We've still got a long way to go

There is a commercial on the TV right now that bothers me. I think it is an abysmal statement of the attitute towards civil and human rights. The commercial sucks you in as Mr. Handsome Guy tells his date that he left "Rusty" at home alone. The date expresses concern, but then he tells her "Rusty" is wearing a shock collar. She looks relieved, but the first time viewer is appalled. One assumes his dog is tied up and getting electric shocks.

Then you see Rusty. He is a white, goofy-looking guy, with his date on the couch, and he is indeed wearing a shock collar that only activates when he reaches for a beer- the product this commercial is incidentaly selling. One gets the feeling that one is supposed to laugh that Rusty is willing to be shocked to enjoy this beer.

I can't laugh. I don't find shock collars funny on dogs or people, or anything else. What kind of a culture are we that we should find that funny? And why is it ok because he looks dorky and is white? If he was handsome, black, Asian, or Hispanic, or a woman, it would have never aired. And if he was middle eastern, I think there'd be even more of a war on our hands.

I don't expect to get answers. But I hope I am not the only one disturbed.

I'm sorry, she's still a liar

Colbert I. King a columnist I usually respect takes exception to Barbara Boxer's attack on Condi Rice and completely misses the point. In Why the Crass Remarks About Rice? he wonders why Boxer said

"I personally believe -- this is my personal view -- that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell the war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth." Loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell the war.

His point being that Rice truly believed in the cause and was not just a parrot. I'm sorry but it doesn't really matter if she is firmly assimilated into the Borg Hive of this administration, she still lied and mislead the American people.

A "woman of color":

Dorothy Height, chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, who wrote in a letter to The Post this week: "Despite the challenges she will face, Ms. Rice's appointment is a time for women of color to smile."

I'm sorry but "women of color" should be hanging their heads in shame that the first of their kind to reach such a pinnacle of power is an incompetent misguided liar. Any attempt by the black community to defend her qualifies as racism.
Mr. Colbert objected to her caricature as a parrot. That's all there is in the Bush administration's hive.

Mortgaging the Future of the Human Race

I looked at the weblog of my favorite author, Diane Duane, today, only to get some disturbing news:

The White House has eliminated funding for a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request and directed NASA to focus solely on de-orbiting the popular spacecraft at the end of its life ...

Yet ANOTHER thing to be ticked off at Bush about. You know, it just blows my mind that this guy manages to tick me off with nearly every decision he makes. You'd think, just by virtue of odds, that one of these days he would have made a decision I liked.

Freedom 27, liberty 16

That's the score according to Jon Stewart of how many times Bush mentioned those 2 words during his 21-minute speech.

One thing that disturbs me greatly- the more Monkey Boy mentions Freedom and Liberty, the more liberties we loose, and the more freedom gets impinged elsewhere.

Lose-Lose situation

Today, that crusader against the privitization of Social Security, Paul Krugman, shoots holes in the idea that it is a good idea.

President Bush is like a financial adviser who tells you that at the rate you're going, you won't be able to afford retirement - but that you shouldn't do anything mundane like trying to save more. Instead, you should take out a huge loan, put the money in a mutual fund run by his friends (with management fees to be determined later) and place your faith in capital gains.

Wouldn't be the first time this crew tried to sell us something that was going to benefit a few of their friends.

The whole scheme ignores the most basic principle of economics: there is no free lunch.

There are several ways to explain why this particular lunch isn't free, but the clearest comes from Michael Kinsley, editorial and opinion editor of The Los Angeles Times. He points out that the math of Bush-style privatization works only if you assume both that stocks are a much better investment than government bonds and that somebody out there in the private sector will nonetheless sell those private accounts lots of stocks while buying lots of government bonds.

If it's such a good deal why would private investors sell you stock and buy treasury bonds? See the faulty logic here? So are stocks really a good secure investment?

Fifty years ago most people, remembering 1929, were afraid of the stock market. As a result, those who did buy stocks got to buy them cheap: on average, the value of a company's stock was only about 13 times that company's profits. Because stocks were cheap, they yielded high returns in dividends and capital gains.

But high returns always get competed away, once people know about them: stocks are no longer cheap. Today, the value of a typical company's stock is more than 20 times its profits. The more you pay for an asset, the lower the rate of return you can expect to earn. That's why even Jeremy Siegel, whose "Stocks for the Long Run" is often cited by those who favor stocks over bonds, has conceded that "returns on stocks over bonds won't be as large as in the past."

