Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Kevin Phillips informs us that up is up and down is down: NYT shocked (Hellie)

As you no doubt know, Phillips is one of the fathers of the Southern Strategy, the coiner of the term 'sunbelt', the author of the book The Emergent Republican Majority, and the like. Despite this odious history, Phillips, being a Very Smart Guy, saw the light at some point, and has since been issuing regular, very well-researched, and historically synoptic broadsides against the dreadful GOP coalition. I'm a huge fan of his '02 book Wealth and Democracy, which points to distressing simliarities between the present US economy and those of Spain, the Netherlands, and Britain at their historic heights. His '04 American Dynasty sets out in painstaking detail the tendrils by which the Bush family has served for decades as bagman and fixer to international arms dealers, spies, and oilmen. Both are required reading on the big syllabus in the sky.

Anyway, Phillips has come just come out with another book, American Theocracy, which details the fundamental links between the modern GOP and theocrats, oil-merchants, and money-lenders. Although I plan to read it, anticipating lots of great detail work, I doubt there will be much in the broad outline not present in earlier books or familiar to readers of this site. Indeed, I echo the sentiments of this Kossack, commenting on the NYTBR take:

he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build......No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness.

Nightmarish vision?  Extremism?  Fiscal Irresponsibility? Not greed...RAMPANT greed?  Shortsightedness.  Hmmm.  Who among us has had similar misgivings?  Maybe Mr. Phillips is a closet dKos afficianado.

 

Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends -- none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies -- that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt -- current and prospective -- that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating.

No shit huh?  Maybe Kevin should be enlisted to inform OUR leadership as to what the fuck is going on in this country.  They have obviously decided that we (the grunts who combat the lies, find the truth, document the scandals, tally the Congressional votes, monitor the polls) don't mean a fuck to them.  Maybe a former Nixon staffer can speak dumbanese well enough to make them hear the words.

 

The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production.

How come when we say it the press ignores us?  But when a politico of any measure raises his or her voice the press comes a runnin?  It is sickening how lazy and ineffectual our "liberal" press has become. Think the boys and girls of Watergate press hounds would have turned away from illegal spying on Americans, illegal searches and seizures, faulty intelligence that led to our loss of some 2500 American soldiers?  Think Tom Delay would have been laughing while getting his mugshot taken?  You think every one of Abramoff's secrets wouldn't be a matter of public record by now?  Bernstein and that other guy took down an administration with, in my opinion, less credible evidence than today's journalists are armed with.  They had Deepthroat.  We have Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson, Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham etc etc etfuckingcetera.  A dedicated press would be having a field day interviewing, corroborating, writing and exposing every dirty secret these people had to tell.  Today?  We have Hannity instead of Cronkite.  We have Tweety instead of Murrow.  We have Brian Williams and not Dan Rather.  (I like Brian Williams ok but I loved the Dan Rather that drove Nixon insane.)

 

that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush administration -- unusually dominated by oilmen -- has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels.

I'm just shocked, as I am sure all of you are too.

How many cops (Wilson)

does it take to "control" a 1000-person peace parade?  Looks like they're ready for May Day in Berlin.

This explains a lot (Wilson)

A recent study shows that extreme partisans don't use rational parts of the brain when processing political information:

Is political persuasion mostly useless? Is the percentage of people essentially immune to rational argument about political things increasing?  [...]

At Emory University, psychologist Drew Westen and his team conducted what they believe is the first study of "the neural basis of any form of political decision making." They did this by using brain imaging to study people as they processed political information during the 2004 campaign.

To rape and pillage fine science with rough paraphrasing, this is what they discovered: When 30 self-described partisans were presented with contradictory quotes about the candidates (President Bush supporting, then denouncing Ken Lay; Sen. John Kerry supporting, then denouncing a Social Security overhaul), it was the portions of the brain that process emotion, not rational thinking, that became active. "The thinking caps went off and the feeling caps went on," is how Westen put it to me.

Normally, Westen says, a brain faced with contradictory information will fire up the zones where reason or rational thought happens. The 30 partisans in this study were presented with contradictory quotes from Bush and Kerry, but also from Hank Aaron, Tom Hanks and the writer William Styron. They processed the information about the non-politicians with the reasoning centers of the brain. It was politics that short-circuited them. ("This is your brain; this is your brain on politics.")

It would be reasonable to ask whether all brains — not just partisan ones — respond to political information emotionally. Westen says the answer is clearly no, that research does demonstrate that centrists or independents are more able to process rational and non-emotional political information.

But Westen's MRIs show that is clearly not the case with political contradictions processed by a partisan brain. That process is almost entirely emotional, heating up regions of the brain that govern things like forgiveness, relief and pleasure. The reasoning zones stayed ice cold.

Your response, I imagine, is "duh." Partisans are emotional; stop the presses, get me rewrite. Perhaps. But I find the graphic clarity of colorful brain scans to be sobering. It’s one thing to know that some people get obnoxious during political arguments; it’s another thing to see that 30 adult men who read candidates' quotes while strapped down in MRI machines didn’t even fire up the thinking parts of their brains.

According to Arthur Brooks, a professor at the business school at Syracuse University, the number of partisan brains is increasing. And they may be becoming more partisan; more precisely, they seem to hate their opponents more.

I don't know.  So far as I can tell, the only thing that prevents progressives from rationally responding to contradictions uttered by the evil mignons of the right are the sheer numbers of them.  One's thought processes can only handle so much cretinous malignant nonsense before they fitz out in outrage.

Notice any difference between these guys? (Hellie)

Birthday party, 29 Aug 2005

Both look like Republicans to me.

Powerline bloggers humiliated by facts (Hellie)

A cute skirmish in the blog wars, with a predictable outcome: the foolish Assrocket and Big Trunk of PowerLine carelessly bullshit about how great the Bush Gang's economy is (why does it seem to suck? Damn that liberal media!). DailyKos's bonddad issues a decisive smackdown (regrettably, in a bit mild a tone for my taste).

Hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner to sue Rumsfeld (Hellie)

His name is Ali Shalal Qaissi; I hope he wins.

UPDATE: Qaissi's "crime"? Complaining to "the military, human rights organizations and the news media about soldiers' dumping garbage on a local soccer field."

Weeks after complaining about the garbage, he said, he was surrounded by Humvees, hooded, tied up and carted to a nearby base before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. Then the questioning began.

"They blamed me for attacking U.S. forces," he said, "but I said I was handicapped; how could I fire a rifle?" he said, pointing to his hand. "Then he asked me, 'Where is Osama bin Laden?' And I answered, 'Afghanistan.' "

How did he know? "Because I heard it on TV," he replied.

 

Sensitive readers might want to use caution before reading more of Qaissi's story of horrible abuse.

A pre-emptive challenge for Bush revisionists (Hellie)

A number of astute observers have predicted that as rule by the Bush Gang is seen by more and more Americans to have been an epic disaster, the GOP will try to save its image by distancing itself from the cult of Bushism: somehow it was special features of Bush himself, or his gang, that led to their special incompetence at implementing policy. Incompetence let Republicanism down this time; True Republicanism, of course, forever remaining the never yet correctly implemented utopia.

The key question for True Republicans is: If not Bush, who would have done better? Who is that dream Republican figure who would serve as president of a GOP-controlled government and  *not* leave a wake of disaster everywhere? (Feel free to swap out more figures of the Bush Gang and replace them with a more expansive Executive Dream Team.)

(My prediction: there's no good answer. It won't happen that the Republicans control all three branches of the government (and the mass media) and epic disaster be avoided. As SusanG puts it,

Everything in this administration comes down to three political positioning maneuvers (and note that #2 and #3 really are subsets merely designed to serve #1):

1.    Corporations should operate absolutely unfettered in order to line the pockets of the oligarchical elite (See: empire building, environmental and safety deregulation, using the armed forces to pry open new markets/ resources/cheap labor, tax cuts, union busting, privatization of anything and everything, etc.)

2.    Pandering to the Religious Right (in order to get the votes to further #1).

3.    Escape any and all responsibility for the obscenely awful consequences of #1 upon the 90% of Americans who fund the stupidity - and pay the personal price in their daily lives - for these policies.

That's not just Bush and his inner circle: #1 is the core tenet of the modern GOP; #2 and #3 follow on as if by force of nature. For instance, not leaving thousands trapped in the Superdome surrounded by rising floodwaters would require an emergency agency with competent leadership and the goal of protecting everyone, rather than a crony- and ideology-police infested patronage machine that only works well when white GOP voters are in danger; a budgetary system sensitive to the infrastructure needs of cities in environmentally sensitive areas, rather than to fat giveaways to rich folks and make-work projects for big corporations indifferent to their use-value; and people in  positions of power at all levels of  government concerned with reality-based policy to support the general welfare.

None of that sounds like the modern GOP to me.)

Don't worry, the cone will protect you (Wilson)

In case you needed more evidence that all the brou-ha-ha about national security is so much bull:

Guards say Homeland Security HQ is insecure

WASHINGTON (AP) - The agency entrusted with protecting the U.S. homeland is having difficulty safeguarding its own headquarters, say private security guards at the complex.

The guards have taken their concerns to Congress, describing inadequate training, failed security tests and slow or confused reactions to bomb and biological threats.

For instance, when an envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at Homeland Security Department headquarters, guards said they watched in amazement as superiors carried it by the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff's window without evacuating people nearby.

Maybe the "superiors" should be informed of the Center for Disease Control's rule #1 for handling a suspicious package or envelope:

Do not shake or empty the contents of any suspicious package or envelope.

Moving on...

The scare, caused by white powder that proved to be harmless, "stands as one glaring example'' of the agency's security problems, said Derrick Daniels, one of the first guards to respond to the incident.

"I had never previously been given training ... describing how to respond to a possible chemical attack,'' Daniels told The Associated Press. "I wouldn't feel safe nowhere on this compound as an officer.''

[...]

Former guard Bryan Adams recognized his inadequate training one day last August, when an employee reported a suspicious bag in the parking lot.

"I didn't have a clue about what to do,'' he said.

When in doubt, grab a cone.

Adams said he closed the vehicle checkpoint with a cone, walked over to the bag and called superiors.

Perfect place to make that call.

Nobody cordoned off the area. Eventually, someone called a federal bomb squad, which arrived more than an hour after the discovery.

"If the bag had, in fact, contained the explosive device that was anticipated, the bomb could have detonated several times over in the hour that the bag sat there,'' Adams said.

The bag, it turned out, contained gym clothes.

Beware the stench bomb!

Some guards who continue to work at Homeland, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of fear of losing their jobs, said they knew of two instances in which individuals without identification got into the sensitive complex.

Another described how guards flunked a test by the Secret Service, which sent vehicles into the compound with dummy government identification tags hanging from inside mirrors. Guards cleared such vehicles through on two occasions, this guard said, and one officer even copied down the false information without realizing it was supposed to match information on the employee's government badge.

Doyle, the agency spokesman, said such tests are conducted routinely and "I can assure you that if people fail the test they are let go.'

They're sure to be replaced by someone more competent.

China attacks US human rights record (Hellie)

Used to be that the US could get away with the fiction of being a paragon of human rights, despite its internal racial discrimination and external proxy wars. Thanks to the GOP and Bush's torture camps in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, and elsewhere, and Bush's illegal domestic spying (not to mention that the US's discriminatory imprisonment of blacks -- and love affair with disgustingly harsh criminal punishments -- has been steadily worsening for decades), the US has lost any claim to have its human rights scoldings taken seriously:

China on Thursday lashed out against U.S. criticism of its human rights record, saying racial discrimination and crime were still rife in the United States and prisoners were being abused at U.S.-run detention centers abroad.

The State Council, China's cabinet, denounced the United States for what it said were rampant violence and widespread discrimination against minorities especially blacks in its annual response to the State Department's report on human rights worldwide.

"For a long time, the life and security of the people of the United States has not been under efficient protection," the Chinese report said.

Blacks are given heavier criminal penalties, arrested more frequently and are more likely to be targeted for hate crimes, the report said.

It also criticized American troops for brutality at prisons in Iraq and the detention camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"As in previous years, the State Department pointed the finger at human rights situations in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but kept silent on the serious violations of human rights in the United States," it said.

It is "an act that fully exposes its hypocrisy and double standard on human rights issues," said the report which drew mostly from stories and statistics in the American press.

The response came one day after the State Department said the Chinese government's human rights record "remained poor, and the government continued to commit numerous and serious abuses."

The U.S. report said repression worsened in China in 2005, with a trend toward "increased harassment, detention, and imprisonment" of people seen as threats to the Chinese government. It also mentioned tightened controls over print, broadcast and electronic media and censorship of online content.

