Friday August 30, 2002
Reminder to myself and others: Howard Zinn is appearing on CSPAN2 on Sunday at 12:00pm ET.
UPDATE: CSPAN2, not CSPAN. Damn!
A WTO ruling would allow for record sanctions ($4 billion) against the US by the European Union, according to this report at the New York Times.
Is there anything more pathetic than plagiarizing Jackson Browne? Apparently his lyrics are rattling around in the brainpan of Norah Vincent, because she took a line from one of his songs almost verbatim in a piece on her blog that was rejected for publication.
Seen at The Rittenhouse Review.
Dave Hyatt, previously of AOL/Netscape, now of Apple, kicks the AOL management in the teeth over Netscape 7, and shows how his predictions came true. From his post:
"Maybe you'll listen to the public. How about eWeek's article, Netscape 7.0 Shrivels Under Mozilla's Shadow? Are you paying attention now, you ignorant, stupid, incompetent buffoons?
"'I told you so.' never felt so good."
Diminishing into the West
The Bush administration's relentless pushing for war in Iraq at the expense of all other foreign concerns will lead in only one direction - the diminishing of our power abroad.
We are already seeing the beginnings of this. After repeatedly turning our backs on international agreements, the world has stood up (with near unanimity) against Bush's call for invasion of Iraq. And they aren't backing down. And now there's talk of not exempting U.S. citizens from war crimes trials at the ICC despite the fact that the Bush administration hasn't ratified the agreement.
Dubya's father's men have tried relentlessly to counter the neocon chickenhawks attempts to stifle debate on the issue (from Bill Kristol saying that the war is as good as started to Dick Cheney condemning any dissent as illogical). But they're losing, and they're not losing because their argument isn't sound. They're losing because the arrogance of the neocons and the rest of Bush's administration is as great as the space between our President's ears is small. Ari Fleischer has shown time and time again that the attitude of the administration is one of complete abdication of accountability and responsibility, an attitude where their every move is beyond reproach. At this point we could have the whole would promising military retaliation against us if we attack Iraq, and it wouldn't change a thing.
In the past they've gotten a lot of traction from playing the "simple, direct leadership" card, but this tactic has been working less and less, and opponents are finding the backbone to stand up to it and demand some justification -- something that goes a step beyond repeating the same words over and over. We're not getting it. We're not getting the evidence; we're being told "trust us". Well, the world doesn't trust the Bush team, and from all the miserable dissembling that we've seen this administration engage in, shouldn't we be a bit skeptical as well?
Neocons counter with "everyone will be on board once the bombs start falling." Don't count on it. Europe has turned, Britain is waffling. And people we would expect to be on our side are having a hard time with it. But we're apparently already informing Israel of our plans for late November. (Yeah, I know the unattributed article on that hacked-together World Tribune site looks shady. Bill Gertz and Robert Morton of the Washington Times are on the World Tribune's editorial board, so it probably is shady, but in the standard Republican way.) And our Undersecretary of State is racheting up the "North Korea is really evil, people!" rhetoric. Are we to believe that Iran and North Korea are going to sit idly by as we invade the first country on the "Axis of Evil" list? I don't think so, nor do I think that our plans will be able to stop with Iraq; we will either be pulled into other conflicts, or continue our march until we run out of money or resources to stop. Or someone stops us. Preemption is the name of the game, it doesn't matter how many tangential conflicts we start in the process.
Wednesday August 28, 2002
Our nation has come to this:
The reality TV version of The Beverly Hillbillies
This is just terribly convenient for our government. Apparently the situation in Afghanistan is just too unstable to support an investigation of the war crimes documented there by an Irish documentarian.
"The U.N. special representative in Afghanistan said today that the weakness of the Afghan government and the risk to investigators or witnesses make it almost impossible to investigate reports that there are mass graves in northern Afghanistan.
"The envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, was speaking about a report in Newsweek magazine that mass graves discovered in May near the northern city of Shebergan could contain as many as 1,000 bodies of Taliban prisoners who suffocated in sealed trucks last November while being transported by Afghan militiamen from Kunduz province to a militia prison at Shebergan, 200 miles to the west."
The article leaves to the last two paragraphs the part where witnesses stated that American soldiers were aware of the prisoners suffocating in the trucks. The Pentagon denies the allegation.
Saw this over at The Sideshow. Bill Clinton takes on the Republicans in some of the most straightforward rhetoric that we're bound to hear from a Democrat in the next two years.
"'The Republicans campaign on ideology and resentment,' he told about 400 people at the West Memphis Civic Auditorium. 'They're good and the rest of us are bad. They spent $70 million of your money to prove I was a sinner, and you could have told 'em that for free.'"
"I'm making a lot of money now. You know what my sacrifice is? They want me to expend the energy necessary to open the envelope containing my tax cut. They want to give me a tax break cut with your Social Security money and your Medicare money - and it's wrong. It's not right."
Going to see today if I can sit in on a class or two this semester - might have fewer updates on the blog if I can get in.
Tuesday August 27, 2002
It is, as Joe Conason says, a "shocker". Bush's special envoy to the Middle East, retired General Anthony Zinni, has come out against the war in Iraq. Zinni:
"It's pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way, and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another way."
Also, Zinni indicated that more important than Iraq right now are "the opportunities that exist for the United States to encourage a peaceful transition in Iran where young people are increasingly challenging the power of the Islamic theocracy."
How many other people can come out against Iraq invasion? Pretty soon we'll be hearing Bush's alkie children caught on tape during another illegal bar tour, making disparaging comments about their daddy's war plans.
Paul Krugman swats down Mickey Kaus with his pinky. With his wee little pinky finger! A great article on the loss of our surplus. Be sure to check out Paul's comments on Bush's latest ruse about forest protection.
