Catowner's Regrets

Days End

2007-04-05T06:24:00.000-07:00

Leave It To Bush

2007-04-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

For Ambassador to Belgium, y'know, where the EC lives, Bush chooses the man least qualified- unless you count electioneering slander as a qualification.

You're doing a heckuva job, Bushie.

Not Our Agenda

2007-04-05T05:13:00.000-07:00

It's important to remember that the American people are not by their natures foul-mouthed bigots. The race-hatred, xenophobia and sexual slander that spews from our radios and televisons today is bought and paid for by the upper classes.

There's no real confusion about why they do it. It's called divide and conquer. The people with real money profoundly believe that the American people are their enemies, and they put the mouth of the talk-radio host where their money is.

If the rich people would stop paying to have their hatred broadcast and printed, this country would be a better place. It's just that simple.

Too Funny

2007-04-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

McCain can stroll in Baghdad...if the area is swept, snipers are posted, he wears a bulletproof vest, is surrounded by a company of infantry, and has five choppers overhead ready to fire.

About what Bush requires to stroll in America. He's definitely not taking a chance on throwing out that first ball in a stadium full of people who know how to boo.

Connect the Dots

2007-04-03T06:32:00.000-07:00

I think we can connect the dots now. On the one hand, the Bush administration making the US Attorneys into political hatchetmen and cover-up artists for the rightwing Republicans. On the other hand, FBI agents seizing the communications records of tens of thousands of Americans, not only without a warrant or subpoena, but actually without the pro forma "letter" that was supposed to be issued while a warrant or subpoena was being sought.

In other words, spying on Americans in the stuyle of the East German Stasi to ensure the perpetual dominance of a one-party Republican state.

I think the technical name for this is "dictatorship".

Dk and Pb

2007-04-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

Too Clever by Half

2007-04-02T11:13:00.000-07:00

A recent comment thread at MattY's blog found itself largely in agreement- we didn't invade Iraq for the oil. Each commenter in turn elucidated the fine points to prove that one must master many details and be very clever to reach the ineluctible conclusion- nobody knows why we went to Iraq.

Bullshit. The average American knows why we went to Iraq- for the oil. We're fighting for our "way of life" and that doesn't mean voting, which barely half of us do, it means driving, which almost all of us depend on to maintain our economy and ourselves within it.

This is why people despise 'liberals', who argue with themselves and lose those arguments. Liberals, lose the attitude and stop losing those arguments. It's better to be wrong once in a while than it is never to be right.

Republicans for Illegal Immigration

2007-04-01T15:04:00.000-07:00

I only wish this were an April Fools post.

Five Republican representatives from Florida have asked Bush to grant Venezuelan immigrants temporary immunity from U.S. immigration laws. It seems that Florida Republicans regard free elections in Venezuela, monitored and certified as honest by international organizations, as some sort of "dictatorship".

What is even more appalling is that our present government is much more likely to give Venezuelans a free pass than it is to allow Iraqis to immigrate.

It makes you wish there were some other political party in the US that could point out the hypocrisy here when the Republicans start bleating about "illegal immigration" again.

What Kind of Fool Am I?

2007-03-31T06:16:00.000-07:00

Under questioning, Sampson admits that he "did have that idea" about using the Patriot Act to circumvent Congressional approval of US Attorney appointments, but states "it was not adopted by the AG".

Hey, wait just a darn minute- IT WAS ADOPTED BY THE AG! Does Sampson think I've forgotten entirely that using the Patriot Act to circumvent Congressional approval was exactly what they did?

If Sampson "can't remember" that the rest of us can remember, he should carry a little card to remind himself of that fact.

Our Story To Date

2007-03-28T07:19:00.000-07:00

Back in 2005, fresh off the electoral 'win' of 2004, the Bushies considered firing all 93 US Attorneys. In retrospect, we can see that they intended to say "Every president fires all the US Attorneys at the beginning of every term". This, of course, is false, but you know how they are.

Then they realized that some of their replacement choices would never make it past the Senate. So the project was put on the back burner while a low-profile staffer inserted a clause in the Patriot Act allowing the president to appoint replacements without the consent of the Senate.

