop pirouette on this issue — are jumping on the politics of offshore drilling is that there is a clear kernel of truth in their stance. There is more oil to be drilled in this world, and more supply will undoubtedly have some effect on prices. Even just the prospect of more supply will likely make a difference. So Bush and McCain’s hurtful accusation that Democrats are responsible for high gas prices is not entirely wrong.

So what’s the worst that could happen?

If we’re going to give Republicans the full benefit of the doubt, then it is only fair to offer the same treatment to Democrats. So let’s take their arguments at face value also. There will be oil spills off the coasts of Florida and California, fouling beaches, killing wildlife, and harming tourism. Unrestrained burning of fossil fuels will continue to raise global temperatures and contribute to rising sea levels and devastating extreme weather events. A plunge in the price of oil will derail the current pressing economic incentives to improve energy efficiency and channel investment into research and development of alternative energy technologies.

And ultimately, these new oil fields will be exhausted, and the whole cycle of rising prices and economic pain will begin all over again. Only this time around, our children, or our children’s children, will be in much worse shape than we are now. Environmental stresses will be higher, climate change will be further advanced, and there will be even less oil to go around. (Because, of course, while the U.S. is pumping to its heart’s content on its outer continental shelf, existing oil fields around the globe will continue to peter out.) Prices will rocket even higher than our current worst nightmares. We will have sacrificed precious decades in which we could have gotten a leg up in figuring out how to maintain properity in a carbon-constrained future. And those madmen and fools who counseled a quick-fix response to humanity’s biggest challenge will be excoriated as some of the stupidest, most criminal leaders in human history.

That’s all.

I’ll admit that the apparent glee that some environmentally minded people have shown over the rising cost of oil as irked me more than a little.  I know that as oil prices rise alternative sources of energy become more realistic but the pain that many Americans are experiencing, including myself, is very real.  Energy is one of those commodities that is vital not only to industry but to each and every person who has to find a way to get to work. 

The U.S. reached the peak oil point back in the seventies so we’re not going to drill our way out of this problem.  So whether it’s the high price of gas or the high temperatures of global warming, we need to put all of our efforts into real alternatives to oil now.

–Paul Wilden

Proving once again how spineless the Democrats can be, a “compromise” is in the works that will give Bush virtually everything he wants regarding FISA including retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that broke the law at the president’s bequest.  For awhile it looked as if the House Democrats were going to make a stand (Senate Democrats had already passed a bill with everything Bush wanted), but it appears now that the House will cave in to Bush’s desires and call it a compromise.  From The New York Times,

Senior Congressional officials said they hoped to seal an agreement early this week and quickly vote in the House and Senate on legislation that expired back in February, though the administration retained the authority to continue spying on terror suspects it already had in its sights. That power begins slipping later this summer.

The main sticking point between the House and Senate has been President Bush’s demand that phone companies that cooperated in the wiretapping program after the Sept. 11 attacks be given blanket immunity from legal action by customers who claim their rights were violated by warrantless surveillance. The Senate went along with the plan but the House balked.
…
After weeks of talks, lawmakers have worked out a deal that would allow federal courts to settle the question of whether the telecommunications companies should be protected because they were assured their participation was legal.
…
The question for the negotiators will be whether the final product is seen by Democrats opposed to the immunity for the phone companies as conceding too much or whether backers of warrantless surveillance will view the compromise as too weak. (emphasis added)

Apparently, if the telecoms were given the proper assurances by the government that their cooperation wouldn’t violate any laws then they’ll be off the hook.  This is completely absurd, the whole point of our system of government, of checks and balances, is that it’s never assumed that a particular action is legal simply because the government says so.  Furthermore, ignorance of the law has never been a valid excuse, not that the telecoms were ignorant of anything.  This is an excerpt from Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling when he refused to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms. (h/t Glenn Greenwald)

That the government isn’t simply to be trusted at face value is not only one of the cornerstones of our democracy, the reason for which is self-evident with the current administration.  From lying to start a war, to signing statements to illegal propaganda programs, George Bush has shown nothing but the utmost contempt for the rule of law.  This administration has been the poster child for why we have checks and balances to begin with and the Democrats, even though they control Congress, are willing to chuck it all, presumably in a misguided attempt to consolidate their power.  This is what Glenn Greenwald has to say regarding the wheelings and dealings of the House Democrats,

There are reports from very reliable sources that Hoyer, after engineering this “compromise” and ensuring it has enough votes to pass, will then vote against it so he can claim it’s not his fault (as will Pelosi). Worse, the Democratic leadership in the Senate (Reid and Durbin) have been saying that while they oppose the “compromise” and will vote against it, they will do nothing to impede its passage.

After eight years of lies and corruption from Bush and the Republicans, now more than ever, we need principled leadership from the opposition party(s) but instead, even with the Democrats virtually guaranteed of continued control over Congress, what do we get, the same style of corrupt, self-serving government we’ve come to expect from the Republican Party.  Is it any wonder that Congress has even lower approval ratings than Bush?

Clearly we have a long way to go to take back control of our country but as a start the so called compromise on FISA must be defeated.  Currently, donations are being accepted to facilitate this campaign and I urgently implore everyone to give what they can.

–Paul Wilden

Much has been written about Russert since his untimely death yesterday and predictably most have praised him as a tough journalist unafraid to ask the hard questions.  Predictably I say, in part because of the natural tendency to speak well of the dead but mostly, I suspect, because his flaws were shared by most in our main stream media.

I’ve written of an interview I heard with Russert, where he was asked by a caller to the radio talk show he was appearing on about the job he and the press in general, had done during the lead up to the Iraq war, specifically in comparison to the Watergate investigation done by Woodward and Bernstein.  And as I noted, his answer was very telling.  His position was that both Republicans and Democrats were given their opportunity to make their perspective cases, the Republicans essentially lied or were just plain wrong and the Democrat’s case was simply non existent.  And that was that, “both” sides were given their chance and there was nothing further that the press could do. 

Of course this was utterly false on at least two counts.  First, just because the Democrats had little to say didn’t mean nobody else did.  The press assumes that the Democrats and Republicans represent the entire spectrum of political thought and there’s no need to look any further.  But there was in fact, plenty of reasoned opposition to the war they could have tapped into but never got around to.  Second, and even more egregious, was the press’ refusal to look deeper regardless of the source.  If Woodward and Bernstein had satisfied themselves with simply getting the spin from both Republicans and Democrats regarding the Watergate break in we never would have found out what Nixon was up to.

But more than anything else, what defined Russert’s brand of journalism was his obsession with being an insider.  While Russert was known for asking some embarrassing questions there was never any follow up and he was always very careful of crossing the line lest he lose access to Washington’s political elite.  This is his policy regarding quoting government officials, (h/t Glenn Greenwald)

When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it’s my own policy — our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission. (emphasis original)

This is an extraordinary position for a “journalist” to take, since when is it the journalist’s responsibility to protect their interviewees from embarrassing themselves or revealing incriminating information?  What kind of investigative journalism does he hope to accomplish if he’ll only use information he has “permission” to use?

This, more than anything, defines the illness that plagues modern journalism.  The parasitic desire to be insiders, part of the Washington elite club, prevents them from doing anything that would ultimately lose them the access they so cravenly desire.  They do this unashamedly, claiming that access to the political class is required for them to do their jobs all the while not realizing that it the very courting of this insider status that is in fact preventing them from doing their jobs.  Tim Russert was the de facto leader of this motley crew hence the platitudes we’ll be reading for days to come.

–Paul Wilden

In a landmark five to four decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees of Guantanamo have the right to appeal in U.S. civilian courts, their indefinite detention.  The Bush administration has argued from the beginning that the detainees are “enemy combatants” and therefore are not afforded the rights that most of us take for granted including habeas corpus.

The court’s decision underscored the importance of habeas corpus, recognizing the fundamental importance to liberty, the right to face your accusers and challenge your imprisonment,

The Framers viewed freedom from unlawful restraint as a fundamental precept of liberty, and they understood the writ of habeas corpus as a vital instrument to secure that freedom.

Freedom from arbitrary imprisonment is a right established by the Magna Carta and as the court noted, was written into the Constitution even before the Bill of Rights,

A brief account of the writ’s history and origins shows that protection for the habeas privilege was one of the few safeguards of liberty specified in a Constitution that, at the outset, had no Bill of Rights; in the system the Framers conceived, the writ has a centrality that must inform proper interpretation of the Suspension Clause. That the Framers considered the writ a vital instrument for the protection of individual liberty is evident from the care taken in the Suspension Clause to specify the limited grounds for its suspension: The writ may be suspended only when public safety requires it in times of rebellion or invasion.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the freedom from arbitrary imprisonment.  Considered one of the most tyrannical powers one could possess, Patrick Henry had this to say about it, (h/t Glenn Greenwald) (emphasis original)

Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings — give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else! . . . Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.

“Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel,” such as our president and the four dissenting justices, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Sam Alito and Antonin Scalia.

Whenever there’s a decision that goes against the right it’s only a matter of time before accusations of “judicial activism” are leveled no matter how well grounded in Constitutional law or legal precedent the decision is.

But what makes this decision so interesting is how Scalia, in writing for the dissent, demonstrates precisely what judicial activism is.  Judicial activism is defined by the practice of making a decision based on the desired outcome rather than the legal merits of the case.  In Scalia’s opinion he devotes an entire section to exactly that, the outcome of the decision as he sees it, (h/t Think Progress) (emphasis original)

“America is at war with radical Islamists. … Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

“The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

“The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.”

His opinion includes as well, actual legal arguments but that an entire section is devoted to these “outcome” arguments speaks volumes about Scalia’s value as a Supreme Court justice.

–Paul Wilden

James Johnson resigned from Barak Obama’s vice presidential search committee today reports The Washington Post in an article written by Jonathan Weisman.  Johnson, former chief executive of Fannie Mae, has been caught up in a potential scandal involving some controversial below market rate loans he received from loan giant Countrywide Financial, a partner of Fannie Mae,

But the Obama campaign found itself on the defensive after the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that the former Fannie Mae chief had received millions of dollars in home loans — some of which may have been below average market rates — from Countrywide Financial, a partner of Fannie Mae and a leading purveyor of subprime mortgages.

There are also questions about the pay package Johnson received for his work at Fannie Mae,

The Washington Post reported yesterday that alleged accounting manipulations for 1998 had resulted in maximum payouts to Fannie Mae’s senior executives — $1.9 million in Johnson’s case — when the company’s performance that year would have yielded no bonuses. Even after he left Fannie Mae in 1999, Johnson received millions of dollars in guaranteed consulting fees and perks that included an office, two secretaries and a car and driver for himself and his wife.

While it’s not clear that anything illegal actually happened, Johnson was seen as a liability to the campaign in light of the criticisms Obama has leveled at Countrywide for their part in the subprime mortgage crises.

What is clear is the fact that the Democrats are never going to bring about the change in Washington politics that Obama has promised and voters are so desperate for.  Even though this has hardly been the scandal of the century, Johnson is just another Washington insider with connections that the rest of us will never enjoy.  Obama may have some high ideals and I have little doubt regarding his integrity, all the same, he’s still one more member of a political class that’s completely out of touch with the people they presume to serve.

Money is at the heart of all Washington politics and Obama has raised more than anyone else, especially the Republican contender, John McCain.  While it’s the Republicans that have been the shameless shills for corporate interests the Democrats get their money from the same places virtually guaranteeing that no real change will ever happen in Washington.

Until we remove the money from American politics we can expect more of the same and though Obama will clearly be better for America than either Bush or McCain nothing will ever change as long as money rules the show.  This is why publicly financed campaigns are so vital to preserving our democracy.

–Paul Wilden

In classic conservative style, David Brooks, in his Washington Post column, laments the changes in this country over the last thirty or so years.  Not just the moral decadence for which he blames Hollywood and TV, but the “financial decadence” for which he mostly blames, well, us,

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.
…
The loosening of financial inhibition has meant more options for the well-educated but more temptation and chaos for the most vulnerable. Social norms, the invisible threads that guide behavior, have deteriorated. Over the past years, Americans have been more socially conscious about protecting the environment and inhaling tobacco. They have become less socially conscious about money and debt.

Brook’s timeline for this decline is interesting because it matches almost exactly the timeline I’ve used to chart the decline of the middle class.  It’s always easy to blame the victims but rarely does it make any sense.  What exactly has changed over the last few decades?  Have everyday working Americans really changed from being frugal and thrifty to spend crazy debt lovers?  Or has our country changed around us.

You used to be able to provide housing for yourself for less than 25% of your income.  There used to be jobs in this country that paid a living wage, layoffs were rare and if you were a loyal worker to your company you were rewarded with a lifetime of work and a pension to retire on.  Now the high paying manufacturing jobs have been replaced with low paying Wal-Mart jobs.  The products that are know being made overseas for slave wages still cost the same or more when we buy them, the corporations that can’t seem to survive without slashing their labor costs still seem to be able to afford lavish pay packages for their top executives.

What has changed over the last thirty or so years is the corporate take-over of this country that has been brought on by the conservative revolution.  The decadence that Brooks complains about, financial or otherwise coincides precisely with the conservative turn this country has taken and until we realize that, and do something about it, we can only expect more of the same.

–Paul Wilden

In Charles Krauthammer’s latest Washington Post column, he tries to make the case that government mandated fuel efficiency standards (CAFE) are counter-productive and that the market performs the same function all by itself,

America’s sudden change in car-buying habits makes suitable mockery of that absurd debate Congress put on last December on fuel efficiency standards. At stake was precisely what miles-per-gallon average would every car company’s fleet have to meet by precisely what date.
…
At $4 a gallon, the fleet composition is changing spontaneously and overnight, not over the 13 years mandated by Congress. (Even Stalin had the modesty to restrict himself to five-year plans.) Just Tuesday, GM announced that it would shutter four SUV and truck plants, add a third shift to its compact and midsize sedan plants in Ohio and Michigan, and green-light for 2010 the Chevy Volt, an electric hybrid.

This is completely absurd.  As one who works in the auto repair industry, first as a technician and now working for a company that makes the diagnostic equipment auto techs need to fix today’s cars, I can attest to changes brought about by government regulations, both in fuel efficiency as well as emissions standards.  Modern cars and trucks, even the gas hog SUV’s are far more efficient and less polluting than they might have been without regulations.  Government standards forced auto manufacturers to make cars that are more efficient rather than, as Krauthammer asserts, “force manufacturers to make cars that nobody wants to buy.”

In fact, on the contrary, the last time market forces brought about such a radical change in consumer buying habits was in the early seventies with the oil embargo.  The big three auto makers were churning out huge, gas guzzling, emissions spewing vehicles and almost went out of business when gas prices shot up.  Smaller, more efficient Japanese cars flooded the market while American manufacturers raced to catch up.  The results were some of the worst cars ever built, I know, I used to fix them.

Four dollar gasoline may indeed have forced the market changes Krauthammer points out but wouldn’t it have been better if cars had been more efficient before gas prices went through the roof?

–Paul Wilden

In a report that should surprise no one, the Senate Intelligence Committee is claiming that Bush and Cheney knew the intelligence did not support their assertions that Iraq was a threat to national security.  While it’s certainly true that our intelligence was flawed, Bush’s claims that his judgment was sound and his actions were based on the information he was receiving were essentially untrue.  From a McClatchy article written by Jonathan Landay,

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials promoted the invasion of Iraq with public statements that weren’t supported by intelligence or that concealed differences among intelligence agencies, the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday in a report that was delayed by bitter partisan infighting.

Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller, D-W. Va., reiterated the fact that the intelligence was faulty but also stated that the administration should not have pushed for war based on the information available,

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence,” Rockefeller said in a statement. “But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.”

