Sick of Bush

I feel that I have to ask this question periodically because it really isn't clear what the answer is. Here is an organization that has a secret multi-billion dollar annual budget that seems to be largely unaccountable. No one really knows what they are up to, including the President - who, by his own admission, received faulty intelligence prior to the invasion of Iraq. They are stiffing Congress on requirements to report, they operate on a 'need to know' basis so even people in the agency only know a small part of the picture. The head of the agency is a political appointee that may be as transitory as Porter Goss, the incompetent former Congressman who resigned rather than face the music for his involvement with other corrupt Congressmen involved in Department of Defense bribery and contract scandals.

The CIA, supposidly an intelligence gathering and analysis agency, has been consistently wrong about the big picture for half a century. They overestimated the Soviet threat, underestimated the potential for blowback from Islamic militants, focused on fantom threats from 'Communists' in Central and South America while ignoring very real threats to our national security posed by allied intelligence agencies such as Pakistan's ISI which nutured the Taliban (with CIA complicity).

Rather than focus on intelligence gathering and analysis, the CIA has put its major efforts into covert action. Consider, in a 'Democracy' we have an agency of the government engaged in actions that are illegal, unethical, unknown to the public at large and possibly to their elected representatives (including the President). The decision to engage in these actions is based on what? Who sets the policy that guides the secrect actions that result in murder, kidnapping, torture, disruption of economies, elections, and governments? All activities we know the CIA has engaged in over its 50 year history.

Who does the CIA work for? Not me. You? Why do we put up with this? Someone (or something) more powerful than the Congress, the President, or the Courts, must be getting its money's worth. So, who is really in charge here?

This is a question so fundamental and frightening you will NEVER hear it asked in the main stream media.

SOB gets up in the moring and turns on CNN or MSNBC only to see the scenes of carnage in Lebanon and Israel presented as sob stories with no meaningful political context. Why this is happening - and even WHAT exactly is happening - is very difficult to discern from the montage of violence and dispair pasted together for each news segment. In an effort to present a coherent picture of what is happening there and what it might mean to us, a search for insightful commentary turned up this execellent analysis by Richard Heinberg, author of numerous books and articles about our emerging energy crisis. Because it is one of the few pieces of analysis I have seen that makes sense of this situation I will quote from The Engergy Bulletin at length. It is well worth the read:

At the fifth annual conference of ASPO (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil), held in July in Pisa, Italy, there were many excellent presentations, one of which I will report on at some length below. But the timing of the conference proved ominous. During two weeks of travel in Italy I had only occasional access to the Internet or to other news sources, and heard only sporadic reports on the unfolding crisis in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon. Back home, I quickly caught up on the events.The situation clearly requires comment, as it has enormous implications both for the world as a whole and for the small but growing community of people involved in preparations for Peak Oil. Mainstream reporting seems to miss much of the context of events and, when discussing the Middle East, the geopolitical struggle for control of energy resources nearly always forms much of that context.Israel / Palestine / Hezbollah / LebanonIt seems useful to start by recounting a timeline of the crisis, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. Where does one start? What incidents should be mentioned or not mentioned? The following is my best effort, but may strike some as incomplete or skewed.In elections held last year, the Palestinian people voted in a Hamas government, which came to power in January. Israel and the US responded by refusing to recognize the new government’s legitimacy; since then, there has been a steady escalation of tensions between Israel and the Palestinian authority. On June 24 Israeli soldiers kidnapped a Palestinian doctor and his brother in Gaza and removed them to some unspecified detention facility. This would not be a particularly noteworthy event, except for the fact that on the following day militants in Gaza—perhaps in retaliation—kidnapped an Israeli soldier.Israel responded with dramatically intensified attacks on Gaza.Then, on July 12, Hezbollah—a political and military Shia Muslim organization based in Lebanon—captured two Israeli soldiers and killed six others. According to the official Israeli version of the story, this occurred during a cross-border raid by Hezbollah into northern Israel. However, early press accounts said that Israel had sent a commando force into southern Lebanon; these commandoes, operating near the village of Aitaa al-Chaab inside Lebanon’s southern territory, were then allegedly engaged by Hezbollah fighters, who struck an Israeli tank. In either case, over the next days and weeks Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, killing dozens and wounding many more, while Israel bombed southern Lebanon, using (according to some reports) chemical weapons and cluster bombs, killing hundreds and destroying roads, bridges, power stations, and other civilian infrastructure.US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice traveled to Lebanon on July 23, but not to broker a ceasefire; instead she called a ceasefire “premature.” In Washington she had said that Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire; en route to Beirut she honed the message: while there was an “urgent” need for peace, conditions had to be right. In Beirut Rice explained that those “right” conditions consisted essentially of the satisfaction of Israel’s goals in the conflict; she also called for the creation of “a new Middle East”—a phrase that can inspire little hope or comfort in the inhabitants of the region, given what the US has accomplished in Iraq during the past three years. While no one would say so, it was obvious to nearly everyone that the US was refusing to call for a ceasefire to give Israel time to conclude its operations.On July 26, Israel bombed a UN observer post in Lebanon, killing four. Then, on July 30, Israeli bombs killed 54 civilians (mostly women and children) in Qana, raising such international outrage that Israel felt compelled to suspended most of its bombing campaign for 48 hours.As of this writing, Rice is proposing a ceasefire to be implemented on condition of the banning of arms sales to Hezbollah, the moving of the Lebanese army to the southern region, and the creation of an international force as a backup. There is no mention, in this proposal for a “lasting” peace, of an Israeli pullback from Gaza or the release of hundreds of Lebanese prisoners. Meanwhile, Israel has commenced a large-scale ground offensive that seems likely to continue for at least a couple of weeks.This is more or less what we know—given the differences in the versions being rehearsed by news outlets and government officials. But there is much that is even less clear: Why is this happening now? What are the motives of Israel, Hezbollah, and the US? And in what direction are the events headed? Hezbollah’s initial motive seems principally to have been to gain a couple of Israeli hostages to use as bargaining chips in exchange for Lebanese, Palestinian, and Hezbollah prisoners held in Israel. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hussein Nasrallah, made it perfectly clear months prior to the commencement of the current hostilities that this was the plan. Secondarily, Hezbollah wishes to support the embattled Palestinians in Gaza. There are those who have suggested that Hezbollah was acting at the behest of Iran in order to deflect international attention from that nation’s nuclear research program (more on that below), but this suggestion seems far-fetched.It would be a mistake to probe only Hezbollah’s motives in the conflict while assuming (as most American politicians and news outlets do) that Israel is merely responding self-defensively to a situation imposed upon it. First, there is the legitimate question as to whether Israel provoked the conflict through its own cross-border incursion; then there is an article published in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 21 (“Israel Set War Plan More than a Year Ago,” by Matthew Kalman), detailing how Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon was in fact planned months in advance, merely requiring a proximate trigger. If this is the case, then it is Israel’s motives that we should probe first and foremost. According to leftist international affairs commentator Pepe Escobar, in “The Spirit of Resistance” (Asia Times, July 26, www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HG26Ak02.html),
As far as Lebanon is concerned, Israel wants nothing less than a permanent buffer zone on its northern flank. And if Lebanon turns into an Iraq, even better—although the Lebanese have learned the hard way about sectarianism and won’t “Iraqify” their own country. Beirut will be rebuilt—again, and again the Hariri clan (with its dodgy deals with the US and the Saudis) will plunge Lebanon in further debt purgatory with regard to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as the clan did in the previous reconstruction process. There’s also the all-important matter of the waters of the Litani River in southern Lebanon. Israel might as well prepare the terrain now for the eventual annexation of the Litani. Beyond Lebanon, Israel is mostly interested also in Syria. The motive: the all-important pipeline route from Kirkuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan, to Haifa. Enter Israel as a major player in Pipelineistan. So Israel wants to grab water (and territory) from Palestine, water (and territory) from Lebanon, and oil from Iraq. This all has to do with the inevitable—the 21st-century energy wars. While the US is not a direct participant in the conflict, its own aims cannot be ignored. These, according to Escobar, include “cutting off Hezbollah from Lebanese society,” which would in turn “lead to a vulnerable Syria extricating itself from a close relationship with Iran.” In the short term, the United States would like Israel to wipe out Hezbollah, allow the Lebanese government to send its troops to the south of the country, ensure the safety of northern Israel, cut Syria’s influence down to size, and apply greater pressure on Hezbollah-supporting Iran. In the longer term, Washington apparently wants to redraw the political and ideological map of the Middle East in ways set forth in various neoconservative planning documents, regardless of the cost to locals.Currently, between Israel and Hezbollah, it is unclear whose goals are being accomplished more fully—although on balance it would seem that Hezbollah has had the upper hand so far (this view appears to hold across the international political spectrum). Israel’s devastating attacks seem not to have turned Lebanese society against the militant organization; moreover, Hezbollah’s Viet Cong-style guerilla campaign appears to be succeeding, as merely to survive the sustained Israeli atttack can be counted a victory. As Israel’s ground assault continues, that assessment could change.But what are the longer-term implications? Where is all of this headed? It may be impossible to assess the situation merely by reference to the current combatants; we must take into account the other trends in the region and how this conflict may play into them.Iran: Will the US Attack Before November?At the ASPO conference a riveting presentation was delivered by Terence Ward, a writer (Searching for Hassan) who grew up in Iran and is currently a cross-cultural consultant for businesses, foundations, and governments in the Islamic World and the West. Ward believes that a US bombing attack on Tehran is nearly inevitable (a view that I put forward in MuseLetter #155, March 2005, “Onward to Iran”), and that it will have devastating consequences for the region and for the world.He began by reminding the audience that there is no clear proof of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, and that what the US and Israel have pointed to as evidence falls short of what would be needed to publicly justify pre-emptive military action. The central question hanging over the proposals and counter-proposals involving the US, Iran, the UN Security Council, and other interested parties including Russia and China, is this: What if both the US and Iranian presidents seek confrontation and war?Sure enough, on August 1 the US was able to obtain a UN Security Council resolution giving Iran 30 days to end its uranium enrichment program (otherwise permitted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty)—which it seems unlikely to do. Events appear to have achieved a relentless, irrational momentum in a direction all too reminiscent of those in the weeks leading up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.Why would the US administration want confrontation with Iran? Perhaps that country represents an essential next step, following “regime change” in Iraq, in the project of remaking the Middle East. From a geopolitical point of view, Iran is located at the juncture of the Middle East and Central Asia. Not only are its own reserves of oil and gas considerable, but it controls access to the Persian Gulf. Iran is thus crucial to oil and gas transshipment routes to Europe, Japan, and the rest of the world.Neoconservatives appear to believe that, as soon as the bombing commences, Iranians will rise up en masse to overthrow their humiliated rulers—just as they believed that the Iraqi people would welcome an American effort to completely reshape their country’s economy and political system following the invasion.Ward speculates that Mr. Bush may bomb before the November elections in order to preserve his Republican majority in Congress. However, the US military is already under enormous strain, and would be unable to deal with likely chain reactions following an air attack; and the likely response of the American people is difficult to gauge.Why might the Iranian leaders want confrontation? Ward made the important point that the current Tehran regime is even less popular domestically than is its US counterpart among Americans. This is shown in the remarkable statistic that, according to a report by the Islamic Republic’s Ministry of Culture and Guidance, less than two percent of the population attends Friday prayers regularly. Ahmadinejad, whose support comes almost entirely from the dwindling ranks of religious fundamentalists, is in power only because his opponent in the most recent election rendered himself utterly odious through blatant corruption.Iranian hard-liners believe the US bombing will enrage and unite their people. Lacking a strong popular base, the Tehran regime has seized upon “nuclear nationalism” as a way of gaining legitimacy with the masses—just as Bush and company seized upon the issue of national security following 9/11. Ahmadinejad and his cohorts evidently believe that, in the event of an American attack, the Iranian people will rally behind their government, thus injecting new life into the Islamic revolution. In confronting the US and Israel, the hard-liners also expect to be propelled to the forefront of the radical Muslim world.Iranian exiles, who number roughly two million, generally loathe the current regime and look forward to its collapse, yet fear a conflict with the US, according to Ward. They say the bombing will not only leave the country in ruins, but will play into the hands of the hard-liners.In discussing the likely scope of the air campaign, Ward foresees a bombing lasting two weeks, targeting 1,000 sites including sea ports, missile defense systems, military bases, airports, industries, and 20 nuclear facilities.Iran’s response is not hard to guess. The nation has hundreds of undeclared dock and port facilities along its Persian Gulf coast. The Iranian Navy recently conducted exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, in which a thousand small Iranian boats simulated attacks on American ships. The Strait is the world’s only access point for millions of barrels per day of OPEC oil. The passage of tankers through this narrow waterway would almost certainly be interrupted for days, weeks, and perhaps months if hostilities erupted.An attack on Tehran would also unleash an enormous backlash against the US in Shia areas of Iraq, possibly making the American presence in that country untenable. The Iranians’ capabilities in this regard have not been lost on US military leaders. According to Ward, from American military leaders’ perspective this is a mission from hell. The Pentagon brass are uncertain what targets to attack, because American and European intelligence agencies have found no specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities. Thus it would be virtually impossible to gain confirmation of the effectiveness of air strikes in eliminating Iran’s nuclear program. Recently, General Pace, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apparently forced the White House to agree not to use nuclear weapons in its planned bombing campaign. This rebellion by the military has infuriated the White House. Ward also provided a helpful perspective on the Shia-Sunni divide in Middle East. He noted that the bulk of oil reserves on the planet lie in Shia territory:
The Shia of Saudi Arabia would love to have the same control over their oil revenues as their Shia brothers in Iraq. Long oppressed by the Sunni Wahhabi rulers, these Shia go on pilgrimage to Iran and will react in subtle and overt ways if Iran is attacked. Bahrain is over 95% Shia and has experienced unrest before along the Shia/Sunni divide. Dubai is a large center of Persian-speakers and Iranian influence. Kuwait is also 30% Shia. In Aramco and KOC, the Shia vastly represent the local skilled labor force. An incident like the attempt on the Abqaiq collection stations by al-Qaeda operatives is not out of the question. Ward pointed out that the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies speak openly of a radical “Shia crescent” across the Middle East, and that both ruling families would support a US strike against Iran. The Shia-dominated government of Iraq strikes fear in the hearts of Saudi leaders because they know it emboldens Shias in the Saudi oil-rich Eastern Province of al-Hassa. It is the emergence of Iran as a regional power that is their principal concern, not Israel.Southern Lebanon is Shia majority, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is a member of the Alawite Shia sect. The alliance between Hezbollah and the Syrian regime is strong, and Iran has provided monetary and military assistance to Hezbollah for decades. Thus the current conflict in southern Lebanon carries a deep resonance across the region. Ward also notes:
Many Sunnis view the US and Shia cooperation in Iraq as a conspiracy against them—a “Wahhabi containment policy.” The profound conviction among much of the Arab world today, including the Saudi royal family, is that the U.S. plans to do the same to Saudi Arabia that they have engineered in Iraq. Like Iraq, the theory goes, Saudi Arabia would be divided into three parts. The moderate Hashemites of Jordan would regain their historic control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; autonomous Saudi Shia would control the oil-laden Eastern Province; and the Wahhabis would be left baking in the sands of the Nejad Desert. Thus the bombing of Iran could trigger wider chaos in the region, provoking not only temporary oil shortages and a global recession, but a wholesale reconfiguration of the Middle East in ways difficult to foresee.Ward offered this helpful insider’s view of Iranian politics:
Iran’s clerical regime includes three pragmatic factional power blocs willing to engage in an opening to the USA: Mehdi Karroubi, Mostapha Moin, and Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Leader of the unelected Guardian Council. They all continue to openly criticize the President, who is increasingly viewed as a loose cannon. His Messianic claims have proved more controversial in Iran itself than in the West. Among the President’s critics, the “dealmaker” Rafsanjani may be a significant figure, for he represents the business class and the unelected clerics. These three factions, in contrast to Ahmedinejad, do not thrive on a siege mentality or on provoking a clash with the West. When hostilities eventually ceased, negotiations between the US and Iran would necessarily ensue. Why not pursue them now and bypass the intervening catastrophe?Ward discussed a recent Trilateral Commission Report—Is There a Plan B?—prepared for the plenary meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Tokyo, which recommended US-Iran negotiations with the goal of creating a Regional Middle East Nuclear Council, which would engage all countries with nuclear weaponry: The United States, Russia, Israel, Iran, China, India, Pakistan, Japan, the UK and France. IAEA inspections would be accelerated, with open, transparent, unrestricted access in all countries. Israel would be provided with a comprehensive security package, and Iran would be offered explicit US security guarantees. Meanwhile the Middle East would be offered a modern Marshall Plan to provide Palestine, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, Egypt and Algeria access to the WTO and World Bank funding. A regional Middle East Water Council would deal with the region’s most valuable resource. Potential members would include Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. Finally, a Middle East Energy Council would deal with the region’s other valuable resources—oil and gas. Regional pipelines, oil security, technology-sharing, and reservoir depletion and monitoring would all be discussed. Such a council would include Saudia Arabia, the United Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. This plan has the potential to avert the looming conflict, but it is handicapped by conventional Western notions about the benefits of association with the World Bank and WTO.Ward’s presentation was remarkable for its depiction of Bush and Ahmadinejad as two sides of the same coin. Both need external conflict to maintain domestic legitimacy, and both are right-wing hard-liners supported by religious fundamentalists; they are also unpopular at home and habitually rely on bravado to boost their image.There are those who maintain that a US attack on Iran is unlikely because the negative consequences for America would be severe and the benefits few or nonexistent. I recently made the acquaintance of an Air Force officer with a high-level security clearance who receives daily classified briefings; while being careful not to divulge secret information, he insisted that no bombing campaign is being seriously contemplated. I can only hope he’s right.Iraq: This Is What Collapse Looks LikeThe war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the growing hostilities between the US and Iran are of course unfolding in the context of the failed US occupation of Iraq. There, ethnic conflicts are deepening, a de facto civil war rages, and a partition of the country seems likely if not inevitable. Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was recently forced to issue a fatwa denouncing the Israeli assault on southern Lebanon. Even the US-supported Iraqi president had to make statements critical of Israel while in Washington, embarrassing his official hosts. But any other attitude would have been unacceptable to his constituents. So far, the only thing to unite Baghdad’s parliament—consisting of Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds—is condemnation of Israel and the call for a ceasefire.Fiery nationalist Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose rising influence now rivals that of Sistani, said at a recent Friday sermon in Kufa, “I will continue defending my Shi’ite and Sunni brothers, and I tell them that if we unite, we will defeat Israel without the use of weapons.” Were Muqtada’s Mehdi Army to join with the few thousand Sunni Arab guerrillas currently bedeviling US troops, Iraq would quickly become untenable for the Americans. Mr. Bush has repeatedly announced a “turning point” in the ongoing war—at the end of the invasion, with the capture of Saddam Hussein, with elections, with the formation of a government, and with the killing of reputed al Qaida leader al-Zarqawi. Now he has ordered an additional 5,000 troops to Baghdad to attempt to control the rapidly deteriorating situation there. This is not the sort of turning point he likes talking about.A New Oil Regime in the Middle East?There is considerable danger that the smoke and fire from these three geographic flashpoints—Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon—could converge in a larger regional conflagration. In light of all this potential for apocalyptic mayhem, a discussion of the oil business may seem almost frivolous. But it is important to remember that, historically, the drawing of borders in the Middle East; the establishment of British, French, and later US-backed puppet governments in these faux nations; and the rise of a radical Islamic fundamentalist movement to challenge the Western-backed regimes, have all been fueled by the wealth produced by oil, and by the need for oil on the part of importing countries.For decades there was a petroleum status quo of sorts in the Middle East: the capacity for production exceeded demand, and OPEC worked to restrain exports in order to keep prices from collapsing; meanwhile big producers like Saudi Arabia served as the world’s petroleum bankers, maintaining the solvency of the system. On only one occasion—the embargo of 1973-74—did the swing producers withhold needed oil flows for political reasons, or cause prices to reach levels unacceptable to consumers (the other major post-1970 oil shocks, due to wars or revolutions, were beyond OPEC’s control). Now the status quo is crumbling—not so much for political reasons (though those are certainly imaginable, given the situations outlined above), but for reasons of geology.Questions about the real size of Kuwait’s oil reserves have emerged in the Kuwaiti National Assembly, leading the opposition party to call for production cuts. Remarkably, Kuwait appears to be groping toward implementation of the Oil Depletion Protocol, without ever having heard of it. However, from the standpoint of nations that want to keep the oil flowing so the global industrial party can continue, this is bad news.Even worse news, potentially, comes from Saudi Arabia, where oil flows have shrunk by some 400,000 barrels per day over the past few months, despite astronomic prices. No one knows for sure what is going on. The Saudis themselves say the production cuts are due to lack of demand, but this hardly seems plausible, unless the kingdom is only able to deliver unwanted heavy, sour crude to market—but even in that case, one would expect flows to increase, with a price discount factored in for resource quality. At the same time, the Saudis are hiring just about every spare drilling rig in the world, resulting in a dramatically falling rig count in the Gulf of Mexico—a place that would otherwise be seeing an increasing count, given the fact that Mexico’s giant Cantarell field is in now in steep decline, with dire implications for the nation’s economy. Matthew Simmons (Twilight in the Desert) has been insisting for the past few years that Saudi production is close to peak and that Ghawar, the world’s biggest field, may be in decline. Now many others are speculating that this is the real reason for the falling production figures.What happens next? It depends on the real condition of Ghawar. Perhaps a heroic drilling campaign could result in a temporary bloom in production, lasting perhaps three years, followed by a swift, terminal collapse. On the other hand, it is possible that the field has been so thoroughly exploited already that we are seeing the irreversible, rapid decline. At the ASPO conference a well-connected industry insider who wishes not to be directly quoted told me that his own sources inside Saudi Arabia insist that production from Ghawar is now down to less than three million barrels per day, and that the Saudis are maintaining total production at only slowly dwindling levels by producing other fields at maximum rates. This, if true, would be a bombshell: most estimates give production from Ghawar at 5.5 Mb/d.Disturbing TrajectoryWhile these events in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are not front-page news, they are in their way every bit as significant as the ongoing violence in Iraq and Lebanon, and the ritualistic war dance of the American and Iranian leaders. The Israel and Lebanon situation seems to be about religion, terrorism, and land; the US-Iran situation seems to be about nuclear proliferation. But if one looks beneath the surface, nearly everything of significance that happens in the Middle East is at least partly about oil. It may be pure coincidence that, just as the world’s biggest oil producers are reaching a historic turning point signaling the end of the energy regime that has held since the end of US production dominance in 1970, a war has erupted between Israel and a militant organization supported by a nation the US plans to attack anyway in order to maintain dominance of world oil supplies going forward. History is full of such coincidences. But coincidence or not, it will be difficult to keep these unfolding realities from rebounding off one another, undermining attempts at a peaceful resolution.Some commentators speculate that we are seeing the slow-motion commencement of World War III (or IV or V, depending on who’s counting). I have no interest in fueling apocalyptic speculations. My strong wish is for a quick and peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Hezbollah-Lebanese conflict, a US stand-down from confrontation with Iran, and a speedy, voluntary US exit from Iraq.In his talk at the ASPO conference, Terence Ward repeatedly said that America’s bombing of Iran would make the work of petroleum depletion analysts easier—presumably because skyrocketing oil prices would force everyone to acknowledge that Peak Oil is a reality. On this point I disagree. If the scenario Ward outlined comes to pass, the public’s attention will be fixated on military developments and casualties, with horrific news footage dominating nearly every moment of every television news broadcast. Oil prices will indeed soar and everyone will feel the economic pain from a crashing global economy—but few will look to geology as an explanation. Instead, they will point to the obvious proximate causes—attacks and counterattacks disrupting oil shipments, with speculators pushing prices even higher than they would otherwise go.We have many reasons to hope that events are not spinning out of control.

SOB is sitting in an uncomfortable hotel room in Princeton, NJ watching CNN while reviewing paperwork for his nine to five (more like seven to eight) day job. Shrub is saying that the current middle east conflict represents the effort of 'terrorists' who oppose 'the march of peace.' What happened to the 'march of democracy'? Lot's of marching in the Bush scenarios. The truth is that abstractions on the march are totally irrelivant to the situations in question. 'Terrorists' are people who have very specific political objectives that have nothing to do with opposing the 'march' of anything. The singular fact that the Bush administration has NEVER honestly addressed the reason for terrorits activity is a good indication of how dishonest their own position is. We cannot address a situation while pretending that it is something other than it is. Anyone who believes that 'the terrorists' are doing what they are doing because 'they hate our freedoms' are living in a world that is pretty much a fantasyland. Wake up before we all die. There is very little latitude for this kind of nonsense. Those who engage in terrorist activities do so because they have policy objectives they don't think can be met through other paths, but they are not engaged in attacking 'our freedom' (nor, as Bush said today 'the march of peace'????).

We do, indeed, live in a kind of political twilight zone.

The most recent Israeli attack on Gaza is an excellent example of the pathology of contemporary civic responsibility. The Israelis claim to be attacking Gaza in an effort to save a kidnapped IDF soldier, but the method they are employing seems rather strange for such an effort - they are bombing a very broad range of targets - none of which has any particular relationship to the missing soldier. Indeed, the most striking target bombed on the very first day was the main power plant that supports the civilian population of Gaza. This means that a population of over a million will be without power for months (one estimate was six months to restore power). Does anyone really believe that Israel bombed this power plan in order to recover one missing soldier? Subject over a million civilians to darkness, no refrigeration, no air conditioning, and - most important - no fresh water (since the water treatment plants are dependent on electricity to operate)?

This is a case of cowboys and Indians, just like the American West. The Israelis want the Palestinians gone. And they have only two methods to achieve that goal - force them all to leave or kill them - and for decades they have been doing some of both. Just as we did with the native population of this land, so the Israelis have been doing with the Palestinians. They have been herded into ghetto settlements - refugee camps and confined areas surrounded by IDF roadblocks and patrols - and periodically subjected to targeted assassinations, Ariel bombardment, sniper attacks, artillery shelling, and imprisonment without charge or judicial due process. They have been deprived of the ability to make a living, to visit family living in other parts of the county, and to participation in the civic, political, or cultural life of the country. Their land and homes have been stolen, their orchards uprooted, their livelihoods blocked. Sources of water, electrical power, food, and financial aid have been blocked or diverted. Their very mobility has been severely restricted - to the point that simply going to work or visit the hospital can present an impossibly difficult set of hurdles.

Yet in the Western press the image presented is almost constantly of the "terrorist" attacks on innocent Israeli civilians, as if suicide bombings and rocket attacks occurred only because the perpetrators were evil and in thrall to 'Islamofacism' or some such nonsense. The reality is quite different. If one looks at the number of casualties and deaths on both sides, the proportion is almost ten to one - ten dead Palestinians to one Israeli. That something is going on here that is not reported - not acknowledged in the western press - if pretty evident. The major part of the suffering is in the world of the Palestinians, not the Israelis. For example, doesn't it strike people as a bit unfair that a country with the most highly sophisticated war planes and bombs is attacking a people who not only don't have an air force or an ariel defense system - they don't even have an army! Israel is essentially attacking a civilian population with weapons designed to be used against comparable military targets. It is so far beyond shooting fish in a barrel that it should be humiliating in the extreme. And, one would think, generate a great public outcry because of the unfair and barbarous assault on the poor and weak. But it seems the world at large doesn't believe that dropping high explosives on densely populated and defenseless urban environments is anything to be ashamed of. All in a day's work for history's favorites. After all, it's the same pathological blindness that allowed America to inflict "Shock and Awe" on a country with no ability to fight back.

Both Israel and the US will some day pay a heavy price for this arrogant, bullying behavior. And I fear that day is nearer than any of us thinks.

In a truly brilliant piece in the current Washington Monthly magazine, Alan Wolfe explains with precise and persuasive logic Why Conservatives Can't Govern:

The collapse of the Bush presidency, in other words, is not just due to Bush's incompetence (although his administration has been incompetent beyond belief). Nor is it a response to the president's principled lack of intellectual curiosity and pitbull refusal to admit mistakes (although those character flaws are certainly real enough). And the orgy of bribery and special-interest dispensation in Congress is not the result of Tom DeLay's ruthlessness, as impressive a bully as he was. This conservative presidency and Congress imploded, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.

Contemporary conservatism is first and foremost about shrinking the size and reach of the federal government. This mission, let us be clear, is an ideological one. It does not emerge out of an attempt to solve real-world problems, such as managing increasing deficits or finding revenue to pay for entitlements built into the structure of federal legislation. It stems, rather, from the libertarian conviction, repeated endlessly by George W. Bush, that the money government collects in order to carry out its business properly belongs to the people themselves. One thought, and one thought only, guided Bush and his Republican allies since they assumed power in the wake of Bush vs. Gore: taxes must be cut, and the more they are cut--especially in ways benefiting the rich--the better.

But like all politicians, conservatives, once in office, find themselves under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives. This puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions--indeed, whose very existence--they believe to be illegitimate. Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.