By this time (2006) they obviously couldn't claim to be firing all 93 "just like every president does at the beginning of a term", so they whittled their list down to about 10. They were also increasingly concerned about how this would look, and increasingly anxious to get rid of Carol Lam, the US Attorney in San Diego who was getting close to Dick Cheney's office with her investigation of the Duke Cunningham bribery.

In fact, at the bottom line, it may be that seven other US Attorneys were fired to reduce the visibility of the Carol Lam firing.

That all remains to be seen, but what is perfectly clear now is that the Bushies attempted a power grab with the clear intent of obstructing justice- and came close to getting away with it.

Libby and Ek

2007-03-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

Baghdad Crackdown Seems To Be Working

2007-03-15T05:13:00.000-07:00

That's the AP headline and WYSIWYG. You can be cheered that the 'liberal media' is finally reporting the 'good news'- see, all it needed was a little firmness and we'll soon have this situation in hand. Or you can be aware that the word 'seems' is often the antecedent to a conclusion like 'but isn't really'.

You won't know unless you read the article. It may be a legitimate lead to a realistic analysis, or it may be a simple lure to gull the unwary. It's 'news' as a game that anyone can play, with the actual transmission of information as a small part of a bigger picture.

Liddy

2007-03-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

Aaaaargghhh

2007-03-14T12:35:00.000-07:00

After secretly consulting with staffers over several years about firing US Attorneys, producing hundreds of pages of notes and e-mails, President Bush told reporters today he is unhappy that the process resulted in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other staffers committing perjury by testifying falsely before Congress.

Bush went on to say that he stands by Gonzales, and expects him to make reforms.

"Reporters" took notes and reported this verbatim, as though it made any sense at all.

Let's Review

2007-03-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

In an eerie replay of the McCarthyite 50s, Republicans are again telling us we need to surrender our liberties to survive a worldwide attack against us. "Fortunately", over the past four years we've tried that. How well has it worked?

Thousands of Islamic men have been taken prisoner and held for years, tortured at length in the hopes of obtaining some "confession" that would justify this treatment. What we've learned is that almost all of them had no connection at all with terrorists.

The Bush invasion of Iraq created a training ground for terrorists, and terrorism has steadily risen with each succeeding year. OBL is again training terrorists in camps protected by the Pakistani dictatorship, a Muslim state with nuclear weapons.

At home, the Bushies have blocked protection of chemical plants from terrorists (it might cost industry money) and, in order to prevent unions from forming, resisted attempts to improve airline security. Combined with the increasing amounts of bad intelligence, now used mainly to justify what the WH wants to do, the probability of another successful terrorist attack in the US seems very high, if not certain.

But, you say, that is because Bush is incompetent- surely if we put unlimited power in the hands of a wise man things would turn out well.

Don't bet on it.

2007-03-02T13:01:00.000-08:00

Heads we win, tails you lose

2007-03-02T12:55:00.000-08:00

According to Michael Leavitt, appointed by Bush as Secretary of Health and Human Services, if the bird flu pandemic comes to America "every community will have to take care of its own".

That's your federal government- when it's time to spread the contagion, all local authorities must bow to Washington DC, and yield their powers. When it's time to pick up the pieces, you're on your own.

To the extent that Democrats are co-conspirators, opening our markets to "free trade" while sanctimoniously "balancing the budget" at home on the backs of laid-off workers, they deserve to lose votes to Nader.

So hard to choose...

2007-03-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

The warmongers among us are warning that the Muslims seek to establish a "caliphate" stretching across 14 timezones and exceeding in world-conquering ability the old Soviet Union or the new hegemonic US.

On the odd-numbered days, they tell us the bad guys want to set ethnic groups and religious sects against one another, plunging the mid-east into a cauldron of warfare, and just plain ruining our summer motoring.

Well, which is it?

Their answer: "Why can't it be both?"

So I hit him with my other hand....

2007-02-23T09:19:00.000-08:00

....and he ducked again.

As a nurse, one night I had a patient who had broken both hands. When I asked about it, he said he'd been in an argument in a bar, and took a swing at a guy. The guy ducked and he hit the brick wall behind the man. So he tried to hit him again...