But a very high return on stocks over bonds is essential in privatization schemes; otherwise private accounts created with borrowed money won't earn enough to compensate for their risks. And if we take into account realistic estimates of the fees that mutual funds will charge - remember, in Britain those fees reduce workers' nest eggs by 20 to 30 percent - privatization turns into a lose-lose proposition.

Sometimes I do find myself puzzled: why don't privatizers understand that their schemes rest on the peculiar belief that there is a giant free lunch there for the taking? But then I remember what Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The only winners in the private accounts scam will be the stock brokers. That's what happened in Britain and now they are trying to undo the mess they created.

Thursday Afternoon Reading

Here is your Thursday afternoon reading.

Daily Kos: Latest wingnut target: SpongeBob SquarePants

Rockridge Institute: It's Not Just Abortion, Stupid: Progressives and Abortion (boring title, but insightful content)

Salon: "Here are 34 scandals from the first four years of George W. Bush's presidency -- every one of them worse than Whitewater." (Very worthwhile reading.)

If You're a Polipundit, You'll Go Ape On This One ...

I recently found a rather incredible website if you're a politics buff like most of us here are.

After visiting it, I have a full head of hair, boundless energy, a buff physique, and I'm a real hit with the ladies!

Well, not really so much. But it is still nevertheless a pretty cool website: GovTrack.Us.

Essentially, consider it an incredibly user-friendly interface to Congress -- everything Congress' official interface should be and isn't. For a starting place, here are the entries for my Congresscritters: Durbin, Obama, and Schakowsky.

See what I mean?

It blows my mind that this is up and functional. Hell, it even seems to parse the Congressional Record PDFs (see the "speeches" tab for each person's entry), believe it or not, so you can read what your representatives are actually saying in Congress.

I just can't see how this functions so perfectly, and I'm frankly skeptical — if anyone seems to find any trace of it being B.S., I'd be curious. In the meantime, I'll be rather happy that someone actually built something like this.

(If you're wondering why the front page stuff seems stalled out on the 5th, it appears that Congress hasn't met since the 6th. And I thought Cook County judges had a nice vacation schedule.)

Go. Have fun. Let us know cool stuff you've discovered about this in the Comments section. I'm really surprised this hasn't exploded huge in the blogosphere yet -- aside from transcribing and posting the Vanity Fair article on Ashcroft a year or two ago, I'm usually not the first one to introduce stuff to the blogosphere.

Edit #1: From the site's About page: "Updates are delayed by several days because the U.S. Government Printing Office often takes several days to post the full information for government bills. GovTrack is generally two days behind in all information."

Edit #2: Even cooler ... you can have updates on your senators' and representatives' activities in Congress e-mailed to you, or served to you as a RSS feed. Coooooooooooooool.

An Amazing Blog Entry from the Blogroll ...

This is an entirely nonpolitical post, but that's okay occasionally -- especially when I'm pointing you towards something amazing.

At Least George Will is Honest

George Will does something today Bush and the Republican lawmakers can't do. He told the truth about the Social Security non-crisis and told the truth about why he doesn't like the current system and is in favor of private accounts. Number one, he admits there is no crisis.

What constitutes a crisis is a matter of opinion, and everyone is entitled to his or her own. But not to his or her own facts. Here are some:

Social Security outlays may exceed revenue by 2018 -- that date almost certainly will recede further into the future, as it has before, as the economy outperforms expectations. After that, the government bonds that Social Security surpluses have bought (money used to fund the government) will be entirely redeemed, as the Social Security Administration calculates, by 2042. Or 2052, according to the Congressional Budget Office, using different assumptions about the rate of economic growth. That depends partly on the rate of productivity growth: Might a growth rate unusually high by historical standards become normal? Immigration rates will affect the ratio of workers to retirees.

Some people warning of a distant Social Security crisis postulate 75 years of 1.8 percent annual growth. But if America has 75 such sluggish years, Social Security's insolvency will hardly be the nation's largest problem -- and personal retirement accounts will reflect, not compensate for, the stagnation.

Good for you George, it's nice to see some honesty from the right for a change. He still believes in replacing the current system with private accounts.

But the best reasons rise from the philosophy of freedom:

Voluntary personal accounts will allow competing fund managers, rather than a government monopoly on income transfers from workers to retirees, to allocate a large pool of money. This will enhance the economic dynamism conducive to an open society. Personal accounts will respect individuals' autonomy and competence and will narrow the wealth gap by facilitating the accumulation of wealth -- bequeathable wealth -- by people of modest incomes.