"Ideas," a distinguished conservative named Richard Weaver once wrote, "have consequences." Americans have learned something about the consequences of conservative ideas during the Bush years that they never had to confront in the more amiable Reagan period. As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster. And the disasters will continue, year after year, as long as conservatives, whose political tactics are frequently as brilliant as their policy-making is inept, find ways to perpetuate their power.

Saddly, this seems like an inescapable conclusion. We are not guaranteed a better government with Democrats in office, but at least many of them believe that government has a legitimate role to play and that competence and honest efforts at wise policy can have positive consequences. I am a pessimist and have often noted that our best policy intentions have bad and unforeseen consequences. But if one doesn't believe in the enterprise from the outset the negative results are a foregone conclusion.

SOB is watching an interview with Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff. Where does the Bush administration find such freaks? Of course, if Bush had gotten his original pick we would be in the middle of another juicy scandal today:

Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, is close to reaching an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to having accepted improper gifts totaling tens of thousands of dollars while he was a city official in the late 1990's, two people with information on the plea negotiations said yesterday.

Under the proposed agreement, Mr. Kerik would plead guilty to failing to report accepting roughly $200,000 in renovations to his Bronx apartment — a violation of the city's administrative code. The work, officials have said, was paid for by a New Jersey construction company that the city had long accused of having ties to organized crime.

Mr. Kerik, 50, who accepted the gift when he served as correction commissioner under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, will not face jail time, but is expected to pay a substantial fine, those with information about the case said. He is also expected to admit having failed to report receiving a loan.

A guilty plea would represent a further fall from grace for a public official whose dazzling ascent in city government took him from the rank of third-grade police detective in 1993, when he served as a volunteer campaign bodyguard and chauffeur for Mr. Giuliani in his mayoral campaign, to becoming the city's police commissioner in 2000, a post he held at the time of the Sept. 11 terror attack.

Mr. Kerik nearly rose higher still, to the rank of cabinet secretary, when President Bush nominated him to head the Department of Homeland Security in December 2004. But he was forced to withdraw a week later, citing possible tax problems involving his family's nanny.

How is it possible that the Bush administration has any credibility with even the small minority of Americans that still bow down to this charade? PEOPLE - this is very BAD theater. Stop applauding. Tinker Bell deserves to expire. Let it go.

If you haven't seen Al Gore's new film, "An Inconvenient Truth," please do. It is surprisingly engrossing (and entertaining despite it's heavy message). Recently there have been a number of reports supporting Gore's contention that Global Warming is both a serious problem and a result of human activity. Today another report attempts to highlight the importance of human activity in creating climate problems:

Now, in the second major global warming study released today, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has found:

Global warming accounted for around half of the extra hurricane-fueling warmth in the waters of the tropical North Atlantic in 2005, while natural cycles were only a minor factor.

… The study contradicts recent claims that natural cycles are responsible for the upturn in Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995. It also adds support to the premise that hurricane seasons will become more active as global temperatures rise.

Some background: Last year, sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic “were a record 1.7° F above the 1901-1970 average.”

Previous studies had suggested that the more intense hurricane activity was largely due to a 60-to-80-year natural cycle in sea-surface temperatures. But according to the study released today, less than .2° F of the rise was due to this natural cycle. Global warming, on the other hand, caused roughly half (about 0.8° F) of the rise, more than any other factor.

Lest we forget, Bush's official position is that we need to study this some more. Present understaning isn't really "sound science." of course, Dubyah wouldn't know "sound science" if it bit him in the ass - as it seems likely to do (and to all of us).

Just as the previous post pointed out the obvious fact that inflicting death and destruction on the poor and weak in Iraq is no way to win hearts and minds (quite the contrary, in fact) so this post - by a serious conservative - makes it clear that we continue to make the same kind of mistake in Afghanistan:

This Sunday’s sacred ritual of Mass, bagels and tea with the Grumpy Old Men’s Club was rudely disrupted by the headline of the day’s Washington Post: “U.S. Airstrikes Rise In Afghanistan as Fighting Intensifies.” Great, I thought; it’s probably cheaper than funding a recruiting campaign for the Taliban and lots more effective at creating new guerrillas.

Getting into the story just made the picture worse:

As fighting in Afghanistan has intensified over the past three months, the U.S. military has conducted 340 airstrikes there, more than twice the 160 carried out in the much higher-profile war in Iraq, according to data from the Central Command…

The airstrikes appear to have increased in recent days as the United States and its allies have launched counteroffensives against the Taliban in the south and southeast, strafing and bombing a stronghold in Uruzgan province and pounding an area near Khost with 500-pound bombs.

One might add, “The Taliban has expressed its thanks to the U.S. Air Force for greatly increasing its popular support in the bombed areas.”

At present, the bombing is largely tied to the latest Somme-like “Big Push,” Operation Mountain Thrust, in which more than 10,000 U.S.-led troops are trying another failed approach to guerrilla war, the sweep. I have no doubt it would break the Mullah Omar Line, if it existed, which it doesn’t. Even the Brits seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid this time, with the June 19 Washington Times reporting that “British commanders declared for the first time yesterday that their troops were enjoying success in the restive south of Afghanistan after pushing faster than expected into rebel territory.” Should be in Berlin by September, old chap.

Of course, all this is accompanied by claims of many dead Taliban, who are conveniently interchangeable with dead locals who weren’t Taliban. Bombing from the air is the best way to drive up the body count, because you don’t even have to count bodies; you just make estimates based on the claimed effectiveness of your weapons, and feed them to ever-gullible reporters. By the time Operation Mountain Thrust is done thrusting into mountains, we should have killed the Taliban several times over.

Icing this particular cake is a strategic misconception of the nature of the Afghan war that only American generals could swallow. According to the same Post story,

U.S. officials say the activity is a response to an increasingly aggressive Taliban, whose leaders realize that long-term trends are against them as them as the power of the Afghan central government grows.

“I think the Taliban realize they have a window to act,” Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commander of the 22,000 U.S. troops in the country, said in a recent interview. “The enemy is working against a window that he knows is closing.”

Except that the power of the U.S.-created Afghan government is receding, not growing, and the Taliban’s “window” only closes when Christ comes again.

Aaugh! The last time a nation’s civilian and military leadership was this incapable of learning from experience was under the Ching Dynasty.

Perhaps it’s time to offer a short refresher course in Guerrilla War 101:

Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren’t your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42 cm. siege mortars.

Big, noisy, offensives, launched with lots of warning, achieve nothing. The enemy just goes to ground while you pass on through, and he’s still there when you leave. Big Pushes are the opposite of the “ink blot” strategy, which is the only thing that works, when anything can.

Putting the Big Push together with lots of bombing in Afghanistan’s Pashtun country means we end up fighting most if not all of the Pashtun. In Afghan wars, the Pashtun always win in the end.

Quisling governments fail because they cannot achieve legitimacy.

You need closure, but your guerilla enemy doesn’t. He not only can fight until Doomsday, he intends to do just that—if not you, then someone else.

The bigger the operations you have to undertake, the more surely your enemy is winning.

The June 19 Washington Times also reported that

The ambassador from Afghanistan traveled to America’s heartland to promote his war-torn country as the “heart of Asia” and a good place to do business…

In his region, “all roads lead to Afghanistan,” he said…

Asia doesn’t have any heart, and Afghanistan doesn’t have any roads, not even one we can follow to get out.

Isn't it interesting that you can't find anyone in the mainstream media who is willing to point out these obvious facts? Real conservatives (like real liberals) are not reality-aversive, but the Bush neoconservative crowd seem to be. For them, reality is what they say it is; all PR and no policy. And the corporate press not only allows this, it encourages it.

There are many reasons to believe the war on Iraq is an evil that we will pay for in ways we can only dimmly perceive - it is unnecessary, unjust, illegal, unconstitutional, planned in secret, sold with lies, pursued with unforgivable brutality against those we claimed to help, and corrosive of every value and freedom that Americans have held dear. And there is a fundamental reality that trumps all of Bush's swagger, Cheney's contempt, and Rumsfeld's self satisfied incompetence - the very nature of the conflict itself will defeat us. This from John Robb at Global Guerrillas:

As news of the incident in Haditha filters out, it is becoming increasingly clear that Martin Van Creveld's paradox of modern warfare is in play:

In other words, he who fights against the weak - and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed - and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force, however rich, however powerful, however advanced, however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat...

Such a fundamental lesson that we should have easily learned long ago - if we lived in reality rather than in the Fox News fantasy of Evildoers and Freedom on the March and defending the Sanctity of Marriage against the assault of gay-immigrant-flag burning-liberal-latte-drinkers-from-Frisco. Aren't we ready to wake up from this nightmare?

So, where is all the good news from Iraq? Why isn't the MSM reporting all the positve stuff that the neocons so fervently believe in?

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Bombs killed dozens of people in Iraq on Monday, adding to pressure on rival factions in the country's new coalition government to agree on interior and defense ministers who can tackle the relentless violence.

A series of separate attacks claimed at least 47 lives, most of them in the capital Baghdad, police and other officials said.

In the bloodiest incident, a car bomb targeting an Iraqi army patrol killed 12 people, mostly students, in a Sunni Arab area of northern Baghdad, police said. A roadside bomb killed at least eight people in a Shi'ite area in the city's northwest.

Elsewhere, 11 people were killed when a bomb planted on a bus taking laborers to work went off in the town of Khalis in a volatile area 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

"What wrong had they done?" a middle-aged man said as he inspected the blood-stained bus. He declined to be named.

An Iranian exiled opposition group said the dead were employees traveling to its base in the area.

Noting Iran's foreign minister was in Baghdad last week, the People's Mujahideen Organization pointed the finger at Tehran and also blamed its Shi'ite Islamist allies running Iraq's new government. Iran sees the group as a terrorist organization.

Two British journalists working for U.S. television network CBS were among four people killed when a car bomb struck a U.S. military patrol in Baghdad.

American CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier was seriously wounded in the attack and six U.S. soldiers were also wounded, CBS and the U.S. military said in separate statements.

An unnamed soldier and an Iraqi civilian working with the military were killed along with the network's London-based cameraman Paul Douglas, 48, and sound man James Brolan, 42.

And of course there are always stories like this:

Sunni Who Aided U.S. Gunned Down in Iraq

The good news just keeps demanding to be heard.

SOB has been saying this for years and it is SO good to have one of his favorite blogs affirm his view:

After September 11, 2001, we’ve learned that we can take a punch and move on. We’ve faced far worse threats to our national survival in our history - the Civil War, the War of 1812, World War II to name a few - but we never abandoned our Constitution. Until now.

Terror is an emotion. Emotions are part of human nature and cannot be eradicated. A "War on Terror" is therefore a war on humanity. The Bush administration has exploited the fear and shock of a nation in the wake of a surprising and dramatic act of violence to whip national fear and paranoia into a constant boil. Why?

The evidence suggests the whole point has been to seize power and steal money. We are witnessing a creeping coup in the United States, the overthrow of the idea, promulgated by our founders and by writers like Tom Paine, that the "Law is King:".
. . .
Ann Coulter and other right wing totalitarian cheerleaders like to talk about traitors to America. George Bush and the Republicans have betrayed America, the actual laws of America and the very idea of America. On Memorial Day, as we remember our sons and daughters who have sacrficed their lives in the blistering sands of Iraq, it does their memory due honor to point this out. Noble men and women fallen, their blood cries out for lawful justice.

In each of our minds lies the beginning of our return to freedom, so please, say it after me: "There is no ‘War on Terror.’"

It’s high time for America and Americans to remember our strength. We need not be afraid. When we surrender to fear, we lose our country, we lose our faith in each other, we lose our future and we lose our freedom. The best way to honor the sacrfices of our nation’s men and women killed in battle is to embrace, once again, that precious liberty.

It’s time to be America again.

Right. So whatever happened to the "land of the free, the home of the brave?" Bush keeps talking about how he has to keep us safe when his oath of office requires that he protect and defend the Constitution - not the public. We need to remind him of what his true obligations are. Americans have always been able to defend themselves - as long as their elected representatives were faithful to their own obligations.

Every now and then, 60 Minute's Andy Rooney hits a homer:

I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States — our United States — is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into.

We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

Now we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China.

Another way the government is planning to pay for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like Medicare prescriptions, highway construction, farm payments, AMTRAK, National Public Radio and loans to graduate students. Do these sound like the things you'd like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?

I'll tell you where we ought to start saving: on our bloated military establishment.

We're paying for weapons we'll never use.

No other Country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year Japan spent $42 billion. Italy spent $28 billion, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion.

We have 8,000 tanks for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford station wagon.

We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons — enough to destroy all of mankind.

We're spending $200 million a year on bullets alone. That's a lot of target practice. We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women and 225,000 officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldier what to do. We have 40,000 colonels alone and 870 generals.

We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. …"

Well, Ike was right. That's just what’s happened.

Don't ya hate it when that happens?

The Washington Post, in another of its seemingly drug induced takes on the Bush administration, presents an analysis of Bush's latest crony appointment with this headline, Strong Grounding in the Church Could Be a Clue to Miers's Priorities.

Excuse me - "the" church? Did I miss something? Ignoring such trivial differences as Catholic and Protestant, what happened to the Baptists, Methodists, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Nazarenes, Pentacostals, Unitarians, Congregationalist, Quakers, Menonites, Amish, Shakers, Mormons, Church of Christ, Church of God, Presbyterians, happy Holy Rollers of all persuasians, etc., etc., etc. There is no such thing as the church. If this were the eleventh century perhaps that phrase would make sense. Today one has to ask - what church? What do they believe? Does it make a difference?

Because I can assure you - despite both claiming to be "Christians" - that what a Baptist (Southern or otherwise) believes is not what a Methodist believes. This should be obvious. So why are we given such childish crap as talk about "the" church as if it makes any sense? It doesn't.

Harriet Miers belongs to the Valley View Christian Church of Dallas, TX - one of those independent mega-churches that seems to exist as a unique part of our current fractured world. The head pastor, "Dr." Barry McCarty, has a PhD in Argumentation and Debate, and has been associated with various Baptist and Church of Christ congregations and colleges. What he actually believes now and where he fits on any religious belief continuum is not clear. His church is fundamentalist and conservative - but its website is pretty vague about specific points of doctrine. According to the Post:

At Valley View, pastors preach that abortion is murder, that the Bible is the literal word of God and that homosexuality is a sin -- although they also preach that God loves everybody.

Pretty schizo. This is the church Miers chooses to attend. She was reared a Methodist but was baptised in this church as an adult. So, what does she get here that she didn't get from the Methodist Church? I think we should really care. It is going to make a great difference in our lives if she is confirmed - and I have no wish to be subjected to any more fundamentalist prejudice. This is the Twenty-first Century. Do we really want to relive the Middle Ages?

Another day, another rally/march. Will it do any good? Who knows? Certainly for the people who participate it is an uplifting experience. It's always good to be reminded that others share one's own qualms and commitments. Still, it's very much a mixed bag. So many of those who show up at these events are people one would really not want to be associated with, but then again, non of them are as repulsive as Condi, Donald Rumsfeld, or Dick Cheney. I'll break bread with a schizo ex-hippie vegan anarchist any day before I would pretend to normal social relations with the Bush administration neo-con goon squad. The "freaks" who show up to protest at least have some sense of human decency and a concern for others. Whereas empathy is not something that has ever troubled the Bush gang.

Today's protest in DC was interesting on many fronts. The turnout was very good. The police elected to present a much lower profile than normal. The physical site was dramatically expanded to include both the elipse behind the White House as well as a large part of the Washington Monument grounds. But there were problems as well: fences and barracdes at arbitray points made movement in the area difficult, no bathroom facilities were provided (people had to go a half mile over to the mall to the those set up for the National Book Fair), and unexplained delays and cancellations of Amtrack trains from New York threw the schedule way off - since speakers and participants were stuck waiting.

And being a total spoil sport I have to ask, isn't it possible to line up some good speakers? The people who appear at these rallies mostly have no business being in front of an audience. I don't care how significant they may be as an organizer and supporter of good causes, if they don't know how to handle a microphone and deal with an audience they shouldn't be there. It brings everyone down to have someone they don't know shouting unintelligiable words into a feedback suffering mike. With the exception of Jessica Lange, Jessie Jackson, and Cindy Sheehan, most of the speakers were worse than useless. And of course this is all complicated by having two different groups (International ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice)with somewhat differing priorities in charge of the arrangements.

Still, it was good that it happened. Now we just need more of the same on some regualr basis. PRESSURE is required, and it needs to be applied ALL THE TIME.

As the chant goes - "The People, united, will never be defeated." And I believe this is true. But the "people" are not yet united. We're getting there, but not yet.

George W. Bush continues to pretend that economic growth and business as usual can be expected in the forseeable future, even as his own advisors tell him otherwise. Matthew Simmons, Texas investment banker and expert on the economics of the oil industry, is a long term Bush advisor and this is what he thinks about our immediate energy future:

Matthew Simmons, Simmons International
Slides from a presentation to World Affairs Council, Houston, Tx.
...
I Believe We Are Now In A Deep Hole
* Spare capacity is over.
* System was too tight in 2004 and only got tighter.
* Adding significant capacity in key bottlenecks takes 5 – 15 years to effect.
* Too much oil and gas production is now in irreversible decline.
* Demand has a resilience not easily hampered by price.
* Stocks got to “just-in-time supply.”

Katrina Was An Energy Tipping Point
* Risk of experiencing finished product shortages over next 6 months is high.
* Risk of forced natural curtailment is high.
* Rig shortage was already real and got far worse by systemic mooring system failures.
* It might be impossible to recreate energy cushion without permanent demand destruction.
* The pain is currently U.S. based: The tightness soon becomes global.
...
Post-Peak Oil Is A Big Deal
* Oil demand growth is insatiable.
* Oil use can never exceed useable supply.
* Working out a peaceful resolution to this pending clash can be done, but will not be easy.
* If issue is ignored and it happens, it becomes a social tipping point.
* It is past time for data reform.
* It is time for a Global Energy Summit.
(13 September 2005)

In other words, the world as we know it is over. What plans are being made to deal with this - other than trying (unsuccessfully) to control other countries that have a lot of oil? Have you heard any of your elected representatives deal with this issue in any way? This is the most important issue of our age and it is virtually invisible except on select web sites and in a couple of honest books that are mostly being ignored. In many ways it is understandable why people want to avoid this issue - there is nothing we can do about it. Still, there is much we could do to ameliorate the consequences of peak oil - but if we don't recognize the problem and actually discuss it, there isn't much chance that we can soften the blow.

At least one community college is actually offering a course in how to respond to the coming petroleum decline:

Course Description

Cheap oil is coming to an end. Within the next decade or two world oil production is likely to reach a peak and then begin an irreversible decline. The end of cheap oil threatens to stall and even reverse economic growth worldwide. It could lead to profound disruptions in our way of life, especially in the areas of transportation and food production.

This course examines the inevitable collision between our growing thirst for oil and the certain decline in its availability in the years to come. What might the consequences for the world economy be? Can we find alternatives to oil before its production begins to decline? What can an individual do to help us make a successful transition to a post-oil economy? Alternative energy, lifestyle changes, conservation and efficiency measures will be discussed.

A much bleaker view can be found at James Howard Kuntlser's website:

Take a good look at America around you now, because when we emerge from the winter of 2005 - 6, we're going to be another country. The reality-oblivious nation of mall hounds, bargain shoppers, happy motorists, Nascar fans, Red State war hawks, and born-again Krispy Kremers is headed into a werewolf-like transformation that will reveal to all the tragic monster we have become.

What we will leave behind is the certainty that we have made the right choices. Was it a good thing to buy a 3,600 square foot house 32 miles outside Minneapolis with an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage -- with natural gas for home heating running at $12 a unit and gasoline over $3 a gallon? Was it the right choice to run three credit cards up to their $5000 limit? Was I chump to think my pension from Acme Airlines would really be there for me? Do I really owe the Middletown Hospital $17,678 for a gall bladder operation that took forty-five minutes? And why did they charge me $238 for a plastic catheter?

All kinds of assumptions about the okay-ness of our recent collective behavior are headed out the window. This naturally beats a straight path to politics, since that is the theater in which our collective choices are dramatized. It really won't take another jolting event like a major hurricane or a terror incident or an H4N5 flu outbreak to take things over the edge -- though it is very likely that something else will happen. George W. Bush, and the party he represents, are headed into full Hooverization mode. After Katrina, nobody will take claims of governmental competence seriously.

The new assumption will be that when shit happens you are on your own. In this remarkable three weeks since New Orleans was shredded, no Democrat has stepped into the vacuum of leadership, either, with a different vision of what we might do now, and who we might become. This is the kind of medium that political maniacs spawn in. Something is out there right now, feeding on the astonishment and grievance of a whipsawed middle class, and it will have a lot more nourishment in the months ahead.

There are two things that the newspapers and TV Cable News outfits are not covering very well. One is that the Port of New Orleans is not functioning, with poor prospects for a quick recovery, and with it will go much of the Midwestern grain harvest. Another thing that has fallen off the radar screen is the damage done to the oil and gas infrastructure around the Gulf Coast, especially the onshore facilities for storing and transporting stuff, and for marshaling the crews and equipment to fix stuff. The US is going to run short of its customary supplies for a long time. The idea that these things will not affect an economy of ceaseless mobility is not realistic.

These serious problems on-the-ground are going to affect the more ephemeral elements floating around in the financial ether: the value of the dollar, the hazard in hedge funds, the credibility of institutions. By October, the hurricane season will be ending and the stock market crash season will be underway. It is hard to imagine that companies like WalMart really believe they will keep their profits up when their customers are paying twice as much as they did a year ago to heat their houses and fill their gas tanks.

Meanwhile, does anybody remember a place called Iraq? A bomb that killed thirty people was reported on page 12 of the Sunday New York Times. That's how important Iraq has become. But, I guess, a nation can hardly pay attention to a bullet in the foot when it has a sucking chest wound.

So, even if it's only half that bad it will be pretty terrible, right? And what is anyone in "power" doing to position us for dealing with this situation - which is happening right now? Look around. We are living in a fantasy land. When the real suffering and dying starts at home - rather than half way around the world - and we are actually living this reality rather than watching other hapless souls suffer in Iraq and Afghanistan while we adjust the Air Conditioning and order a pizza delivery - how are we going to react? What will the political realities be when Americans realize that their "special" place is a fantasy and that they are as vulnerable as anyone else - and even worse, since being deprived of our excess will seem even more painful than being deprived of the little that most people in the world have.

Welcome to the new century. We are not going to like it.

In honor of the many freedoms that Bush wants to extend to the rest of the world, the U.S. just refused to admit British journalist Robert Fisk into the country. There's nothing like a clear demonstration of what you really believe in, and George Bush obviously believes in suppressing voices that don't support him. Ain't democracy wonderful? No wonder all those Iraqis are killing each other to get some.

DC braces for a weekend of anti-war protests. And SOB plans to be there all day.

Cronyism in the Bush administration has recently been highlighted because of the unfortunate performance of campaign fundraiser and former Arabian Horse Association Director Mike Brown as hapless "Director" of FEMA during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. That whole set of circumstances led many otherwise complacent folk to reassess their opinion of Bush and his inner sanctum of compassionate conservative advisors, leading to a sharp decline in support for his policies with a majority of Americans disapproving of his performance in office.

Now a whole new drama is unfolding that seems destined to dramatically highlight the corruption and greed that underlies the Bush administration approach to virtually everything it does. On Monday, David Safavian, head of procurement for the OMB (Office of Management and Budget), was arrested on three felony counts stemming from an investigation into the business practices of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff:

According to court papers, Mr. Safavian, 38, is accused of lying about assistance that he gave Mr. Abramoff in his earlier work at the General Services Administration, where he was chief of staff from 2002 to 2004, and about an expensive golf trip he took with the lobbyist to Scotland in August 2002.

Mr. Abramoff, a former lobbying partner of Mr. Safavian, was indicted last month in Florida on unrelated federal fraud charges. He is not identified by name in the court papers involving Mr. Safavian's arrest. But "Lobbyist A" in an F.B.I. affidavit could only be Mr. Abramoff based on descriptive details in the documents filed in the Federal District Court here.

The Justice Department said Mr. Safavian had been specifically charged with making false statements to investigators about his efforts at the General Services Administration in 2002 to help Mr. Abramoff acquire two large pieces of government-owned property in the Washington area, including the historic Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mr. Safavian was in charge of a procurement budget of approximately 300 Billion dollars. He was already involved in decision making relating to the costly reconstructino of New Orleans. To make matters much worse, his wife has a questionable role in much of this. By way of Atrios:

Mr. Safavian's wife? Oh, that's Jennifer Safavian. Her job? Chief counsel on oversight and investigations on the House Government Reform Committee.

Their latest job? Heading up the sham Katrina investigation...

Richard Nixon very famously declared "I am not a crook." It seems that before long, no one in the Bush administration will be able to make that claim without expecting gales of laughter.

Among the many distressing revelations concerning FEMA's weaknesses - despite years recently focusing on major threats - the Miami Sun-Sentinel presents the story of FEMA's extravagent waste:

The handling of aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina is only the latest in a series of missteps and fraud that has plagued this tax-funded government agency.
The Sun-Sentinel took a look at 20 recent disasters and found mismanagement and misallocation abound.

The Washington Post does a followup on FEMA incompetence in the aftermath of hurrican Katrina:

Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, red tape and poor planning have left thousands of evacuees without basic services, according to local and state officials, public policy experts and survivors themselves.

Hundreds of thousands of people from New Orleans and Gulf Coast communities have fled, sometimes to neighboring states and beyond, moving in with friends and family or into shelters, public housing and hotels funded by the Red Cross. With little guidance from federal and state governments -- and no single person or entity in charge of the overall operation -- cities and counties have been left on their own to find survivors homes, schools, jobs and health care. A patchwork of policies has resulted, causing relief agencies to sometimes work at cross-purposes.

And CNN reports that lower level FEMA employees fault their boss's (mostly political appointees) lack of emergency management experience:

As Hurricane Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast three weeks ago, veteran workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency braced for an epic disaster.

But their bosses, political appointees with almost no emergency management experience, didn't seem to share the sense of urgency, a FEMA veteran said.

Among the notable "firsts" afforded by Katrina are:

1. an acceptance of responsibilty (sort of) by Bush for FEMA's bad response,

2. an actual resignation (by FEMA Director Brown) as a result of bad performance,

3. and repeated Rovian photo ops to try and recover the Bush myth.

Quite a show, but it doesn't seem to be working. Based on the latest poll numbers it seems that the only support Bush still has is his minimum base - and I suspect that will not hold for long. Maureen Dowd agrees.

Senate Kills Bid for Katrina Commission

Here we go again. With a national disaster still lingering in people's memories and demands for explanations growing, the Republicans first response is to stifle any realistic effort to get honest answers:

WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans on Wednesday scuttled an attempt by Sen. Hillary Clinton to establish an independent, bipartisan panel patterned after the 9/11 Commission to investigate what went wrong with federal, state and local governments' response to Hurricane Katrina.

Editorials, Including Those at Conservative Papers, Rip Bush's Hurricane Response:

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was the first practical test of the new homeland-security arrangements and the second test of President Bush in the face of a national crisis.

The performance of both has been less than stellar so far.

Katrina was a disaster that came with at least two days of warning, and it has been more than four days since the storm struck. Yet on Thursday, refugees still huddled unrescued in the unspeakable misery of the New Orleans Superdome. Patients in hospitals without power and water clung to life in third-world conditions. Untold tragedies lie yet to be discovered in the rural lowlands of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

And just in case one thinks that all the criticism is misplaced and that Bush is really sincere in his concern, Kevin Drum spells out the true picture:

BUSH AND KATRINA....Echidne of the Snakes reports that on Good Morning America today, George Bush said:

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

I swear, this is the Bush administration in a microcosm. Everyone was anticipating a breach of the levees before Katrina hit. In fact, Katrina changed course the night before it made landfall and then weakened a bit right at the moment it hit New Orleans. If it had continued along its previous path and hit about 30 miles west as a full Category 5, the levees would have been instantly overrun and possibly breached within hours instead of days.

Does Bush genuinely not know this? Or is he just so comfortable lying about stuff like this that he doesn't give it a second thought? And which is worse?

Yeah, clueless or shameless - which is worse, and does it really matter when the end result - in New Orleans as in Iraq - is so bad?

This from Mark Schmitt of The Decembrist:

Two days ago I suggested that the Abramoff case might be the uber-scandal, rather like the BCCI case in the mid-1990s, tying together all the other threads of corruption and dishonesty of the last few years.

But here's another: Last night I saw that the former publisher of the Chicago Sun-times, F. David Radler, had been indicted on many counts of fraud in the Hollinger/Conrad Black case. Hollinger has owned the Sun-Times since 1994.

Who is the most prominent employee of the Chicago Sun-Times?

That would be Robert Novak.

Who were some people on the board of Hollinger Corp., suspected of abetting the fraud?

The best description of the board: "the roster of independent directors reads like the politically plugged-in guest list at an American Enterprise Institute dinner" There was Henry Kissinger, former Illinois governor James Thompson, and most notably Richard Perle. Perle was a member of the executive committee, profited handsomely himself through a Hollinger investment fund he was put in charge of, and by his own admission exercised very little oversight.