Now, in Iraq, our 'policies' have stimulated the creation of the chemical weapons we didn't find when we invaded. This in itself should inspire reflections on the nature of violence.

If that doesn't, the upsurge in chopper downings should. They're pricey, hard to maintain, and we don't have an unlimited number of them. We've gone from being the quick-draw artist who shot himself in the foot to being a stumblebum, drunk and repeatedly shooting himself in the feet.

No wonder the American people just wish the Bush years were over. But it won't be that easy.

Take a break....

2007-02-23T09:09:00.000-08:00

HRC- the Short Form

2007-02-20T11:41:00.000-08:00

If there is one thing I am absolutely sure of about the American electorate, it is that they will chicken out. If you think that just once they will take courage in their hands and vote for the right thing, you will be wrong.

And that, in a nutshell, is why HRC will not be elected President.

Well, there's another career down the drain...

2007-02-16T12:41:00.000-08:00

Recently a local dog groomer cut off a dog's ear, superglued it back on and returned the dog to the owner, and then hightailed it out of town.

I guess what strikes me as funny about this story is the idea of someone so inept they can't even groom a dog without having to flee an angry mob.

And, somehow, it also reminds me of the Bush gang in Iraq....

Cats Love Schedules

2007-02-16T09:46:00.000-08:00

Cats love schedules. If you have only one cat, you might not be able to set your watch by him, but where two or three gather together- you pretty much can. On numerous occasions I've wondered why Libby was so insistent, and then realized it was 4.01 PM- one minute past the feeding time!

In fact, this is an accuracy which exceeds the advertised, which in this case would be "somewhere around four". It's not too hard to see why cats would love priests and their temples, or that there might be an interaction with the cats leading the priests towards stricter punctuality.

Quite possibly, in the dim mists of the past, a group of cats, gathering in the same place at the same time every day, noticed humans dong something similar, and decided to check them out.

Because cats are not only punctual, but also curious.

2007-02-13T16:31:00.000-08:00

"Ooops! I hope I'm not interrupting anything!"

Box of Catnip

2007-02-09T08:48:00.000-08:00

Free Cat Included With Every Box!

Hoist on Own Petard- Ultimate Indignity Edition

2007-02-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

Undoubtedly, the greatest damage we've suffered from 9/11 has been inflicted by the Bush invasion of Iraq.

But in the 'war of ideology' the rapier blowback struck to the core of American life this week when our fears turned us against advertising.

Nothing is more American than advertising, and when our fears lashed out at an ad campaign, prompting furious calls to punish the malefactors who had so misjudged the American psyche, we repudiated our very being. If our belief in the sanctity of 'freedom of speech' for advertisers is eroded, what is left of the America we knew?

John C. Stennis Leaves Port

2007-01-31T16:26:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of MSNBC, the John C. Stennis leaves Bremerton on an unusually frosty day. I think she's about two miles north of town, getting ready to go through the little narrows.

No Baby Einstein He

2007-01-31T07:41:00.000-08:00

Bush's SOTU this year contained a stirring tribute- a tribute to a woman who, thrilled with her new baby, immediately retired to her basement studio to create videotapes that might substitute for a real mother's presence.

Research has confirmed the intuitively obvious- parking an infant in front of a television is bad for their brain. As always, Bush is resolutely on the side of cold uncaring parents marketing harmful products in an effort to escape the obligations laid on them by nature and society, the obligations to provide nurture and guidance for the young people they chose to bring into the world.

Some things never change.

Most of 'Em

2007-01-26T15:52:00.000-08:00

What a tangled web we weave...

2007-01-23T11:11:00.000-08:00

Well, maybe not the first time the British Empire has practiced to deceive. Still, this story is a doozy, even by their standards.

Remember the IRA bombing campaign of the 70s? Now we know that many of the bombs were provided or planted by British agents- agents provacateurs. And in the 90s dozens of murders were winked at by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But maybe the capper is that the IED explosive devices that have been most effective against our troops in Iraq, were given to the IRA in yet another agent provacateur incident, and subsequently transferred worldwide by the IRA.

Now, that's a gift that just keeps on giving, decade after decade. Ironically, the Iraq War in turn may spur the independence of Scotland and Wales, as Blair's refusal to leave gracefully undermines the Labor Party. We are so past the point of diminishing returns for the policy of England dominating Ireland.