Monday August 26, 2002
So, Dick Cheney failed to answer one big question about his imminent Iraq invasion: "Why not Iran or North Korea? Aren't they as-or-more dangerous?"
Nick Kristof has an answer in his latest editorial.
Bjorn Lomborg is wrong
From The Environmentalists are Wrong, in the NYTimes today:
"There is, however, one problem: this litany is not supported by the evidence. Energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so. More food is now produced per capita than at any time in the world's history. Fewer people are starving. Species are, it is true, becoming extinct. But only about 0.7 percent of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not the 20 percent to 50 percent that some have predicted. Most forms of environmental pollution look as though they have either been exaggerated or are transient — associated with the early phases of industrialization. They are best cured not by restricting economic growth but by accelerating it."
I thought for a minute I was reading Rush Limbaugh. Let me get this straight - toxic pollution, toxic landfills, toxic runoff -- these are all ameliorated by more industrialization? According to the author, people must pull themselves out of poverty before they care about things like environmental protections, and until then, the only option is to develop the hell out of their land with the latest (polluting) technologies.
Please don't let China hear that. What kind of effect will an even-more-massive industrialization effort there have on the world's environment? What about one with no environmental protections? The author is right that the developed world is focused mainly on sustainability, because it is they who have the resources to devote to the research into alternative energies and alternative industrial processes. And if we don't get the developed world focused on these concerns, as the developing world grows they will have few options for creating a cleaner industrial system. Because they'll be buying their technologies from us.
Mr. Lomborg believes that it will be cheaper in the long run to help these countries develop industrially than to focus on sustainability issues. However with this he sets up a false foundation for debate, assuming that the two issues remain mutually exclusive. At the same time, he actively attempts to minimize the environmental impact of industrial development, and seems to ignore the possibility of cumulative impact from greater world-wide industrialization.
In every regard Mr. Lomborg's argument seems to be oriented more towards corporate interests than legitimate concern for the plight of the poor of the world. One could consider it the "Microsoft Environmental Policy". Get users hooked on crappy technology, and then keep them locked into a system in which the only realistically "affordable" improvements are a series of costly upgrades and retrofits. We shouldn't be focused on providing the consumer with a better technology today; instead, we should get them using our existing technology as soon as possible, in as large a quantity as possible, and the let the inevitable economic improvements drive environmental policy later.
In the computer technology industry, we see Microsoft behaving in exactly this manner; they are trying to forclose IT options all over the world. For example, in Peru an effort is underway that would move the entire governmental computing platform to Open Source technologies. An amazing argument in favor of this strategy was made by Peruvian Senator Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez. But Microsoft is actively assailing the bill as anti-freedom, anti-choice, anti-capitalist.
The threads that seems to tie Microsoft and Mr. Lomborg's arguments is the idea that 1) existing technology is good enough to foist on developing nations, 2) the impact of the existing technologies is not as bad as critics say, 3) starting development with an eye towards sustainability is more costly in the long run. But I think the hidden thread is that sustainability leads to independence, freedom of choice, and a harsher market environment for old-school technologies to compete. And we can't have that, can we?
Sunday August 25, 2002
I've updated my link list at left with some great sites. For more left commentary and news and meta-filtering, be sure to check out Causality, Scoobie Davis, The Sideshow, Altercation, and Counterspin Central.
For interesting economic commentary, check out Brad DeLong's blog.
And for your daily dose of vegan/porn activism, check out Vegan Porn.
The excellent site The Rittenhouse review has a link to Counterspin Central, which Rittenhouse considers a "platinum-class weblog". After checking it out, I have to agree.
From Counterspin, here's a link to audio (RealAudion format) from the Portland protests. As suggested on Counterspin, fast-forward to the 6 minute mark and listen to the comments from a female participant.
Saturday August 24, 2002
More on the Portland protests from the AP. BTW, the AP numbers the protesters at over 1,000. A reporter on Fox News numbered them at "around 150".
"George W. Bush Hates America", by Ted Rall:
"There are few more sickening sights than George W. Bush wearing a lapel pin bearing an image of the American flag. Bush and his creepy henchmen can wrap themselves in nationalistic symbolism all they want, but these right-wing thugs aren't patriots. They may pledge allegiance to the flag, but they despise the republic for which it stands."
Friday August 23, 2002
Blake Ross and Ben Goodger have their work cut out for them now that Dave Hyatt has entered their contest for the "Kate Bosworth naked" Google search crown (mentioned in Wednesday's blog). Dave revels the fight, and seems to believe that although he has no pictures of Kate Bosworth naked, he will somehow be propelled to the top of the heap above Blake and Ben, neither of whom have pictures of Kate Bosworth naked, nude, or otherwise unclothed. When will this madness and needless suffering end? Will any of us ever see Kate Bosworth naked?
Bush protesters get the pepperspray and the truncheon in Portland on Thursday. Check out this thread at Smirking Chimp and this running thread and more coverage at Portland IndyMedia Center.
Bush was in Portland for a fundraiser for Senator Gordon Smith.
The Republicans are starting to see Ed Rendell's governorship in Pennsylvania as an inevitability, and are trying to cut their losses in the Commonwealth's house and senate.
In a solicitation earlier this month for the House Republican Campaign Committee, House Speaker Matt Ryan writes: "We must be prepared for Rendell to run stronger than any Democrat statewide candidate in Pennsylvania history... . We must persuade Republicans who vote Rendell to vote Republican for their state representative."
That's what we like to see - Republicans watching the weight of their history of mismanagement and neglect crush their majority to dust.
VentiquattroreTV made the point today that the war against Iraq has already started, in that the US oil companies have cut imports from Iraq by approximately 80% over the last year. The drop is blamed on an oil pricing scheme adopted by the UN sanctions committee, which the US and England refuse to abandon, which delays pricing the oil until it is loaded, presumably to avoid illegal surcharges from Baghdad.