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced,” Rockefeller said. “Unfortunately, our committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence.”

Predictably, the administration has charged that the report is biased and reveals nothing we didn’t already know,

The White House dismissed the main report as a partisan rehash of what’s already known about erroneous U.S. intelligence on Iraq.

“The majority report today is a selective view,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. “The administration statements on Iraq were based on the very same intelligence that was given to the Congress. And they came to the same conclusion, as did other countries around the world. The issue . . . ultimately turned out to be false, and we have fully admitted that.”

But the report revealed far more than “old information” about “erroneous intelligence,” it showed there was reason to be skeptical of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program or connections between Saddam Hussein al-Qaida and that Bush cared little about the truth, being only interested in justifying a war he was already determined to wage,

The committee found that the administration’s warnings that former dictator Saddam Hussein was in league with Osama bin Laden, a highly inflammatory assertion in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaida attacks, weren’t substantiated by U.S. intelligence reports. In fact, it said, U.S. intelligence agencies were telling the White House that while there’d been sporadic contacts over a decade, there was no operational cooperation between Iraq and al Qaida, the report said.

The administration’s repeated statements “suggesting that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al Qaida with weapons training, were not substantiated by intelligence,” it said.

Statements by Bush, Cheney and other top officials that Saddam had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons in violation of U.N. resolutions were “generally substantiated” by what turned out to be erroneous U.S. intelligence analyses, the report said.

However, while intelligence reports “generally substantiated” their claims that Iraq had secretly restarted a nuclear weapons program, the committee said, Bush and other officials failed to disclose that the State Department disputed that finding. (emphasis added)

Furthermore, one need only look at the source of the report in order to dismiss criticisms of partisanship.  The Senate Intelligence Committee has hardly been the president’s harshest critic and the committee chair, Rockefeller, has been championing Bush’s desire for unrestricted use of warrantless eavesdropping on Americans and full immunity for the telecoms that have been illegally helping in this endeavor.  The fight over reauthorizing the Protect America Act (PAA) is a whole other in itself but it basically comes down to trusting Bush to spy on Americans without oversight and to take his word for it that the telecoms that have helped him should be shielded from being held responsible for their illegal activities.  It would be difficult indeed to make a case that Rockefeller is part of the “hate Bush” crowd, determined to take him down on any pretense.

In fact, given the revelations that Bush’s judgment, not to mention his integrity, are not to be trusted, it will be interesting to see whether Rockefeller continues to be so willing to trust Bush not to trample on our rights.

–Paul Wilden

Hillary Clinton is expected, any day now, to concede the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama.  Clinton was never my particular choice for president but then neither was Obama.  And while there were moments in both campaigns that were disappointing, all in all I have a great deal of respect for Clinton.  She’s an intelligent and strong person with far more character than the misogynists that criticized her, calling her names and leveling charges that could only be applied to a woman.

Now that the long and hard fought battle for the Democratic nomination is over what can we expect?  McCain, for all the talk of being an independent “maverick” as well as being a moderate that can “reach across the aisle,” McCain has shown that that he’s every bit the radical Bush is when it comes to foreign policy and regardless of whatever his position is on social issues, he’s more than willing to pander to the most extreme right wing elements in our society.  He may have rejected Hagee’s endorsement but only after he was forced to by the revelations of Hagee’s extreme and hateful bigotry.  For all the talk about Jeremiah Wright, Obama never sought his endorsement and the fact that Wright was Obama’s minister for so many years really means very little.  Most of us, those with open minds anyway, associate with people with varying viewpoints.  My best friend happens to be very conservative and as anyone who’s read my blog knows, I’m about as liberal as you can get.  Anyone who’s paying attention, and has any integrity at all, can tell that Obama’s views are very different from Wright’s and that Wright’s inflammatory remarks have absolutely no bearing on the type of president Obama would be.

McCain on the other hand actively sought Hagee’s endorsement and though, for the most part, I don’t think that McCain really shares Hagee’s bigotry, he clearly plans to pander to the same religious zealots that actually listen to man such as Hagee.  And while their motivations are most likely different, McCain and Hagee are both warmongers and their foreign policy positions are both similar and frightening.

Another aspect of the Hagee endorsement that I plan to expand on more in the coming days is, how it demonstrates just how bogus McCain’s reputation as an independent maverick really is.  McCain once warned of the dangers of pandering to the religious right and now he’s doing the exact same thing.  Furthermore, this is hardly the first flip-flop McCain is guilty of.

So what then can we expect?  McCain is cut from the same cloth as Bush and Cheney which means we can expect the same kind of low class, personality based campaign we’ve come to expect from Bush ala Karl Rove.  Expect to hear plenty about pastors and flag pins and very little about the issues that are on the minds of most Americans.

–Paul Wilden

As I’ve written here , former Bush advisor Karl Rove has been issued a subpoena by the House Judiciary Committee.  They want to find out if Rove had any involvement in the politicization of the Justice Department, the same scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.  Specifically, they want to know if Rove has any information concerning the recent conviction of Donald Siegelman, former Democratic governor of Alabama.  Siegelman’s prosecution appears to have been politically motivated as he was poised to possibly retake the governorship of Alabama from the Republicans.  From an editorial in The New York Times,

Mr. Siegelman – who began serving his sentence before being freed on appeal – was convicted on corruption charges that appear to be flimsy, and his supporters have long insisted that he was prosecuted for partisan reasons. Until his indictment, he was the Democrats’ best chance of taking back the Alabama governorship.

After Mr. Siegelman’s conviction, Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer, swore in an affidavit that she had heard another G.O.P. political operative, Bill Canary, boast in a phone call that his wife would “take care” of Mr. Siegelman and that Mr. Rove was involved in the planning. Mr. Canary’s wife is Leura Canary, the United States attorney for Montgomery, and her office prosecuted Mr. Siegelman.

While most consider Washington politics as nothing more than either partisan bickering or shameless power mongering with little or no regard for what is in this Country’s best interest, the Justice department has traditionally been free of political games.  That is until the Bush administration came along.  In an effort to garner a permanent Republican majority, former Bush operative Karl Rove had led the effort to politicize the department by firing federal prosecutors and replacing them, in many cases, with partisan hacks who’s only qualifications were loyalty to the Republican party.  And now we’re beginning to see some of the results of that process with not only Siegelman’s prosecution but possibly others as well,

The House Judiciary Committee has prepared a report on the Siegelman case, and several other questionable prosecutions.

The question now is whether Rove will obey the subpoena, an event that doesn’t seem likely as he’s refused to comply with a previous subpoena citing executive privilege.  As the Times points out, disobeying this subpoena would be legally dubious and ethically repugnant,

Mr. Rove has already defied a Senate subpoena on the issue of politicized prosecutions, claiming executive privilege, and he seems intent on defying the House’s subpoena. His claim of executive privilege is not only weak; it is shamefully cynical.

If he was drumming up political prosecutions in the Justice Department, and talking about it with operatives in Alabama, those conversations are not privileged. And if there is any privilege to be protected – such as a conversation with the president that did not involve illegality – he would still need to show up in Congress and plead the privilege to specific questions.

Will Attorney General Michael Mukasey do his job, perform his constitutional duty and enforce this subpoena?  When Mukasey’s name was offered to the Senate to replace Gonzales as Attorney General, it was hoped that even though he’s a staunch conservative, he would possess the independence and integrity to act in a non-partisan manner as the nation’s leading law enforcement officer.  His equivocations regarding the legality of “waterboarding” during his Senate confirmation hearings didn’t inspire much confidence but here he has the opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to the rule of law by compelling Rove’s sworn testimony to the House Judiciary Committee.

–Paul Wilden

Thomas Friedman’s op-ed column in The New York Times attempts to teach us how to properly conduct negotiations with foreign governments.  Appropriately titled “It’s All About Leverage”, Friedman contends that you don’t talk with your foes without first possessing leverage,

As I have argued before: When you have leverage, talk. When you don’t have leverage, get some. Then talk.

While he doesn’t come out and say it, it’s clear how, in Friedman’s mind, you “get some,”

The fact is, Mr. Obama was right to say that he would talk with any foe, if it would advance U.S. interests. The Bush team negotiated with Libya to give up its nuclear program, even after Libya had accepted responsibility for blowing up Americans on Pan Am Flight 103. Those negotiations succeeded, though, not because Mr. Bush was better “prepared,” but because, at the time, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush had leverage. Iraq had yet to fall apart.

“Get[ting] some” means invading sovereign nations and overthrowing their governments.  This isn’t the first time that invading Iraq was justified by the fact that Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program and while it’s debatable that the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with Libya’s decision, the real point is, how astounding it is to suggest that it’s okay to invade and destroy a country, kill hundreds-of-thousands of its people because some other country is now less of a threat.  It’s precisely this hubristic, hegemonic attitude that has created the terrorist problem we face today.

To Friedman and his kind, talking with other countries isn’t about compromise or finding common ground, talking is nothing more than a precursor to possible military action.  There’s no point in discussing anything that you couldn’t take by force anyway,

Mr. Bush was also right: talking with Iran today would be tantamount to appeasement – but that’s because the Bush team has so squandered U.S. power and credibility in the Middle East, and has failed to put in place any effective energy policy, that negotiating with Iran could only end up with us on the short end. We don’t have the leverage – the allies, the alternative energy, the unity at home, the credible threat of force – to advance our interests diplomatically today. (emphasis added)

Never mind that negotiating with Iran could take the wind out of the sails of the more extreme elements in that country like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Bush’s incessant saber rattling towards Iran has only strengthened the hardliners in that country.  Another case in point is North Korea.  The Clinton administration had all but wrapped up an agreement with that country to end their nuclear aspirations when the Bush administration came in and cut off negotiations.  Now, several years after the fact and after North Korea obtained the bomb, Bush has restarted talks with Kim Jong.  Yes, Bush won what he wanted, six-party talks rather than dealing with them direct, but at what cost?  Surely it would have been better to continue negotiations before they developed the bomb, before they held most of the cards.

In fact, it’s the inability to recognize what really changes world events that is behind authoritarian ideals favored by the Bush administration and championed by the likes of Friedman.  In Friedman’s world, winning what’s in the best interests of the U.S. is paramount and while that may seem to make sense the problem is, exactly what is in the best interests of the U.S., it changes depending on who you talk to.  Invading Iraq was supposed to be in our best interest and Bush still believes that, but not most of America.  Typically, what’s meant by America’s best interests is in fact, corporate America’s best interests.

Additionally, Friedman’s style of negotiations involves a mindset that for every winner there must also be a loser.  By only concerning your self with your own interests, by “leveraging” negotiations so that only you are the winner, you may gain some short term victories but the long term results are bound to haunt you.  On a planet that has already suffered two world wars, foreign policy and negotiations with foreign governments must have as their goal what is in the best interests of the entire world.  World peace, ending poverty, these are not just idealistic but unattainable goals; they are the true path to the freedom and security that we all desire.  And negotiating settlements with foreign nations where everybody’s needs are met, where there are no losers, is not just pie-in-the-sky idealism, it is in fact, in our best interests.

When Osama Bin Laden plots terrorists acts against the U.S., when Bush invades sovereign nations, when Ahmadinejad expresses a desire to wipe Israel of the map, these men, all these men, are using fear to manipulate the majority to serve the needs of the minority in exactly the same manner that Hitler used and Friedman and his ilk are mere pawns in this unwinnable game.

–Paul Wilden

The reaction to McClellan’s tell-all book, where he reveals, among other things, Bush’s elaborate propaganda scheme to sell the public on the need to invade Iraq, was swift and furious.  McClellan was said to be a disgruntled ex-employee, disloyal, disingenuous, and self-serving, just to name a few.  In an administration where loyalty is valued far above honesty, integrity and competence-”heck of a job Brownie”-McClellan’s stock is now valued somewhere below Judas’.

So it was interesting to read at Think Progress’ website how “boring” McClellan’s book really is, (emphasis original)

Now several prominent conservatives are dismissing the book by insisting that no one outside of “people who follow Washington issues” really even cares about McClellan’s allegations:

Ari Fleischer: This is a very Washington and people who follow Washington issue, and people tend to read these types of books. What is interesting, Bill, is TV shows, for example, millions watch the news at night, a great selling book only sells about 100,000, so it’s kinda gonna be a self-contained story.

Bill O’Reilly: McClellan says Mr. Bush did not handle Katrina very well. Gee, I’m stunned. He says the president used propaganda to justify Iraq. Again, is that a bulletin? … McClellan also believes that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby conspired in the Valerie Plame case. Forgive me if I’m bored.

Newt Gingrich: No. I don’t want to shock you, Alan, but I actually don’t care. … I mean my lack of interest in Scott McClellan’s personal odyssey of self-discovery is a negative. I’m more concerned about American Idol than I am about Scott McClellan.

Mary Matalin: I don’t care, like Newt, I don’t really care to analyze this kind of betrayal.

It’s really quite comical listening to the right trying to deal with McClellan’s confessions, as I noted , when liars and crooks (and those who support them) are exposed for who they really are, there’s not a whole lot you can do, truth isn’t on your side so your only real choice is to discredit the whistle blower.  But in doing so, they’ve given the story that much more attention so now they have to pretend it’s really no big deal at all.  And they do this with a straight face as if no one can see through their transparent façade.

–Paul Wilden

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, in a tell all book soon to be released, accuses the Bush administration of leading us into war by manipulating the public with an elaborate propaganda campaign,

Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.

This of course comes as no surprise to anyone other than the True Believers who still think Bush is doing a good job.  It was just eight days ago that The New York Times broke the story that the Pentagon was running its own propaganda program which Bush doubtlessly was aware of.

The response from the right is as predictable as it is laughable, when liars get caught in their lies there’s little else they can do but to try and smear the person that exposed them.  This is what was said about McClellan when he resigned, from the Think Progress website,

President Bush: “And I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity. He really represents the best of his family, our state and our country.” [4/19/06]

White House Counselor Dan Bartlett: McClellan “served this country and this White House very well during very difficult times.” [On Hardball, 4/19/06]

Former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: McClellan enjoyed “the trust and confidence of the president” and “was flawless in his performance, especially when you read the transcripts.” [4/20/06]

And this is what’s being said about him now, also from the Think Progress website,

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino slammed McClellan today as a “disgruntled” employee; former press secretary Ari Fleischer said he was “heartbroken.”

Other former White House officials started the smear campaign last night. Karl Rove, interviewed on Hannity and Colmes, asserted that McClellan sounded more like “a left-wing blogger” than himself. Former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend, interviewed on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, called McClellan “self-serving” and “disingenuous.”

This no doubt is only the beginning.  Smearing “disgruntled” former employees is old hat for this bunch; here are a few other examples of their work,

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill

WROTE: Bush planned in invade Iraq before 9/11 and was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people” during Cabinet meetings.

SMEAR: “We didn’t listen to [O'Neill's] wacky ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now?” – A senior official who informed Bush of O’Neill’s comments, 1/12/04

 

Former Campaign Chief Strategist Matthew Dowd

SAID: Bush has “become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in”; that “our leaders have to understand what they [the American public] want. They’re saying, ‘Get out of Iraq.’”

SMEAR: “He’s going through a lot of personal turmoil but also he has a son who is soon to be deployed to Iraq. That could only impact a parents’ mind as they think through these issues.” – Dan Bartlett, 4/1/07

 

Former Counter-Terrorism Chief Richard Clarke

WROTE: Bush “ignored terrorism for months”; sought to tie 9/11 to Iraq immediately.