Well that sounds real good but we know now that even educated Americans don't have the skill, time or inclination to "manage" their 401k plans. What Will is suggesting is a "freedom" to retire with even less "security" for many if not most Americans. While I may disagree with George Will I applaud his honesty, something that is very rare from the right.

Dying in Search of the Mythical

The following commentary is a must read for all and especially for all who voted for George W. Bush and the spineless Democrats who voted for the confirmation of Condiliar Rice.
Why My Brother Died

This week, the White House announced, with little fanfare, that the two-year search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had finally ended, and it acknowledged that no such weapons existed there at the time of the U.S. invasion in 2003.

For many, this may be a story of only passing interest. But for me and my family, it resonates with profound depth.

My brother was Sgt. Sherwood Baker. He was a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard deployed a year ago with his unit out of Wilkes-Barre. He said goodbye to his wife and his 9-year-old son, boarded a bus and went to Ft. Dix, N.J., to be hastily retrained. His seven years of Guard training as a forward observer was practically worthless because he would not face combat. All he needed to do was learn how to not die.

He received a crash course in convoy security, including practice in running over cardboard cutouts of children. We bought him a GPS unit and walkie-talkies because he wasn't supplied with them. In Iraq, Sherwood was assigned to the Iraq Survey Group and joined the search for weapons of mass destruction.

David Kay, who led the group until January 2004, had already stated that they did not exist. Former United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix had expressed serious doubts about their presence during prewar inspections. In fact, a cadre of former U.N. inspectors and U.S. generals had been saying for years that Iraq posed no threat to our country. On April 26, 2004, the Iraq Survey Group, at the behest of the stubborn administration sitting safely in office buildings in Washington, was still on its fruitless but dangerous search. My brother stood atop his Humvee, securing the perimeter in front of a suspect building in Baghdad. But as soldiers entered the building, it exploded; the official cause is still not known. Sherwood was struck by debris in the back of his head and neck, and he was killed.

Since that day, my family and I have lived with the grief of losing a loved one. We have struggled to explain his death to his son. We have gazed at the shards of life scattered at our feet, in wonder of its fragility, in perpetual catharsis with God.

I have moved from frustration to disappointment to anger. And now I have arrived at a place not of understanding but of hope � blind hope that this will change.

The Iraq Survey Group's final report, which was filed in October but revealed only on Wednesday, confirmed what we knew all along. And as my mother cried in the kitchen, the nation barely blinked.

I am left now with a single word seared into my consciousness: accountability. The chance to hold our administration's feet to that flame has passed. But what of our citizenry? We are the ones who truly failed. We shut down our ability to think critically, to listen, to converse and to act. We are to blame.

Even with every prewar assumption having been proved false, today more than 130,000 U.S. soldiers are trying to stay alive in a foreign desert with no clear mission at hand.

At home, the sidelines are overcrowded with patriots. These Americans cower from the fight they instigated in Iraq. In a time of war and record budget deficits, many are loath to even pay their taxes. In the end, however, it is not their family members who are at risk, and they do not sit up at night pleading with fate to spare them.

Change is vital. We must remind ourselves that the war with Iraq was not a mistake but rather a flagrant abuse of power by our leaders � and a case of shameful negligence by the rest of us for letting it happen. The consequence is more than a quagmire. The consequence is the death of our national treasure � our soldiers.

We are all accountable. We all share the responsibility of what has been destroyed in our name. Let us begin to right the wrongs we have done to our country by accepting that responsibility.

Re-read those last two paragraphs, especially if you voted for George W. Bush because you don't approve of abortion or don't think gays should marry.

We must remind ourselves that the war with Iraq was not a mistake but rather a flagrant abuse of power by our leaders � and a case of shameful negligence by the rest of us for letting it happen. The consequence is more than a quagmire. The consequence is the death of our national treasure � our soldiers.

We are all accountable. We all share the responsibility of what has been destroyed in our name. Let us begin to right the wrongs we have done to our country by accepting that responsibility.

Tell me all about moral values now.

Cross posted at Middle Earth Journal

My other blog

Some of you more observant folks have noticed that on the right, it says Georg (mail) (blog1) (blog2). Thank you Mike for the changes. Other minor cosmetic changes should continue to happen.

But I thought I'd mention what you might find under blog2- that's my research blog, where I intend to put the fun stuff I've been doing in the non-fiction department for the joy of learning and writing and sharing. So far, it's calligraphy, cheese, and privies. I hope to write up my quilt research and have it there too. It will get updated, but not as often as the Dear Dear Diary, which gets updated not often enough at all.

And of course, my email is there. Not that I expect lots of fanmail, mind. But if you want to chat- hey, There I am.