The State Department study, published each year since 1977, offers a comprehensive analysis of all countries in the world except the United States.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Washington's report ignored China's progress in human rights, which he claimed "not only met with the satisfaction of the Chinese people but also has been widely affirmed by the international community."

"We express our strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition," Qin said, adding that Washington should "immediately end the erroneous practice of interfering in other country's internal politics."

A large section of the Chinese report was devoted to racial discrimination, which it said had "long been a chronic malady of American society."

It said the country's blacks and other minorities had much lower living standards and incomes and faced job discrimination. Blacks were also more likely to receive the death penalty for serious crimes, it said.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, Muslims have been targeted for arrests and detention under "the banner of 'anti-terrorism,'" the report said.

It also criticized American foreign policy and detailed prison abuse by American troops in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, accusing them of using "various kinds of torture" while trying to "extract information."

The report also touched on:

  private gun ownership in America, saying the "unchecked spread of guns has caused incessant murders."

  secret wire taps and surveillance on American citizens under the Patriot Act.

  the poverty rate and the problem of homelessness.

"No country in the world can claim to have a perfect state of human rights," the Chinese report said.

"We urge the U.S. government to look squarely at its own human rights problems, reflect what it has done in the human rights field and take concrete measures to improve its own human rights status."

A trolley problem for rightwingers (Hellie)

A bright caller to wingnut radio host Andrew Wilkow asks whether Wilkow would save a two-year-old or five petri dishes from a burning fertility clinic. Wilkow freaks out. Score! Catch the audio here.

Torture in Afghanistan (Hellie)

Discussed here.

A moment to reflect (Hellie)

What if the blogosphere hadn't come into existence only shortly after the Bush Gang takeover? Imagine having to face down Rove/Cheney/Frist/DeLay/Abramoff/Scaife/Murdoch with nothing but Z Magazine, a few tattered Chomsky books, and Lexis-Nexis (or for the unaffiliated, shudder, microfiche at the public library). Now everyone's Chomsky. I didn't see the "My Pet Goat" footage until mid-2003, and at the time it was secret knowledge; now "no one anticipated the breach of the levees" is available for anyone on Crooks & Liars to expose Bush's lies after Brownie's attempted self-rehabilitation. How did Bush spend 9/11? On 9/11 we learned that he was cowering, then on 9/13 reality changed and he was heroic for a few years. These days, you can't get away with strumming a guitar and cutting a cake while a city is destroyed. I worried publicly prior to the 2004 election that if Bush kept power, he'd destroy Social Security and that would be game over; Josh Marshall and others kept all over individual legislators and humiliated Bush. The Plame outing was going to be yet another silent but deadly Roving; bloggers locked their teeth into a few paragraphs on A17, now maybe Rove is going down, and at least he's distracted. Why did public opinion turn against the Iraq war so much faster and more decisively than against the Vietnam war? Because the blogosphere is constantly humming with reality-based information and analysis to counter the constant propaganda from the GOP and traditional media.

UPDATE: on a more gloomy note, this post is a stark reminder of the forces on the other side.

Jews: true blue (Hellie)

Interesting study (by the Solomon Project) of patterns of political affiliation and voting among American Jews here. From the bullet points:

• The best estimate of the two-party Jewish vote in 2004 – based on the National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll sample of 1511 Jewish voters – is:

Senator John Kerry: 78%
President George Bush: 22%

• The Jewish two-party vote in 2004 was 29% more Democratic than the national two-party vote. This number has been remarkably stable over the last three presidential elections.
• A large majority (from 65% to 74%) of American Jews identify as Democrats. Estimates of the percentage of American Jews who identify as Republicans range from 11-21%.
• Jewish Americans overwhelmingly identify themselves as liberal (up to 40% liberal in surveys by The Mellman Group along with Kiley and Co. and the Feldman Group) or moderate on an ideological scale. Somewhere between 13-18% of Jews identify themselves as conservative.
• There was a significant gender gap among Jewish voters in November 2004 according to the NEP survey. Though Jewish men voted for Kerry 70-28% (a 42% margin), Jewish women voted for Kerry 82-16% (a 66% margin).
• The strongest GOP subgroups within the Jewish population appear to be voters who attend synagogue at least weekly (47% for Bush in The Mellman Group’s surveys) and Jewish men under 30 years of age (35% for Bush according to the NEP survey). The strongest Democratic subgroups were Jewish women who were 60 years of age or older (90% for Kerry in the NEP survey) and Jewish women under 30 years of age (88% for Kerry in the NEP survey).
• Though there is some evidence that Bush captured a majority of Orthodox Jewish voters and Russian Jewish voters, sample sizes for both of these subgroups were either unavailable or too small in all surveys to make any definitive claims regarding their partisan attachments in 2004.

No reason to believe this sort of nonsense, then:

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said the strong loyalty of the Depression-era generation of Jewish voters to Democrats is eroding.

"We have had two presidents, Ronald Reagan and this president, who have addressed anti-Semitism in the world and threats in the world to both America and to Israel with moral clarity," he said. Still, he acknowledged, "we have a lot of work to do."

Reagan?!?!?

(Hat tip: Jonathan Singer)

UPDATE: My impression that Mehlman is completely out to lunch on Jewish views of Reagan receives confirmation from this graph (from the Solomon Project report, p11):

UPDATE: In light of the sort of considerations addressed in this post, one might suspect that lower curve won't be dropping much in the near future.

Hollywood comes through (Wilson)

Kudos to Hollywood for making films that matter, and honoring them and those that made them:

Best director (Ang Lee) and best adapted screenplay: Brokeback Mountain

Two guys in love in a world that won't let them be what comes naturally

Best picture and best original screenplay: Crash

How fucked up racism is, and how people periodically manage to transcend it

UPDATE: some concerns about Crash's presentation of the reality of racism are here.  Thanks to reader Amir for the link.

Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote

Another gay guy rocks the house

Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line

Reese as smartass June Carter, soul mate of the pill-poppin, prisoner-appreciating Johnny Cash

Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney in Syriana

Can we say enough about this awesome guy?  Director and actor in arguably the two most righteous mainstream films of 2005: Syriana (how oil, money, and power poison even the best intentions) and Good Night and Good Luck (journalist Ed Murrow fights to take down the grotesque Joe McCarthy).

Of Murrow, it is said: "He set standards of excellence that remain unsurpassed".

Good on Hollywood, and especially Clooney, for raising the standards of mainstream movies to deal with reality rather than hype.  And they say Hollywood is the land of dreams!

UPDATE: some concerns about Crash's presentation of the reality of racism are here.  Thanks to reader Amir for the link.

Who knew Mamet was a polymath? (Wilson)

This speaks volumes.

"Preemptive" war, "preemptive" incarceration (Wilson)

Guantanamo inmates despair of ever leaving:

Ahamed Abdul Aziz has been in the Guantanamo Bay prison for more than three years and, by his account, has been interrogated 50 times without being charged with any crime. He waits with anguish for freedom but fears it will never come.

"We are in a grave here," he told his lawyers, echoing the despair felt by many of the roughly 490 prisoners held as suspected terrorists at the U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba. Charges have been filed against only 10 of them.

[...]

Major Paul Swiergosz, a Defense Department spokesman, said that holding detainees who are considered a risk is necessary in time of war, while the review process ensures innocent detainees are released.

"Holding detainees in Guantanamo is not a punitive measure, it's preventive," Swiergosz said. "That keeps them from continuing to fight against the United States and its allies. The Defense Department will continue to work diligently to process all the detainee cases we have."

Jobs for Philosophers, Sunday Afternoon Edition (Hellie)

Those with an AOS in value theory may wish to consider this position.

US to withdraw from Iraq by '07? (Hellie)

How long can the military sustain the current casualty rate? Until after the midterm elections, apparently. (So, allegedly, say "unnamed senior defense ministry sources".)

Iraqi death squads for dummies (Wilson)

The director of the Baghdad morgue has fled in fear of his life, after reporting that 7000 people have been killed by death squads in recent months -- and of course those are just those that made it to the morgue after being tortured and executed.  Unclear who's responsible, exactly, but suffice to note that John "Death Squad" Negroponte was recently ambassador to Iraq, and it was just a few months ago that the "Salvadoran" option was openly discussed.

Those unfortunates left behind in Iraq are circulating this horrific document, translated from the Arabic:

Before reading the guidelines, please keep the following facts in mind:

1- The mere fact that you are arrested by security militias would mean possible death or deadly injury, even if you were innocent. Therefore, your main goal should be to escape arrest by any means possible.
2- The phrase "We have a few questions, and you'll be back in an hour" usually means your disappearance for months or, God forbid, your death. Therefore, do not be naive to trust security forces.
3- Remember, your presence in detention means 11 dollars a day for prison officers to feed you; a dollar for your food and 10 for the officers. As a result, keeping you in detention is a guaranteed source of profit for security officers, even if you were innocent.

The following security plan to avoid detention depends on organising neigbourhood watch teams, and in the following manner:

1- Look for trustworthy friends in your area and remind them that your cooperation is vital to save many lives in the neighbourhood.
2- Draw a simple map of your area. Put down the main streets and back alleys that would be used by Interior ministry forces to reach your area. Remember that security patrols will not land on your house from a helicopter, but will instead use main streets leading to your house.
3- You can use Internet services such as Google Earth to identify the streets leading to your area. Download it from http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html
4- Coordinate with your neighbourhood team to watch and to patrol surrounding streets, according to the diagram. This should be around usual raid hours.
5- Exchange landline and cellular phone numbers with your team. Upon noticing a patrol (usually modern 4 wheel drive vehicles with no number plates) entering your area, call to notify neighbours and the rest of your team members.
6- Train your family and friends to be alert to movement in the street, strangers or suspicious activities. Regularly discuss the neighbourhood’s situation with your team members.
7- Every person should be trained on the appropriate method to hide or escape. Learn to hide valuable items and jewelry within minutes of a raid. Remember that all cupboards and drawers will be opened. Beds and blankets will be turned over.

Things to remember:

1- In most occasions, the raiding force is unaware of your identity, until you tell them! Train yourself on impersonating someone else when necessary.
2- It might be a good idea to carry a second ID card, with your own photo but under a different name. Some people have escaped arrest by claiming they were guards with no relation to the family living in the residence.
3- If you are not familiar with your neigbourhood, now is the time to be so. Stay up to date with events and gossip in the area. The murder of your neighbourhood's baker, for example, could lead to the murder of the storeowner next door, as an act of vengeance by security militias. It does not matter if both were innocent.
4- Security militias rarely know you in person. They usually learn your name and address from an informer in your area. It is of the utmost importance to remain alert at all times. Do not enter and leave your residence at known intervals. Do not use the same vehicle if possible. Try to spend a few nights away at friends or relatives.
5- Arrange with your neighbours to place small roadblocks (palm tree trunks) at all entry points to your area. Every extra minute you gain is on your side, and would help you escape more easily.
6- Do NOT resist the raiding force, under any circumstances. Just try to escape capture, using any trick possible. Remember that you know the insides and outsides of your area better than anyone else.
7- Remove anything from your residence or your computer that might be interpreted by the raiding force as related to 'terrorism'. Books, posters, photos, religious leaflets printed in Saudi Arabia, websites, audio and video clips and CDs, even if they are commonly available on the market.
8- Important data on your computer might be lost forever. Use an online storage service to backup your important files, or use a well-hidden flash memory stick, or even your email inbox. If you are forced to destroy your SIM card, you can store your telephone contacts using the same method. Remember that cell phones are almost always stolen during raids. You might endanger your friends and family if security militias confiscate your cell phone.
9- People are commonly arrested and killed because of the surname in their ID cards. If you have a surname that identifies your sectarian background (such as Al-Dulaimi or Al-Janabi), try to issue a new ID with no surname or tribe name if possible. If your birthplace is Ramadi, Fallujah, or Madain, for example, be sure to issue a new ID to keep you safer. Do not drive a vehicle with Al-Anbar number plates in areas of sectarian unrest.

Important guidelines: 

1- Women should arrange to hide valuables such as jewelry, money and important documents as they see fit. The raiding force rarely searches women.
2- Most victims of sectarian killings or torture had specific religious appearances. Try to shave your beard, and avoid behaviour, appearances and discussions that might identify your sectarian background.
3- Before you leave the house, watch for movements and any suspicious vehicles or strangers around you. Do not use the same road often, and try to leave and return at different intervals.
4- If you receive a threat, do NOT ignore it. Move to another area or governorate for some time.
5- Avoid entering sectarian or religious discussions, for whatever reasons, even when you feel you, or your beliefs, are intentionally provoked. Your life is more valuable than a pointless debate.
6- Be respectful and tolerant of your colleagues. Let them feel you are sympathetic and understanding to their feelings. Respect other people’s religious occasions. Close your store or business if necessary. Learn to compliment!
7- Keep the above guidelines in mind all the time. Pass it on to others. Reject sectarianism and remember that all Iraqis of all sects and ethnicities are paying dearly for this.

