Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
I wonder if Karl Rove had a backup plan for this one: A top-level Republican conspiracy to protect a pedophile among their ranks on Capitol Hill, and *everyone* knows about it, a month to election day. Now that's a scandal for the history books.
Interestingly, the Republicans who claim they are so fucking good at defending America are totally incapable of defending their own teenage pages from predatory Florida congressmen on Capitol Hill. They literally cannot control sexual predators in a 1000-yard radius of the U.S. Capitol. These are the geniuses who are supposed to smoke the evildoers out of their Central Asian hidey-holes?
I want to watch the Daily Show tonight. Jon Stewart's head might explode from eschatonary total irony singularity syndrome (ETISS - the itis of modern politcs). One interesting consequence of this whole matter is that apparently the House Republicans are going to get whomped because in many ways, they are now politically paralyzed until the election. Anything they say can be flipped around to "But can you protect the interns?"
That whooshing sound you hear across America today is the moderate middle dropping out of the program. If this isn't the last straw, I don't know what it could possibly be. Hardball and Keith Olbermann should have a fun time tonight too...
I am reposting this chunk from the excellent political news & commentary site, Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo.com . This is the big picture, and it seems totally on target:
Here at TPM, as well as at TPMmuckraker and Election Central we're going to be devoting a lot of resources over the coming days to covering the unfolding Foley scandal. But I've gotten a lot of questions about the larger political impact of this debacle. So I'd like to draw back for a moment to take stock of that question.I think it's a pretty safe assumption at this point that Democrat Tim Mahoney will win Mark Foley's seat on November 7th. But I'd say that'll be relatively far down the list of eventual consequences.
The simple fact is that Foley's downfall has pretty nearly decapitated the leadership of the House GOP with just five weeks to go before election day. And that's devastating.
What do I mean by decapitated? Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that nothing else really comes out about how the House leadership handled this. No more shoes drop. Not a safe assumption from what seems to be in the reporting pipeline. But let's assume it.
Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) is in a tight race for reelection and he's chairman of the NRCC, the Republican House campaign committee. He's in charge of the effort to keep the majority.
What's the number one thing on his mind right now? I doubt it's the NRCC or even his race for reelection. I think Reynolds is, to put it mildly, distracted right now.
How about Denny Hastert and John Boehner? I don't see them going on shows or making any public appearances for a while. They'll get asked awkward and possibly unanswerable questions about Foleygate. I'd say they're out of commission for fundraisers too.
And pretty much any campaign joust or jab at the Democrats from one of these guys, on whatever issue, will be instantly transformed into some sex-with-pages snark. "How can we trust them to protect America when they can't even protect the summer interns on Capitol Hill."
Just to give some sense of how these interviews are going. Yesterday, when Tom Reynolds was asked by the local paper how Rep. Rodney Alexander had characterized Foley's emails when he told him about them, he said "I'm not going to get into all that . . . I'm not into a grand jury witness thing here, or whatever." Well, don't be sure, Tom. The night is still young.
The one thing a pol can't brook is being the object of ridicule and derision. And at the moment that's about the best these characters can hope for.
Add to this the fact that in the final weeks before an election it's critical for each side's leaders to work together seamlessly. And what do you think the Haster-Reynolds relationship is like at the moment? Or how about Boehner and Hastert? They still trust each other?
And what happens when Joe Sestak asks Curt Weldon whether he's lost confidence in Denny Hastert? How does that conversation go?
The simple fact is that to the extant campaigning determines the outcomes of elections, the race goes to the side that can remain on the offensive most consistently and define the national debate on its own terms. Foleygate has made it very hard for the leaders of the House GOP to go on the offensive on anything relevant to the election. For political purposes they're basically out of commission. And they've given Democratic challengers in every district around the country a slew of questions with which to pummel GOP incumbents or any Republican, for that matter, who puts his head up on television. This is in the context of an election that was already going very badly for House Republicans. Foleygate has now made them all but politically defenseless in the final stretch of the campaign. And that is a very big deal.
Primaries are going on in Minnesota today and you should roll over to that.
The Star Tribune has a nice feature on their site called MyVote that tells you where to go and what the choices are.
Turnout is usually pretty low so your vote makes a bigger difference than the general, and for matters like the DFL 5th district (of which I am not a part), it's way more important than the November election. Best of luck to all the candidates, especially, here, Judge Ostby, who threw out my charges after I got arrested because the police tampered with evidence!!
Just after I noted the tricky matter between Keith Ellison and the Jewish community over in the Fifth District, I get an email from the Ellison campaign proclaiming that he's been endorsed by the local paper American Jewish World. They seem to think he's sort of a Muslim Wellstone, and that's pretty sweet. Here's the email in full:
Keith Ellison for U.S. Congress
Dear Friend,
Keith Endorsed by American Jewish World!
Keith Ellison’s historic campaign for Congress gained the extremely valued and valuable endorsement today of the influential Twin Cities newspaper American Jewish World.
Keith said, “I am humbled, and just plain thrilled, by the confidence the American Jewish World has placed in my vision of a just future where there are no throw-away people and peace is our guiding principle. Indeed, this is a collective vision of tens of thousands of us in our uniquely progressive district, a vision we have built together out of our most deeply-held values.
“I am proud that the American Jewish World has honored us with their support and has joined our extraordinary coalition of progressive people of good will who represent all faiths, all colors and all our neighborhoods.”
“This is how we will win – by creating a powerful force of real people unified behind a passion for justice.”
Below are excerpts from their endorsement, with our highlighting added:
“Regarding the 5th District DFL Primary, there are three fairly conventional candidates who would bring particular strengths to service in the U.S. House and would likely provide competent representation for their constituents. However, voters could make an emphatic statement – one that would gain national and international attention – by casting their ballots for Keith Ellison. The 43-year-old state representative would bring a singular passion and intelligence to the job of representing citizens of Minnesota Fifth District; in many ways, Ellison represents the progressive populist vision that Minnesota lost with the untimely passing of Paul Wellstone in 2002.”
“Ellison acted as the lawyer for the House DFL caucus in an ethics proceeding against former representative Arlon Lindner, who contended that gays were not victims of Nazi oppression in the Holocaust. Ellison understands the importance of guarding against Holocaust denial and revisionism, and links the lessons of the Shoah to more recent cases of genocide in Rwanda and Darfur. Further, he supports the State of Israel and the continuation of U.S. aid to Israel. He holds to the mainstream position of a negotiated two-state solution regarding the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
“We all know that nobody is perfect and no political candidate is without shortcomings. We are now in Elul, the last month of the Hebrew year and the month preceding Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur…During this period of heightened spirituality, we find ourselves considering the choices before us as citizens of a free nation. We cannot take our civil liberties for granted, especially in the face of well-reported government actions to curb our constitutional rights and consolidate political power. In the trying times ahead, we will need courageous political leadership and we must hold our elected representatives accountable.”
“We think that Keith Ellison has the attributes to be a dynamic and effective representative in Congress. In Ellison, we have a moderate Muslim who extends his hand in friendship to the Jewish community and supports the security of the State of Israel. He is a person with a vision of a more humane and equitable society and he is the candidate we favor in the Fifth District DFL election.’
The next three paragraphs are horror incarnate. It's like we wrapped everything wrong about the whole last six years into one little ball and fucking nuked the world. Seymour Hersh's latest:
Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”
Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”
The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”
Securing the Northern Border:
Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by:
• striking Syria’s drug-money and counterfeiting infrastructure in Lebanon, all of which focuses on Razi Qanan.
• paralleling Syria’s behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces.
• striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.
"A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith & other neo-cons (1996).
Emphasis mine on 'precedent,' or 'demo', as it was called in Washington during the Lebanon planning stage earlier this year.
Ten years on, the clean break has run its course:
The clock just ran out. And now we find out that they were winding it up weeks before Hezbollah captured the Israeli soldiers. The captures were just a pretext: Israel and the United States wanted to smack Hezbollah around to demonstrate how weak the Iranian proxy was, and also to prepare American military planners for an Iranian attack with a "demo" of bombing (Shiite) missiles, bunkers and tunnels.
Of course, the demo failed. Failed Big Time. Thousands of dead all around, an inhuman consequence of the war Israel launched with American backing, but it's quite possible that Hezbollah's performance in the war has blown all the Pentagon's Iran fantasies to smithereens. In Washington, Bush and Cheney planned to kill lots of Lebanese in order to weaken Hezbollah and prepare the Iran war. That alone should chill you for a while.
It should chill you almost as much as witnessing the complete failure of the Western military style's beloved "full spectrum dominance", which we pretty much just did. Strategy, intelligence, tactics, training, logistics: all were complete failures. The Bush Administration misread Lebanon in a way that Ariel Sharon never would have. Now Israel's vaunted military "posture" has been crushed, revealed to all the world as incapable of defeating a well-armed modern infantry playing defense.
Israel's weak, almost meaningless military performance was one of the 21st century's signature moments – and the cruel ideologies endorsing the carpet bombing of Lebanon – this is the face of the Neoconservative world to come, if we do nothing.
The sense that Israel's military power would create order in the Middle East, forcing the Arabs to accept a peace deal on Israel's dictated terms, was one of the major principles of the Neoconservative philosophy, and the Revisionist flavor of Zionism before it. In the 1920s, Vladimir Jabotnisky wrote in the Iron Wall that only force would or could bring the Arabs to moderation – and today the Neoconservatives refuse, in principle, to negotiate with Evil Ones. Their fantasy that Israel and America could create a new, hard hegemonic (imperial?) alliance over the Middle East, on a foundation of splintered ethnic groups and military force, would never work. (Partly because those pesky subjects of the alliance tend to unite when they get bombed). Today, a core element of the Neoconservative philosophy has just evaporated as the UN saves the day. Its gears are gone.
Part of the Bush administration's plan here, according to Hersh, was to set Lebanon's other minorities against Hezbollah by bombing the common infrastructure of the country. This appears to me a pretty good example of the Iron Wall intended to divide Arabs so they cut a nicer deal with Israel. And yet again, it failed because it's a stupid fucking idea that has ruined Israel's fortunes with illusory violence at every turn. Hersh:
The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said.
Maybe Ariel Sharon learned this one the hard way in Beirut. He never wanted to try for the Litani River again, I think we can guess.
The information operation to justify the war was cynical and employed a "family == nation" metaphor designed to help the American audience psychologically project support for the war agenda, in a way that the ordinary spats between Israel and Arabs don't. The Israeli soldiers captured were just the 'morality' window dressing of the war makers. They were nothing but symbolic pawns, deliberately used to inspire the Israeli and American populations to support their leaders. They were just an opening bracket, a façade fronting a sinister "demonstration war" blasted through Lebanon, intended to enhance Israel and America's strategic might – and the Republican Party's dark political prospects in November.
Sy Hersh is giving us the goods again. He will probably be the one man who holds back the Iran war from happening. What he reports here is the hardest version of what I suspected: in DC they egged this war on, they planned it, they wanted to blow the shit out of Lebanon, and then Iran. They've wanted to run the Clean Break program since 1996. It is clear today that it's a failure at every level, but soon they'll hand out medals to make themselves feel better.
You need to read this whole article right away. This is another disastrous execution of an ideology that has critically damaged Israel, the United States, Lebanon and Iraq. The big winners are Al Qaeda and Iran. Tell me again why it's such a fucking good idea.
WATCHING LEBANON: Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2006-08-21, Posted 2006-08-14
In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
[snip.........]
The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier [than the kidnapping], after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.
One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone. “Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past.”
Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,” the consultant said.
The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)
The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)
[.......]In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”
.....Get ready for the New October Surprise. Michael Ledeen is pissed right now. He's gonna pull some shit to stage an Iran conflict, as James Bamford warned you in Rolling Stone.
Who, me?
It's just another disaster for the Jews and the Arabs, and certainly a disaster for America. When will these folks realize that their leaders are the real enemies, paralyzing their nations with fear to secure their own power?
And what about War Crimes charges? Billions of people want to know...
In the field of disgusting things, this is pretty much at the top:
George Stephanopoulos: Can Karl help Joe?
According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President's political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: "The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do."But in a year where even some Republican candidates are running away from the President on the campaign trail, does this offer have any value to Lieberman? Still smarting from all that coverage of "the kiss" at last year's State of the Union, the Lieberman camp isn't looking for an explicit endorsement. That could create more problems than it solves.
The White House might help Lieberman by putting the kibosh on any move to replace the weak Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger, with a stronger candidate.
And it might be able to convince Schlesinger to drop out of the race and endorse Lieberman in the final week or two, when it's too late for another candidate to fill the GOP slot. A quiet White House effort to steer some money in Lieberman's direction is another possibility.
This is a tricky dance for Lieberman. He needs to figure out a way to get the benefits of Bush support -- some votes from loyal Republicans -- without turning off the independents and moderate Democrats he needs to win. The safest course may be a polite "thanks but no thanks" to the White House offer.
Connecticut August 08, 2006 - 10:55PM ET (i) = incumbent = winner = runoff Governor - - Dem Primary 713 of 748 Precincts Reporting - 95.32% Name Party Votes Pct
DeStefano, John Dem 127,208 50.50
Malloy, Dan Dem 124,711 49.50
Lieutenant Governor - - Dem Primary 696 of 748 Precincts Reporting - 93.05%
Name Party Votes Pct
Glassman, Mary Dem 113,087 57.06
Slifka, Scott Dem 85,091 42.94
U.S. Senate - - Dem Primary 706 of 748 Precincts Reporting - 94.39%
Name Party Votes Pct
Lamont, Ned Dem 136,353 51.73
Lieberman, Joe (i) Dem 127,249 48.27
Hit up these guys for the results
U.S. Senate
Connecticut U. S. Senate Democrat
Candidate Votes Percent Winner
Ned Lamont 40,044 55%
Joe Lieberman 32,575 45%
Precincts Reporting - 184 out of 748 - 25%
Finally a good day for democracy
Joe Lieberman's website went down and they blamed the bloggers. Here is the view, 1:15 after polls closed. It looks shady to me. I strongly suspect that this bullshit was staged by the Liebs as a last-second false flag kinda thing.
The site redirects here:
Shady. I think Lieberman's going down - i still think about 6 to 8 points although I haven't heard any results yet. It could easily be closer...
Connecticut likely Democratic primary voters back challenger Ned Lamont 51 - 45 percent lead over incumbent Sen. Joseph Lieberman in the U.S. Senate race, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.(Source)This compares to a 54 - 41 percent Lamont lead among likely Democratic primary voters in an August 3 poll by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University.
In this latest survey, 4 percent of likely Democratic primary voters remain undecided, but 90 percent of voters who name a candidate say their mind is made up.
Among Lamont supporters, 54 percent say their vote is mainly against Lieberman. Lieberman's support for the war in Iraq is the main reason they are voting for Lamont, 36 percent of Lamont voters say, while 54 percent say it is one of several reasons.
If you care to look, sites like the DailyKos have lots of updated goods about this race. Mainstream media coverage of the race has generally framed it as a "powerful illuminati leftist bloggers bring down dearly beloved, fairest and most reasonable man in Washington." However, there is a catch: Lieberman is a shitty senator who has totally ignored the needs of his constituents, and this means, in a democracy, that his job should be in jeopardy.
It's true that Ned Lamont expertly used the blog side of things to get some early buzz going, and raise some money from out of the state, but his candidacy would not generate volunteers and genuine interest unless it was obvious to Connecticut Democrats that Lieberman is a horrible senator that they need to get rid of.
And the polls now are showing that Lieberman will probably lose by 5 to 7 points. This means that Lieberman will no longer have workers from organized labor, like the AFL-CIO, to run his get-out-the-vote operation.
Meanwhile, on the national level, the Democrats are winning plenty of fundraising cash. As detailed here, this means that the engine is primed for a serious nationwide Dem sweep in November.
House campaigns raised $544 million (up 18% from 2004 levels) and spent $325.5 million (17% above the previous cycle). They reported a cash balance of $367 million as of June 30. Receipts by Republican House candidates increased 12% with increases for incumbent candidates (23%) and open seat candidates (15%) but a decline in overall receipts for Republican House challengers of 34% when compared with 2004. Democratic candidates' receipts were 26% higher than in the last cycle with a small increase for incumbents (4%) and larger increases for both open seat candidates (46%) and challengers, whose fundraising more than doubled when compared with 2004.
