Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
There has been plenty of bad news for the Bush administration in this most difficult of August vacations. First of all, a new poll has shown that a majority of Americans would prefer 'someone else' to Bush. Now, polls can fluctuate in a range and all that (it's just a touch over 50%) but still, it shows a very large bloc of people aren't happy with things.
To put this in some perspective, you should check out the site Professor Pollkatz, which has a few interesting graphs and charts. In particular check out this graph, which shows an unquestionable slope downwards. Bush's approval ratings look like a sawtooth: his ratings jump up astronomically when the country has shifted into immediate war/reaction mode (spikes at 9/11 and this March), but as things settle the air comes out like a leaky balloon. Granted, the percentages are falling off extremely high numbers that no one expected to last. I just think its interesting that the polls pull down with such little variance. Also compare his approval rating with other recent wartime presidents, and you can see they have a rolling, up and down kind of pattern. Will this pattern bend around at a safe 55%? Why the hell would it?
And the economy. Let's have just a bit from the Scripps Howard News service:
Labor Day 2003 finds unemployment hovering near a nine-year high and people thankful to have work nevertheless feeling anxious because of the jobless recovery. Some 9.1 million Americans are officially unemployed, even though joblessness ticked down 0.2 percentage points from June's 6.4 percent high because 470,000 people quit looking for work last month. Meantime, 74.5 million adults are outside the labor force, 4 million more than when the nine-month recession started in March 2001.Happy day! The federal deficit wanders into new and exciting territory as it will reach around, oh, $480 billion or so. That's $480,000,000,000. I like it when they can just write their contributors dividend tax 'rebates' to get tossed in that phat $200 million election coffer. That's what I call prosperity."For too many working families, the current recovery is indistinguishable from the recession," said economist Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank.
High-paying manufacturing jobs have plunged by more than 2.7 million since August 2000, and the National Association of Manufacturers forecasts that U.S. factories will add back just 200,000 to 250,000 of those jobs even if the economy grows at 4 percent or better through 2004. Association president Jerry Jasinowski blames a "toxic brew" of fair and unfair foreign competition and high health care, litigation and energy costs at home for "the slowest manufacturing recovery on record since the Federal Reserve began tracking industrial production back in 1919."
On the elder Bush's watch, it took 15 months for job growth to resume, but today job growth hasn't jump-started 22 months into recovery - the worst job-creation record since the Labor Department started tracking such statistics in 1939.
The federal deficit will hit a record $480 billion next year, more than twice the level forecast just five months ago, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.Then on the foreign policy front, the spread of freedom and the spirit of liberation are strong in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has liberated itself from the label of 'destroyed' and gone wreaking havoc in the provinces, which are controlled by an anarchic system of U.S.-backed warlords, in what resembles a combination of Reagan's Honduras, Khengis Khan and Lebanon. What is the secret of the Taliban's guerrilla persistence, when all had dismissed them? Human Resources! Basically they set up a bunch of religious schools in remote areas around Pakistan and Afghanistan, (with Saudi money) and these schools teach a rather remote and extreme version of Islam, generating a number of militantly motivated young kids who go off and cause trouble. There's quite a lot of trouble to get into with right now, as Israel and the United States occupy every other Muslim territory from Jerusalem to Pakistan.Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said in a statement that "this unprecedented binge-borrowing imposes a heavy burden on Americans by increasing the cost of borrowing for businesses, home buyers and students."
If the tax cuts are extended, the CBO said, deficits would grow by an additional $1.6 trillion over the next decade, by an additional $400 billion if a drug benefit is enacted, and by another $400 billion if Congress takes steps to keep the alternative minimum income tax -- a baseline amount of tax that must be paid, even if the filer's tax calculated under standard rules falls below that level -- from affecting more middle-class families.
The nonpartisan agency said the annual budget shortfalls will total nearly $1.4 trillion over the next decade, compared with a $5.6 trillion surplus the CBO forecast in 2001. Bush didn't address the deficit directly. But in St. Paul, Minn., where he raised $1.2 million for his re-election campaign, Bush spotlighted his tax cuts, the centerpiece of his economic policy.
"Here's what I believe and here's what I know: that when Americans have more take-home pay to spend, to save or invest, the whole economy grows, and people are more likely to find a job," Bush said.
Then of course there's the Palestinian cease-fire that collapsed when Israel, in its wisdom, decided to kill the guy in Hamas that Mr. Abbas talks with, dealing a handy blow to his efforts.
Then there's the UN bombing, which has wigged out all the NGO's trying to clean up in Iraq. The Red Cross is reducing its operations, which is very depressing for Iraqis, because the Red Cross is the group which acts as a go-between with Iraqi POWs, detainees, their families, and the Americans.
So the Neo-con scheme is working out pretty smoothly, as prescribed. And we're Taking the Fight to Them! Oh yeah!
This is a bit of older news, but I still think it's worth looking at. 2001 Nobel Prize winner, econ professor George Akerlof, has become somewhat politicized by the outrages he sees in the Bush administration. He spoke out against Bush's terribly constructed tax cuts and the general depravity of the president's policies:
The government is not really telling the truth to the American people. Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting...Future generations and even people in ten years are going to face massive public deficits and huge government debt. Then we have a choice. We can be like a very poor country with problems of threatening bankruptcy. Or we're going to have to cut back seriously on Medicare and Social Security. So the money that is going overwhelmingly to the wealthy is going to be paid by cutting services for the elderly...
I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign and economic but also in social and environmental policy. This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for people to engage in civil disobedience.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Of what kind?