By the way, did you know that Death Squad has a new job now... as the U.S.'s first Director of National Intelligence?  Sworn in by the Senate 98-2 (Tom Harkin and Ron Wyden the only dissenters).  Sleep tight.

Who is Joe Lieberman? (Hellie)

Joementum, that fool; the DINO who gladly submits to Bush's cheek-pinchings; Gore's VP candidate, Loserman; gleeful accepter of endorsements by the corrupt GOP: who is this familiar figure? As it turns out, he has a long history of slimy bastardness related program activities:

Joe Lieberman works hard at coming across as a nice man. But as veteran of the music business with a long memory, I can say from experience Joe Lieberman has never been a nice man, just a cut-throat practitioner of partisan politics -- with a big smile. He's up for re-election this fall and everyone should be aware that he's done more in his time to promote government censorship and destroy freedom of speech for artists than any politician on the national stage today.

[. . .]

Lieberman started his political career in 1970 by going up against a Democratic Party boss Arthur Barbieri and outwitting him in manipulating elderly voters in Crawford Manor, a government-built retirement community, in an election for Connecticut State Senate in which Lieberman was challenging New Haven Democratic incumbent Ed Marcus. Lieberman recognized that parties no longer deliver all the votes and money needed to win elections. You have to build your own machine based on personal loyalty.

[. . .]

But Lieberman was dealt 2 crucial political defeats before he started his real ascendancy. The party bosses bushwhacked him in a 1978 bid to become Lieutenant Governor and he was defeated in a bid for Congress by a Republican 2 years later. In his self-serving book, IN PRAISE OF PUBLIC LIFE, Lieberman delineates the 3 lessons he took away from that race: to rely on daily tracking polls, to never "let your opponent go negative on you without giving at least as good as you get in return," and, most important, to "never, ever let anyone attack you as a 'high-taxing, big-spending liberal.'" That third one's the one he's based the rest of his career in politics on.

In 1982 he ran for Connecticut Attorney General as a law-and-order candidate inching slightly towards the right and glomming on to an aggressively "pro-family" position that has served him very well. He won. For the next 6 years he marketed himself assiduously to Connecticut citizens. In 1988 he challenged progressive Republican incumbent U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker -- attacking from the right -- and beat him. Lieberman ran a brutal and viciously negative campaign, mocking Weicker personally and even red-baiting him for being soft on Castro (William Buckley formed a PAC to raise money for Lieberman and later Jack Kemp called him "one of us.") Today Lieberman is far more popular in Connecticut with Republicans and with conservatives than he is with Democrats and with progressives, and in 1988 conservatives gave him his small margin of victory over Weicker. Once in the Senate he went even further right and pro-corporate. "He accumulated the most pro-corporate record of any Senate Democrat -- and the millions of campaign dollars that came with them." He joined the DLC and became their president-- before that, the domain of right-leaning Southern Democrats.

This is when Lieberman, like a snake, shed his old skin entirely, discarding the last vestiges of anything vaguely Democratic, and became what he is today: a right-wing demagogue, a really vile politician who belongs in the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party. He made racism quasi-acceptable by framing it as being against unfair affirmative action. An unrelenting homophobe, he joined Jesse Helms' campaign of defamation of gay people and he joined forces with far right extremists like Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed to promote school prayer and voucher programs for religionist schools. And then he got into my own business and my growing hatred for Joe Lieberman turned personal.

The sordid story of Lieberman's key role in the priggishly moralistic censorial group, the PMRC, is then nauseatingly detailed, with this conclusion:

Lieberman destroyed an alliance between young voters and the Democratic Party that had started with John Kennedy's election as he ham-fistedly savaged their culture for his own political ambitions.

In a more recent post, Klein goes into more detail on Lieberman's non-censorship-related activities:

A 2003 piece in the LA Weekly titled "All in all, as Democrat, Lieberman makes a great Republican," takes the bull by the horns when it comes to Lieberman's carefully disguised dog whistle brand of political bigotry:

On gays in the military, Lieberman has enunciated the now-discredited canard that 'homosexual conduct can harm unit cohesion and effectiveness.' (Tell that to the dozens of countries, from England to Israel, that permit openly gay troops in their armed forces.) In fact, Lieberman worked with Georgia's Sam Nunn to fashion the destructive 'don't ask, don't tell' policy, which resulted in escalating expulsions of gays from the military every year after it took effect. Its Catch-22 provisions have directly stimulated a rising wave of violent gay bashing and harassment in the military because victims can't complain without 'telling.'

This is just part of the record that has made Lieberman his party's most notorious theocrat. The Scripture-quoting Lieberman made God-bothering a staple of his 2000 vice-presidential campaign: That August, Holy Joe told a Detroit congregation never to imagine 'that morality can be maintained without religion.' This position was denounced as 'unsettling' by no less than the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith (ADL), which released a letter to him arguing tartly that 'To even suggest that one cannot be a moral person without being a religious person is an affront to many highly ethical citizens.'

Prayer in the schools? Holy Joe lined up with the GOP's religious zealots to push it repeatedly in the Senate. Subsidizing parochial schools at the expense of public education? Holy Joe has sponsored legislation to give parents vouchers to send their kids to parochial schools, draining money from the public schools to which most Americans send their kids. And Lieberman just last year joined with rabid gay basher Rick Santorum -- the Pennsylvania Republican who compared same-sex love to bestiality and incest-- to co-sponsor George Bush's faith-based initiatives, praising Bush's 'leadership' in tearing down the constitutional barrier between church and state.

Right after Gore made the colossal error of naming Lieberman to the Democratic ticket in 2000, Dr. Manning Marable, Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, wrote in the Detroit Free Press:

Throughout his twelve years in the U.S. Senate, Lieberman positioned himself on the extreme conservative wing of the Democratic Party. He chairs the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the 'centrist' group of elected officials (including Clinton and Gore) who have aggressively pushed their party toward more conservative public policy positions. On a wide variety of issues, Lieberman is clearly to the right of both Clinton and Gore. On gay rights, for example, in 1994 Lieberman supported an amendment offered by reactionary Republican Senator Jesse Helms, which cut off federal funds to any school district that used educational material that in any way 'supported homosexuality.'

Lieberman, in a tough primary battle against a progressive Democrat who comes off as anything but the Inside-the-Beltway professional pol that Lieberman has become, probably did take offense to my charge that he's a homophobe; anyone who would still use that "some of my best friend are..." line undoubtedly doesn't think they are homophobic. But I really don't know any gay people who could look at his record as outlined above and conclude anything else.

It's somewhat harder to believe that a US Senator, an ostensibly Democratic one, no less, does not know that he's providing an acceptable frame for racism when he says affirmative action is "un-American."

Let me go back to the very learned and distinguished Dr. Marable for a moment:

Lieberman has a long record of hostility toward affirmative action that even his liberal apologists in the Democratic Party cannot hide. Back in 1995, when Lieberman took over the DLC, he declared, 'You can't defend policies that are based on group preferences as opposed to individual opportunities, which is what America has always been about.' Lieberman embraced California's Proposition 209 in 1996, which outlawed affirmative action programs in that state. When President Clinton, after months of hesitation, finally put forward the formulation that affirmative action programs ought to be 'mended, not ended,' Lieberman led the opposition within the Democratic Party. The DLC's Progressive Policy Institute issued a report criticizing Clinton's position, and called for abolishing it for government hiring and contracting, and making it voluntary in private business.

On issues of higher education, Lieberman has again played a conservative role. He was the only Democrat to vote against liberal historian Sheldon Hackney, the President of the University of Pennsylvania, to become head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He claimed that Hackney was too liberal on campus issues of 'political correctness.' Lieberman then became co-founder of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a five-year-old group that reject ''racial preferences,' opposes 'political correctness,' and defends 'Western civilization.'

(More on the odious ACTA to be found here)

Lieberman and his co-founder, Lynn Cheney, were on a mission. But could he really not realize that these actions played directly into the hands of the bigots of the GOP, giving them cover for their racist agendas? If so, he's the only one.

It didn't fool the NAACP, who gave him a "D" on his voting record, and it didn't fool Jesse Jackson. "We submit to the senator of this state," Jackson roared in 1995 three years before Lieberman's NAACP "D" grade, that we have marched too long, and have died too young. We have been to too many funerals to turn back now! No, Mr. Lieberman, we are moving forward!"

Anyone one who needs further evidence of what could only charitably be referred to as "racial insensitivity" can read the infamous transcript that made many civil rights partisans denounce Lieberman as a racist here (where Lieberman calls affirmative action "un-American.") Former Congressman and NAACP President Kwesi Mfume branded Lieberman as a candidate with "no legitimacy" in the African American community and compared his political capital there to "confederate dollars" after he snubbed an NAACP convention so he could schmooze with Bill O'Reilly on Fox TV.

And Maryland Congressman Albert Wynn, commenting on a subsequent meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus where Lieberman acted the buffoon as he tried to mend fences, said "basically, people were laughing at him."

But the fact that those affiliated with a United States Senator (sorry-- formerly affiliated) became enraged and demanded a retraction about what one lone blogger like myself had to say about them speaks volumes-- Lieberman must indeed be terrified of Ned Lamont. I can well imagine why. Lieberman is still a rabid supporter of an unpopular and disastrous war; his vote helped put a man on the Supreme Court who is now writing love notes to James Dobson, and the man he's running against-- Ned Lamont-- is someone people really believe in, someone I believe in, someone that people are working their butts off for.

So if you would like to help replace a reactionary Bush-lover with a real progressive Democrat, please visit my Act Blue page and be part of the grass roots movement that will add up five, ten and twenty dollars at a time to fight the big money Lieberman will get from all the defense contractors his warmongering has done so much to enrich.

Mask off, mask on (Wilson)

The latest manifestation of the GOP rhetoric-reality gap is too wide even for your typical Republican, but as per usual the facts (see also here and here) that would resolve the seeming inconsistency (and maybe serve as a wake-up call for real people to take back their country) are largely absent from any mainstream reporting:

I watched most of the Sunday talking head shows yesterday, and for the ones I missed I read the reports by my stalwart blogmates. Notable by it’s absence was any mention of administration officials’ financial connections to the Carlyle Group, CSX, Dubai Ports World and the UAE. Even though venerable CNN host Lou Dobbs had thoroughly reported on this last week on his show [see my previous post].

I even watched the Wall Street Journal report with Maria Bartiromo [Rowr! Ciao Bella!] hoping the issue might be raised. No such luck. But during a segment where a writer from the WSJ editorial page and the WSJ’s managing editor proceeded to beat Rep. King about the head over his opposition to the port deal, an intriguing question came up: why would Bush come out and threaten to veto any legislation blocking the deal before the discussion had even really started? The WSJ people were practically tearing their hair out in disbelief. Why would Bush take such a strong stand on something that is, politically, a big fat loser?

Why indeed.  Another thing you can’t talk about on TV is the motives of administration officials.   Why would John Snow tell reporters he had no idea that Dubai Ports World had bought the shipping operations of the company (CSX) he had headed for 20 years for $1.15 billion? Maybe he was too busy to notice since he was nominated to be Treasury Secretary at almost exactly the same time. And of course this would have no connection to the fact that Snow’s Treasury Department approved Dubai Ports World’s recent bid to buy operations at six US ports.

Nothing fishy here, right? As compared to, say, Whitewater? No need for the Press or the Government to investigate the financial dealings of people in the White House. We should all just respect the office of the President.

The Print Media is also silent on the issue.  With the exception of a column by David Lazarus in the San Francisco Chronicle which politely points out that there might be, ahem, a slight appearance of impropriety.

[...]

The pattern that emerges is something like the Duke Cunningham bribery shenanigans on a much larger scale where entities interested in gaining political influence buy assets controlled by politicians for significantly more than they’re worth. The politicians get to “keep the change”, as it were. Or maybe it’s more like the scams in the “Funky Finger Productions” skits on In Living Color: “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money!”

While the Dems and the Corporate Media chase after the White House’s flurry of fake-ass talking points about PortGate (see talk show reports linked above), the giant piggy bank in the middle of the room goes unnnoticed.

Unfortunately, the same is true of most progressive bloggers.  So, for example, Glenn Greenwald's discussion of the ports issue focuses primarily on arguing (against a Repub talking point) that those opposing Dubai World managing the ports are justified since the UAE is anti-Israel.  Whether or not you agree with Greenwald (I don't), all this is besides the point of the real story of the ports: that the Republican national security hysteria is just so much dispensible clothing on the slavering Corporate wolf.