Newsflash!

2007-01-13T17:02:00.000-08:00

They're telling us the war in Iraq could go on for decades, cost us a trillion dollars, ruin millions of lives, result in the los of our freedoms. But that's already happened in the other war- the war on drugs.

Thirty years, tens of millions imprisoned, a cost over a trillion dollars, and what can only be described as a police state compared with life as we once knew it- that's the war on drugs. Perhaps with the passing of the "Greatest Generation" it will become possible for rational people to influence public policy here- we can only hope.

Because, compared to the War on Drugs, the war in Iraq is just an infant.

The Echo Chamber

2007-01-13T15:34:00.000-08:00

As any neuropsychologist could tell you, an echo chamber is just what the human brain needs, if you want to learn something. What we learn goes first into short-term memory and, if not reinforced there, down the memory hole in short order.

And that, in a nutshell, is what is so fascinating about the blogosphere. The memory or idea is refined in successive iterations and reiterations and thank you Mr. Wolcott, I do not need serial commas here. Just take a deep breath and read it aloud.

It is, in short, the creation of a collective brain. Of course, with the actual human brain you begin the study by looking at a brain and trying to understand the pathways and synapses, while with the virtual internet brain you begin by lookng at pathways and synapses and trying to visualize the brain, but basically we're talking intelligence, in portions so small that trillions inhabit a pinhead, but of such activity that an impulse traverses the globe in under a second.

No small thing.

Dk also likes Chester...

2007-01-12T17:01:00.000-08:00

Pb 'n Chester

2007-01-06T15:20:00.000-08:00

Devil Kitten Seizes the Catbed

2007-01-05T05:27:00.000-08:00

Wilsonian Dmocracies

2007-01-01T16:37:00.000-08:00

A striking aspect of the situation in the midEast is the similitude with the Europe created by Woodrow Wilson's postwar mapmaking exercises. Employing a team of demographers, Wilson proposed that new states be created in Europe (Austria, Hungary, Chechoslovakia) with borders grouping viable political units of ethnic minorities. This idea was enormously popular with the democracy loving peoples of Europe.

Unfortunately, in the absence of the other elements of a stable democracy, the idea turned out disastrously. Most of the new states were semi-fascist semi-dictatorships by the early thirties and things got worse from there.

It's always possible to draw too much from a historical parallel, and equally possible to draw too little.

Chester and Pb

2006-12-16T08:03:00.000-08:00

Hoist on Own Petard

2006-12-14T13:13:00.000-08:00

George Bush is now well and truely spitted on the kebab of the Baker-ISG Report. The Report, which calls for a semi-permanent American garrison and control of Iraqi governmental agencies, and the privatization of Iraq's oil, blames the incompetence of George Bush for what has happened, and suggests that if the goals of the Report are not attained, it will be because of what George Bush does in the future.

Bush, a tool who would be as idle and useless as his daughters were it not for Baker's successful theft of the 2000 election, can only wriggle. If he is left with enough rope, it is only that he may hang himself.

He could, of course, embrace the members and conclusions of the Baker-ISG group, and turn to bi-partisan Congressional committees for the implementation of the best plans State and the Pentagon could develop. In a parallel universe, that is.

Our Leaders Are Morons, Part XCXXXIV

2006-12-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR: We might go all the way back to World War II, where the United States continued to have discussions with Stalin. He was the enemy, not our friend, but we continued to have discussions. And I think we pretty much have to do the same here.

Who Knew?

2006-12-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

Spencer Ackerman, at TAP, and Matt Yglesias, also at TAP, are shining. Could it be because they're spending time together? Read them for their wit and stay to applaud their conclusions.

General Rommel Presses Deep Into Egypt....

2006-12-09T09:36:00.000-08:00

Much weeping and wailing will accompany the 'failure' of the Bushies to implement the findings of the Baker-ISG Report. Somehow it has escaped notice that the report gives the PNAC types all they asked for and more, now calling openly for the privatization of Iraqi oil.

In a nutshell, the cause of disequilibrium in the Mid-east is oil. Attempts to cure the disequilibrium by erecting formal structures will be about as effective as attempting to keep a beach from shifting by building a jetty or a groin.