This video should illustrate everything that is wrong with Joe Lieberman. If you still don't get it, well, go straight to Fox News for your idiotbox fix. I promise some more goodies later. I've just been slacking the last few days, chilling on my healing ankle, watching movies, sleeping a lot with the aid of (prescribed) Vicodin. Good times.
Be advised there are graphic images of violence in this post, partly because the American TV networks have suppressed such imagery. Nothing is quite as elusive as Arab blood on American eyeballs. Now that's information warfare.
When God looks down on a "proportionate response," what does S/He see (via the agonist)? Beirut satellite image:
I won't go into details, but always look at Juan Cole's site. Some of the links come from there today. The Agonist is also essential reading, and Antiwar.com's blog. Good points about Western hypocrisy, and said today:
This whole thing was about Olmert proving he had stones as big as Sharon. (Shades of Fallujah in 2004 if you ask me.)
Pat Lang, formerly a top dog at the Defense Intelligence Agency, observes of the IDF withdrawal from Bint Jbeil:
Sounds Like They Couldn't Stand The Heat.
The IDF pulled its ground forces out of Bint Jbeil Saturday all the way back into Galilee. They fought there for days to take the town, lost some men and then started house demolitions. According to my Israeli sources, Hizbullah counter-attacked in strength starting Friday night. The next day Israel withdrew from the town.
It sounds like the politicians couldn't stand the prospect of real war. Or, more fancifully the IAF has laid an elaborate trap for HA. Some of the members of our seminar will prefer that idea.
A week ago the Jerusalem Post said that a "civil administration" (i.e. occupation) government for South Lebanon was being prepared, but it looks like it won't be needed at all.
Essential reading (and not just because I interviewed the guy!) in the Nation:
Anger in the Arab World by Rashid I. Khalidi - posted July 27
In what passes for analysis of the war involving Israel, Lebanon and Palestine in US and Israeli government circles, in the well-oiled PR machine that shills for them, and in much of the US media, we are told about a struggle against terrorism by a state under siege. The basic argument is that Israel is "responding to terrorist violence," and that the only real question is, How soon will Israeli force, backed by American determination, prevail? But this scenario has little to do with reality in the Middle East.
There will be no "destruction" of Hezbollah, and no "uprooting" of its infrastructure or that of Hamas, whatever the results of Israel's siege of Gaza and its merciless attacks against Lebanon. The rhetoric about "terrorism" has mesmerized those who parrot it, blinding them to the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas are deeply rooted popular movements that have developed as a response to occupation--of the West Bank and Gaza for nearly forty years, and of southern Lebanon from 1978 to 2000. Whatever one might say about the two movements' callousness in targeting civilians (a subject on which Israel's defenders are hardly in a position to preach), both have won impressive victories in elections and have provided social services and protection to their people.......
.....Much depends on whether an Israeli, American or Israeli-American war with Syria and, much more serious, Iran can be avoided. If escalation of what is already a major war in Gaza and Lebanon can be prevented, the conflict's regional effects will be mitigated. Much depends on how fast European public opinion, turning rapidly, expresses its revulsion at what is happening in Lebanon. Tales of the massive destruction and civilian casualties are being carried home by tens of thousands of French, British, Italian and German evacuees, many of them dual nationals, appearing on French and British TV talking about the atrocities they have seen. Much also depends on how adventurous Iran and Syria choose to be, how much punishment Hezbollah can take and still keep fighting, and how wise the Palestinians are in dealing with their difficult internal situation. And much depends on how far the man in the White House will go with his instincts. If he reins in his darker impulses and those of the Israeli general staff, which is running the show on that end of the alliance, the current slide into the abyss can yet be halted. If not, the Middle East and the United States are headed for catastrophe.
Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian: The neocon resurgence: The delusional US mindset that made the Iraq war a disaster has resurfaced in Lebanon. Lebanon Daily Star: "America's credibility will be a casualty of Israel's war: Whatever reasons arabs ever had to trust washington are going up in smoke".
Osama Bin Laden wins BIG: July 21: "Doing bin Laden's Work for Him" by Michael Scheuer, the CIA guy that ran the Bin Laden unit for years. Gotta read this one:
Most damaging for G-8 leaders will be this week's validation for Muslims of bin Laden's assertion that the West considers Muslim lives cheap and expendable. They will see that three kidnapped Israeli soldiers and several dozen dead Israelis are worth infinitely more to the West than the thousands of Muslims held for years in Israel's prisons, the hundreds already killed in Lebanon, and the eradication of Lebanon's modern infrastructure.
So bin Laden wins without lifting a finger........The impact of this Israel-Hezbollah round will not stop with the inevitable truce that will be declared after Israel ruins Lebanon. While temporary order may return to the Levant, America, Britain, and the West should not fool themselves. They have again gratuitously picked sides in a fight between two inconsequential nations; the survival of neither is a genuine national security interest for any G-8 state. Led by Washington's absurd, 30-year obsession with the minimal Shia threat to America, and blind to the hatred generated among Muslims by their foreign policies, the G-8 have mightily strengthened the enmity, durability, and resolve of the Sunni extremist movement that bin Laden leads and personifies.
Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line: First Iraq, now Lebanon: Mainstream media is making the same excuses furnished in Iraq for the destruction of infrastructure and the mass killing of civilians in Lebanon, writes Firas Al-Atraqchi.
Where were those Israeli soldiers captured? Obviously the moral foundation of the war is that Hezbollah captured those Israeli soldiers over the 'Blue Line', inside Israel. But there are stories burbling up that they were actually captured inside Lebanon on some kind of Israeli commando raid. It seems implausible, but the story is out there.
Neo-cons ginning up Iran war NOW: This is a MUST-read: Iran: The Next War:
Even before the bombs fell on Baghdad, a group of senior Pentagon officials were plotting to invade another country. Their covert campaign once again relied on false intelligence and shady allies. But this time, the target was Iran. BY JAMES BAMFORD
This story HAS to be read. It explains the AIPAC spy scandal, how Ahmed Chalabi told the Iranians that the U.S. was reading their encrypted messages, how Michael Ledeen is gearing up the Iranian opposition to stir up more trouble in Iran. This is a very big deal. I won't quote a lot from here, but this story tracks with a lot of the stuff we've tried to cover here on HongPong in the past. And now it is really getting put into motion. Some jackass on National Review denies everything.
Lebanon Daily Star reports yesterday that Israeli military casualties has forced a change in Israel's military strategy, abandoning a large expansion of ground warfare.
Middle East Report: Israel's War Against Lebanon's Shiites by Jim Quilty in Beirut - July 25. Features copies of Israeli propaganda leaflets (pictured here). Lots of details about those tricky complexities of Lebanese politics.
CSM: UN deaths prompt 'diplomatic firestorm': Annan calls attack on observers in Lebanon 'apparently deliberate,' but Israel angrily denies charge. July 28: "Israeli strikes may boost Hizbullah base: Hizbullah support tops 80 percent among Lebanese factions." July 26: Asia Times Online: Hezbollah banks on home-ground advantage By Sami Moubayed.
Antiwar.com: Be sure to read Fourth Generation War in Lebanon by Ehsan Ahrari. Justin Raimondo: Lebanon: Are the Yanks Coming? Let's hope not…. and Lebanon: Winners and Losers: Bin Laden wins, and we lose. Also, Israel is winning the battle, but not the war on July 25. However, it appears they have lost the battle too. The Fire Next Time by Osamah Khalil about the impact on the rest of the Arab world. Lawless by Nebojsa Malic. Israeli Offensive Targeting Relief Efforts? by Aaron Glantz. Five Myths that sanction Israel's war crimes by Jonathan Cook. (This article was too long though)
On Iraq check out the review of Unembedded, about freelance photo-journalists in Iraq. The photo below was in the book.
Voice of America News conveys Lebanese refugee stories:
'Tehfa says the bombs are not the only danger. Yaroun is all but cut off from the outside world. "Plus, the people die without food. There is no water, no electricity, no gas. Nothing!" she added. Tehfa literally walked to safety, wearing a pair of black flip-flop sandals and carrying nothing but her shiny black handbag. After nearly two weeks under siege, she and a group of about 70 townspeople - waving a large white flag - walked six kilometers to the nearest village, a place called Rmeich. Another Australian, Fatima Salim, managed to find a car to take her to Rmeich, and then slept in a cramped apartment with 80 other people for three days. "I lost my mother, my brother, my sister-in-law. I do not know where they are gone," she said. "Because I go out from one door, they go out from another door. And for one minute, I cannot see my parents. I do not know where they are." '
Some angry Lebanese post photos of wounded Lebanese children, and photos of Israeli children writing messages on bombs. Graphic. They also posted images of the "Marwaheen Massacre" where Israeli jets pounded and killed a fleeing Lebanese familiy earlier in fighting. The family had previously been turned away from a UN post, which is why the Blue Helmets had to pick up the pieces, literally:
Washington Post editorial from Tuesday: "Air Power Won't Do It" as I said earlier. Interview from a week ago with a former Bush hand on Lebanon in Harpers.
News updates from Wednesday, noted because the Dell this fleeing Beirut guy is heaving over the fence looks just like the old HongPong server. Civilians killed as Israelis target ambulances. From nearly a week ago, the AP was reporting the tenacity of Hezbollah fighters against Israel. Hezbollah fighters popped up in Beirut shortly after Israeli bombings without delay. On the 26th, UK Times said Ferocity of Hezbollah comes as a surprise as Israeli intelligence turns out to be incredibly shitty:
[Israeli] domestic support remains strong, but the first cracks have appeared, with media commentators accusing the army of providing an “insulting level of intelligence” about Hezbollah’s defences. As they munched watermelon yesterday, sweating Israeli soldiers were visibly shocked by the stiff opposition they had encountered, describing their Hezbollah opponents as a “guerrilla army” with landmines and anti-tank missiles capable of crippling a Merkavah battle tank.
“It was really scary. Most of our armoured personnel carriers have holes,” a paramedic told The Times after recovering three wounded tank soldiers. “It’s a very hard situation. We were in Lebanon before but it wasn’t like this for a long time.” A tank commander said: “It’s a real war.” In the Galilee town of Safed, Brigadier-General Shuki Shachar, deputy commander of the northern forces, conceded that the foe was not an easy one. “Hezbollah is a fanatical organisation. It is highly motivated to fight. I don’t want to give grades to the enemy, but they are fighting. They are not escaping,” he said. He insisted, however, that Israel was “changing the balance” after a belated recognition that the Shia group was dug in deeper than expected.
“After a few days we realised that Hezbollah prepared itself over the last six years with thousands of rockets, with hundreds of shelters, bunkers, with hundreds of rockets hid in houses of civilians inside south Lebanon,” he said. [this is one of those small things you figure out BEFORE you launch a war --Dan]
His forces had never intended to “conquer every square inch” of Bint Jbeil but had now achieved their objectives of taking the high ground. Wherever the Israel Defence Forces decided to act, the general said, “we have no problem to do so, no restrictions”.
Which is why they have already departed Bint Jbeil. Because they launched a war unaware of the honeycombs of bunkers and rockets. Hmm.
Things are definitely getting worse in Iraq but at least we got Lasers now?!! under the radar, it seems. News analysis: U.S. could face a showdown with al-Sadr, even more so as the U.S. eggs Israel on to kill more Shiites. In a shrewd move, the U.S. Army fired a gay Arab linguist. War Crimes trials for abusing and torturing detainees are a possibility. Time magazine: How the Lebanon Crisis Complicates U.S. Prospects in Iraq. Democracy Now reports: Star Wars in Iraq: Is the U.S. Using New Experimental Tactical High Energy Laser Weapons in Iraq? It doesn't quite sound like a laser. My money is on directed microwave radiation... I won't make a joke, because this is too creepy:
MAJID AL GHEZALI: Just the head was burnt, and the other parts of the bodies wasn’t anything happened on it.
NARRATOR: Al Ghezali reported that he had seen three passengers in a car, all dead, with their faces and teeth burnt, the body intact, and no sign of projectiles.
MAJID AL GHEZALI: There wasn’t any bullet. I saw the teeth, just the teeth and no eyes, all of them. With the body, nothing for the bodies. Just the teeth, and all the -- I mean, the heads were burnt.
NARRATOR: There were other inexplicable aspects. The terrain where the battle took place was dug up by the American military and replaced with other fresh earth. The bodies that were not hit by projectiles had shrunk to just slightly more than one meter in height.
......DOCTOR NO. 2: It seems to be a new weapon.
SAAD AL FALLUJI: Yes, a new weapon.
DOCTOR NO. 2: They are trying to do experiments on our civilians. Nobody can identify what the type of this weapon.
Ohohoho those crazy Iraqis and their stories. "How could such a thing be true?" says the skeptic. One possibility: half a billion dollars in spending may have produced something larger than a pen laser to fuck around with occupied Muslim populations. The last bit of the article:
WILLIAM ARKIN: So, right now you have about $50 million a year being spent on non-lethal weapons. You have about another $200 million or so being spent on high power microwaves, active denial-type systems. You’ve got probably another $100 to 200 million being spent on secret black laser programs. And then you’ve got the big lasers, the high energy laser of the Air Force and the other tactical lasers. So probably, when you add all of that up, you know, the United States is probably spending a half of a billion dollars a year right now on directed-energy weapons, you know, probably somewhere in the order of 300-400 million euros. So this is a significant amount of money. This is the size of the defense budgets of some countries in Europe.
On a lighter note, Joe Klein on Lieberman's Last Stand and another one of his friends ditches him. Polls are showing Lamont doing real, real well. Oddly, we discover that John Ashcroft was against torture, which is part of the reason they got rid of him.
Blog bits: The Guns of August on DailyKos.com was an interesting roundup of everything. William Arkin tries pretty hard at the WaPo to keep tabs on this stuff. Al Qaeda says it ought to fight alongside Hezbollah and Hamas, a surprising twist. Some general remarks from Obsidian Wings. Neo-con blather about Arab governments supporting Israel turns out to be false. Arab-American Abu Aardvark notes that the Rome conference was a failure.
Idiot on Fox talks about how great it is that Israel attacked UN peacekeeping posts. Greek antiwar protesters toppled a statue of Harry Truman (bet you didn't see that one coming). Kind of a funny video of these cute (Iranian?) girls talking about how much they like Hezbollah.
More Haaretz of course: Haaretz has an interesting feature on how Israeli intelligence agencies have attempted to wrap their heads around Hezbollah's tactical reality. Opening a window on intelligence. "No Time to Lose" by Amir Oren is about the peculiarity of the blaring American "green light" to bomb the shit out of Lebanon. The plan was 2 kilometers "cleared", but it ain't happening. Hezbollah, an empire of millions. Big questions, great frustration indeed. Moral Muddle - interesting questions at an IDF base about the morality of killing Lebanese civilians. A kind of funny article about Arab journalists. Check out The turnabout will come quickly By Meron Benvenisti, a peace guy explaining why the war will be abandoned in Israel. From Wednesday, The war so far / No goals attained By Ze'ev Schiff. Was there a proper decision process? By Aluf Benn. Has the army failed? By Amos Harel Finally,
Morality is not on our side By Ze'ev Maoz
There's practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards.
This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on Hezbollah's side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah "started it" when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side.
German paper Der Spiegel has INTERVIEW WITH LEBANESE PRESIDENT EMILE LAHOUD: 'Hezbollah Freed Our Country'.
Mitch Prothero in Salon.com on the bullshit about Hezbollah hiding among civilians:
Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.
But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.
For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they'll get some fighters, too.
The Anglican Christian Bishop in Jerusalem gets blown off by American Christians. Pretty scathing letter from the Bishop:
.....Movement of residents of the West Bank is difficult or impossible as “security measures” are heightened to break the backs of the Palestinian people and cut them off from their place of work, schools, hospitals, and families. It is family and community that has sustained these people during these hopeless times. For some, it is all that they had, but that too has been taken away with the continued building of the wall and check points. The strategy of ethnic cleansing on the part of the State of Israel continues.
This week, war broke out on the Lebanon-Israeli border (near Banyas where Jesus gave St. Peter the keys to heaven and earth). The Israeli government’s disproportionate reaction to provocation was consistent with their opportunistic responses in which they destroy their perceived enemy.