SMEAR: “He wanted to be the deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department after it was created. … He did not get that position, someone else was appointed to it. … His best friend is Rand Beers, who is the principal advisor to the Kerry campaign.” – Scott McClellan, while serving as press secretary, 3/22/04

All dutifully reported by a lazy and complicit press that eats this kind of stuff up and regurgitates it for public consumption because it’s easier and more rewarding to repeat gossip than it is to investigate the stories behind the smears.

One does have to wonder what motivated McClellan to spill his guts however, as he didn’t seem to have any problems spouting the party line while still gainfully employed by the White House.  This is what he had to say when asked for a comment by Washington Post reporter Michael Shear,

Like many Americans, I am concerned about the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. I wanted to take readers inside the White House and provide them an open and honest look at how things went off course and what can be learned from it. Hopefully in some small way it will contribute to changing Washington for the better and move us beyond the hyper-partisan environment that has permeated Washington over the past 15 years.

It would have been nice if he had been more “concerned” when it could have made an actual difference.  The families of the four-thousand plus dead American soldiers no doubt would have appreciated it, not to mention the hundreds-of-thousands Iraqis who lost their lives, still, better late than never I guess.

This, I think, is probably the most interesting comment about this affair,

According to the Politico, a “former colleague” said of McClellan: “It looks like a fairly pathetic attempt to restore his reputation by junking the only positive attribute people saw in him – loyalty.”

Interesting because it highlights a basic truth regarding crooks and liars, that “loyalty” is far more important to them than truth.  But loyalty is a two way street.  McClellan clearly was a good and loyal accomplice at first, but they must have screwed him over but good for him to have broken the faith the way he did, so much the better for us.

–Paul Wilden

If Senator Joseph Lieberman had his way YouTube would be required to take down any videos he deems objectionable, all in the name of protecting us against terrorism of course.  From an editorial in The New York Times,

Mr. Lieberman recently demanded that YouTube take down hundreds of videos produced by Islamist terrorist organizations or their supporters. YouTube reviewed the videos to determine whether they violated its guidelines, which prohibit hate speech and graphic or gratuitous violence. It took down 80 videos, but left others up. Mr. Lieberman said that was “not enough,” and demanded that more come down.

This is wrong on multiple levels.  First and foremost, taking away one of our most cherished freedoms is not a solution to any problem.  Just exactly what would we be protecting if we were to turn this country into a Taliban like state where our “leaders” control what we can watch on the internet or anywhere else for that matter?  As the editorial itself points out,

Terrorism is a real concern. All Americans know that. They also know that if we give up our fundamental rights, the terrorists win. If people use speech to engage in criminal acts, they should be prosecuted. Cutting off free speech is never the right answer. (emphasis added)

Or as Benjamin Franklin put it, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  Wise words that still ring true more than two hundred years later but are completely lost on the arrogant fool Lieberman.

It’s also hasn’t been demonstrated that censoring YouTube would even produce the desired results, i.e. make us any safer.  It certainly could be argued that making potential terrorist videos easier for law enforcement to find would be a far more effective way of monitoring terrorist activity, especially considering that any banned videos could easily resurface on virtually any web page,

Not only do these efforts contradict fundamental American values, it is not clear if they would help fight terrorism. Even if YouTube pulled down every video Mr. Lieberman did not like, radical groups could post the same videos on their own Web sites. Trying to restrain the Internet is a game of “whack-a-mole” that cannot be won, says John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Having the videos on YouTube may even be a good thing, because it makes it easier for law enforcement officials, the media and the public to monitor the groups and their messages.

Finally, one of the most objectionable aspects of censorship is; who does the censoring?  In this case it would be Lieberman and his ilk.  This is a man who just recently has come out in support of the vile and disgusting bigot John Hagee, a man who called the Catholic church “the great whore,” who has blamed the tragedy of Katrina on gays and who has suggested that Hitler may have been doing the lords work.  This is the kind of man Lieberman looks up to.  Is this who you would want deciding what you can and can not look at on the internet?

The fact of the matter is, those who would control what you see and here, whether it be in the name of safety or decency, are invariably objectionable characters themselves.  Lieberman sees the world as a monumental struggle of good versus evil and is more than willing to wage endless war and to trample our most cherished liberties in order to stamp out evil.  It’s a fool’s errand and Lieberman is just the fool to attempt it.

–Paul Wilden

The McCain campaign issued a statement today unequivocally supporting amnesty for the telecommunications companies that broke the law by helping the Bush administration spy on American citizens.  As reported by Wired,

It’s official, John McCain still supports amnesty for telephone and internet companies that helped the Bush Administration target Americans for wiretapping for five years, without getting any court orders.

The confusion resulted from a tech policy discussion in New Haven, Connecticut Wednesday where a surrogate for presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain said that as president, McCain would require strict conditions for amnesty. If by 2009, Congress hasn’t broken the current deadlock over whether to free the telecoms from the civil suits against them, McCain would want hearings, clear future rules and apologies from the telecoms before supporting amnesty,his surrogate said, making a big change in position from McCain’s earlier votes in support of the provision.

 This is the actual statement that was issued,

John McCain through his votes and statements has shown a commitment to winning the battle against Islamic fundamentalists whose quest is to destroy the United States.  John McCain believes that as part of this battle, companies who assist the government in good faith should not be punished, but he also believes that Congress must put forth clear guidelines for requesting the participation of private companies, provide proper Congressional oversight of any such participation and protect all Americans privacy.

After careful and deliberate consideration, fact-finding, and exploration of options, John McCain has continued to support renewal of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act.  The granting of retroactive immunity supports the continuing efforts of participating companies yet should be done with explicit statements that this is not a blessing for future activities. 

Supporters of amnesty love to make references to “good faith” assistance and how if amnesty isn’t provided, telecoms will no longer be willing to “cooperate” with the government but these are specious arguments at best.  First, the whole point of the concept “rule of law,” is that cooperating with illegal government requests is never okay.  Our constitution and our system of checks and balances are there to prevent government from over stepping its bounds and it’s never the duty or responsibility of any person or corporation to break the law at the request of the government.  Additionally, the original was written with the help of the telecommunications industry specifically so there would be no confusion about what constitutes legal and illegal cooperation.  And as for providing amnesty in order to ensure future cooperation from the telecoms, it is in fact required that telecoms comply with any and all legal requests from the government.

What this is really all about amounts to two issues.  First, the Bush administration has wantonly and repeatedly broken the law and sees no bounds to its power.  From the multitude of signing statements to illegally eavesdropping on Americans, Bush sees no limits to what he can do and no law he’s compelled to comply with.  Second, if your pockets are deep enough you can buy your way out of taking responsibility for breaking the law as Glenn Greenwald demonstrates in his post on this issue,

Just in the first three months of 2008, recent lobbyist disclosure statements reveal that AT&T spent $5.2 million in lobbyist fees (putting it well ahead of its 2007 pace, when it spent just over $17 million). In the first quarter of 2008, Verizon spent $4.8 million on lobbyist fees, while Comcast spent $2.6 million. So in the first three months of this year, those three telecoms — which would be among the biggest beneficiaries of telecom amnesty (right after the White House) — spent a combined total of almost $13 million on lobbyists. They’re on pace to spend more than $50 million on lobbying this year — just those three companies. (emphasis original)

And this is the America that John McCain supports.  Endless war, unrestricted government power and a free pass for large corporations to break the law at will.  Meanwhile, the Americans for whom this country was intended to serve face declining wages, home foreclosure and uncertain futures for themselves and their children.

–Paul Wilden

The House Judiciary committee issued a subpoena to former Bush advisor Karl Rove.  According to a Washington Post New York Times article written by Neil Lewis, the committee is looking to question Rove on matters concerning the firings of several federal prosecutors that were believed to be dismissed for political rather than performance reasons as well as the possibly politically motivated prosecution of former Alabama Governor Donald Siegelman,

WASHINGTON – The House Judiciary Committee pressed its investigation of possible political influence in Justice Department prosecutions on Thursday by issuing a subpoena to Karl Rove, the former chief political operative at the Bush White House.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the committee chairman, said the subpoena was necessary because Mr. Rove had explicitly declined an invitation to appear voluntarily. Mr. Conyers and fellow committee Democrats say they want to question Mr. Rove about the dismissals of several federal prosecutors and ask whether he knows anything about the decision to prosecute former Gov. Donald E. Siegelman of Alabama, a Democrat.

Mr. Siegelman, who was convicted on a bribery charge, was released from prison in March pending an appeal after an appeals court ruled that he had raised “substantial questions” about his case.

It remains to be seen whether Rove will comply with the subpoena, Bush may further flaunt the law by invoking Executive Privilege barring Rove from testifying.  Another Bush operative, Harriet Miers has also, like Rove, declined to testify voluntarily and additionally, defied a subpoena.  Her case is now before a federal court,

Mr. Rove’s lawyer also noted that the House committee was engaged in a similar conflict with Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, who has also declined to provide voluntary testimony about the dismissals of the federal prosecutors and has defied a subpoena. That issue has landed in federal court, and Mr. Luskin said the Rove matter should await the resolution of that case.

Mr. Conyers, in a letter to Mr. Luskin on Thursday, said that the request to Mr. Rove was wider than the one to Ms. Miers because it also sought information about the Siegelman prosecution.

While partisan political games are common in Washington and played by both sides, the Justice department has traditionally been free of such issues.  The Justice department is charged with upholding the law regardless of political affiliation and often must investigate the very people who appointed them.  The politicization of this department by Bush, under the direction of Rove was a part of their larger plan for the permanent Republican majority envisioned by the conservatives and represents one of the more egregious examples of the lawlessness of the Bush administration.

Typically, whenever it’s suggested that one aspect or another of Bush’s presidency should be investigated, it’s dismissed as nothing more than partisan finger pointing or political maneuvering but the fact is, in order for our government to represent the people as it was originally intended, much work needs to be done to reverse the expansion of presidential power under Bush.  And in order to do that, it’s imperative that these types of investigations move forward uncovering as much as possible.

–Paul Wilden

I don’t always agree with Israel’s actions and the unflagging support of the U.S. no matter what the Israelis do is extremely disturbing but in apparent repudiation of Bush’s cowboy diplomacy Israel has begun negotiations with Syria.  As reported in The New York Times by Ethan Bronner,

JERUSALEM – Israel and Syria announced on Wednesday that they were engaged in negotiations for a comprehensive peace treaty through Turkish mediators, a sign that Israel is hoping to halt the growing influence of Iran, Syria’s most important ally, which sponsors the anti-Israel groups Hezbollah and Hamas.

So while Cheney plots the different ways he can start another war, this time with Iran, Israel has chosen an alternate course, one far more likely to diffuse Iran’s growing power and bring the security that Israel so desperately desires,

Syria’s motives are clear: it wants to regain the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, and to re-establish a relationship with the United States, something it figures it can do through talks with Jerusalem.

For Israel – which has watched the Palestinian group Hamas take over Gaza and gain ground in the West Bank, and the Lebanese group Hezbollah display raw power in Beirut – an effort to pull Syria away from Iran could produce enormous benefits. An announcement on Wednesday of a peace deal that gives Hezbollah the upper hand in Lebanon’s government probably added to Israel’s sense of urgency.  (emphasis added)

For all of the hyperbolic statements about wanting to “wipe Israel off the map,” the fact of the matter is that both Arabs and Israelis just want to live their lives in peace.  Polls show for example that a majority of Palestinians support continued negotiations with Israel.  In this country, where the dominate our political discourse, mostly what you hear are the most outrageous and often distorted statements from leaders like Iran’s Ahmadinejad.  But in doing so the true reality is usually obscured.  Ahmadinejad may be Iran’s president but he’s not the only person holding power in that country, and in any case, Ahmadinejad no more speaks for all Iranians than Bush speaks for all Americans.

What is so utterly ridiculous about all of this is how Bush’s heavy handed approach to foreign policy has worsened tensions in the region and how the invasion of Iraq has strengthened Iranian power and influence rather than weaken it, and despite all that has happened, rather than learning from their mistakes, by refusing to negotiate with Syria, Bush and Cheney are poised to compound them,

The American government opposed Israeli-Syrian negotiations because they feared that such a negotiation would reward Syria at a time when the United States is seeking to isolate it for its backing of Hezbollah and its meddling in Lebanon, Bush administration and Israeli officials said. The United States yielded when it became clear that Israel was determined to go ahead, they said.

The talks come less than a week after President Bush, speaking to the Israeli Parliament, created a stir by criticizing those who would negotiate with “terrorists and radicals.” Mr. Bush’s remarks have become an issue in the American presidential campaign because they were widely perceived as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic front-runner. (emphasis added)

This is classic authoritarianism, where you ignore the fact that real lives are at stake and treat the whole issue as if it’s some sort of a game with winners and losers, “rewards” and punishments.  Fortunately, Israel is showing a little more sense than the warmongering neocons controlling America by looking for real solutions to the problems plaguing that region.

–Paul Wilden 

Now that Barak Obama has the Democratic nomination all but wrapped up we can expect the right-wing-noise-machine to gear up and start attacking Obama in full force.  Robert Novak’s op-ed column today in The Washington Post accurately assessed what’s in store for us,

When one of the Democratic Party’s most astute strategists criticized John McCain this week for attacking Barack Obama’s desire to engage Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I asked what the Republican presidential candidate ought to talk about in this campaign. “Health care and the economy,” he replied. That is a sure formula for a Democratic victory, but it is one that McCain’s campaign rejects.

McCain is not about to disarm. His campaign has no intention of fighting this battle on Democratic turf. During the more than five months until Election Day, Republicans will explore the mind-set of this young man who is a stranger to most Americans. That includes his association with the Chicago leftist William Ayers, who has remained unrepentant about his violent role as a 1960s radical. It will not be popular with McCain’s erstwhile admirers in the mainstream media, but America will hear more about Ayers in this campaign. (emphasis added)

Could it be any clearer?  Don’t look for the Republicans to spend much time discussing the issues that actually affect Americans like “[h]ealth care and the economy,” but I’m sure we’ll hear plenty about William Ayers, and I’m guessing that Jeremiah Wright’s name will pop up as well.  Of course this will all be so that we can carry out the important job of “explor[ing] the mind-set of this young man who is a stranger to most Americans.”  We could explore Obama’s mind-set by examining his stance on the important issues facing us but it’s so much more fun, and not to mention rewarding, if instead you can link him, no matter how weakly, to certain dubious characters.

This has been the Republican game plan for decades.  It has been extremely effective and there’s no reason to think it will stop now.  The Swift Boating of John Kerry bought us four more years of war, a failing economy and a government that considers itself above the law.  Now, more than ever, we need to keep our eye on the ball and not let the smoke and mirrors tricks of the Republicans fool us again.

–Paul Wilden

In a slim 4-3 decision, California’s Supreme Court has overturned the laws banning marriage between same sex partners.  The decision was something of a surprise given that six out of the seven justices are Republicans but contrary to what the religious zealots are saying, far from being “judicial activism”, the decision was based solely on  constitutional issues,

Accordingly, the legal issue we must resolve is not whether it would be constitutionally permissible under the California Constitution for the state to limit marriage only to opposite-sex couples while denying same-sex couples any opportunity to enter into an official relationship with all or virtually all of the same substantive attributes, but rather whether our state Constitution prohibits the state from establishing a statutory scheme in which both opposite-sex and same-sex couples are granted the right to enter into an officially recognized family relationship that affords all of the significant legal rights and obligations traditionally associated under state law with the institution of marriage, but under which the union of an opposite-sex couple is officially designated a “marriage” whereas the union of a same-sex couple is officially designated a “domestic partnership.”