The United States could substantially reduce the disequilibrium by reducing our purchases of oil and removing our military from the region. On the surface this would appear to increase the ferment, but in actuality the stakes would be dramatically lowered and market forces, if there are such things, would redistribute and diffuse the tensions.

This in fact is the most likely eventual future but, being moderately subtle, cannot be prepared for by American pundits or policy-makers, which will probably have unfortunate effects for the American people.

UPDATE- Tom Haden observes, on commondreams.org, that the Baker report actually calls for individual Iraqis to pay more for the gas and oil they buy- apparently it is impossible to overestimate the cruelty of our ruling oligarchy.

Tobias Toebiter, Recumbent

2006-12-08T07:25:00.000-08:00

Ek (Evening Kitten) Takes A Nap

2006-12-02T07:07:00.000-08:00

Another Silent Majority

2006-11-30T16:18:00.000-08:00

From GlobeSt.com-

BOSTON-Americans are strongly opposed to commercial development projects, and a majority of them favor using tax dollars to keep land undeveloped, a new survey finds. According to the Saint Index, a survey of 1,000 Americans commissioned by the Hingham, MA-based Saint Consulting Group, nearly three quarters of the respondents said they are opposed to development in their own community and twice as many Americans actively oppose development as support it.

Its becoming a significant issue, Saint president Patrick Fox tells GlobeSt.com. Americans are looking for ways to stop development.

The study found that the strongest citizen opposition surfaces around landfills, quarries and power plants, but opposition to such as Wal-Mart and biotech research facilities have gained ground since last year, when the consulting firm conducted its first national study. Americans are also supportive of state laws that curb the use of eminent domain for private development, with 71% of those polled saying they approve such measures.

Ironically, the study found that Americans are less concerned about the environment than they are about protecting property values and maintaining the character of their community. Only 11% of those polled cited environmental reasons for their opposition to development while 36% said they were concerned how new projects would affect home values and 29% were concerned how growth would impact their community. Americans are becoming more politically sophisticated, and its clear theyre moving actively to protect the investment in their homes, says Fox.

Some development sectors, like office buildings, apartments and condominiums, casinos, grocery stores, large shopping centers and single-family developments, are also not wanted but opposition to those sectors have dropped since last year. Opposition to home-improvement and department stores has remained fairly consistent over the past two years, the study shows. And, while public support for new hospitals is significant, the study found that medical facilities in many areas face strong opposition to expansion.

And so forth....

2006-11-29T17:28:00.000-08:00

The Silver Lining

2006-11-28T20:44:00.000-08:00

It's hard for Bush to criticize the results of clean elections in South America when he's yammering all the time about "democracy" in Iraq. A little news from venezuelanalysis.com on the Ecuadorean elections:

His victory follows those of President Lula Da Silva in Brazil and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, both left of center politicians who were not the preferred candidates of the US government.

Correa won with 57.9 percent of the vote, compared to the conservative banana tycoon Noboa's 42.1 per cent.

Correa ran on a platform that promised to rein in political elites, threatened to default on foreign debts and to renegotiate oil contracts. Ecuador is the second biggest oil exporter in South America after Venezuela.

He has also in the past criticized the presence of a US military base in his country and like Hugo Chávez is not afraid to stand up to the US government. The US military base contract ends in 2009. When asked whether he thought the contract should be renewed he said, If they want we won't close the base in 2009, but the United States would have to allow us to have an Ecuadorian base in Miami in return.

Also, asked to comment on Chávezs description of President George W. Bush as the devil he said that, Calling Bush the devil offends the devil. Bush is a tremendously dimwitted President who has done great damage to the World.

The Deep Thinker

2006-11-26T15:20:00.000-08:00

In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush's chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:

"Because Afghanistan wasn't enough," Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them." The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionateon a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, "in order to make a point that we're not going to live in this world that they want for us."

So Kissinger, the supposed deep thinker of the bunch, thought we would really send a message to the Muslim Masses by taking out the only really secular state in the region, the only tyrant strong enough to keep his country free of al Qaeda, the only bulwark of modernity against the Immams.