Thursday August 22, 2002
I bet none of you knew about this aspect of the Patriot Act.
"Section 213 of the newly enacted Patriot Act allows the police to enter and search a home without telling anyone they have done so, seriously undermining the Fourth Amendment and one’s ability to mount a fourth amendment challenge to the search or any other kind of defense."
Saw this at Eschaton.
So, am I the only person who hadn't seen the "Open Letter to America" before today?
The lengths that this administration will go to twist a fact to fit into their Iraq war plans.
Take the news that our supposed allies, the Kurds in the north of Iraq, are hosting refugee Al-Quaeda from Afghanistan (mentioned here 2 days ago).
Well, here's what Donald Rumsfeld had to say about it:
"Responding to reported US intelligence briefings that 'ranking' al-Qaeda have taken refuge in Iraq, Mr Rumsfeld said: 'They have left Afghanistan, they have left other locations, and they’ve landed in a variety of countries, one of which is Iraq.
'In a vicious, repressive dictatorship that exercises near-total control over its population, it’s very hard to imagine that the Government is not aware of what’s taking place in the country.'
Although the administration has no connection between Saddam and Al-Quaeda, and despite the fact that they seem to be holed up with our allies in the remote north of Iraq, Rumsfeld wants us to believe that the Al-Quaeda are in Iraq because Saddam wants them there. Now, that may be true, but there is nothing in this situation that can lead directly to such a conclusion. Only the most adept dissemblers can create such a logical leap and present it as evidence. Again, it seems that absence of evidence is being presented as evidence itself.
How much longer do we have to endure this? Every time I listen to these people, or turn on Fox News, I feel that I have to lose a few IQ points just to comprehend their porous logic.
Wednesday August 21, 2002
Trouble in Google land. Mozilla developer Ben Goodger has deposed Mozilla developer Blake Ross as king of the "Kate Bosworth naked" Google search results.
Neither of them has even a link to a picture of Kate Bosworth naked.
Washingtonpost.com's front-page text on the Georgia primary results reads:
"Redistricting hurts the GOP maverick; 9/11 comments haunt the Democrat."
Barr's loss (2-1 against) has nothing to do with the fact that he's a complete loon! No sir!
BTW, a TV ad for Barr's campaign ended with this tagline "Vote for Barr.. he's gooder".
E.J. Dionne points out the fundamental logical flaws in Bush's threatening of a veto of additional spending:
"But it just doesn't work to be 100 percent against deficits and 100 percent in favor of the policies that are making them grow. That contradiction cannot be hidden behind the dust kicked up by a staged fight over a little extra spending for public housing or agricultural research. Waging tiny skirmishes may affect the political atmospherics, but not the deficit and not the economy."
"Military service isn't a prerequisite for advocacy of military action, but those who haven't served ought to temper their enthusiasm for shedding other people's blood, if only as a matter of civic etiquette. Warrior pundits might also think carefully before they slur combat veterans who dare to dissent from the war-making mindset."
Bin Laden: from 'Evil One' to Unmentionable One.
Osama Bin-Who?
The article contains something else fascinating: my first glimpse in the mainstream media of criticism of Bush's bellicosity and his trumped-up war rhetoric against Saddam Hussein.
"Robert Gray, a professor of government at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, said Bush had made a mistake by identifying the war against terrorism too much with the person of bin Laden and was in danger of making the same mistake by repeatedly vowing to remove Saddam from power in Iraq.
"'Bush says he has not decided to invade but he's pretty far out there on a limb and it's going to be difficult for him to crawl back,' said Gray, North American editor of Defense and Security Analysis magazine."
Sometimes a person's underlying psychology can't be any more transparent. Does anyone really think that we won't invade Iraq?
Does anyone think that in the end we'll be better off than we were before?
Bob Barr has gone the way of the dodo.
Boy, I wish I hadn't missed Crossfire last night. Search the transcript for "god damn" or "assholes" to see why. Does anyone have video or audio clips?
Tuesday August 20, 2002
Complicating Bush's Iraq plans are some Iraqi opposition people who have just stormed the Iraq embassy in Berlin and taken hostages (this last bit according to the latest live reports on CNN). First we have our Kurd "allies" aiding Al-Quaeda, now our opposition allies in Europe storming embassies and taking hostages.
Paul Krugman strikes at the Bush administration for their faux populism.
Bush calls off an attack against Al-Quaeda in Iraq (under the auspices of Kurdish rebels - not Saddam Hussein) developing poison gas.
And if you think it's interesting that Bush wasn't conducting the War on Terror wherever it leads him, you'd be surprised to find out why:
"As U.S. surveillance intensified, officials concluded the operation was so small and crude that in the final analysis, it was not worth risking American lives to go after it — and also not worth the outcry that might follow any U.S. operation inside Iraq."
That's right - Bush's foreign policy and warmaking has been so hobbled by his "git Sodom" blathering that he can't even go after the guys that we're supposedly fighting.
Or is it that Bush is merely protecting his relationship with Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq? Give 'em a little leeway so that they'll be with us for the real conflict later on?
America Loses Against Iraq in Wargames
Today's Drudge Report headline:
Thanks to our thoroughly scripted war games, we know we could deal with any contingency out there - we don't need no stinking allies...
But wait! There's actually a second, smaller headline on Drudge's website. I almost missed it!
"Ex-General Says Wargames Were Rigged..."
The Marine General who had been the red commander [the Iraqi side], had actually outwitted the Blue side [American forces]. He had done things like use motorcycle messengers to transmit instructions to his disparate forces. He had done so well that "...(m)uch of the Blue force's ships ended up at the bottom of the ocean. Oakley said Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and 'refloat' the fleet in order to continue."
Apparently this General's bosses didn't like that he was kicking America's simulated ass:
"Van Riper said exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against the Blue, or friendly, forces, and on several occasions the Red forces were directed not to use certain weapons against Blue."