Complaints of “going against the will of the voters” have been voiced far and wide but even grade-schoolers are taught that everyone in this country has the same rights as anyone else and that no vote can take that away.  Slavery after all was once favored by the majority, not to mention denying women the vote and Jim Crow laws, all with majority support in their time.  The court dispelled this particular argument by citing the 1948 case, Perex vs. Sharp,

Although, as an historical matter, civil marriage and the rights associated with it traditionally have been afforded only to opposite-sex couples, this court’s landmark decision 60 years ago in Perez v. Sharp (1948) 32 Cal.2d 7114 - which found that California’s statutory provisions prohibiting interracial marriages were inconsistent with the fundamental constitutional right to marry, notwithstanding the circumstance that statutory prohibitions on interracial marriage had existed since the founding of the state – makes clear that history alone is not invariably an appropriate guide for determining the meaning and scope of this fundamental constitutional guarantee. The decision in Perez, although rendered by a deeply divided court, is a judicial opinion whose legitimacy and constitutional soundness are by now universally recognized. (emphasis added)

The “history” argument being essentially the same as the “will of the voters” argument, either way, all laws and regulations must pass constitutional muster in order to be valid regardless of what the voters want or how it’s always been done.

But what is probably the most disingenuous argument I’ve heard so far is how unfair it is for the court to “redefine” marriage and force this new “definition” on heterosexuals.  Allowing gays to marry doesn’t change heterosexual marriage in any way at all.  And nothing is being “forced” on anybody.  My marriage, along with every other existing marriage, will remain exactly as it was before.  What is so hypocritical about this argument is; by denying the right for same-sex couples to marry, you do in fact cause harm, and you are “forcing” your values on people who don’t share those values.  And in doing so, you accomplish nothing of any real importance, other than satisfying some xenophobic need to force other people to conform to your own idea of morality.

–Paul Wilden

The Republicans, already “thumped” in the 2006 midterm elections, have now lost three Congressional seats in special elections this year signaling a further decline in the confidence Americans have for the Republican Party.  From an article in The New York Times written by Carl Hulse and Adam Nossiter,

House Republicans struggled to regroup Wednesday in the aftermath of a devastating election loss in Mississippi, acknowledging that their party faced a significant challenge in November after the loss of three Republican seats in special elections this year.

“It was another wake-up call that we have to show Americans that we can fix the problems here in Washington and fix the problems they deal with every day,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader.

No word yet on how Boehner and the Republicans plan on fixing the problems that they themselves created.

For around three and half decades or so this country has taken a significant turn to the right.  Starting with Nixon, gaining steam with Reagan and now culminating with Bush, with, until recently, a rubber stamp Republican Congress.  The mostly centrist Clinton, dealing with a hostile Republican controlled Congress, represented a slight detour at best from this conservative turn we’ve taken.

What do we have to show for the last thirty-five years?  A stagnant if not declining standard of living, a misguided and destructive war with more possibly to come, a reckless and irresponsible financial system that has left our economy in shambles.  The “small government” conservatives have created an Executive branch that believes and acts as if it’s above the rules, ignoring whatever laws it chooses, detains American citizens without due process and tortures whomever it pleases.

The Republicans have been inordinately successful at selling themselves as the party for everyday Americans, as righteous and virtuous men of strength and integrity while simultaneously portraying Democrats as effeminate, gender confused elitists.  It’s a strategy that has worked for years now but as they’ve left this country in shambles their message no longer seems to resonate,

“In 2006 the voters voted for change over the rubber-stamp Republicans who stood by and encouraged the president’s policies,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic caucus. “They continue to identify, as the three special elections show, that Democrats are the party of change and the Republicans are the party of the status quo. That is one thing that is consistent in all three elections.”

And while the Obama/Wright controversy may have gained some traction in certain parts of the country, namely West Virginia where Clinton resoundingly beat Obama, polls show that most voters aren’t buying the idea that Barack Obama is even remotely like Jeremiah Wright.  Having nothing of any real substance to offer America, Republicans have consistently resorted to these types of personality based attacks on their opponents but as reality sets in it appears that voters are looking past the smoke and mirrors and are demanding real change in Washington,

And even in this district, it is not difficult to find conservative voters dissatisfied with the administration in Washington. “There’s a lot of people that are mad at Bush,” said Jim Jennings, a retired businessman, sitting at a table with Republican voters at a barbecue restaurant in DeSoto County.

Predictably, the Republican response is more about selling the message than the message itself,

Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the party was disappointed and needed to be better prepared to deal with conservative Democratic candidates, but he warned that time is short

“Voters remain pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in general,” Mr. Cole said. “Republicans must undertake bold efforts to define a forward-looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for.”.

 Again, no word yet on what this “forward-looking agenda” is all about.  I can’t wait.

–Paul Wilden

One of the biggest stories of late that you probably haven’t heard about is the uncovering of the military’s blatant, and almost certainly illegal, propaganda program.  I say that you probably haven’t heard about it because the national media has been almost completely silent on the matter.  No surprise here because the media was fully cooperating with the Pentagon every step of the way.

I’m not going to write a lengthy post on the matter because I really don’t have anything to add that Glenn Greenwald hasn’t already covered, here, here, here, here and here.

I did want to ensure that my readers were aware of this very serious issue and I encourage you to read each one of Greenwald’s pieces on the subject.  This is an excerpt from Greenwald’s latest post, (emphasis original)

On the question of whether the Pentagon maintained an illegal covert domestic propaganda program — and on the broader question of whether the American media’s political coverage is largely shaped and controlled by the U.S. Government — I don’t believe it’s possible to obtain more conclusive evidence than this:

These are excepts from a memorandum sent on January 14, 2005 — just before President Bush was to be inaugurated for his second term — from Capt. Roxie T. Merritt, the Director of DoD Press Operations, to several top Pentagon officials, including Larry Di Rita, the top aide to Donald Rumsfeld (pp. 7815-7816 (.pdf)). It reports on Merritt’s conclusions and proposals in the wake of a Pentagon-organized trip to Iraq for their military analysts:

BACKGROUND

One of the most interesting things coming from this trip to Iraq with the media analysts has been learning how their jobs have been undergoing a metamorphosis. There are several reasons behind the morph . . . with an all voluntary military, no one in the media has current military background. Additionally we have been doing a good job of keeping these guys informed so they have ready answers when the networks come calling.

CURRENT ISSUES

The key issue here is that more and more, media analysts are having a greater impact on the television media network coverage of military issues. They have now become the go to guys not only for breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues. They also have a huge amount of influence on what stories the network decides to cover proactively with regard to the military. . . .

RECOMMENDATION

1.) I recommend we develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become part of a “hot list” of those that we immediately make calls to or put on an email distro list before we contact or respond to media on hot issues. We can also do more proactive engagement with this list and give them tips on what stories to focus on and give them heads up on issues as they are developing. By providing them with key and valuable information, they become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves . . . .

3.) Media ops and outreach can work on a plan to maximize use of the analysts and figure out a system by which we keep our most reliably friendly analysts plugged in on everything from crisis response to future plans. This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter and the more they know, the more valuable they are to the networks. . . .

5.) As evidenced by this analyst trip to Iraq, the synergy of outreach shops and media ops working together on these types of projects is enormous and effective. Will continue to exam (sic) ways to improve processes.

I did want to add one salient point.  With the revelation that the media were willing partners in all of this, as well as their complete refusal to take responsibility for their actions, can we finally put to rest the ridiculous notion of “the liberal media”?

–Paul Wilden

I’ve written previously on and how far too much attention has been paid to his remarks.  I’ve also John McCain’s own Pastor Wright, Pastor John Hagee, and how that in spite of his anti-Catholic and homophobic remarks, not much has been mentioned in the press concerning his connection to McCain even though McCain actively sought out his political endorsement.  My main point was that in either case, placing too much emphasis on these candidates associations obscures the real issues we should be focusing on,

But the real point has nothing to do with defending Wright or condemning Hagee because neither of these men are actually running for president.  And while I don’t mean to suggest that we should completely ignore the associations of the candidates for elected office, I do think we should put it in its proper perspective.  When it comes down to it, trying to gauge the qualifications of a candidate on their perceived personality, or that of their associations, will invariably lead us astray.

This is certainly true of Barack Obama.  Wright is a separatist while Obama preaches unity.  Obama has never played to race during his campaign; in fact, some in the black community have accused him as not being black enough.  Anyone who believes that what Obama stands for has any real resemblance to Wright is just not paying attention.

As far as McCain’s connection to Hagee, I was willing to give McCain the benefit of the doubt.  For all his faults, I certainly don’t consider McCain to be the rabid religious fanatic that is Hagee.  However, it’s been pointed out to me that I may be going to easy on McCain.  ThinkProgress published a post on this very issue to which I entered the following comment,

McCain actively sought and accepted Hagee’s endorsement, going so far as embracing this vile and disgusting bigot on stage. All the while the media has been mostly silent prefering (sic) to yammer on endlessly about Obama and Wright. While certainly some of Wright’s remarks have been out there, what really has invoked America’s ire (to the extent that anybody cares), has been his “god damn America” remark. That remark is what really pissed off the American herd, never mind that blacks were brought here in chains and that legacy remains even into today.

Wright for all of his incendiary and sometimes ridiculous comments is still just an understandably angry black man while Hagee is nothing more than a disgusting bigot. But which one is getting all the press?

More or less echoing the thoughts I have expressed here.  However, another commenter, Blueflash, in answer to my comment, pointed out something I had failed to consider,

Paul W – Hagee’s worse than just a bigot. He fervently believes the Rapture is immanent (sic) in the Middle East and apparently that it will take John-Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran-McCain to further it along. Naturally, our horse’s @ss of a media obsesses over the fundamentally powerless Rev. Wright while ignoring McCain’s association with a dangerous whackjob who can’t wait for World War 111. The fact that there are black preachers and congregants who don’t worship at the altar of blind, see no evil patriotism is just a tad less scary than the fact that millions of whites agree with Hagee and that McCain feels the need to make them his allies.

What makes the McCain/Hagee connection different from Obama and Wright is that while different in certain respects, both McCain and Hagee are in complete agreement on the necessity of attacking Iran.  And that their reasons may or not be the same matters very little.  There were a variety of motivations when it came to invading Iraq, some had convinced themselves that removing Saddam Hussein would transform the region, others, like Hagee saw this as potentially starting Armageddon, while still others were in it just for the oil.  And so while the motivations of the various factions were quite different, their goal was ultimately the same and clearly they were able to work together making the invasion a reality.

I’m quite certain that McCain is not the religious wingnut that Hagee is, but that both these influential men want to invade Iran and are apparently willing to work together to achieve it, makes John McCain a very scary prospect for president.

–Paul Wilden

The Washington Post reports that the House passed a bill today aimed at helping at risk homeowners stave off foreclosure.  The plan would let borrowers trade their adjustable loans with sharply rising interest rates with more traditional and affordable loans backed by the federal government,

The House today approved an ambitious plan to rescue hundreds of thousands of homeowners at risk of foreclosure by helping them trade exotic loans with rapidly rising monthly payments for more affordable mortgages backed by the federal government.

To nobody’s surprise, Bush has threatened a veto and Republican leaders have criticized the bill as a “bailout for speculators and irresponsible borrowers.”

It’s funny how when a bank like Bear Stearns goes bust and needs their own bailout, you don’t hear the same outcry, not from the conservatives anyway.  While I have no doubt that many borrowers facing foreclosure truly are irresponsible, what does that say about those who loaned them money in the first place?  You would think that one of the largest banks on the planet would know enough about their business to be able to properly access risk.

It’s not that I don’t hold people responsible for taking out loans they couldn’t afford to pay back, but in many cases its understandable how it could happen.  Mostly what you’ll find are hard working people chasing after the American dream of home ownership.  A little naive perhaps, a little too trusting of all the happy talk, “don’t worry about the loan rate re-adjusting, by then your home will have increased in value and you’ll be able to refinance into a fixed rate loan.”  But unlike a lot of people, I find it easier to forgive stupidity than I do greed.  It was as if our entire financial system had broken down.  From loan brokers misleading clients and coaching them to lie on their applications, to Wall Street slicing and dicing mortgage backed securities to the point where nobody understood the risk anymore, every semblance of fiscal responsibility went out the window.  The borrowers, for the most part, were just trying to capture a little something they could call their own, something to show for a lifetime of hard work, while the financial “experts”, the ones who were supposed to know what they were doing, put our entire economy at risk just to add to their already fat wallets.

–Paul Wilden

In typical True Believer® fashion, Michael Gerson’s column in The Washington Post, entitled “A Phony ‘War on Science’” demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what science is.  And also, in typical “patriotic” fashion he displays the same appalling lack of knowledge of American history.  Unbelievably, Gerson asserts that liberal accusations that Republicans are hostile to science are in themselves “faith-based” and it’s the conservatives that are the true champions of science,

There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a “war on science.”

According to Hillary Clinton, the Bush administration has declared “open season on open inquiry.” “When I am president,” she promises, “scientific integrity will not be the exception; it will be the rule.”

The exceptions, in this case, are pretty exceptional: Elias Zerhouni, who has reformed the National Institutes of Health with widely praised efficiency; Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who helped set in motion large-scale AIDS treatment in Africa; Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who led the effort to map the human genome. The “war on science” recently has allowed some extraordinary achievements.

For the most part, these accusations are a political ploy — actually an attempt to shut down political debate. Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled “anti-science.” Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as “theological” and thus illegitimate.

The reality of course, is that Bush has been incredibly hostile to science wherever it has interfered with his preconceived religious beliefs or interfered with the business of making money.  His administration has gone so far as to alter scientific reports and to browbeat scientists into saying what he wishes them to say.  You simply can’t be any more hostile to science than that.  Additionally, Bush’s answer to the AIDS problem in Africa has been to cut funding for condoms in favor of abstinence only education despite the fact that all scientific evidence shows this approach doesn’t work.  And let’s not forget Bush’s belief in Creationism over Evolution, “teach the controversy,” he declared, except the only controversy is in the fevered imaginations of those desiring to turn this country into a Christian theocracy.  From a purely scientific view point, there is no controversy.  There are mountains of scientific evidence in favor of evolution and literally nothing for Creationism or Intelligent Design because regardless of one’s beliefs neither of these ideas qualifies as science.

Predictably, Gerson disingenuously characterizes science as something it isn’t,

Liberal views are “objective” while traditional moral convictions are “biased.” Public scrutiny of scientific practices is “politicizing” important decisions.

These arguments are seriously made, but they are not to be taken seriously. Does anyone really believe in a science without moral and legal limits? In harvesting organs from prisoners? In systematically getting rid of the disabled?

 Liberal views are only objective if they are…objective.  And if “traditional moral convictions” are held inspite of evidence to the contrary, then they most certainly are biased.  That’s the whole point of objectivity, whether you call yourself a liberal or conservative has absolutely nothing to do with it, objectivity is when your views are based in evidence and reason, and nothing more.  And “harvesting organs from prisoners” has nothing at all to do with science; this is nothing more that a really bad straw man argument.  The fact is; science and ethics very often go hand in hand, for example, a hospital ethics committee would never suggest harvesting organs from prisoners because…such a practice would clearly be unethical.  But that has nothing to do with rejecting scientific conclusions based on preconceived ideas, and calling it “morals” doesn’t change anything.  Choosing not to implement a scientific conclusion because it would be unethical is one thing, but to reject that conclusion as false because it offends your morals is quite another.

Next, oddly enough, Gerson connects liberalism with science.

All of which highlights a real conflict, a war within liberalism between the idea of unrestricted science in the cause of health and the principle that all men are created equal — between humanitarianism and egalitarianism.