Good Tyrants

For all of the talk of spreading democracy the US government really only objects to tyrants who won't stick to the program. Remember those pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in the 80s. And yes, the Democrats have been just as guilty of this as Bush and the Republicans. A case in point is the charming dictator of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang. Mother Jones brings us the details on how the US props up the government of this ruthless dictator in A Touch of Crude.

American bankers handled his loot. Oil companies play by his rules. The Bush administration woos him. How the pursuit of oil is propping up the West African dictatorship of Teodoro Obiang.

Mr Obiang likes to be called "El Libertador". He came to power in a bloody coup which overthrew Equatorial Guinea's first dictator, Obiang's uncle Francisco Macias Nguema. And although Obiang did liberate them from that dictator he has proved to be just as bad.

Equatorial Guinea sometimes seems a parody of an oil kleptocracy -- a Blazing Saddles of the world of petroleum. Yet it has emerged as an all-too-real example of how a dictator, awash in petrodollars, enriches himself and his family while starving his people. His conduct has been aided by American companies: As detailed in Senate and Treasury Department documents, Riggs Bank helped Obiang shuttle millions into offshore accounts. Oil companies, meanwhile, made payments to his regime that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now scrutinizing under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

If America?s interest in foreign countries were predicated on human rights, Equatorial Guinea would have seized our attention long before its 1995 oil boom. Francisco Macias Nguema, whose self-bestowed titles included "Leader of Steel," "The Sole Miracle of Equatorial Guinea," and, of course, "President for Life," was a morph of Idi Amin and Pol Pot. He killed or forced into exile nearly a third of the population, decimating in particular the small educated class. Some of his victims were crucified on the road leading to the airport. It was one of the 20th century's most brutal genocides, but no foreign power except for Equatorial Guinea's former colonial ruler paid attention to it, and the fascist regime of Spain's Francisco Franco was not overly troubled by human rights abuses. Obiang's coup was a welcome event, and his rule has not been nearly as ruthless as his uncle's. Of course,that's not much of an achievement.

The US embassy was closed they in 1995 because of human right violations after the life of the ambassador was threatened. But all that changed a year latter.

The country might have disappeared from our geopolitical radar had Mobil not struck oil in the waters off Malabo later that year. It quickly became clear that the Zafiro oil field was world-class. After a decade of development, oil production in Equatorial Guinea stands at more than 300,000 barrels a day, which at current prices translates to nearly $5.5 billion a year. A gas field owned by Marathon Oil has also become a major producer, and the ocean beds off Equatorial Guinea are being combed for additional deposits. Energy companies have invested several billion dollars in Equatorial Guinea, and Marathon is building a major liquefied natural gas facility. It is now possible to fly nonstop from Malabo to Texas on a weekly flight known as the "Houston Express."
[...]
U.S. corporations are now investing more in Equatorial Guinea than in any other African country except for Nigeria and South Africa. In 2003, the Bush administration reopened the embassy, a move sharply criticized by human rights groups as a favor to the oil companies and to Obiang. Frank Ruddy, U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea in the mid-1980s, decries current U.S. policy, saying that Bush administration officials are "big cheerleaders for the government -- and it"s an awful government."

So much for freedom and democracy when oil and oil companies are involved.

Yet to Western oil companies, Equatorial Guinea is an ideal partner. Nearly all of its oil and gas reserves are offshore, which means securing the fields is relatively easy. ExxonMobil and Marathon workers live in gated compounds that operate their own electrical, water, and communication systems. Unlike in Nigeria or Saudi Arabia, foreign workers do not face major security threats, and the government's brutish security apparatus has kept the violent-crime rate low. Expats freely cruise the rutted streets of Malabo in their pickup trucks and hang out at the most popular bars, like La Bamba and Shangri-La, among an abundance of professional women, known as "night fighters" because they bicker over prospective clients.

Most important for oil companies, Equatorial Guinea is a profitable place to do business. According to a 1999 report by the International Monetary Fund, oil companies received "by far the most generous tax and profit-sharing provisions in the region." The state received only 15 to 40 percent of the revenues from its oil fields, while the norm in sub-Saharan Africa was 45 to 90 percent.

And what do the people of Equatorial Guinea think?

"Obiang doesn't care about the people, only his family," the man said. "He doesn't want to share the money. He says he wants democracy, but if I say to him these things, I will go to jail and be killed. It is our brother who is killing us. The whites, they should help us. Saddam Hussein, he was a dictator, and the whites decided to get rid of him. They should help us, too."