Damn! So we can only win (even against ourselves) when it's part of the script? And doesn't that fly in the face of the larger, ludicrous headline at The Drudge Report?
Monday August 19, 2002
MWO is a cornucopia of commentary today.
Jeff Birnbaum of Fortune magazine, a regular at Fox News, is on CSPAN now. In response to a question about Clinton's SEC chief Arthur Levitt, and his desire to separate accounting and consulting practices, Jeff said that Mr. Levitt was blocked by the accounting industry, who had given money to both parties, so it wasn't a partisan issue.
That seem somewhat in conflict with the facts, seeing as the new SEC chairman Harvey Pitt was the accounting industry's lobbyist against that regulation:
From pbs.org: "In 2000, in the last and biggest political battle of his tenure, he proposed a major reform of the accounting industry that included the separation of auditing and consulting to restore 'auditor independence.' Harvey Pitt was hired by the accounting lobby to represent their case that the industry was best left to police itself. In the end, under intense pressure from Congress, including threats to the SEC's funding, Levitt backed down. Auditing firms could keep their consulting work as long as they informed corporate audit committees of any potential conflicts of interest. 'That was a compromise that I would not make today,' Levitt tells FRONTLINE."
Unless Harvey Pitt was an independent during Clinton's tenure, I think it's safe to say that this was a quite partisan conflict.
I've added a handful of new blogs at left. Be sure to check them out. More tabs to add to my Mozilla tab groups.
Sunday August 18, 2002
With the news of the war crimes in Afghanistan, Bush finds another option in Iraq closed off. For how can he push for a special-forces controlled invasion, in which the majority of the on-the-ground fighting is done by local opposition, when the supposed best example of this kind of strategy has led to a war crime with nearly 1,000 dead?
Unfortunately, this makes Bush one more step towards desperate. Everything's going completely to shit. Karen Hughes has left, and with her has gone any semblance of control over the affairs of the administration. With the ruinous machinations of Karl Rove ringing in his head, Bush was given the go-ahead to ratchet up the rhetoric against Iraq.
But no one is in the mood to hear (except Fox News). Our allies quickly start stepping away -- they had been burned too many times by Dubya recently, and aren't interested in playing his war games. Even Tony Blair has cooled his relationship with Dubya -- there are even reports of Blair making jokes at Bush's expense.
"Fine," we can hear the upstanding warmongering pundits say, "we can easily go it alone. We don't need no stinking allies." Oh, and "we save their asses twice, and this is the thanks we get." Despite what these fine folks are saying, let's call this strike one.
But then something interesting happens. Suddenly, from different corners of the Republican party, voices rise up to counter Dubya's neocon advisers. Obviously someone in the upper echelons of the old power structure of the party are concerned that these young pups are biting off more than they can chew. So within the course of a week we have public oppositional comments from Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger, Chuck Hagel, Jack Kemp and others. They know the power of coalition building, and how difficult going it alone can be. This is a big strike two for our President. A whiffer.
Is the news about the warcrimes in Afghanistan Bush's third strike? Or is the news that Russia is planning an economic agreement with Iraq the third strike? Maybe these are just fouls off into the stands, but he's running out of swings. And he's already called the result - the removal of Saddam from power. A home run, as it were. There's no turning back now.
Bush's family members are giving him an out. They're legitimizing a way to gracefully withdraw from his course of action. If he takes it, he can refocus and come up with a new plan to win the next election. It would come with some loss of credibility and a little ego bruising, but with Iraq off the table there are many ways that Bush can re-enter the fray.
Or, he could stay the course. Beyond anything, beyond frustration and desperation, our President must be feeling horribly betrayed. Betrayed by advisers and close friends of his father no less (who some believe were working as proxies for daddy). Betrayed in front of the whole world. If there was a possibility of allies changing their opinions, it's gone now. They can tell a weak hand when they see one. Why would they put money down now? And would they want to associate again with a war action that could lead to new atrocities?
Our President doesn't take disloyalty lightly. In fact, from everything we've seen, betrayals and leaks only seem to stiffen his stance on even the most indefensible issues. Even without betrayals, the Bush administration's motto is "it's as good said as done." Convinced of their own infallibility, could even the betrayal of the old guard stop them?
War now hinges upon which of the two Republican factions comes out on top. But the neocons are the ones in control. They've got something to prove. And I don't think that anything will stay their hand now.
Monkey troop rescue their orphan from police station
Maybe the news that the Reagan administration assisted Iraq as it was gassing Iran will throw a kink in the "Reagan as our new God" movement that is trying to get his name on everything from subway stops to cereal boxes.
Sometimes I love watching CSPAN, if only to hear one quote from a caller that so closely echoes my own feelings. Specifically, this caller mentioned, and I paraphrase, "the young pseudo-journalists on the morning show at Fox that are itching to go to war with Iraq."
Fox News has been pushing for war with Iraq as hard or harder than even George W. Bush. Is Bill Kristol now a full member of the 6:00pm gab team? Or is it just because he's there to push the case for war on Iraq? From the looks of the opposition to war, I imagine that Fox will soon have an Iraq roundtable with Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Condoleeza Rice (and Bill Gertz as the token journalist). Brit Hume will "moderate".
According to the brief glimpse I got on CSPAN, it seems that next week's Newsweek has a cover story on US war crimes in Afghanistan that have been documented on film by an Irish documentarian.
Let's see how the rest of the press manages to ignore this story.
Saturday August 17, 2002
"What makes the morning-after outrage [over the Waco forum] of the nation's commentariat seem a bit over the top is that the preordained hollowness of the Waco show is not news. This is how this administration always governs. Mr. Bush has two inviolate, one-size-fits-all policies (if obsessions can be called policies): the tax cut (for domestic affairs) and "regime change" in Iraq (foreign affairs). Everything else is a great show designed to provide the illusion of administration activity when it has no plan."