What's the relationship between Robert Novak and Richard Perle?

It's not just that both have proudly worn the nickname, "Prince of Darkness." They are bound by their stock in trade: leaking and receiving leaks of classified information. In 1975, Perle leaked classified information to Novak with the purpose of scuttling the SALT II treaty.

Who is the prosecutor who indicted the former publisher of Novak's paper?

Patrick Fitzgerald.

This just gets better and better.

The more George W. Bush speaks the less likely it is that anyone will take him seriously. This week, in response to ongoing problems in Iraq, he said this:

"Like our own nation's founders over two centuries ago, the Iraqis are grappling with difficult issues, such as the role of the federal government. What is important is that Iraqis are now addressing these issues through debate and discussion, not at the barrel of a gun,"

Of course, this is to ignore how many guns are in play in Iraq at the moment, but more importantly, it is to fail to recognize the most significant part of the parallel he is drawing between Iraq today and America after the revolution - in his analogy we would be the British - the occupying country that the locals were fighting against. Why is this so hard to see? Iraq is not free and whatever is going on bears little resemblence to any kind of democratic process.

What it comes down to is that our approved stooges for the various factions are unable to come to any agreement on how to divide the spoils. What we now have is civil war - just cranked up but shortly to be full strength. If we get out now it won't be so bad. If we wait it will be much, much worse. And of course, we are going to wait - because no one in the front ranks of professional politics is willing to be associated with a pullout - even though it is the only option that makes any sense.

Via Daily Kos:

Ahh, the good ol' days
by kos
Wed Aug 17th, 2005 at 11:47:32 PDT
Quotes from when Clinton committed troops to Bosnia:

"You can support the troops but not the president."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."
--Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
--Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."
--Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
--Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."
--Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
--Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

Funny thing is, we won that war without a single killed in action.

By way of Talking Points Memo:

Bolton stopped by for a jailhouse visit with Judy Miller before heading off to the UN? So says Arianna.

Maybe he had pity on her and dropped by to leak some new info.

This just gets curiouser and curiouser.

Cindy Sheehan has already scored points against Bush by providing a telling counterpoint to his indulgent five week vacation. Now the President, who has told us how HARD it is to be the Commander in Chief, is helping make himself look even worse. Impossible? Hardly. He is justifying not meeting with Cindy Sheehan because . . . well, consider:

President Bush, noting that lots of people want to talk to the president and "it's also important for me to go on with my life," on Saturday defended his decision not to meet with the grieving mom of a soldier killed in Iraq.

Bush said he is aware of the anti-war sentiments of Cindy Sheehan and others who have joined her protest near the Bush ranch.

"But whether it be here or in Washington or anywhere else, there's somebody who has got something to say to the president, that's part of the job," Bush said on the ranch. "And I think it's important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say."

"But," he added, "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life."

The comments came prior to a bike ride on the ranch with journalists and aides. It also came as the crowd of protesters grew in support of Sheehan, the California mother who came here Aug. 6 demanding to talk to Bush about the death of her son Casey. Sheehan arrived earlier in the week with about a half dozen supporters. As of yesterday (Saturday) there were about 300 anti-war protesters and approximately 100 people supporting the Bush Administration. In addition to the two-hour bike ride, Bush's Saturday schedule included an evening Little League Baseball playoff game, a lunch meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a nap, some fishing and some reading. "I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy," he said when asked about bike riding while a grieving mom wanted to speak with him. "And part of my being is to be outside exercising."

Amazing. I just don't know where to start. First, do any of you remember the last "crisp decision" this sorry son-of-a-bitch made? Why should we worry about the president staying "healthy" when Americans are dying each and every day only because of decisions (crisp?) that he made and refuses - even in the face of changing circumstances - to reconsider? I just pray that all those deluded souls who have continued to believe that Bush is a sincere and honest person find this kind of callous disregard for public sentiment to be as offensive as I do. Not likely, but one can always hope.

Cindy Sheehan - the mother of Casey Sheehan, a soldier who died in Iraq on April 4, 2004 - has emerged during this last week as the unexpected serious thorn in the side of our self proclaimed "War President" George W. Bush. Both praised and reviled by many, she has effortlessly claimed the media spotlight that professional media experts no longer seem able to control. Why is this? There are many theories, such as the one that she has refocused criticism of the war to the view of families and grieving mothers. There is much truth in this, but I think it is more. I think it is because she is putting Bush on the spot in a way that no one else has been able to do because of the unanswered question she asks.

Two months ago SOB was one of several hunderd people who gathered in Lafayette Park in front of the White House to rally in support of John Conyer's and his efforts to force the Bush administration to confront the charges inherent in the Downing Street Memos - that war with Iraq was decided long before it began and that the reasons given to the public were based on exaggerated and distorted intelligence. Conyers had been forced to hold an unofficial hearing in the basement of the White House because he was not allowed an official venue for his investigations. This activity was mocked by the main stream media - or simply ignored. But many Americans were closely attuned to what he was trying to accomplish. One of those who participated in the hearings that day - along with other family members who had lost loved ones in the war in Iraq - was Cindy Sheehan. I stood near her for over an hour while various people who had either participated or attended the hearing spoke at the rally. She also spoke. She is not a great speaker. But she had the virtue of simple dignity and an honest inquiry - why had her son died? And this is the great question George W. Bush cannot answer. It is so simple - so fundamental in this situation - and HE HAS NO ANSWER!

I listened to Cindy Sheehan talk to many people during that small rally two months ago, and she addressed them all with the same direct focus and dignity that has won for her such a central place in the current anti-war movement. Those who charge that she is driven by ego are way off base. She is driven by the fundamental grief of a mother who has lost her child AND DOESN'T KNOW WHY. Bush says that those who die in Iraq die for a "noble cause." She has a simple question - what is that "noble cause." I would like to know as well. Wouldn't you? Especially since Bush can't tell us. Doesn't that seem like a simple question to answer? After all, these "official sources" have had years to develop their pitch. And we have seen how it keeps changing. So what is it now? What is that NOBLE CAUSE? The American public - and the world - eagerly await Bush's answer.

SOB has just discovered a new Google function - "define:" - that returns all definitions and references for any word entered following it. For example, entering Define:Bush returns this (emphasis added) as the initial definitions:

Definitions of Bush on the Web:

shrub: a low woody perennial plant usually having several major branches
a large wilderness area
scrub: dense vegetation consisting of stunted trees or bushes
43rd President of the United States; son of George Herbert Walker Bush (born in 1946)
United States electrical engineer who designed an early analogue computer and who led the scientific program of the United States during World War II (1890-1974)
pubic hair: hair growing in the pubic area
provide with a bushing
bush-league: not of the highest quality or sophistication

Seems pretty accurate to me.

As much as he loves dressing up in uniforms himself, appearing before throngs of adoring uniformed young people seems to be Bush's second most favorite activity:

SOMEBODY PLEASE tell me I’m not the only one who saw the coverage of the Boy Scout Jamboree arena show Sunday night and thought: Yikes, that’s a bit too much like some of the scary weirdness that torments me in my sleep.

I mean, isn’t there something nightmarish about our misleader swooping down on a steaming pit of sweat and testosterone and whipping a throng of brown-shirted youths into a nationalistic frenzy?

And what’s not surreal about the author of an unnecessary, costly, and wholly counterproductive war claiming that his policies are “laying the foundations of peace for decades to come”?

But President Bush’s appearance at the jamboree was more than just a bad dream. It was one of those grandiose expressions of state power that, at least briefly, transforms a bumbling and dishonest politician into protector of all that is good and true in the fatherland.

Despite the patriotic fervor, there’s actually little about these kinds of events that marks them as distinctly American. Swap out the little American flags for little Cuban flags, and Bush’s visit with the Scouts would have seemed a lot like one of those government-orchestrated rallies in Havana over which Fidel Castro presides (although if el jefe had been speaking Sunday, he’d have gone on for hours and hours, precipitating another rash of heat-related illnesses at the jamboree).

The extravaganza featuring our commander in chief felt especially creepy coming on the heels of a weeklong effort by the military to turn the jamboree into one big recruitment fair.

Trouble in Bush country: Iraq hammers president's poll ratings

More and more people seem to be getting Bush's number - and it gets smaller and smaller as time goes on:

A national Newsweek survey Saturday put Bush's national poll ratings on Iraq at a new low, with only 34 percent of Americans polled saying they approved of his management of the conflict.

While there are no recent equivalent surveys in Ohio, anecdotal evidence suggests sentiment is at least as bad in the tiebreaker state which Bush narrowly won over challenger John Kerry in the 2004 election.

Red flags were raised for Bush on Tuesday, when Democrat Paul Hackett, an Iraq veteran critical of his war leadership, narrowly lost a special election for the US House of Representatives in a hard core Republican district.

Today the main news stories are that 14 marines were killed yesterday in one attack, a day after 6 others were killed in the same region, and that as that is happening President George W. Bush begins another five week vacation.

Let's hear it for compassion, accountability, responsibility, resolve, maturity, morality, honesty, etc, etc - all the fantasy qualities that this administration was supposed to represent. What we really have is selfishness, greed, ignorance, secrecy, intolerance, dishonesty, pretence, PR, spin, distraction, corruption, and a president who can't even put out the energy to pretend to care about anything except providing rewards for his rich and powerful "base." Fuck the troops.

One of the most frustrating things for those of us who pay attention is the tendency of the media to treat each aspect of Bush deception as a seperate story - Plamegate, the Downing Street Memo, failure to find WMDs, the need to "stay the course," torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, lack of due process for prisoners at Gitmo, huge contracts for companies with ties to the administration despite clear evidence of failure to perform (as well as actual fraud), and the continuing effort to conflate the war in Iraq with a meaningful response to 9/11.

The truth is that all of these "stories" are parts of the same saga - the illegal, immoral, and ultimately insane, effort to impose an immature idea of America's will on the rest of the world. It is all of a piece. Without the Neocon agenda - clearly enunciated in such published documents as this from the Project for a New American Century, we would not be engaged in this losing situation. And make no mistake, it is a losing proposition. We cannot "win" in Iraq any more than we could have won in Viet Nam. First of all, we have no objective criteria that could be used to indicate success. What if the "insurgents" quit killing people tomorrow? Would that indicate success? How long would we have to wait to know that we had "won"? What would be happening in the meantime? If we left and all hell broke loose would we have lost? Would that be any different from what is happening today? If we stayed despite the lack of insurgent activity could we justify it? How would we? Why would we?

Since we have never been honest about why we are there, we can't really be honest about what it would take for us to leave. When a majority of Americans realize the essential dishonesty of this whole enterprise it will collapse in a horrible moment of truth - and we will all look bad - just as we did leaving Viet Nam. The longer it takes to get to that point, the worse the aftermath will be.

The Bushies are likely to be left looking like the most incompetent and corrupt figures in all of American history. The rest of us who allowed these assholes to stay in power as long as they have will not fare much better. If it's true that people get the government they deserve we are really much worse than I could have imagined.

So what are the real threats to America's future? How about an oil crisis that paralyzes the economy and puts all nation's against one another in a desperate attempt to keep the lights on? One higly respected energy expert believes that is possible in the near future. Matt Simmons, in his new book _Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy_ presents a case for a coming emergency based on the inablity of oil production to keep up with demand:

Oil prices could rocket to $100 within six months, plunging the world into an unprecedented fuel crisis, controversial Texan oil analyst Matt Simmons has warned.
After crude surged through $60 a barrel last week, nervous investors were pinning their hopes on a build-up in US oil-stocks to depress prices in the coming months.

But Simmons believes surging demand will keep prices bubbling well above $50. 'We could be at $100 by this winter. We have the biggest risk we have ever had of demand exceeding supply. We are now just about to face up to the biggest crisis we have ever had,' he said.

And how has George W. Bush faced what even he admits is a serious problem of dependence on foreign oil? By invading a country that was a major oil exporter and in the process creating such chaos that oil production in Iraq has fallen to half of the low pre-invasion levels.

Ya gotta remember that our CEO Pres was a failure at every oil business he started and a success only as a baseball owner - and even then only thanks to political connections. His cronies can't save him - or the country - this time.

Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State for Richard Nixon, apologized today for a decades old gaffe, calling Indira Gandhi a bitch. For his conivence in the illegal bombing compaign of Laos and Cambodia, and support of genocide in East Timor, not a word of apology. This is the reality of our political theater - public figures feel compelled to issue apologies when they are caught saying harsh things about "important" people - but can massacre peasants with impunity.

With all this shifting and reorganizing of America's police and intelligence services, it is easy to miss what looks like the beginnings of an executive branch secret police service:

President Bush ordered another shake-up of the nation's intelligence services yesterday, forming new national security divisions within both the FBI and the Justice Department and, for the first time, putting a broad swath of the FBI under the authority of the nation's spy chief.
...
Civil liberties advocates immediately criticized the changes at the FBI, arguing that they represent a radical step toward the creation of a secret police force in the United States. Many Justice prosecutors and FBI agents had also fiercely opposed the changes but were overruled by Bush's homeland security adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, officials said.
...
"Spies and cops play different roles and operate under different rules for a reason," said Timothy Edgar, national security counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "The FBI is effectively being taken over by a spymaster who reports directly to the White House. . . . It's alarming that the same person who oversees foreign spying will now oversee domestic spying, too."

Americans may miss it but the BBC sees it clearly:

The BBC's Adam Brookes in Washington says Americans have long resisted the growth of domestic intelligence agencies, believing they pose a threat to civil liberties.

Well duh! The FBI was bad enough in its earlier incarnation that kept tabs on labor leaders, bugged civil rights groups, disrupted anti-war organizations, sent threatening letters to Martin Luther King suggesting he commit suicide, engaged in entrapment and provocatureing - and all the while pretending that the Mafia didn't exist (because J. Edgar Hoover got to vacation and gamble on the Mafia's tab as long as he looked the other direction).

The only saving grace about this situation is that the FBI has historically proven to be so incompentent one can only hope that any secret police embodied within it will be equally useless.

In a testiment to how swiftly sentiment has turned against the Bush administration and its policies, a new Zogby poll shows not only that Bush's approval ratings actually fell further after his recent speech but also:

In a sign of the continuing partisan division of the nation, more than two-in-five (42%) voters say that, if it is found that President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should hold him accountable through impeachment. While half (50%) of respondents do not hold this view, supporters of impeachment outweigh opponents in some parts of the country.

Last year only a handful of Bush opponents dared mention impeachment. And now? Members of Bush's administration like to chide their opponents as members of the "reality based community" while proclaiming that they - the Bushies - make "their own reality." Well, that may be true - but it sure looks like it isn't the reality they intended.

Our Wartime President is busy imagining himself fighting a kind of war that doesn't exist any more. Baghdad is not Stalingrad. In WWII Russia, though the battle was in a complex urban environment, it was a case of one formal army confronting another, with civilians trying to stay out of the way. In Baghdad today, one sees one formal (and hyperdefensive) army facing a rebel force that looks just like the civilian population (because in many cases it IS the civilian population). This long but worthwhile essay on Fourth Generation Warefare is one of those pieces we must all work through and internalize. We are in a new age; time to own up to it.

In his speech last night aimed at recovering some of that lost momentum in the Global War on Terrorism, Bush demonstrates once again that he is totally out of touch with reality. As Billmon says:

To paraphrase Leonard, the psychotic Marine in Full Metal Jacket: We (or rather, our troops) appear to be in a world of shit.

Under the circumstances, the mindless chants of "failure is not an option" are starting to sound like the desperate prayers of the terminally ill. Failure is always an option -- particularly for morons who launch a war of choice under the impression that they can't possibly lose it.

Anyone who actually watched this pathological exercise must have been struck by how psychotic Bush seemed - how seriously divorced from the world around him and all its inconvenient facts. I can only imagine that those who have in the past supported him must be sqwirming uncomfortably now. If they continue to pretend that he is "in charge" and that things in Iraq are "on the mend" they will have their own mental problems to deal with.

The Bush Administration has lost it. And most of the country knows it. Game over.

New Poll: Disapproval of Bush at high point.

Contrary to the offical position it looks as though this administration has begun back channel communications with the "enemy."

An article in Thursday's Washington Post reports on a recent simulation conducted using former senior government officials:

The United States would be all but powerless to protect the American economy in the face of a catastrophic disruption of oil markets, high-level participants in a war game concluded yesterday.

The exercise, called "Oil Shockwave" and played out in a Washington hotel ballroom, had real-life former top U.S. officials taking on the role of members of the president's Cabinet convening to respond to escalating energy crises, culminating in $5.32-a-gallon gasoline and a world wobbling into recession.

Some of us wonder why it is only now that this kind of thing is being paid attention to. People forget that a quarter century ago President Jimmy Carter warned that catastrophe awaited us if we didn't break our (even then) dependence on foreign oil. Not only did we not achieve energy independence, we actually allowed ourselves to become more dependent - with bigger houses to heat and cool, SUVs, even more distant suburbs to commute to, electronic goodies hungry for electircal power, and increased air travel.

Now all of that is about to change. The global scramble to secure scarce resources - especially energy resources like oil and natural gas - has entered a new phase. Thanks to the rapid industrialization of China, India and other formerly third world countries, there is increased competion with the US, EU, and Japan for what energy resources are available, thus driving up the price and impacting everything dependent on energy - which is just about everything in the global economy.

"The American people are going to pay a terrible price for not having had an energy strategy," said former CIA director Robert M. Gates, who took on the role of national security adviser. Stepping out of character, he added that "the scenarios portrayed were absolutely not alarmist; they're realistic."

The underlying situation dramatized in the exercise -- and accepted by most energy analysts -- is that tolerances are so tight between supply and demand, that even small disruptions in the delivery of oil and natural gas can cause cascades of unpleasant developments.

And this simulation only considered the impact of oil on the world economy. When the simulation was first planned last year, oil was at $40 a barrel. This week the price of oil reached $60 a barrel. And that is just one factor in the increasingly interconnected and fragile global economy. What about the effects of global warming? What about the effects of an overdue world-wide flu pandemic? What about another terrorist attack on the "homeland"?

Face it, we are vulnerable, and largely because of our long term policies. Rather than pursuing mutually supporting goals with other countries and regions we have narrowly defined our "national interests" and engaged in decades of deception at home and intimidation abroad to secure those interests. We now find ourselves with a huge foreign trade deficit financed by consumer spending based on debt - a housing bubble about to burst - and creditors (especially China) who are not likely to be willing to put up with our shortsighted policies much longer.

The coming financial meltdown will be painful for the entire world, but those of us who have been most cushioned by the plenty of consumer products and cheap energy will feel it most. There is nothing the Department of Homeland Security can do to make this nasty situation better - and nothing Osama bin Laden could do that would be as bad.

Well, if there was any question about whether America's priorities were the rights of private citizens or those of corporations, the Supreme Court settled the issue today by ruling that government can seize the property of citizens in order to further private economic developemnt:

It was a decision fraught with huge implications for a country with many areas, particularly the rapidly growing urban and suburban areas, facing countervailing pressures of development and property ownership rights.

The 5-4 ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They argued that cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.

As a result, cities have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes to generate tax revenue.

Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community, justices said.

I think this really sucks. In case you don't remember, this is how George W. Bush made his fortune - through the public seizing of private land to build the Texas Ranger's stadium (and its attendant development).

For all those who thought 'peak oil' was an empty scare we have oil prices hitting a record high of $60 a barrel - and stocks sliding as a result, and this on the same day that a Chinese firm announces a bid to buy UNOCAL the California petroleum company at the heart of much of the Afghanistan controversy prior to the US invasion (Afghan 'President' Karzhi's former employer).

Given that we have a huge debt and the Chinese have a hugh surplus - of dollars - thanks to our shortsighted business practices of the last few years, we are probably seeing the first move in a game we cannot possibly win. It is the hand we have dealt ourselves, so this shouldn't come as a surprise.

Isn't it great to have an "oil man" as President? If he's as good a CEO for America as he was for his own companies, the next Great Depression should be right around the corner.

In the days leading up to the return of Iraqi "sovereignty" the US Coalition Provisional Authority went on a mighty spending spree with billions of dollars still unaccounted for.

There was a time when war profiteering was considered shameful. With this crew, it's just business as usual. It seems that no matter how overtly Halliburton and other "friends" of this administration fuck up, the Bush administration is always there to cover their backs.

So, who's looking out for you? It sure ain't Bill O'Reilly.

Maybe our Salesman Prez is too young or too unobservant to make the connection - but his PR pitch for 'nucular' power plants has him pictured in a setting that is imprinted on millions of minds as the prelude to disaster. The image of Bush gesturing in the middle of nuclear power plant control room looks so much like the set for the significant scenes of "The China Syndrome" that it's scary. And hearing him pitch "more safe, clean, reliable electricity" makes one think of Ronnie Reagan the TV pitchman par-excellance.

This is what the American presidency has been reduced to - a pitchman for an otherwise unsaleable product. I wonder how much play this scene will get on NBC (owned by General Electric - a major manufacturer of 'nucular' power plants and other things radioactive - submarines etc).

And another thing - that movie has such wrong connotations for GWB and his agenda - it starred Jane Fonda. Don't you just love unintended irony?

Once the inevitability of Peak Oil and its consequences have been internalized there is no going back to any innocent belief in a rosy future of sci-fi goodies and ever increasing technological powers. One does, however, really pay attention to the price of crude oil (today at a record high of $59 a barrel) but also one starts to note current events in light of predictions made by those paying attention decades ago. For example, today I came across this article by Jay Hanson, written almost a decade ago and imagining what a ruthless power would do if it recognized that the west was about to run out of cheap and available oil while OPEC was moving into a dominant position; he suggests that:

After the Cold War was over, low oil prices made it difficult for the Saudis -- and oilman President George Bush's friends -- to make ends meet because OPEC members were cheating on quotas.

The obvious solution to OPEC cheating was to sequester an entire country: Iraq. In order for our scheme to work, Saddam would have to remain in power and the UN would have to embargo his oil. That's exactly what we did.

We only need to keep Saddam in power for a few years -- till the rest of the world's oil production "peaks".

World oil consumption rose by 2.4 percent in 1996 to 69.55 million barrels a day (BP America, June 19, 1997). Thus, we seem to be on the Petroconsultants' high scenario, with OPEC output hitting an 18-year high of 27.39 mbpd in August of 1997 (Reuters, Sept. 7, 1997). It seems reasonable to assume that global production will soon be unable to keep up with surging worldwide demand, and that global oil production must peak by the year 2005.

SPECULATION
Once global oil peaks, and we NEED to start pumping Saddam's oil, I expect Americans to invade and OCCUPY Iraq. Moreover, profits will flow to friends of George Bush -- not some wild-eyed, gun-waving crackpot like Saddam.

Sort of right on the money - except that the Iraqis seem to have their own mind about who is going to be pumping that oil - and it isn't likely to be us.

Check out Avery Ant and his One Minute Rant. A great put down of our pompus POTUS.

Bush and his pack of yalping curs constantly chant about FREEDOM and LIBERTY - but only in reference to certain countries. For others it is a subject never broached. Consider the situation in Algeria - and the the odd silence from the Bushies.

SOB has just recently read James Weinstein's history of the American left, _The Long Detour_, and so was saddened to read that Weinstein has just passed away at age 79. He was also the publisher of the radical magazine "In These Times" which I also subscribe to. The active old guard left is a rapidly declining group in America, and we will miss the contribution that Weinstein made to our political dialogue. A good life appreciation essay is this homage by Doug Ireland.

This was one of those weeks that give me some reason to be optimistic that things might change for the better. I was in attendance at the Lafayette Park rally following the House pseudo-hearing on the Downing Street Memo chaired by Rep. John Conyers. It was a relatively small crowd (at least compared to the half a million of us that shut down midtown Manahttan in February two years ago) but it was a spirited group - and, for the first time in months, clearly encouraged that things were beginning to turn. Just think:

Democrats are calling for an investigation into the facts about going to war with Iraq;

Bush's support on major issues continues to decline in polls;

the good-ole-boy corruption network that pervades all of the Bush enterprise has been put under a merciless spotlight this week with Cheney/Halliburton's connections to Gitmo and the mounting scandal there.

We could go on and on. It seems that the tide is running strongly against more Bush BS being accepted as business as usual. I don't have a clue what is going to happen - but something is. People have lost patience with this crap.

Let the games begin.

There have been several books raising questions about the offical story of what happened on 9/11 and none of them have been given much mainstream attention, despite raising some very difficult and potentially devastating questions that follow from the factual record. Now, a former member of the Bush administration has come forward to charge that the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings was likely "an inside job."

A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

"If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling," said Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, a former member of the Bush team who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.

Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, also believes it's 'next to impossible' that 19 Arab Terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding the scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11.

"It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7," said Reynolds about his comments that first appeared June 9 on the web. "If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.

It is well worth reading the entire article. There are so many disturbing facts surrounding the 9/11 situation that it can't help but raise questions - especially since the Bush administration resisted every attempt to really investigate what happened - and actually succeeded in limiting the scope of all investigation, limiting the time available for investigation, limiting the budget available, and limiting the power of congressional investigators to call witnesses and obtain documents from the executive branch. Why the restrictions? What is Bush trying to hide? What is he afraid of?

And am I the only one that is bothered by the long term business relationships between the Bush and Bin Laden family's? Or the Bush's and the Hinckley's? This - like many "coincidences" that seem to plague the Bush family and its far flung "business" dealings, just begs for some objective investigative reporting. But that is the one thing that never seems to materialize around this secretive and vindictive clan.

A couple of good websites that deal with these issues (and more) are What Really Happened? and Information Clearing House. One of the first books (and written by a respected theologian who was disturbed by the facts) to raise these issues in detail is The New Pearl Harbor by Professor David Ray Griffin. Disturbing material. Not easily dismissed and impossible to explain away.

Is America a great country - or what?

When he can't find anything else to fall back on to justify the war with Iraq, Bush can always say that the world is a better place with Saddam removed from power. But is it? How, exactly, have we made things better? Consider:

Under Saddam, Iraqis who spoke out against the government (or were suspected of such) were taken away, imprisoned, tortured, sometimes killed, and held indefinately with no legal options available to them.

Under American occupation, Iraqis who speak out against the government (or are suspected of such) are taken away, imprisoned, tortured, sometimes killed, and are held indefinately with no legal options available to them. PLUS:

Unemployment has dramatically increased, availabiltiy of electrical power has declined - as has potable water and sewar services, crime has grown exponentially - to the point that many people fear leaving their homes, and all of this has helped reduce the availability of schools, hospitals, and clinics, and even the oil industry (the backstory that has driven this whole sordid affair) is in disarray and producing less than under Saddam.

Ah, the freedom! Bush and Chaney both parrot endlessly that we have "liberated two countries" when in truth what we have done is turn Afghanistan back over to the warlord regime, a bit of tribal backwardness that preceded the Taliban, and have replaced Iraq's former strongman with a new one of our own choosing. I can't imagine that Jefferson or Madison would find much in the current Iraqi political situation to be optimistic about. Can you? Bush and Chaney can - and that alone should be grounds for doubting either their sanity or their honesty.

With the public increasingly turning against Bush's war in Iraq, he is now facing opposition even from his own party.According to US News and World Report:

Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is angry. He's upset about the more than 1,700 U.S. soldiers killed and nearly 13,000 wounded in Iraq. He's also aggravated by the continued string of sunny assessments from the Bush administration, such as Vice President Dick Cheney's recent remark that the insurgency is in its "last throes." "Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel tells U.S. News. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

With talk like that coming from within the Republican tent it is going to be increasingly difficult for the President to get by with the simplistic slogans and vague promises he has relied on in the past. When he talks about staying the course people are going to want to know more about what that "course" really is. And when he says, as he did in his radio address yesterday:

"We will settle for nothing less than victory"

people may remember Viet Nam and similar claims and ask - as more should have then - what such "victory" would look like and how we would know if it had been achieved. This is not an idle question. The fabled "war on terror" does not have a coherent enemy who can surrender, negotiate a truce, sign a peace treaty etc.

Victory will be whatever (and whenever) we say it is. Let's declare vitory and get the troops home. The longer they stay the worse this will get. Viet Nam is the template. We already know the end result. The only question is how bad we are willing to have it become before we wash our hands of this mess.

George W. Bush has been unable to tell the truth about Iraq since he first began to focus his threatening attention on that unfortunate country. Yesterday, in the first speech of a new PR blitz to counteract increasing opposition to the war, Bush made a series of statements that were quite extraordinary. Some were outright lies while others simply made no sense.

He claims

"We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens".

What sense does this make? We were attacked by a small group of Saudi and other Middle Eastern religious fanatics (none Iraqi) so our response is to attack an entire country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack - as Bush himself has admitted when pressed on the issue. That is the oft repeated argument that simply makes no sense - yet it continues to be his only line of defense. It is augmented with further nonsense such as:

"Our troops are fighting these terrorists in Iraq so you will not have to face them here at home."

As anyone who has been keeping up with the ongoing travisty in Iraq knows full well, none of the "terrorists" we are fighting are likely to have any plan - much less any way - to attack America "at home" - while they can attack our soldiers who are in their backyards. While those who do pose a threat to us - Osama and crew - are still at large and apparently not engaged in the action in Iraq. Nor is Bush really interested in them, since he has been quoted as saying that he doesn't think Osama is important and spends little time thinking about him.