Pay your credit card off, raise a terrrr flag (Hellie)

Real Americans don't have enough liquidity to emancipate themselves from debt peonage:

The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.

"When you mess with my money, I want to know why," he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

"The more I'm on, the scarier it gets," he said. "It's scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy."

My private theocracy (Hellie)

Your pizza dollars at work:

If Domino's Pizza founder Thomas S. Monaghan has his way, a new town being built in Florida will be governed according to strict Roman Catholic principles, with no place to get an abortion, pornography or birth control.

The pizza magnate is bankrolling the project with at least $250 million and calls it "God's will."

Civil libertarians say the plan is unconstitutional and are threatening to sue.

The town of Ave Maria is being constructed around Ave Maria University, the first Catholic university to be built in the United States in about 40 years. Both are set to open next year about 25 miles east of Naples in southwestern Florida.

The town and the university, developed in partnership with the Barron Collier Co., an agricultural and real estate business, will be set on 5,000 acres with a European-inspired town center, a massive church and what planners call the largest crucifix in the nation, at nearly 65 feet tall. Monaghan envisions 11,000 homes and 20,000 residents.

During a speech last year at a Catholic men's gathering in Boston, Monaghan said that in his community, stores will not sell pornographic magazines, pharmacies will not carry condoms or birth control pills, and cable television will have no X-rated channels.

[. . .]

"If they attempt to do what he apparently wants to do, the people of Naples and Collier County, Florida, are in for a whole series of legal and constitutional problems and a lot of litigation indefinitely into the future," warned Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

[. . .]

Frances Kissling, president of the liberal Washington-based Catholics for a Free Choice, likened Monaghan's concept to Islamic fundamentalism.

"This is un-American," Kissling said. "I don't think in a democratic society you can have a legally organized township that will seek to have any kind of public service whatsoever and try to restrict the constitutional rights of citizens."

Cash's basement tapes (Wilson)

On the way.

More documents show Bush knew what he claimed not to know (Hellie)

Yesterday, Katrina; today, Iraq. Tomorrow: reports from the treasury warning against ruinous giveaways to the ultrawealthy?

Two highly classified intelligence reports delivered directly to President Bush before the Iraq war cast doubt on key public assertions made by the president, Vice President Cheney, and other administration officials as justifications for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, according to records and knowledgeable sources.

The first report, delivered to Bush in early October 2002, was a one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate that discussed whether Saddam's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for the purpose of developing a nuclear weapon.

Among other things, the report stated that the Energy Department and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research believed that the tubes were "intended for conventional weapons," a view disagreeing with that of other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which believed that the tubes were intended for a nuclear bomb.

The disclosure that Bush was informed of the DOE and State dissents is the first evidence that the president himself knew of the sharp debate within the government over the aluminum tubes during the time that he, Cheney, and other members of the Cabinet were citing the tubes as clear evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Neither the president nor the vice president told the public about the disagreement among the agencies.

Read the rest: similar stuff on whether Saddam would attack the US (bwah-ha-ha-ha; hm). Liars!

UPDATE: it appears that the recent flurry of revelations has not been due to something special in the March air: rather, "a network and a cable affiliate" had the Katrina tape on hand by 29 August!

A bribe menu (Hellie)

Former Rep Duke Cunningham:

Prosecutors call it a corruption case with no parallel in the long history of the U.S. Congress. And it keeps getting worse. Convicted Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham actually priced the illegal services he provided.

Prices came in the form of a "bribe menu" that detailed how much it would cost contractors to essentially order multimillion-dollar government contracts, according to documents submitted by federal prosecutors for Cunningham's sentencing hearing this Friday.

"The length, breadth and depth of Cunningham's crimes," the sentencing memorandum states, "are unprecedented for a sitting member of Congress."

Prosecutors will ask federal Judge Larry Burns to impose the statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The sentencing memorandum includes the California Republican's "bribery menu" on one of his congressional note cards, "starkly framed" under the seal of the United States Congress.

The card shows an escalating scale for bribes, starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value required a $50,000 bribe.

The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went above $20 million.

At one point Cunningham was living on a yacht named after him, "The Dukester," docked near Capitol Hill, courtesy of a defense company president.

UPDATE: the actual bribe menu reproduced here. 'Menu' is a bit much -- it's more an inarticulately scrawled description of quid = m*quo + boat.

A uniter not a divider (Hellie)

Bush shows his face in India, and ...:

"Whether Hindu or Muslim, the people of India have gathered here to show our anger. We have only one message --- killer Bush go home," one of the speakers, Hindu politician Raj Babbar, told the crowd.

(Joke mercilessly stolen from Chris in Paris)

Scalito Heart Dobson (Hellie)

Heartfelt thanks:

Dear Dr. Dobson:

This is just a short note to express my heartfelt thanks to you and the entire staff of Focus on the Family for your help and support during the past few challenging months.

I would also greatly appreciate it if you would convey my appreciation to the good people from all parts of the country who wrote to tell me that they were praying for me and for my family during this period.

As I said when I spoke at my formal investiture at the White House last week, the prayers of so many people from around the country were a palpable and powerful force.
As long as I serve on the Supreme Court I will keep in mind the trust that has been placed in me.

I hope that we'll have the opportunity to meet personally at some point in the future.

In the meantime my entire family and I hope that you and the Focus on the Family staff know how we appreciate all that you have done.

Sincerely yours,
Samuel Alito

Texas chainsaw massacre (Wilson)

Steve Gilliard has a creepy post on Bush's sinking ship, better than a night at the horror flicks.  The suspense starts with this extremely weird pickup (from Atrios) from Bush's interview with ABC's Linda Vargas:

Wow

Does Laura have to call him Mr. President too:

BUSH: You know, it's interesting, you said that one of the things that we love doing is to invite our buddies up from Texas. And I think about the time we had Jones, Procter and Selee . These are guys we grew up with in Midland, Texas. They are down to earth, you know, they have no agenda, except being with their friends Laura and George.

VARGAS: They call you George?

BUSH: No, they call me Mr. President.

VARGAS: I was going to say…

BUSH: They probably don't want to call me Mr. President, but they do call me Mr. President. And we sit up there in the White House. First of all, it's a great joy to see their joy about being here. It's a fantastic experience for people to be able to come here.

We are aware that we are in the presence of a genuine fucking freak.

Bush is such a dry drunk his friends can't call him George.  Which also means that no one can tell him about anything bad and that is a handicap. 

The suspense heightens, with people in the wrong place in the wrong time getting it in the face:

Which means he can't deal with crises. Look at last month, Bush didn't get a good day of press. The month started off with Cheney shooting a man in the face and ended with a giveaway of American ports to the UAE. Leaving many GOP House members exposed to Dem challenges on national security. My God, that's like the GOP gaining the high ground on health care. This isn't a minor blunder, but a major strategic failure, and Bush is oblivious.

Oh yes, there will be blood:

But Iraq has gone  horribly wrong and is about to end very ugly.

The US cannot stop the violence now, and every commander and soldier knows this. They admit it in polling. They don't have enough men or equipment and the men they do have are about to take a sharp decline in quality.

The scenes of evacuation from Iraq will make Saigon look like Spring Break. Thousands who worked with the US will be killed by all sides. Think Rwanda or Bosnia. Think piles of bodies, decapitated, shot. Abu Gharib will pale before the carnage.

And this is in an orderly evacuation with phased withdrawals.

In a full out flight, we will abandon our Iraqi allies wholesale. Iraqi units, already infiltrated, will turn on US forces and join the resistance en masse. US troops will abandon their equipment by the side of the road. Three years of war will catch up with them, and only the air cover of AC-130's will prevent massacres.

By the end of it, artillery will be taken out of storage and fired at fleeing troops.

Either way it ends, Bush will be held responsible. Whether it is a phased withdrawal or Chosen II, Bush's adventure in Iraq will fail and Osama will be chortling about it on video.

Sometimes the best stuff I read is in the comment threads (HT Sekmet):

He sat on the Carlyle Group board for three years and basically wasted everybody's time with his towel-snapping b.s.

http:// www.informationclearingho...article3994.htm

'Rubenstein said, "We put [Bush] on the board and [he] spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years - you know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.'

Rubenstein continued: "He said, well I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board."

Nanny nanny boo boo, stick your head in doo doo.

Does that sound like the response of an adult? "And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board." It says volumes about how much American politics has degenerated that they took this childish butthead, cleaned him up, and somehow sold him to enough people as a mature adult who should be elected president. It is a triumph of the advertising and public relations arts.

You'll wish it was only make believe.

Pre-Katrina Bush briefing video (Hellie)

"I don't think anyone could have anticipated a breach of the levees". What about the people you were in a videoconference with a few days ago?

Watch the videoconference here.

UPDATE: Professor Edmundson points out that the video demonstrates that Brownie did indeed do a heckuva job -- or at least, he was not the completely detached and clueless crony he was pilloried for being. But what about the image-obsessed Brownie of the email exchanges? Did Rove slime the gang's own guy to insulate the detached and clueless preznit? Presumably with Brownie's cooperation and the promise of future reward, of course.

UPDATE 2: More proof that Brownie gave his career so that the Son might live here.

Who made the most accurate predictions about the outcome of the Iraq war? (Hellie)

I've been hunting around for the answer to this question a bit lately. Chomsky did an OK job, responsibly (and more-or-less accurately) warning against a potential death toll rising to the hundreds of thousands. But he seems to have been a bit squishy on the chemical and biological weapons issue, advancing a healthy but not especially focused skepticism about their existence. And I was unable to find predictions of sectarian strife leading to civil war.

Then I came across this excellent posting by Glenn Greenwald, who reminds us of Howard Dean's prewar position:

when one reviews the pre-war arguments made by Howard Dean as to why the war was ill-advised, it is glaringly self-evident just how right he was -- at a time when few others recognized it -- about virtually everything. Here are excerpts from a speech Dean gave on February 17, 2003 -- just over a month before we invaded -- at Drake University which reflects the prescient warnings he was making back then:

[...]

The Administration has not explained how a lasting peace, and lasting security, will be achieved in Iraq once Saddam Hussein is toppled.

I, for one, am not ready to abandon the search for better answers.

[...]

We have been told over and over again what the risks will be if we do not go to war.

We have been told little about what the risks will be if we do go to war.

If we go to war, I certainly hope the Administration's assumptions are realized, and the conflict is swift, successful and clean. I certainly hope our armed forces will be welcomed like heroes and liberators in the streets of Baghdad.

I certainly hope Iraq emerges from the war stable, united and democratic.

I certainly hope terrorists around the world conclude it is a mistake to defy America and cease, thereafter, to be terrorists.

It is possible, however, that events could go differently, . . . .

Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.

Anti-American feelings will surely be inflamed among the misguided who choose to see an assault on Iraq as an attack on Islam, or as a means of controlling Iraqi oil.

And last week's tape by Osama bin Laden tells us that our enemies will seek relentlessly to transform a war into a tool for inspiring and recruiting more terrorists.

[...] Those who claim that there was nobody before the war who doubted that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs which compelled our invasion ought to read this passage from Dean's speech:

Now, I am not among those who say that America should never use its armed forces unilaterally. In some circumstances, we have no choice. In Iraq, I would be prepared to go ahead without further Security Council backing if it were clear the threat posed to us by Saddam Hussein was imminent, and could neither be contained nor deterred.

However, that case has not been made, and I believe we should continue the hard work of diplomacy and inspection. . . .

Secretary Powell's recent presentation at the UN showed the extent to which we have Iraq under an audio and visual microscope. Given that, I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness. . .

Can anyone dispute that Dean was right about virtually every prediction and claim he made, every warning that he issued about why invading Iraq was ill-advised and counter-productive? Compare this outright prescience from Dean to the war supporters’ declarations of cakewalks, predictions of glorious victory celebrations, promises that the war would pay for itself, Purple Finger celebrations where they insisted that democracy was upon us, errors regarding the number of troops needed, inexcusable failure to anticipate or plan the insurgency, and shrill fear-mongering about Saddam’s non-existent weapons.

Chalk one up for the left, I was prepared to think -- against the Pentagon's absurd faith-based mums and mints prediction, we in the reality-based community were right on.

Not so fast. I was astounded to come across this (h/t Wolcott):

With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration’s policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq.

The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney— to no avail— that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war. They said so before the war, during it and in the aftermath, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the U.S. intelligence community’s chief Middle East analyst, from Wayne White, the State Department’s chief intelligence analyst on Iraq and from two CIA Baghdad station chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that pre-war intelligence on Iraq was distorted by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.

For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn’t even alarming: they just didn’t care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans to John Bolton’s arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney’s shadow National Security Council in the Office of the Vice President from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.