In her recent article, “The Insane Brutality of the State of Israel,” American, Kathleen Christison, a former CIA analyst says, “The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.” She continues, “A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer’s brutal murder of a thirteen year old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post (one of nearly seven hundred Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the Intifada began) is not a society with a conscience.” The “situation” as it has come to be called, has deteriorated into a war without boundaries or limitations. It is a war with deadly potential beyond the imaginations of most civilized people.
As I write to you, I am preparing to leave with other bishops for Nablus with medical and other emergency supplies for five hundred families, and a pledge for one thousand families more. On Saturday we will attempt to enter Gaza with medical aid for doctors and nurses in our hospital there who struggle to serve the injured, the sick, and the dying.
My plan is that I will be able to go to Lebanon next week - where we are presently without a resident priest - to bury the dead, and comfort the victims of war. Perhaps as others have you will ask, “What can I do?” Certainly we encourage and appreciate your prayers. That is important, but it is not enough. If you find that you can no longer look away, take up your cross. It takes courage as we were promised.
Write every elected official you know. Write to your news media. Speak to your congregation, friends, and colleagues about injustice and the threat of global war. If Syria, Iran, the United States, Great Britain, China and others enter into this war - the consequence is incalculable. Participate in rallies and forums. Find ways that you and your churches can participate in humanitarian relief efforts for the region. Contact us and let us know if you stand with us. I urge you not to be like a disciple watching from afar.
2 Corinthians 6.11:
“We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians, our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. In return - I speak as to children - open wide your hearts also.”
Blackwater blowback: As I just mentioned, the incident with the Blackwater guys in Fallujah was a big deal – so big, it may have crashed the American war effort altogether.
Well that took a long time. I am done blogging for a while, at least a few days. Things are too horrible to leave my mind in this frame. It's the last Saturday in July, and here I am, presenting all this death and doom. I don't want to spend precious days doing stuff like this any more.
Massive 5 ton cocaine bust tied to Bush cronies?: Yummy stuff. This weird company called SkyWay Aircraft, which claimed to sell security products to the Department of Homeland Security, got busted with a huge amount of cocaine from Mexico, and both Mexican and American authorities are being curiously silent about it. The Mexican press, on the other hand, has been speculating that high-ranking members of Vincente Fox's government are involved. Of course, SkyWay is based in Venice, Florida, right by where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained.
MadCowProd.com is offering the goods in this case. They conclude:
DC9’s cost money. But the twin airliners weren’t being used to demonstrate SkyWay’s products, for the simple reason that the company never had a product to demonstrate. The fact is both inescapable and mind-boggling at the same time. Two DC9’s painted to impersonate U.S. Government planes were being used for an as-yet unknown purpose… for almost two years.
Like the FAA, the attitude of the DEA toward a drug trafficking case involving 5.5 tons of cocaine seems remarkably laissez faire. A call to the DEA to inquire whether the Agency had mounted an investigation of an American-owned airliner busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine elicited a terse “no comment.”
The duty officer at the Tampa Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration revealed no indication that the DEA has taken any interest in the case. Two days of phone calls to the Agency’s Public Information Officer in Miami yielded nothing but busy signals.
.........The answer, both here in the U.S. as well as in Mexico, appears to be: Damage Control, for what clearly appears to have been officially-sanctioned drug trafficking. The silence in the U.S. and Mexico is a tell-tale sign of clandestine activity gone horribly awry. The bust was a mistake.
Once again, low-level personnel just hadn't been "clued-in" to the protected nature of the trade. Because of the sensitivity, everything is on a need to know basis. This creates a continuing problem.
You can't tell just anyone.
Cheney seems to be investing in securities that favor a weak dollar: That's pretty fucked up, observed at Attu Sees All and dissected on Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine.
Are they going to gut the Freedom of Information Act under the mask of 'counter-terrorism'? (via The Agonist)
The Mexican election is starting to look pretty ugly. How could there possibly be voting fraud south of the US?? More here.
UK Times: Leftist calls supporters onto streets in Mexican crisis
Mexico's electoral crisis deepened today after a recount separated the two leading candidates by less than 0.5 per cent of the vote and the leftist, Andres Manuel López Obrador, called his supporters onto the streets to protest against the result.
With 99.48 per cent of the vote reviewed by election officials, Felipe Calderon, a pro-business former energy secretary, led Señor López Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City, by 0.41 per cent, or just 170,000 of the 41 million votes cast on Sunday.
Señor Calderon appeared relaxed at a party in the headquarters of the ruling National Action Party (PAN), saying: "Now is the hour for unity and agreements between Mexicans."
But Señor López Obrador said he would challenge the result in Mexico's highest electoral court, the Federal Electoral Tribunal. He asked his supporters to rally in Mexico City's huge Zócalo square on Saturday afternoon.
"We have taken the decision to challenge the electoral process," he told a press conference. "We cannot recognize or accept these results. There are lots of irregularities."
......
Señor López Obrador, whose Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was founded by a populist famously cheated of the presidency in a rigged election in 1988, has alleged throughout the week that PAN activists had counted votes twice in some districts and ignored votes in others.
Today he said that a case before the Federal Electoral Tribunal would expose the "lack of transparency, the lack of independence of the electoral body".
"We have triumphed and this is what we will demonstrate to the tribunal," he said.
Aryan Nations & other hate groups infiltrating the US Army: An army desperate for recruits might be handing guns to unsavory criminal lunatics: NY Times:
A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."
.......
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."
Mr. Barfield said Army recruiters struggled last year to meet goals. "They don't want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military," he said, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."
The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr. McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot. Those revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple in order to win tattoos and 19 others were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.
.......
An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the author as Steven Barry, who it said was a former Special Forces officer who was the alliance's "military unit coordinator." "Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.' "
He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."
Holy shit. And let's not forget about Gulf War vet Timothy McVeigh.
The twisted Internal Disinformation of the Bush Regime:
I thought this was pretty nuts. Ron Suskind's new "One Percent Doctrine" is selling pretty well, and the
review in the NY Times was disturbing, for it paints a portrait of a president protectively misinformed in order to defend the illogical madness of the war. This is madness:
During a November 2001 session with the president, Mr. Suskind recounts, a C.I.A. briefer realized that the Pentagon had not told Mr. Bush of the C.I.A.'s urgent concern that Osama bin Laden might escape from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan (as he indeed later did) if United States reinforcements were not promptly sent in. And several months later, he says, attendees at a meeting between Mr. Bush and the Saudis discovered after the fact that an important packet laying out the Saudis' views about the Israeli-Palestinian situation had been diverted to the vice president's office and never reached the president.
Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush ''plausible deniability'' from Mr. Cheney's point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief's own impatience with policy details. Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes: ''Keeping certain knowledge from Bush -- much of it shrouded, as well, by classification -- meant that the president, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed. He could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements.''
''Whether Cheney's innovations were tailored to match Bush's inclinations, or vice versa, is almost immaterial,'' Mr. Suskind continues. ''It was a firm fit. Under this strategic model, reading the entire N.I.E. would be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the president's rhetoric, a key weapon in the march to war. He would know too much.''
Plainly nuts.
The situation in Gaza is pretty ugly right now. On the one hand, the Israeli strategy is brutal, but even worse, it's pointless. HAMAS has offered a prisoner swap, like the old days with Hezbollah. Check out "The Ideology of Occupation, Revisited" from Israeli peacenik Ran HaCohen. James Zogby observes the Deadly Silence over the matter. I haven't said much about it, but this piece pretty much sums up the problem.
Captive in Gaza: Israel has several objectives in Gaza -- all mutually exclusive, writes Graham Usher
There are four aims behind operation "Summer Rain", the Israeli army's latest invasion of Gaza, according to ministers, officers and analysts. The first is to free "unconditionally" Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Palestinian guerrillas just outside the Strip on 25 June. The second is to end Palestinian "rocket fire" that, in the last month, has peppered Sederot and other Israeli areas on the Gaza border, so far without serious injury.The third aim -- undeclared but acknowledged -- is to force the Palestinian government from office via a rising curve of pre-emptive strikes. So far this has included tightened economic and political blockades, destruction of civilian power plants and bridges, military re-occupation, rocket attacks on the prime and interior ministers' offices and the wholesale arrest of Hamas ministers, members of parliament and local authority officers.
The ouster has little to do with the government's refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the Jewish state -- a rejection that suits Israel since it frees it from having to deal with an elected Palestinian Authority. It has more to do with Hamas's success not only in surviving the siege but in enshrining resistance as a central policy in its and any future National Unity Palestinian government, courtesy of the recently agreed Prisoners' Document.
The fourth aim is to repair the battered status of Israel's "deterrence". It is now clear to most Israelis that the relative quiet they enjoyed for the last year or so was not due to their army's military prowess. It was due to the Palestinian ceasefire, observed above all by Hamas's military arm, Izzeddin El-Qassam (IQ). Since it was renounced, 200 mortars have been fired into Israel, four soldier abductions have been attempted or carried out and two soldiers and one settler have been killed.
Threats Hamas may now take the fight "deep into Israel" reminds most Israelis of the bloodiest days of the Intifada. It destroys the illusion that the Gaza disengagement was somehow a military success. And it casts Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's project to determine unilaterally Israel's eastern border as absolute folly.
Vanity Fair had a lengthy feature on the Duke Cunningham/hookergate scandal and here's a summary.
Italian intrigues: In a small tidbit perhaps related to the Valerie Plame scandal, some of the top-ranking guys in Italy's SISMI intelligence service were arrested, as noted in the Italian media and the AP. This probably has more to do with furious Italian judges going after SISMI and CIA agents who helped get some terror suspect abducted.
.....the Italian military intelligence organization's deputy director and director of the first "foreign" or counterintelligence division Marco Mancini has been arrested in Italy, allegedly for his role in the CIA extraordinary rendition of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar from Milan in 2003. When I was in Rome on a few recent reporting trips, Mancini was the guy who everybody was literally frightened of even saying his name. I mean literally, people just referred to him as Marco. He was highly involved in Sismi's Middle East affairs, as well, apparently, I am hearing from Rome, in several recent cases of illegal wiretapping and illegal domestic spying in Italy. Arrest warrants have apparently been issued in the same Abu Omar case for four more CIA officials as well, including for the former CIA station chief in Rome.
In fact, on Sismi's behalf, Farina and Libero led the bogus charge that France was responsible for the Niger forgeries. Farina was also the beneficiary of illegal wiretaps seemingly conducted by friends of Sismi. Interesting times indeed.
From my brief exposure to politics there, I would say Mancini is far more comparable to a Lewis Libby figure than to his ex-CIA deputy director counterpart John McLaughlin, far more wired into the Byzantine politics of the Berlusconi project than a straight intel professional. Although this arrest would seem to be lapping pretty high on the ankles of the ex-Berlusconi administration itself, a friend in Rome writes that it may not go any further, and Prodi is giving indications he may not wish it to, especially as far as Sismi is concerned.
.......
Update: A reader in Rome writes that Libero's Farina is "under investigation not for his articles but because he has allegedly been identified as a Sismi source code-named 'Betulla.' ... [Sismi's] Mancini and Pignero are suspected of having studied Abu Omar’s habits and having prepared an initial plan for his abduction which would have the airport of Ghedi as the first destination of Abu Omar after his kidnapping. The plan went otherwise, as Aviano was opted for. They are also accused of spying on Repubblica's Giuseppe D’Avanzo as of May 12th..."
If I understand this and other recent Italian news reports correctly, Mancini was allegedly a liaison to several private Italian dirty tricks intelligence operations.
Ann Coulter's plagarism situation seems not that serious, but here's the comprehensive index. Xenu, the Scientology warlord, is involved.
The LA Times tries to claim that anti-Lieberman-ism is a "purge" of the Democratic Party by antiwar fanatics, while in fact it's more of a reaction to the fact that Lieberman is a crappy senator all around.
Around the paranoid side: I was advised to check out "The Resistance" on MySpace. As always PrisonPlanet will fill your daily conspiratoria quotient. Some Montana guy that sold (legal) gun kits was raided by the FBI, ATF and Canadian law enforcement for handing out 'subversive' Alex Jones material, according to... Alex Jones. In a crossposted story from the Sacramento Bee, Homeland Security denies tracking political activity after the state office got word of a peace rally on April 18. There was a new al-Qaeda video released to mark the 7/7 London bombings, and PrisonPlanet asks a bunch of questions about 7/7 anomalies, suggesting as they have from the beginning it was staged by the UK government.
The guy who invented Ren & Stimpy (a particularly raunchy but funny one that never went on TV is here) is in a battle with Warner Bros. because he's been posting their really good but forgotten cartoons on YouTube as Examples of the Art.
Worse than a Star Trek 'red shirt': 10 worst jobs to have in the action film universe.
Well that should tide folks over for a bit of the weekend here...
Death to Smoochy: Bush Kiss of Death (video)
What could possibly go wrong?
Kicking out a Senator?!
Sen. Joe Lieberman is in serious trouble in Connecticut, as Ned Lamont threatens to win the Democratic nominating primary in early August. Lamont's not leading in polls, but he's probably within shooting distance. If Lamont won the primary, Lieberman would have to be an 'independent' on the ballot, and he now says that as an independent he would still support the Democrats in the Senate.
Hillary, Al Gore and other leading Dems are essentially leaving Lieberman twisting in the wind. Some senators are still going to back Liebs, but it's pretty thin for an incumbent senator!
NY Times: Lieberman Says He Will Run on His Own if He Loses Primary (July 3, 2006)
HARTFORD, July 3 — Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut said today that he will run independently if he loses in the statewide Democratic primary next month, a move that further underscored his increasing vulnerability for his support for the war in Iraq and effectively means that he is willing to run two campaigns within three months to keep the seat he has held for three terms.
Under increasing pressure from Ned Lamont, a businessman and political newcomer who has criticized the senator for supporting President Bush on the war and other issues, Senator Lieberman said today, the eve of Independence Day, that he would begin gathering the 7,500 signatures on petitions necessary to run on his own should he lose to Mr. Lamont in the state Democratic primary, which is Aug. 8.
The most recent poll showed Mr. Lieberman 15 percentage points above Mr. Lamont among likely Democratic primary voters. In a three-way race against Mr. Lamont and the Republican Alan Schlesinger, polls show Mr. Lieberman winning with 56 percent of the vote.
Tomorrow there will be a debate between Lamont and Lieberman carried on C-SPAN and MSNBC. Lieberman has recently picked up support from, say, Ann Coulter (the Witch in Quicktime):
CAVUTO: So you would admire more at least the politician that says a timetable to get out than going back and forth?
COULTER: No. I would admire a politician, not as much as basically your run of the mill garden-variety Republican, but as far as Democrats go like Lieberman, who apparently does want to defend America and fight the war on terrorism. He is the one facing a primary fight.
CAVUTO: You know, there is talk about him maybe bolting to a third party. The seeds are there for a third party movement. Do you buy that?
COULTER: I think he should come all the way and become a Republican. He wouldn’t be our best Republican but at left he’d fit in with the party that wants to defend the country.
(Coulter is getting tangled up in a plagarism scandal, huzzah...)
More on depressed Lieberman supporters here, more on it here. He says he's really not President Bush. RawStory heard today that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will "likely" not back Lieberman if he loses to Lamont. ABC News notes that Senators Joe Biden, Barbara Boxer and Ken Salazar are going to campaign for Lieberman in Connecticut:
Democrats fear Lieberman and Lamont could split the November vote and hand the Republicans a Senate seat in a three-way runoff. Party officials also did not anticipate having to devote scarce campaign resources to Lieberman in reliably Democratic Connecticut.
Here's what some guy named Greg thinks. The funny thing is that Lamont's whole campaign has come out of nowhere, sustained by Internet buzz and disgruntled Connecticut activists. More on this from the Agonist, MyDD and the DailyKos. Major marks to the blog guys and gals for stirring up a huge amount of trouble against America's worst elected DC Democrat.
Sen. Arlen Specter is pissed with Dick Cheney about White House interference in their hearings on mass wiretapping and phone data mining. TPM has the angry letter from Sen. Arlen Specter to Vice President Cheney.