By "whites" he meant "Americans." We are the ones offering jobs to a lucky few workers. In his eyes, we are the ones who stand for democracy and a future that is not filled with theft and violence by a government mafia. We are a good people who will do what is right -- or should do what is right.

Is it any wonder that the world sees the US as hypocritical imperialists?

February 12, 2005 -- A Day of Reckoning

Astute observers of this blog will notice that Jazz recently left the Republican party. On Saturday, February 12, 2005, or very shortly thereafter, I'm going to learn whether I will be leaving the Democratic party.

The race has rarely been so clear between those who want to make the Democratic Party "Republican Lite™" and those who want to make the Democratic Party return to its core progressive principles. One side believes that the reason Democrats lost in November was because our values don't mesh with the public's; the other side believes that the reason Democrats lost in November was because we never came out and told people what we were for, we just expressed ourselves as a negative, the "Not Bush" candidate.

I firmly believe that the reason we lost was because of the latter. Kerry never came out and said who he was for. He gave voice to the criticisms of Bush we were all feeling, but I really feel that most of the passion people felt for the 2008 campaign was fueled by the thought of "let's get this homicidal psychopathic drunkard out of the White House" rather than "oh yeah Kerry! he'd be a great leader for the country!".

When I learned that George Lakoff (who I wrote about here) had Dean's ear and that Dean had firmly embraced Lakoff's teachings in his campaign, I got even more excited. A DNC that embraces the ideas about political and cognitive thought that Lakoff is teaching would be a very successful movement. The turnaround would be a frickin' wonder to behold. It is for that reason that I wrote to all of the DNC representatives from Illinois, asking them to vote for Howard Dean.

Yesterday, thanks to Daily Kos, I learned who the alternative to Dean is: Martin Frost, the former Congressman from the state of Texas.

And I was absolutely horrified.

From the Dallas Morning News, via Kos:

Mr. Frost — running in a mostly Republican district — is trying to appeal to GOP voters in North Dallas.

Some of his campaign commercials show Mr. Sessions being in opposition to President Bush, while portraying himself as a tough, moderate Democrat.

He uses popular Republicans like Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and John McCain of Arizona to make his point. And one ad even casts fellow Democrat Ted Kennedy in the same liberal boogeyman role as some Republicans do.

Kos also points out the following excerpt from Frost's 2004 campaign website:

I am [...] proud to stand with President Bush whenever he is acting in the national interest. I broke with a majority of my own party to support the President's decision to send American troops to Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime. Two years ago, I was the only Democrat on the Select Committee on Homeland Security to vote to create the new Department of Homeland Security and, unlike my opponent, I supported President Bush's bipartisan 'No Child Left Behind Act' to improve public education.

The choice is so very clear. This man here is most likely the most prominent competitor of Dean for the DNC chair, and he pretty much embodies the "Republican Lite™" concept of the Democratic Party.

If the DNC candidates vote him in, then I know that the Democrats are not going to offer up any useful resistance to the neocon movement of the Republican party. At that point, I will probably give up on the Democrats and officially become a "former Democrat." Especially if the Democrats are stupid enough to either put Kerry back up again in 2008 (want to know why he conceded so damn quickly? to save his future political career) or to put the ever-polarizing Hillary Clinton up (who would, no doubt, get the lowest popular vote a Democrat could get in the 2008 election).

Where I would go from there, I don't know. Maybe Dean'd spin off the Democracy for America movement into a third party? Or something entirely different. I'm not environmentally conscionable enough to become a Green, I think. Hell, this is enough for me - a very civically minded person, mind you - to consider giving up voting for President.

I am surprised, folks, because I hadn't expected this to be so important to me, but it is. The Democratic Party is deciding which path it wants to take to the future, and the paths being considered are a hell of a lot more clear than you'd expect them to be. If the party adopts Frost, the Democrats will become Republican Lite™, and there'll be no difference between the parties. If the party adopts Dean, the Democrats will re-envision their party and return to their core values much as the Republicans did in '68, and they'll have the support of tens of thousands of grassroots people who simply want someone to believe in. It could be a transformation amazing to behold ... or we could instead witness the Democrats firmly stand together, and with one voice, look America in the eye and say, "Same old. Same old."

Election Day². February 12, 2005.

Hold your breath. This'll be a doozy.

Selling Social Security

We had discussed a few weeks ago how the administration planned to sell Social Security Reform like it sold the Iraq war. Today Paul Krugman addresses this topic. After a brief summary on the selling of the war he talks about Social Security and discusses how the same tactics may not work this time.