In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous “Clean Break” paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : “The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.” After Saddam, Iraq would “be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” he wrote. “Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.” Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse. “The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.”

(As far as I can tell from skimming Wurmser's paper, what he didn't like about the then current situation was the nationalism of the Baathist rulers. Like many tories, his brow became dewy in the presence of the our-class-dear hereditarily fancy; correspondingly his bizarre "Hashemite option" for expediting the chaotic collapse was to induce the royals of Jordan to woo clan leaders throughout the region, establishing a great big feudal-monarchic structure along the lines of mediaeval Britain: in other words, to restore the "natural" royalist system installed with great brutality by the Brits in the '20s. So much for the Wilsonian rhetoric. As we now know, the Bush Gang had worked overtime with great care and delicacy prior to the invasion to bring this option about, by establishing the necessary diplomatic ties among the Hashemite clan bosses.)

Wow! So the leading war "planners" at the Pentagon themselves had no illusions about the inevitability of "chaotic collapse". The left from top to bottom, and the upper echelons of the right, were in total agreement! All the "peeance and freeance" rhetoric from the right was not just moronic drivel, but pure unadulterated bullshit. The only suckers here were the lumpen-right.

Memo to the lumpen-right: don't get fooled again.

South Dakota tests Scalito [UPDATED] (Hellie)

South Dakota has just passed an unconsitutional anti-abortion bill, in a deliberate attempt to give the Roberts court a quick opportunity to overturn Roe. An especially odd aspect of this frightening turn of events is the promise by an anonymous donor to give SD $1 million for legal defense.

UPDATE: this post was a bit telegraphic, as indicated by the following correspondence, apparently taking me to task for missing that "[the SD statute] will be enjoined; the 8th Cir will affirm and Ct deny cert". The writer apparently takes me to be "frightened" that Roe would soon be overturned, not my intent -- after all, as the writer correctly indicates, there's no reason to suppose any of Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, or Breyer would vote to overturn Roe (or, for that matter, to even consider hearing the case; from what I've been able to determine, the same may be true of Roberts), so there's little to fear on that front (though we should not ignore the possibility that wishful thinking by the SD right may well have interfered with their ability to count).

Rather, among the obviously frightening facts about the SD law are (a) that the right is now pushing their aims much more aggressively than would have been dared not long ago; (b) that a few not-excessively-unlikely events would now tip the balance the other way on the bench; (c) that enough residents of the once-sensible Upper Midwest are now buying into rightwing beliefs about women that their elected representatives either feel forced into this dreadful position, or are the sort of people who relish being in it; (d) the still greater hardships that, until the law is struck down, are likely to be forced on South Dakotan women and girls wishing to terminate pregnancies, and healthcare workers seeking to help them; (e) the danger that other red state legislatures may be tempted to pursue similar actions, forcing comparable hardships on women and girls residing in them.

Dawkins surrounded by idiots (Hellie)

In two episodes of his UK Channel 4 TV show, eminent British biologist Richard Dawkins visits the heart of darkness -- Colorado Springs, USA, ground zero of irrationalist bronze age Christian fundamentalism. In the seven minute video clip linked here, Dawkins converses with the creepily toothy pastor Ted Haggart, comparing his sermon to a Nuremberg rally, and in return being told by Haggart that he needs to brush up on his knowledge of the biology literature. The clip is very much worth watching, and the page to which I link provides information on how to acquire the rest of the episode.

NSA Scandal: No Reason for Pessimism ... (Hellie)

At least not in excess of the usual, in light of the Senate Intel Ctee's recent cover-up activities. While I agree with most of Professor Wilson's post immediately below this, Greenwald provides an excellent morale-boost here --- in brief: of course Bush lackey Roberts is trying to cover up the NSA scandal; the Bush Gang won't go down without a fight. But remember the Saturday Night Massacre: that was just the beginning of the long hard slog it took to rid the country of Nixon.

Political angst (Wilson)

Remember existential angst?  Neither do I.  OK, maybe once in a while I experience a vague yearning for meaning, but then I read some Frege and feel better right away.

But seriously, folks, there's a new distinctively political angst in town (and I'm not just talking about that uneasy feeling you get when you hear Bush try to speak) that is associated with scandal overload and which more specifically reflects the past five years' bearing witness to a continuing series of crimes and scandals that we are evidently powerless either to prevent or to prosecute.  None of the usual conduits of resistance, change, justice are working.  As Burbules notes, elected Democrats aren't trying to stop (or even slow down) the criminals in office.  And nothing individuals do---including vote---seems to be making much difference.  Every day a new outrage (or several) with the now-predictably-tiny half-life.  It's getting even Digby down:

I'm feeling down right now. I know I shouldn't. The fact that Tom DeLay has stepped down is such a huge victory for humanity all by itself that I should be dancing a jig for the next six months. But, I'm down in the dumps, mostly because I am watching George W. Bush repeat his patented mantra for the 514,346th time. It's filled with lies, mischaracterizations and simple-minded gibberish, as always, and I'm watching it go out unfiltered, in its entirety, unchallenged by the media, no Democrats in sight, on every cable channel. I think they are personally trying to drive me crazy. [...]

They are going to the 9/11 well again. They say that Democrats are sending talking points to Osama and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Rove says we don't believe that the government should monitor al Qaeda's telephone calls. The next several months will be spent fending off accusations that if we don't let the president do anything he damned well pleases we are all going to die.

I don't know if it will work again. But I also don't know if I can take this campaign one more time. Five years of hearing the same thing over and over again and watching American sheeple fall for it over and over again is just too depressing. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to January 20, 2009 (and I'm of an age where rushing the future is no longer wise.) The day I no longer have to listen to one more word from this immoral, dishonest, incompetent, delusional prick will be the best day of my life.

Of course it worked again.

A few of the comments on Digby's post are of the "buck up, have courage" variety, but I was struck by how many echoed Digby's angst:

Digby, this country is becoming fascist. No doubt about it. Look, its time to start planning an escape - a life somewhere else. America is dead.

Well, the death of a democratic society is never pretty. Our country has become incapable of self governance and will, like all countries that lose that capacity, soon lose that privilege, if it has not been lost already. Our press has become a complicit player in the deceptions of a secretive, autocratic government. Our populace has become conditioned to accept as credible anything presented to it with high enough production values. High barriers to entry preclude the high-risk game of speaking truth to power.  We have blogs, that's about all.

I, too, know how you feel. The nausea and shame I feel when I watch George W. Bush speak in public has become almost unbearable.  Lately I have found it harder than ever to fight the notion that he understands my country better than I do: that America has truly become the small-minded, ignorant place he seems to believe it is, a place that no longer values either democracy, republican government, or the truth.

[T]he  United States of America, as it was historically conceived and developed, is deader than a squashed armadillo...

I'm in the same boat. Without a functioning press and opposition party, I don't know what to do...

I'm really sorry to read this post and the comments, because I've been feeling exactly the same lately. I was hoping it was just a case of the wintertime blues for me and not that everyone who actually cares about our country is becoming exhausted.  [...] Our country is sick, and it seems like there is no cure.

...if we haven't made a dent in this tragi-comic farce of the last five years it seems like we never will ... no matter how much truth we have on our side.

Does anyone actually believe, since [the U.S.] has gone this far already, it can possibly right itself? What kind of a country could even have "elected" him in the first place? "America is dead."

Agreed. But in the death throes it will take everyone down with it. There are no countervailing institutions operating in American society to halt the inexorable fascism. Legitimation crisis? My ass. They don't need no stinking badges.

I agree with every single word in this post [...] You've said exactly what I've been feeling. And I am depressed, resigned. These guys have got a lock, and there's nothing -- not corruption, not blatant lying, not Katrina screwups, not kiling and maiming in Iraq -- that makes a difference. Fascism is on the march. I really feel that. AAGh.

One more "me too." All well and good to hear that the country is with us, we're in the mainstream, 36% approval rating... But what difference does it make? We're still sitting ducks for these ass-clowns; our voices are still drowned out by money interests; we still have no opposition party. Get a Democrat in office in 2009? Which war-supporting, non-filibustering, bankruptcy-bill supporting, couldn't find his spine with both hands, a flashlight and a blinking neon sign Democrat is that going to be? And how do you begin to rebuild all that's been destroyed over the past several years?  Sorry -- I hope the optimists here are right; I really do. Me, I'm curling up with a Garbo movie tonight and dreaming of Sweden.

Most succinct of all:

Oh god.  We're fucked.

These people aren't just having a bad day.  They're expressing a deep-seated and perfectly understandable resignation born of the fact that nothing they do seems to matter to the course of terrible events.

Of course, maybe our efforts are not entirely inefficacious, in that without them things would be (god forbid) even worse.  Even so, given how little positive effect we are having, it is irrational to keep on doing (only) what we're doing.  What we're doing isn't good enough.

We need as a community to come up with a better strategy.

To start (as I've previously discussed here) progressives need to stop (only) describing the symptoms of U.S. decay in however brilliant analytic detail and start talking, plainly and simply, about the disease.  The larger part of the disease is, of course, corporate capitalism, and it explains not only the symptoms but the fact that we have been unable to cure them via the usual treatments.    Prominent liberal bloggers could do some good here, by contextualizing their criticism.

Speaking from experience, it goes some distance towards dealing with political angst to realize that our inefficacy has a comprehensible, relatively straightforward institutional explanation.  And while identifying the inherent failures and dangers of corporate capitalism as the basis for social and economic policy need not imply the embracing of any of the standard alternatives, it wouldn't be such a bad idea if "socialism" reentered the lexicon as an alternative with comparatively positive valence.

That's the easy part, I think.

The hard part will be figuring out how to cure the disease.  In lieu of palace revolution, I'm inclined to suggest radical surgery: we need to cut ourselves off from the Democratic party.  If they haven't risen to the occasion by this time and in response to these pressures, they aren't ever going to do so.  We need a real live opposition party -- why not call it the Progressive Party? -- capable of taking our outrage and anger and turning it into action of the sort that can make a difference. 

I can see the leading lights of the party now...  Steve Gilliard as Prez, Jane Hamsher as Vice-prez, Juan Cole as Secretary of State, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga as Secretary of Defense, Glenn Glenwald as Attorney General, Brad Delong as Secretary of the Treasury, Duncan Black as Secretary of Commerce, Nathan Newman as Secretary of Labor, PZ Meyers as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Jerome a Paris as Secretary of Energy, Bob Whitson as Secretary of the Interior, and (of course) Brian Leiter as Secretary of Education.  Me, I'll settle for a diplomatic post.

Ah.  I feel better already.

How to Respond to Charges of Media Bias (Hellie)

The great reporter Helen Thomas, of roughly 50 years of distinguished service to UPI, one of the very few members of the gaggle with the tenacity, intelligence, and moral compass to confront the slimy McLellan and describe his evasions and lies as such, was subjected to a really obnoxious and abusive line of questioning by one Hugh Hewitt. Phoned up on Hewitt's radio show to discuss Cheney's craven failure to report his hunting accident, Hewitt started asking Thomas whether she owned a gun or supported abortion rights, and speculating that she'd voted for the Dem in each presidential election since 1976; the insinuation being that she exemplified Hewitt's accusation against the "entire White House press corps" of being "biased and liberal", a "liberalism" which consists in failure to like Bush and Cheney -- evidence of effeteness and corruption -- and seeing themselves as arrogant "gods of the universe", who judge but are immune to judgement.

Thomas responded in the old-school way, correctly accusing Hewitt of getting into issues of no bearing of on her or anyone else's ability to report the facts objectively (indeed, adhering to a somewhat romanticized view of her profession, she didn't accuse the gaggle of being too deferential to the dictators and their fascist party).

I thought she was correct here. But to Hewitt's audience, she must have come off as refusing to acknowledge obvious facts, due either to blindness or deliberate dishonesty.

I thought there was a more effective line for her to take: your central claim is that the gaggle is untruthful. You argue that this is somehow due to the corrupting influence of effete tastes (for instance, dislike of Bush). Obviously you have no backup for the causal claim here, so let's test the central claim directly. Can you provide direct proof that the gaggle is untruthful?

The excellent Peter Daou makes a similar point, strongly indicating that no direct proof is likely to appear:

A Challenge to Rightwing Bloggers Who Blame the Media for the Cheney Mess: Prove it. One of the great absurdities of our time is the persistent notion that the traditional media skews left. Reporters buy into it, Democratic strategists and leaders buy into it, and rank and file rightwingers live by it. As I've written previously, the right controls all branches of government, talk radio is dominated by rightwing voices, there's a cable channel devoted to the rightwing perspective (and two others racing to do the same), there's a herd of rightwing pundits spewing anti-left venom across editorial pages, radio, television, the internet, etc., Bush's press conferences are cloying jokefests, and "neutral" journalists echo deep-seated pro-GOP myths.