I think the public is beginning to realize that the President's strange focus and odd priorities pose a real danger for us. The man is either insane or totally divorced from the truth. Either way, he souldn't be in office.

I'm so confused. We had to invade Iraq because it was such a grave threat; its military force made us cringe. Now we are bogged down in Iraq (after defeating its very menacing forces in a matter of days) but can't leave until we train Iraqis to defend themselves - against other Iraqis. Of course, Iraqis who have not had the benefit of our training have our military pretty much penned down and restricted to occasional patrols in mass.

They are killing us because we are there but we can't leave until they stop killing us.

Does this situation really make any sense to anyone?

The State Department has decided to stop publishing an annual report of terrorism because it showed that terrorist attacts had actually increased under Bush's leadership:

According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004.

That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.

We Are On the Edge of Breakdown

I have spent a lot of time lately fretting about the very real possibility of some catastrophic breakdown occuring - economic, social, political, whatever - the conditions are such that this whole complex world we live in is teetering on the edge of collapse. Take just one possibility - "Peak Oil" - the inevitable point at which the maximum amount of oil possible is being pumped and refined. Several major studies have designated 2005 as the year for peak oil (the most conservative estimates are 2020). Peak oil will mean that as increasing demand drives prices up, a dwindling supply exaggerates those prices and forces countries whose economies depend on oil to "confront" one another in ever more hostile and threarening ways. Since the most populous country - China - and the second most populous - India - are growing at an exaggerated rate far greater than us - and thus making ever greater demands on the world's available oil - we have a little problem.

I don't know if those who were not involved in the immediate craziness of 9/11 realize how devistating it was, but for me, it marked a moment that was a fundamental turning point. As I walked home from National Airport in D. C. (since cabs and the Metro were not an option that day) I was not able to contact anyone on my cell phone; the circuits were overloaded from the call volume of all those who needed to check on someone. Now I ask you, do you think that anything has been done to insure that communication is possible in the event of another attack? You know it hasn't. All the billions of dollars that were funded in response to 9/11 have greased the palms of friends and supporters of the Bush administration and provided an overt display of "concern" but have not gone to address real problems. If such an obvious and simple problem has not been addressed in the years since 9/11, what do you think has been done to prepare for any of the possible crises we might face in the near future - currency free fall, stock market collapse, systemic power outages, a major pandemic, or another 9/11 style attack on, of course, some target we never dreamed would be attacked? We are in trouble and it's our own fault for allowing a bunch of idiots to be in charge when we need real competence - and don't know where to find it.

Newt Gingrich Draws Away From Tom Delay

One can't help but imagine the pleasure that Newt is experiencing in seeing his rival for Republican Party genius hung out to dry:

"I don’t want to prejudge him and my hope is that Tom will be able to prove his case," said Gingrich, who engineered the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. "But I think the burden is on him to prove it at this point."

Is he doing that? "I don’t know yet. I think the jury's out," said Gingrich.

"DeLay's problem isn’t with the Democrats; DeLay's problem is with the country," Gingrich continued. "And so DeLay has a challenge: to lay out a case that the country comes to believe, that the country decides is legitimate. If he does that he's fine."

If Delay doesn't see the handwriting on the wall, he's not as smart as I think he is. On the other hand, if he IS as smart as I think he is, he has files and photos on all the guys that matter. It worked for J. Edgar.

Once again, the price of oil reaches record highs:

Oil prices raced to all-time peaks on Monday, climbing above $58 a barrel, while OPEC producers said they had begun discussing a second output rise to try to quell the market's rally.

U.S. light crude for May delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit a record $58.18 a barrel, up 91 cents on the day. London's Brent crude traded oldman Sachs bank that prices could spike above $100 as global demand growth strains supply capacity. . .

U.S. oil prices have surged by more than 30 percent this year, with big-money speculative funds buying heavily on signs that robust demand growth in Asia's emerging economies and the United States would strain world supply.

Non-OPEC producers are pumping at full tilt and have little spare capacity to offer the market. Russian data released on Monday showed the world's second-biggest exporter pumping 9.33 million bpd in March, steady from February.

It was the sixth month in a row that output had failed to rise and another sign of a slowdown in Russia's industry.

Concerns about the adequacy of U.S. gasoline stocks ahead of the peak summer demand season have also driven price strength after a handful of refiners have had production problems.

U.S. gasoline futures struck an all-time high on Monday of $1.7491 a gallon, later easing slightly to $1.7470, up 1.60 cents.

Since SOB has been concerned about the implications of "peak oil" recently, every jump in oil prices drives the implication of the coming oil decline more sharply into focus.

Tough times ahead. No one who knows anything about this doubts that oil will functionally run out in our lifetime, but no one in any postion of authority is doing anything reasonable to address that eventuality. The implications are stark. Why are we wasting our time talking about "reforming" Social Security when the very existence of the economy is in danger? And that danger is close. Many academic studies of peak oil predict that the year total worldwide oil production peaks and begins its inevitable decline is 2005! If that prediction is correct we are at the point where from here on out, each year the amount of oil produced will be less while the demand will be greater. What that means for every aspect of life as we know it is profound and the fact that no one in our government is actively dealing with this is criminal.

No doubt when the full ugly consequences of this situation begin to be realized by the public, the Bushies can find some way to blame it on the Clintons. Yeah, that's the ticket.

For sheer spectacle and craziness it would be hard to top the recent "Save Terri" campaign. It did a great deal to expose the shallowness and hypocrisy of the "Compassionate Conservatives" that dominate our government. But SOB seems not to be alone in thinking that perhaps the Rebublican play-acting on this one went a bit too far for the intended audience; in Digby's words:

So, we are dealing with a very powerful constituency of religious nuts now doing the muscle work for a criminal political gang. And it would appear that nobody is safe, not even those who sign the blood oath to the Republican Party. The slimy criminals and the self-righteous religious zealots have formed their own power center right smack dab in the middle of the Republican Party.

I say let the games begin. This has been brewing for quite some time. This undemocratic streak in the GOP waxes and wanes but it has been dramatically on the upswing for the last decade or so. But this time the radical Republicans are piping their revolution straight into homes and cars and offices all over this country and it's starting to freak out the normal people.

We can only hope. Things tend to go in cycles but there is no reason to assume that the pendulum is yet ready to swing leftward - but maybe. As noted in LancasterOnline by Gil Smart:

this is what conservatism has become in this country. No more is there a dedication to the traditional principles of limited government and fiscal restraint; as John Danforth, a former Republican senator and an Episcopal minister, noted in the New York Times last week, the Republican Party “has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.”

“As a senator,” wrote Danforth, “I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.”

And in this, I suspect we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the conservative movement. For American politics is cyclical; what goes up comes down. And the descent generally begins when extremists start calling the shots.

And they are certainly calling the shots today; but I suspect that more and more responsible conservatives are having a hard time going along with this. There is no way to predict how things will play out but it sure looks as though it will not be the way Bush and company predicted.

SOB tries in vain on a daily basis to find any real "news" about what is going on in Iraq. The reports coming out of that unfortunate country continue to be a strange combination of fantasy and wishful thinking totally divorced from reality. We know we can discount virtually everything said officially by our military spokespersons - all of it has been proven over time to be in error, either deliberately untrue or terribly off the mark guesses.

Today, in a typically unedifying story entitled "U.S. Marine killed in Ramadi: Separately, 5 Iraqis die in car bomb blast" MSNBC concludes with this sentence that says so much about our disconnect with reality in Iraq:

Insurgents fighting to overthrow Iraq’s U.S.-backed government frequently target Iraqi police and soldiers.

Where to start? First, the term "inusrgents" as used in this sentence - and this is typical of stories about Iraq - is used incorrectly. Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines "INSURGENT" as "a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government". There is neither civil authority nor an "established government" in Iraq. Thus, the second part of the sentence that refers to attempts to "overthrow Iraq's U.S. backed government" is total wishful thinking. The U.S. has tried - and failed - to create a government that our military occupation could hide behind but all we have done is provide for an election of disconnected individuals who can't even agree on how to begin the process of creating a government. There is no constitution - hence no governmental structure of any kind. Iraq is still under the authority of rules promulgated by Paul Bremer as head of the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) - a totally bogus entity put forward as a "civilian" interface between the U.S. military and the hoped for tame Iraqi front. Their banking rules, tax rates, business law and even traffic regulations were imposed by an occupying power with no input from any Iraqi, and those rules will be in force until Iraq has the prower to overturn them (and that isn't likely to happen as long as our military is occupying the country).

Until reporters start addressing the reality on the ground in terms that don't embrace the PR fantasy of a "soverign" self-governing Iraq beset by bad-guys who want to overthrow the good-guys, no news stories about what is happening there will make any sense. The Weekend Australian has a story that at least tries to address what is really happening:

Although the "good news" blogs that compile instances of Iraq's progress tend to present an over-rosy picture, the consistent progress being achieved on the ground, away from the headlines, highlights one of the stranger truths about post-Saddam Iraq: the country has devolved into a set of local fiefs, each effectively administering itself. . .

Like all Arab societies, it functions best at the level of the individual street or neighbourhood, where Islamic injunctions to help fellow Muslims have real force.

Despite the destructive effects of the Baathist system, and the overwhelming chaos caused by the US invasion and the political transformations attempted in the 24 months since US troops rolled into Baghdad, Iraq remains a network of small, "high social capital" communities, well able to run itself without central leadership.

Our own press seems incapable of any nuanced reporting about Iraq, preferring to stick with whatever the official U.S. government line is and quoting without context whatever government figure is the speaker of the day.

Following yesterday's posts about the upcoming debacle of peak oil comes this news that oil prices have hit a new high:

prices jumped 3.4 percent to a record yesterday, prompted by concerns over the level of gasoline stockpiles in the United States before the summer driving season.

The May contract for crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose $1.87 and settled at $57.27 a barrel after reaching $57.70 in earlier trading. The closing futures price was the highest since trading began in 1983. . . Oil markets continue to be rocked by the tightness in global production and concerns over rising demand. These issues, along with unexpected interruptions from producers like Iraq or Venezuela, have contributed to a 67 percent jump in oil prices in the last year.

But congress is concerned about steroid use by pro baseball players and passing special legislation to "save" a single comatose patient with no possibility of a life. The rest of us can just get by as best we can.

Pathetic. Meanwhile, a host of other problems attend on this issue of oil price increases:

The rise in energy costs is starting to be felt in the economy. Fewer jobs were created in March, according to the Labor Department, although America's unemployment rate fell to 5.2 percent, from 5.4 percent in February. In addition, airlines, including Delta, United and Continental, have increased fares in response to rising costs.

The gains in oil prices yesterday came after Goldman, Sachs released a report Thursday that suggested oil prices could go as high as $105 a barrel - the level that the bank analysts estimate is needed to significantly curb consumption.

Well duh! For a government filled with and run by "businessmen" the end result for the country as a whole seems spectacularly inept. Increased fuel costs will mean increased prices for everthing that must be transported by train, plane, or truck - and that is almost everything bought and sold in this country; and since we no longer actually manufacture anything ourselves, most of it has to be transported a very long way - so expect major increases in prices over the next few months. And if prices rise across the board there will be no way for the Fed to keep pretending that inflation is under control - and that, of course, will mean major increases in interest rates - which is all that is needed to puncture the already over extended real estate bubble.

2005 is shaping up to be a very interesting year.

Rolling Stone magazine has an interesting piece previewing an upcoming book The Long Emergency by JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER
about the consequences of "peak oil" - the phenomenon we are about to experience when oil demand outstrips production. The picture isn't pretty:

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion. . .

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements. . .

If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. . .

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

The full book length treatment of this subject is due out May 15th - just in case you need to be depressed any further.

As a clear indication that this subject is not an isolated blip on one person's radar, today we also have an editorial by Molly Ivins about same and a Bloomberg analysis that indicates serious problems with our oil supply and doubts about future viability:

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil rose and gasoline and heating-oil surged to records on signs that U.S. refineries lack capacity to make enough fuel and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts predicted that oil could touch $105 a barrel.

Record prices have failed to curtail surging fuel consumption, the Goldman Sachs analysts said in a research note. The firm's upper limit was $80 previously. U.S. supplies of gasoline and distillate fuels, such as diesel and heating oil, fell last week, according to an Energy Department report yesterday.

``Concern is growing that there will barely be enough fuel to meet growing global demand,'' said Michael Fitzpatrick, vice president of energy risk management at Fimat USA in New York. ``The world had cheap oil for years and the chickens are coming home to roost. Investment was deferred and China and India are now major users, which isn't going to change.''

To recap: oil supplies are finite; demand is ininite. Train wreck for sure - the only question is when.

Why aren't our "representatives" dealing with this issue NOW? Later is too late. In fact, now may be too late.

The entire "Terri" business makes me crazy. This is one of those stories that should have been of import only to family and friends. Instead, it became the tabloid fodder that kept the mainstream talking heads jumping up and down and screaming at one another for most of the last week. The freak faction of the Republican party (most of it, that is) joined in the moaning, hand-wringing, and sanctimonious display for the benefit of the credulous media.

OK, I've got a question about all this stuff. Why do people who think they are talking to God have to talk funny? you know what I mean - the moaning, quivaring voice - the shaking and kneeling of the body - the waving hands and rolling eyes. I mean, these people act as if God refuses to hear people who aren't acting is though they are possessed. What is that all about? And why do mainstream reporters ignore it? It's weird - and somebody needs to call them on it. There is no scriptural justification for it; the Bible doesn't - anywhere - suggest that believers put on this kind of display. Far from it. On the contray, Jesus suggests that when people pray they should do so in private and avoid appearing like the hypocrits who pray publicly in order to be appreciated by the public.

Ya know, you just have to believe that if God created the entire Space/Time Continuum and all its complexities he doesn't need some inbred dipshit Southern Baptist to explain to him what he should do about a particular situation. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

One can only hope that the inherent irrationality and silliness of the "Christian Right" will do them in. But experience demonstrates that many truely stupid movements - the Nazis, for example - survived for a long time and did terrible damage before finally self destructing.

SOB woke up at 3:00 AM this morning from a frighteningly real dream of apocalyptic doom; sharply rising gas prices, declining stock prices, push-back from foreign countries no longer willing to support the self serving policies of an American empire playing blind-mans-bluff with the world, resulted in the to be expected collapse of U.S. trade and the value of the dollar, an increase in the crushing growth of the national debt, collapse of consumer confidence, dramatic rise in unemployment, etc, etc - bleak times.

Then what? From that position - which is almost certainly on the horizon - where can we go? How do we make progress? I don't think anyone in our "representative" government has a clue how to make this right. We deserve better than this.

Billmon is the best; his take on the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz to be President of the World Bank is priceless.

In a truely strange twist, a report by the US Army's official historian claims that the US started to lose the war in Iraq within three months of toppling Saddam's regime:

"In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative gained over an off-balanced enemy," the report said. "The United States, its Army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since." . . .The report disclosed the lack of planning by the U.S. military for the occupation of Iraq. Over the last year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides have been blamed for lack of post-war planning based on their assessment that the military campaign in Iraq would be brief and quickly lead to a democratic and stable post-Saddam Hussein government.

In contrast, Wilson said army planners failed to understand or accept the prospect that Iraqis would resist the U.S. forces after the fall of the Saddam regime. He deemed the military performance in Iraq mediocre and said the army could lose the war.

"U.S. war planners, practitioners and the civilian leadership conceived of the war far too narrowly," the report said. "This overly simplistic conception of the war led to a cascading undercutting of the war effort: too few troops, too little coordination with civilian and governmental/non-governmental agencies and too little allotted time to achieve success."

So, the Army's own official report says we are fucked in Iraq but could still pull things out if we recognized our mistakes. George W. Bush, however, never makes mistakes - at least not any that he will admit. So, we continue to plod along without a plan and pretend that everything is just fine. What a crock.

Back when Bush appointed the very sinister John Negroponte to be Ambassador to the UN, SOB figured things couldn't get much worse. I mean, after all, Negroponte had one of those evil, in the shadows kind of "diplomatic" backgrounds connected to an ugly series of US covert actions - from the Phoenix assassination program in Viet Nam through the illegal Contra wars in Central America where he covered up the actions of US supported death squads and terrorist repression of uppity local populations of the poor. Then Negroponte was appointed ambassador to Iraq - of course - an entire new population in need of righteous blood letting. Unfortunately, that opened up his old job at the UN. Now comes George W. Bush, fresh from his "fence mending" tour of Europe, and one could hope that he would reach out to someone who could do justice to the needs of the UN post.

But no. That would be expecting way too much. Bush is, after all, a mean, spiteful and vendictive little man. So, just to show the world what he really thinks of it he tapped what is probably the worst possible choice for the job - John Bolton, the ultimate idiotic neocon; a man who has spent years in a simple minded focus on attacking the UN and all cooperative actions between the US and other countries. Just as he was installed in the State Department to undermine every real diplomatic move made by Colin Powell, so he is now picked to be the man to preside over the deliberate sabotaging of the UN.

In an inspired piece of writing, Professor Juan Cole, winner of this year's blogger's Koufax award for Best Post, imagines what life would be like for us in America if we were experiencing what is happening in Iraq:

If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?

President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq's current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?

What if all the reporters for all the major television and print media were trapped in five-star hotels in Washington, DC and New York, unable to move more than a few blocks safely, and dependent on stringers to know what was happening in Oklahoma City and St. Louis? What if the only time they ventured into the Midwest was if they could be embedded in Army or National Guard units?

There are estimated to be some 25,000 guerrillas in Iraq engaged in concerted acts of violence. What if there were private armies totalling 275,000 men, armed with machine guns, assault rifles (legal again!), rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar launchers, hiding out in dangerous urban areas of cities all over the country? What if they completely controlled Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Denver and Omaha, such that local police and Federal troops could not go into those cities?

What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated?

What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target "safe houses" of "criminal gangs", but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and even pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial over on the Mall? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?

What if there were virtually no commercial air traffic in the country? What if many roads were highly dangerous, especially Interstate 95 from Richmond to Washington, DC, and I-95 and I-91 up to Boston? If you got on I-95 anywhere along that over 500-mile stretch, you would risk being carjacked, kidnapped, or having your car sprayed with machine gun fire.

What if no one had electricity for much more than 10 hours a day, and often less? What if it went off at unpredictable times, causing factories to grind to a halt and air conditioning to fail in the middle of the summer in Houston and Miami? What if the Alaska pipeline were bombed and disabled at least monthly? What if unemployment hovered around 40%?

What if veterans of militia actions at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing were brought in to run the government on the theory that you need a tough guy in these times of crisis?

What if municipal elections were cancelled and cliques close to the new "president" quietly installed in the statehouses as "governors?" What if several of these governors (especially of Montana and Wyoming) were assassinated soon after taking office or resigned when their children were taken hostage by guerrillas?

What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?

If you don't regularly read this man's work, you should. He, unlike most of our "experts" on Iraq and the Middle East, has lived in the area, speaks the langauge, and has some sense of what on the ground reality is. Those of us who are paying taxes that fund this ugliness need to know.

In Europe, just as in the U. S., Bush shows how fearful he is of actually confronting real people:

With a Hush and a Whisper, Bush Drops Town Hall Meeting with Germans

During his trip to Germany on Wednesday, the main highlight of George W. Bush's trip was meant to be a "town hall"-style meeting with average Germans. But with the German government unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance, the White House has quietly put the event on ice.

Have we ever before had a president so timid about confroting reality?

George Bush is in Europe - and "Old" Europe at that - on what is being called a fence-mending tour. His idea of reaching out, however, is to insult Europeans and lecture them about what they must do. Among other silly, hypocritical statements made in his first speech there he says:

"Our greatest opportunity, and our immediate goal, is peace in the Middle East, . . . Lasting successful reform in the Middle East will not be imposed from the outside. It must be chosen from within."

That, of course, is why we have 150,000 troops in Iraq, bomb its cities daily, shoot civilians at checkpoints, torture detainees, impose our own pre-determined laws and decrees on them, sell off their assets, and impose a host of restrictions on their "soverign" government. If this is freedom, shoot me and get it over with. Does he really think that anyone in Europe is going to be taken in with this silly talk about "peace" and "freedom" when we deny both to the Iraqis over whom we have absolute control?

A 'reporter' for Talon News (a website that specialized in featuring exerpts from official GOP sources) who gained recent prominence by asking leading Bush-friendly questions at White House news conferences, has been revealed as something other than what he seemed. First of all, his name - Jef Gannon - seems to be a pseudonym, so his actual identity remains obscure. His credentials - a weekend seminar in journalism offered by a right wing organization - hardly seems to justify a White House press pass. But on top of all the other strange stuff there is the revelation that Gannon (or whatever his real name is) has a questionable online presence represented by gay prostitution sites in which he figures rather strongly.

The mainstream media has largely ignored this story - not quite knowing how to get a handle on it that won't prove presonally embarassing, but many bloggers have had a field day - and the fun is just beginning.

Stay tuned.

The day that peace broke out?

According to "The Economist": Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas have declared an end to all hostilities after their first summit, in Sharm el-Sheikh. So, after four years of bloodshed, is the Palestinian uprising over?

Well, talk - as they say - is cheap. Let's wait for tomorrow - and tomorrow - and tomorrow. I've lived a long time, and I've seen this more than a few times before.

In a story that would be funny if it were not so sad, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reports that a Quaker peace group has been bared from a Putnam County High School for distributing materials that were judged to be "anti-American" and "anti-military." It is a testiment to how far down the rabbit hole we have fallen to realize that the offending quote:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed. Those who are cold and are not clothed ..."

is from a speech by Dwight David Eisenhower, former two term Republican President of the United States and Supreme Allied Commander during World War II. Anti-American? Anti-military? Of course, the John Birch Society did claim that Ike was a commie, but that level of craziness was one reason no sane person took them seriously. Now we live in an age when public school administrators are equally crazy - and there is no outcry from the public to indcate any outrage - so I guess there is none.

Once again, Paul Krugman delivers the goods. Today's column in the New York Times makes a clear case for rejecting the Bush con job on social security:

few weeks ago I tried to explain the logic of Bush-style Social Security privatization: it is, in effect, as if your financial adviser told you that you wouldn't have enough money when you retire - but you shouldn't save more. Instead, you should borrow a lot of money, buy stocks and hope for capital gains.

Before President Bush's big speech, a background briefing by a "senior administration official" made it clear that the plan calls for exactly the "borrow, speculate and hope" strategy I described - not just for the system as a whole, but for each individual.

Here's the money quote: "In return for the opportunity to get the benefits from the personal account, the person forgoes a certain amount of benefits from the traditional system. Now, the way that election is structured, the person comes out ahead if their personal account exceeds a 3 percent rate of return" - after inflation - "which is the rate of return that the trust fund bonds receive. So, basically, the net effect on an individual's benefits would be zero if his personal account earned a 3 percent rate of return."

So all the fuss and expense will have no real effect on benefits - unless one's investments go south, in which case the investor is screwed. And, the only way this 'plan' will actually make a difference in the longterm viability of the system is if benefits are cut, since the main privatization portion of the plan isn't expected to add new funds to the system, merely alter how those funds are handled. Does any of this make sense?

To put the real state of the union in perspective, see this from The Campaign for America's Future:

STATE OF THE UNION 2005 BY THE NUMBERS

ON UNEMPLOYMENT:
--5,630,000: American workers unemployed in December 2000
--8,050,000: American workers unemployed in December 2004

ON PERSONAL DEBT:
--1,226,037: number of personal bankruptcies filed in 2000
--1,584,170: number of personal bankruptcies filed in 2004

ON HEALTH CARE:
--39,800,000: number of Americans without health insurance in 2000
--45,000,000: number of Americans without health insurance as of January
2004

ON RISING GAS PRICES:
--$1.51: average price of a gallon of gasoline in 2000
--$1.88: average price of a gallon of gasoline through November 2004

COLLEGE COST
--$7,750: average cost of tuition and fees at 4-year public university
in 2000 when Bush promised to increase Pell grants to $5,100
--$11,354 :average cost of tuition and fees at 4-year public university
in 2004 when Pell grants remain at $4,050 for 3rd straight year

FUNDING FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS
--$121.97 billion: promised since 2001 to make No Child Left Behind act
work
--$95.01 billion: actually provided since 2001 for NCLB due to Bush
administration cuts

FALLING WAGES
--$13.00: hourly wage of the bulk of jobs eliminated since Nov 2001
--$9.00: hourly wage of the bulk of jobs created since Nov 2001

Are you better off?

In a situation that proves, once again, that satire can't keep up with real life, Kinky Friedman - bestselling author and front man for the country group "The Texas Jewboys" - is running for governor of Texas under the motto "How hard can it be?"

Friedman said the main priorities in his campaign will be reforming the
Texas education system, adding safeguards in the judicial process where
Texas ranks as the nation's leader in capital punishment and
establishing a peace corps for the state.

Plus, he wants "to fight the wussification of Texas."

"I am determined to get back to a time when the cowboys all sang and
their horses were smart," Friedman said. . .

"We hope the people of Texas are going to reject the choice of paper or
plastic," he said.

And just in case you think that he isn't really serious and that a country singer and mystery writer has no business in the public arena, he offers these words of wisdom, "The professionals gave us the Titanic, amateurs gave us the Ark." Enough said. And after all, Bush was Governor of Texas, so - how hard can it be?

In his State of the Union speech last night George W. Bush honored "freedom" by demonstrating that words can be totally free of any connection to reality while still pleasing an audience of true believers. According to CNN, "U.S. President George W. Bush vows to spread freedom around the world." Well, "freedom" isn't like manure - you can't just spread it around. Freedom isn't a physical thing that can be manipulated; it is a relationship between an "actor" and whatever forces restrain the possibility for action. And like the phony election in Iraq, what Bush normally chooses to call "freedom" is a kind of counterfit that looks good from a cursory glance but has no real value. Are Iraqis "free"? They got to vote (if they were willing to risk being shot) for a list of candidates put together by the U.S. and its hand picked interim government - so they had a "choice" of pre-selected and pre-approved candidates that, for the most part, were unknown to the public and couldn't afford to campaign - even if campaigning were possible in current day Iraq, which it clearly isn't.

Or consider even more Orwellian uses of "freedom" by this administration. Just a couple of days ago, retiring Attorney General John Ashcroft claimed that the misnamed Patriot Act's expansion of police powers of search and seizure were an expansion of "freedom". Well, for the cops, sure - but for us? This is an issue that always needs to be highlighted - when we talk about freedom we are talking about freedom for some at the expense of others. And this is the part that the Bushies are never willing to face.

So right on cue we have this piece on CNN in which Nelson Mandela demonstrates the real meaning of "freedom" in the world of ordinary people:

South African democracy icon Nelson Mandela challenged rich nations on Thursday to help end the misery of the world's poorest millions.

Speaking on the eve of a meeting of G7 finance ministers, the political prisoner cum world diplomat told a crowd of about 2,000 in Trafalgar Square that now was the time for decisive action.

"Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times ... that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils," he said.

"In this new century, millions of people in the world's poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free."

But this can't be mentioned in the same context as Bush's use of "freedom" because that would be playing "class warfare". Keeping the poor down is OK because that is how things are supposed to be - but talking about it is both impolite and impolitic. As Orwell pointed out half a century ago, the most obvious truths don't require any real censorship to hide; we self-censor those concepts that are generally known to be unacceptable - such as "the president is a liar." Sorry - we all know that is true - especially the press that spent last night talking about everything BUT that central fact.

Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev called the Iraqi
parliamentary elections a profanation. In an interview with the Interfax
news agency, he said the elections are "very far from what true
elections are. And even though I am a supporter of elections and of the
transfer of power to the people of Iraq, these elections were fake."

"I don’t think these elections will be of any use. They may even have a
negative impact on the country. Democracy cannot be imposed or
strengthened with guns and tanks," the agency quoted Gorbachev as
saying.

Douglas Feith, the neocon gnome described by Gen. Tommy Franks as "the fucking stupidest guy on the planet," announced today that he is resigning his job as Undersecretary of Defense. The official DoD press release, in the purest Orwellian prose proclaims:

Under Mr. Feith's leadership, the Defense Department's policy organization has developed a number of key initiatives relative to the Department's future, including:

defense policy advice in the global war on terror;

development of a new U.S. global defense posture;

global peace operations;

policy guidance to the 21st century defense strategy;

Defense Department aspects of the Moscow Treaty on strategic offensive nuclear weapons and the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review; and

Defense Department work on the enlargement and reform of NATO.

This makes me feel SO much better about the prospects for peace and security in the world. You?

When SOB was a lot younger he used to feel superior because American politicians didn't feel the need to wear symbols of their rank and political affiliation. It had always been an obvious affectation of Communist (and previously, Nazi) political figures that they felt the need to wear some badge on their lapel to remind everyone of who they were. I used to think how fortunate we were that our political figures didn't go around with flags and symbols on armbands and lapel pins. But no more. For the last few years all our major political figures - including many Democrats - have felt the need to wear an American flag lapel pin - just in case we might mistake them for Japanese or something.