White House officials themselves concede - or maybe boast - that their plan to sell Social Security privatization is modeled on their selling of the Iraq war. In fact, the parallels are remarkably exact.

Everyone has noticed the use, once again, of crisis-mongering. Three years ago, the supposed threat from Saddam somehow became more important than catching the people who actually attacked America on 9/11. Today, the mild, possibly nonexistent long-run financial problems of Social Security have somehow become more important than dealing with the huge deficit we already have, which has nothing to do with Social Security.

But there's another parallel, which I haven't seen pointed out: the politicization of the agencies and the intimidation of the analysts. Bush loyalists begin frothing at the mouth when anyone points out that the White House pressured intelligence analysts to overstate the threat from Iraq, while neocons in the Pentagon pressured the military to understate the costs and risks of war. But that is what happened, and it's happening again.

Last week Andrew Biggs, the associate commissioner for retirement policy at the Social Security Administration, appeared with Mr. Bush at a campaign-style event to promote privatization. There was a time when it would have been considered inappropriate for a civil servant to play such a blatantly political role. But then there was a time when it would have been considered inappropriate to appoint a professional advocate like Mr. Biggs, the former assistant director of the Cato Institute's Project on Social Security Privatization, to such a position in the first place.

Sure enough, The New York Times reports that under Mr. Biggs's direction, employees of the Social Security Administration are being forced to disseminate dire warnings about the system's finances - warnings that the employees say are exaggerated.

Just like the run up to the war dissenting opinions are being silenced and lapdog officials are being used to spread the lies and spin. But will it work this time?

Still, there are two reasons why the selling of Social Security privatization shouldn't be another slam dunk.

One is that we're not talking about secret intelligence; the media, if they do their job, can check out the numbers and see that they don't match what Mr. Bush is saying. (A good starting point is Roger Lowenstein's superb survey in The Times Magazine last Sunday.)
The other is that we've been here before. Fool me once ...

It would appear that some of the MSM is doing it's job this time. Of course you have that Republican hack rag the Wall Street Journal which will continue to tow the party line and what can we say about FOX. Disney owned ABC continues to give us news from Fantasy Land but there have been some bright points from the Times and MSNBC.

What It's Like Over There ... and a Call for Hope

I read a story on CNN today that made me realize how very blessed I am to be a civilian, and not to be one of our troops that are deployed over in Iraq. When I read soldiers' accounts of what it is like over there, and I try to imagine the experience as they tell it, I can't help but think Dubya's channeling something evil, whether he realizes it or not:

Benderman told of bombed out homes and displaced Iraqis living in mud huts and drinking from mud puddles; mass graves in Khanaqin near the Iranian border where dogs fed off bodies of men, women and children.

He recalled his convoy passing a girl, no older than 10, on the roadside clutching a badly injured arm. Benderman said his executive officer refused to help because troops had limited medical supplies.

"Her arm was burned, third-degree burns, just black. And she was standing there with her mother begging for help," Benderman said. "That was an eye opener to seeing how insane it really is."

This man is applying for conscientious objector status here in the States, and is now being considered AWOL and being court-martialed because he did not ship out with his unit when they were redeployed back to Iraq, despite the filing. His unit's chaplain, however, is no Father Mulcahy:

"You should have had the moral fortitude to deploy with us and see me here in Kuwait to begin your CO application," Army Chaplain Matt Temple said in a recent e-mail to Benderman. "You should be ashamed of the way you have conducted yourself. I certainly am ashamed of you."

Well, chaplain, I'm ashamed of you. I don't know what religion you claim to represent ...

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

... but men in your unit are attempting suicide (specialists J.R. Burt and David Beals) rather than being redeployed, and given your obviously caring counsel, I can understand why. You're obviously giving them wonderful comfort and compassion.

I don't know what to say. I've stayed away from public obscenity on this blog, but let me drop the F-bomb here: I just don't know what to fucking do as a citizen of the United States at this point.

This man is devastating families across the nation and across the globe, and yet millions upon millions of us were stupid enough to put him there and to ask him to do it.

Call for Hope

I don't know if what follows will be echoed anywhere -- if it'll just sit there with a Comment (0) attached to it until the entry drops off the front page, or it'll be picked up and echoed throughout the blogosphere. I'd hope the latter. But I think that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who read blogs on the Internet who would really like to have something to be hopeful about. So if you have a way of looking at all of this -- the Bush Administration Part Two and the Iraq mess to follow (and Iran mess to follow further?) -- that has some whit of hope for the future, I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one to deeply appreciate hearing it.