Despite the glaringly obvious fact that major media narratives favor the right, we get bloggers like this, this, and this attacking the "MSM" for hyping the Cheney hunting scandal. Rather than waste cyber-ink explaining why it's a big deal that the Vice President of the United States shot a man in the face and heart and went to bed without letting the American people know about it, let me share a question I asked of a blogger at Real Clear Politics who questioned my premise about the pro-Bush press:

I know the assertion that [supposedly neutral or liberal] reporters favor rightwing narratives blows your mind; after all, the liberal media fiction is hard-wired into the right's political nervous system. But why should I believe your foregone conclusion that these people are left-leaning? Just because you say it with such conviction? Give me concrete examples of bias, not of negative coverage. (How can there not be negative coverage of the mess in Iraq? Or Katrina? Or the Plame outing? Or the NSA fiasco? Or do you want our media to simply fawn over the government? Is anything less than total pro-Bush propaganda considered media bias?)

This ties in - albeit tangentially - to a recent post by Glenn Greenwald about the Bush-cultism masquerading as conservatism on rightwing blogs. Glenn unmasks the ideological lie at the core of rightwing blogging. Similarly, digging beneath the surface of the anti-media stance of these bloggers reveals a philosophically bankrupt and logically fallacious position. If the definition of media bias is anything critical of the administration, then these bloggers must be advocating for a servile, state-run press. Which, ironically, seems to be where we're heading.

Of course, reporters take some comfort in being attacked from both sides, believing that it somehow justifies their actions and nullifies the complaints.

So here's my challenge to rightwing bloggers who assail the media for liberal bias (and to journalists who think it's all a he-said-she-said pissing match): Back up your claims. With concrete examples of bias. And without the tautological crutch that any story critical of the administration is proof of liberal bias.

I'll back up mine:

++ ISSUE: Cheney shooting incident --- NARRATIVE: Bush and Cheney are infallible --- EXAMPLE:  ABC News covered the Cheney  hunting incident by downplaying the significance of the weapon itself.  ABC  reported that "the vice president accidentally shot prominent Texas lawyer  Harry Whittington with a pellet gun while hunting for quail." Cheney used a shotgun, not  a pellet gun. ABC later altered the story to read, "a shotgun loaded with birdshot." (Which is why we maintain screenshots of all print stories we reference.) This exemplifies a common tendency of the media, namely, to play defense for Bush and his team, downplaying negative news or polls.

++ ISSUE: Cheney shooting incident --- NARRATIVE: Bush strong, Dems weak  --- EXAMPLE: CNN's Bruce Morton used the VP's shooting to repeat the tired GOP spin that Republicans are tougher than Democrats, and specifically tougher than war hero John Kerry. Morton  commented that Bush and Cheney are avid hunters, and contrasted the observation with 2004 Bush campaign talking points by saying Sen. John Kerry "spent time posing with guns" two years ago, and that "voters probably saw more of him pursuing exotic sports, windsurfing and so on." The truth is Kerry has been hunting since the age of 12. As Media Matters points out,  "Morton's jab echoed language Cheney used during the 2004 campaign to attack  Kerry as effete and elitist."

++ ISSUE: Cheney shooting incident --- NARRATIVE: Bush and Cheney are infallible --- EXAMPLE: Jane  Hamsher notes that CBS News ran a provocative news item on Monday,  explaining that "Texas authorities are complaining that the Secret Service  barred them from speaking to Cheney after the incident." For reasons that are  still unexplained, CBS has scrubbed the report from its website without  explanation.

Etc. Daou presents 29 other case studies. After a week, no right-wingers have responded to his challenge.

Who Are the Armstrongs? (Hellie)

And could Cheney have been plotting war during his hunting trip? Details here.

Yet more Abu Ghraib images (Wilson)

For the strong of stomach: the Australian SBS Dateline report and the Salon article publishing new photos and video clips of detainee torture, abuse, and murder at Abu Ghraib.  As ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh (speaking on the Dateline report) reminds us, the overwhelming majority of detainees are in all likelihood innocent (not that their being guilty would justify these atrocities).

The photos published with the Salon article come from a leaked DVD of photographic evidence associated with an internal Army investigation into the abuse.  Evidently the DVD contains 1,325 photographs and 93 video clips of suspected abuse of detainees, 546 photographs of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, 20 images of a soldier with a Swastika drawn between his eyes, 37 images of military working dogs being used in abuse of detainees, and 125 images of "questionable acts".

Based on date stamps, all images were recorded between October 18 and December 30 2003.  In other words: these represent a very small fraction of abuse (presumably most such events weren't preserved for posterity) occuring during a short period of time.

No independent investigation into the abuse has been conducted.

"Specialist" Charles Graner was sentenced to a mere 10 years; Pvt. Lynndie England just 3 years; involved higher-ups, Singh notes, have frequently been promoted.

One of the creepiest scenes in the Dateline report shows Graner being led handcuffed and shackled to a van.  A reporter calls out "Any regrets?"  "No, ma'am", Graner says, shaking his head.

UPDATE: As Juan Cole says: US Constitution RIP.

Codswollop (Wilson)

Whether or not you partake of the succulent weed, this is ridiculous:

MPs have voted by a huge margin to ban smoking from all pubs and private members' clubs in England.

The Commons decided by a margin of 200 to impose a ban on smoking in all enclosed public spaces.

Oh, give me a bloody break.  It's two years now since they imposed this inhuman constraint on meeting places in Ireland:

Despite opposition from publicans, restaurateurs and punters, the authorities have pressed ahead with legislation that will become law on Monday March 29 [2004]. [...]

Those caught smoking illegally will face a fine of £2,000.

Wonderful. To save a few thousand lives -- supposedly -- and if those lives don't like the smoke, why don't they hang out at their local Dairy Queen or the overseas equivalent -- millions of pubgoers have to suffer the ignomy of being "good" and the unwanted burden of being "healthy".  I'm with Jim Moloney, the barman at the Davy Byrnes pub in central Dublin:

"It's codswollop!" he cries. "Completely ludicrous!" he shouts. "These politicians are taking away our rights! They're taking away our Irish culture!"

He wags his finger vigorously at a portrait of James Joyce hanging on the opposite wall. "And he would have had a few vulgar words to say about it too."

You might not have understood those words, but no doubt their intent would have been clear.  Supposedly the smoking ban will take a burden off the public health system, but Jim disagrees:

"If we all stopped smoking," Jim says, leaning forwards conspiratorially so that his black bow tie almost touches the bar, "then the state would have to pay out pensions for another 30 years. How are they going to pay for that?" Jim gazes nostalgically across to the facing wall and shakes his head.

Let's face facts.  We can basically say farewell to good Anglo-Irish writing:

"James Joyce would never have come in here if there was a smoking ban."

If James Joyce had not enjoyed a glass of burgundy, a gorgonzola sandwich and a cigarette in Davy Byrne's, then Ulysses might never have been written. For it was here, 80-odd years ago, that his fictional hero, Leopold Bloom, did just the same.

Yet another sign of the fast-creeping decline of civilization.  I think I need a smoke.

Follow the Money (Hellie)

Who buys your legislators their seats? This can be easily answered by playing Follow the Money. Here's an illustration of how the game is played:

Let's Play: Follow The Money

Earlier, we noted that Sue Kelly raises more campaign cash from PACs than she does from people, and far more than she does from actual constituents here in the 19th Congressional District.  Wouldn't you just love to know what kind of PACs she takes money from, and how she's helped their pet causes?

So would we, so it's time to play, Follow The Money, or, Who's Sue's Daddy?"

Here are the rules, and if we all play nice, we can all be winners:

 

1. Go to the official website of the Federal Elections Commission, and look up Sue's latest campaign finance report.  Look over her list of PAC contributors.

    

2. Pick a PAC, look `em up, and see what you find. 

    

3. When you find one that's really fun (or disturbing) report the results of your search by dropping us an email at take19(at)gmail.com. 

    

4. The best entries simply get the satisfaction that you've done something for your country.

    

5. We all win!

To get you started, let's do one together. (We'll include photos of actual screenshots as we go along. Click on the photos to enlarge).

Let's Play!

First, go to that: FEC website. This is what you'll find:

Fill in the information as shown...2005-2006, Kelly, New York, House, 19, Republican, Incumbent. Then click "send query," and you'll be shown the one-line report that tells you about Sue's net receipts of $893,715 through the end of 2005:

Now, click on "Sue Kelly" at the left side of the report line, to get to her summary statement.

Now you can see that more than half of her receipts were from "Non-Party (e.g. PACs) and other Committees". To see which PACs love Sue, just click on  "Non-Party (e.g. PACs) and other Committees", and see what comes up! 

MY GOODNESS, there are a lot of them. So many to investigate. And  a lot of them seem to have her on an allowance...with checks coming two, three, four times a year! Nice work, if you can get it.

Look at all those banking and credit bureau PACs coughing up the dough. Can anyone spell BANKRUPTCY BILL? So that's the going rate for a "yes" vote on a terrible piece of legislation. Pretty cheap considering how much the bill is costing Hudson Valley families.

But, we digress. Let's take a look at the non-industry PACS. These guys turn out to be money-bundlers who, in effect, raise money from folks and then give it to Sue, so the folks who really gave it don't show up on Sue's reports. Like who, for instance? Let's pick one...um.."Every Republican Is Crucial" (ERICPAC) sounds interesting.

ERICPAC happens to be the creation of Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor, who also happens to be a close associate of...drumroll, please...TOM DELAY. His name just keeps popping up, doesn't it?

Let's give that a click:

Let's click on "Contributions received by this candidates committee."

Whoa...RJ Reynolds and Altria show up...a lot. Tobacco money, huh? Wonder what they want and why would Sue want to hide their names from public eyes? Bet you won't hear a single reference to those contributions in any of her campaign speeches.

Let's hit the back button and then click on the "individuals" who give to ERICPAC.

WOW..lots's of folks. Hundreds of them want to give to Congressman Cantor's "Every Republican is Crucial" PAC.

Now, we note the names, Edwin Buckham, Daniel Gans and Allison Shulman. Let's click those:

Why did we choose these folks? They all are members of a group called the Alexander Strategy Group. Now what the heck is that? Well, let's be good search monkeys and check in with wickopedia and see what they have to say:

Can you read that?

 

The Alexander Strategy Group (ASG), a Republican Party-associated lobbying and political strategy firm with offices in Washington, DC, and Hong Kong, was founded in 1998 by Ed Buckham, Thomas D. DeLay's former Chief of Staff, "with a huge initial contract that DeLay secured from Enron. (The group also paid DeLay's wife a salary for several years.)

There's that pesky TOM DELAY guy again...but let's read on...

 

On January 9, 2006, ASG announced it would be closing shop due to being "fatally damaged by publicity about the ongoing federal investigation into the affairs of" and "its ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former House majority leader Tom DeLay. --emphasis mine "

Well, well, well...now wasn't that fun? So, dive in, look around and report back. We know Sue Kelly isn't working for us, so let's play Follow The Money and discover Who's Sue's Daddy!

The nuking of the U.S. economy (Wilson)

Paul Craig Roberts, conservative economist, has analyzed the Bureau of Labor Statistics's re-benchmarked payroll jobs data from January 2001 through January 2006 (also available here) (hat tip to this Kos diarist). The take-home message: free market capitalism has destroyed the U.S. economy:

Over the past five years the US economy experienced a net job loss in goods producing activities. The entire job growth was in service-providing activities--primarily credit intermediation, health care and social assistance, waiters, waitresses and bartenders, and state and local government.

US manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17% of the manufacturing work force.
The wipeout is across the board. Not a single manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.

The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a super-economy that is "the envy of the world." Communications equipment lost 43% of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of its workforce. The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30%. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25% of its employees. The workforce in motor vehicles and parts declined 12%. Furniture and related products lost 17% of its jobs. Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of the work force. Employment in textile mills declined 43%. Paper and paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs. The work force in plastics and rubber products declined by 15%. Even manufacturers of beverages and tobacco products experienced a 7% shrinkage in jobs.

The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized "new economy" never appeared. The information sector lost 17% of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25%. Even wholesale and retail trade lost jobs. [...A]ccounting and bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%. Computer systems design and related lost 9% of its jobs. Today there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago.

In five years the US economy only created 70,000 jobs in architecture and engineering, many of which are clerical. Little wonder engineering enrollments are shrinking. There are no jobs for graduates. The talk about engineering shortages is absolute ignorance. There are several hundred thousand American engineers who are unemployed and have been for years. No student wants a degree that is nothing but a ticket to a soup line. Many engineers have written to me that they cannot even get Wal-Mart jobs because their education makes them over-qualified.