Stephen Kappes returns to the CIA after being chased out by Porter Goss, NY Times reports. I have no idea how to interpret this, save one bit at the end:
A man of military bearing and a storied past, Mr. Kappes would become the first person since William E. Colby in 1973 to ascend to one of agency's top two positions from a career spent in the clandestine service. General Hayden has said that his return would be a signal that "amateur hour" is over at the C.I.A., which has seen little calm since Mr. Kappes's departure. A no-nonsense former Marine officer who insists on addressing his elders as "sir," Mr. Kappes speaks Russian and Persian; served as the agency's station chief in Moscow and Kuwait during a quarter-century at the C.I.A.; and played a pivotal role in the secret talks with Libya that culminated in December 2003 in the agreement in which Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi agreed to give up his chemical and biological weapons program. ...After leaving the agency, he became an executive vice president at ArmorGroup, a private security firm based in London.
Well that is sketchy on the face of it, though I haven't heard of ArmorGroup in any especially nasty things. More on them here and Kappes here.
Victor Davis Hanson: a fog-headed, bespectacled wistful neo-con, (perhaps best deemed a 'Gonzoconservative') he's the armchair general's armchair general. When you need to make fusty locutions about the wisdom of the Peloponnesian War, he's your man. He is one of these guys infatuated with how the Athenians and Spartans fought, using it as a kind of triumphalist template to encourage Americans to support wars because the Greeks did it. Davis' most recent was "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War", which, despite hashing through the details of the good old days, is basically supposed to tell you that the Athenians were Right to fight Sparta. In reality, the war was a terrible idea, brought on by stupid, belligerent Athenians who doomed Athens to the dustbin of history. But it felt really fucking cool at the time to Greek Victor Davis Hansons... As this response to his book "A War Like No Other" makes clear, he's fucking stupid because the war destroyed Athenian power. But this is the kind of guy that the Hoover Institution puts up as their military historian.
He described the Abu Ghraib scandal as 'hearsay.' He also has rambled at length about secret Mexican plans to generate that AZTLAN separatist thing in the SW United States. In this case, he is defending General Tommy Franks' dumb decisions in the execution of the Iraq invasion against the content of 'Cobra II', an insiders' account of the early war filled with many anonymous interviews: Commentary - Refighting the War. One bit:
Even American psychological operations, an often over-hyped element of war-fighting, worked well: when American planes showered leaflets on it, an entire Iraqi division guarding Baghdad more or less melted away, leaving behind only 2,000 of its original 13,000 combatants.
Except for the part where we decided to fuck them over after the war and they kept fighting us anyway. It takes guts to ride the horse both ways:
Nor do Gordon and Trainor credit the still more telling fact that, following the Afghanistan campaign in the fall of 2001, some fifteen months of national and worldwide discussion ensued concerning Iraq, including the excruciatingly drawn-out United Nations debate. Rarely, in truth, has the United States conducted so prolonged and so public a discussion about its intentions in the run-up to any war.
The authors are more on target in dwelling on the administration’s preoccupation with weapons of mass destruction at the expense of other, more compelling writs for action. As they point out, the WMD issue warped the public presentation of the war and later diverted some resources away from reconstruction to numerous wild-goose chases after nonexistent or no longer existent arsenals. Yet even here there is a disconnect in their version of the WMD issue—attributable, no doubt, to the selectivity of their sources. While suggesting deceit on the part of an administration bent on overplaying a fanciful danger, they do not question the sincerity of General Franks’s frantic efforts to warn his commanders about the impending threat of chemical and biological attack.
In other words, since the WMD lies took 15 months to pound into everyone's head and consequently fucked up the post-war stage, this is... um... very patriotic. Thanks. Oh by the way, his other contributions to the Neo-Con Commentary rag are summarized:
"Donald Rumsfeld, we are told, had a bad summer and a worse fall. But what Midge Decter's biography reminds us is that we need this seventy-one-year-old veteran far more than he needs us."
"The real strategic issue is not how many soldiers are on the ground, but how they are used."
"Far from tying us down, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and its aftermath have enlarged our strategic options."
"The antiwar movement contains a large element of plain anti-Americanism; where does it come from?"
I think if you poked a hole in his ear, a reeking cloud of burnt popcorn stink would come out.
Howard Fineman is like the Beltway media version of Hanson: totally stodgy, but perhaps two pixels to the left of Joe Klein. Fineman:
But perhaps the netroots' favorite avatar in waiting is Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana. In their eyes he's the rootin'-tootin' real deal, a rancher turned politician who believes in government activism set free from traditional liberal thinking and interest-group methods. This week a protégé of Schweitzer's, a rancher named Jon Tester, won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. Kos happily noted that Tester comes from "the middle of nowhere"--Big Sandy, Mont.--and provided a link to a Yahoo map to prove it.
So that's the place to start from in this new political era: not Washington, but the middle of nowhere.
As Kos puts it, "No doubt." Mainly because DC is a total mess and fog-brains like Fineman are part of the problem.
Juan Cole was blocked from working at Yale. The Jewish Week observes : Middle East Wars Flare Up At Yale: Controversial academic shot down for appointment; was campaign against him politically motivated?
Juan Cole, one of the country’s top Middle East scholars, was poised for the biggest step of his career. A tenured professor at the University of Michigan, Cole was tapped earlier this year by a Yale University search committee to teach about the modern Middle East. In two separate votes in May, Cole was approved by both the sociology and history departments, the latter the university’s largest.
The only remaining hurdle was the senior appointments committee, also known as the tenure committee, a group consisting of about a half-dozen professors from various disciplines across the university.
Last week, however, in what is shaping up as the latest in a series of heated battles over the political affiliations of Middle Eastern studies professors, the tenure committee voted down Cole’s nomination. Several Yale faculty members described the decision to overrule the votes of the individual departments as “highly unusual.” The reasons behind the rejection remain unknown; several calls to a Yale spokeswoman went unreturned.
But university insiders say that the uncharacteristic rebuff may have been influenced by several factors, central among them the political commentary Cole writes on his blog, “Informed Comment.” They also contend that Cole’s nomination was torpedoed mainly by senior professors in both departments who were concerned with Cole’s controversial persona. Often favoring a pugilistic tone and consistently criticizing Israel’s policies in the West Bank, Cole has attracted a visibility that has made him a favorite target of several conservative commentators.
When Cole’s potential hiring became publicly known, several of his detractors, including the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin and Washington Times columnist Joel Mowbray, took various steps to protest the decision. They wrote op-ed pieces in various publications and Mowbray went as far as to send a letter to a dozen of Yale’s major donors, many of whom are Jewish, urging them to call the university and protest Cole’s hiring.
Cole, while refusing to comment on the tenure committee’s vote, told The Jewish Week he believes that “the concerted press campaign by neoconservatives against me, which was a form of lobbying the higher administration, was inappropriate and a threat to academic integrity.
“The articles published in the Yale Standard, the New York Sun, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, and the Washington Times, as part of what was clearly an orchestrated campaign, contained made-up quotes, inaccuracies, and false charges,” he said. “The idea that I am any sort of anti-Jewish racist because I think Israel would be better off without the occupied territories is bizarre, but I fear that a falsehood repeated often enough and in high enough places may begin to lose its air of absurdity.”
Well, I think it sucks because Juan Cole is basically The Dude on these matters. Billmon's reaction to this was worth checking:
I’m sure Mowbray doesn’t have a clue about the perverse irony of what he’s done – which plays directly into every conceivable anti-Semitic stereotype about wealthy Jews pulling strings from behind the scenes. Neither Al Jazeera nor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could dream up a scenario more calculated to confirm every Middle Eastern prejudice about what (and who) drives U.S. foreign policy. How can we explain to them that it’s just the educational bureaucrats at Yale, who would probably do whatever it takes to please any well-heeled group of donors – even if it involved putting on bright red lipstick and getting down on their knees. Especially that.
....Well, they’ve finally got their man... The Bush administration has done a 180 on Iran policy, the GOP Congress is stumbling towards defeat, the Likud Party (Israel branch) has been reduced to a corporal’s guard and the dream of a Greater Israel is irreparably lost – in other words, the neocon world has come apart at the seams – but at least Juan Cole isn’t going to Yale. Mission fucking accomplished.
To his credit, Cole is saying he's not too upset because his current job is pretty sweet:
I am doing what I enjoy doing, which is studying and teaching the Middle East and South Asia, and communicating about it to various publics. I have not, and short of foul play cannot be stopped from doing what I am doing, and what I enjoy. I welcome critiques of my work. There are obviously some critics, however, who go rather beyond simple critique to wishing to silence or smear me. In the former, at least, they cannot succeed by mere yellow journalism. So I have what I want, but they cannot have what they want. I win, every day.
Cole's work is top-notch, and it's a damn good thing that someone in academia has the guts to take on the Likud-Republican Complex these days.
All right, I think that does it for today. Are we entertained yet?
I really promise that there will be forthcoming photos and goodies from the DFL convention. Today I got a haircut and checked out some more job stuff. Now I am going to have a social life. I think we could say that the number of words on this site are inverse to Dan's productive activity, and for that I ought to be saluted so far this week. However I can still post a couple photos.
Sen. Becky Lourey gives a press interview after the first gubernatorial ballot. The intrepid MPR reporter Tom Scheck is the cue ball behind the guy in the green Kelley shirt.
The Teamsters were the muscle behind the event - controlling the doors and such. This was after the first ballot, during intense floor delegate lobbying operations.
Consulting with future Attorney General Matt Entenza about important matters - and making that Macalester grad look short!
I promise there will be updates later. For now, life rolls on.
A quick note from the Montana situation: our man Andy Tweeten has been working in communications and field ops for Jon Tester, and operating the TesterTime campaign blog.
Tester just trounced his primary opponent, a rather scuzzy lawyer/state auditor named Morrison, by a resounding 61% or so. David Sirota says: Populist Jon Tester Scores Huge Win Against D.C. Dems & For the Rest of Us. This means that he's going to fight the highly corrupt (Abramoff-ultra-tainted) Senator Conrad Burns in November. See also:
Secret to Tester's win: Large margin of primary victory surprises political observers
By CHARLES S. JOHNSON of the Missoulian State Bureau
HELENA - Jon Tester's victory in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary Tuesday night was like a prairie fire sweeping across Montana. As the vote tallies were reported, political observers across the state were stunned by the magnitude of Tester's win in what had been seen as a tossup.
“Although it was clear that Tester was coming on like a rocket in the last couple of weeks, I'm frankly surprised at the margin of the win,” said Pat Williams, a former Democratic congressman and senior fellow at the University of Montana. Tester, a Big Sandy farmer and Montana Senate president, grabbed 76 percent of the vote in Missoula County, 72 percent in Lewis and Clark County and 66 percent in Cascade County.
In his own neck of the woods, Tester saw his vote balloon to 91 percent in his home county of Choteau, 89 percent in Liberty County and 84 percent in Hill County. Tester won 60.8 percent of the total Democratic vote to defeat chief rival and State Auditor John Morrison, who had 35.5 percent. And the drubbing occurred even though Morrison's campaign spent nearly twice as much as Tester's.
The winner captured 48 counties, Morrison took seven counties and they tied in Fallon County, according to unofficial election returns. So what happened? How did Tester's campaign catch fire? What doused Morrison's campaign?
“I think in a nutshell it was grass-roots,” Tester said Wednesday. “We hit the issues that Montanans are connected up with - energy, health care, jobs, public land issues, ethics, fiscal responsibility.” Tester said he will stay with that grass-roots model as he runs against Conrad Burns, the three-term Republican incumbent, in the general election.
“Ultimately, what I heard and what I saw last night was that voters want a change,” he said. “They're tired of the same old, same old. They want somebody to represent Montana values and they want honesty.” Here are some factors cited by political observers.
n Ethics and the Morrison affair. Both Tester and Morrison regularly attacked Burns over the incumbent's ethics because of Burns' ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the central figure in the congressional influence-peddling scandal. In April, however, Morrison was on the receiving end of allegations of ethical improprieties.
News stories ran that told how Morrison had an extramarital affair with a Bigfork woman before he was elected auditor in 2000. The woman later married a Flathead Valley businessman, David Tacke, whom Morrison's office investigated for securities fraud. Critics suggested Morrison's office went soft on Tacke, a claim Morrison heatedly disputed.
Jennifer Duffy, managing editor of the Cook Political Report in Washington, D.C., said news of the Morrison affair and his handling of the Tacke case was the turning point in the campaign.
OK, your opponent's affair is pretty much a sophomore mistake. But basic fact that Jon Tester is a terrific candidate with an excellent haircut and a nice populist style. I am really proud of Andy for his excellent work on the ground, and I wish him the best in what's going to be a barnburner mountain folk populist-vs-DC taint election of total buzzcut badassery!
There is another round of the Minnesota state Republican Convention at 8 AM today (Saturday). I'm crashing now, got up hella early at 8 Friday too. David (i.e. "Roy")'s fan belt ripped apart when he stopped by to check the scene. Therefore he's snoozing on the futon now. More later. In the meantime, look at this Hades-esque situation. Pawlenty was speaking at the time. There are a lot of strange details to say later. For now, this photo says it all. No editing here at all - Blood Red is Gubernatorial.
Looks like I'm going to handle the booth a bit for Politics in Minnesota at the Republican state convention down at the Minneapolis convention center this afternoon, Friday & Saturday. I woulda been able to make some bank if I could do the DFL convention at Rochester, but it looks like I'll have to deal with the Chunkies graduating from high school next Saturday.
Mordred sends word that he's busy moving out of his apartment in Tucson and I think going to Santa Fe. But he sent along a REALLY sweet video of one North Carolina Republican's Vernon Robinson's ad for Congress.
His platform is basically pretty straightforward:
Vernon Robinson's Public Policy Views in a Nutshell
I am pro-Constitution, pro-national sovereignty, pro-military, pro-veteran, pro-growth, pro-business, pro-property rights, pro-marriage, pro-adoption, pro-farmer, pro-school choice, pro-states' rights, pro-religious freedom, pro-Pledge of Allegiance, pro-death penalty, pro-gun, and pro-life.
I will secure our borders and demand the vigorous enforcement of our immigration laws. I support market-based reforms of government entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
I am unabashedly and unalterably opposed to racial quotas, special rights for homosexuals, the United Nations, the proliferation of frivolous lawsuits, women in combat, pork barrel spending, useless government programs and agencies, onerous regulations, and all tax hikes.
Securing Our Borders
Our current immigration policy is a treasonable threat to both public health and national security. We do not need a wall to secure our borders. Five thousand Marines and 100 UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) can do the job tomorrow. We must also make English the official language of the United States. Any local government or college that interferes with immigration enforcement should lose its federal aid. Finally, automatic citizenship for those born here must be replaced with the baby adopting the citizenship of the mother. These steps must precede any guest worker program.
.....Defending Marriage and Traditional Values
I will always fight for what's right and you will always know where I stand. We cannot redefine marriage as any grouping of adults and children. I will vigorously oppose homosexual marriages, marriage-lite proposals and adoptions, as well as "gay" Scoutmasters. While my opponent believes that those in a drag queen parade and Rosa Parks are both civil rights leaders, I will join the dozens of Congressmen who sponsored an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that provides that "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman."
There was also some funny stuff about stopping the "feminization" of the military and shutting down bases in Japan, Germany and Korea.
I can only hope that the denizens of the MN GOP are half as entertaining.
How to Pick a Satisfying Career: Know Yourself
Hongpong.com Drupal development: Some new advancements: I have organized the menus a bit and set up a basic forum. It is colossally easy to register an account on the new system, which allows you to put up files and such, as well as personal blogs and polls. Anonymous comments are also turned on.
Check out the new RSS headline aggregator thingy set up - viewed here as a big list of mixed things, or here broken into the component sections (or "wires")or a set of the sources we're putting together. NOTE: Right now the auto headline updater doesn't work - in other words it won't check sites on its own yet. Therefore I think anyone can hit drupal.hongpong.com/cron.php to force updating the feeds. (we're gonna do some SEO somehow, too)
Meanwhile some randomness: Bill Salisbury on polarization in MN nominating processes. He is an intrepid reporter who's been around the Capitol for a long time.
Help Palestinians but dodge giving Hamas government money? Sounds dubious.
Aspyr is releasing Civilization IV for Macintosh tentatively in June. I just saw it on PC again, and it is excellent.