But as John Prine says,

"Your flag decal won't get you into heaven any more/They're already overcrowded from your dirty little war/and Jesus don't like killin', no matter what the reason for/ so your flag decal won't get you into heaven any more."

Am I the only one that this flag lapel pin bothers so much? If not, what can we do to make the president and his imitators aware of how silly they look? If we're not careful, the next thing we know he will be wearing a military uniform all the time - as if he had the right.

In his current New Yorker article The Coming Wars, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reports a number of disturbing changes in how the Bush administration is pursuing its "war on terror." He claims that covert action is being moved from control of the CIA where congressional oversight is a potential problem, to the Pentagon which has no such reporting requirements. Specifically, he says that well connected sources tell him the U.S. is already conducting special operations inside Iran with the goal of identifying a specific number of targets that can be successfully destroyed in initial military strikes.

It seems that the neocons who orchestrated the ill conceived invasion of Iraq continue to believe that the right application of targeted military force will magically transform the Middle East. They believe that a coordinated attack on Iran's nuclear facilities will result in an uprising against the Mullahs that will topple the current regime and allow a more moderate and democracy friendly one to emerge. Sound familiar? It should. It's the same crap they peddled about Iraq, and we see how well that worked - or didn't. These assholes just can't seem to understand that no one wants to be invaded by another country. And to make it worse, General Jerry Boykin (the fundamentalist Christian who believes we are really in a war against Satan) has a pivotal role in this nonsense. I am SO not comforted by this.

And to make it worse, we are relying heavily on Israel and unstable allies such as Pakistan (whose secret police - the ISI - were laregly responsible for creating the Taliban). If the world gets any crazier I may just have to drop out. In a quote that really makes me believe I have lived too long, Hersh has this to say:

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”

Are we proud of this?

Michael Chertoff, Bush's nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, was once the defense attorney for terrorist financier Dr. Magdy Elamir. According to an article in The University Star:

Elamir’s HMO was sued by the State of New Jersey to recoup $16.7 million in losses. At least $5.7 million went “to unknown parties... by means of wire transfers to bank accounts where the beneficial owner of the account is unknown,” according to the article.

Foreign intelligence reports given to then chairman of the House International Relations Committee Ben Gilman, R-New York, in 1998 accused Magdy Elamir of having “had financial ties with Osama bin Laden for years,” according to an Aug. 2, 2002 Dateline NBC broadcast.

In 1999, Magdy Elamir and brother Mohamed were named suspects in Operation Diamondback, an FBI/ATF undercover infiltration of Pakistani arms merchants who sought to arm Osama bin Laden with conventional and nuclear weapons, according to independent researcher and former New Jersey police officer Allan Duncan and taped transcripts with FBI informant Randy Glass.

While others were convicted in federal court for involvement in these activities, Elamir never was. In fact, he was never charged. And the man who would have been responsible for his prosecution - had it been brought - was his old defense attorney Michael Chartoff who, in the interim had been made Assistant Attorney General:

From 1990 to 1994, Chertoff was U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, during the period when the first attack on the World Trade Center took place.

Omar Abdel-Rahman preached at the Al Salam mosque and was later arrested for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, according to Dateline. Magdy Elamir was one of the Al Salam mosque’s financial supporters.

“The Jersey City area and particularly the Al Salam mosque were allowed to continue to be one of the major hubs of terrorist activity in the United States,” Duncan said.

So SOB has to ask, why is this information only appearing in a student newspaper and not in the mainstream press? The information is all in the public record and it is, if not damning, highly suspicious. How could this connection have failed to set off alarm bells within the Bush administration? How could this man have been approved for the federal bench with this past? Something really doesn't add up.

At his second inauguartion, George W. Bush delivered an inaugural address that was totally devoid of any factual content. Bristling with high level abstractions ("freedom", "liberty") piled high one upon the other with no connection to any specific time, place, or action - the president seemed to be saying that what he intends to do during his second term is more of what he has been doing. This is so not reassuring.

For a more sober take on U.S. policy failure and the confusion of freedom talk with fact, see Ivan Eland's US Foreign Policy: Question All Assumptions:

All of this leads to the inescapable conclusion that the USG runs a “Tarzan” foreign policy—that is, “Me good, you bad.” The USG’s propaganda machine excessively demonizes the motives of anyone or any country that takes actions the United States does not like and asserts that U.S. motives are only idealistic and pristine. No one in the Islamic world—or in the entire world, for that matter—believes the latter. The USG’s propagandistic “hoo-ha” is really meant for the American public, the only party that has been bamboozled into believing it. Why doesn’t the public ask its government to explain why Saddam Hussein’s unnecessary invasion of Kuwait was bad and President Bush’s unnecessary invasion of Iraq was good? Also, why don’t they ask if killing innocent civilians, even as collateral damage, in an unnecessary and aggressive invasion is any better than deliberately targeting them as bin Laden does?

It's so much easier to spout off about "freedom" and "liberty" without having to actually tie the words to anything real.

SOB spent the day of Bush's second inaugural in various forms of protest. As ususal, such protests served mainly to make the participants feel better but are unlikely to have any effect on the obtuse faction that has taken control of our government.

With temperatures hovering around freezing even at the high, all out of door activities had a Dr. Zhivago patina of crunchy snow and frosty breath imposed on whatever else was happening. I started the day walking north to Meridian Hill (Malcolm X) Park for a 9:00 AM rally sponsered by DAWN (DC Anti-War Network). The crowd, while smaller than I had hoped, was animated and varied - reflecting the odd mix of groups that had come together to form this organization. One reason it was not as large as past rallies was that a number of different organizations had conflicting priorities and approaches to protesting the inauguration, so they staged rallies and marches at other locations and times. International ANSWER on the parade route, Code Pink at Dupont Circle, and the Anarchists in Frankin Square and Logan Circle, all had their own agenda and timetable to follow. So, only part of everything happening could be experienced by a single participant. Those of us at the DAWN rally formed up to march around 11:30 and headed down 16th St towards the White House. The march was not particularly memorable. The route is primarily a residential area of high end apartment buildings. There were few obervers and no opposition. The police presence was light (most being focused on the area immediately around the parade route on Pennsylvania Ave) so that was a blessing. The march terminated at McPhearson Square where another rally by the group formerly known as Re-Defeat Bush was just ending.

Later in the afternoon SOB linked up with Chris of the California based organization Think Blue (www.thnkblue2008.com) to pick up 50 blue bracelets we had ordered for friends and other non red state types. Think Blue is trying to raise a dollar for every Democratic vote in the last election at one dollar per bracelet. The money can be designated for a number of different "blue" causes, including MoveOn.org. According to Chris they sold 8000 that morning to those attending the A.N.S.W.E.R rally at 4th and Penn.

Last night was given over to a more pleasant "protest." Mrs SOB and a couple of friends put together a dinner party featuring only French food and wine, feeding sixteen like minded blue state enthusiasts. A subtle and extremely enjoyable way to give the finger to all that Bush and company stand for.

It is very strange to be here in our nation's Capital 'celebrating' Martin Luther King Day as we approach the second inauguration of George W. Bush, probably the worst president in the history of America. King - no saint and someone who, like Gandhi, challenged prevailing wisdom while generating tremendous criticism, still calls us all to rise above our limited everyday world view and attempt to recognize what is best in human potential. Bush appeals to our desire to pay less tax and instead of asking for sacrifice he suggests that the patirotic thing to do is to shop more.

It is said that liberals become conservative if they are mugged. In the same vein, conservatives become liberals (or radicals) when they have been confronted with the hypocrisy of 'holier than thou' conservatives trying to pretend that real problems don't exist. In 1967 SOB was a graduate student at the Universiy of Tennessee in Knoxville in the Speech and Theater program. He wanted to do a Master's thesis on Martin Luther King's speeches but his committee objected because it was too contemporary/controversial and lacked sufficient 'objectivity'. Then King was assassinated. Suddenly the committee felt the subject had 'significance.' So, SOB's Master's thesis wound up being "Three Significant Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr." I can't help that I have always felt somewhat guilty about that, and not just because I would have had to do a different thesis study than the one I wanted if he had lived. What is really horrible is to recognize that King's death followed his decision to pursue those fundatmental inequities that transcend race - poverty and imperial aggression. Against these he launched the Poor People's March and a campaign against our involvement in the Vietnam War. This was too much for the powers that be. His death was a foregone conclusion. For those who doubt, read An Act of State, a depressing but necessary book for these times.

In a laughably revealing picture of Bush incompetence a recent interview with the president on Air Force Once produced the following exchange with reporters:

Asked why bin Laden was not been captured yet, the president responded, "Because he's hiding."

There really isn't much one can say about that staggering bit of obtuse excuse making, and this from the newly elected head of the most powerful state in the world. Amazing.

And continuing the studpidity:

He predicted most Muslims will eventually see America as a beacon of freedom and democracy, but said: "There's no question we've got to continue to do a better job of explaining what America is all about."

Say what? All the "explaining" in the world will not counter the bombing of homes in densly populated urban areas. PR may work with the majority of the American public, but then they aren't being dragged from their beds in the middle of the night or bombed with our amazingly "precise" munitions. How proud they must be to be blown to bits by the best of modern science.

What an unmitigated crock of shit.

Not that it will be a big story in the American media, but it seems that many members of the armed forces are electing to run away to Canada rather than serve in Iraq:

American Army soldiers are deserting and fleeing to Canada rather than fight in Iraq, rekindling memories of the thousands of draft-dodgers who flooded north to avoid service in Vietnam.

An estimated 5,500 men and women have deserted since the invasion of Iraq, reflecting Washington's growing problems with troop morale.

This is a larger number of troops than any other member of the "coalition of the willing" (except from Great Britain) even has in place. It's almost equal to the population of Mrs SOB's hometown. We read about the occassional soldier refusing to serve or running away but who would have guessed at this number? Things in Iraq are obviously worse than even I thought.

Mike Reed, Man About Murphreesboro, objects to the idea that Bush is a "cowboy":

While driving through the drizzle to work this morning. I noticed a bumper sticker on a minivan in front of me. It had a photo of Bush on the left wearing a cowboy hat (its a campaign shot we saw often in which he was driving his pickup truck) and the famous photo of Reagan in a cowboy hat on the right.

In the middle, it read "My heroes have always been cowboys."

I thought to myself "what self-delusional horseshit is this?"

Bush isn't a cowboy. Sure, he wears the hat sometimes and has a house in Texas, but he owns no cattle. He doesn't do much on the ranch besides clear brush. His only claim to cowboy status is that he hails from Texas.

But he was born in the northeast. He was educated at Yale and Harvard. Being governor of a shit-kicker state doesn't make you a cowboy.

But as SOB has noted repeatedly, what is important to his administration is an image - not a reality. An image can be easily manipulated. Reality is rather less tractable.

Conservative spokesman Pat Buchanan believes that Bush is facing a crisis in Iraq brought on by reliance on his neoconservative advisors. They believed a small force of Americans could topple the Saddam regime and pacify a country expected to respond to our presence with joy and cooperation. Instead, we face an ever increasing insurgency that shows no signs of slacking even as it is clear that we don't have nearly enough "boots on the ground" to secure the peace:

President Bush now approaches the crossroads LBJ reached in December 1967. Then, Gen. William Westmoreland came home to tell LBJ he needed 200,000 more troops, in addition to the 500,000 already committed. A war-weary LBJ said no. Came then the Tet Offensive, and the presidency of Lyndon Johnson was broken.

Bush is nearing his Tet moment. After the Jan. 30 elections, he will have three options. Persevere in a no-win war with 150,000 U.S. troops bleeding indefinitely until America turns on him, his policy and his party. Send in tens of thousands of fresh U.S. troops to crush the insurgency as we undertake a years-long program of training Iraqis to defend their own democracy. Third, find an honorable exit, and leave Iraq to the Iraqis.

The success or failure of the Bush presidency will likely hang on his decision. For which, he can thank the neoconservatives.

In the most recent demonstration of his "compassionate" conservatism, George W. Bush is planning dramatic cuts in the budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development:

The White House will seek to drastically shrink the Department of Housing and Urban Development's $8 billion community branch, purging dozens of economic development projects, scrapping a rural housing program and folding high-profile anti-poverty efforts into the Labor and Commerce departments, administration officials said yesterday.

The proposal in the upcoming 2006 budget would make good on President Bush's vow to eliminate or consolidate what he sees as duplicative or ineffective programs. Officials said yesterday that economic development programs are scattered too widely in the government and have proved particularly ineffectual at HUD.

Advocates for the poor, however, contended that the White House is trying to gut federal programs for the poorest Americans to make way for tax cuts, a mission to Mars and other presidential priorities. Administration officials would not say how much the consolidation would save, but it could lead to steep funding cuts. That is because the HUD programs would have to compete for resources in Commerce and Labor budgets that are not likely to expand to accommodate the shuffle.

Walking in downtown DC this morning with the temperature in the low 30's and seeing the large number of the homeless still out in the open and struggling to stay warm without shelter, I have to wonder about all this "duplication" of service that Bush wants to eliminate. Why is it more important to eliminate duplicate service rather than this human suffering?

SOB is reading All the Power: Revolution Without Illusion, Mark Andersen's combination autobiography, radical history, and how-to manual for punks and activists. Andersen, also author of Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital is a neighbor (I don't know him but will work to correct that) and among other things runs a radical book/music cooperative only a few blocks away that I have been meaning to visit.

It is feeling more and more important to get engaged in some ongoing struggle with the current financial, political, and social trends. SOB is looking at making a radical lifestyle change - after decades of being a total curmudgeon and generally avoiding groups, he may have to start actually cooperating with others who are as fed up as he is.

I just don't know how I feel about this story. It was reported today that former Secretary of State James Baker - Bush family friend and the political "fixer" who nailed down Dubya's uncertain election in Florida in the 2000 election - believes we "should consider a phased withdrawal of some of the 150,000 troops now there".

"Any appearance of a permanent occupation will both undermine domestic support here in the United States and play directly into the hands of those in the Middle East who -- however wrongly -- suspect us of imperial design," Baker said Tuesday in a speech at Rice University in Houston. News reports of his comments were disseminated on national news wires on Thursday.

Baker, a Republican Party stalwart, was an architect of the 1991 Persian Gulf War in the administration of President Bush's father. Bush enlisted him to help win international debt relief for the newly conquered Iraq.

The rich irony here is that (1) we wouldn't be in this ugly situation if Baker hadn't gone to bat for Bush four years ago, and (2) we wouldn't be viewed as having "imperial designs" except that we really, really do. It is SO obvious and it does little good to pretend otherwise. We didn't attack Iraq because it was a threat, but because it was weak and potentially rich. We thought it was an easy mark. More fool us. We need to learn to stay home and try and put our own house in order. It needs our attention - Iraq needs to be left alone.

In what is more and more looking like VietNam Redux, the war in Iraq is unfolding in all too familiar ways. The News Telegraph tells us that US deserters flee to Canada to avoid service in Iraq:

American Army soldiers are deserting and fleeing to Canada rather than fight in Iraq, rekindling memories of the thousands of draft-dodgers who flooded north to avoid service in Vietnam.

An estimated 5,500 men and women have deserted since the invasion of Iraq, reflecting Washington's growing problems with troop morale.

Of course, we aren't seeing any of this in the mainstream American (so called liberal) press. Wonder why.

This interesting piece taken from Bilmon:

Mr Powell's bleak assessment, less than three weeks before Iraqis are due to elect a parliament, reflects what advisers close to the administration and former officials describe as an understanding in the State Department and Pentagon of the depth of the crisis. But, they say, this is not a view accepted by President George W. Bush . . .
According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr Bush recently asked Mr Powell for his view on the progress of the war. “We're losing,” Mr Powell was quoted as saying. Mr Freeman said Mr Bush then asked the secretary of state to leave.

Financial Times
Powell gives bleak assessment of Iraq security problems
January 12, 2005

No one tells Dubya something he doesn't wnat to hear.

Am I alone in thinking that Bush's pick to head the Department of Homeland Security looks like someone out of "Night of the Living Dead"? I hate to be this way - judging someone strictly on looks - but this dude is REALLY STRANGE.

On a more practical note, does he have any significant management experience? I only ask because the Dept of Fatherland Insecurity is the largest bureaucracy in the Federal Government. This is not a trivial consideration. Tom Ridge never got on top of it and he had been governor of a pretty large and complex state. One suspects that Chertoff was picked only because of his longterm experience as a right wing Yes-man - from working on the Whitewater non-scandal to assisting John Ashcroft. The Washington Post says that he is known "for his intensity and political savvy." Well hey, what else do we need? More intense political BS rather than any realistic response to terrorism. This is what we have had from the Bushies all along. Why should it be different now?

In Forbes, Dan Ackman presents the World On Brink Of Ruin, a well deserved attack on Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, all the more interesting because it comes from his own former fan club:

Stephen Roach, the chief economist for Morgan Stanley & Co. (nyse: MWD - news - people ), one of the most powerful investment banks and one of the 50 largest companies in the world, says Greenspan has "driven the world to the economic brink."

Writing in an upcoming issue of Foreign Policy, Roach says that when Greenspan steps down as chairman of the Federal Reserve next year, he will leave behind a record foreign deficit and a generation of Americans with little savings and mountains of debt. Americans, Roach says, are far too dependent on the value of their assets, especially their homes, rather than on income-based savings; they are running a huge current-account deficit; and much of the resulting debt is now held by foreign countries, especially in Asia, which permits low interest rates and entices Americans into more debt.

Roach even questions Greenspan's political independence. He does not claim the chairman is a partisan Republican, but he does fault him for being a "cheerleader for policies such as tax cuts...that could make the endgame all the more treacherous."

Greenspan is to central banking what J. Edgar Hoover was to fighting crime. He will soon surpass the fondly forgotten William McChesney Martin as the longest-serving Fed chairman. But his term as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors expires in just over a year from now, and America will have to do without. Roach says, "Greenspan will be a tough act to follow." But the difficulty may not be living up to the chairman's reputation so much as cleaning up his mess.

Maybe its a good thing that Kerry didn't get elected; now Bush will be stuck with the many ugly ramifications of his own bad policy - and those that supported him will go down in flames as well. Of course - so may we all.

After the recent debacle of appointing as Director of Homeland Security someone who was under criminal endictment and trailed a past of potential tabloid headlines, George W. Bush has decided to take a more conservative tack and appoint someone who is merely a potential war criminal. His current pick to head the useless Department of Homeland Security is Judge Michael Chertoff, one of the architects of the failed and discredited policy of widespread detentions and military tribunals as a shotgun approach to potential threats - and a strong supporter of the misnamed Patriot Act - this former subordinate to ex Attorney General John Ashcroft insisted, in the face of criticism, that the administration's tactics were constitutional as well as prudent.

Just what we need to go with Alberto Gonzolez.

Another protest planned for inaguration day:

David Livingstone says the idea behind the economic boycott he's organizing is simple: If people don't show up at work or buy things, companies lose money. As he sees it, that's money the Bush administration can't tax, and can't use to run the war in Iraq (news - web sites), protect polluters or chip away at the Constitution. . .he's vowing not to buy gas, food or use his credit card that day: He wants the GOP, big oil, big banking, big box stores and any other "bigs" to know they can't push him around or ignore him — at least not on Jan. 20.

The White House is taking all the boycott talk in stride. Bush "is proud that we live in a society where people are free to peacefully express their opinions," spokesman Jim Morrell says.

Of course, the White House is really pretty steamed that anyone would even consider protesting his excellency's right to office and as a way of getting back at the District of Columbia (which voted more than 90% against Bush)is refusing (a first for any president) to pick up any of the cost of extra security and logistics that the city will have to carry. No problem, say the Bushies, pay for it out of your special Homeland Security funds. If you wanted a clear indication of how important Bush takes Homeland Security, this is it. Paying for his inaugural celebration takes precidence over actually addressing ongoing security issues. George Bush, all image, all the time. Fuck reality - we want good PR!

Check out the plan for dealing with the Bush social security charade.

SOB is reading Joe Klein's (_Primary Colors_) first book, _woody Guthrie: A Life_, and finds, much to his surprise, that both he and Guthrie were baptised in the Church of Christ. Both of us got better. Still, it's an interesting thing to have in common. We share that also with Ken Starr, who didn't get better. Starr and I even attended the same conservative, Church of Christ college in Arkansas for our first two years of higher eduction. He started the year I left. He left voluntarily to attend a better school and I was simply ordered to go away and not be seen again. My crime was suggesting that in 1963 it probably was not a really "Christian" thing to maintain a segregated admission policy while pretending to be a Christian instituion. The administration of Harding College of Searcy, Arkansas were not amused. In fact, they were pissed and had me on a bus for home so fast I had no time to really understand what was happening. As Dr. Benson, the school's President said, to integrate the school would risk its endowment from Arkansas business. I'm sure Jesus would have really cared about that! As it was, Harding was integrated the very next year because the Federal government threatened to cancel Harding's federal matching funds for their building program if they didn't open their doors to other races. God does, indeed, work in mysterious ways.

And it saved me from another two years of tight assed hypocracy and daily chapel attendance.

For all the claptrap that has been written and spoken about moral values and the election just past, the truth is that morality is only something the Bushies talk about - something they create images and slogans around - not something they really believe in or base their behavior on. Consider, how can killing thousands of innocent women and children (as we have done and continue to do in Iraq) be considered "moral" - regardless of the elaborate sophistic rationales presented to excuse it? "Shit happens" or "collateral (it was just an accident) damage" or "Would you rather have Saddam still in power" don't cut it. There was a time not so long ago when we condemned Communists because they believed that "the end justified the means" and now the Bushies expect to be able to use the same argument and have it considered "moral"? These are the same assholes who want to post the Ten Commandments in Public places? Are we ammending them? As in :

Thou shalt not kill (unless it is Iraqis who are 'bad guys' or those who get in our way when we try to kill 'bad guys', or people who are suspected of being 'bad guys' and those they associate with, or convicted killers in Texas - even if they are underage, mentally retarded or have other extenuating circumstances),

Thou shalt not steal (unless its an election one is entitiled to, or the wealth of an undeserving country, or the earnings of ordinary Americans who need to pay more taxes so the wealthy won't be so burdened),

Thou shalt not commit adultry (if one is a Democratic president - otherwise, back off),

Thou shalt not bear false witness (if one is a Democratic president; otherwise lying is an acceptable strategy and especially encouraged if used in conjunction with misdirection, secrecy, and dishonest framing of issues),

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image (unless its a ten ton stone with copies of the Ten Commandments and other quotes on it),

Thou shalt -

Oh, forget it. This is depressing. Do all the idiots who want to post the Ten Commandments in schools, court houses and other public places, really pay attention to what the commandments say?

SOB has long maintained that the so called "War on Terror" is an illogical fiction conjured up by the Bushies in order to cover and justify a host of policies that otherwise would not be possible for them. What is really infuriating is how little this administration has done to actually deal with the terrorist "threat" realistically.

For an excellent review of this situation, the New York Review of books presents The Truth About Terrorism, a very good review of a number of books and an excellent analysis in its own right. Reading this piece is worthwhile if for no other reason than the summation of the book _Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror_ by "Anonymous", a longtime CIA analyst and expert on bin Laden and al Qaeda. In his words:

The United States is hated across the Islamic world because of specific US government policies and actions. That hatred is concrete not abstract, martial not intellectual, and it will grow for the foreseeable future.... America is hated and attacked because Muslims believe they know precisely what the United States is doing in the Islamic world. They know partly because of bin Laden's words, partly because of satellite television, but mostly because of the tangible reality of US policy. We are at war with an al Qaeda-led, worldwide Islamist insurgency because of and to defend those policies, and not, as President Bush has mistakenly said, "to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world."

It is so frustrating that going into our third year following the 9/11 attacks most Americans still have no clue what happened or why. I have to ask, how can you have a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" when the people are lied to, kept in the dark, and told to act normal and shop while someone else will take care of them?

In two weeks our faux president will be sworn in for another term. I was present for the last inaugural ceremony - in the sleet, rain, and mud - and as depressing as I found that day it can hardly be as heavy as the upcoming one.

For those who care, there are a series of protests in the works for the upcoming inaugural - see, for example:
the counter-inaugural

Mrs. SOB is away on business so SOB is treating himself to sounds that would otherwise disturb domestic tranquility - Pink Floyd's "The Wall", a couple of hours of early Bob Dylan, and now "Rock Against Bush: Vol 2" featuring such unlikely political activists as Greenday, Bad Religion, Flogging Molly, Rancid, Sleater Kinney, and No Doubt. Good stuff. Dancin' with myself. One has to do something to stay sane with that vile, beady eyed twit guaranteed another four years. Those of us who don't have that many years left really resent having to spend them fighting off and cleaning up after the kind of hypocritical nastiness the Bush family & friends circus brings to town. Consider:

They're trying to kill Social Security, one of the few government programs that actually work as intended, by pretending that it is broken,

They nominate as Attorney General a legal lightweight who conondes torture and the execution of the mentally handicapped in order to please his boss,

They view "tort reform" (putting limits on damanges that can be awarded for serious harm caused by businesses and medical doctors) as more important than either preventing the harm or providing access to affordable healthcare for those who can't afford it,

They are more intent on prosecuting doctors who prescribe too much pain medication and those that advocate medical marijuanna than they are in providing funds to combat aids,

They demand that public schools be heavily tested and punished if they don't meet arbitrary standards while refusing to measure the success or failure of any of the "faith based" programs that received over a billion dollars in federal funds last year,

They oppose "tax and spend" liberals at the same time they are raising the national debt by record amounts, spending but not taxing - simply borrowing - more and more,

They want to get government "off our backs" while inisting that it has the right to tell people what drugs they can ingest and with whom (and how) they can have sex,

They say they are waging war in Iraq in order to bring peace, restricting freedoms at home in order to make us safe, and putting former industry insiders in charge of programs intended to regulate those industries "because they understand the industry's needs."

I have really never seen such naked hypocrasy so blatantly displayed. The saving grace here is that history offers no evidence of any empire avoiding the fate of over extension and ultimate collapse. All the demographic trends are against the current U.S. ruling class. It may be painful now, but the Bushies and their ilk will someday be swept away - of course, many of us may be swept away with them - history offers little comfort in this regard. When governments lose track of reality and start governing based on fantasy, the results tend to be hard on everyone - rich and poor, citizen and non-citizen alike.

I am more and more struck by how certain obvious aspects of our environment seem to disappear in public discourse. For example, the overriding power of the U.S. military in determining government and business policy in America is never mentioned in the press - and seldom in academic studies of how policy is made.

In the same vein, the fact that George W. Bush is a child of priviledge, afforded every advantage from birth and sheltered from any negative consequences of bad behavior or mistakes of judgement, is never mentioned by the press. Indeed, the very fact that certain folk are afforded a different path from birth than most Americans is pretty much ignored in our public discussion. We pretend that this is a classless society but nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of thousands of people suffer simply from being born into underpriviledged families in which they have, from day one, less of everything good and more of everything bad. And if they don't rise above this it is somehow their own fault. But the priviledged few like Bush prosper even when they fuck up - again and again.

Is America a great country or what?

On his recent trip to Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a creative style of reframing the Iraq war as somehow not really a US responsibility. After invading a weak country that was at peace and defeating its already broken military, the US found itself confronted by opposition from numerous groups of ordinary Iraqis that didn't appreciate being occupied and controlled by a foreign country. Since the supposed reason for the invasion (Iraq's threatening WMDs) proved to be a fanatasy, the Bush administration has struggled with one excuse after another to justify our continuing presense there. The longer we stay we more we are hated. The more we are hated the more violent opposition we receive. The more opposition we receive the more repressive and hostile is our response. The harsher our response the more violent is their retaliation. It has become painfully obvious that we cannot "win" in this situation short of killing a major portion of the Iraqi population and reducing the country to rubble (as we have in Fallujah).

Now comes our nimble worded SecDef to put a new spin on the situation; the insurgency is an Iraqi, not an American, problem":

Earlier in Fallujah, the restive city that had been the insurgents' main haven until U.S. forces overran it last month and are still rooting out holdout fighters Rumsfeld used a simple analogy to explain his view that the time is arriving for Iraqis to take responsibility for their own security.

Faced with a chore like digging a ditch, a typical American, he said, will grab a shovel and start digging. In Iraq now, however, the task is to step aside and get the Iraqis to dig their own ditches.

He warned against allowing the Iraqis to become too dependent on the U.S. military. More independence is what's needed, he said.

Note how mysteriously the "insurgents" and the "Iraqis" are spoken of as if they are different entities when in fact the insurgents are primarily ordinary Iraqis and those Rumsfeld refers to as Iraqis constitute some mythic comination of our appointed stooges and an imagined populace that wants us to be there.

As for the ditch digging analogy it is a perfect example of our bad faith in Iraq. Rumsfeld doesn't want us digging their ditches for them but never bothers to consider whether or not the ditch we think should be dug is one they desire or would be willing to commit to. If he really believes that more independence is what is needed then we should leave so they can have it. Anything else is lying, self-serving, hypocracy on our part - and ultimately self-defeating as well.