Einstein

Einstein's own explanation for his creativity doesn't sound anything like genius. Normal adults don't think about the problem of time and space, he once said. "That's above all the work of children. I, on the other hand, developed so very slowly that I first started to think about space and time as an adult. Naturally, I got deeper into the problem than an average child."

Albert Einstein is one of my few hero's. I frequently have a quote from him in the header of Middle Earth Journal. In Germany, a country he left in 1932, they are honoring Einstein on the 50th anniversary of his death.

Germany is honoring the 50th anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein with a series of lectures, conferences and events. A look at history's only pop-icon physicist.

The story goes that in 1931, Charlie Chaplin invited Albert Einstein to a screening of his film "City Lights." As they drove into town, the crowds along the roadside cheered and waved.

Chaplin turned to his guest and said: "The people are applauding me because everybody understands me, and you because nobody understands you."

Although his work eventually led to nuclear weapons he was if not a pacifist someone who believed war should be the last resort.

A committed pacifist, Albert Einstein lobbied for a single world government. In the area of peace and conflict studies, Einstein's positions are still current, said Thomas Held of the German Foundation for Peace Studies. Einstein had spent a good deal of time contemplating what a political means to peace might be.

"He wasn't a pure pacifist," said Held. Einstein had also thought about the limits of civilian means toward peacekeeping, and had asked himself when the military would need to intervene. Thus Einstein, fearing the Germans would build atomic weapons, wrote a letter to then US President Franklin D. Roosevelt recommending the Americans build an atom bomb. It was a recommendation he later regretted.

This is reflected in the quote I have over at Middle Earth Journal now:"If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith."

Keeping the Covert War a Secret

Thanks to a tip from MEJ's Bill in DC

The title may sound redundant, it's not. In the NewYorker, Seymour Hersh tells us how the Pentagon under Rumsfeld with the help of Bush/Cheney is neutering the CIA in order to circumvent laws put in place to limit CIA activities after the abuses in the 70's.

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld?s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon?s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon dosen't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it "covert ops"it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's "black reconnaissance." They're not even going to tell the cincs--the regional American military commanders-in-chief.

The first target is Iran and it's nuclear program. Typical of the Bush administration they have refused to cooperate with anyone else in addressing this very real problem.

One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a "lose-lose position" as long as the United States refuses to get involved. "France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it," the diplomat said. "If the U.S. stays outside, we don't have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse." The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, "The only solution is to bomb."

The brut force and ignorance of this administration is putting the entire world in danger. Keep in mind Rumsfeld has fucked up everything else he has done from Afghanistan to Iraq. But now Rumsfeld will have a free hand to do as he pleases, a fact that should terrify everyone.

"Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government's intelligence wringer," the former official went on. "The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What's missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone's priorities in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he's doing so they can ask, "Why are you doing this?" or "What are your priorities?" Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.

The Hersh piece is very long and I would suggest you check out the entire thing.

The Law of Infernal Dynamics

Over at Pacific Views, Natasha brings us some wisdom in the form of Gerrold's Law of Infernal Dynamics.

1. An object in motion will always be headed in the wrong direction.

2. An object at rest will always be in the wrong place.

3. The energy required to change either one of these states will always be more than you wish to expend, but never so much as to make the task totally impossible.

Most of us will recognize the current Republican Party as number 1. Some will see the Democratic Party as number 1 and others will see it as number 2. We moderates certainly fall into the number 3 category and as much as we don't want to expend the energy expend it we must.

Late-Night Sketch Comedy: What the Hell Happened?

Saturday Night Live evidently took notice of the fact that Dean is in the running for DNC chair (according to Kos, even possibly the lead), incorporating him into a skit with Anderson Williams and Zell Miller last night.

I have to admit, I've not often nowadays found Saturday Night Live skits humorous, but I found this one even insulting. The entire substance of the characterization was taking the concept of the "Dean scream" and Dean's rather infamous energy level and converting it into a semihomicidal mania. "GIVE ME YOUR BABIES," the actor yells at one point, "GIVE ME YOUR BABIES!!!" Come on ... is there really any skill in that? I've laughed at parodies of my own 'sacred cows' in the past, but that's mostly because the parodies were conducted with skill and paniche, not by taking a sledgehammer and pounding the audience's heads, going "IT'S FUNNY! HE SCREAMED! nevermindthatitwasaunidirectionalmikeandhewasshoutingovercrowdnoise HE'S A WILD MAN WITH NO COGNITIVE THOUGHT OR FEAR! OOOOOOOOOOOH!"