"Though the president's harshest critics think he's stupid, I've always maintained that the real problem is that he thinks we are stupid. He never doubts that his show will distract us from bad news."
He ends with this sobering paragraph:
"The only mystery is when D-Day will be. Given the administration's history, I'd guess that it will put on the big show as soon as its political self-preservation is at stake. Certainly the White House's priorities are clear enough. It has guarded the records of Dick Cheney's energy task force and the S.E.C. investigation of Harken far more zealously than war plans that might endanger the lives of the so-called real Americans who will have to fight Saddam."
Friday August 16, 2002
According to Fred Barnes and Mort Kondrake and the rest of the numbs at Faux News, war with Iraq is inevitable, and, as Tony Snow so eloquently puts it, "The ship has left the station."
Condoleeza Rice spells out the reasoning behind the inevitable strike against Saddam, and Europe says, "show us the proof". Up until now, there has been no proof. Not one agent of our administration has pointed to one piece of evidence that Saddam has, or is developing, weapons of mass destruction. Bush says that "...Americans need to know I'll be making up my mind based on the latest intelligence and how best to protect our own country and our friends and allies." So, there isn't any proof, but, as Donald Rumsfeld so often frames it, "absence of proof is not proof of absense." And it seems that the government is already leaking news of occurences in Iraq that will be their eventual justification for attack, and allowing the press to fill in all the vague patches themselves. And people like Bill Gertz are doing just that. The administration doesn't know what's going on over there, but they're pretty sure it's something bad. Absence of proof is itself proof, apparently.
Now we have a Republican opposition rising up against an invasion, with Colin Powell actively seeking the aid of Henry Kissinger (of all people). Powell seems to finally be looking out for number one, and fighting back against the neocons who are pushing for war war war. But the Bush team has backed itself into a rhetorical corner.
First came the "Wanted - Dead or Alive" jargon about Osama Bin Laden, which soon turned into "Osama who?" Now Bush, lacking in self-control as well as common sense, as started mouthing off about Saddam. And if he doesn't follow through this time, he'll be kickin' it on the back 9 with his daddy and his skin lesions.
Thus comes the startling admission from Richard Perle, who has been advising the President on the benefits of Iraq invasion:
"The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said would produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism."
Read: "...that it would dash the chance of Bush's re-election."
And in the next breath he is abdicating any administration responsibility towards resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict:
"I think it is naïve to believe that we can produce results in the 50-year-old dispute between the Israelis and the Arabs, and therefore this is an excuse for not taking action"
But Scowcroft counters. If the US "were seen to be turning our backs" on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute "in order to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us."
Who would have thought that the first actions in the war against Iraq would be Republican infighting of such epic proportions?
Is this not news? Republicans, from Chuck Hagel and Dick Armey to Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, all rising up to admonish Bush about the folly of the course he is embarking upon. It makes one wonder if we're really getting a true airing of the risks of this war.
Don't think for a minute that this will have any effect whatsoever on Bush's plans. But it makes the whole business feel a hell of a lot scarier than it did just a few days ago.
The readers of MediaWhoresOnline rip into Brendan Nyhan for his article about MWO at Spinsanity.
Garrison Keillor, everyone:
"Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality."
"What keeps you going is stubbornness and righteous anger: at ugly buildings, suvs, background music, the eminence of nonentities, at cravenness and cruelty in general and the shamelessness of this government — leading the lynching of a few corporate scapegoats to distract the mob from your own sins — the naked hypocrisy of it! If you're not brave enough to have morals when you're 72% popular, what hope is there for you?"
Eminence of nonentities.
More news on the Rohrabacher meeting with the Taliban Foreign minister. According to Joshua Micah Marshall, here's the list of congressman who were at the Free Markets and Democracy conference in Doha, Qatar:
Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA)
Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-IL)
Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA)
Rep. Nick Rahall II (D-WV)
Rep. Ciro D. Rodriguez (D-TX)
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
Rep. John E. Sununu (R-NH)
Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO)
So, which ones were at the not-really-a-meeting with the Taliban Foreign Minister?
Thursday August 15, 2002
Camille Paglia has no fucking shame. She essentially blames 9/11 on Bill Clinton, saying, "I warned again and again in Salon about the dangerous insularity of American culture, which was worsened by the tilt of the Clinton administration toward p.c. domestic issues and away from world affairs."
Christ Almighty, Camille! Take that little bale of straw that you keep between your ears and put it to better use. Please! Feed some goats or sumpin'!
Why oh why did I return to the vapid wasteland that is Andrew Sullivan's website? And why did I ever set my eyes to read words from Camille Paglia again? I need to flog this sin out of me.
Seen at The Rittenhouse Review: an interesting oppositional stance to the impending war on Iraq, from an unlikely source.
You may recall the mention I made recently of California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and his secret meeting with the Taliban Foreign Minister Ahmad Muttawakil last year, a few months before the terrorist attacks.
Joshua Micah Marshall has looked into this meeting further, and it just so happens that Grover Norquist's Islamic Institute was one of the groups behind the trip, and that the meeting with the Foreign Minister was attended by a few congressmen. Which ones exactly? Oh, and the head of the Islamic Institute was at the meeting too, and Norquist was there at the same time for the Free Markets and Democracy conference.
And, if the meeting was, as Grover characterized it, simply a quick improvised run-into-each-other-in-the-hall between Rohrabacher and Muttawakil in the hallway, were these congressmen (who, according to the AP and the AFP, also met with the Foreign Minister) also running into him at the same time in the same hallway?