Wise words from KOS:

The Democrats need to offer an alternative agenda over the next four years. It won't be enacted, so they can shoot for the moon. The hell with good policy, make proposals that sound great. The GOP used flag burning and gay marriage to rally their side. We can find equivalents. Don't worry about them becoming law, because they won't. Worry about branding the party and placing every bit of bad news (and there will be plenty) squarely at the feet of the party that controls all levers of government.
We need to make the GOP radioactive. Their incompetence is providing the ammunition. It is our job to wield it. Remember, they control everything. We don't need to be bipartisan. We don't need to work with them for them to pass their agenda. So we offer up clear alternatives to everything they propose. We have to be aggressive.

We have nothing to lose. Being in the minority is being in the minority. Yet we have much to gain.

Trying ANY form of cooperation with Republicans is a losing game. It's time to really fight back and mean it.

Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, has an opinion piece this week calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq:

Despite unhappy holidays, nearly all of us who served in WWII were proud, determined and properly armed and equipped to help defeat would-be world conquerors Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and Hirohito in Japan.

At age 80, I'd gladly volunteer for such highly moral duty again. But if I were eligible for service in Iraq, I would do all I could to avoid it. I would have done the same during the Vietnam War, as many of the politically connected did.

"Support Our Troops" is a wonderful patriotic slogan. But the best way to support troops thrust by unwise commanders in chief into ill-advised adventures like Vietnam and Iraq is to bring them home. Sooner rather than later. That should be our New Year's resolution.

This has prompted a great deal of spirited response, much of it incoherent raving about Neuharth being a traitor, but worth reading just to see the odd level of "reality" some of our fellow citizens inhabit. Really frightening.

I read in this morning's papers that the Democrats are engaged in major soul searching about whether or not to de-emphasize abortion as a core issue. As with so much about the Dims lately, this indicates they have learned nothing from the long series of humiliations they have suffered at Republican hands. It was never the Democrats that over emphasized abortion; it was the conservative Republicans who made abortion, the "murder" of the unborn - rather than a woman's control over her own body - the issue. It was a decades long process of definition that, once again, allowed the conservatives to define the terms of debate in their favor. The problem for Democrats is not that they have a losing issue, it's that they have accepted the losing side of a loaded question. No, Democrats are not "in favor of abortion." They are "in favor" of making the decision on whether or not to have an abortion a matter of personal choice. That is quite a different thing.

Kevin Drum, the "Political Animal" has this to say:

I have to confess that I'm bewildered by the big abortion controvery that's apparently brewing in the Democratic party:

The fight is a central theme of the contest to head the Democratic National Committee, particularly between two leading candidates: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who supports abortion rights, and former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, an abortion foe who argues that the party cannot rebound from its losses in the November election unless it shows more tolerance on one of society's most emotional conflicts.

.....If Roemer were to succeed Terry McAuliffe as Democratic chairman in the Feb. 10 vote, the party long viewed as the guardian of abortion rights would suddenly have two antiabortion advocates at its helm. [Harry] Reid, too, opposes abortion and once voted for a nonbinding resolution opposing Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

This genuinely doesn't make any sense to me:

What's Roemer talking about? The Democratic party is no more "intolerant" on this issue than the Republican party — just on the opposite side. There aren't any pro-choice folks in the Republican leadership, after all, and if it's lack of tolerance you're after, just look at the humiliating process Arlen Specter had to go through recently just to get a Senate committee chairmanship.


I'm usually in favor of more inclusive language, greater sensitivity, etc. etc. But obsessing about the emotional turmoil of getting an abortion just doesn't work. Since we fundamentally believe that there's nothing wrong with pre-viability abortion, shouldn't our job instead be to persuade women that they shouldn't feel emotionally whipsawed if they choose to get an abortion? It's awfully hard to take both sides.


There's no issue that doesn't hurt you with at least some voters, but of all the "moral values" issues out there, abortion is one of the few in which the Democratic position is also the majority position. If we feel the need to pander on some culture war issue, why pick this one?


The odd thing is that this is a social issue where I'm more comfortable with policy changes than I am with rhetoric changes. I can live with parental notification, for example, but mainly because I think abortion really should be treated like any other medical procedure. And I don't object to bans on late-term abortions (with appropriate safeguards, of course), but that's perfectly consistent with Roe v. Wade.

Rhetoric, on the other hand, really can't be watered down very much. You either believe in a right to choose or you don't. I don't see how you can tap dance around a core principle like that.

That's about right. Can't someone actually get the Democrats to pay attention to what is really going on?

What's the real story of the season? Over at Daily Kos we get to the heart of the matter: the Bushies are doing what they do best - using a PR campaign to create a false "reality" and deflect attention from the ugly truth of what their policies have brought us. No, the worsening war in Iraq is of little consequence (Rummy assures us that things are getting better), no, the real "war" is the one that secular-liberals are waging against Christmas.

CJR has more on this non-story:

When not flogging the same three stories -- two of which are essentially false -- to create the appearance of a genuine national trend, the media is busy interviewing the same outraged representatives of a few conservative family groups trying to put the Christ back in Christmas. The Alliance Defense Fund, for example, has been cited in numerous stories in the past week, as has the Rutherford Institute, another conservative group.

We're reluctant to take the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in this morality play, but in the course of digesting over four dozen of these faux stories, the words "Bah, Humbug!" just kept coming to mind.

So we have a suggestion for all the reporters and editors who are keeping this one alive: Instead of worrying so much about putting Christ back in Christmas, you might start thinking about putting news back in "news reports."

And major "news" outlets continue to treat this as a serious topic. Pathetic.

George Bush would have us believe that Social Security is ready to collapse unless we start funnelling money into the stock market. Paul Krugman on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" explains why this is all a load of horse manure. Enjoy.

The John Prine lyric from thirty years ago has never been so apt. We live in a time when all major organs of "news" are really full of crappy and manipulative propaganda that supports the very worst of the options available to us. Left to our own devices - without the prodding and unsolicited directives we are given each day by the corporate media - we might achieve some reasonable solution to real problems. As it is, we are encouraged to respond to phony crises and agonize over non-existant or greatly exaggerated threats.

In the first move of the upcoming battle of economic reality against conservative idealogical fantasy, the Bush administration has hosted an Economic "Summit." That they are dealing strictly in fantasy is made clear by calling this staged propaganda performance a summit. Since it wasn't a meeting of heads of state - or even high level experts - it can hardly be called a summit. In fact, since the very bold sign in front of the podium proclaimed "Challanges" - a mis-spelling of "Challenges" - these guys lose a lot of credibility right up front for failing to even bother with basic editing. If they don't care enough to spell their stupid slogans correctly what faith should we put in their message?

Not much. All depends on not paying close attention to what is really being said. The "summit" was divided between two themes - taxes and Social Security. When the Bushies were talking about taxes they had to pretend that everything was wonderful with the economy and that the continued reduction in tax cuts would make things even better, but when talking about Social Security they had to pretend that the economy was on the verge of collapse and that we are facing a real crisis (though far in the future). The ability to maintain two such opposite positions at the same time is a clear indication of lack of contact with reality.

These are hard times and SOB is not alone in being unable to articulate a coherent expression of where we are and where we should be heading. However, there are a number of topics I have been wrestling with and will deal with shortly, but as a preview, please accept this short list as an overview of what I think we will have to deal with in 2005:

1. Civil War in Iraq - The Sunnis and Kurds are calling for postponing the elections and the (majority) Shias are demanding that they remain on schedule. Thus the stage is set for full fledged civil war no matter what position the American occupying forces take.

2. Economic melt-down for the U. S. - the continuing decline of the dollar will encourage European and Asian pressure that will contribute to a major destabilization of the currency and a concommitant collapse of business.

3. Fracture of the Republican Party - now that all power resides in Republican hands all members will be demanding their own share and the forces that led to Republican unity over the last few decades will collapse as each demands what he is due; Democrats will not be able to exploit this situation - at least not for a while.

4. Diplomatic isolation of the United States - the new SecState will offend and further alienate foreign powers even as public opinion abroad continues to collapse.

5. And, of course, the Rich will get richer and the Poor will get poorer and the media will treat it as just the way things are. Nothing to be done.

Why Should We Accept This?

OK, just asking, but what is with Kerry to give up without even a close look at what seems to have gone wrong? Why not at least spend a day or two reviewing the various problems and reported cliches? Why not demand some independent analysis of what seem to be very odd discrepencies between exit polls and final tallies? Why the early surrender?

I am not amused. And I am not alone.

CHECK OUT THIS EXCELLENT PIECE BY SAM SMITH

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FALSE FAITH DEFEATS LOUSY WORKS
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Sam Smith

ONE OF THE THINGS that happened on Tuesday was that the Republicans'
false faith trumped the Democrats' lousy works. Since the former was an
act of imagination and the latter a product of experience, the odds
inevitably favored the former.

But both sides were lying. After all, what sort of moral values
considers an unborn fetus sacred but not the lives of 100,000 innocent
Iraqis? And what sort of life on earth can the Democrats offer as an
alternative to the millennium if they haven't one good new idea in three
decades?

We are, some theologians will tell you, in the midst of the fourth
"Great Awakening" in this country's history, periods in which life
becomes so complex and frightening that there is a rush to pristine
promises in various guises. The conservative Ralph Reed gave a fair
thumbnail on PBS a few years back: "The first great awakening gave rise
to the revolutionary struggle. The second great awakening. . . some of
the most uproarious revivals that have ever been seen in western
civilization, led to the formation of the American anti-slavery society.
Then, of course, the third Great Awakening of the 1890's leading to the
social gospel movement and the progressivism of which are Wilson and
Theodore Roosevelt, and today historian Robert Fogel has argued a fourth
Great Awakening has begun with rising church attendance among baby
boomers, and this shift to evangelicalism and fundamentalism of which
the electronic church was such an important part."

The range of beliefs in such awakenings can be quite broad; in fact some
scholars believe the latest Great Awakening began in the 1960s with the
myriad spiritual adventures of the left. William G. McLoughlin, a
history professor at Brown, wrote a book in 1978 that placed within the
phenomenon the Beats, the popularity of Zen, and “experimental
life–styles associated with drugs, the hippies, the practice of
occultism, and rock concerts.”

Wrote David Carlin (at the time both a philosophy professor and chair of
his local Democratic Party), "The famous Woodstock concert of 1969 was a
kind of sacramental event for the Fourth Awakening, analogous to the
revivalistic camp meeting of earlier awakenings."

If so, it has produced an ironic twist: the spirit of the '60s has
almost disappeared and the Democratic Party is being beaten and kicked
by people who claim moral values but ignore every part of the Bible save
that which condemns the nature or habits of people they don't like
anyway.

While such periods are clearly a misery to go through, there is some
light to be found at the end of the tunnel vision: these awakenings tend
to be preludes to some big leap in American social and political change
including the American Revolution, the abolition movement, and 20th
century social democracy.

As Rhys H. Williams has put it: "Many have credited awakenings with
helping to foster religious pluralism, advance ideas sympathetic to
political democracy and social reform, and forge an American national
identity. More contentious is the claim that awakenings are cyclical,
representing a religious response to social and cultural change. They
help believers come to terms with the stress that change produces and
adjust the culture to new modes of societal organization."

And they are not unique to the American republic. Both the spread of
totem poles in the Northwest, and the long nosed god icons that swept
through Native American cultures that had little other contact, were in
part reactions to stress created among American Indians by European
terrorists unsecuring their homeland. And residents of Pacific islands
disrupted by World War II and its aftermath engaged in what came to be
known as "cargo cults" with salvation supposedly dropping from planes
like the crates they had seen so often.

This, however, is small comfort to those living through one of these
eras of hysteria, hate, and hoopla. Further, there is the problem that
Charles McKay outlined back in 1852: "Men, it has been well said, think
in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only
recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

As a skeptic who neither partakes in the blood of Christ nor has danced
with a Sufi while, say, making the slow transition from Presbyterianism
to Buddhism, I sometimes think of what is happening as a struggle
between two sects, rather than between the faithful and non-believers.
On the one hand, we have those enveloped in a retro version of
Christianity devised by some highly successful hustlers and charlatans
and, on the other, we have liberals who seem to believe that politics
begins and ends with abortion and gay rights, and in a cargo cult that
delivers salvation through SUVs, Botox injections, the right wine, and
Vanity Fair. It is rare anymore to hear liberals speak of things like
pensions, health care, or labor issues. Thus they have little to talk
about to the fundamentalists save the issues that divide them so
sharply.

This, of course, is not how it is explained and that just makes it all
the more difficult to wend our way out of this mess. The common thread
across all forms of faith these days - conservative and liberal - is
certainty and a contempt for those who do not share it. Our recovery,
however, will begin not with triumph over our tormentors but with the
discovery of tolerance for them.

Tolerance is a word much out of favor these days yet its organization
and promulgation is the underlying genius of the American system. It has
been also described as the concept of reciprocal liberty: I can't have
my freedom unless I give you yours. It is based not so much on shared
values as indifference to unshared values.

Once you decide it isn't your business to save, control, or correct a
born-again Christian or, conversely, two gays headed for the altar, life
not only becomes simpler but considerably more pleasant. Which is why I
tell conservatives complaining about gay marriage, "Then don't marry a
gay;" and liberals who complain about born-agains, "Look we've always
had Christian fundamentalists in this country; we just used to call them
things like 'New Deal Democrats.'"

The magnificence of America lies in the opportunity not to have to agree
with other Americans. The Christian right has clearly forgotten this,
but so have liberals who send all sorts of unconscious signals that
they will be no less vigorous in imposing their values should they get
the chance. Both these messages, because of their implicit aggression,
become extremely threatening to the other side.

But what if we talked about, negotiated, and even possibly celebrated
the fact that we are and probably will be different from each other? Not
in a smarmy, goody-goody way but as citizens honestly talking about our
differences and seeking mutual accommodation and safe ground.
Impossible? If they managed in South Africa and in the American South,
maybe we can do it, too.

If we tried, one thing we might soon discover is that it would be
advantageous to exclude the media and the politicians from the
discussion. They are, after all, the ones with the greatest vested
interest in the fight.

And what exactly do we have to lose? The stability of views on abortion
in recent years, for example, suggests very little. We have, in fact,
adopted an approach to these issues that sanctify our own beliefs
without moving them forward much.

And when a politician of the Democratic Party actually reached out to
those who weren't like himself earlier this year, the liberal
establishment was quick to trash him. Howard Dean's desire to get the
votes of people who drove pickups with confederate flag stickers was
excoriated by Kerry and Gephardt. Yet Kerry could have used some of
these guys the other day.
By any traditional Democratic standards, this constituency should be a
natural. After all, what more dramatically illustrates the failure of
two decades of corporatist economics than how far these white males have
been left behind? Yet because some of them still cling to the myths the
southern white establishment taught their daddies and their
granddaddies, Gephardt and Kerry didn't think they qualified as
Democratic voters.
It is also interesting to note, as William Saletan did in Slate, that
Dean received quite a different reception before he became the
frontrunner. Here's what he told the Democratic National Committee last
February:
"I intend to talk about race during this election in the South. The
Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us,
and I'm going to bring us together. Because you know what? White folks
in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the
back ought to be voting with us because their kids don't have health
insurance either, and their kids need better schools too."
Wrote Saletan: "I have that speech on videotape. I'm looking at it right
now. As Dean delivers the line about Confederate flags, the whole front
section of the audience stands and applauds. It's a pretty white crowd,
but in slow-motion playback, I can make out three black people in the
crowd and two more on the dais, including DNC Vice Chair Lottie
Shackelford. Every one of them is standing and applauding. As Dean
finishes his speech, a dozen more black spectators rise to join in an
ovation. They show no doubt or unease about what Dean meant."
In fact, the best way to change people's minds about matters such as
ethnic relations is to put them in situations that challenge their
presumptions. Like joining a multicultural political coalition that
works. It's change produced by shared experience rather than by moral
revelation. Martin Luther King understood this as he admonished his
aides to include in their dreams the hope that their present opponents
would become their future friends. And he realized that rules of correct
behavior were insufficient: "Something must happen so as to touch the
hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the
law says it, but because it is natural and right."
This doesn't happen logically, it doesn't come all at once, and it
doesn't come with pretty words. Tom Lowe of the Jackson Progressive
voted a few years ago in favor of a new Mississippi flag without the
confederate symbolism. But in retrospect, he wrote later, he realized
that the voters' rejection of the change was a honest reflection of
their state of mind: "Perhaps a time will come when we have truly put
aside our nasty streak of racism. When that time arrives, maybe we will
choose to replace the flag with something more representative of our
ideals. On the other hand, when we reach that point, we may no longer
care about the symbolism of the Confederate battle flag. Or perhaps we
will keep it for another reason: to make those of us that are white
humble by reminding us of our less than honorable past."
The decline the Democratic Party has been accelerated by the growing
number of American subcultures deemed unworthy by its advocates: gun
owners, church goers, pickup drivers with confederate flag stickers. Yet
the gun owner could be an important ally for civil liberties, the
churchgoer a voice for political integrity, the pickup driver a
supporter of national healthcare. Further, the greatest achievements of
the Democratic Party, both in terms of good legislation and votes, came
under presidents who were willing to deal with southern politicians far
more retrograde than your average Falwell follower. Today's liberals
never could have created the Great Society; they would have hated too
many of the people whose votes were necessary to make it happen.
The strange thing - strange that is to an era that believes that all
progress is the product of propaganda and salesmanship - is that taking
a more laisse faire attitude towards what others think offers greater
opportunity for antagonists to come together simply because they have
less to fear from each other.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't air gripes. In fact, one of the greatest
services the media could provide would be to end religion's exemption
from its standards of "objectivity," and treat any religion that engages
in politics as a political institution whose faith is worth no greater
honor than that of the Democratic National Committee. If we took the
media halo away from religion we would quickly discover that it is
religion that is currently at the heart of our global problems,
dangerously propelled by three fanatics abusing their alleged faith: bin
Laden, Bush, and Sharon. Moral values have put the entire world at risk.


But, as has been said, the powerful do what they will, and the weak do
what they must. And part of the latter in times of fear and uncertainty
is to find safety in faith, homilies, and congregations of the like
minded. Then the powerful exploit the anxiety of those living in the
caves of their souls, making it all that more difficult for them to find
the light again.

Our job, however, is not to resave them for rationalism, but to engage
in real politics: which is the art of getting people to think about the
right things, things like what is happening to their jobs, healthcare,
and housing costs. And if a gun-toting, abortion hating nun wants to
help you save the forest, to put her on the committee. Change comes when
the people who the powerful wish to keep apart discover their true
common interest.

There is no progress in polarity; the secret is in unexpected alliances.
It's way past time to find the issues around which they can form. And
then to make it happen.

U.S. Warplanes Pound Targets in Fallujah

There is an old addage that "Jobs seek tools" - perceived needs inspire those that must deal with them to search for tools to fix the problem. Thus the belief that Iraq possessed those scary "weapons of mass destruction" led the Bush administration to select the U. S. Military as its tool of choice to deal with the ugly job of protecting us from Saddam. Alas, once it was clear that Iraq did not possess any WMDs and the rationale for being there shifted to "bringing democracy", the military seemed to be the wrong instrument. Much embarrassment and confusion followed. But the corollary to "Jobs seek tools" is that "Tools seek jobs." The very heavy presence of the military begged for a mission. The Bush administration found it one - the "pacification" of Iraq in preparation for "free" elections next year. Those of us who are old enough to remember how successful "pacification" was in Viet Nam are not encouraged by this.

Fallujah's crime is that it doesn't want us there. How can we not understand that? We wouldn't want them here! Our response is that until they quit killing us we will kill them. Their position is that as long as we are in their country and trying to kill them, they will seek to kill us. Sounds like Catch-22 to me.

I somehow really didn't think it could get any worse. In fact, I had a false sense of confidence that things were bound to get better because almost everyone I spoke to was truely sick of Bush. I thought we were due for a change for the better. Alas. Now we face the very real possibility that America as we knew her is doomed.

SOB and Ms SOB had the good fortune to have tickets to the final concert of the Vote for Change tour, an effort to raise money for ACT (America Coming Together), a progressive group dedicated to voter registration. This is one of the few occassions where the much overused term "awsome" actually fails to fully capture the magnitude of the event - John Melancamp, Bonnie Raitt, Keb Mo, Jackson Browne, REM, the Dixie Chicks, James Taylor, the Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and more, including Tim Robbins who just appeared on stage singing harmony. The MCI Center holds 21,000 people and they were all really into the event. The show, broadcast live on the Sundance Channel, started at 7:00 PM and ended at 12:25 AM, with a sold out house on their feet for the final numbers that featured all the evening's principals.

If Kerry doesn't win the election it won't be for lack of enthusiasm on the part of his supporters. As James Taylor said: "For all you undecided voters, just pay close attention to what the candidates say, and then vote for the smart one.

Amen.

Amid controversy, Afghan vote results tallied: Karzai challengers boycott, claiming fraud and incompetence

Imagine that. Right out of the gate the Afghans manage a truely American style election with charges of voter fraud and corruption and a general feeling that the American backed candidate, Ahmid Karzi, would be "elected" no matter what. So why should we be suspicious of a "free" election in Afghanistan? Ted Rall, in A Laughably Fake Election in Afghanistan provides a partial answer:

Afghanistan will again preview future failure in Iraq on October 9, when the United States will hold its first occupation-era national election. A real Afghan election? Not now; not in 20 years.

Afghanistan doesn't even have a government. Puppet president/former Unocal oil consultant Hamid Karzai is the weak, ineffectual mayor of Kabul. As Agence France reports, "Karzai has tried and largely failed to extend his control outside the capital of Kabul and into medieval-era provinces which remain under the sway of regional warlords." In 95 percent of the country, the warlords and their thuggish commanders issue visas to travel through their districts and charge entry fees to travelers. And the Taliban are back. U.S. military officers have already ceded several large provinces to Taliban governors.

And just for grins, with no real national media, how would most Afghan voters even get to know anything about any of the candidates? Just asking.

Afghan bureaucracy is non-existent. Afghans don't have passports, driver's licenses or national ID cards. Representatives of the Karzai government can't travel freely, nor do they know who lives in their country, since they have never taken a census. Estimates of the total population vary widely, between 24 and 28 million. Millions more live in in Iran and Pakistan; absentee ballots are impossible because Afghanistan doesn't have a postal system. To add to the fun, many Afghans are like Madonna; they only use one name. Because there are no phones or electricity to allow officials to crosscheck records, Madonna from Kabul can easily register as Madonna from Mazar-e-Sharif and Madonna from Kandahar. The Bushies brag that 12 million Afghans registered to vote; they leave out that only 10 million are eligible.

Is Bushworld a great fantasy, or what?

While it isn't getting the media attention I would have expected, a judge today has directed NY Times reporter Judith Miller to jail for refusing to identify the administration figures who contacted her with information that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. Miller, of course, maintains that she cannot reveal her sources because to do so would mean that whistle blowers would not be willing to come forward and - in her words - "the public would not be informed."

Well, where to start? A real case could be made that without Judith Miller's exaggerated reporting about Iraq's mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction (mostly based on lies from Ahmed Chalabi and his followers) we would never have gone to war in Iraq. She has never admitted to any mistake despite having virtually all of her frontpage extravaganzas revealled to be so much hot air. Now she is refusing to identify federal criminals who attempted to use journalists in Bush's war against his enemies. In the whole ugly Iraq situation Miller has been a player and not a reporter, a role she continues in this legal grandstanding.

SOB was so excited by the vigorous VP 'debate' that he went to sleep after the first hour. Commentators this morning assure him that he missed some really good stuff, but what he saw was so shallow that it's hard to imagine it getting better.

See, for me the problem is that the two parties have moved so close together that they can't really clash on most issues. The Dems want to fault the Repugs for the 'way' they went to war in Iraq - as if the war makes any sense - which it clearly doesn't. Then they want to claim that they will be able to fight the 'war on terror' better, as if the 'war' on terror were something real rather than a bad figure of speech.

There are many real issues that the American public needs to hear about in this election season, but what the two parties are giving us is total crap. I really want Bush and his whole crew out - but the Democractic opposition is not much of an alternative. They promise to be more hawkish on Iraq, more supportive of Israel against the Palistenians, more 'whatever' is required to be alert to 'evil' in our midst. This is not the set of choices I want. This is nasty nonsense. And we deserve better.

SOB is hold up in an ugly motel room in East Hartford, CT watching the pre-Veep debate coverage. It's enough to make one scream; hours of idiotic talking heads predicting what will or won't happen in just a couple of hours. What's the point? Most of this talk is nonsense and will be invalidated as soon as the actual debate happens. Give it a rest and wait and see what actually happens.

School invite to first lady yanked

A couple of years ago, Laura Bush cancelled a White House poetry event because some of the poets invited had publicly said they would take the occassion to read anti-war poems. The response was the creation of the organization Poets Against the War and lots of negative publicity for the criticism averse first family. Now the tables have been turned and Laura Bush as been dis-invited from a reading in a public school because of her husband's stand on the assault weapons ban:

Hubbard Woods School officials last week withdrew an invitation to first lady Laura Bush to spend 30 minutes reading to school children after meeting resistance from local Democrats and gun-control advocates.

Invoking memories of a shooting rampage at the school 16 years ago, members of two gun-control lobby groups told the school's principal, Maureen Cheever, there was no place in the "sacred" halls of Hubbard Woods School for a representative of the Bush administration, which they argued has a lax stance on gun control.

Seems that what goes around comes around.

Even the Media Sees the 'World' Through Bush's Eyes

One of the problems in watching the debates last night was in seeing how far right the Bush administration has skewed the terms discourse. John Kerry had to accept numerous ideologically slanted postitions in order to even have a basis for debate. This gives an unjust advantage to the Republican zealots from the start and is a hard thing to counter because it requires a different debate on its own terms, and one the media is not willing to engage in.

By way of example, consider this story in CNN online, "U.S.: 109 insurgents killed in major offensive":

In the largest operation seen in Iraq's Sunni Triangle city in months, an estimated 3,000 U.S. troops moved into Samarra late Thursday. It was a response to what the United States called "repeated and unprovoked attacks by anti-Iraqi forces."

The article does not bother to explore the implications of our government maintaining that its attack is in "response" to "unprovoked attacks." Somehow we are all expected to accept that 130,000 U. S. troops on Iraqi soil and daily bombings of Iraqi cities don't constitute a provocation. I am constantly amazed at the seeming inability of ordinary Americans to put themselves in the place of those we are supposidly 'helping' through violence and force. If the shoe were on the other foot, would most Americans stand passively by while foreign troops attacked our fellow countrymen and told us it was for our own good?

Isn't it time for some real truth telling and honest assessment of what is happening in the world? Bush claims to be a Christian; is a full out military assault on a basically civilian population what he thinks a "good Samaratin" sould do in Samarra?

A Great Communicator Bush is NOT

It was with some trepidation that I approached the presidential debates last night. I have come to cringe when hearing John Kerry's constant pompous upward inflection, ending long run-on sentences that tend to confuse rather than clarify. Of course, I have long since simply given up hearing the annoying nonsense Bush parrots over and over with his idiotic self satisfied smirk - proud to have managed a complete sentence that some staffer crafted for him. Much to my surprise, the debates were a welcome change. Kerry kept his answers brief and emphatic and Bush was - if this is possible - even worse than normal, appearing annoyed and petulant at having his judgement questioned and actually having to explain his reasons for being such a jerk.

Kerry clearly "won", but whether that will make much of a difference is another question.

Repeatedly in recent days our faux president has proclaimed that things in Iraq are getting better and better. This is in keeping with his inablility to ever see anything that he doesn't want to see. Contrary to his rosy prognostications, the professional assessment of the situation in Iraq is bleak:

A growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse, and the path to success much more tenuous, than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials, according to former and current government officials and assessments over the past year by intelligence officials at the CIA and the departments of State and Defense.

While President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say.

This is one of the most frustrating things about those who maintain that they are going to vote for Bush because he is "stronger on defense." When you can't even distinguish between things getting better and things getting worse, how are you going to make a difference? For Bush it's all PR. The reality doesn't matter, only what is said (and repeated by the media) is "real."

In a similar vein, Prof. Juan Cole takes Bush to task for pretending that changing ones mind is a bad thing in On the Virtues of Changing the Mind:

It is depressing for me to see George W. Bush on the stump doing a stand-up comedy routine about John Kerry, parroting the predictable line that Kerry has had more than one opinion about Iraq. Serious news reporters who have gone back over the record find that Bush's charge is without merit, and that Kerry has been consistent on his Iraq position.

The thing that most worries me is not when a politician's thinking evolves on a subject and he changes his mind. It is when a politician refuses even to consider changing his mind. Such inflexibility is almost always a sign of rigidity, which can be catastrophic in the most powerful man in the world.
. . .
When you are deep in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging. Whatever Bush has been doing in Iraq for the past 18 months demonstrably has not worked. He desperately needs a change of mind on these policies. He needs to try something else.

The image of him giggling about Kerry changing his mind on Iraq takes on a chilling aspect when you think of him as Captain Joseph Hazelwood of the Exxon Valdez. Hazelwood told the helsman to steer right and then went to bed. The helsman didn't steer far enough right, and plowed into the Bligh Reef and disaster. Part of the reason was that corporate cost cutting had left the ship without radar. If you think about it, in fact, a wrecked oil tanker is a good image of Bush administration Iraq policy.