The man is a moron, a senile moron.

Toby dreams of turkey...

2006-11-24T10:55:00.000-08:00

Not So Hard

2006-11-24T10:35:00.000-08:00

It's really not that hard to see a way out of Iraq with honor and dignity. Pretty simple, really.

First, create a government people want- a socialist government that can provide jobs, education, healthcare, and basic welfare. A government with a strong Bill of Rights to ensure everyone has equal access to the proceeds. A government with proceeds from the sale of nationalized oil.

Of course, we can see the problem right away- none of the "higher" Western Civilisations want to see any of this come to pass. Even the advanced EU largely sees Iraq's oil as a glistening bronzed turkey on a platter, simply waiting a quiet moment for the carving.

Be that as it may. The problem is not that we can't see a way out, the problem is that we don't want to take it.

Bitter Leaves

2006-11-22T17:00:00.000-08:00

Reading the tea leaves has become a bitter not-good-to-the-last-dregs experience. And you know what they say- if you don't like what you're reading- read something else.

With little regret, then, I turn to medieval history. Gingerly, like the man tasked with cleaning the tiger cage, I circle around the chef d'oevre, a modest, unassuming, and in fact, economically remaindered volume entitled Peasant Economic Development within the English manorial system, J.A. Raftis.

Like the tiger cage sweeper, I linger by other exhibits, the manorial house, the deserted medieval village, even the Norman influence, for I fear my intellect may not equal Raftis's dissertation.

Charming it is, to consider a time when social forms were more complex and advanced than technology, but hard to understand the accumulation of peasant capital in a time when almost nobody had either money or fee-simple ownership of land.

Still, it beats reading the tea-leaves of Iraq.........

Tobias Toebiter, Recumbent

2006-11-18T10:24:00.000-08:00

This is what....

2006-11-13T05:46:00.000-08:00

.....it was like. In summer. Which is gone. Now, it's raining.

No Bandaids Please

2006-11-11T14:31:00.000-08:00

If the coverage is <i>universal</i>, the people who are covered today will see little difference. If they want additional coverage, they are certainly in a position to buy it.

The big picture is that we spend 15% of our GDP while similar countries spend 10%, but they get better results providing health care for their money.

The savings come from the <i>universal</i> aspects of their coverage, not least the ability to constrain prices by aggressive bargaining with suppliers.

The question is, how do we get the savings, that is to say, what practical steps need be taken? It remains necessary to collect the 10% of GDP to pay for the care, but also important to distribute the 5% that is saved to the right people. That might involve mandating increases in pay by employers relieved of the necessity of providing coverage to employees, or it might involve investment in the building of clinics or the provision of services.

Introducing a patchwork of bandaid repairs is the worst approach. Every such 'fix' becomes a perpetual hostage of legislative fortune, administered by empire-building bureaucrats who can be trusted, in any case, to ignore the legislative intent and mandate of the legislation that funds them. The intended recipients are harrassed by means tests and the providers by authorization demands. The worst approach.

Enough Already

2006-11-10T04:50:00.000-08:00

As the two-story building labelled 'Starbucks' nears completion in the Safeway parking lot, we now find that a Starbucks booth is being constructed in the QFC.

Bad cess to both of them. The coffee-girls with their independent stand at the QFC are trim, comely, and full of life as they fetchingly fetch the water for their unplumbed booth. I'm not buying coffee from some young guy with a Tom Dewey mustache and a stud in his ear.

Where Two or Three Gather Together...

2006-11-09T16:51:00.000-08:00

Big Deal

2006-11-06T17:17:00.000-08:00

Sometime in the near future Americans will be startled to learn that having a huge military, and two dollars, will get you a cup of coffee. After all, just because the Russian state collapsed, and they set all those captive countries free, does not mean they fired all their soldiers.

In fact, the Russian military is still number two, after us, still eyeing us uneasily, because we eye them uneasily, because they have those thousands of nukes, as do we.

It's like the guy you see out in the rural area driving the two-ton Lincoln or Chrysler Town car that's 30 years old. Over the years he's put so much in the thing that he can't discard it now, even though it is eating him out of house and home.