It's not surprising that Norquist's name turns up when shady dealings with Islamic radical groups comes up. Norquist has been attempting to convert American Muslims to Republicanism for years. And he has been hanging out with some extremist groups in the process. You may have seen the photo that surfaced of Norquist posed with gun and turban alongside some American militiamen. For more on Norquist and the Islamic Institute and his other interesting associations, read this article written last November by Franklin Foer for The New Republic. The article even mentions the Free Markets and Democracy conference in Doha, Qatar -- the conference where Grover saw Rohrabacher and the Taliban Foreign Minister not officially meeting together. The conference was an attempt apparently to cast Qatar in a more liberal light. This is the same Qatar that condemned the attacks in Afghanistan. The same Qatar where we will be holing up during our spur-of-the-moment improvised meeting with Saddam and his armies.
Wednesday August 14, 2002
I finally crossed 10000 hits on the weblog this evening. Yahoo! Thanks for visiting!
I saw some putz who fancies himself a debater rail against Bloomberg's call for a smoke-free workplace throughout New York. You know -- the law that would prohibit smoking in restaurants and bars -- the one that is supported by a majority of New Yorkers? The New York State Restaurant Association has even dropped their opposition to the ban, after they found that most of their members were in favor of it.
His argument went something like this: the employee can choose to work anywhere. Why should their inconvenience trump the rights and desires of the restaurant owners and their customers?
Let's break down his idiotic argument one point at a time:
1) Employees in America don't "choose" their jobs. The only ones that "choose" their jobs are the ones who grow up covered in ivy. Employees have preferences. But they never choose. And when you climb down to the lower rungs of the employment ladder (I think this aspiring academician hasn't even set foot on the ladder yet), your "choice" and even your "preference" becomes very limited. Should these people deserve less workplace protection than people who have had better luck in the job market? If not, your position essentially becomes "employees should be grateful for what they get, and should put up with workplace abuse and health hazards". It was worker organizations that forced this issue to the forefront and banished the dimwits who employed this rhetoric to the sidelines of history. Ignorant libertarians are apparently exempt.
2) Being accosted with second-hand smoke isn't a mere "inconvenience"; it's a significant health hazard. A factory worker would never be forced to breath fumes as toxic as second-hand smoke. HE would have protection under the law. But the waiter/bartender/dishwasher/busboy are somehow exempt?
3) Why should an employer be allowed to lessen the life-span if his employees in order to turn a profit?
He ends by saying that these workers would end up being more "economically coerced" if some bars were forced to close for lack of customers under the new rule. (BTW, there's no statistic to back up the assertion that any bar would be forced out of business by a smoking ban. That's just more libertarian smoke-blowing.) So, let's re-word his assertion: "Without the employer's right to actively lessen the lifespan of the employee by forcing him to work in unsafe conditions, the employee will lose his power of choice in the marketplace."
No wonder these guys have trouble even getting on the ballot.
As usual, things seem to be falling apart right before a big presentation. Probably no posts today.
Tuesday August 13, 2002
It's all Karen Hughes's fault. She leaves for Texas to help elect a Republican Governor (so as not to stain Bush's reputation - a rep that's already lost its lustre inside Texas itself), and the whole administration goes to hell. Andrew Card was right. It seems that without Karen there's no one to keep Karl Rove from whispering poisonously into the President's ear.
Joshua Micah Marshall on Fortune's 25 Greediest CEOs:
"I did a quick bit of research through the campaign filing data. And out of that 25 I came up with 10 who were Bush campaign contributors. Four out of the top five actually. Two of the 25 gave money to Al Gore. But those two also gave money to Bush. So it would seem that even if these flighty CEOs were beguiled by Clinton's seductive amorality the affliction didn't stop them from supporting George W. Bush."
The latest This Modern World.
Bush's economic circle-jerk in Waco will include such illustrious moneygrubbers as John Chambers, CEO of Cisco systems.
Paul Krugman weighs in on the whole sordid mess.
Monday August 12, 2002
A California Republican Congressman's opponent in the upcoming election strikes out with a press release that accuses him of having meetings with the Taliban in 2001 and joining the Afghan Mujahideen in 1988. It seems that there's actually talk of his meetings in the Arab press (scroll about halfway down).
Scalia, Radical Christianists and the Subversion of Democracy
Seen at Buzzflash: God, Death, and Justice Scalia
You may recall the story about Scalia I linked to weeks ago, entitled US Supreme Court Justice Scalia on capital punishment: "Death is no big deal", where he said the following:
"Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that for the believing Christian, death is no big deal."
This counter-argument by Sean Wilentz to Scalia's views and his supposed strict-constructionist views appeared shortly after in the NYTimes. You can read Scalia's full comments from that event here.
Now the Washington Post steps up to the bat to counter Scalia's radical murderous appetites. Apparently Scalia believes that the Bible is the place to turn for ideas on government rule. It's like the Joy of Cooking for radical fascist Christianists. He paraphrases St. Paul, saying
"that government . . . derives its moral authority from God. It is the 'minister of God' with powers to 'revenge,' to 'execute wrath,' including even wrath by the sword (which is unmistakably a reference to the death penalty)."
He goes on:
"The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible."
The fact of the matter is that Christianists are of the belief that they got screwed by American democracy. American democracy said to the world, "There's one place that God can't go -- into the government." And with that, God becomes completely marginalized; he's no longer the great omnipotent. Our government, in essence, castrates Christianity by refusing to acknowledge God as the final arbiter.
It's obvious that Scalia himself believes this, and it seems that his time on the bench has been nothing but an attempt to mutate America, subverting its democracy and supplanting it with a radical theocracy. Would he deny the Washington Post's characterization of his views of the constitution as allowing for the... "(Execution of ) children for shoplifting?" Probably not.
It's not surprising the things that we're finding out about radicals such as Scalia now that Bush has ascended to power. It seems to me that these people have started allowing some of their more twisted views surface to public view. Either they believe that somehow the election legitimized them and they will find a receptive audience for these views, or they know the game is rigged, they've got control, and now the masks are coming off. Who better than Scalia would know that the game is rigged, having rigged it himself?