In “Science and the Left,” his insightful article in the latest issue of the New Atlantis, Yuval Levin argues that a belief in the power of science is central to the development of liberalism — based on the assertion that objective facts and rational planning can replace tradition and religious authority in the organization of society. Levin summarizes the liberal promise this way: “The past was rooted in error and prejudice while the future would have at its disposal a new oracle of genuine truth.”

It’s odd because there’s no argument about this.  Liberalism is what this country was founded on.  The similarity between the words “liberal” and “liberty” is not accidental.  Prior to the formation of this country, this world was ruled for centuries based on religion and superstition, they called it the Dark Ages.  Eventually, people began to realize there was a better way, that science and reason should rule our thoughts and actions instead.  This became to be known as the Enlightenment and it was with these principles that the Founding Fathers created this country.  And it’s Gerson’s lack of understanding of this crucial point that drives him to make this absurd statement,

But the oracle of science is silent on certain essential topics. “Science, simply put,” says Levin, “cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal.”

It was before science and reason ruled the day that the notion of one class of humans being superior to all others was commonly accepted, they called themselves Monarchs and Priests, the concept of equality came in with the Age of Reason.

It’s not surprising that Gerson’s ideas are in contradiction to both reality and the foundation of this country.  As conservatism was hijacked by religious fundamentalism the separation between conservative political ideals and real American values was formed, those values being life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  This is why that more than two-hundred years after a group of very wise men determined this country should be ruled by reason, we still can’t seem to decide what passes for science and what doesn’t.

–Paul Wilden

Now that the Supreme Court has decided that it’s okay to inflict unbearable pain while executing someone and therefore ending the de facto moratorium on capital punishment, it’s time to re-examine the use of this uncivilized and barbaric punishment.

Study after study shows that the death penalty does not deter crime nor does it reduce the cost to society for dealing with murderers.  Its sole purpose has been to satisfy the visceral need for revenge that many people understandably feel as a result of some of the more heinous crimes that are committed.  But revenge has absolutely nothing to do with our criminal justice system whose purpose is only to protect the safety of the general population.

Topping the list of reasons to end capital punishment has to be the fact that innocent people have been executed and there’s no reason to think it will stop here.  Michael Radelet and Hugo Adam Bedau wrote a book entitled Inspite of Innocence where they document 23 innocent people executed and Equal Justice Project finds an additional 16 wrongly put to death.  Furthermore, more than one-hundred people convicted of capital crimes on death row have since been exonerated demonstrating just how flawed the system is.  This from a New York Times article discussing this issue and specifically, the case of Levon Jones, recently released after fourteen years on death row,

John Holdridge, director of the A.C.L.U. Capital Punishment Project, which provided representation for Mr. Jones, said the successful appeals showed that the problem with the death penalty was not the method of execution – the issue ruled on by the Supreme Court last month – but instead “poor people getting lousy lawyers.”

“All these states are gearing up to start executing people again, and nobody seems to be concerned about these systemic problems,” Mr. Holdridge said. (emphasis added)

Our legal system was founded on the principle that it’s better to let ten guilty men go free rather than imprison one innocent man.  But the permanence of the death penalty flies in the face of this belief.  That would be true even in the best of circumstances but is especially so given the gross inequities found in the application of justice, particularly as it applies to the poor and minorities.

The only real argument that death penalty proponents have in their favor is that the majority of Americans favor it.  It’s doubtful though that most Americans truly understand how many mistakes are made in its application, most believing that every opportunity to ascertain a person’s possible innocence is exhausted before actually being put to death.  But even if we could be reasonably sure that innocent people weren’t being executed, it wouldn’t change the fact that this practice is cruel and unnecessary. 

Years from now history will not be kind to those in favor of capital punishment.  I’m reminded of a PBS documentary, Eyes on the Prize, a history of the Civil Rights movement.  There were many disturbing scenes in this film but one in particular stands out in my mind.  It’s the scene where in Little Rock Arkansas, after the courts have mandated integration and the National Guard has to be called in to protect nine black students entering a white high school for the first time from a mob of angry white people hurling disgusting slurs at these innocent children.  When I watched that, I had to wonder, all these years later, how would these people feel now if they could witness their despicable behavior.  Would they want that to be their legacy, preserved for generations to come?  Future generations will almost certainly judge the proponents of capital punishment in the same light.  Is that how you want to be remembered?

–Paul Wilden

Is it any wonder we’re mired in an endless war in Iraq or why Israel and the Palestinians can’t seem to work out their differences when we have this, an article from The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl, as an example of serious foreign policy discussion?

Last Tuesday, Israel faced the fallout from a Palestinian family of five perishing in the Gaza Strip during an Israeli strike against militants firing rockets at an Israeli town. On Wednesday, the Bush administration woke to a front-page picture in The Post of a 2-year-old Iraqi boy killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad aimed at Shiite militiamen launching rockets at the city’s Green Zone. The similarity of these tragic and politically costly episodes was anything but a coincidence.

For months now, Israel has been mired in an unwinnable war against Hamas and allied militias in Gaza, who fire missiles at civilians in Israel and then hide among their own women and children, ensuring that retaliatory fire will produce innocent victims for the Middle East’s innumerable satellite television networks. A growing number of the militiamen have been to Iran for training, and some of the missiles they launch are Iranian-made. Their objective is obvious: to exhaust Israelis with an endless war of attrition while making it impossible for Israel’s government to reach a political settlement with the more moderate Palestinian administration in the West Bank. (emphasis added)

Yes, these people are just animals, sub-humans who’d willingly sacrifice innocent women and children for television publicity.  This is the same kind of racism used by General Westmoreland during the Viet Nam war to justify the killing of countless Vietnamese people,

The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.

It’s simply amazing that Diehl can accuse others of having such low regard for human life after we invaded Iraq and killed hundreds-of-thousands of innocent civilians.  I wonder how many of them were women and children?  And it gets even better as Diehl continues his diatribe with this,

It’s not hard to grasp the common strategy at work here or to intuit what interest it serves. The rockets fired from Gaza and from Sadr City are two prongs of an offensive aimed at forcing the United States out of Iraq, putting Israel on the defensive — and leaving Iran as the region’s preeminent power. (emphasis added)

This is just pure denial.  Apparently Diehl forgets that Iran owes their new found power and influence to us for having invaded and neutralized their most formidable opponent, Iraq.  And finally, Diehl, predictably claims that it’s only the Israelis and Americans who are seriously interested in peace,

Both Israelis and Americans are tantalized by the prospect of a political solution. With U.S. encouragement, the Iraqi government is negotiating with both Sadr and Iran; Israel is talking to Hamas through Egypt. Both militias say they would be happy to observe a cease-fire in exchange for political concessions. (Sadr has already announced one, though the rocket launches continue.) But neither will agree to disarm. This is again the model of Hezbollah, which participates in the Lebanese parliament but refuses to give up its weapons, giving it the ability to wage war at any time of its — or Tehran’s — choosing. Hamas will not surrender its option to bleed Israel, nor will the Mahdi Army its means to harry the American enemy.

No, these dark skinned Middle-Easterners aren’t interested in peace only the ever righteous light skinned Europeans are seriously interested in finding peaceful solutions to the conflicts plaguing the region, the same ones who invaded and destroyed a sovereign nation, the same ones who perpetuate the hardship and humiliation in the open-air prison that is Gaza.

–Paul Wilden

Once revered world-wide as a beacon of freedom and justice, America has devolved into just the kind of nation we were all raised to abhor.  Started as a grand experiment in democracy where all are created equal, where we’re a nation of laws and not men, we’ve sunk to the point where our president not only believes he’s above the law but that the ends justify the means and that nothing, including torture, is off limits.  From an op-ed column in The New York Times written by Nicholas Kristof,

My Times colleague Barry Bearak was imprisoned by the brutal regime in Zimbabwe last month. Barry was not beaten, but he was infected with scabies while in a bug-infested jail. He was finally brought before a court after four nights in jail and then released.

Alas, we don’t treat our own inmates in Guantánamo with even that much respect for law. On Thursday, America released Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera who had been held without charges for more than six years. Mr. Hajj has credibly alleged that he was beaten, and that he was punished for a hunger strike by having feeding tubes forcibly inserted in his nose and throat without lubricant, so as to rub tissue raw.

“Conditions in Guantánamo are very, very bad,” Mr. Hajj said in a televised interview from his hospital bed in Sudan, adding, “In Guantánamo, you have animals that are called iguanas … that are treated with more humanity.” (emphasis added)

This is precisely the kind of thing this country is supposed to be against.  It would be bad enough if one of our allies were to condone this type of treatment (and many do), but it’s reprehensible for this country to run this kind of prison itself.

And to simply call these prisoners terrorists or enemy combatants doesn’t excuse this at all.  As the article points out, many if not most of these people are completely innocent of any crime,

First, most of the inmates were probably innocent all along, but Pakistanis or Afghans turned them over to America in exchange for large cash rewards. The moment we offered $25,000 rewards for Al Qaeda supporters, any Arab in the region risked being kidnapped and turned over as a terrorism suspect.

And to the extent that any of the prisoners are in fact terrorists, descending to their level (or worse), not only goes against the founding principles of this country, it’s morally wrong by any decent standard, religious, ethical or humanitarian.

It’s an unfortunate fact that many in this country consider patriotism to be nothing more than believing their country to be superior to all others for no other reason than they were born in it.  But in fact, real patriotism is demanding your country act in the highest moral and ethical standard possible.  We all learned in school that our government operates on a system of checks and balances, that no branch of government is more powerful than another but presently we have an Executive branch that considers itself above the law, a Legislative branch that whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats, refuses to perform its constitutional duty of reigning in lawlessness and a Judicial branch that increasingly acts on partisan self-interest.  But worse of all is a citizenry that evades its civic duty of providing the ultimate check and balance against excessive government power by acting in blind patriotic loyalty rather than with healthy skepticism.  And contrary to popular opinion, when your country is at war more skepticism is required, not less.

–Paul Wilden

Could there be anything more ridiculous than Fred Hiatt’s editorial in The Washington Post today?  It’s Hiatt’s contention that the recent airstrikes in Somalia that killed a top ranking al-Qaeda leader was misguided because of the civilian casualties involved which ultimately, will just create more recruitment opportunities for the terrorists,

TOMAHAWK MISSILES fired by a U.S. Navy ship demolished a house in central Somalia on Thursday and killed a vicious militia leader and al-Qaeda operative. It was a victory for the Bush administration’s counterterrorism operations in Africa — and a demonstration of the limits of a strategy based almost entirely on “over the horizon” military strikes.
…
But Thursday’s U.S. operation had a distinct downside: At least two dozen other people were killed in the attack, some of them apparently civilians. Al-Shabab responded defiantly, and Somalia-watchers said new leaders for the militia and al-Qaeda will quickly come forward, while fresh recruits may be gained through a backlash against the American intervention. The attack was the fifth U.S. airstrike in Somalia aimed at individuals with al-Qaeda ties since the beginning of 2007. While at least one other operative was killed, some of the attacks appear to have missed their targets while injuring civilians.

I am the first person to agree with the notion that indiscriminately killing civilians is not only morally wrong but completely counter-productive as well.  I have little doubt that the net effect of such airstrikes will be negative.  But where Hiatt goes off the beam is in his alternate strategy,

Somalia is a cautionary example for those who, like Barack Obama, favor rapidly withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq and managing any threat from al-Qaeda with an “over the horizon” strike force. Such forces indeed have the ability to target and kill leaders. They do nothing, however, to change the conditions under which al-Qaeda finds refuge and recruits. As Gen. David H. Petraeus is demonstrating in Iraq, successful counterterrorism requires providing security for the civilian population, economic reconstruction and the brokering of political accords — in other words, nation-building. That’s as true in Somalia as it is in Iraq. (emphasis added)

So Hiatt is holding up the occupation of Iraq as a shining example of how to go about conducting these operations.  Apparently he’s forgotten that al-Qaeda didn’t even exist in Iraq until we invaded and killed hundreds-of-thousands of its citizens.  “[P]roviding security for the civilian population?”  How, by killing them?  It is simply incomprehensible how anyone could present the occupation of Iraq as evidence for the best way of eliminating terrorism.  However one might feel about the need or wisdom of taking out Saddam Hussein, there is simply no disputing that terrorism flourishes in Iraq because of our occupation rather than the other way around.  It’s bad enough when you can’t learn from your mistakes, and the war that Hiatt has been championing from the beginning was, in the opinion of most Americans, a mistake, but to present it as an example for future actions is completely delusional.

–Paul Wilden

I’ve written previously on this nation’s insistence with choosing its leaders based on traits (or perceived traits).  And nowhere is this truer than with our obsession with Barack Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright.  I’ve also about Wright, and while I wouldn’t want to try and defend his every utterance, most of what he’s said has not been that unreasonable.

While Wright’s remarks have been front page news, when it comes to unholy alliances the right gets what amounts to a free pass.  When John McCain sought and received the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee you didn’t hear a negative word from the press, not until the blogosphere picked up the story anyway.  Hagee is famous (or should be) for spewing anti-Catholic remarks like, “This is the Great Whore of Revelation 17″ and calling the Catholic church “the anti-Christ system.”  So when Wright says “god damn America,” you might fault him for not giving enough credit for the progress that has been made, but at least his remarks are somewhat based in reality.  After all, blacks were brought to this country in chains, segregation and Jim Crow actually existed, and not all that long ago either.  And aside from the very real progress that has been made, the disproportionate number of blacks still living in poverty or jail attests to the fact that racism is not over.  Meanwhile, have the Catholics harmed Hagee’s people in any way, other than in his own fevered imagination?  Yet the coverage of the McCain/Hagee connection pales in comparison to the coverage of the Obama/Wright connection.

But the real point has nothing to do with defending Wright or condemning Hagee because neither of these men are actually running for president.  And while I don’t mean to suggest that we should completely ignore the associations of the candidates for elected office, I do think we should put it in its proper perspective.  When it comes down to it, trying to gauge the qualifications of a candidate on their perceived personality, or that of their associations, will invariably lead us astray.  When George Bush first ran for president, the perception of his personality was that he’d be the kind of guy you could sit down and “have a beer with.”  For all of Bush’s supposed down-home charm, I really don’t think that this privileged, spoon fed, spoiled frat boy really has much in common with the men and women in this country that actually have to work for a living.  But even if it were true, what difference did it make?  Bush, deservedly, has job approval ratings hovering somewhat lower than the spotted owl.  Among other things, he lied is unto an unpopular, multi-trillion dollar war, turned a surplus into a huge deficit, gave tax breaks to the rich and tried to dismantle one of the most popular government programs ever created-Social Security.  So have a beer with him if you must, but please don’t allow him to be in charge of anything larger than the local Boy Scout troop ever again.

And the same fatal flaw arises when you try to assess Obama’s qualifications for president by judging the remarks of his Pastor.  Because even if Wright really is the wing nut he’s been portrayed to be does anyone really believe that Obama shares Wright’s judgment or temperament?   From Obama’s time as an activist to his stint in state government to Senate term and especially as a presidential candidate, Obama has endorsed cooperation rather than divisiveness and regardless of anything else Obama is certainly the most likely candidate to ease the racial tensions in this country rather than to exacerbate them.  But in order to recognize that fact, you have to put away the politics of personality and judge the candidate on the totality of what he represents.

–Paul Wilden

Wednesday, the Senate voted down a bill that would’ve made it easier for women to sue their employers for pay discrimination.  The bill, introduced by Senator Kennedy, was an effort to counteract the ridiculous Supreme Court decision last year that limits a woman’s right to sue to 180 days after the discrimination is first alleged.  Because people don’t ordinarily discuss pay with coworkers, and are in fact usually discouraged from doing so by their employers, it can take years for pay discrimination to come to light making the 180 day limit unreasonable at best and a bad joke at worst.