Bush should stop slapping his thigh and guffawing about that flipflopper Kerry and being to think seriously about changing his mind on some key policies himself. Otherwise, an Iraq as failed state could pose a supreme danger to the United States, the kind of danger that the Bligh Reef posed to the Exxon Valdez.

The truth is, I suspect that Bush doesn't really care about Iraq or any of its consequences. He plans to use it for political purposes and then, when he can, walk away and claim that the Iraqis have been "freed." If the press continues to give him the benefit of the doubt, he will probably get away with it. After all, no one is making him face the ugly reality of his aborted policy in Afghanistan.

Damn! Gone a week and when I resurface our presidential dipstick has a lead in the polls and Dems are making like Chicken Little. I just can't afford to turn my back.

While away from the blog world I visited with my daughter and her family. SOB's son-in-law is not in favor of Bush but is having a hard time getting enthusiastic about Kerry. Well get in line. Still, he asks why he should think that Kerry would do any better at defense than Bush. In anwser, I can do no better than present this piece by Matthew Yglesias Optimist Club:

While the official party line out of the White House -- and parroted by most of the right's pundits -- continues to be that everything's fine in Iraq (also: in Baghdad, the grass is blue and the sky is purple), your more intelligent conservative writers have shifted to a more, shall we say, nuanced view. Iraq may be, in the words of The National Review's Jonah Goldberg, "a mess," in large part because of the president's bungling, but that's not necessarily any reason to vote against him. "So sure," Goldberg concluded, "[George W.] Bush hasn't done everything right -- never mind perfectly -- in Iraq. [Winston] Churchill didn't conduct World War II perfectly every time either."

Max Boot, house neoconservative on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, reached for an analogy to Abraham Lincoln, who "is remembered, of course, for winning the Civil War and freeing the slaves" despite the fact that "along the way he lost more battles than any other president."

On the surface, it's a fair enough point. Mistakes happen, and perfection is not a reasonable standard for political leadership. The problem with this case for Bush, however, is precisely that it isn't Bush's case for Bush. Instead, the president wants us to re-elect him because he's a flawless leader whose mistake-free policies have created a lovely situation in Iraq, where freedom is blossoming and the war has made Americans safer.

At an April 16 prime-time press conference, Bush was asked "After [September 11], what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?" If the president wanted to admit to the American people that he had made some mistakes while also reassuring us that he, like the great leaders of the past, had learned from those mistakes and was prepared to lead us to ultimate victory, this would have been a good moment.

Instead we got, "You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hasn't yet." These are, perhaps, the words of a hardened liar, or just of a self-deluded man who has chosen to surround himself with sycophants, but in the tradition of Lincoln and Churchill they aren't.

Another good opportunity was present in late July, when the president received a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) reflecting the consensus view of the intelligence community that the range of possible outcomes in Iraq was bleak to very bleak. Instead, the White House sat on the report for months until it was leaked to The New York Times in September. When simply hiding the NIE from the public was no longer possible, Bush explained that the CIA was "just guessing" and mischaracterized the content of the report, saying that under one scenario for Iraq, "life could be better." In fact, the report stated that, at best, things would stay the same.

On Saturday, Knight-Ridder obtained a report from the Iraqi Health Ministry on civilian casualties, which revealed that more than 3,000 Iraqis have been killed since April 5. Worse, U.S. and Iraqi government forces have killed twice as many civilians as have the insurgents they're supposed to be protecting the population from. The response from Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who's been hanging out in the United States and operating as a part of the administration’s spin machine, was to rule that the Health Ministry will stop releasing casualty figures.

Boot wrote that "most of the Union's failures were because of inept generalship, but it was Lincoln who chose the generals." And so he did. But Lincoln, famously, also fired the generals. Lots of them. When Lincoln decided that a general was making mistakes, he would get rid of him and find someone new. If the new guy proved to be no good, he would be sacked as well. Meanwhile, commanders who proved themselves competent at lower levels found themselves getting promoted. As a result, the Union shifted strategy over time, and by the end of the war, solid leadership was in place in key positions (even though the bulk of the most talented high-level officers of the antebellum Army had gone over to the Confederacy).

By contrast, Bush has fired precisely no one for making mistakes. And why would anyone be? After all, Bush maintains that no mistakes were made, or at least none noteworthy enough for him to remember. Most of the errors that Bush won't acknowledge were caused by his decision to take advice from the vice president, the secretary of defense, and people on their staffs instead of listening to the sound advice provided by officers in the State Department and the CIA. Dick Cheney, of course, is still on the ticket for re-election, and the president's standard stump speech describes him as "a man of great experience, sound judgment … a man who can get the job done." Cheney certainly is experienced, but if the president thinks his judgment has been sound, we can be sure that a second term will mean getting the job done by making the same mistakes over and over again. Donald Rumsfeld hasn't been fired. Instead, Bush says he's "the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had."

Even such shrill left-wing partisans as The Weekly Standard have suggested that Rumsfeld should go, but Bush will have none of it. Even more frightening is the persistence in office of some of Rumsfeld's subordinates, notably Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. General Tommy Franks, who commanded the Iraq War and has endorsed Bush's re-election, describes Feith as "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Feith's office was responsible for bad intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, and worse intelligence on Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda. His subordinates have been arranging secret unauthorized meetings with a shady Iranian arms dealer despite repeated warnings from the CIA that the man in question is not to be trusted. Worst of all, Feith and his subordinates were responsible for torpedoing the work of the State Department's Future of Iraq Project and, instead, structuring the occupation around a too-small force and Ahmad Chalabi, an unpopular exile who turns out to have been doing some freelance spy work for Iran.

None of the guilty parties has been fired, though the situation is so out of control that several are under investigation by the FBI's counterintelligence division. Nor have they learned from their mistakes. Instead, Newsweek has reported on their plan to repeat the Iraq debacle in Iran, to "oust the existing regime, swiftly install a pro-U.S. government in its place (extracting the new regime's promise to renounce any nuclear ambitions) and get out." Naturally enough, the plan -- like its predecessor in Iraq -- "horrifies U.S. military leaders."

And rightly so. But these are the men in whose hands Bush has placed U.S. defense policy. And it's not as if no one has been fired from the administration. General Eric Shinseki, who correctly estimated that Bush's plans for Iraq involved too few troops, was forced out. Larry Lindsey, who correctly estimated that Bush was understating the costs of the venture, was fired. Jay Garner, Iraq's first civilian administrator, was fired for his entirely warranted skepticism about plans to bring a crash program of neoliberal privatization of the Iraqi economy.

In light of all this, the president should, for once, be taken at his word. Where Goldberg and Boot see errors to be corrected, Bush sees flawless policy-making. Where the Standard sees a stubborn, inept secretary of defense, Bush sees a legendary leader. If re-elected, Bush will be confirmed in all of these beliefs, employing the same strange logic that led Cheney to say that Ronald Reagan "proved deficits don't matter." If you agree with the president about all this, you have good reason to welcome his small, but real, lead in the polls. If not, then, well, not. The idea that he'll do something different in the future, though, is just wishful thinking.

SOB is going on vacation for the next two weeks so there will be no posting until the end of September or the first of October. It seems like a perfect time to be leaving the country to enjoy the sites, tastes, and pace of "Old Europe." With any luck I will not see ANY 'news' for weeks. That should at least allow my blood pressure - if not my attitude - to stabilize.

For those unable to cut and run in this worst of all political seasons, why not take John Prine's advice, "Blow up your TV, throw away your paper. . ." If there was ever a good time for turning our backs on the corrupt media it is now.

Till next month, take care.

Time to Be Honest on Iraq

"Anonymous" - the CIA analyst who just published the best analysis of our anti terrorism policies (Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism)has this take on the situation in Iraq:

The death toll in Iraq has now exceeded 1,000 U.S. soldiers, more than 640 of whom are combat casualties after President Bush declared "mission accomplished" aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Casualties in war are inevitable. And the American public is willing to tolerate such casualties if our troops are defending the country against real threats, such as al-Qaeda or the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that supported and harbored al-Qaeda.

But Iraq was a phantom menace, so 1,000 dead U.S. soldiers is not only tragic – it is needless. The question now is how many more U.S. servicemen and women must die in a quixotic quest to create democracy in Mesopotamia?

Read the rest of the article here.

Bin Laden's Vision Becoming Reality

Professor Juan Cole, ever the voice of informed commentary on the complexities of the Middle East situation, has this unsettling take on Osama bin Laden and Bush's lame 'war on terror':

In order to evaluate the aftermath of Sept. 11, we first must understand that event. What did al-Qaeda intend to achieve? Only if we understand that can we gauge their success or failure.

From the point of view of al-Qaeda, the Muslim world can and should be united into a single country. They believe that it once had this political unity, under the early caliphs. Even as late as the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman state ruled much of the Middle East, and the Ottoman sultans had begun making claims to be caliphs (Muslim popes) from about 1880.

From al-Qaeda's point of view, the political unity of the Muslim world was deliberately destroyed by a one-two punch. First, Western colonial powers invaded Muslim lands and detached them from the Ottoman Empire or other Muslim states. They ruled them brutally as colonies, reducing the people to little more than slaves serving the economic and political interests of the British, French, Russians, etc. France invaded Algeria in 1830. Great Britain took Egypt in 1882 and Iraq in 1917. Russia took the Emirate of Bukhara and other Central Asian territories in the 1860s and forward. Second, they formed these colonies into Western-style nation-states, often small and weak ones, so that the divisive effects of the colonial conquests have lasted.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was not an unprecedented event from the point of view of bin Laden and his followers. Far from it. It was only the latest in a long series of Western predations in Muslim lands. The British had conquered Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and had unilaterally opened Palestine to Jewish immigration, with the colonized Palestinians unable to object. The Russians had taken the Caucasus and Chechnya in the early nineteenth century, and had so brutally repressed the Muslims under their rule that they probably killed hundreds of thousands and expelled even more to the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey).

From al-Qaeda's point of view, the Soviet attempt to absorb Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of the colonial venture. They demonstrated that even a superpower can be forced to withdraw from a Muslim land if sufficient guerrilla pressure is put on it.

Bin Laden sees the Muslim world as continually invaded, divided and weakened by outside forces. Among these are the Americans in Saudi Arabia and the Israelis in geographical Palestine. He repeatedly complained about the occupation of the three holy cities, i.e., Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

For al-Qaeda to succeed, it must overthrow the individual nation-states in the Middle East, most of them colonial creations, and unite them into a single, pan-Islamic state. But Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, al-Jihad al-Islami, had tried very hard to overthrow the Egyptian state, and was always checked. Al-Zawahiri thought it was because of U.S. backing for Egypt. They believed that the U.S. also keeps Israel dominant in the Levant and backs Saudi Arabia's royal family.

Al-Zawahiri then hit upon the idea of attacking the "far enemy" first. That is, since the United States was propping up the governments of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., all of which al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow so as to meld them into a single, Islamic super-state, then it would hit the United States first.

The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the U.S. fleet so that they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum. The U.S. was going to cut off imperial Japan from petroleum, and without fuel the Japanese could not maintain their empire in China and Korea. So they pushed the U.S. out of the way and took an alternative source of petroleum away from the Dutch (who then ruled what later became Indonesia).

Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the Palestinians. Bin Laden wanted to move the timing of the operation up to spring of 2001 so as to "punish" the Israelis for their actions against the Palestinians in the second Intifada. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was mainly driven in planning the attack by his rage at Israel over the Palestinian issue. Another goal is to destroy the U.S. economy, so weakening it that it cannot prevent the emergence of the Islamic superpower.

Al-Qaeda wanted to build enthusiasm for the Islamic superstate among the Muslim populace, to convince ordinary Muslims that the U.S. could be defeated and they did not have to accept the small, largely secular, and powerless Middle Eastern states erected in the wake of colonialism. Jordan's population, for instance, is 5.6 million. Tunisia, a former French colony, is 10 million, less than Michigan. Most Muslims have been convinced of the naturalness of the nation-state model and are proud of their new nations, however small and weak. Bin Laden had to do a big demonstration project to convince them that another model is possible.

Bin Laden hoped the U.S. would timidly withdraw from the Middle East. But he appears to have been aware that an aggressive U.S. response to 9/11 was entirely possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the U.S. into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the U.S. military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri's recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy.

The U.S. cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground.

Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate bin Laden's wisdom and foresight.

After the Iraq War, bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush even in a significantly secular Muslim country such as Turkey. This is a bizarre finding, a weird turn of events. Turks didn't start out with such an attitude. It grew up in reaction against U.S. policies.

It remains to be seen whether the U.S. will be forced out of Iraq the way it was forced out of Iran in 1979. If so, as al-Zawahiri says, that will be a huge victory. A recent opinion poll did find that over 80 percent of Iraqis want an Islamic state. If Iraq goes Islamist, that will be the biggest victory the movement has had since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Islamist Iraq might well be able ultimately to form a joint state with Syria, starting the process of the formation of the Islamic superstate of which bin Laden dreams.

If the Muslim world can find a way to combine the sophisticated intellectuals and engineers of Damascus and Cairo with the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf, it could well emerge as a 21st century superpower.

Bin Laden's dream of a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate may well be impossible to accomplish. But with the secular Ba'ath gone, it could be one step closer to reality. If you add to the equation the generalized hatred for U.S. policies (both against the Palestinians and in Iraq) among Muslims, that is a major step forward for al-Qaeda. In Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda has emerged as a dissident political party. Before it had just been a small group of Bin Laden's personal acolytes in Afghanistan and a handful of other countries.

Although the United States and its Pakistani ally have captured significant numbers of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a whole new generation of angry young Muslim men has been produced. Al-Qaeda has moved from being a concrete cell-based terrorist organization to being an ideal and a model, for small local groups in Casablanca, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and elsewhere.

The U.S. is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the U.S. has of its.

Of course, this is not the view that we will hear from the Bush Whitehouse, but then the Bushies have never had any use for facts - or for analysis that doesn't support their presupposisions. I think we need to retire these people.

Journalist killed on camera


While claiming we want to win over Irag's (and other Muslim's) support, we continue to act as though we can do spiteful things with impunity. Today we add another Arab journalist to the list of those we have assassinated while they were in the process of doing their job. The central moment of "The Control Room", the documentary about Al Jazeera, is the film of the American jet turning slowly and then firing on reporter Tareq Ayyoub. His death - caught on tape and broadcast repeatedly to the Muslim world - outweighs all the effort at winning hearts and minds we claim to be concernced with. Today we repeated this fiasco with a reporter and cameraman from Al Jazerra's prime competetor, Al-Arabiya:

A PALESTINIAN television journalist was killed today as he was giving a live report to camera on deadly clashes between US forces and insurgents in the heart of the Iraqi capital.

Residents of his home town in the West Bank watched in horror as Mazen al-Tomaisi, who worked for Saudi television Akhbariya and for the pan-Arab satellite channel Al-Arabiya, went down.
Mr Tomaisi, 28, was killed when a US helicopter fired missiles on a mob which had gathered round a US tank in Baghdad that had been set ablaze in a car bomb attack, one of a string of bombings across the capital today.

Blood spattered across the cameraman's lens and screams were heard by viewers of the Al-Arabiya report.

Mr Tomaisi, from the West Bank town of Idna, is the fourth Palestinian journalist killed in Iraq.

I know that I am something of a cynic, but this almost seems deliberate - as if the U. S. somehow wanted to instill just as much hatred as possible in the Muslim world. And who would benefit from hardening the lines of conflict?

It's Worse Than You Think

Over the last year we have heard numerous excuses aimed at making us believe the chaos and violence in Iraq were not really as bad as they seemed (it proved that the 'insurgents' were desperate - meaning we were really winning; it meant we could kill them there rather than here - the 'flypaper' theory; it wasn't as bad as Viet Nam - so it was nothing to worry about, etc). But the truth is that whatever is happening in Iraq has to be judged against the predictions made by Bush and his neocon advisors, who all assured us that deposing Saddam Hussein would result in a democratic, secular, market friendly country that would be a beacon to other countries in the Middle East. This has SO not happened. According to Newsweek:

As Americans debate Vietnam, the U.S. death toll tops 1,000 in Iraq. And the insurgents are still getting stronger.

"We're dealing with a population that hovers between bare tolerance and outright hostility," says a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. "This idea of a functioning democracy here is crazy. We thought that there would be a reprieve after sovereignty, but all hell is breaking loose."

It's not only that U.S. casualty figures keep climbing. American counterinsurgency experts are noticing some disturbing trends in those statistics. The Defense Department counted 87 attacks per day on U.S. forces in August—the worst monthly average since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. Preliminary analysis of the July and August numbers also suggests that U.S. troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties apparently took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting—a step up to phase three.

Another ominous sign is the growing number of towns that U.S. troops simply avoid. A senior Defense official objects to calling them "no-go areas." "We could go into them any time we wanted," he argues. The preferred term is "insurgent enclaves." They're spreading. Counterinsurgency experts call it the "inkblot strategy": take control of several towns or villages and expand outward until the areas merge. The first city lost to the insurgents was Fallujah, in April. Now the list includes the Sunni Triangle cities of Ar Ramadi, Baqubah and Samarra, where power shifted back and forth between the insurgents and American-backed leaders last week. "There is no security force there [in Fallujah], no local government," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. "We would get attacked constantly. Forget about it."

U.S. military planners only wish they could. "What we see is a classic progression," says Andrew Krepinevich, author of the highly respected study "The Army and Vietnam." "What we also see is that the U.S. military is not trained or organized to fight insurgencies. That was the deliberate choice after Vietnam. Now we look to be paying the price."

Whatever is happening, we aren't prepared to deal with it. And people are really going to vote for George W. Bush because of his record in the 'war on terror?' I may vomit.

Al Qaeda Hoped to Lure U. S. Into War

According to The Scotsman:

One of al Qaida's aims in its September 11 attacks on the US three years ago was to draw the west into military conflict on Arab soil, Prime Minister Tony Blair's former envoy to Iraq acknowledged today.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock's comments appeared to give some credence to the argument of critics of the Iraq War that the US and UK played into al Qaida's hands by launching last year's invasion. . . Sir Jeremy today said the allies had "suffered the consequences" in Iraq of al Qaida's determination to exploit the opportunities presented by a war on Arab soil.

This fits with what is charged in the new book Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, which makes the argument that virtually everything Bush has done since 9/11 plays into bin Laden's hands and ultimately serves us poorly. Whenever I hear people say they are voting for Bush because of his record fighting terrorism I have to wonder whether or not we are living on the same planet. The man has done nothing of value with respect to terrorism. By attacking and occupying a Muslim country that had done nothing to us we have inflamed the entire Islamic world and insured that terrorist attacks against us will continue until we are out of the middle east completely. The author of Imperial Hubris makes clear that we have only two options open to really end the threat of terrorism against us, (1) change our policies in the middle east (including our uncritical support of Israel against the Palestinians), or (2) wage all out war against all Muslim countries, inflicting such devastating destruction that those who survive - like native Americans - are decimated, exhausted and unable to fight back. Because our political "leaders" are unwilling to take either initiative, we will be subject to continued and repeated attacks until we are the ones too exhausted and weary to fight back. That day will come, and those who have chosen spin over factual analysis will be to blame. History will not be kind to them.

This point was even made in a recent video tape of Osama bin Laden's number two man:

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 figure in al-Qaeda, appeared in a new videotape yesterday, ridiculing U.S. forces as stuck in a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"In both countries, if they continue they will bleed to death and if they withdraw they lose everything," he said. "The Americans are hiding in their trenches and refuse to come out to face the mujahedeen. . . . Their defence is only to bomb by air, wasting U.S. money as they kick up dust."

See, these guys remember when the U. S. recruited them to do the same thing to the Russians in Afghanistan. We seem to have forgotten. It was Russia's "Viet Nam" and we have just invited ourselves for another helping of the same humble pie we had to endure when that last helicoptor lifted off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Keep in mind, none of this had to happen. Bush chose it and now there is no way to undo it. The Bush administration's only response is to try and hide the evidence of the worsening situation in Iraq and Afghanistan:

During August, Iraqi insurgents proved themselves more capable of inflicting casualties on American troops than ever before. Sixty-six American soldiers were killed and more than 1,100 were wounded, according to information released by the Department of Defense. But even with extensive coverage of the intense conflict in Najaf last month, the U.S. media was relatively quiet about the cost of battle to U.S. soldiers.

That cost has been steadily rising for months, says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a think tank in Washington specializing in military and international security issues. "The amount of combat that U.S. soldiers are seeing is going up, but the amount of combat the American public is seeing is going down," he says. "Iraq has almost turned into the forgotten war — it's just faded into the background."

The news on Tuesday of crossing the 1,000 marker for U.S. fatalities in Iraq has brought the conflict back into the headlines, at least temporarily. But since the transfer of power to Ayad Allawi's interim Iraqi government in June, deaths and casualties have risen every month: August was the bloodiest month in the conflict so far. A week into September, the situation looks no calmer; at least 14 soldiers have died in the last three days.

The steady rise in U.S. casualties can't be helpful to Bush's reelection campaign — which continues to stick to its message that the overall situation in Iraq is improving — and could have an impact on the homestretch of the election. To that end, Pike believes that Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense is being "economical with the truth" in order to downplay the increasing casualties. "The numbers they release are the smallest possible numbers that cover the most restricted possible definition," he says. "And they are being released as late as possible."
. . .
But are they being forthright about the rate of U.S. casualties?

I think if you look at the information being released, you can see all types of information not being covered. The Army gives out casualty evacuation numbers; the Marine Corps does not. And there's very little information being given out on combat stress casualties. The Army gives out information on how many psychiatric evaluations they've had from the war theater, but some significant multiple of that number must be in the combat stress care system in the theater. But they'd only evacuate somebody due to combat stress if all else failed. So we're getting an extremely incomplete portrait of what the human cost to American soldiers has been.

Out of sight, out of mind. This administration's approach to all problems is PR and managed image. If a soldier dies in the desert and no one knows, did it really happen?

Since I know I'm not alone in feeling great frustration trying to make sense of election year polls that seem to swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other, I offer this take by Mark Morford, Who The Hell Is "Undecided"? And Why do so Many Election Polls leave you Angry and Stupefied and Drunk? :

Polls are the genital warts of election year. They are the swarming gnats in your Jell-O salad, the dead escalator in your shopping mall, the sour milk in your coffee.

Because clearly, if you attempt to follow any of them, the CNN/USA Today/Gallup polls or the American Research Group polls or the Newsweek polls or the ABC News/Washington Post polls or the CBS News/New York Times polls or the Zogby polls, you can only conclude one thing:

These polls are designed solely to mangle your head and confound your synapses and elate you and titillate you and then plunge you into instant despair and then yank you back out at the last second like some sort of "Fear Factor" death-plunge moronism.

I know I am not alone in this sentiment.

Take, for example, how nearly every single poll listed above indicated that, just after the Democratic convention, John Kerry could not lose. He had gained huge numbers on a miserable and baffled Bush and every poll had Kerry nailing Shrub by anywhere from two to six percentage points and he had momentum and a clear message and broad support and it all meant it was Kerry's election to lose and woo-hoo go team break out the champagne.

But wait, not so fast. Because then BushCo had his big, tearful, gay-hatin', war-lovin' GOP convention and whored the 9/11 theme so shamelessly you could veritably feel the World Trade Center victims cringing in their graves.

Now, of course, polls indicate that those pro-Kerry numbers are exactly reversed. Bush's numbers are suddenly up again and have barely broken through that magic 50-percent ceiling that held him in check this past year as the nation had seemed to be finally realizing what an unmitigated embarrassment he was, and suddenly Kerry is lagging behind by those same few points. Hey, it's the polls, baby. They're not supposed to make any goddamn sense.

But they do force you to ask: What the hell just happened? What changed? Why do these polls flip so ridiculously?

Could it be true? Are there simply millions of voters out in this sad and divisive nation who are so gullible, so unsure, so unclear about who they want to vote for that one overblown Vegas-style political convention followed by numerous insidious smear campaigns maligning Kerry's Vietnam heroism could sway them that easily, back and forth and forth and back?

Perhaps this is an "elitist" question, or naive, or simple misguided. Maybe I need to read far more detailed statistical sociopolitical theory, which is about as much fun as having all your skin scraped off with a cheese grater. But I simply know of no one anywhere in my world, from family to friends to family friends to remote acquaintances to the guy who sells me my socks, who is undecided about this election.

Do these people exist? Or are the polls merely wicked phantasmagorical allegories designed by the media to boost sales and pump ratings and numb the intellect and ruin your appetite for reason? I know my answer.

SOB has stayed off line for weeks because the political environment has been so dismal and alien that to even attempt commenting on it reduces one to furious, inarticulate rage. We - all of us as citizens of this country - face very real problems that require tremendous energy and resources to resolve - and yet candidates of both parties ignore the reality we live in so that they can play games with words and symbols, hoping to gain points in a PR game of image and spin. Damn the reality, let's play to childish emotions and ignorant bias. Of course, this has been the Bush administration's entire game plan. Their whole approach to governance is Public Relations and image management. The maddening thing is that the Democrats have bought into the same game and rather than puncturing the empty balloon of Bush nonsense have attempted to float their own.

We were told last week by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card that President Bush views America as a "10-year-old child" in need of the sort of protection provided by a parent. Apart from the insult of being condescended to by the likes of George W. Bush, the idea that our un-elected president believes his job is to be the strong daddy of an infantile public is truely frightening. This guy has got to go. So, despite feeling very pessimistic about the Dem's ability to hold their own in what should be an easy fight (given that Bush has no record he can really run on) I offer this upbeat assessment by Caroline Arnold from Common Dreams, Why Kerry Will Win.

For the last couple of days many news stories have appeared that deal with an ongoing FBI investigation of possible espionage within the Bush Department of Defense. Today, several influential commentators weigh in with their interpretations of what is going on - and it isn't pretty. According to Prof. Juan Cole:

Franklin's movements reveal the contours of a rightwing conspiracy of warmongering and aggression, an orgy of destruction, for the benefit of the Likud Party, of Silvio Berlusconi's business in the Middle East, and of the Neoconservative Right in the United States. It isn't about spying. It is about conspiring to conscript the US government on behalf of a foreign power or powers.

Josh Marshal of Talking Points Memo has this take:

On Friday evening, CBS News reported that the FBI is investigating a suspected mole in the Department of Defense who allegedly passed to Israel, via a pro-Israeli lobbying organization, classified American intelligence about Iran. The focus of the investigation, according to U.S. government officials, is Larry Franklin, a veteran Defense Intelligence Agency Iran analyst now working in the office of the Pentagon's number three civilian official, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

The investigation of Franklin is now shining a bright light on a shadowy struggle within the Bush administration over the direction of U.S. policy toward Iran. In particular, the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's office, which more-senior administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up.

He points out that a key player in this story is Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar - a major part of the Iran-Contra debacle during the Reagan years. Old conspiracies never die, they just lie around waiting to bite a new generation in the ass.

Kiss Your Rights Goodbye

Gary Indiana takes the Bush in-justice department to task in a wonderful rant in the Village Voice:

It's a small, telling measure of G.W. Bush's contempt for the electorate that after Missouri voters chose to elect a deceased candidate rather than give Ashcroft another term, Bush promptly installed him as the country's chief law enforcement officer. When sworn in, Ashcroft was, appropriately, anointed with oil by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Ashcroft is, not to mince words, a lunatic. This would have been universally recognized at almost any other moment in American history. In the looking-glass world of "the war on terror," however, Ashcroft's religious manias haven't excited even mild censure from anyone in government. By all reports, Ashcroft runs the Department of Justice like a Pentecostal revival meeting, enjoining his staff to raise their voices in righteous hymns of his own composition.
. . .
Ashcroft inhabits the same mental universe as Osama bin Laden, which isn't as useful to a "war on terror" as it sounds. Like bin Laden, Ashcroft considers his job to be smiting the infidel, prosecuting Muslims and Arabs on an ethnic-religious basis. Many Homelanders conflate Muslims with terrorists, so Ashcroft has been able to do the same, forearmed by Jesus for the clash of civilizations. Alas, unlike bin Laden, Ashcroft really doesn't know much about our civilization, much less anyone else's.

Murdered by Capitalism

SOB has just finished John Ross's great autobiography+left wing history rant, "Murdered by Captialism: A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the American Left" and can't recommend it too highly. A very entertaining way to be introduced to the characters and significant acts of left wing politics from the late 19th Century to current times.

What exactly is so "radical" about Moqtada Sadr?


One of the frustrating things about our tame news media is the willingness to parrot silly explanations and forgo any serious analysis and reporting - and this is equally true of foreign and domestic "stories." One ongoing story that has never made any sense as presented is the fight between Moqtada Sadr - always characterized as "radical cleric" - and U. S. armed forces. "Arab Media Watch" tries to make sense of this situation:

As US forces run amok once again in Iraq, faithfully aided by the puppet regime of Iyad Allawi, the spotlight has again fallen on rebel Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr. While the media cannot resist calling him "radical", it is in fact very difficult to find any basis for this description.

A consistent centerpiece of his policies has been his staunch opposition to the occupation of his country. "There can be no politics under occupation, no freedom under occupation, no democracy under occupation," he said this month. What is so radical about that? If his Mehdi Army were patrolling and bombing London, New York or Washington, I would be astonished to find media descriptions of US and British resistance as "radical".