Porter Goss: shitty leader goes back to Capitol Hill. Never should have brought his greasy face outta the House.
You gotta see the Truth live. The word is law, bitch! Wayne Madsen promotes Al Gore comeback in 2008 in the Salt Lake Tribune.
If you care at all about South America you need to check out Greg Grandin's "Rumsfeld's Latin American Wild West Show" on TomDispatch.com. Basically the U.S. is militarizing its relations with the whole region, as one country after another slips out of Washington's orbit. Only a small part of a CRUCIAL read about how direct American imperialism/Full Spectrum Dominance has been field-tested south of here:
Latin America, in fact, has become more dangerous of late, plagued by a rise in homicides, kidnappings, drug use, and gang violence. Yet it is not the increase in illicit activity that is causing the Pentagon to beat its alarm but rather a change in the way terrorism experts and government officials think about international security. After 9/11, much was made of Al Qaeda's virus-like ability to adapt and spread through loosely linked affinity cells even after its host government in Afghanistan had been destroyed. Defense analysts now contend that, with potential patron nations few and far between and funding sources cut off by effective policing, a new mutation has occurred. To raise money, terrorists are reportedly making common cause with gun runners, people smugglers, brand-name and intellectual-property bootleggers, drug dealers, blood-diamond merchants, and even old-fashioned high-seas pirates.
In other words, the real enemy facing the U.S. in its War on Terror is not violent extremism, but that old scourge of American peacekeepers since the days of the frontier: lawlessness. "Lawlessness that breeds terrorism is also a fertile ground for the drug trafficking that supports terrorism," said former Attorney John Ashcroft a few years ago, explaining why Congress's global counterterrorism funding bill was allocating money to support the Colombian military's fight against leftist rebels.
Counter-insurgency theorists have long argued for what they describe as "total war at the grass-roots," by which they mean a strategy not just to defeat insurgents by military force but to establish control over the social, economic, and cultural terrain in which they operate. "Drying up the sea," they call it, riffing on Mao's famous dictum, or sometimes, "draining the swamp." What this expanded definition of the terrorist threat does is take the concept of total war out of, say, the mountains of Afghanistan, and project it onto a world scale: Victory, says the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, "requires the creation of a global environment inhospitable to terrorism."
Defining the War on Terror in such expansive terms offers a number of advantages for American security strategists. Since the United States has the world's largest military, the militarization of police work justifies the "persistent surveillance" of, well, everything and everybody, as well as the maintenance of "a long-term, low-visibility presence in many areas of the world where U.S. forces do not traditionally operate." It justifies taking "preventive measures" in order to "quell disorder before it leads to the collapse of political and social structures" and shaping "the choices of countries at strategic crossroads" which, the Quadrennial Defense Review believes, include Russia, China, India, the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia -- just about every nation on the face of the earth save Britain and, maybe, France.
[Read the next one carefully then check your phone records: -Dan]
Since the "new threats of the 21st century recognize no borders," the Pentagon can, in the name of efficiency and flexibility, breach bureaucratic divisions separating police, military, and intelligence agencies, while at the same time demanding that they be subordinated to U.S. command. Hawks now like to sell the War on Terror as "the Long War," but a better term would be ‘the Wide War," with an enemies list infinitely expandable to include everything from DVD bootleggers to peasants protesting the Bechtel Corporation. Southcom Commander Craddock regularly preaches against "anti-globalization and anti-free trade demagogues," while Harvard security-studies scholar and leading ideologue of the "protean enemy" thesis, Jessica Stern, charges, without a shred of credible evidence, that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is brokering an alliance between "Colombian rebels and militant Islamist groups."
.....In Latin America more generally, it is increasingly the Pentagon, not the State Department, which sets the course for hemispheric diplomacy. With a staff of 1,400 and a budget of $800 million, Southcom already has more money and resources devoted to Latin America than do the Departments of State, Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture combined. And its power is growing.
For decades following the passage of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, it was the responsibility of the civilian diplomats over at Foggy Bottom to allocate funds and training to foreign armies and police forces. But the Pentagon has steadily usurped this authority, first to fight the War on Drugs, then the War on Terror. Out of its own budget, it now pays for about two-thirds of the security training the U.S. gives to Latin America. In January 2006, Congress legalized this transfer of authority from State to Defense through a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, which for the first time officially gave the Pentagon the freedom to spend millions from its own budget on aid to foreign militaries without even the formality of civilian oversight. After 9/11, total American military aid to the region jumped from roughly $400 million to more than $700 million. It has been steadily rising ever since, coming in today just shy of $1 billion.
Much of this aid consists of training Latin American soldiers -- more than 15,000 every year. Washington hopes that, even while losing its grip over the region's civilian leadership, its influence will grow as each of these cadets, shaped by ideas and personal loyalties developed during his instruction period, moves up his nation's chain of command. [And that in turn, could be the backdoor for American-directed coups and direct political pressure --Dan]
Training consists of lethal combat techniques in the field backed by counterinsurgency and counter-terror theory and doctrine in the classroom. This doctrine, conforming as it does to the Pentagon's broad definition of the international security threat, is aimed at undermining the work civilian activists have done since the end of Cold War to dismantle national and international intelligence agencies in the region.
BagNewsNotes on Pitching the Zarqawi bloopers.
The Ny Times says today:
Two related National Security Agency surveillance programs begun after the Sept. 11 attacks have provoked legal controversy because the agency does not seek court warrants for their operation.
In the domestic eavesdropping program, the N.S.A. listens in on phone calls and reads e-mail messages to and from Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes may be linked to Al Qaeda. Only international communications — those into and out of the country — are monitored, according to administration officials. Until late 2001, the N.S.A. focused on only the foreign end of such conversations; if it decided someone in the United States was of intelligence interest, it had to get a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Now such warrants are sought only for communications between two people who are both in the United States.
In the telephone record data-mining program, the N.S.A. has obtained from at least three phone companies the records of all calls — domestic and international — showing the phone numbers on both ends of each conversation, and its date, time, duration and other details. The records do not include the contents of any call or e-mail message and do not include personal data like credit card numbers and home addresses, officials say.
Security agency employees perform computer analysis in an effort to identify possible associates of terror suspects.
Meanwhile a nice birthday present from the AP - May 11: Justice Department Abruptly Ends Domestic Spying Probe
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey.
Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Meanwhile it is interesting that the Carlyle Group has some control over how those security clearances are handed out via the U.S. Investigative Services, USIS, entity. $13 million in a recent contract.
Man, to hell with it. I'm gonna go have fun now.
I was at the 5th Congressional District DFL nominating convention at St. Louis Park Jr. High today, where. after 3 ballots, State Rep. Keith Ellison was selected as the DFL nominee in the heavily Democratic district. I went under the Politics in Minnesota banner with a press pass, even though I was also there because I have done a smidgen of work for one Susan SegaI, who was running for Hennepin County Commissioner. However, the current commissioner, Gail Dorfman, was also running for the Congressional nomination that Ellison bagged. Dorfman did make it to the final round, though, in second.
What this means is that SegaI had to drop out, as she had promised Dorfman (who now wishes to keep her seat in November - although this hasn't been confirmed by me), abruptly ending my two-week campaign gofer stint. Kind of unfortunate but now I feel motivated to dig up another gig with the DFL and I'll probably get some help.
At the event I met Sabo, Kelley, Laurey, Ellison and got to see quite a spectacle. Never been to one of those before. On my way back from a final meeting with SegaI in Kenwood, I happened across some kind of StonerFest with my camera. The dudes at bottom are throwing flaming torches. Funny movie to post later. Right now, it's saturday night! -->outta here ---->
.
...at the moment, because I am doing some data entry work for a campaign for Hennepin County Commissioner. Susan Segal is an attorney in the Hennepin County attorney's office, who is running for Gail Dorfman's seat in Hennepin. Dorfman, in turn, is now running for Congress in retiring Martin Sabo's current seat.
So it is kind of a DFL daisy-chain effect. Only if Dorfman wins the nomination, against such heavyweights as State Rep. Keith Ellison, can Segal's campaign go forward. However, as I enter delegates into our fancy Drupal-based content and contact management system, I see that she's got quite a bit of delegate support already locked in, provided Dorfman makes it to the next round. Interesting stuff.
I really promise to dish up some goodies on Hookergate and other stuff later, famous blogger last words.... But sweetly enough, old GOP hand Ed Rollins suggested that around 15 (mostly?) Republican congressmen could get snared into Hookergate and indicted. And that would make it truly a great summer.
There is an organization called the Sunlight Foundation that just got rolled out. It would appear to be one of these combined blog/exposing data/grassroots participation type things. (it runs on the Drupal content management system, if you care) There is also a CongressPedia wiki that is being hosted through the sweet anti-power-conspiracy type site SourceWatch.
Earlier this week, on Wednesday, April 26, the Sunlight Foundation officially opened its doors. Our goal is to use revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy.
Sounds like it could really be a pain for the Powers that Be Corrupt.
About the Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts.
Our initial projects – from the establishment of a Congresspedia, the making of “transparency grants” for the development and enhancement of databases and websites, and two separate efforts to engage the public in distributed journalism and offer online tutorials on the role of money in politics efforts – are based on the premise that the collective power of citizens to demand greater accountability is the clearest route to reform.
Sunlight’s work is committed to helping citizens, journalists and bloggers be their own best watchdogs, both by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and websites to enable all of us to pool our intelligence in new, and yet to be imagined, ways.
Well hey, way to go. Check it out....
WASHINGTON TIMES: CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs
By Bill Gertz April 19, 2006
President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said.
The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.
"A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we're getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to ... people putting information on there that doesn't exist anywhere else," Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.
I'm gonna throw some random stuff at you. It's not a waste of time to look at, but it won't tell you one coherent story, so much as some shades of what went down over the last week while I was wrapped up in all the Macalester festivities... which I will elaborate on later.
Tony Snow for WH press sec.?: Lying water carrier for Republicans + doesn't stammer or sweat so much == why not? Tony Snow's many lies make him an unacceptable press sec'y
New protest album: NEIL YOUNG - Living With War, reviewed positively. Won't be in stores until the beginning of May, but online purchases later this week.
A.Norman sends along the following cartoon:
Spam keywords auto-pass NSA filter?: The odd internet journalist Wayne Madsen offered that
April 20, 2006 -- Beating Bush's NSA e-mail surveillance simple. According to NSA sources, there is a simple method to avoid having one's e-mail captured by NSA Internet filters that have been installed within major Internet exchanges, such as the AT&T facility in San Francisco, which is the subject of a class action suit against AT&T. By typing "Viagra" or "Cialis" in the message text, the filters will automatically identify the e-mail as spam and ignore it. The e-mail could contain the words "Al Qaeda" or "Bin Laden," but as long as Viagra or Cialis are also contained in the text, the e-mail will pass through the filters without being intercepted.
(Madsen's site design now looks much better, BTW)
Execrable writing: Powerline has an odd poop fetish. They use 'execrable' to describe everyone from Rybak to Kofi. I will have to remember to give Scott Johnson a wedgie when I see him.
Earth Day: This House site is fucking crazy: On Earth Day website, House Republican Committee seeks to 'dispel environmental myths'. Really crazy.
Time to kiss some Caucasian ass as the rather autocratic president of Azerbaijan visits the White House. Bush still claims that final Iraq war decisions happened after an ultimatum. Rolling Stone features: is Bush the worst President in History?
A really long article in the American Prospect (a liberal mag) about how the Democrats need to find some values and stuff. It may have been a good article but it was too long even for me.
If you have an online group, try Frappr to map them globally.
Rice is getting roped into AIPAC case: A lot seems to be transpiring in the AIPAC case for this summer, and we'll have to dig into the AIPAC angle a lot later. But for now, AP reports:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaked national defense information to a pro-Israel lobbyist in the same manner that landed a lower-level Pentagon official a 12-year prison sentence, the lobbyist's lawyer said Friday.
Goss CIA analyst crackdown: RawStory: The CIA announced today that it has fired an employee for leaking classified information to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. Also a big story in the NY Times on it. Pretty fucked up. Juan Cole compares how in DC these days, it is good to leak Valerie Plame's name, but bad to inform the American public about a network of secret prisons in eastern Europe.
Secret torture flights: There is a global shadow detention gulag of sorts, and all kinds of rumors about it around the Internet. Perhaps we'll stir up a little trouble later with some of those exotic stories, but in the meantime consider: Amnesty International claims CIA used private airlines to hide CIA torture flights (from a couple weeks ago).
Apple lawyers say blogs not journalism: Apple is trying to sue some blogger-type guy at PowerPage.org and say he's not a journalist with journalist-style credentials because of a story about Apple developing a consumer-oriented Firewire-based GarageBand music interface - codenamed 'Asteroid' according to AppleInsider.
Corporate dudes are suing against NSA wiretaps along with the ACLU. NSA wiretaps were a prominent part of Sunday's West Wing episode, wherein President-elect Santos calls up the Chinese premier to do some saber rattling over Kazakhstan – I don't know why the hell Bartlett, or anyone, would place thousands of US troops between the Russian and Chinese armies, but to the West Wing's credit, Santos doesn't like it either.
I loathe that Clifford May and his neocon ways. But "What to make of the anti-antis?" is a pretty sublime exercise in Orwellian labeling and slanders. Also the Zarqawi psyops story makes an angular appearance I don't really understand – but it appears that he supports the psyops because it manipulates perceptions against "anti-antis"... WTF?
The media, too, have more than their share of anti-antis, and I'm not talking here only about the left-wing blogs that compare President Bush unfavorably to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Recently, the top story on the Washington Post's front page was headlined: "Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi: Jordanian Painted as Foreign Threat to Iraq's Stability."
Is there anyone -- even Ward Churchill -- who would argue that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander of Al-Qaida in Iraq, is not a "foreign threat to Iraq's stability"?
A seemingly more cogent reason for the Post to object to what it blasts as a U.S. military propaganda campaign: An American colonel is quoted as saying that Zarqawi and other "foreign insurgents" are only "a very small part of the actual numbers" of those fighting Iraqi government forces and the American-led coalition.
The Moussaoui case distracts from profound problems in the legal system that need to get unraveled.
Is Bush ripping Beatles onto his iPod? The RIAA is arguing in court that turning your own CDs into MP3s is not fair use, which is insane. But since you can't buy Beatles digitally at all, this means that Bush must have been ripping them. Should the RIAA bust his yarblockoes? Well as this guy says, "They nailed Al Capone for tax evasion, didn't they?"
Boston Globe says Bloggers fanning the controversy over Rumsfeld. Describing a few milblogs, the blogs in turn hasten to redefine themselves. I am in favor of military blogs, as they open new and interesting channels of information. Among those mentioned: COUNTERCOLUMN: All your bias are belong to us, and Guidons. OPFOR is apparently the standard bearer these days. Is it part of military.com? Features such bits as "Somalia Remains Free of US Imperialism, Food, Laws, Prosperity, Peace…" under the category "The Long War." Real progressive. The mil blog wire is an aggregator which looks interesting.
The Blackwater lawsuit: Those Defense contractor guys hung on the bridge probably shouldn't have been in Fallujah -- but can their widows sue over it? After the Fallujah hangings, did Blackwater cover up their own negligence and fake documents to protect their Pentagon contract? More on it here in the DailyKos. In the broader context, it's evidence that these private companies treat their employees like shit while causing the military industrial complex to spiral out of control:
The Nation: Blood Is Thicker Than Blackwater by JEREMY SCAHILL [from the May 8, 2006 issue]
It is one of the most infamous incidents of the war in Iraq: On March 31, 2004, four private American security contractors get lost and end up driving through the center of Falluja, a hotbed of Sunni resistance to the US occupation. Shortly after entering the city, they get stuck in traffic, and their small convoy is ambushed. Several armed men approach the two vehicles and open fire from behind, repeatedly shooting the men at point-blank range. Within moments, their bodies are dragged from the vehicles and a crowd descends on them, tearing them to pieces. Eventually, their corpses are chopped and burned. The remains of two of the men are strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates River and left to dangle. The gruesome image is soon beamed across the globe.