I tend to think, though, that the longer a television sketch comedy show is around on network television, the more it becomes reliant upon 'safe' repeating character sketches, until it starts feeding on itself like Ouroboros and ends up becoming a shell. I say this particularly after watching the semi-swift decay of "MADtv," which after only a decade or so on television, swiftly lost all the controversy it used to have.

I'll sometimes catch a first- or second-season episode of "MADtv" on Comedy Central, and it'll be remarkable exactly how brave the sketches were. There was an entire recurring sketch called "That's My White Mamma" that made fun of exactly how far UPN shows were going at the time -- a black woman got run down and her ghost gets up and inhabits actor Artie Lange -- who, to give you an idea of the contrast involved, was pretty much a taller John Belushi. Most of the other material on the show in the first few seasons was similarly weird, strange, or enjoyable, but at least 80% of it was immensely politically incorrect and boundary-testing. Even the sketches that got old, such as the Vancome Lady who spouted hatred of every variety at any opportunity, weren't boring.

Nowadays, for "MADtv" or "SNL," you just see the same character sketches recur over and over again. This is a shame, but I'm not too surprised. It actually was explained to me by a wonderful moment in a movie called "Bob Roberts," which is a documentary of a fictional neoconservative Republican candidate's 1992 campaign for one of Pennsylvania's Senate seats. If you've not caught it, you've missed one of the most biting analyses of the neocon movement ever, and what makes it remarkable is its prescience: it was released in 1992, long before the neoconservative movement ever really began becoming tidal, and features an absolutely amazing ensemble of actors, including Tim Robbins as the candidate and Alan Rickman in a f—kin' BRILLIANT role.

Anyway, in this scene, Bob Roberts is due to appear on a Saturday Night Live-type show as the musical guest, along with John Cusack (appearing as himself) as the host. John Cusack tries out this monologue on the director:

In the beginning, our great company provided appliances for the neighborhood. We heated your home, we refrigerated your food, and improved the quality of your life. We prospered, and you loved us, and we grew into a large multinational corporation. In fact, we own this very network. Our chief source of income, however, is the arms industry. Yes, we rely heavily on those fat government contracts to make those useless weapons of mass destruction. And even though we've been indicted and convicted for fraud several times, you don't hear about our bad side because, well, we own our own news division. Chances are pretty slim you'll hear reports of our environmental mishaps, or the way we bust those unions. We even have a highly-rated Saturday night show that the public buys as entertainment with a leftist slant.

"That's like cutting your own throat," replies the show's director, nixing the sketch. "It's not funny. Some of us need our paychecks."

P.S. I don't know as I could write an entirely new entry about it, but I wanted to make sure you guys caught, on the Smoking Gun, the e-mails that chairman Michael Powell got from people complaining about the FCC's prudishness surrounding the "Desparate Housewives"/NFL sketch. I'm starting you out with #14, the funniest one, but the others are pretty damn funny, too.

Outrageous

Social Security Enlisted to Push Its Own Revision

Over the objections of many of its own employees, the Social Security Administration is gearing up for a major effort to publicize the financial problems of Social Security and to convince the public that private accounts are needed as part of any solution.

So the Social Security System is going to be forced to push Bush's LIES.

The agency's plans are set forth in internal documents, including a "tactical plan" for communications and marketing of the idea that Social Security faces dire financial problems requiring immediate action.

Social Security officials say the agency is carrying out its mission to educate the public, including more than 47 million beneficiaries, and to support President Bush's agenda.

"The system is broken, and promises are being made that Social Security cannot keep," Mr. Bush said in his Saturday radio address. He is expected to address the issue in his Inaugural Address.

But agency employees have complained to Social Security officials that they are being conscripted into a political battle over the future of the program. They question the accuracy of recent statements by the agency, and they say that money from the Social Security trust fund should not be used for such advocacy.

"Trust fund dollars should not be used to promote a political agenda," said Dana C. Duggins, a vice president of the Social Security Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 50,000 of the agency's 64,000 workers and has opposed private accounts.

Propaganda and lies:

The agency's strategic communications plan says the following message is to be disseminated to "all audiences" through speeches, seminars, public events, radio, television and newspapers: "Social Security's long-term financing problems are serious and need to be addressed soon," or else the program may not "be there for future generations."

The plan says that Social Security managers should "discuss solvency issues at staff meetings," "insert solvency messages in all Social Security publications" and spread the word at nontraditional sites like farmers' markets and "big box retail stores."

Also, the document says, agency managers should observe and measure how much their employees know about the solvency of the program.

This is worse than the propaganda campaign for "No Child Left Behind" and Medicare Reform because they are not even trying to hide it.