All one has to do is revisit the earliest news stories that even mention Sadr and it is clear that U. S. forces have brought the war to him and not the other way around. U. S. troops repeatedly fired into crowds of unarmed protesters - claiming fear for their lives. Such preemptive action eventually resulted in the followers of Sadr fighting back. It's almost as if the U. S. wanted to precipitate such a clash. And you have to ask "Why?" Who will profit from an ongoing armed conflict in Iraq? Who will pay? Certainly one casualty of this insurgency has been the prospect for a unified and peaceful Iraq - at least as long as U. S. troops remain. The Guardian of London sees things going badly for the Bush team:

Secular as well as Islamic anti-occupation forces in Iraq are now beginning to drop their caution about Moqtada al-Sadr and are openly siding with his resistance forces in Najaf. The National Foundation Congress, the influential umbrella organisation that represents most religious, nationalist and other secular forces opposed to the US-led occupation, on Saturday issued an eight-point proposal, already approved by Sadr, to peacefully end the crisis in Najaf. This proposal strengthens Sadr's hand and is in essence a call to end the US-led forces' carnage in Najaf and Baghdad and all other areas of Iraq.

The article goes on to present an analysis of just who Moqtada Sadr is and why he has inspired such a following. A point made in both these pieces is that Sadr's militia is just one aspect of his organization and that he is responsible for a very large network that has been providing many social services not provided by the government. A recent poll in Iraq showed that 82% of Iraqis have a favorable impression of Sadr, but our media continue to act as though his supporters are criminal or unbalanced fanatics and that reasonable Iraqis should line up behind our hand picked and CIA funded puppet government. Whatever we think of Iraqis - they're not that stupid.

The real insanity of our position in Iraq was clearly highlighted in yesterday's USATODAY in a story that reports continuing strong conflict:

While most attention has been focused on the showdown in Najaf between Shiites and the new Iraqi government, data show the insurgency is a stubborn and continuing phenomenon throughout the country.

"If we have the political will and stamina to stay, I could see this going on for 10 years," says Randolph Gangle, a retired officer who heads the Marine Corps' Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities in Quantico, Va.

Ten years? What possible reason would we have for continuing to fight Iraqis in their own country for ten years? What sense does it make to be fighting them now? Over 90% of ordinary Iraqis see us as an occupying power - which of course we are. That's the reality. Do we want to remain an occupying power there for ten years? For any years? Again, we have to ask what our sycophant media will not - "Why?"

Attack What You Can't Match

I have a basic question: why is John Kerry's military record a controversy but George Bush's is not? After all, Kerry won multiple citations for bravery attested to by multiple persons, both peers and superiors. Bush, on the other hand, can find no one to attest to his supposed service with the Alabama Air National Guard, has no explanation for why his flight status was cancelled, no explanation for how he managed to get into the Texas Air National Guard with so many people in line ahead of him, and no explanation for how he managed to get out early to go to graduate school.

But John McCain, Max Cleland, and John Kerry are all questionable in terms of both service and patriotic fervor - according to Bush and Company, almost all of whom managed to avoid military service through one strategy or another.

Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order


SOB is reading Mark Crispin Miller's new book about Dubya and his various ugly failings. The one theme that is most telling in Miller's book is that Bush and company are heavily invested in "projection" wherein they attack their enemies for the very sins that most mark themselves - for example, the "Democrats are trying to steal the election" in Florida!

Really a good book and very insightful. The sections on the Christian right are especially good - since this subject is just not covered in any real depth by the mainstream press, but should be.

Bereuter: War in Iraq Not Justified

Published on Wednesday, August 18, 2004 by the Lincoln Journal Star (Nebraska)
Bereuter: War in Iraq Not Justified
by Don Walton

In a dramatic departure from the Bush administration, Republican Rep. Doug Bereuter says he now believes the U.S. military assault on Iraq was unjustified.

"I've reached the conclusion, retrospectively, now that the inadequate intelligence and faulty conclusions are being revealed, that all things being considered, it was a mistake to launch that military action," Bereuter wrote in a letter to constituents in the final days of his congressional career.

That's especially true in view of the fact that the attack was initiated "without a broad and engaged international coalition," the 1st District congressman said.

"Knowing now what I know about the reliance on the tenuous or insufficiently corroborated intelligence used to conclude that Saddam maintained a substantial WMD (weapons of mass destruction) arsenal, I believe that launching the pre-emptive military action was not justified."

As a result of the war, he said, "our country's reputation around the world has never been lower and our alliances are weakened."

Bereuter is a senior member of the House International Relations Committee and vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

His four-page letter represented a departure from his support for a 2002 House resolution authorizing the president to go to war.

Soldier sues Rumsfeld on Iraq policyv

In what seems to be an ongoing trend, another soldier has filled suite against Donald Rumsfeld. I would like to be able to report on the status of the many suites currently pending against the very embattled SecDef but this administration is so secretive with basic information that I just don't know what is happening. In the current case:

US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld has been sued by an army reservist over a retention policy that allows the Pentagon to keep troops on active duty in Iraq even after their contracts expire.

As many as 40,000 soldiers have been forced to extend their stay in the US army through the "stop-loss" emergency programme since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to legal experts.

The plaintiff, who filed suit against Rumsfeld, Acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee and other top military officials with the Ninth US District Court on Tuesday, alleges a breach of contract. . .

I don't expect this to be the last of these kind of suites. Without reinstating the draft, the government is really pushing its luck to assume that soldiers will be willing to serve indefinately and at the government's whim.

Nation's Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal

The ongoing conservative attack on public education continues to be played out on many fronts - all claiming to correct supposed failings of public education with "free market" solutions such as vouchers and charter schools.These are hardly free market since they depend on shifting taxpayer's money from a common enterprise into largely profit making or church supporting schools of varying and uncertain capability. Now a government supported study of school results is casting doubt on the ability of charter schools to even do as well as public schools:

The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.

The findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.

The data shows fourth graders attending charter schools performing about half a year behind students in other public schools in both reading and math.

The Bush administration has denied playing politics with these results by burying them in a mountain of other statistical data released without any public statement. This is how these guys always deal with facts that don't support their irrational beliefs - ignore them until forced to look and then deny that the evidence means what it clearly does. For true believers, facts that contradict belief only make them strive harder to prove that what they believe is true. So in the face of bad data about charter schools expect to see a renewed push for more money for them and an outpouring of conservative excuse making.

Saving the Vote

Paul Krugman offers a preview of the upcoming presidential election, its potential problems and what responsible voters should do.

Dick Cheney, Hugo Chavez and Bill Clinton's Band: Why Venezuela has Voted Again for Their 'Negro e Indio' President

Now that Venezuela has - yet again - confirmed its support for President Hugo Chavez - the Bush administration and its allies in Venezuela's upper and middle classes go in for a lot of excuse making rather than understanding:

There's so much BS and baloney thrown around about Venezuela that I may be violating some rule of US journalism by providing some facts. Let's begin with this: 77% of Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the 'hacendados.'

I met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march. Oddest demonstration I've ever seen: frosted blondes in high heels clutching designer bags, screeching, "Chavez - dic-ta-dor!" The plantation owner griped about the "socialismo" of Chavez, then jumped into his Jaguar convertible.

That week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the "socialist" manifesto that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new law passed by Venezuela's Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez law transferred only fields from the giant haciendas which had been left unused and abandoned.

This land reform, by the way, was promoted to Venezuela in the 1960s by that Lefty radical, John F. Kennedy. Venezuela's dictator of the time agreed to hand out land, but forgot to give peasants title to their property.

But Chavez won't forget, because the mirror reminds him. What the affable president sees in his reflection, beyond the ribbons of office, is a "negro e indio" -- a "Black and Indian" man, dark as a cola nut, same as the landless and, until now, the hopeless. For the first time in Venezuela's history, the 80% Black-Indian population elected a man with skin darker than the man in the Jaguar.

So why, with a huge majority of the electorate behind him, twice in elections and today in a referendum, is Hugo Chavez in hot water with our democracy-promoting White House?

Maybe it's the oil. Lots of it. Chavez sits atop a reserve of crude that rivals Iraq's. And it's not his presidency of Venezuela that drives the White House bananas, it was his presidency of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC. While in control of the OPEC secretariat, Chavez cut a deal with our maximum leader of the time, Bill Clinton, on the price of oil. It was a 'Goldilocks' plan. The price would not be too low, not too high; just right, kept between $20 and $30 a barrel.

But Dick Cheney does not like Clinton nor Chavez nor their band. To him, the oil industry's (and Saudi Arabia's) freedom to set oil prices is as sacred as freedom of speech is to the ACLU. I got this info, by the way, from three top oil industry lobbyists.

Why should Chavez worry about what Dick thinks? Because, said one of the oil men, the Veep in his bunker, not the pretzel-chewer in the White House, "runs energy policy in the United States."

And what seems to have gotten our Veep's knickers in a twist is not the price of oil, but who keeps the loot from the current band-busting spurt in prices. Chavez had his Congress pass another oil law, the "Law of Hydrocarbons," which changes the split. Right now, the oil majors - like PhillipsConoco - keep 84% of the proceeds of the sale of Venezuela oil; the nation gets only 16%.

Chavez wanted to double his Treasury's take to 30%. And for good reason. Landless, hungry peasants have, over decades, drifted into Caracas and other cities, building million-person ghettos of cardboard shacks and open sewers. Chavez promised to do something about that.

And he did. "Chavez gives them bread and bricks," one Venezuelan TV reporter told me. The blonde TV newscaster, in the middle of a publicity shoot, said the words "pan y ladrillos" with disdain, making it clear that she never touched bricks and certainly never waited in a bread line.

But to feed and house the darker folk in those bread and brick lines, Chavez would need funds, and the 16% slice of the oil pie wouldn't do it. So the President of Venezuela demanded 30%, leaving Big Oil only 70%. Suddenly, Bill Clinton's ally in Caracas became Mr. Cheney's -- and therefore, Mr. Bush's -- enemy.

So began the Bush-Cheney campaign to "Floridate" the will of the Venezuela electorate. It didn't matter that Chavez had twice won election. Winning most of the votes, said a White House spokesman, did not make Chavez' government "legitimate." Hmmm. Secret contracts were awarded by our Homeland Security spooks to steal official Venezuela voter lists. Cash passed discreetly from the US taxpayer, via the so-called 'Endowment for Democracy,' to the Chavez-haters running today's "recall" election.

A brilliant campaign of placing stories about Chavez' supposed unpopularity and "dictatorial" manner seized US news and op-ed pages, ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times.

But some facts just can't be smothered in propaganda ink. While George Bush can appoint the government of Iraq and call it "sovereign," the government of Venezuela is appointed by its people. And the fact is that most people in this slum-choked land don't drive Jaguars or have their hair tinted in Miami. Most look in the mirror and see someone "negro e indio," as dark as their President Hugo.

The official CIA handbook on Venezuela says that half the nation's farmers own only 1% of the land. They are the lucky ones, as more peasants owned nothing. That is, until their man Chavez took office. Even under Chavez, land redistribution remains more a promise than an accomplishment. But today, the landless and homeless voted their hopes, knowing that their man may not, against the armed axis of local oligarchs and Dick Cheney, succeed for them. But they are convinced he will never forget them.

And that's a fact.

Gambling in Najaf:
Iraq as the Twenty-first Battleground State

Despite repeated claims by the Bush adminstration that they would never use the war for political gain, it looks very much as though military decisions are being made with an eye to the upcoming elections rather than the actual need in Iraq.

The Bush administration has embarked on a desperate military adventure in hopes of creating the appearance of a pacified Iraq. The assault on the holy city of Najaf, with its attendant slaughter of combatants and civilians, its destruction of whole neighborhoods, and its threat to Shia holy cites is fraught with the possibility of another major military defeat. But the military commanders are hoping it will instead produce a rare military victory, since they are fighting lightly armed and relatively inexperienced members of Muqtada al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army. Nevertheless, even such a victory would be short-lived at best, since the fighting itself only serves to consolidate the opposition of the Shia population. The administration is apparently hoping that a sufficiently brutal suppression of the Sadrists will postpone the now almost inevitable national uprising until after our November election.

Since the longterm effect of such brutal tactics currently being applied by US Marines will surely be negative and at variance with our expressed goals in Iraq, employing them indicates a very short term perspective. Bush and company have always counted on the short memory span of American citizens but this will only work this time if we do, indeed, succeed in achieving something akin to an actual victory in Najaf, and that is looking less and less likely. Complicating the strictly military aspects of the situation is the general uprising among Iraq's Shitte population that is being inspired by our heavy handed assault on a holy city and hand to hand combat in the oldest and most sacred cemetary in the Muslim world. As Juan Cole reports:

Al-Jazeerah's crawl is saying that Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, based in Qom, has issued a fatwa or ruling that no Iraqi Muslim may fight another Muslim on behalf of the current regime in Iraq and its American backers. . .But even the more mainstream clerics, such as Ayatollah Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, have turned against the Americans over their hamfisted assault on the holy city of Najaf.

Bahr al-Ulum, who should know, says that the Allawi government and its American backers have lost political control of everything south of Najaf:

' "The government has lost the support of the Middle Euphrates region and the south, even if it manages to calm down these areas temporarily using brute force," he said, referring to clashes in central and southern Iraq. '

Our "no win" situation is spelled out in a recent Slate article by Fred Kaplan:

This is a terribly grim thing to say, but there might be no solution to the problem of Iraq. There might be nothing we can do to build a path to a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there's no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster.
. . .
Meanwhile, the U.S. military—the only force in Iraq remotely capable of keeping the country from falling apart—finds itself in a maddening situation where tactical victories yield strategic setbacks. The Marines could readily defeat the insurgents in Najaf, but only at the great risk of inflaming Shiites—and sparking still larger insurgencies—elsewhere. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, as U.S. commanders acknowledge, practically every resident is an insurgent.

Needless to say, this is not the situation the Bushies predicted; nor is it one that they will even own up to. It is this inability of Bush and his advisors to admit to inconvenient facts that will insure they go into the history books as the worst administration ever. Even the most obtuse Fox News fan has got to be aware that the economy is rotten, corporate corruption is on the rise, and Iraq is turning into Vietnam Redux. And every month more people respond to polls by saying that we are headed in the wrong direction. Bush says we have turned a corner, but if so it is into a blind alley, and the voting public is not likely to follow him there.

Report Finds Tax Cuts Heavily Favor the Wealthy

Not that this should come as a real surprise to anyone, but a new Congressional Budget Office report makes it clear that Bush's tax cuts were heavily oriented toward "relief" for those wealthiest Americans who didn't really need any - but that do make up Dubya's "base":

Fully one-third of President Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be published Friday.

The report calculated that households with incomes in that top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings - averaging about $57,000 a year - were getting an average cut of only $1,090.

Granting that the highest earners pay - on average - the highest amounts of taxes still does not make this OK. Americans at all levels are paying a relatively modest income tax compared to citizens in other industrial nations - and in comparison to the level of taxation that all citizens in America faced during most of the decades following WWII. The reality is that government services are important and must be paid for. Reducing the revenue stream this way means either that services will be further curtailed and/or the burden of paying for them will shift more to middle and lower class citizens who will be required to pay heavier fees and taxes of all kinds.

The GOP Minstrel Show:
A white tycoon in blackface race-baits Teresa Heinz Kerry

Some years ago SOB worked for Golden Rule Insurance (he who has the gold makes the rules) which was owned and run by J. Pat Rooney, an eccentric right wing millionare who has long supported such programs as school vouchers (because he is a Catholic and thinks all kids should go to church schools) and medical savings accounts (because they make him money). Now Rooney, who I always liked in person but couldn't stand ideologically (over the years I was only aware of him as a regular sponser of Rush Limbaugh) has re-emerged as the sponser of a series of ads on black radio attacking John Kerry and his wife:

A new radio ad paid for by a nonprofit called People of Color United takes Teresa Heinz Kerry to task for playing up her African heritage. (She was born and raised in Mozambique.) As Thomas B. Edsall reports in the Aug. 12 Washington Post, the ad copy includes the following:

His wife says she's an African American. While technically true, I don't believe a white woman, raised in Africa, surrounded by servants, qualifies.

What's interesting about this blacker-than-thou statement is that it's underwritten by a white man. People of Color United, although run by a black woman named Virginia Walden-Ford, got nearly half the money for its media buy from a Caucasian insurance tycoon named J. Patrick Rooney. Walden-Ford confirmed to the Post that Rooney gave the group $30,000 for a series of ads that are running in swing-state urban areas, and that the total ad buy thus far cost $70,000. Rooney, she said, was the group's biggest donor. All its funding information will eventually be public, but the law does not require People of Color United to file with the IRS before the ads go on the air. It will be interesting to learn whether a single person of color has written a check to People of Color United.

I don't know about you, but when I hear a statement meant to inflame gratuitous resentment of white people, I prefer that it come from a black person. A white man who puts on blackface to call John Kerry's wife a fraudulent African-American is acting in so many kinds of bad faith that I scarcely know where to start. Why did he do it?

The answer has nothing to do with the struggle for civil rights. Rooney is a medical-privatization pimp. His former company, Golden Rule Insurance Co., and its successor, Medical Savings Insurance Co., market private savings accounts of the type that Republicans are gradually using to displace health insurance provided by the government under Medicare and Medicaid (most recently in last year's Medicare prescription bill). In pursuit of this goal, Rooney, his family, and his employees have lavished more than $5 million on the GOP. Rooney's latest game, according to a recent story in Business Week, is to mau-mau hospitals into lowering rates for uninsured patients while simultaneously (and much more quietly) securing debt forgiveness for his company.

Rooney, naturally, rejected the Post's suggestion that he's bankrolling a race-baiting ad in order to expand his health insurance business. "I have a long history of involvement with and support of the black community," he told Edsall.

For 21 years I have gone to an all-black church. They finally elected me over other black people to their church board. I'm one of them. I don't know what it has to do with health savings accounts.

It does Rooney credit that he has sought and won acceptance from African-Americans. But how can his church be "all-black" if it includes Rooney? Is "I'm one of them" a statement of laudable solidarity or shameful arrogance? Perhaps, having smeared shoe polish onto his face so that he might better smear the Democratic nominee's wife, Rooney looks in the mirror and concludes he really is black. But the rest of us needn't be fooled.

Pat Rooney is a bundle of contradictions. He has to be given credit for winning a lawsuite against Educational Testing Service for racial bias in their tests, but that was motivated by personal anger because ETS tests flunked someone he knew personally and felt should have passed. It's a shame his personal anger can't be marshaled to support all those who suffer medical conditions that are either not covered by insurance or only partially so. As the joke used to be when I worked for Golden Rule, if someone called in for the Claims Department, connect them to Legal. Money was always more important than people to this guy. So what this says concerning Pat's current political activity is that Bush will be better for his new insurance business than Kerry will. And of course we know that Bush will be better for Halliburton, Enron, Bechtel, Exxon, GE, etc, etc.

Is this the world we really want?

Bush/Cheney Lie to Voters and Reporters Just Don't Seem to Care
From The Daily Howler:

No, it wasn’t hard to explain the clownistry of Cheney’s remarks. There was the VP, out on the trail, pretending that John Kerry had said he’d be “sensitive” to our terrorist enemies. Plainly, that wasn’t what Kerry had said; if you’re able to read, you can see that (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/13/04). But all around the national “press corps,” trembling reporters were too afraid to confront Cheney’s silly clowning. Can you say “enablers,” boys and girls? They simply refused to tell the public things that are as plain as day. Cheney was playing the voters for fools. And your “reporters” all knew not to notice.
How easy was it to lay out the truth? On Thursday’s CBS Evening News, Jim Axelrod almost dared do it. He played a few of Cheney’s comments, then flirted with telling the truth:

AXELROD (8/12/04): Cheney was referring to a comment Kerry made last week. Kerry said international coalitions were necessary to fight terror, and that he could build them.
KERRY (videotape) I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side.

AXELROD: Not only did the vice president seize on the word “sensitive,” implying Kerry meant he’d be sensitive to terrorists—

CHENEY (videotape): A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans and who seek the chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more.

AXELROD: So did his wife.

LYNNE CHENEY (videotape): I can't imagine that al-Qaida is going to be impressed by sensitivity.

Axelrod flirted with stating the obvious—both the Cheneys, Dick and Lynne, were baldly misstating what Kerry had said. But even The Ax was too afraid to pursue the real news in this stupid story. Continuing directly, he ended with the weak “rebuttals” that came from the Kerry campaign:
KERRY (videotape): Oh, it's sad that they can only be negative. They have nothing to say about the future vision of America.
AXELROD: While the candidate stayed on message today, staffers said Mr. Cheney distorted Kerry's words. Then they pointed to the president at the same conference, using the S-word.

BUSH (videotape): Now in terms of, you know, the balance between running down intelligence and bringing people to justice obviously is a—we need to be very sensitive on that.

AXELROD: A few retired generals came out today for Senator Kerry, saying he volunteered for military service when the vice president was working hard to avoid it. Eighty-two days till the election, and the brass knuckles are out in a fight over sensitivity. Jim Axelrod, CBS News, Los Angeles.

Axelrod flirted with telling the truth. But why can’t newsmen—newsmen like Axelrod—follow stories where stories lead? In the wake of Cheney’s ludicrous spinning, why do they only ask Kerry to comment? Why aren’t they asking questions of Cheney? Why didn’t Axelrod end his report with a statement like this:
WHAT AXELROD SHOULD HAVE SAID: We asked both Cheneys if, after reading Kerry’s text, they thought the senator had really advised sensitivity toward terrorists. Neither camp supplied an answer. Jim Axelrod, CBS News, Los Angeles.
Why didn’t Axelrod ask those questions? The answer to that is very clear—asking such questions would be quite scary. Why weren’t questions directed at Cheney? You know why. The answer is fear.

Discreet Charm of the Status Quo in Venezuela

Tomorrow citizens in Venezuela go to the polls to cast votes in a special recall aimed at President Hugo Chavez. George W. Bush and most mainstream American media have expressed their displeasure with Mr. Chavez and their desire that he be ousted. This is especially interesting given that we profess a concern for "democracy" and Chavez - unlike Mr. Bush - has been elected twice by strong majorities of the Venezuelan voting public. So why the recall? One reason is the meddling of the U. S. Government, whose taxpayers have largely funded the recall effort, supported by infusions of cash from the very Orwellian named National Endowment for Democracy - a CIA front organization that specializes in destabilizing countries we don't like (such as Haiti) and providing support for "dissident" groups that support U. S. policy. Needless to say, Chavez doesn't support U. S. policy; rather he opposes NAFTA like trade agreements that profit international banks and harm indigenous people. Further, he has advocated land reform - always a red-flag issue with the ruling elites in South America - and has used oil profits from the State owned oil enterprise to help the poorest of Venezuela's citizens, further alienating the middle and upper classes.

I probably shouldn't have to mention that if Venezuela wasn't a major oil producer George W. Bush wouldn't even be able to find it on the map - much less worry over whether it was truely "democratic." The fact that he rushed to recognize the failed coup against Chavez last year is one of the more embarrassing fiascos of his administration. Chavez survived, Bush was made to look a fool, and thus the animosity was only increased. The fact that Chavez afterwards called Dubya an "asshole" only made it worse. Of course, for some of us, that made Chavez something of a hero.

We needn't pretend that Chavez is without fault to recognize that the United States has no business meddling in Venezuelan politics. We have enough problems of our own. At least their president was elected by a strong majority of the public and continues to have widespread support of his people. Bush cannot say the same.

We have met the enemy and he is us

OK, let's think this through. We went to war in Irag because Bush said that Saddam was a "threat" to us because of his "weapons of mass destruction" - which seem not to exist. So, uh, that doesn't matter because we really are just freeing the Iraqis from an evil dictator that ruled by force, imprisoned and tortured those that disagreed with him, and ignored the will of the people. We have honered this tradition by imprisoning and torturing (in Saddam's own jail) those that don't agree with us, and ignoring the will of the people while installing our own puppet figures to govern the country. Behind the scenes are the many illegal decrees issued by Paul Bremer, our "democratic" false front for a year, who tried to insure that all profit from Iraqi oil would be realized by American corportions.

That our "free press" is not willing to deal with any of this is an indication of how unfree we really are as a society.

Invisible Children

While none of us like to think that we are indifferent to the plight of children, the reality is that lacking a serious lobby, children suffer in many ways - and society suffers even more as a result:

90% of the children in the U.S. Juvenile Justice system have come from the Child Protection system. Over 90% of the adults in Criminal Justice have come out of Juvenile Justice. Legislators predict the need for new prisons by extrapolating from the number of children in their Child Protection System. America is the only nation in the world to build prisons based on the number of children in Child Protection.

America has created a prison feeder system for poor and abused children. Abused children are 66 times more likely to enter Juvenile Justice than children who are not abused. Most of the children in the Child Protection and Juvenile Justice Systems are people of color and poor. Income and color seem to be great un-equalizers.

For many years America has suffered about 40,000 murders per year (plus millions of assaults and robberies) and for twenty of the last twenty-five years between one out of four and one out of five Americans has been a victim of a crime every year.

For a long time the United States has had the highest per-capita rate of incarceration (imprisonment) of all the industrialized countries (except for Russia).

Today, there are 600,000 felons in Florida (without counting the current prison population in Florida). About 600,000 felons are released each year in America, with little chance of employment, or fitting back into to the community. We the People have decided that prisons are for punishment, not rehabilitation.

For many years, the U.S. rate of recidivism (returning to prison) has been greater than 66%.

America executes more people who were prosecuted while juveniles than any other country in the world. We are the only nation at the UN to refuse to sign the Child Rights Treaty (190 other nations have signed it), simply because we refuse to stop executing juveniles.

Consider these truths the next time your DA charges a 16 year old who randomly shoots someone outside a convenience store, as an adult (or, the 12 year old girl who left her baby in a shoe box under her bed). Both children were terribly abused by their parents (national and local cases this year).

Children sent into the adult Criminal Justice System are 8 times more likely to commit suicide and five times more likely to be raped than if they were in the Juvenile Justice system.

The prison industry is a good business in America and it makes big money. Prison related industry has a much larger PAC (money raising political action committee) than do the abused and neglected children of our nation (there is no money raising PAC for children's issues).

Nationally, a disproportionate number of the children in abusive homes, Child Protection, and the Juvenile Justice system are children of color and poor. They are invisible, and they have no voice in their own affairs. We don’t see them until they have done something terrible. Then we punish them.

As a nation, we don't spend much money helping children in need of protection, or the ex-convicts they become, to fit back into our society. We do spend a fortune on prisons, parole, and the court systems that send them to jail.

Child Protection Systems vary widely from state to state. When a county gets bad press (a child dies forgotten, or lost in the system) county child workers get the blame. The media doesn't bring attention to the huge caseloads of the social workers, or the lack of services that are available within the system to help the worker to get results.

The community may be outraged, but it continues to provide minimal funding to run these systems.

Compare the plight of children with government support for Halliburton, Enron, and any other company that generates enough profit to shave off some bucks for political contributions. We could change this if we gave a damn.

Pathetic.

Leak allowed al-Qaeda suspects to escape

TERRORISM – WHITE HOUSE LEAK ALLOWED AL-QAEDA SUSPECTS TO ESCAPE: The AP reports, "the disclosure to reporters of the arrest of an al-Qaeda computer expert allowed several wanted suspects from Osama bin Laden's terror network to escape." On Sunday "National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged...that Khan's name had been disclosed to reporters in Washington 'on background,' meaning that it could be published." According to senior Pakistani officials "after Khan's arrest, other al-Qaeda suspects abruptly changed their hide-outs and moved to unknown places." Sen. Chuck Schumer has asked the White House "to explain why the name of Khan was revealed.

Diplomacy sidelined as US targets Iran

As if we don't have our hands full with Iraq and Afghanistan the Guardian newspaper of London is reporting that U. S. pressure against Iran is on the increase:

The US charge sheet against Iran is lengthening almost by the day, presaging destabilising confrontations this autumn and maybe a pre-election October surprise.
The Bush administration is piling on the pressure over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme. It maintains Tehran's decision to resume building uranium centrifuges wrecked a long-running EU-led dialogue and is proof of bad faith.

The US will ask a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency on September 13 to declare Iran in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, a prelude to seeking punitive UN sanctions.

Of courses, Iran is part of that nonsensical "Axis of Evil." But unlike Iraq the Iranian government is largely popular with its citizens, it has a large and well equipted army, a viable air force, and widespread support in the region. Bush seems to be blindly stumbling into another situation that is likely to blow up in our faces.

The Night Porter

By now you've probably heard the news that President Bush has nominated House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss to be his new CIA director.

Goss - last seen in Farenheit 9/11 giving out the number to an entirely ficticious civil liberties complaint hotline - is a former CIA operative turned Florida hack congressman who has made himself useful to the administration in ways both large and small, not least by savaging the reputation of the agency he once worked for and now hopes to lead.

In other words, picking Porter Goss to be CIA director is roughly the same as nominating Dick Cheney's little finger - or so says former CIA analyst Ray McGovern.