The bill attempted to correct this by making the last paycheck the starting point for the 180 days.  The bill would have required 60 votes to pass the senate but only garnered 56 votes.  On a side note, I have seen no mention of why this or many other bills require 60 votes to pass rather than the 51 votes normally needed to gain a majority.  The reason for this is because every vote deemed important by Republicans faces an automatic filibuster which would then require 60 votes for cloture.  What is disturbing about this is that when the Republicans controlled the Senate they made a huge fuss whenever the Democrats threatened a filibuster even though it was a relatively rare occurrence.  But now that the Democrats are in charge, Republicans use the filibuster so often that it isn’t even mentioned anymore, it’s simply assumed that 60 votes will be needed to pass any bill of any particular significance.  Whenever the Democrats threatened a filibuster, Republicans would portray them as undemocratic for not allowing a “straight up or down vote” and the press would duly report it but now that the shoe is on the other foot, not a word is heard from the media.  They write about needing 60 votes to pass a bill as if this was always the way.

Absent from the vote was John McCain who opposed the measure stating,

I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems,” the expected GOP presidential nominee told reporters. “This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system.”

This opinion is just as absurd as the Supreme Court’s decision that sparked this bill.  In the first place, complaints of frivolous law suits rings hollow due to the fact that most litigation in this country is from one business suing another.  And second, neither the Supreme Court’s decision nor the bill speaks to the validity of suing for equal pay but only the timing of the complaint.

This whole episode, including the Supreme Court’s decision, has far more to do than just women’s rights.  As important as that is, all working Americans are affected by pro business turn that all three branches of government have taken.  And while there’s not much we can do about the Supreme Court for now, we can decide who we will send to Congress to represent us and that just being a Democrat is not enough to qualify for the job.  And finally, the last person we need occupying the oval office is John McCain.

–Paul Wilden

Recently I wrote about the .  About how in the fifties and sixties not only did we enjoy a great deal of prosperity but that prosperity was widely distributed, at least among whites, and that all in all public policy was geared toward expanding the middle class.  While these days we’re experiencing stagnating wages, jobs shipped overseas and a crumbling infrastructure.  Over the past thirty-five years or so this country has taken a sharp turn to the right.  We’ve been through Reaganomics, deregulation and now a right wing Supreme Court seemingly poised to overturn Roe vs. Wade.  All of this has resulted in the savings and loan fiasco, the Enron and World Com collapses, the sub-prime meltdown and credit crunch and a general contraction of the middle class. 

So, after all that has happened, where is the outrage?  We’re in the midst of a very unpopular war and Bush’s approval ratings are even lower than the credit scores of those who’ve recently lost their homes and yet the presumed Republican presidential nominee appears to have at least an even chance of winning the presidency even though he’s virtually indistinguishable from the current office holder.  What is going on here?  As we watch the American dream slip away it would seem obvious that the right has failed to deliver on their promises and that the rich have only gotten richer at the expense of everyone else.  So why then, hasn’t this resulted in more than the usual whimpers for “change?”

A recent Salon article titled, The Gilded Age, past and present, written by Steve Fraser, may provide some clues to this puzzle.  It starts out by examining the similarities of today with the Gilded Age of the late 1800′s,

Google “second Gilded Age” and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. The unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a Yogi Berra-ism: It’s a matter of déjá vu all over again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a replica of the world Mark Twain first christened “gilded” in his debut bestseller back in the 1870s?

Certainly, Twain would feel right at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object of his satirical wit in “The Gilded Age,” is thriving. Incestuous plots as outsize as the one in which the Union Pacific Railroad’s chief investors conspired with a wagon-load of government officials, including Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president, to loot the federal Treasury once again lubricate the machinery of public policymaking. A cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain has made the wheels go ’round in these terminal years of the Bush administration. Even the invasion and decimation of Iraq were conceived and carried out as an exercise in grand strategic cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America.

But as troubling as these similarities are, it’s the differences that prove to be of greater concern.  According to Fraser, the first Gilded Age was characterized by, among other things, an extreme exploitation of labor while in present times hardship and poverty are more or less the result of exclusion and marginalization,

Disaccumulating capitalism also undermined the political gravitas of poverty. In the first Gilded Age, poverty was a function of exploitation; in the second, of exclusion or marginalization. When we think about poverty, what come to mind are welfare and race. The first Gilded Age visualized instead coal miners, child labor, tenement workshops and the shantytowns that clustered around the steel mills of Aliquippa and Homestead.

Poverty arising out of exploitation ignited widespread moral revulsion and a robust political assault on the power of the exploiters. The perpetrators of the poverty of exclusion of our own time have been trickier to identify. In his 1962 book, “The Other America,” Michael Harrington noted the invisibility of poverty. That was half a century ago and misery still lives in the shadows. Helped along by an ingrained racism, poverty in the second Gilded Age was politically neutered … or worse.

The article makes several interesting comparisons between past and present.  For example, the dress and mannerisms of the rich during the first Gilded Age were specifically for the purpose of emulating the European aristocracies, aristocrats being the very antithesis of the founding principles of this country, while modern entrepreneurs are far more likely to be low key, favoring blue jeans over spats.  But it’s the manner in which the working class is treated that I believe is most significant.  When children are exploited in factories, when coal miners are risking their lives for paltry wages etc., it’s far easier to see where the blame lies.  But as Fraser points out, the exclusion and marginalization of today not only makes it harder to identify the perpetrators it also makes it easier to scapegoat the victims.  Blaming poverty on the poor is nothing new but it’s far easier to do when the class divisions are along easily defined lines such as race.  And when the rest of the would-be middle class struggles to achieve the American dream on Wal-Mart wages, it’s easy to blame them for their own stupidity when their houses are foreclosed on.

The question now is; how do we turn this around.  How do we stop blaming ourselves for the plight that faces us?  How do we make this country work for the majority of its inhabitants rather than just the privileged few?

–Paul Wilden

What can be made of the recent “revelations” that Syria, with North Korea’s help, is building a nuclear program, presumably to obtain nuclear weapons?  First of all, what do we really know about this program?  Is it for real?  We’ve been down this road before.  Does anybody remember Colin Powell’s United Nations speech where Powell presented supposedly irrefutable evidence of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction program?  Glenn Greenwald in his usual superb analysis exposes the media’s typical lack of skepticism of the administration’s assertions and accusations,

There are multiple reasons why substantial skepticism is warranted concerning the Bush administration’s claims that the structure which Israeli jets destroyed inside Syria last September was a nuclear reactor Syria was developing with the aid of North Korea. Such skepticism, however, is difficult to find in most (though not all) American press accounts, which do little other than repeat Government claims without challenge.

This Associated Press article, for instance, is 32 paragraphs long, yet it contains little other than unchallenged assertions by the Bush administration, using the now-familiar media conventions for disseminating government claims — i.e., quoting administration accusations without challenge and then granting completely unwarranted anonymity to “intelligence officials” to echo those accusations:

Not to suggest that there isn’t cause for concern here but it would be nice if we could examine all sides of the issue before deciding on the proper course of action.  A clear majority of Americans believe that invading Iraq was a mistake.  The New York Times has issued their own mea culpa regarding their critical lack of skepticism over Bush’s rationalizations for going to war, so you might think that we’d learn from past mistakes and examine the circumstances more critically but then again, we never do seem to learn anything from our errors.

But what I really want to focus on here are two issues.  Let’s assume the story is true and Syria really is developing a nuclear weapons program, first, why are we, and Congress, only hearing about it now, seven months after the Israeli airstrike that destroyed Syria’s reactor?  From the Associated Press article breaking the story,

Seven months after Israel bombed the site, the White House broke its silence and said North Korea assisted Syria in a secret nuclear program and that the destroyed facility was not intended for “peaceful purposes.”
…
This is a serious proliferation issue, both for the Middle East and the countries that may be involved in Asia,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich. 

Hoekstra and Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, told reporters after the closed briefing that they were angry that the Bush administration had delayed informing the full committee for so long.

Certainly members of the Intelligence Committee should be fully informed of any information concerning America’s security.  And that a nation labeled as terrorist (true or not), is developing nuclear weapons would certainly qualify as a security risk.  But yet again Bush disregards the constitutional separation of powers and keeps vital information from the American people and those elected to represent them.  It is impossible to overstate the significance of this.  It is completely unacceptable for the Executive branch to operate under this level of secrecy but for Bush and Cheney this is just par for the course.

The other point I wanted to bring up has to do with the law of unintended consequences.  Instead of trying to be good world neighbors, instead of trying to find common ground, this country has tried ceaselessly to shape the world in our own image and to manipulate the world to our own ends.  And by our I don’t mean the everyday working Americans to whom this country belongs but rather those privileged few who feel this world is their oyster.

Contrary to the inane drivel spouted endlessly by the coddled and disconnected political class, the reason why so many people in this world hate us is isn’t because “they hate our freedoms,” there are plenty of other democracies on this planet that aren’t being attacked by terrorists.  No, the reason they hate us is because our armies are in there countries.  We turn a blind eye when our allies like Israel, India and Pakistan develop nuclear weapons in violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, a treaty that we signed.  We invade and destroy sovereign countries on trumped up pretexts.  And then we cry foul when they want to develop their own weapons.  Not only is this hypocritical and immoral but it’s going to bite us in the ass in the long run.  America, as an empire will fall because all empires fall.  And when we’re no longer the biggest dog on the block, then we’ll wish we had acted more responsibly and with more concern for the rest of the people we share this planet with.  Let’s hope it’s not too late then.

–Paul Wilden

Stories of the Bush administration’s ban on photographing returning coffins from Iraq may be old news, but it might surprise some to learn that even when the family of a slain soldier specifically permits press coverage of the funeral, the Pentagon still tries it’s best to keep it out of the public eye.  From a story in The Washington Post written by Dana Milbank,

The family of 38-year-old Hall, who leaves behind two young daughters and two stepsons, gave their permission for the media to cover his Arlington burial — a decision many grieving families make so that the nation will learn about their loved ones’ sacrifice. But the military had other ideas, and they arranged the Marine’s burial yesterday so that no sound, and few images, would make it into the public domain.

Even though a clear majority of Americans are against the war and want a timetable to bring our troops home.  Bush and the military continue to play the public relations games hoping to keep Iraq off of our minds.  To some extent it might be working,

A Pew Research Center poll earlier this month found that 14 percent of Americans considered Iraq the news story of most interest — less than half the 32 percent hooked on the presidential campaign and barely more than the 11 percent hooked on the raid of a polygamist compound in Texas.

One can only assume at this point that Bush is trying to protect his legacy but when the elections are over, even with the tanking economy, thoughts will surely return to Iraq and finally bringing this nightmare to an end.

The problem with the smoke and mirrors games played by Bush and the Republicans is that eventually the smoke clears and reality sets in.  No amount of tricks are going to hide the unmitigated disaster that is the Bush presidency.  From Iraq to the economy, from the law breaking to the failed (thankfully), plans to privatize social security, Bush’s legacy will be that of the worst president in this nation’s history.

–Paul Wilden

According to David Brooks’ column today, what our political campaigns need is a good dose of medieval superstition.  Apparently we are too focused on reality and that has somehow taken all the fun out of electing our leaders,

But on my desk for much of this period I have kept a short essay, which I stare at longingly from time to time. It’s an essay about how people in the Middle Ages viewed the night sky, and it’s about a mentality so totally removed from the campaign mentality that it’s like a refreshing dip in a cool and cleansing pool.

The essay, which appeared in Books & Culture, is called “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”

This speaks volumes about Brooks’ outlook, particularly as someone who enjoys an elitist detachment from the realities faced by working men and women not only in this country but around the world.  It also says much for Brooks’ appreciation of the principles that the Founding Fathers used to create this country.

The Middle Ages, also known as the Dark Ages, were brutally tough times to live in.  It was a period characterized by ignorance, superstition, fear and back-breaking work with little reward.  It was a time when common everyday working people had no control over their lives and the aristocratic class that ruled them saw them as dirty, ignorant people that were completely beneath them.  It’s ironic that not only does Brooks romanticize this age but actually uses this period as a comparison to a modern election, given that the people living back then couldn’t even vote.

This country was founded in the ideals of the Enlightenment, an age that threw off the superstition of the Dark Ages and celebrated reason as its foundation.  No longer were some people considered to be inherently better than others.  That we’re all created equal and the pursuit of happiness is for everyone, not just a privileged few.

Brooks continues his trip down fantasy lane with this observation from C. S. Lewis,

The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is. Lewis also wanted to include the mythologies, symbols and stories that have been told about the heavenly actors, and which were so real to those who looked up into the sky hundreds of years ago. He wanted to strengthen the imaginative faculty that comes naturally to those who see the heavens as fundamentally spiritual and alive.

I love a good story, The Lord of the Rings is one of my all time favorites.  I’ve read Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia many times, both to myself and my children, in spite of the fact that his books are dripping with a religion that I have no use for.  But I can also wonder at the universe as well, exactly the way it is, without the superstition and fantasy.  Rather than disenchanting, the vastness of the universe is awe inspiring and that the sun is a “huge flaming ball of gas” never ceases to amaze me.

While Brooks is essentially correct in his summation of modern political campaigns,

Campaigns are all about message management, polls and tactics. The communication is swift, Blackberry-sized and prosaic. As you cover it, you feel yourself enclosed in its tunnel. Entire mental faculties go unused.

It doesn’t have anything to do with a “disenchant[ing]” modern view.  Modern politics deals far more with fantasy than it does with hard facts, the kind of facts that actually affect people’s lives.  What Brooks is saying is: politics is all about impersonal, scientific like data rather than some magical heartwarming fantasy.  But if that were really the case then politics and the campaigns it produces would be far more useful than it really is.  In other words, we need more reality in our political discussion not less.

What I find so disturbing about Brooks’ screed, other than his general lack of appreciation for reality or his lack of appreciation to the founding principles of this land, is his willingness to find romance in what in reality was a dark, desperate period of incredible hardship for so many people, much in the same way he, and his ilk, romanticize war with all of its destruction and the despair that it brings.

–Paul Wilden

In a move that was widely criticized, former president Jimmy Carter began negotiations with the democratically elected leaders of the Gaza strip, Hamas.  As Carter travelled to the region, pretty much all you heard was that Hamas is a terrorist group that refuses to accept the existence of Israel and therefore is unworthy of negotiating with.  Given our current political climate, this was hardly a surprise.  Bush, in classic authoritarian style, has refused to negotiate with any of our enemies, even when counseled by his own friends and allies that to do so would be in our best interest.  One would hope however, that the so called serious foreign policy experts would be able to learn from past mistakes and see the value and necessity of such negotiations but alas, it’s not to be.

Previously, I had out that Carter should be praised rather than condemned for his attempt to bring peace to the Middle East and that simply labeling Hamas as terrorists and refusing to deal with them was a woefully misguided policy.  In the authoritarian model of the world one need only look at the leadership as a basis for making decisions while completely ignoring the actual people involved.  But in fact, you ignore the will of the people at your own peril.  This was certainly true of the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power and seems to be the case with Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza.  Jimmy Carter appears to understand this and while he’s been almost universally vilified by the media, he’s already producing results as reported in this Washington Post article,

The armed Islamist movement Hamas is prepared to accept Israel as a neighbor if the Palestinian people approve the terms for peace, former president Jimmy Carter and the group’s exiled leadership said Monday following a visit to the region that included seven hours of negotiations.