Akerlof: I don't know yet. But I think it's time to protest - as much as possible.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: You've mentioned the term civil disobedience a minute ago. That term was made popular by the author Henry D. Thoreau, who actually advised people not to pay taxes as a means of resistance. You wouldn't call for that, would you?
Akerlof: No. I think the one thing we should do is pay our taxes. Otherwise, it'll only make matters worse.
This has been a pretty rough week... This UN thing. The Jerusalem thing and the Afghanistan thing. Seems like a thousand plans sinking in quicksand. This came up today and I kept looking at it over and over::
Stratfor.com (Strategic Forecasting): The situation in the region is, in our view, reaching the crisis stage for the United States. Things are going very wrong for the Bush administration. The threat of an Islamist rising from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf no longer is an interesting theoretical concept. Except for Jordan, it is becoming a reality. Under the circumstances, Jordan's stability and security should not be assumed in the next year or so. If Iran -- or native Iraqi leaders -- send the Shiites into the streets, then all of Iraq will be in chaos and a perfect storm will have formed.Our perception of the U.S. strategy has been that the basic assumption was that the United States has the time to let the guerrillas burn themselves out or that it has enough time to craft an effective strategy. We do not think that basic assumption is valid any longer. The collapse of the cease-fire between the Israelis and Palestinians creates a regional force that can be contained only by decisive U.S. action in Iraq.
Salon.com: "We're losing the war in Afghanistan, too":
Afghanistan is full of mutually reinforcing relationships, on smaller local levels. These types of alliances are what the politics of Afghanistan are made of. As many Afghans point out, Karzai isn't really the leader of Afghanistan; he's simply a figurehead over a set of rival parties vying for control. In reality, the Afghan state is just a complicated anarchy in which various local players, with varying amounts of power, exert power over one another in different ways.There are no functional political processes in the country, just naked power dynamics. And this is to be expected: Afghanistan's provincial governors, village mayors and police chiefs are really only local military strongmen -- usually former mujahedin -- who are ostensibly allied with Karzai but ultimately loyal to no one. Many are self-sufficient, independent sovereigns over the areas under their control, and act and think as soldiers. The political dynamic resembles a battlefield, a state of war, even with Afghanistan at peace.
Most Afghans refer to their country's local leaders as jangsalar, Dari for "warlords," or tufangdar, "gunmen," which is, essentially what they are. Kabul journalists use the term "warlordism" to describe the country's core problem (which allows them not to name names). And yet warlordism also has a cause, which journalists are glad to point out if you ask them.
"The Americans," said one newspaper editor to me, in July. "The Americans put the warlords into power."
I got an e-mail from Ruminator saying that Texas radio talk-show host and author Jim Hightower will be speaking at Macalester and promoting his book, "Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country--And Its Time to Take It Back" on Thursday, September 4, 7:30 PM at Weyerhauser Chapel. There is going to be admission sadly, $2.50 for students and $5 for others, but free if you buy his book! What a deal! Ruminator says:
Hightower offers hilarious and hard-hitting solutions for giving power back to grassroots America in his new book Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back [Viking]. Our most popular populist takes on the Bushites, the Wobblycrats, and the corporate Kleptocrats, as well as tapping into thriving activist networks all over the country. Hightower gives us the real America that the rest of the world doesn't get to see in his uplifting tales of grassroots organizations retaking control of their communities.Will Hightower try to vacuum up some of that St. Paul Wellstone love like Dr. Dean did? Hightower has a syndicated column in the Pulse every week and a monthly column in the Nation.
NEW POLL!
A quick lunchtime update: Fox News has just sued Al Franken for titling his next book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," because Fox believes it controls the concept of 'fair and balanced.' What I really like is how their lawyers phrased the case(NyTimes)
"Franken is neither a journalist nor a television news personality," according to the complaint. "He is not a well-respected voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight."... "Franken is neither a journalist nor a television news personality," according to the complaint. "He is not a well-respected voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight." Lawyers for Fox who filed the complaint also take issue with Mr. Franken's book cover because it "mimics the look and style" of two books written by Bill O'Reilly, a prominent Fox News personality. Mr. O'Reilly is also pictured on the cover, just beneath the word "Lies."I did see bits and pieces from said dinner... Judging by the choice edits made by MSNBC that day, O'reilly is a screaming bastard and Franken a rambling idiot. I forsee the possibility that this lawsuit may unequivocally prove Fox News is not fair and balanced. That would be precious. This is great, as it will help promote his book, which I do intend to buy. He better stop at Ruminator on the book tour!Court papers refer to Mr. Franken, who is a former "Saturday Night Live" writer and performer, as a "parasite" who hopes to use Fox's reputation to confuse the public and boost sales of his book.
Franken is also accused of verbally attacking Mr. O'Reilly and other Fox personalities on at least two occasions, and of being "either intoxicated or deranged" as he flew into a rage at a press correspondents' dinner in April 2003. Mr. Franken has not filed a response in court to the suit.
Well the site's been off for about a week. Last Thursday some geniuses from Comcast were doing stuff in the alley and there was a bunch of static, and then our TV signal was fuzzy and the cable modem wouldn't connect. So I'm assuming it was because of those guys... Yesterday they come and fix it by installing a new line into my house and it's all fine... There's a Comcast double-header at my house today, as they are going to install a real phone line. My cell phone doesn't work so hot at the house, so this is nice. I will post my phone number later. My job is going really well, and hm, I should get back to work now. :)