Sunday August 11, 2002
Atrios at Eschaton pointed out this:
Read it now!
Mozilla UI stuff, for those who care about such things
"FWIW, Hyatt feels splitting the toolbars and offering a way to merge them would be a UI nightmare."
Absolutely. Don't do it! Splittable toolbars (as in IE) are horrible UI. IE is *NOT* *NOT* *NOT* a pinnacle of UI design!
Some imply that IE's interface must be good because so many people use it. I must have somehow passed through some mystic portal into another land where bad UI design becomes good UI design merely by being used by a lot of people. Person X's grandmother uses IE because it's the only thing she has used, not because its UI makes sense! (BTW, it doesn't.)
Just try to figure out what that little 'e' over a piece of paper icon in the lower left hand corner of the IE browser window signifies. Go on. I dare you. And then try to figure out why they use that same icon in the address bar and the personal toolbar. And why those icons are clickable and draggable, but the one in the lower left corner isn't. And what are those three delineated spaces to the right of the "Internet" text in the lower right hand corner? And why does nothing appear in them? And why is that "Internet" text clickable, even though it doesn't give you any indication that it is clickable? (And what does it mean? Explain that to your grandma!) And why, if you double-click in the first blank space to the right of the "Internet" text in the lower right, does a security certificate alert box come up?
IE's interface is a joke, and, as seen above, that point can be made with even a cursory examination of its main window. If we're going to fix bugs in the Mozilla UI, let's not look to IE for guidance. Please?
Friday August 09, 2002
A screenwriter's plea for an end to cigarette smoking in movies.
It looks like we have a great new mozilla baby on the horizon -- and it uses my favorite throbber from the contest we held years ago! Asa says that it's fast as hell.
It's time for all you lefties (and maybe a few righties) who come here for the politics and not the technology to start checking out Mozilla! Open Source, cross platform, full of all kinds of gooey goodness.
Mickey Kaus seems to dislike Paul Krugman because he dares to tell the truth. Or that he dares to use rhetoric that Kaus finds unseemly. A pale version of the same rhetoric that Kaus and his ilk (Andrew Sullivan, Lucianne Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, et al) have used in their own careers to vilify Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and any political view that has too few tax breaks for the ultra-mega-rich. He actually gives a shout out to Lucianne in his latest posts. If Lucianne was born for a web, it's a spider's web, Mickey.
Thursday August 08, 2002
What's another $3.3 billion at this point? We could hear that the CEOs were conducting black magick rituals in some basement chamber at Worldcom, and no one would be surprised.
From Salon: Why we should invade Iraq, in animated comic form.
I guess that this is what we deserve for putting people in office who think that industry should be self-regulating.
Wednesday August 07, 2002
Also seen at A Level Gaze, our government has now decided that it's alright to ignore court orders from judges. It's a time of war, you know.
Read how American and European financial institutions kicked Aregentina in the teeth, and turned people's savings into mush. Saw this first at A Level Gaze. As David points out, "...they've got a bottom line to protect, and if it means people have to starve, sicken and die, well, to hell with 'em."
From the article:
" 'And yet there I was, with my own bloody knife and piece of meat,' Banrel said. 'I felt like we had become a pack of wild animals . . . like piranhas on the Discovery Channel. Our situation has turned us into this.'
The past two days have been completely absurd. And yeah, you don't get more than that - I'm too stressed.
Tuesday August 06, 2002
Paul Krugman keeps getting better and better. Lucky us: we hit the trifecta.
Monday August 05, 2002
The advertising market is down 10% this year, and pundits say that it's due to the bubble bursting, to September 11th, to a flagging economy.
But some pundits feel that there is something more fundamental going on, that people at a basic level are turning off from advertising. And they're absolutely right.
I don't remember the last banner ad I saw on a website. My selective vision has advanced to the point that my mind blocks out seeing advertisements on a page. And I think this rebellion against ads has infected other forms of media. Tivo is the most notable example, with its ability to virtually eliminate commercials from recorded programs. But even without TiVo this anti-ad sentiment, along with a public whose tastes are becoming more compartmentalized (due to the Internet and its ability to provide content that people want, and not what somebody else thinks they need), has created a catch-22 that advertising gurus may never escape. For how do you, during a time in which the public is actively tuning out advertising, do you catch a person's attention without turning them off?
The answer for some advertisers has been to integrate further and further into the content that people actually want to see. But as one pundit pointed out, this is probably a losing proposition. As more content is written to accomodate marketing messages, the more annoyed the public will become, and the more likely they will seek out content that is tuned to what they want, not what someone else thinks they need.
Steven Spielberg in Minority Report goes in the opposite direction, by making advertisement invade the personal lives of the customer directly, catching their eye on a walkway with personally addressed messages that play off their purchasing records.
Of the two, I believe that the Minority Report futurism is the most likely. The demoralization that comes from watching a movie filled with product placement is enough to cause a viewer revolt if it is carried to an extreme. But we've already seen the beginnings of personalized advertisement on the Internet, and as technology evolves so will the techniques for advertising that more directly engages the viewer. Catch them with an ad at the gas pump, at the ATM, in the changing room.
The real revolution in advertising, however, will be in the wrangling and exploiting of positive feedback about products. In the case of the car market, 60-80% of consumers check the Internet for car specifications and comparisons. The best way to engage a customer for big ticket items will be at this level, assessing and subtly tweaking the feature set of a new product to propel it up the web page. Because as many of you may have noticed if you've visited a site like pricewatch.com or shopping.com, only the top 3 or 4 products on a list (sorted by price or quality or rating) are ever seriously looked at. And being able to get into that top 3 or 4 may become the focus of promotional budgets in the near future.