Obviously it’s far too soon to declare peace in the region but the point is this; Hamas’ position regarding Israel was not terribly important in and of itself.  What was important, was the collective opinion of the Palestinian people living in Gaza, who had already expressed a desire to recognize Israel and find a way to live side-by-side with the Israeli people.  The Hamas leadership can rant and rave all it wants about the destruction of Israel but their role as leaders would be short lived if ultimately they didn’t reflect the will of their would be followers.  This simple lesson is invariably either forgotten or never learned by the so called experts in this country that play such a vital role in guiding our foreign policy.  But clearly, it’s time to end this playground style dispute that the U.S. leaders insist on engaging in and let some real grownups take over.

–Paul Wilden

David Brooks column Friday argues that Barack Obama having once been a candidate of high ideals and principles has, in the end, descended into nothing more than just commonplace politics or as he puts it, “How Obama Fell to Earth.”  Brooks makes many points, some of which may even be valid but this post isn’t about Obama, it’s about the all too familiar themes the pundits and the media use to examine our leaders and would be leaders, and the excuses they use to defend their actions.  So in that light, I want to focus on one of Brook’s points in particular.

Then there are the cultural issues. Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News are taking a lot of heat for spending so much time asking about Jeremiah Wright and the “bitter” comments. But the fact is that voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut as clues about shared values. (emphasis added)

Is this really true?  Are voters more concerned with haircuts and helmets than they are with the issues that actually affect their lives?  Too Sense provides the answer to that question in last Thursday’s post,

… Keep in mind those aren’t just “pressing” issues, in the sense that they are affecting all of our lives…those are the issue the voters have identified as important to them, according to Gallup’s poll in March, the top four issues being the Economy, Iraq, healthcare, and fuel prices. Soon to be joined by food prices, I’m sure. Has anyone seen how much it costs to buy cereal lately? Pretty soon they’re going to be selling Captain Crunch on the corner in vials. (emphasis original)

Not only has Gallup exposed the lie that it’s the shallow and stupid voters demanding endless coverage of all this personality based gossip, the fact that Obama has been gaining ground in Pennsylvania after more than a weeks coverage of his “bitter” remarks, demonstrates conclusively that voters are capable of putting this stuff into its proper perspective.  And what is Brooks talking about when he refers to voters wanting a president who shares their “life[‘s] experiences?”  What life experiences does Brooks think working Americans share with the likes of Bush, Cheney or McCain?

Brooks certainly isn’t alone here; if he was the only one spouting off these unsupported and condescending remarks about everyday Americans it wouldn’t be worth commenting on.  But the fact is, the vast majority of the media’s coverage of elections is either this same king of gossip, better suited to People Magazine, or they’re falling all over themselves trying to predict what voters are going to do before they do it.  Either of which have no use or place in our nation’s political discourse.

–Paul Wilden

While the best that President Bush can muster as a leader is to prance around in a flight suit, Jimmy Carter has demonstrated what real leadership is all about as he attempts to negotiate a peace settlement in the Middle-East.  Of course Carter is taking plenty of flak from a shallow, vapid and clueless media that’s incapable of even covering an election without falling into meaningless personality-based coverage more suitable for People Magazine.  A perfect example is this Washington Post editorial,

ON THE OPPOSITE page today we publish an article by the “foreign minister” of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, that drips with hatred for Israel, and with praise for former president Jimmy Carter. We believe Mr. Zahar’s words are worth publishing because they provide some clarity about the group he helps to lead, a group that Mr. Carter contends is worthy of being included in the Middle East peace process. Mr. Carter himself is holding what appears to be a series of meetings with Hamas leaders during a tour of the Middle East. He met one militant in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Tuesday and was reportedly planning to meet Mr. Zahar in Cairo today before traveling to Damascus for an appointment with Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s top leader.

While this may be marginally better than reports of Obama’s bowling scores it still exhibits the fundamental flaws in the personality-based politics that pervade in our national media.  It doesn’t matter what you think of Hamas or Mahmoud al-Zahar, the fact is this; Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinians living in Gaza.  That is why you negotiate with Hamas, because, like it or not, they represent the people we are trying to make peace with.

It’s easy to view the world in black and white, it requires no thought, simply label your enemies as terrorists, unworthy of negotiating with, and call it a day.   Of course you won’t actually solve any problems but you can feel smug in your self-righteousness that you are morally superior.  But are you?  We invaded a sovereign nation based on lies and incompetence, killed hundreds-of-thousands of its people but none of that matters, we are better than they are, we get to decide who is worthy of talking to even when we are not the primary stakeholders in the conflict.

So what do bowling scores and Hamas have in common?  The media’s focus on both has centered on personalities while deliberately obscuring the important issues.  According to our political class, because Obama is a bad bowler, he’s incapable of connecting with working class Americans (who apparently are all avid bowlers), and therefore incapable of leading them.  It matters not what he has to say, or what his leadership capabilities are, but because can’t bowl, he’s an out of touch elitist who’ll turn this country into a Mecca for trial lawyers, gays and illegal aliens.  While real men like Bush or McCain are morally upstanding, regular, beer drinking guys who are perfectly in touch with everyday folks.  Never mind that both are filthy rich, privileged men who have about as much in common with the working class as Pastor Wright has with Pat Buchannan.

And with Hamas, by looking only at the surface, the media has all but ignored the plight of the Palestinians of Gaza who live in what amounts to an open air prison.  In much the same way that Obama’s leadership qualifications are reduced to his ability to roll a ball down a lane, the Palestinians are painted by the utterances of one man, “Mr. Zahar’s words are worth publishing because they provide some clarity about the group he helps to lead.”  Not only does this represent a gross over-simplification of Hamas, it says virtually nothing of the Palestinian people as a whole, who just like the Israeli’s, have indicated a willingness to create a two-state solution to their conflict.  So while it’s true that the Hamas leadership has been unwilling to recognize the state of Israel, they don’t speak for all Palestinians anymore than Bush speaks for all Americans.

The Palestinians want their own homeland.  The Israelis want to live without fear.  Both have legitimate grievances and concerns.  Picking sides will never bring peace to the region; only by finding common ground will this conflict ever be solved.  Jimmy Carter understands this and his efforts should be praised rather than scorned but don’t look for our political class get it.

–Paul Wilden

In Bush’s speech welcoming the Pope’s arrival he made the following statement,

We need your message to reject this dictatorship of relativism and embrace a culture of justice and truth.

What exactly is a “dictatorship of relativism?”  Sounds more like an oxymoron than a coherent statement.  Relativism is about making judgments in the context of the situation. Relativism is an all inclusive philosophy that looks at the whole picture before making judgments, what could be more democratic than that?  Certainly not Bush’s philosophy of authoritarian absolutism.  Moral absolutism may have a comforting appeal to it, the notion that there are absolute standards by which to follow but the problem is; who’s standards?

With absolutism, whoever happens to be in charge is the one determining the rules and while there are some rules that are essentially universal, like laws against murder and robbery, not all the rules have the same consensus.  In fact, moral absolutism has always been about rationalizing morally deviant behavior like slavery and the subjugation of women.  The powers to be, including the church and the government, simply declare Africans to be sub-human and therefore enslaving men, women and children becomes morally acceptable.  Women are decided to be the “weaker” sex so denying them basic constitutional rights is also acceptable.

The moral absolutists love to paint relativists as being for “anything goes,” claiming that without absolute rules to guide us then it’s possible justify anything you want.  But in fact, it’s the other way around.  When one believes that their morals are absolute, divinely inspired as is often the case, then that permits an “ends justifying the means” attitude that leads people to kill abortionists to end killing or to start wars for, well, any reason that’s convenient.

What is so strikingly hypocritical about Bush’s words is, right or wrong, it’s the absolutists that are dictatorial.  While the relativists try to understand the nature of the problem in order to find the answer, it’s the absolutists who look for the answers from god, or who they believe speaks for god, or the president, or whomever they deem as their leader.  Which one sounds more like a dictatorship?

–Paul Wilden

At first I was more concerned by the criticism from Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama’s “bitter” remarks because as I pointed out before, you expect inane drivel from the right but Clinton is expected to know better.  But after reading George Will’s column I realized you should never underestimate the right’s ability to bring hypocrisy to new heights.  According to Will, Americans are bitter, and it’s because of condescending remarks by liberals such as Obama, the embodiment of modern day liberalism,

Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are “bitter,” he said they “cling” to guns, religion and “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” because of “frustrations.” His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America’s grinding injustice.

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism’s transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them. (emphasis added)

After decades of the right exploiting these very issues, “god, guns and gays,” he can actually write something like this with, one would guess, a straight face.  Anybody remember the “wolves” campaign ad from Bush during the 2004 election?  What could possibly be more condescending than that kind of blatent fear-mongering?

And who are the ones exploiting the illegal immigration issue, taking advantage of the fear Americans have of losing their jobs to foreigners, would that be the liberals or the conservatives?  Of course it’s been the same ones that have been giving the jobs to foreigners by moving their factories to other countries as well as hiring the undocumented workers they’re so desperate to keep out. 

It is simply amazing to watch the right accuse Obama of being condescending for simply pointing out in effect, what an exemplary job they’ve done exploiting the public’s most base and visceral fears.  The fact is, working Americans are bitter.  Bitter at watching their hard work count for less and less, bitter at watching their “American dream” slip away.

–Paul Wilden

Op-ed columnist Paul Krugman’s column today dealt with what he refers to as a “crises of confidence.”  Citing a study from The Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan, Krugman declares that “Americans are more pessimistic about their situation than they have been for more than a quarter century.”  And while by traditional measures, the economy doesn’t look that bad, Americans haven’t been this pessimistic since the early nineties,

What’s striking about this bleak mood is that by the usual measures the economy isn’t doing that badly – at least not yet. In particular, the official unemployment rate of 5.1 percent, though rising, is still fairly low by historical standards. Yet economic attitudes are worse now than they were in 1992, when the average unemployment rate was 7.5 percent.

But as Krugman points out, you need to look a little closer to understand what’s behind the unfavorable mood of the country,

Our bleakness partly reflects the fact that most Americans are doing considerably worse than the usual economic measures let on. The official unemployment rate may be relatively low – but the percentage of prime-working-age Americans without jobs, which isn’t the same thing, is historically high. Gross domestic product is up, but the inflation-adjusted income of the median family is probably lower than it was in 2000. (emphasis added)

This is the real problem, working Americans are producing the wealth but are getting an ever smaller piece of the pie.  Problems like the sub-prime crises, the credit crises, as well as corruption in corporate America as evidenced by the Enron and World Com collapses are merely symptoms of a much greater problem, and that problem is the corporate takeover of America.  For about the last three or four decades we’ve been hammered with the notion that the answer to our problems is to maximize free enterprise.  Fewer regulations and lower taxes would bring prosperity to everyone.  But the reality is; that prosperity has been mostly enjoyed by a select few while most Americans have found their real income has stagnated at best or even declined.

The fifties and early sixties are often referred to as “the good old days” by those who lived through them (providing you weren’t black or some other minority), and many consider that period–before the hippies came on the scene–as a very conservative period in America.  But as Stephanie Coontz reveals in her essay, What We Really Miss About the 1950s, from an economic stand-point, this was probably the most socialistic era in our history.  While as Coontz points out, there’s more to the nostalgia than just the economics, still, there’s no question that economics has a lot to do with it,

For one thing, it’s easy to see why people might look back fondly to a decade when real wages grew more in any single year than in the entire ten years of the 1980s combined, a time when the average 30-year-old man could buy a median-priced home on only 15-18 percent of his salary.

And though the people who remember the fifties fondly like to think that factors such as morals and values are what defined that generation, when pressed these illusions melt away,

Nostalgia for the 1950s is real and deserves to be taken seriously, but it usually shouldn’t be taken literally.  Even people who do pick the 1950s as the best decade generally end up saying, once they start discussing their feelings in depth, that it’s not the family arrangements in and of themselves that they want to retrieve.  They don’t miss the way women used to be treated, they sure wouldn’t want to live with most of the fathers they knew in their neighborhoods, and “come to think of it” – I don’t know how many times I’ve recorded these exact words – “I communicate with my kids much better than my parents or grandparents did.”  When Judith Wallerstein recently interviewed 100 spouses in “happy” marriages, she found that only five “wanted a marriage like their parents.”  The husbands “consciously rejected the role models provided by their fathers.  The women said they could never be happy living as their mothers did.” (emphasis original)

When it comes right down to it, it’s the prosperity that people are actually nostalgic for.  But unlike today, and that includes the nineties where we enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, working Americans enjoyed a significantly greater share of the wealth they helped produce,

   Contrary to widespread belief, the 1950s was not an age of laissez-faire government and free market competition.  A major cause of the social mobility of young families in the 1950s was that federal assistance programs were much more generous and widespread than they are today.

     In the most ambitious and successful affirmative action program ever adopted in America, 40 percent of young men were eligible for veterans’ benefits, and these benefits were far more extensive than those available to Vietnam-era vets.  Financed in part by a federal income tax on the rich that went up to 87 percent and a corporate tax rate of 52 percent, such benefits provided quite a jump start for a generation of young families.  The GI bill paid most tuition costs for vets who attended college, doubling the percentage of college students from prewar levels.  At the other end of the life span, Social Security began to build up a significant safety net for the elderly, formerly the poorest segment of the population.  Starting in 1950, the federal government regularly mandated raises in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation.  The minimum wage may have been only $1.40 as late as 1968, but a person who worked for that amount full-time, year-round, earned 118 percent of the poverty figure for a family of three.  By 1995, a full-time minimum-wage worker could earn only 72 percent of the poverty level.

     An important source of the economic expansion of the 1950s was that public works spending at all levels of government comprised nearly 20 percent of total expenditures in 1950, as compared to less than 7 percent in 1984.  Between 1950 and 1960, nonmilitary, nonresidential public construction rose by 58 percent.  Construction expenditures for new schools (in dollar amounts adjusted for inflation) rose by 72 percent; funding on sewers and waterworks rose by 46 percent.  Government paid 90 percent of the costs of building the new Interstate Highway System.  These programs opened up suburbia to growing numbers of middle-class Americans and created secure, well-paying jobs for blue-collar workers.

Higher taxes, greater redistribution of wealth, increased government spending, these all marked the period dubbed “the good old days.”

We’ll never return to the fifties, globalization and free trade are here to stay but the point is this; we need to stop buying into the mantra endlessly repeated by the greedy capitalists who brought us Enron, the sub-prime crises and the general decline of the middle class, that fewer regulations, lower taxes and smaller government are good for us all, it just isn’t true.

However we move forward, we need to understand that this country doesn’t belong to the Exxons and Enrons, it doesn’t belong to the Bushes and the Cheneys, it belongs to us.  The fifties were all about expanding the middle-class, about sharing the prosperity and while we’ll never recreate the fifties, we need at least to understand that we don’t have to take the crumbs they offer us and be happy about it.  By learning from the lessons of the past we can make this country work for all of us.

–Paul Wilden

Time after time the right has succeeded in framing the debate, whatever the debate, on their own terms and in their own language.  Whether it’s accusations of being soft on defense, soft on crime, tax and spend, liberal elitists, the Republicans continue to put Democrats on the defensive regardless of whether there’s any truth to their charges.

This has become such an effective strategy for them that the Democrats are even doing it to themselves now.  After Obama made some remarks suggesting that middle class Americans are “bitter” over their economic circumstances and as a result, “cling” onto other, less relevant issues,

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Hillary Clinton seized on this and accused Obama as being an elitist and that he’s out of touch.  Exactly the kind of accusations the Republicans have so disingenuously hurled at Democrats over recent memory,

Now, like some of you may have been, I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small town America. Senator Obama’s remarks are elitist and they are out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans. Certainly not the Americans that I know – not the Americans I grew up with, not the Americans I lived with in Arkansas or represent in New York.