Offshore outsourcing and offshore production have left the US awash with unemployment among the highly educated. [...]

Unless the BLS is falsifying the data or businesses are reporting the opposite of the facts, the US is experiencing a job depression. Most economists refuse to acknowledge the facts, because they endorsed globalization. It was a win-win situation, they said.

They were wrong.  [...]

The economics profession has failed America.

Of course, it's no great surprise that economists relying on unsound arguments turn out to be very bad predictors.

Cheney shoots lawyer (Hellie)

On a "hunting trip":

"The vice president didn't see him," she continued. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."

How could a man be in the line of fire of a bird?

UPDATE: turns out it was less a hunting trip than a visit to an all-inclusive bird murdering theme resort.

UPDATE: Drat! Turns out my co-blogger Professor Edmundson scooped me by 15 minutes on this one. One snoozes, one loses. At least it's not the first time!

UPDATE: Fellow blogger Ruchira Paul writes in:

Uncle Cheney could have been drunk or just lost his NRA handbook.

You will be interested to know that at some Texas ranches, they hunt
birds and animals (including big tigers and lions) confined within an
enclosed or fenced off area, with no opportunity of escape.   I know
that Cheney has hunted ducks that were let loose within a net
enclosure (like an aviary at the zoo)  limiting their flight. How
brave, how fair and how sportsmanlike! But then we all know that
He-Men Bush and Cheney like their victims weak, poorly armed, easy to
find and at a safe distance.

Here a surgeon describes the treatment of a shotgun blast to the face:

I haven't examined Mr. Whittington, the man the Vice President shot, nor seen much detail on his case. But facial plastic surgery is what I do, and I have seen fairly awful traumas to the area. Both during residency in the US and as a volunteer in Kosovo, it's my judgment that it doesn't get a lot worse than a shotgun discharge to the face - few traumas cause pose a greater challenge to surgeons in my field.

Patients with shotgun injuries to the face need to be intubated and sedated at once. Protection of the airway is paramount because hemorrhaging is virtually certain. The primary concern here is aspiration of the hemorrhaged fluid. A secondary concern is emesis of ingested fluid from the fast bleeders in the area - particularly the superficial temporal artery, the angular artery, or the facial artery.

Once the patient is stabilized, the attending physician will examine, visually and by palpation, from the scalp downwards and outwards. He or she will be looking for bone fracture, nerve damage, asymmetry - that sort of thing. It's not typically possible to assess the sensory or motor functions of the face at this stage because the patient is unconscious - and this is probably why Mr. Whittington is in the ICU.

At this point I'd order radiographs to see how much damage is done, and ideally an MRI except that if they use steel shot in Texas, you can't do that. So a CT is probably indicated - lateral obliques through the orbits especially. The anatomy is complicated and fragile in the area, so you really need to be careful.

Finally, surgical repairs. The surgeon will carefully assess and reduce any jaw or bone fractures, debride any remaining shot, bone fragments, and soft tissue that can't be salvaged and then put any displaced but viable soft tissues back where they're supposed to go. And a 28 gauge round contains, depending on the shot size, somewhere between 200 and 400 individual pellets. For a surgery like that, I'd expect to be in the OR pretty much all day. This is not a 90 minute rhinoplasty.

Assuming the patient survives to this point, a complete facial reconstruction procedure can be undertaken, which, assuming good patient health and no postoperative infections, can take several years. Careful counselling both of the patient and his family is indicated, and the surgeon needs to be very honest about expectations.

How scary is this? (Wilson)

Halliburton has been given a $385 million contract to build immigration "detention centers":

The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that has been criticized for overcharging the Pentagon for its work in Iraq.

What the hell for?  Um, just in case there's some kind of "immigration emergency":

[the] "temporary detention facilities" [...] would be used, the story said, in the event of an "immigration emergency."

Jamie Zuieback, an official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), explained such an emergency like this: "If, for example, there were some sort of upheaval in another country that would cause mass migration, that's the type of situation that the contract would address."

That sounds a tad fuzzy...

To be sure.  What kind of upheaval and "mass migration" are they talking about?  In this article, an unclear source suggests:

[O]utside events have prompted large waves of immigration in the past. Political upheaval and changes in immigration policy in nations such as Haiti, Cuba and Rwanda have caused an influx of immigrants and refugees from those countries at different times.

Oh, I feel so warm and fuzzy: KBR detention centers are just to keep political, economic, and natural disaster refugees safe, warm, and well-fed (OK, maybe not so well-fed) until they can be resettled in the Land O'Poverty.  Only one problem with this justification: after the last large influx of refugees (during the Mariel boatlift), the U.S. responded by clamping down hard on political and other refugees (and that was before 9-11).  As per this article from the American Immigration Law Foundation:

News reports indicate that if a significant number of Cubans were to seek freedom in the United States, the anticipated response from the Bush Administration, dubbed “Operation Distant Shore,” would involve “a dramatic escalation in the number of Coast Guard and other military vessels patrolling the Florida Straits – a veritable floating wall designed to interdict as many migrants as possible at sea.”

OK, feeling less warm and fuzzy now.  BTW, you might not know just how few refugees the U.S. generally targets for admission each year:

Each year, the State Department prepares a Report to Congress on proposed refugee admissions, then the U.S. President consults with Congress and establishes the proposed ceilings for refugee admissions for the fiscal year. For the 2005 fiscal year (i.e. October 1, 2004 - September 30, 2005), the total ceiling is set at 70,000 admissions and is allocated to six geographic regions: Africa (20,000 admissions), East Asia (13,000 admissions), Europe and Central Asia (9,500 admissions), Latin America/Caribbean (5,000 admissions), Near East/South Asia (2,500 admissions) and 20,000 reserve.

A mere 70K -- ludicrous. Anyway, let's get real. The chillier reason for the centers has nothing to do with sheltering and processing immigrants in times of emergency, but rather with the increasing lust for rounding up and incarcerating illegal immigrants:

Additionally, ICE is planning to increase the capacity of its detention facilities around the country, Zuieback said, particularly after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff pledged to end the agency's unofficial "catch-and-release" policy for some illegal immigrants.

Because ICE's detention facilities are frequently full, there is nowhere to hold illegal immigrants who must have a hearing before they can be deported. This includes most immigrants from nations other than Mexico. In the past, those illegal immigrants have been issued an order to appear for their court date, and then simply released into the United States. The vast majority never show up for the hearings.

Big surprise, but honestly.  Why not just look the other way, so "illegals" can go back to working in U.S. sweatshops and fields for no benefits and a few bucks a bushel?  Hey, I want my strawberries!

I wonder what KBR's contract has to do with the recent passing  (December 2005) of HR. 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act?  According to Human Rights Watch:

The legislation undermines basic due process protections, human rights obligations, and principles of fundamental fairness. Instead of a comprehensive approach to immigration reform, H.R. 4437 is an enforcement-only approach that fails to sufficiently protect individuals in need of protection from persecution and torture, the wrongly accused, and thwarts fair and efficient consideration of the particular circumstances of individuals’ cases. 

Of particular concern, the legislation would:

[...]

• Impose mandatory detention even when the individual is not a flight risk or threat to the community.

• Allow for the indefinite detention of non-citizens who cannot be deported.

[...]

Not only is H.R. 4437 unnecessarily punitive, but it fails to deal with a key cause of the problem: the enormous mismatch between certain United States immigration policies and the increasing demands for workers – often undocumented immigrants – to fill low-wage, service sector jobs.

Perhaps the mismatch is explained by the fact that prisons are big business.  Whatever the real reason for the centers, Tom Hennessey is right:

[A] news story about construction of government detention centers should give us all pause.

Considering what took place in Nazi Germany, as well as the shameful incarceration of Japanese-Americans in 1942, no detention camp should be built without the widest possible public scrutiny.

Bottom line: The contract cries out for greater attention. So far, the government's expressed reason for building them is insufficient and ill-defined. And even if the camps do relate to illegal immigration, their purpose could be changed overnight.

Scary indeed, given the criminal thugs in charge these days. And now for the final icing on the corporate cake:

KBR also has faced allegations that, through subcontractors, it hired numerous illegal immigrants to perform rebuilding work in the Gulf Coast region following Hurricane Katrina and paid them subminimum wages.

Maybe the workers can build themselves into the centers, just like Mike Mulligan's steam shovel Mary Anne!

Barbara Comstock (Hellie)

Interesting material on head of Libby's defense fund here and here.

UPDATE: 'interesting' is a bit weak.

Scandal Fatigue (Hellie)

Libby's lawyers report that Cheney gives free rein to Libby to pass around classified info to sell the war, Brownie testifies that the WH lied about when it knew about the NO levee failure, Bush gets caught trying to sneak Social Security privatization into the budget, DeLay gets a post on the House subcommittee overseeing the justice dept, Gonzales testifies that the WH is willing to "listen to" the legislature's "ideas", the CIA admits the WH lied about intel to sell the war, and that there was no postwar planning for a year after the war.

All in one week! The abundance of disaster and/or attendant desensitization is remarked upon editorially by the Times, strategically by Daou, rudely by the Rude Pundit.

Financial Times: Time to soak the rich (Hellie)

In light of recent posts on inequality here, note the following from the Financial Times:

In any case, we can no longer say with as much confidence as before that redistribution will achieve very little. Tony Blair, prime minister, once said that reducing the earnings of football star David Beckham was not a priority. But if Beckham's corporate equivalents now account for a substantial proportion of the national income, the matter looks different.

Does that mean another "soak the rich" campaign? One is indeed likely in the US. Republicans will not be able for ever to divert attention to religious and "moral" issues.

Hm, we'll see.

The Denunciation Game (Hellie)

An especially odious rhetorical tactic I've encountered from the right is the demand that leftists/Democrats denounce, say, Chomsky over some remarks from the late 1970s, or distance themselves from Michael Moore over unspecified remarks, or -- in a recent turn that deeply rankles and offends me -- denounce the co-founder of the SCLC, or President Carter, for alleged rudeness to the dreadful Bush by daring to allude to some of the murderous failures and crimes of his unjust, illegal regime in his majestic presence.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, however, this situation makes no sense, as dozens of right-wing media figures routinely pump out really awful slander/libel and harrassment as part of their job description:

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its annual get-together in Washington this weekend. This was not just some random, fringe event. Speakers included Vice President Dick Cheney, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, 2008 presidential hopeful Sen. George Allen, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Newt Gingrich. This event was comprised of the heart and soul of the Republican Party.

The deranged hate-monger Ann Coulter was also a featured speaker, despite -- or because of --her history of repeatedly urging the murder of her domestic political opponents and government officials by methods ranging from terrorist attacks to poisoning to skull-bashing with baseball bats. None of those violence-advocating comments ever prevent the most prominent Republican groups from inviting her to speak, nor do they prevent the most prominent Republican politicians from appearing next to her without ever condemning her remarks.

Coulter’s appearance at the event was not, of course, a surprise; to the contrary, it was touted as an attraction beforehand by the event organizers. The remarks she made at the CPAC event have now been well-documented, and include unsurprising gems such as: ""I think our motto should be post-9-11, 'raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences’" and "If we find out someone [referring to a terrorist] is going to attack the Supreme Court next week, can't we tell Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalito?"

According to one of her blogging fans in attendance, 5,000 "conservatives" reverently sat there and listened to her and did nothing to indicate disapproval. To the contrary, her urging of violence against "ragheads" specifically "prompted a boisterous ovation." RightWingNutHouse reports that her speech was "well received by the audience."

In addition to Coulter’s tawdry hate-mongering, the conference was also graced with such dignified and honorable sentiments as these:

* Bumper stickers declaring that "Happiness is Hillary's face on a milk carton";

* T-shirts proclaiming "Straight Pride";

* Appearances by members of "Exodus International," encouraging gay people to become "ex-gays."

There is an endless ritual routinely spawned in right-wing media crevices which then inevitably seeps into the establishment media, whereby Democrats are confronted with allegedly outrageous statements made by "fringe extremist" liberals, and demands are then made that every Democrat roll onto their backs, expose their bellies, and denounce those statements. To prove that they are decent human beings fit for respectable company and are part of the "mainstream," Democrats are frequently forced to opine on what are depicted as the extremist opinions expressed by Harry Belafonte, Michael Moore, Moveon.org, etc. etc.

For that reason, every politician attending that CPAC event – Dick Cheney, Ken Mehlman, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist, every one of them – should be asked repeatedly wherever they go -- until they answer -- why they appeared at an event with Ann Coulter as she urged violence on "ragheads," called for terrorist attacks (again) on Supreme Court Justices, and named as her biggest moral dilemma whether she should assassinate Bill Clinton.