Normal advertising won't go away. But advertising budgets will diminish, as manufacturers work on a more direct way of appealing to customer wants, instead of manufacturing new needs.
Damn, DJA down 269. Glad I don't gamble!
A grassroots movement to reform New York's draconian drug laws, led by one of the bill's original sponsors.
"In New York state, first-time, nonviolent drug offenders routinely receive higher sentences than rapists and murderers."
"'Noelle Bush forges a prescription and goes to rehab,' says Teresa Aviles, a 54-year-old Bronx police clerk whose son, Isidro, died of an untreated, undiagnosed illness after serving eight years of a 27-year federal prison term. "If that was my daughter, she would have gotten a mandatory five-year sentence."
Bush's Shame: Thomas Friedman rips into Bush for his administration's weak response to the jailing of an Egyptian dissident, with some of the harshest words to appear on the NYTimes opinion page in a long while:
"Watching the pathetic, mealy-mouthed response of President Bush and his State Department to Egypt's decision to sentence the leading Egyptian democracy advocate to seven years in prison leaves one wondering whether the whole Bush foreign policy team isn't just a big bunch of phonies. Shame on all of them."
It seems that Bush's gnat-like attention span is causing some reticence even among those who would support war against Iraq.
"...the postwar 'nation-building' of Iraq will be as crucial as the war itself. The administration’s actions in Afghanistan are not an encouraging sign, where an ideal, moderate, pro-Western leader, Hamid Karzai, is being slowly destroyed largely because the Pentagon will not extend security protection outside Kabul."
Sunday August 04, 2002
The thing I find scarier than the skin lesions in this picture is how much the son is coming to resemble the father.
At birth, every American should be incorporated, and should have a fan club. This Chris Nelson has a fan club (albeit a club of 2). I want one too.
Saturday August 03, 2002
Morally Bankrupt: "Now, in the Herbert Hoover-like financial nightmare that has engulfed America in the Second Coming of Bushonomics, millions of people have been thrown out of work. Millions more have seen their pensions, their nest eggs, their financial security wiped out by the gargantuan frauds of Wall Street. But even this has not stopped the "financial services industry" from trying to gut the slim protections of the existing laws and force bankrupts to pay off credit card debts and loans -- sometimes before paying for other trifles, such as alimony, medicine or groceries."
Get your war on: "If the whole country is gonna play 'Behind the Iron Curtain,' there better be some fine fucking state-subsidized alcohol! And our powerlifting team better kick ass!"
People of the left seem to be regaining their voice. Watching CSPAN today, the first question is about releasing the names of the detainees who were taken in response to September 11th. The first "yes-release the names" caller used the word fascism to describe the behaviour of our current administration. And after that has been a string of people fed up with our government's dissembling on this issue.
Friday August 02, 2002
A judge has ordered the release of the names of all detainees being held by the Justice department, with a few exceptions. Unfortunately, I think those exceptions are more like giant loopholes, and the Justice department is gonna use them to their advantage.
Damn - Blogger's posting interface could use some fixin'. I thought I wasn't gonna be able to save my blog for a minute. Hopefully all my articles are still here.
Yay! MediaWhores is back from vacation! And there's a new Get Your War On.
I watched the last half hour of a show on PBS last night about the poor in Cambodia. Specifically, the documentary was following a group of workers as they laid a telecommunications cable across 400 miles of land. They had to deal with miserable conditions, low pay that equated to no pay, digging up unexploded bombs leftover from past wars, and little or nothing to eat. Their families would tag along, foraging for food while the father (or both parents) worked. Sometimes they would find a nest of red ants in a tree, and that would be the meal for the evening.
These people were keenly aware of their lot. If they don't work, they don't get money. If they don't get money (which isn't even enough for them to sustain and feed their families), they can't use that money to get loans (loans which they'd never be able to pay off, but that they need to survive). None of them have the electricity to utilize the technology that they are burying. They feel they have no future, and the hopelessness is etched on their faces.
It occurs to me that there is little difference between destiny and despair. Because with despair comes an inability to change your lot in life. Without hope, there are no possibilities, and your life is at the mercy of outside forces. On one of the final days of the work laying the cable, the workers' crew boss took off with their pay. Nevermind that they can't even buy a pair of shoes with that money; this was the last straw for some. They wanted to strike, to show that they had some dignity. They felt ashamed that they had been used. But the talk of striking faded quickly as they realized that no one would care. If they didn't work, they didn't get paid. So they kept working, and after 400 miles of digging they returned back to their villages with nothing to show for their toil.
A commentator after the documentary stated that these people live in a poverty that kills. We should take heed to that; because poverty and inequality like this harms everyone and rightfully breeds resentment. It's in our best interest to treat with dignity, respect, and equality the people who we have working on our behalf. Anything less is utterly amoral.
A prime indication that Bush spent his years in college being a container for alcohol and assorted drugs:
"In the way they're kind of writing it right now out of the Senate Finance Committee, some people could spend their entire five years on welfare - there's a five-year work requirement - going to college. Now, that's not my view of helping people become independent, and it's certainly not my view of understanding the importance of work and helping people achieve the dignity necessary so they can live a free life, free from government control."
Apparently people who want to go to college so that they have a better chance in the marketplace are either 1) doing it so that they can goof off for 5 more years, or 2) just don't understand that their place in the world is toiling at some hard-labor job for the man.
Thursday August 01, 2002
From CNN: "The number of Halliburton subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens rose from 9 to 44 while Cheney served as chief executive between 1995 and 2000..."
Salon gives Joe Conason a blog, then makes it unlike any blog out there - no permanent page location, no permalinks next to new articles. C'mon people!
First, easiest rebuttal to any Republican ANWR/Iraq nonsense: "Then why are you not working to drill off the Florida coast?". Oh, Jeb. That's right. My bad.