Of course Obama’s remarks are essentially correct.  It’s this reality that is precisely why Republicans focus on these issues in the first place.  In their quest for power, conservatives have nothing of any real value to offer working Americans.  For example, lowering taxes, only the rich see any real benefit from their tax plans, the piss on…err…trickle down theory was shown to be completely bogus when Reagan tried it, the only thing that everyday Americans get from the Republican’s endless quest for lower taxes are failing schools and collapsing bridges.  That’s why conservatives are constantly pushing the “god, guns and gays” issues, it’s their only actual hope of resonating with voters given that their real agenda is nothing more than to enrich and empower themselves, the true elite. 

Hillary Clinton should know this; after all she was the one talking about the “right wing conspiracy” when they tried using sex to bring down her husband’s presidency.  And if nothing else, that it failed should have given her a clue to the appropriateness of this kind of tactic. 

It comes as no surprise that McCain accused Obama of elitism, for Republicans that’s just par for the course, but Clinton should know better.

–Paul Wilden

Since the recent declassification of the John Woo torture memos, there has been a heated debate among academics and others as to whether John Woo should continue to hold his position as a tenured professor at UC Berkeley School of Law.  At issue is the freedom of expression that tenure was designed to protect vs. the despicable opinions Woo espouses.  Opinions that don’t merely reflect the misguided judgment of some low level government functionary, but opinions that were provided for the expressed intent to give legal cover to the Bush administration’s torture regime and ultimately branding both Woo and this administration as war criminals.

UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. issued a memorandum stating that Yoo will not be dismissed nor will there be an inquiry into the matter.  While Edley believes that the protections provided by tenure are nearly “absolute”, and therefore trump the content contained in the torture memos, he interestingly titles his memorandum “The Torture Memos and Academic Freedom”. 

Professor Yoo began teaching at Berkeley Law in 1993, received tenure in 1999, and then took a leave of absence to work in the Bush Administration. He returned in 2004, and remains a very successful teacher and prolific (though often controversial) scholar. Because this is a public university, he enjoys not only security of employment and academic freedom, but also First Amendment and Due Process rights.

It seems we do need regular reminders: These protections, while not absolute, are nearly so because they are essential to the excellence of American universities and the progress of ideas. Indeed, in Berkeley’s classrooms and courtyards our community argues about the legal and moral issues with the intensity and discipline these crucial issues deserve. Those who prefer to avoid these arguments-be they left or right or lazy-will not find Berkeley or any other truly great law school a wholly congenial place to study. For that we make no apology. (emphasis original)

More on this debate can be found in the posts, and corresponding comments of Brad Delong, Marty Lederman and Henry Farrell.

Glenn Greenwald takes care to point out that as reprehensible as Yoo is and as despicable as his dubious legal opinions are, it would be a grave mistake to scapegoat John Yoo, all the while forgetting the people who were and still are behind all this.

But I want to focus on a slightly different problem — namely, the danger of turning John Yoo into a scapegoat through unwarranted focus on him. Yoo’s defense that he was merely offering legal opinions, not making any policy decisions, is absurd, since, as he surely knew at the time, the purpose of those opinions was to enable and legally authorize savage and illegal acts. But it is true that he did not act alone, or with supreme authority — really, he lacked authority to implement any policies at all. And it’s also true that he could not have accomplished anything without the highest officials in our government at least implicitly encouraging and supporting what he was doing.  (emphasis original)

This is undoubtedly the most important aspect of all this.  Whether or not Yoo keeps his job, the people who sought the legal cover of Yoo’s opinions are not only just as responsible for these memos but are in fact, still in power and are continuing to perpetrate these war crimes as we speak.

But I wanted to add a less important but still disheartening point to all of this.  Berkeley used to be at the center of these kinds of controversial issues, students would have taken to the streets after learning that such a disgusting character was teaching at there college.  Whether Yoo deserves to be terminated or not, the outcry from the entire Bay Area community would have been heard across this country but today, nary a peep is heard, the entire controversy has been virtually contained to the blogosphere and academia.  This is the culture we live in today, torture has become the norm and almost nobody cares.

–Paul Wilden

When Barack Obama visited a bowling alley in the Pennsylvania town of Altoona a couple of weeks ago and rolled a couple of gutter balls, the national media saw fit to run over one thousand articles on the event while virtually ignoring stories of much greater importance.  Typically, members of the media defend this behavior by claiming that these are the stories Americans want to read.  Setting aside for now that this is hardly a reasonable excuse for not reporting on important events that actually shape our country, it also appears that Americans aren’t quite as shallow as the media thinks they are.

In a Salon article, Walter Shapiro shows that blue collar Americans are capable of looking past the photo ops that the media is so enamored with,

“Of course, it makes a difference — Obama was in my bowling alley,” said Thad Ritter between frames Wednesday evening. Ritter, a computer programmer, is an antiwar Republican who plans to switch parties in November if Obama (but not Hillary Clinton) is the Democratic nominee. Sporting a 210 average, Ritter, whose bowling team is sponsored by Original Italian Pizza, is sympathetic to Obama’s deficiencies as a kegler. “I’d be more than happy to give him some lessons on the White House lanes,” Ritter said, not having heard that Obama has threatened to replace them with a basketball court. “The fact that he bowled at all was good. It showed that he isn’t afraid to be average.” (emphasis added)

And, apparently Obama’s poor showing as a bowler hasn’t hurt his chances in the upcoming primary, where instead, he may be gaining ground in a region once presumed to be firmly in Hillary Clinton’s camp.

With its population dwindling to under 50,000 in recent years, Altoona should by all demographic factors be Hillary country in the primary. In this old railroad city in the mountains of central Pennsylvania, family incomes, housing prices, educational levels and racial diversity are all well below the state average. (In past general elections, this area has been reliably Republican. But the final pre-primary figures for Blair County, in which Altoona is the largest city, show that Democratic enrollment has increased by more than 2,000 voters since November 2007, while GOP support has dropped by more than 600 registrants.) (emphasis added)

The point here isn’t about who actually wins the primary, or the nomination for that matter, but rather to point out just how shallow and useless our national media is.  We need a news media that’s willing to investigate the hard stories, Watergate style, without regard to the ratings.  And especially in an election year, we need the media to pass on stories about haircuts and bowling scores and focus on the issues that actually affect Americans.

–Paul Wilden

In what seems like an endless parade, yet again one of our political class pundits shows how completely out of step he is with the prevailing American opinion.  Michael Gerson’s op-ed column, Obama’s Iraq Weakness, tries to explain how Obama, the candidate for change, is living in the past with regards to Iraq while McCain is the future looking candidate,

There is little doubt that Americans generally feel that the initial use of military force in Iraq was a mistake. Recent, paradoxical polls show a dramatic increase in the number of people who believe that the war is now going well alongside a hardening majority who believe it should not have been begun. Barack Obama’s strongest argument on Iraq is increasingly about the past.

But presidential elections tend to focus on the future. In spite of their past failures, whom do you trust more to conduct a flawed, messy war in the years ahead? Lincoln or McClellan? Nixon or McGovern? Bush or Kerry? McCain or Obama?

The crux of his argument is, here it comes, that the surge is working.  Specifically, Gerson cites unnamed “polls show[ing] a dramatic increase in the number of people who believe that the war is now going well…”  Therefore, if elected, Obama’s plans to get out of Iraq are out of step with public opinion.  There may very well be data showing a “dramatic increase” in people believing that the war is going well (though Gerson doesn’t tell us if they represent an actual majority), but this completely ignores the more important reality; that a clear majority of Americans want us out of Iraq and have felt this way for quite sometime now.  From a recent Rasmussen poll,

A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 65% of Americans would like to see U.S. troops brought home from Iraq within a year. That’s the highest total recorded in the tracking poll which has been conducted regularly since August of last year. The 65% total is up six points from two weeks ago, but just a single point higher than the total from a month ago.

Not only has public opinion consistently favored withdrawal from Iraq over the past several months, the numbers have actually increased recently rather than decreased as Gerson would have us believe.  So once again one of the “experts” projects their own opinions onto the American people, claiming to reflect public sentiment when in fact, their misquided opinions are theirs alone.

–Paul Wilden

        The other day I on the shameful behavior of our national media for reporting on the most trivial and unimportant matters while hardly mentioning the far more serious issues such as torture, lying and lawbreaking from our nation’s leaders and unrestricted expansion of governmental powers, to name a few.  I quoted from a Glenn Greenwald post where he illustrated the problem by listing some statistics regarding the number of stories reported on both serious topics as well as some frivolous ones.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” – 102

“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73

“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16

“Obama and bowling” — 1,043

“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

“Obama and patriotism” – 1,607

“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

        Two responses to Greenwald’s charges emerged, Megan McArdle of The Atlantic and Daniel Drezner, University of Chicago professor, both writing in defense of the media but instead of providing reasoned opposition, they just dug the hole even deeper.  According to Drezner,

It’s pretty clear what Greenwald thinks this indicates — it’s an indictment of “our nation’s coddled, insulated journalist class.”

To me, this indicates the following:

1) Comparing NEXIS searches of events where the media cycle has yet to play out with events where the media cycle has played out is a really disingenuous way of making one’s point;

2) There are more press mentions of an event when the target of the media inquiry actually responds to the press. To my knowledge, John Yoo has said nothing since the terror memo was leaked published, and the Bush administration has clammed up as well. Barack Obama, on the other hand, clearly did respond to the Jeremiah Wright business, leading to multiple news cycles about that issue;

3) Shockingly, the press appears to be more interested in events that determine the future (i.e., who will be the next president?) than in events that look back at the past. [Isn't that a slanted way of contrasting these events?-ed. Compared to Greenwald's slant? No, not really.];

4) Glenn Greenwald might be a good blogger/collumnist, (sic) but he’s not that great at social science.

But the number of “media cycles” doesn’t explain why there were ten times more stories about “Obama and bowling” over “Yoo and torture.”  Nor does the number of “responses” to a story explain away the disparity.  It’s only news when person in question responds?  Why were there over one thousand stories covering Obama’s bowling to begin with?  Is this really news?  Is our nation so trouble free, is the world so trouble free that the journalists filing all those accounts of Obama’s apparent lack of bowling skills had nothing better to report on?  Is this the information that we need to know in order to elect our next president?  Apparently Drezner thinks so, “Shockingly, the press appears to be more interested in events that determine the future (i.e., who will be the next president?)”

        The whole notion of looking into the future as opposed to dwelling in the past is nothing more than a pathetic excuse anyway.  John Woo’s defense of torture and limitless presidential power have helped shape the political climate we live in today, this isn’t about some meaningless event from the past, the policies Woo advocated are still very much with us today.

        McArdle’s arguments are basically that anything Barack Obama does is automatically more important than everything that someone like John Woo does, regardless of the outcome,

Americans care more about him than John Yoo because, well, John Yoo isn’t running for president. Indeed, if one in ten Americans had even heard of John Yoo, I would be shocked, because most people don’t care about minor government functionaries, no matter how pivotal their role may be in screwing up the world. (emphasis added)

I had to read that twice just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.  So, as long as you’re name isn’t a household word, it doesn’t matter “how pivotal [your] role may be in screwing up the world.”  It’s just not newsworthy?  Never mind of course that John Woo has gone largely unnoticed precisely because the media hasn’t written about his deeds.  I’m not sure which is more disturbing, the ridiculousness of that circular argument or the notion that it isn’t news if you “[screw] up the world,” so long as nobody knows your name.

        Of course none of this is the fault of the journalists; it’s all the fault of the stupid Americans,

It is because readers buy more papers with headlines about Jamie Lynn Spears than they do with headlines about Alphonso Jackson or John Yoo, since as I think I just mentioned, they have never heard of either person. You can lead a consumer to stories of vital national importance, but you cannot make him care. You can just make him pass over your paper in favor of the Enquirer.

Again, the circular argument that Americans aren’t interested in John Yoo because they’ve never heard of them, but how could they have heard of him if the media hasn’t reported on him in the first place.

        This whole thing is precisely what I’m talking about when I refer to personality based journalism.  Bowling becomes front page news not because bowling is important but because the bowler is.  How is this any different from the fluff produced by The National Enquirer or People Magazine?

–Paul Wilden

        Like an unsinkable rubber duck, John McCain continues to insist that things are going just swell in Iraq, that real progress is being made and success is just around the corner.  Ignoring the recent “surge” in violence where a reported 900 plus Iraq civilians were killed, ignoring that the American death toll topped 4000 this week, McCain insists that the surge has brought Iraq “something approaching normal,” and “[w]e are no longer staring into the abyss of defeat, and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success.”

        After nearly eight years of listening to Bush ignore the evidence flying in his face that invading Iraq was a hideous mistake, can we afford four more years of denial and wishful thinking? 

        McCain, the “maverick”, as his supporters like to think of him, has been a tireless cheerleader of this war.  The only criticism he’s ever offered was on how this war has been conducted rather than that this war was started in the first place.  Next, he insists that the surge is working and that victory is in our grasp in spite of the evidence that the surge had little or nothing to with the changing dynamic in Iraq and that despite the lower levels of violence, the underlying problems plaguing Iraq were as bad as ever.

        And now, after a week of intense fighting in Basra and other areas of Iraq, McCain continues to insist that we’re heading in the right direction, that success can be ours, proving yet again that McCain is just Bush reincarnated–remember “stay the course.”  This really should come as no surprise; this is just one more example of the classic authoritarianism inherent to conservatives in general and to neocons in particular.  One of the characteristics of an authoritarian is insisting on pursuing a course of action regardless of evidence suggesting otherwise.  Similar to the War on Drugs, where not only can we see it’s not working, but that Prohibition showed us it never had a chance of working, but we plowed on ahead anyway.  Similar to the war in Viet Nam where we should have learned that you can’t just bend people to your will simply because you desire it, that people have a way of deciding for themselves what they want for themselves.

        The recent violence in Basra was our Tet Offensive albeit on a smaller scale.  While Tet was a strategic failure for the Viet Cong, it demonstrated that after all of the happy talk of winning in Viet Nam that was being peddled back home, we were nowhere near defeating the North Vietnamese.  Just as now, with all of the happy talk of winning in Iraq, peddled by McCain and others, violence can erupt at the drop of a hat and neither the Iraq government nor the U.S. has the power to stop it.  The time has come to start basing our decisions on reality rather than wishful thinking.  The time has come to rid ourselves of the Bushes and the McCain’s.

–Paul Wilden

        Thanks to the tireless efforts of our nation’s news media we now know just exactly what type of bowler the leading Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, is.  In fact, the scandal has been probed to its depths and new information has been revealed-they had it wrong!  Obama’s pathetic score of 37 wasn’t the whole story; he had only bowled half a game! 

And yet! All is not as it seems, apparently. That devilish Mainstream Media is leaving out one very important fact as it has its fun: Obama didn’t bowl a whole game! He says he only bowled five or six frames (a normal game is 10 frames, for those of you not from Milwaukee), which, let’s be honest, doesn’t make him much better of a bowler. He still threw several very dainty gutter balls. So, no, we’re not going to take back the 9-year-old girl crack.

Thank goodness we got the bottom of that story, enquiring minds want to know.  We can all sleep better now that we know the real truth behind Obama’s bowling prowess.

This, of course, is but one example of the completely useless stories reported and repeated endlessly by a news media that unceasingly focuses on shallow, personality based investigations of our nation’s leaders and would be leaders.