In the Oval Office the killings were taken as "a challenge to America's resolve," according to the Los Angeles Times. President Bush issued a statement through his spokesperson. "We will not be intimidated," he said. "We will finish the job." Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt vowed, "We will be back in Falluja.... We will hunt down the criminals.... It's going to be deliberate. It will be precise, and it will be overwhelming." Within days of the ambush, US forces laid siege to Falluja, beginning what would be one of the most brutal and sustained US operations of the occupation.
.....
Shortly after Helvenston left that message, the men left the base and set out for their destination. Without a detailed map, they took the most direct route, through the center of Falluja. According to Callahan, there was a safer alternative route that went around the city, which the men were unaware of because of Blackwater's failure to conduct a "risk assessment" before the trip, as mandated by the contract. The suit alleges that the four men should have had a chance to gather intelligence and familiarize themselves with the dangerous routes they would be traveling. This was not done, according to Miles, "so as to pad Blackwater's bottom line" and to impress ESS with Blackwater's efficiency in order to win more contracts. The suit also alleges that McQuown "intentionally refused to allow the Blackwater security contractors to conduct" ride-alongs with the teams they were replacing from Control Risk Group. (In fact, the suit contends that Blackwater "fabricated critical documents" and "created" a pre-trip risk assessment "after this deadly ambush occurred.")
AP: Israel Preparing to Retake Gaza Strip. Probably saber rattling, but the situation is getting really bad. Some other newsbits:
Senate Bill Shorts Gear for Troops By ANDREW TAYLOR, AP Thu Apr 20, 3:46 PM ET
WASHINGTON - A Senate measure to fund the war in Iraq would chop money for troops' night vision equipment and new battle vehicles but add $230 million for a tilt-rotor aircraft that has already cost $18 billion and is still facing safety questions.
Kyrgyz Leader Threatens to Expel US Troops By KADYR TOKTOGULOV , 04.19.2006, 10:36 PM
Kyrgyzstan's president threatened Wednesday to expel U.S. troops if the United States does not agree by June 1 to pay more for stationing forces in the Central Asian nation.
Some random DailyKos goodies: What is the 'center' in American politics? What of the innocent people in Guantanamo? (and what of that Abbasi guy?) Are we becoming the Republic of Gilead?
Some random Israel goodies: "We could lose the next war" - an interview with idiosyncratic Likud hawk Yuval Steinitz, wherein he suggests that the Israeli military leads its government, not vice versa. Really interesting stuff. He is also paranoid about Egypt. Editorial: The UN versus Hezbollah. Hebron settlers assault two female international aid workers. I had some more links but they disappeared because of that damn Haaretz auto-reload thing.
I promise that the Big Lebowski-themed Iran exegesis is on its way. It's a new week now... Gotta get real before oil goes $80+/barrel.....
Genetically engineered bladders have been created in labs from host samples. Then the bladders have been successfully implanted. Excellent. The eschaton is at hand.
I was just given word that Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, of MyDD.com and DailyKos.com respectively, will be at Arise! on Tuesday, May 2, at noon.
The event is confirmed! Tuesday, May 2nd at noon.
Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga will be speaking and signing copies of their new book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. Markos is the founder and editor of The Daily Kos--the largest and most popular progressive blog in the country.
(Check it out at: http://www.dailykos.com)
This event could be seriously huge. The blog is read by a crazy amount of people, including everyone from left-leaning Democrats to the far left. I'm going to start with publicity today. So, we may start to get some calls at the store about the event. Please confirm the date and time w/people, provide directions, etc. If anyone has any other questions about the event, please give them my cell # and email address.
Thanks!
maddy
as was noted to me:
its gonna be crazy big, probably way bigger than we can handle, but thank goodness we are about the last option for independent bookstores in the twin cities.
I read Crashing the Gate on my way down to Arizona, and it was pretty good, if a bit uneven, as reviewed earlier. Interesting stuff. I gotta say what up to Kos and get the book signed. Sweet.
There's a nine minute Ali G Show clip wherein Borat checks out the American political scene, and in a subtle conversation about religion, gets one James Broadwater to say that Jews will go to hell because they aren't for Jesus. There's plenty more, but I am always amazed how easily Cohen can bring out the latent antisemite in Americans.
Charlie Sheen popped up on Alex Jones' radio show (for the uninitiated, Jones is one of the leading Internet Conspiracy Guys - infowars and prisonplanet are kinda required if you're into that sort of thing). Anyhow there was an interview that can be downloaded (mp3) and here is the summarized story about it.
"It feels like from the people I talk to in and around my circles, it seems like the worm is turning."
I listened to the interview on my iPod when I went to Target this morning, and there wasn't anything particularly new about the vaunted 9/11 conspiracies, such as the funny-looking hole in the Pentagon, the "pulling" of WTC 7, controlled demolition and all the rest. I am really not a believer in such things, although I will always be happy to note that the hole in the Pentagon just doesn't look right at all. But Jones and Sheen go through the basic motions of the Story, so it's sort of amusing.
Oh yah, PrisonPlanet currently claims that there is a media coverup, as the Associated Press refuses to run a wire story about Sheen's remarks. They say:
Mainstream Media Blackout On Sheen 9/11 Piece (March 22):
Controlled gatekeepers and delusional Neo-Cons attempt to kill story
.....We will not cease in our efforts to turn this into a massive story but we need your support. Get the story and e mail it out to every newspaper, newswire and TV news station in existence.
And also March 21: PrisonPlanet: Huge Reaction To Sheen 9/11 Story. Gawker: Escort-Loving Sitcom Actors Lend Credibility to 9/11 Doubters.
All right, I am officially amused by the Charlie Sheen Effort to Expose the 9/11 Conspiracy of March 2006. Everyone gets bonus points for originality.
On the flip side there is a massive story on 9/11 conspiracy theories from a skeptical perspective (although I have not read it yet) "The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll" in New York Magazine.
Well those are a couple brief and weird things. More later. Sorry things have been sparse but i've been trying to get the other sections of my life together, and watching bizarre Egyptian movies and stuff...
Juan Cole catches a bitter Muqtada al-Sadr: (UPI)
Young Shiite nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr said Monday that Iraq is in a state of civil war. He responded to guerrilla provocations against Sadr City, with bombings and mortars having killed over 50 persons there Sunday, by ordering his Mahdi Militia not to engage in reprisals.
Like many Iraqi and Arab observers, Muqtada was shocked when US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that the US military would not intervene in an Iraqi civil war, leaving that to Iraqi forces.
' "May God damn you," Sadr said of Rumsfeld. "You said in the past that civil war would break out if you were to withdraw, and now you say that in case of civil war you won't interfere." '
The Machine Rages On: Raimondo: Another War for Israel: The amen corner howls for war with Iran, The Shame and the Sorrow. UK Independent: Iraq: The reckoning. (photo via KarbalaNews.net)
Welcome to the Long War: We are moving from the War on Terror®© to the Long War©, a hellish state of perpetual warfare forever, but it will be totally badass according to the Quadrennial Defense Review, a Pentagon planning document prepared every four years. It's called the Long War, and most of the stuff in this article is apocalyptically gloomy and depressing. And they are going to take your money to pay for it too.
On a note that I hope is totally unrelated, from the Antiwar blog, Why are Marines Training in US Neighborhoods? as reported in the Toledo Blade. Let me fetch my tinfoil.
Blunt Honesty Dept: The State Department informs us in "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" of Iraq's many human rights shortcomings: "The following human rights problems were reported:
Other than that, it's peachy. There's a ton of stuff in there, worth glancing at. I like how 'Impunity' has its own bullet.
REALLY, IT'S GOOD: CounterPunch: Neocon Advocates Civil War in Iraq as "Strategic" Policy; Daniel Pipes Finds Comfort in Muslims Killing Muslims:
"The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy. Iraq's plight is neither a coalition responsibility nor a particular danger to the West. Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition's responsibility, nor its burden. When Sunni terrorists target Shi'ites and vice versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy, but not a strategic one." .... The fact is that the neocons who control U.S. strategy have no interest in preventing a civil war but only in inciting one. Sectarian tensions were virtually unknown in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. And in fact the Iraqi Shia fought loyally as Iraqis against Iranian Shia in the disastrous Iran-Iraq war. So to avoid an Iraqi civil war, the most important step is to get all the U.S. troops home and thus to terminate U.S. provocations. For it is now crystal clear that the neocon strategy is one of civil war to divide and destroy Iraq; and such a strategy amounts to a crime against humanity.
Which will really be a funny notion when the oil ports in eastern (the suppressed Shiite part of) Saudi Arabia get bombed. A real thigh-slapper.
JPost: India is not Iran. But they are Asians with Nukes, which counts for -10,000 points these days.
Fourth Generation Warfare: I have been saying that this is probably the best model to understand America's current strategic and especially tactical situation. It's gaining more notice now. They even care about the concept in Grand Forks. This long essay by Michael Mazarr, a professor at the U.S. National War College, details a crucial problem with the body of 4GW theory so far: it explains the modes of conflict, but not the underlying causes and motivations.
Libertarian critique of war and socialism: Iraq and the Democratic Empire by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
The US spends money, invades countries, sheds blood, and becomes ever more powerful at home and unpopular abroad. In the end, no matter how powerful its weapons or how determined its leaders, it loses. It loses because people resist empire. It loses for the same reasons that socialism and its central plans always fail. Large-scale attempts to force people into predetermined molds founder on the inability of the state to allocate resources rationally and to anticipate change, as well as the ubiquitous and pesky phenomenon called human volition. Mankind was not meant to live in cages.
Why did the US win wars in the past? Because it fought far poorer governments. Today it loses because it fights populations – people acting on their own, forming their own associations, using their brains to outwit bureaucrats, and cobbling together resources from underground markets. The market always outruns the planners for the same reason that guerilla armies usually win over regular armies. Decentralized and spontaneous associations of dedicated individuals are smarter and wiser and more committed than centralized and planned bureaucrats who follow their rule books.
.....Therefore, [Mises] said, war and socialism are both part of the same ideological apparatus. They both presume the primacy of power over property. In the same way, peace and free enterprise are cut from the same cloth. They are the result of a society with a regime that respects the privacy, property, associations, and wishes of the population. The liberal society trades with foreign countries rather than waging war on them. It respects the free movement of peoples. It does not intervene in the religious affairs of people but rather adopts a rule of perfect tolerance.
I'm sorry, this caught my eye and made me laugh:
Former Teacher Surrenders at French School: Armed Ex-Teacher Holds 23 Hostages, Mostly Students, at French School Before Surrendering:
Vilpail had taught at the Colbert de Torcy High School until two years ago, school officials said. He was armed with a gun that fires rubber bullets, police said, adding that the weapon was nevertheless dangerous. He surrendered after hours of negotiations, said Jean-Luc Prigent, a top aide in the local administration.
Even their crazies surrender!! All right, that's a little crass. But it speaks to a certain less-than-subtle difference in the American character. Our paranoid edge goes all the way to the bitter end -- see Falling Down, Fight Club, Glory, Bonnie & Clyde, Thelma & Louise. That key part of the American narrative where the suggestion of violent subversion is transformed into The Real. It is part of our national psychology. We are proud of it: any proper story tends to go this way. Otherwise it seems half-finished.
In this case, well, the French guy wanted to make a symbolic gesture without quite crossing over into the Real. It appears that he wanted to take a little swipe and then step back like a reasonable European. This is part of the reason that the various apocalyptic segments of the population voted for Bush in droves. It's who we are. No surrender.
Pissed off CIA dudes are cool: I still dig Larry Johnson's No Quarter blog, as well as Pat Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis. Johnson is on point with tidbits about the Plame case, the 'victory' strategy, Libby's legal tactics, etc.
Misc file: Isaac Hayes quits 'South Park'. Hopefully Chef will have a funny death scene. Top 10 strangest Lego creations. Radiohead's 'Just' video brought to life via London graffiti (QT). This is really pretty sweet.
DC Democrats are Bastards & Chickenshits®™: Greenwald lays it out (via Kos - more here):
With very few exceptions, national Democrats in Washington see the blogosphere as composed of uninformed, ranting, dirty masses who need to be kept as far away as possible. While they are willing to take your money, many of the Beltway Democrats see the vibrant activism in the blogosphere as some sort of an embarrassment, while others see it as a threat to their feifdoms.
Here's a tip for DC: Your methods suck. Your fiefdoms are powerless. You guys have no guts (except Feingold). No one better deserves to put up with Howard Dean than you fuckwits that have absolutely no idea how to tread water, let alone win. Go cry with Joe Lieberman about how no one likes you anymore. Go straight to Hell, do not pass Go.
This was in the context of a NY Times review of "Crashing the Gate", a new book from Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com and Markos Zuniga of DailyKos. It details how the Netroots can revolutionize the power structure in America and DC, and how it makes the Confused DLC Douche-bag Consultant Class (or whatever you care to call them) a little hot under the collar. Order it here
For his part, Kos has some really good wisdom today on how blogs can generate fundraising seed money for candidates, as well as more on the book & tour.
Oops, I guess [legal] abortion is doomed: "They Mean It" by digby, worth checking.
Kind of a grab bag of stuff for the afternoon. We got posted as a City Pages MN blog o the day for Mordred's trip to Las Vegas yesterday. That is Teh Pimp. Thx to Mordred for a day of fame!
Kircher's Cat Piano is plainly the best thing ever. (via GM)
MN Governor Rasmussen Poll (via Kos). 2/20. Likely voters. MoE 4.5% (1/16 results in parens)
Pawlenty (R) 40 (47)
Hatch (DFL) 45 (44)
Pawlenty (R) 42 (46)
Kelley (DFL) 42 (37)
The January results were perhaps an outlier, and of course the third party factor is unknown. But it indicates Kelley is solid - and I keep thinking that Kelley is a better candidate than Hatch, despite the fact that the DFL heirarchy seems to believe that it's automatically Hatch's turn – the same stodgy thinking that got us the Moe candidacy last time. Maybe...
The network news still sucks. ABC' Elizabeth Vargas is a fine example. Thanks to MediaMatters for chipping away at the typical layers of garbage. Such great moments in history as these recent Fox News moments deserve to be recorded: "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?" and "CIVIL WAR" IN IRAQ: MADE UP BY THE MEDIA?"
Random: A Rubik's Cube Prank and Mario Cookie from the infinite well-documented prank sphere of the Internet, a genre started by such great exploits as the 1994 Police Cruiser placed on MIT's Great Dome.
"Neo-Isolationists" take heart: 42% of Americans believed the US should "mind its own business" in a October 2005 poll. To the various warmongers of Washington, this is the 'dreaded isolationism' they fear -- or rather, its the natural inclination of the American people to step away from the tangled messes of Eurasia.
Just a third (34%) say Bush's calls for greater democracy in the region are a good idea that will succeed; 36% think it is a good idea that will not succeed; and 22% believe it is a bad idea. ..... Fully 71% say the Iraq war is a major reason that people around the world are unhappy with the U.S. And just 16% – the fewest in over a decade – are satisfied with the way things are going in the world.
Raimondo at Antiwar.com hails this as evidence that 'interventionism' is basically imposed by neo-cons and hawks upon the American public. Thus, Antiwar will keep holding the line. Moment of Truth and On the Road to Empire, indeed. Even Henry Hyde is warning against the arrogance of empire these days:
...by its very nature, the U.S. is a revolutionary power. Its foundational beliefs posit universal truths that permeate all of its actions and perceptions of the world. These have had, and continue to have, catalytic effects on other societies..... [but] Lashing our interests to the indiscriminate promotion of democracy is a tempting but unwarranted strategy, more a leap of faith than a sober calculation.
.....We can and have used democracy as a weapon to destabilize our avowed enemies and may do so again. But if we unleash revolutionary forces in the expectation that the result can only be beneficent, I believe we are making a profound and perhaps uncorrectable mistake. History teaches that revolutions are very dangerous things, more often destructive than benign, and uncontrollable by their very nature. Upending established order based on theory is far more likely to produce chaos than shining uplands.
.....We are well advanced into an unformed era in which new and unfamiliar enemies are gathering forces, where a phalanx of aspiring competitors must inevitably constrain and focus our options. In a world where the ratios of strength narrow, the consequences of miscalculation will become progressively more debilitating. The costs of golden theories will be paid for in the base coin of our interests.
There's even more but I think that gets the point. Seriously, what ever happened to the gruff conservatives of yore preaching caution? ... Tom Tomorrow predicts the future?