Tim Russert, for some oh-so-indiscernible reason, demanded that Barak Obama opine about the recent anti-Bush comments of Harry Belafonte while visiting Venezuela -- a far less important figure than the best-selling Coulter in a far less important venue than the CPAC event. Shouldn’t Russert ask every GOP guest, beginning this Sunday with Pat Roberts, whether they approve of Coulter’s remarks? You can e-mail Russert here and demand that he do so.

And the same goes for every right-wing blogger who drooled with glee and happiness at being able to participate in this event, beginning with Professor Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, who -- despite being one of the conference’s keynote speakers (so that he could hawk his upcoming book) -- has said nothing about Coulter’s speech other than to refer to her comments neutrally -- perhaps even admiringly -- as "explosive."

We ought to demand statements from each and every one of the self-proclaimed responsive, accountable, self-correcting bloggers who constantly condemn what they claim is "extremism" among Democrats. Here are just a few of the usually opinionated attackers of "fringe views" who, for some reason, we haven’t heard from at all with regard to their views of Coulter’s remarks:

* Glenn Reynolds ([email protected])

* Kathryn Jean Lopez ([email protected])

* Jonah Goldberg ([email protected])

* John Hinderaker ([email protected]) * Michelle Malkin ([email protected])

* Hugh Hewitt ([email protected])

Many people, I think, would be interested in their answers to these questions:

Do you approve of Coulter’s advocacy of violence against the "ragheads"?

Should her frequently expressed hopes for the death of Supreme Court Justices prevent any decent Republicans from appearing with her at events?

Are her comments within the range of what is acceptable at a conservative event?

In light of her prior comments urging violence against her political opponents and other well-documented hate-mongering, should she have been invited to speak by the CPAC at all?

Why haven’t you condemned her remarks in the past, or her remarks this weekend?

There are scores of participants in the conservative blogosphere defending her comments. It is possible to be a decent and good American while defending Coulter's speech? Should Republican politicians who appeared along with her at this event denounce her and her comments?

Republicans, aided by their mindless allies in the media, have been getting away with this nakedly hypocritical game for years. They focus extraordinary and patently excessive media attention on a stray comment here and then from Michael Moore or Harry Belafonte, and then exploit those comments over and over to suggest that they are representative of all Democrats and that all Democrats have the obligation to distance themselves forever from these figures.

All the while, they embrace and work in tandem with hate-spewing extremists from Pat Robertson to Ann Coulter, and are never held accountable for their views, are never asked to denounce them, and continue to appear side-by-side with them. It is so past time for that double standard to end. Republicans have spent the last five years courting the most extreme and radical hate precincts in our country while being allowed to present a respectable face to the rest of the country, while the media ignores their alliances with this extremism.

Ann Coulter is just one example, but it’s good to begin somewhere. Almost every leading Republican light beginning with the Vice President on downwards participated in this event. Each and every one of them should be asked about Coulter’s remarks and be forced to denounce them categorically and vow not to appear with her again.

Those who want to play the denunciation game have a fruitful source of information at the Media Matters media personalities site.

Solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish (Hellie)

A familiar story from psychologists tells us that right-wingers are (a) likely to accept inequality and (b) authoritarian. Recently, some sociologists have teased apart these two features: two independent and highly predictive dimensions of political personality are a scale measuring degree of concern about fulfillment/survival (with acceptance of inequality reflecting survival-orientation), and a scale measuring degree of authoritarianism/individualism. On the familiar story, right-wingers are <survivalist, authoritarian>, left-wingers are <fulfillmentist, individualist>.

Strangely (and worryingly) enough, a growing quadrant in the US is oriented toward <survivalism, individualism>:

 

Citation

Where Democracy Corps found voters unable to hear economic appeals through the noise of cultural ones, Environics’ research suggested an even more profound interrelationship between materialist concerns and a community’s broader beliefs. They found economic changes driving changes in social values, and those, in turn, driving political preferences. Using data from Environics’ in-home consumer survey in the United States, Nordhaus and Shellenberger were able to tease apart changes in the thinking of voters since 1992 on 117 different “social values trends.” These values, such as “time stress,” “joy of consumption,” and “acceptance of violence,” are not what people normally think of as “values” -- abortion, gay marriage, or other hot-button social issues. Nordhaus and Shellenberger were looking at something more fine-tuned: the attitudes, biases, and normative beliefs that undergird people’s stances toward politics, life, and policy. They were, in short, trying to elucidate the measurable components of worldviews.

“None of the polling I was looking at really had much ability to explain what was happening in the country socially and politically,” says Nordhaus, the more voluble of the pair, with close-cropped sandy brown hair and slick rectangular glasses framed by hip-for-D.C. charcoal plastic. The data the corporate world was using were “vastly more sophisticated than the methods I was using as a pollster, which were, respectively, quite crude.”

Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house” increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that “men are naturally superior to women” increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that “violence is a normal part of life” -- and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” -- a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”

Over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant.

Any reader remotely familiar with American popular culture will immediately recognize the truth of this analysis. Ariel Levy recently grappled with one aspect of it in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, writing about a hypersexualized culture that encourages its young women to be Girls Gone Wild and its young men to be piggish voyeurs. She describes a new anti-feminist vision of “liberation” that eschews both traditional constraints and any concern for gender equality. “Despite the rising power of Evangelical Christianity and the political right in the United States, this trend has only grown more extreme and more pervasive,” notes Levy. Indeed, the coarse, brawny, self-centered new philosophy could take as its exemplar television personality Bill O’Reilly, a man who, it was alleged in a sexual harassment lawsuit, is as interpersonally crude as he is politically rough and bullying. Americans, writes Environics founder Michael Adams in his 2005 book American Backlash: The Untold Story of Social Change in the United States, increasingly reject traditionalism and progressivism alike.

“While American politics becomes increasingly committed to a brand of conservatism that favors traditionalism, religiosity, and authority,” Adams writes, “the culture at large [is] becoming ever more attached to hedonism, thrill-seeking, and a ruthless, Darwinist understanding of human competition.” This behavior is particularly prevalent among the vast segment of American society that is not politically or civically engaged, and which usually fails to even vote. This has created what must be understood at the electoral level as a politics of backlash on the part of both Republican and Democratic voters: Voters of both parties, Environics data show, have developed an increasingly moralistic politics as a reaction to the new cultural order.

Americans seem to see themselves as in a Hobbesian state of nature. That's frightening if true, of course, because everyone knows what kind of regime people in that condition go in for.

The rich get richer (Wilson)

...and are getting richer faster:

New government data indicate that the concentration of corporate wealth among the highest-income Americans grew significantly in 2003, as a trend that began in 1991 accelerated in the first year that President Bush and Congress cut taxes on capital.

In 2003 the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth, up from 53.4 percent the year before, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the latest income tax data. The top group's share of corporate wealth has grown by half since 1991, when it was 38.7 percent.

In 2003, incomes in the top 1 percent of households ranged from $237,000 to several billion dollars.

For every group below the top 1 percent, shares of corporate wealth have declined since 1991. These declines ranged from 12.7 percent for those on the 96th to 99th rungs on the income ladder to 57 percent for the poorest fifth of Americans, who made less than $16,300 and together owned 0.6 percent of corporate wealth in 2003, down from 1.4 percent in 1991.

Given that this article appears in the NYT, we are not surprised to see even David Cay Johnston (author of Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else) devoting (under what sort of pressure, one wonders?) the requisite bulk of the article to a crazed capitalist and an administration shill.  Hence:

The analysis did not measure wealth directly. It looked at taxes on capital gains, dividends, interest and rents. Income from securities owned by retirement plans and endowments was excluded, as were gains from noncorporate assets such as personal residences.

This technique for measuring wealth has long been used in standard economic studies, though critics have challenged that tradition.

Among them is Stephen J. Entin, president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation in Washington, which favors eliminating most taxes on capital and teaches that an unintended consequence of the corporate income tax is depressed wage rates. Mr. Entin said the report's approach was so flawed that the data were useless.

Was it you, Johnston, who used the word "teaches"---a verb whose default reading is factive (it's hard to teach something false, now, isn't it?)---or did your editor just slide that on in?  In either case you here perpetuate, and insinuate the truth of, the right-wing trope that the present depressed (indeed, falling) wage rates (including minimum wage rates) are due to burdensome corporate taxes.  You know this trope is false, for thanks to off-shore tax sheltering and expansive corporate tax breaks, profitable U.S. corporations have been paying little, no and even negative federal corporate income tax:

Eighty-two of the [most profitable] 275 companies, almost a third of the total, paid zero or less in federal income taxes in at least one year from 2001 to 2003. Many of them enjoyed multiple no-tax years. In the years they paid no income tax, these companies earned $102 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But instead of paying $35.6 billion in income taxes as the statutory 35 percent corporate tax rate seems to require, these companies generated so many excess tax breaks that they received outright tax rebate checks from the U.S. Treasury, totaling $12.6 billion. These companies’ “negative tax rates” meant that they made more after taxes than before taxes in those no-tax years.

[...]

Over the 2001-03 period, the 275 companies in the survey earned almost $1.1 trillion in pretax profits in the United States. Had all of those profits been reported to the IRS and taxed at the statutory 35 percent corporate tax rate, the 275 companies would have paid $370 billion in income taxes over the three years. But instead, the companies reported only about half of their profits — $557 billion — to the IRS. Over the three years, the effective tax rate on the companies as a group was only about half the ostensibly required 35 percent rate.

Similarly for state corporate income taxes:

A new analysis of the state corporate income taxes paid by 252 of America’s largest and most profitable corporations finds that by 2003, these companies on average failed to include two-thirds of their actual U.S. pretax profits on their state tax returns.

[...]

By 2003, these 252 companies had slashed their state income tax payments to an average of only 2.3 percent of their U.S. profits. Since the average statutory state corporate tax rate is about 6.8 percent (weighted by gross state product), that means that in 2003, two-thirds of their profits escaped state taxes entirely.

A shocking 71 of the 252 companies managed to pay no state income tax at all in at least one year from 2001 through 2003—despite telling their shareholders they made $86 billion in pretax U.S. profits in those no-tax years. Twenty-five of these companies enjoyed multiple no-tax years.

As further evidence against what Entin and his fellow capitalist crazies "teach", the decrease in corporate taxes has been accompanied by a massive increase in profits:

[C]orporate income taxes in fiscal 2002 and 2003 fell to their lowest sustained share of the economy since World War II. (Only a single year during the early Reagan administration was lower.) From 2001 to 2003, the Commerce Department reports that pretax corporate profits grew by 26 percent. But over that same period, corporate income tax payments to the federal government fell by 21 percent.

By some incomprehensible failure of the benevolent hand of the market, these non-taxed massive profits have failed to translate into wage increases.  But no need to let such facts sully the steady flow of disinformation through the river Times.

Anyway, to return to the corporate wealth among top income-earners study.  Why does Entin think the study is so flawed as to be "useless"?

[Entin] said reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains may have prompted wealthy investors to sell profitable investments. That would show up in tax data as increased wealth that year, even though the increase may have built up over decades.

Suppose that some of the apparent acceleration in wealth inequality can be explained by this factor.  Would that render the study "useless"?  God forbid that Johnston figure this out (or ask Isaac Shapiro of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) and tell us.  Anyway, suppose that the increase in wealth occurred over some years.  Are we supposed to feel better if the corporate wealthy are not nouveau riche?

And now let's hear from the White House:

The White House said it did not believe that the 2003 tax cuts had much influence on wealth shares. It also said that since wealth is transitory for many people, a more important issue is how incomes and wealth are influenced by the quality of education.

"We want to lift all incomes and wealth," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman. "We are starting to see that the income gap is largely an education gap."

"The president thinks we need to close the income gap, and he has talked about ways in which we can do that," especially through education, Mr. Duffy said.

Is it at all plausible that the 2003 tax cuts did not have much influence on income or wealth shares? Well, no, as Johnston himself earlier told us (check out the graphic on the LHS: The Wealthiest Benefit More from Tax Cuts).  Evidently these facts are now non grata.

How about the claim that the present disparities are just a matter of "quality of education"?  That's ludicrous.  What differential in quality of education is supposed to explain the massive discrepancy between wealth of the top 1% of income-earners and everyone else?  Did the top 1% all go to Harvard?  Of course not.

The rich get richer, and the reporters get shut up.  No doubt there's a connection.

Bush Gang appoints 24 year old henchmen as overlords of science (Hellie)

The new overlords of science issue orders to scientists about what they can assert, and threaten "dire consequences" against the disobedient:

A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.

"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff."

The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency's 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.
[...]
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."
[...]
Mr. Wild declined to be interviewed; Mr. Deutsch did not respond to e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.