House Republicans sense a good time to retire. (Ten or 15 more?! wow) This could help us, of course.
Afghanistan: Opium still big-time as a Taliban spring offensive looms: Guardian: Four years after fall of Taliban, leader's power barely extends beyond the capital. WaPo: Growing Threat Seen In Afghan Insurgency: DIA Chief Cites Surging Violence in Homeland. Traditionally in Afghanistan, the fighters hunker down for the winter as snow closes off mountain valleys. In all likelihood, this spring will see the strongest Taliban offensives since 2001. Opium yields are slightly down this year, apparently because the market is flooded and prices have fallen. However, productivity per hectare is way up, and according to ABC News, a mere 200 hectares were actually shut down through NATO/Western political drug suppression efforts. About one in ten Afghans is directly employed by the opium industry, which makes up between 1/3 and 1/2 of GDP.
Thus, the Pentagon presides over probably the largest organized narcotics economy ever. Always remember that the Taliban's Tajik, Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Uzbek rivals only managed to finance their survival through exporting the raw material for heroin. These are the "good guys" who control the turf, and this is how they do it. The central government can only be a passive framework, at best, in this environment. As I noted earlier, over about 200 years they defeated the British two or three times, and the USSR's great Red Army. That's how they roll. The Kabul prison rebellion (now reportedly crushed) is just the overture for the first movement.
Freedom beckons for the Bluth family: Apparently the rumors were true and Arrested Development got picked up by Showtime, for another 26 episodes. I was watching the DVDs recently and really, it might have been the best comedy on network TV. FOX is dumb for replacing it with more garbage.
How to consider purchasing an LCD monitor: A subtle art: This AnandTech comparison of top-end 20" Apple and Dell LCD displays explains all the factors.
Indian nuclear plans: According to ArmsControlWonk, it appears that only about 65% of India's nuclear plants will be monitored as civilian operations by the IAEA. Why do Americans generally ignore the existence of Israel and India's nuclear weapons, try to forget about Pakistan's and Russia's? Is Iran, which has its own damn uranium mines, really that different? Then again, the 21st century will probably have a nuclear history that will make the 20th look like Daisy picking flowers.
My good friend Andy Tweeten is out in Great Falls, Montana, working for the Jon Tester for Senate campaign. He sent out an email today to let people know where he's at.
He also takes care of the TesterTime campaign blog. Right on. Tester is something of a prairie populist, and he's in a neck-and-neck race with some DLC-style city slicker lawyer type for the Democratic primary. Tester's opponent in November (hopefully) will be the wildly unpopular Conrad Burns. It's a fight worth watching, and I'm glad Andy's around to get a handle on things.
Something completely different: Andy also alerted me to a tidbit about how Facebook is used by the Man to peer into our lives. Interestingly, one of the groups behind Facebook, the Accel Group, has been tied to DARPA. Including a nasty threat to the president that led to Secret Service visits for some pissed-off student.
The story has a sad little note at the end:
This is a revised version of this piece. An earlier version incorrectly implied that U.S. intelligence agencies were involved in Facebook and may have been read as suggesting that Facebook played a role in disseminating information to authorities. CampusProgress.org regrets these errors.
Well, if you post stuff publicly, and intelligence agencies use Facebook to find it, it's not exactly facebook's fault. If it would be bad for the District Attorney to see your facebook page, then you shouldn't have it there. But I wonder if facebook uses heuristics / AI methods to dig for incriminating stuff that people have posted themselves. And what of the private messages?
MySpace, on the other hand, is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, who will ultimately own all their poor souls. Kind of a pity.
Tester will have to come riding in at the last second to save the day. Go Jon!!
Lots of people in Minnesota have seen these "Midwest Heroes" ads by now. They remind us of how Al Qaeda in Iraq is trying to destroy America. Well done. Who is plunking the cash down? The "Progress for America Voter Fund," run by such luminaries as Ken Mehlman, the director of the Republican National Committee, and various Swift Boat conspirators.
Nick Coleman called it the Swift Boating of Iraq, otherwise Swift Boating in reverse. Also a bit here. Hindrocket applauds that "My own guess is that liberals aren't afraid that the Midwest Heroes are wrong. They're afraid they're right."
So the oddity is that on my boss' radio show, one of the guys, Stephenson I think, was on there, and of course Janecek praised him, while Lambert was more critical. But what sort of media transaction is this? Why is this message an ad buy? Who is pushing it?? Well the director of the Republican Party. That simple.
PFA has some really nice Republican attack ads from 2004 on their site. "Why do we fight?" is cheesy. "Finish it" has a really funny part at the end. "John Kerry has a 30 Year Record of Cuts in Defense and Intelligence and Endlessly Changing Positions on Iraq. Would You Trust Kerry up against these fanatic killers. President Bush didn't start this war, but he will finish it."
Which I think is especially amusing because he sure as fuck won't finish it. Well, it would be amusing if it weren't a national disaster. My point is that this is a 527-style wing of the Republican attack machine. And they are using Minnesota as their test TV market for November.
They offer this on MidwestHeroes.com and the PFAVoterFund site:
About PFA Voter Fund
Some politicians are working overtime to push their failed policies on America and distort the accomplished public policy records of conservative leaders across this nation. These policies thwart the ability of American families to support the War on Terror, keep more of what they earn, provide a safe environment for educating their children, and continue to expand employment and grow the economy.
Progress for America Voter Fund ("PFA-VF") is a conservative issue advocacy organization dedicated to setting the issue record straight about these critical issues.
Here are the goals of the PFA-VF:
1. Level the playing field on issue advertisements — it may not be possible out raise even George Soros alone, but the PFA Voter Fund must try to reduce the lopsided advertising advantage that liberal 527s have on the campaign trail today.
2. Reinforce the messages of conservatives across the nation -- we have messages we know will work and energize the base; we just need the resources to deliver these messages.
As a diverse coalition of concerned citizens, nonprofit organizations, and other players in the political process, PFA-VF is dedicated to educating the American people regarding the public policy positions of candidates for federal, state and local office and mobilizing conservative voters. These activities provide the American people with the information they need to see through the misleading public policies and campaign themes of liberal politicians.
Well there ya go. Good times. If only we could get George Soros to keep ruining everything, liberals could finally take over.
Hello to the rest of America, this is like $10 billion dollars in November's generic Republican attack ads distilled to about 30 seconds. Set your brains on "drool" and prepare to be bombarded 600,000 times.
It doesn't get any more pure than this. But wait!! Look at all this fucking progress in Iraq!!!! Thanks MidwestHeroes, for giving us this Stuff that The Bush Hater Liberal Media Wants To Hide!!
“Iraqi Students Now Carry Laptops That Connect At Internet Cafes To The World’s Web Sites And Libraries Where Before They Had To Rely On Pencils, Slide Rules And Outdated -- Often Censored -- School Textbooks.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
“Iraq Is Laying The Groundwork For A Self-Sustaining, Market-Based Economy.” “Only a year-and-a-half after regaining its full sovereignty, Iraq is laying the groundwork for a self-sustaining, market-based economy which can serve as an engine of growth for that nation and for the broader Middle East.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, Op-Ed, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
“Iraq’s economy is expected to grow by nearly 4% this year and accelerate to nearly 17% in 2006.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, Op-Ed, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
“Per capita income should soon exceed $1,000 -- nearly double the level in 2003.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, Op-Ed, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
“More than 30,000 new businesses have been registered and many have set up shop.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, Op-Ed, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
There are also lots of Department of Defense Press releases, and quotes from an editorial in the Indianapolis Star!!
This is some kind of joint project of the "Families United for our Troops and their Mission", whatever precisely that is. I started drifting over their blog and found this chestnut.
Monday, February 06, 2006: Information Warfare
Information warfare, what’s the big deal? Gold Star families are working to tell their stories to anyone willing to listen, including the media. One Gold Star mom said this of her husband, “He would talk to the moon about our son”. One reason we tell their stories is to keep the memories of our loved ones alive. Another reason is to continue to serve our country.
The battle continues to be waged, at home and abroad. Every war is fought on two fronts. Every war must be won on two fronts-the battlefield and the field of public opinion. President Lincoln set down the perimeters of the battle when he said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”
We will win the War on Terror, on the battlefield. We must continue to share the successes of the war in the media so that the public opinion is not swayed for defeat by misinformation on the home front.
“The American Enterprise” March, 2006, published an article written by John Guardiano. The article entitled, Information Warfare, stated: “Like most veterans of the war, I am amazed and dismayed at the relentlessly negative—and very misleading—media portrait of our efforts.” He cited this example, “Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is a media cause celebrity; but Diane Ibbotson, Debby Argel Bastion, and countless other mothers who have lost their sons (and daughters) and continue to support the war are ignored. This despite the fact that they are more articulate and serious –minded than Sheehan, with personal stories that are just as compelling.”
So we “soldier on” in the cause that our loved ones gave their lives for, to win the battle on the home front that our Armed Forces are winning on the battlefields. We will continue to tell the stories of America’s fallen heroes, of veterans service and sacrifice, of the resolve of families who support the military and their mission.
Posted by Diane Ibbotson @ 11:55 AM
And Ken Mehlman is master of Information Operations.
Here in Minnesota we always have a special spot for the ironic political campaign. Wellstone and Ventura cut against the typical style, but they fit their times somehow. And now, another candidate has emerged from esoteric wiccan pentagrams and two (two!) covens. He also offers to impale terrorists and drug dealers at the state capitol, as a dramatic Star Tribune story detailed today.
Satanism and the Vampyres Witches and Pagans party: The Agenda:
6) Any one found committing an act of terrorism in Minnesota will be IMPALED by me at the State Capital. If the US DOJ wants to prosecute me for it, then I will take my chances in Court, for I do not believe an American Jury will convict me of brutally killing a terrorist!
I particularly liked how the capitol graphic was filched from the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board.
Just like Anakin, my main concern was to help save the life of the woman I loved dearly. However, Susan returned my unconditional love and caring by having me wrongly incarcerated for 150-days (as a result of IUPUI Law Professor Joel Schumm) I was vindicated, almost 3-months after spending 150-days in jail!
As a result of Susan's actions, I fully turned to "The Dark Side" and dedicated my life to serving Lucifer.
Unlike Susan, I will not attack an innocent person through my hatred. I prefer to use the blessings and gifts that come from Vampyrism and WitchCraft to attack those who prey on the innocent.
[....]
My sister has a saying, "Evil Begets Evil!" Well, starting in 2007, it will be the criminals who realize first hand, that there is someone more evil than they are, who cares about the safety and well-being of the innocent!
WAR, WHAT'S IT GOOD FOR? There are also high plans as he intends to run for President.
Though my Magikal Path Name is: Lord Ares, I do not believe that Americans should die needlessly in Iraq or any other country.
As Governor of Minnesota I will NOT allow any of our National Guard soldiers to be deployed to Iraq or any other combat area in the world.Upon becoming President I will immediately recall ALL servicemen and women from combat areas around the world. Additionally, I will have President George W. Bush charged and tried for the murders of every American that has been killed in Iraq as a result of him sending them into War. Upon being convicted, I think everyone knows what his punishment will be.
That sets a new bar for rhetorical gestures in gubernatorial campaigns. Adjusting the discourse with guerilla ontology. He also goes way back with Jeb Bush, which is really quite strange. He has apparently been an apparatchik of the Florida Republican Party, so who knows what dark reaches his connections go to.
So we will surely follow this one as it develops. Jonathon Sharkey is a great name for a Satanist.
I had heard that my former Macalester classmate Jesse Mortenson '05 was considering a run for the State House — and indeed, he is not the only recent Macalester grad to consider a run. Apparently, Jesse is the first Green Party candidate to shoot for a spot at the Capitol, which makes me wonder what the hell the rest of them are doing. (official Green Party press release on it)
Fortunately for Jesse, his campaign got some good press with a Doug Grow column in the Star Tribune today ('Pol's fundraiser won't be typical DFL bean feed'), mentioning a planned vegan fundraising dinner next month. The column rambles on about the difference between Republican and Democrat food fundraisers, mentions the Al Juhnke "hotdish law."
Anyway, I think it is great that Mortenson is going for this. Certainly in 64A, he has a better shot of winning Green than almost anywhere else in the state, save Dinkytown or the relative Green strongholds of Minneapolis.
He is only two years younger than the House's youngest, freshman Rep. Andy Welti (D) of the Rochester countryside area. And his core platform — anti-Wal-Mart & Big box retail organizing, single-payer health care, more renewable energy and demanding an end to the Iraqi occupation — all of these issues will certainly find their supporters around Macalester. (needless to say, I pretty much agree with his take on these issues)
The main potential problem is that some older, richer Macalester graduate in the neighborhood could likely snap up the DFL endorsement. If s/he is not such a hot candidate, Jesse would certainly have a sporting chance in November. City Hall Scoop reported that Ian Keith, an elementary school teacher, announced for the race in November. In that case, with no other contenders (?), Jesse is the more interesting candidate, hands-down.
In our time at Mac, Jesse and I found ourselves aligned in cliques that were sometimes mutually hostile — namely his occasional spats with some in The Mac Weekly, in particular during my time as an editor there during the controversial 'need-blind' days. Mortenson was criticized for talking too much at Macalester College Student Government LB meetings, for throwing monkey wrenches rather than working constructively, in other words all the usual accusations leveled against the activist set around Mac. I secretly never saw any of this as a problem, because the MCSG is often something of a farce, and I supported anything improving the quality of the theatre therein. In any case, he did a lot to raise awareness of broader problems that many preferred not to face.
So Jesse had a mixed public image among some at Macalester. In person, I always found him friendly, informed and connected, a kind of utilitarian progressive who took a keen interest in the activities and structures of governments and corporations. There are quite a few protesters-of-the-week at Macalester, who talk a lot of talk. Jesse is not of that class: as a grassroots progressive, he seriously walks the walk.
After the Brian Rosenberg wars, I can only imagine the fun of seeing Jesse squaring off against Phil Krinkie and Steve Sviggum. With a little luck and a lot of elbow grease... If he has been up at Midway building some kind of stealth coalition among small business owners and activists at the Midway Citizen Consumer Community Coalition and Metro Independent Business Alliance, he might be able to pull off an unlikely pro-business Green campaign that other progressives could try nationwide. Where did all the people on that stage come from?
Naturally, Sociology chair Terry Boychuk had nothing but glowing things to say about Jesse's candidacy in the Dec. 9 (or Dec. 2?) Mac Weekly story that announced his campaign.
After all, Macalester students only end up running the whole world, so what chance could Mortenson have in one of Minnesota's most liberal districts? My grandfather, Daniel S. Feidt, was elected to the Minnesota House in 1936 at age 28, on his second try. He got to the Senate two years later, where he stayed until 1961. Like Mortenson, he was of an independent streak and was wary of party machines, preferring the independent structure of the Legislature in those days.
I'll add a bit from his 1957 pamphlet, Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature, an ode to the dead nonpartisan system. I think that Mortenson would appreciate it:
It is understandable why party leaders desire to increase their power by gaining control of the Minnesota legislature, but the view of the independent voter is different, he does not want his legislator, alderman or school board member, to be subject to party responsibility.
He does not want a political climate to develop where there might be brought back to Minnesota's scene the paid political hack, the ward healer or the ward boss.
The independent wants Minnesota to remain as it is -- the cleanest political state in the nation and the independent wants his public official, be he legislator or alderman, to be responsible to the voters, not to some party boss.
…Minnesota has the opposite of the party boss system; it has its own system -- a non-boss system, in which every legislator is free to decide what is in the best interest for his constituents and what is in the best interest of the state on each issue. The Minnesota system, in my judgment, is infinitely more in the interest of the public.
So my warmest regards to Jesse Mortenson's independent effort in 64A. It will be a difficult year, but surely a rewarding one. I'll be following this one closely.
(Campaign photo shamelessly ganked from Jesse's official announcement entry on his campaign site, JesseMortenson.com)
Mel Gibson tries subliminal maniacal grin: Apple - Trailers - Apocalypto. Look at about 1:46 in the trailer for this bizarre film. For a single frame, Mel Gibson is chomping on a cigarette, leaning on the clay-encrusted native. Best weird subliminal moment of the year, so far.
Oil prices climb on speculative buying. Chinese claim to develop first live vaccine against bird flu.
Peter Bartz Gallagher has struck up InfantFoundation.com. Thus far it's a few thumbnails of the crew and such, but it's a fine start.
Strib: Older story, but a fun fantasy: Trolleys may be jolly, say Minneapolis officials.
How evil are you? I came up Evil. Must be because I got an ex-stripper on a Clear Channel station today.
National Security bits: Urban design + war on terror = National Security Sprawl. NSA Web Site Puts 'Cookies' on Computers.
Aljazeera.Net - US increases air attacks in Iraq. Antiwar.com: Two False Options - by William S. Lind
Victory is not an option, and it never was. The strategic objectives the Bush administration set for this war – a peaceful, democratic Iraq that would be an American ally, a friend of Israel, a source of unlimited oil and of basing rights for large American forces – were never attainable, no matter what we did. Strategies invented in Fairyland cannot be implemented in the real world. Pity the military that is ordered to try.
Defeat is an option. In my last column I described one way that could occur, an Israeli and/or American attack on Iran that leads Iraqi Shi'ites to join the Sunni jihad and cut our lines of supply and retreat through southern Iraq. There are additional scenarios that could lead to a dramatic American defeat, a defeat we could not disguise to anyone, not even ourselves.
German media suspects US strike in Iran: UPI: German media: U.S. prepares Iran strike
...the respected German weekly Der Spiegel notes "What is new here is that Washington appears to be dispatching high-level officials to prepare its allies for a possible attack rather than merely implying the possibility as it has repeatedly done during the past year."
The German news agency DDP cited "Western security sources" to claim that CIA Director Porter Goss asked Turkey's premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets. Goss, who visited Ankara and met Erdogan on Dec. 12, was also reported to have to have asked for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation.
[....]
It is possible that leaks from NATO and German security sources are part of a ploy to convince the Iranian government that the Americans and their NATO allies are in dead earnest when they say a nuclear-armed Iran would not be tolerated, and that Iran had better start negotiating seriously.
But the German media speculation about the supposed U.S. plans has been fueled by a number of high-profile visits to Turkey this month, including trips by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, by the CIA's Porter Goss and by the FBI Director Robert Mueller, who also delivered U.S. intelligence reports on Iranian backing for PKK operations aimed against Turkey. There have also been some significant Turkish visits to Washington, as reported by Der Spiegel.
[the PKK Kurdish faction, with Iran, against Turkey and Iraqi Sunnis?! Oy!....]
The original story in the German press which provoked the wider media furore was written for the DDP agency by a veteran reporter on security and intelligence matters, Udo Ulfkotte, who has in the past been criticized in the German media for being "too close to sources at Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND" (Bundesnachrichtendienst).
Anti-Imperialists Beware – Bush Is Reading Again - by Jim Lobe. Lobe has been a close follower of the neo-cons since the 1980s as UPI's Washington DC. This makes the point that Bush seems easily swayed by cheesy imperialist writing — these guys really do deceive themselves with breathless talk of empire. Don't miss Robert Kaplan's characterization of the entire Islamic world as "Injun Country." Bush friggin' loves Kaplan, as Lobe details why:
[Kaplan] describes the presumed thoughts of a Filipino in Zamboanga, presumably a descendant of Moro who resisted, at the cost of tens of thousands of their lives, U.S. imperialism 100 years ago: "His smiling, naïve eyes cried out for what we in the West call colonialism."
Good stuff from Raimondo (the anti-war libertarian) at Antiwar.com for how to Beware the New Year:
.... conservatives often pave the way for more government spending and centralized controls in the name of "national security" by supporting war and preparations for war. The same principle operates – in reverse gear – in the case of ostensibly antiwar liberals. As history shows, they are all too often persuaded that the domestic "benefits" of operating in a wartime atmosphere – conducive to economic and social planning – outweigh the moral and material costs of war.
The War Party is counting on this kind of opportunism to quash antiwar dissent in the Democratic party and marginalize the candidacy of Russ Feingold. The Senator from Wisconsin voted against the Iraq war and was the only member of that august body to cast his vote against the PATRIOT Act. On domestic policy, he is the quintessential liberal, well to the left of the determinedly "centrist" Hillary. One can easily imagine the Democrats being persuaded that Feingold is too "extreme" to even think about carrying a single "red" state. If the Democratic "Leadership" Council can successfully invoke the specter of "McGovernism" – convincing Democratic delegates to ignore the antiwar grassroots for "pragmatic" reasons – the War Party can sell Hillary as The Only Alternative to four more years of Republican misrule.
He's right that the Democratic hawks will try to eat Feingold. DLC is almost worse than the Republicans. However, Feingold seems to actually be the most 'vigilant patriot,' if I can wield that phrase. Meanwhile, from the disgruntled old Dem Dept., Sidney Blumenthal: The Long March of Dick Cheney:
The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined. [this is what I am talking about!!]
Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held "cabal" - as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it - wields control.
Within the White House, the office of the vice president is the strategic center. The National Security Council has been demoted to enabler and implementer. Systems of off-line operations have been laid to evade professional analysis and a responsible chain of command. Those who attempt to fulfill their duties in the old ways have been humiliated when necessary, fired, retired early or shunted aside. In their place, acolytes and careerists indistinguishable from true believers in their eagerness have been elevated.
Says it all. Crush the bureaucracy with political appointees. Drink the Kool Aid, we've got New Realities to make here! Study it, judiciously, as you will.
The One Laptop Per Child nonprofit organization is supporting the distribution of a Linux-based $100 laptop, which will soon go out to children in Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria. It also has a hand-cranked power generator, which is a brilliant idea.
Forbes: Intel's Barrett Dismisses $100 Laptop As 'Gadget'
LONDON - It's a crank. Intel Chairman Craig Barrett has dismissed a WiFi-enabled, Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop aimed at bringing computers to developing economies as a "$100 gadget". The lime-green devices run on electromotive energy from a wind-up mechanism--thus allowing the machines to be used in areas lacking a regular power supply.
Bit of a jackass, then. See also PCWorld.com - Kids' Laptop Hits World Spotlight. Pic source from the oddly negative article carried in Vermont Guardian.
By 2007, five to ten million of these laptops will have been shipped to developing countries. By the year after that, the number is expected to have grown ten-fold. What is not known is whether this project will mark a new phase in the spread of knowledge, or whether hundreds of millions of children will become slaves to their little green boxes instead of playing in the backyard.
The Man was Here: WaPo: "CIA scours blogs for useful intelligence: Some `secrets' can be found in plain view." Well at least I know the CIA has already been here a couple times. So it's not breaking news.
Ten stoner ideas for peace in Iraq: Brilliant. Air conditioners, kind bud, Xbox 360s with extra controllers, Madden 2006, Marshmallows, kegs of Budweiser, acoustic guitars and whores. Shrewd strategy. "I guarantee this much: Give a 16-year-old Sunni the choice between killing himself and spending his life playing videogame football, and he’ll make the right choice every time." BSnews.org also features the "Bush War Plan Clearly Written In Crayon."
DeLay is hurting Republicans in vulnerable districts. Ouch. Sweet.
The blogosphere may be unreasonably carried away with Paul Hackett's chances in the Ohio senate race, given his low name ID. Rep. Sherrod Brown seems to be leading in polls.
Polls in Iraq seem oddly positive. I doubt their scientific value. "'Failure' Most Popular Term Sending Traffic From Google To US White House Site".
Bite the patting hand: Rightwingers are angry when the NY Times Magazine carried a story titled "Conservative Blogs are more Effective." Weird.
Elections in wars may not work: Haaretz/Reuters: Gaza gunmen fire on PA security compound, storm election HQ. "The Wall of Hate" is a film about the West Bank partition wall that Israel is constructing.
Iraq blogstorm and the 'Iranian occupation': Check out Iraq Blog Count for an index. A friend of mine was saying that all these blogs and Internet things complicate the situation, but I strongly disagree because I think we get a real good sense of the mentality and the situation of Iraqis, just by looking through a few of them. Baghdad Burning by Riverbend is of course well-known now, and excellent. The Iranian Occupation bit is interesting:
The agony of the long war with Iran is what makes the current situation in Iraq so difficult to bear- especially this last year. The occupation has ceased to be American. It is American in face, and militarily, but in essence it has metamorphosed slowly but surely into an Iranian one.
It began, of course, with Badir’s Brigade and the several Iran-based political parties which followed behind the American tanks in April 2003. It continues today with a skewed referendum, and a constitution that will guarantee a southern Iraqi state modeled on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Of course all this talk about the US dropping chemical weapons makes it more 'complicated.' Would the Baghdad Burning book -- now on its way -- seem more credible somehow? Truth-about-iraqis.blogspot.com has a anguished rant whose tone rings very true. And this one too:
This is not Iraq. The only Iraq I can identify with is the Iraq that rages in the hearts of those who defend its honor, who die defending its honor, those who fight the Iranian horde, the US oppressor.
.....In any case, everything is coming tumbling down. The war lies, the GOP, right wing radio, the illusionists, the nazis and their WASP allies, the zionist war machine, and the racist white-hood wearing commentators.
The Iraq lie is simply too heavy a burden.
Sow it buddy, then drink the rotten milk of human waste.
Nefarious is as nefarious will do.
I think it makes a major, positive, difference -- although the terrible experience of Khaled Jarrar when he was captured by the Interior Ministry, and his additional troubles because they found out about his blog, were an example of how it can hurt the writers. But we wouldn't know about what it's really like inside the New Security Organs of Iraq without people like him.
For more, consider Aunt Najma's A Star from Mosul (with many relatives blogging too), Treasure of Baghdad, Free Iraq ("The US's pre-emptive occupation of Iraq will see to it that the Lion of Babylon rises again" sweet) and Iraqi Rebel.
David Ignatius likes the eschatological-conspiracy angle in "Breaking the Assassins." Thanks for obfuscating reality with a bunch of grand gibberish. Can Rummy defeat the Cult of the Assassins? Sure!
Ethnically pure militias: Bloomberg service: Bush's Strategy, Iraq's New Army Challenged by Ethnic Militias
The Defense Department's intelligence agency says there are dozens of loosely organized Shiite armies in southern Iraq, Kurdish militias in the north that function like a regular army, and as many as 20,000 Sunni fighters who are part of the violent insurgency in Iraq's four central provinces.
..... ``The situation continues to deteriorate,'' said Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. ``It's a matter of the militias, new political organizations, Shiite groups'' and Iraqi security forces becoming ``forces for revenge or reprisal.''
....Leslie Gelb, former assistant secretary of state and former president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, said most of the militias pay first allegiance to their ethnic or tribal group. ``It's not an Iraqi army,'' said Gelb, who visited Iraq for 10 days earlier this year. Kurds are loyal to Kurds, Shiite militias resembling ``mafia operations'' run the south, ``the central region has the insurgency, and Baghdad is all mixed up,'' he said.
Patrick Lang, former chief analyst for the Middle East at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Iraq's different ethnic groups ``will not serve together'' in national army units. ``They tried it and it didn't work, and now they're going back to ethnically pure units,'' he said, citing Defense Department officials he declined to identify. Lang, a retired colonel in the Army's Green Berets, is now president of Global Resources Group, a Washington-based consulting firm.
"Islamic leaders unveil action plan to rescue a 'nation in crisis'." Baghdad Press Club investigated as a central node of paid military propaganda.
Cheney visits Auschwitz and secret CIA Poland camp on same trip? Oy vey. FT: Allegations of secret US jails in Europe are 'credible'. Guardian: Investigator links Europe's spy agencies to CIA flights. Ireland On-Line 'Signs suggest US illegally held detainees in Europe' especially Poland and Romania. Take it with a grain of salt, but Wayne Madsen's report on Cheney visiting secret camps in Poland (Dec. 13) around his visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camp last January. Not sure if it's a true report, but if it is true, a very dark irony.
Iran talks a big game: But this Haaretz article makes it all too clear that their economic situation is excellent, and they can count on Russia and China to help them in the UN if things get hairy. Ahmadinejad can continue to smile while the world argues. True.
The Horatio Alger NAMBLA chapter: Larry Beinhart's "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin" looks interesting. In particular, for example, he establishes that Horatio Alger was a pedophile, and was a pedophilic minister before he got chased out of Brewster, Massachusetts, and admitted to it. That's established, then the spin dissection starts. Weird. And maybe that's more widely known, but I never heard of it. Also claims that the NYC chapter of NAMBLA is the Horatio Alger chapter. Creepy.
Vote Spoofing: The War at Home: Diebold chief executive Wally O'Dell resigns, as more questions about company conduct and illegal trading have come up. There are lawsuits happening as people claim that Diebold failed to get its modified voting machine software correctly certified on some occasions. In North Caroline, the EFF has filed a lawsuit. O'Dell was the guy who claimed he would help 'deliver' Ohio's electoral votes to Bush.
There is a lot of weird shit on the Internet, and the last few days' dark December surfing have brought me to some mean and lowly places.
I have not said much about the Minutemen militia / vigilante groups that have spontaneously mobilized on the southern border. Healthy democracies don't usually have strange mobs milling around their border deserts, acting out militant nationalist fantasies of control. No, not healthy at all.
While I sensed an violent undercurrent right away, I underestimated the direct white supremacist organizational ties to Minutemen. It seems that neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups are deeply tied in with the Minutemen, seeing them as an instrument to attempt to mainstream their unpopular views.
One of the Minutemen leaders, Jim Gilchrist, is running for Congress in California's 48th CD, where he will probably split the hard-right vote as the grassroots goes xenophobic, possibly allowing a Democrat to squeak into victory. Small plus, but if this one-issue movement expands further it could herald a New Intolerance.
In times that feel this right-wing, it seems unlikely for mainstream politicians to veer fully into racist politics, but I worry that it could mushroom easily.
These groups are using the Internet to chat and organize, of course. The average armchair militant racist, who formerly had to find physical groups, now finds virtual community among the 'white' genome purists. But this allows we who fear them to peer in and see what they are really thinking, and publicize it.
In particular, the Internet exchanges around a set of Minutemen and "SOS" (Save Our State) protest rallies in California — where a Nazi flag was suddenly unveiled — show that the display of the swastika is a debated but widely accepted move among the hardcore racists and border vigilantes. (the photos came from an Indymedia post)
The (liberal) blogger David Neiwart at Orcinus, who has written a book about right-wing extremists, offered a fine summary and links to a neo-Nazi white supremacist forum called Stormfront and its discussion of the Minutemen rallies and the Nazi flag. Some argued that it would turn whites off of the message, but there seemed to be no real sense of shock that such a symbol was an element of their movement. As Neiwart explained,
The Stormfront forum is especially enlightening, since it is a specifically neo-Nazi chatroom. Especially noteworthy were the many posts questioning the use of the Nazi symbology at the rally, since it would "turn off" many whites. It's worth remembering that most dedicated racists take care not to let it show publicly -- unlike these fellows. But the whole thread makes clear to what extent these extremists now move among allegedly "mainstream" right-wing operations and not infiltrate them, but fully hijack them.
(Neiwart's work called "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis" (PDF) is a classic at explaining where a latent fascist movement or proto-ideology could lie in America today)
The idea that such openly racist stuff is going straight into the mainstream right via sites like RedState.org ought to be considered as well.
George Wallace and David Duke left their mark on the American political landscape (Duke is still involved with Stormfront) by scapegoating the Other, as so many experienced politicians did before them. American political discourse these days is in a twitchy state of paranoia, and the Borders remain a favorite topic for cable news anchors like Lou Dobbs to bitch about, to burnish their tough-nationalist credentials.
Most of what I found today pointed out that Republicans are reluctant to criticize these groups, and instead co-opt them. Their outward agenda is just a thin facade for traditional xenophobic white supremacism. Their members know it. Why doesn't the media?
National Socialists of some sort also have a TV show on MTN - Minneapolis public access TV. I support the marketplace of ideas, and I think that we can disprove racist genetic dogma quite easily nowadays, so it's not surprising that they have coded their virtual-KKK politics into the matter of immigration. I think that they have the right to organize for peaceful politics on the Internet, and if that lets the concerned Real World peer in and get an idea of their basic idiocy, then perhaps the consequences will be positive.
But this Nazi-Minutemen thing is spooky. It ought to be talked about.