So we'll probably have our military, and a few other big-buck dollar wasters like the Drug Wars, long after the rest of the world has mentally put us alongside Russia- big, dumb, and clumsy.

Huh? Whuzzat?

2006-11-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

It ain't over...

2006-11-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

...until the Fat Lady sings.

If experience is any guide, the oil and the revenues from the oil will have a big say in the outcome.

Right now, the Iraqis are doing just what Bush wants them to do- fighting among themselves and demanding that US troops withdraw to bases in the countryside. Presumably at some point a Quisling government will make a deal with the Bushies, involving the use of US troops to protect sweetheart contracts that steal the oil.

The Sunni presumably are the group with the best memories of what national control of the oil can buy. If the Shiites were well and truely frozen out of the benefits under Saddam, the Shiite 'street' may not even miss national control of the oil, or may be more cheaply bought off than the Sunnis, but of course, there are a lot more Shiites to buy off.

The situation, in short, looks very glum for the average American, but is pretty much going according to plan for the Bushies. If that in fact is the case, I wouldn't expect an early end to any of this.

Is this Ironical, or what?

2006-10-31T10:02:00.000-08:00

Evidence suggests that Al Qaeda has consistently banked one off the goalie, so to speak, keeping the US in Iraq by not-very-subtly releasing propaganda videos whenever it seemed that the Bush popularity was failing.

But, two can play that game, and when al Maliki recently demanded that US troops withdraw from the cities, and garrison bases in the rural areas, the US was all like "Don't throw us in that briar patch".

Because, heaven knows, the last thing we want is to be stuck in permanent bases in Iraq.

Shamelessly quoting...

2006-10-28T09:43:00.000-07:00

Matt Yglesias:

The administration's been caught in an infinite loop on this question from day one. As everyone can see, it's essentially impossible to accomplish anything in Iraq insofar as the governments of two adjacent countries are actively trying to undermine what we're doing. And yet, the president keeps insisting that one of his long-term goals in Iraq is to overthrow the governments of two of Iraq's neighbors. So -- surprise! -- they try to undermine his policies. And then the administration turns around and whines about it, before deciding down the road that he should once again re-iterate his goal of toppling the regimes. Meanwhile, he has no actual means at his disposal to accomplish this. It's moronic; the kind of thing that it would only take about five minutes of thinking to dissuade you from. But he's been at this for years.

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/

And more cats...

2006-10-27T16:57:00.000-07:00

Chester and Pb

2006-10-27T07:16:00.000-07:00

Past The Verge

2006-10-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

Vin Weber, a lobbyist and former Republican member of Congress with ties to the White House, said he thought the president more broadly was trying to appeal to the American public as it loses faith in his Iraq policy.

"Basically, the bottom has fallen out," he said. "The public is on the verge of throwing up its hands over Iraq."

That's how the story in the Seattle Times ends, so let's flesh it out a little- 51% of the public want Bush impeached, only 44% say no. The public is not "on the verge", the public simply has no way to enforce their will on the Republican noise machine. Something had better change when those numbers reach 80 or 90% for impeachment, or there will be trouble around here.

Inscrutable elements of Greatness...

2006-10-25T16:46:00.000-07:00

(h/t to Lawyers Guns & Money)

Speaking fifty-two years ago today -- in an otherwise unrelated statement on the 75th anniversary of the invention of the incandescent light bulb -- Dwight Eisenhower offered the following quilt of non sequiturs:

Soon we will be celebrating one of our holidays, one that typifies for me much of what we mean by the American freedom. That will be Halloween. On that evening I would particularly like to be, of course, with my grandchildren, for Halloween is one of those times when we Americans actually encourage the little individuals to be free to do things rather as they please. I hope you and your children have a gay evening and let's all give a little prayer that their childish pranks will be the only kind of mischief with which we Americans must cope. But it can be a confident kind of a prayer too, for God has made us strong and faith has made and kept us free.

Uh, isn't that 51% FOR impeachment?

2006-10-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

Or, as Newsweek puts it, "Other parts of a potential Democratic agenda receive less support, especially calls to impeach Bush: 47 percent of Democrats say that should be a 'top priority,' but only 28 percent of all Americans say it should be, 23 percent say it should be a lower priority and nearly half nearly half, 44 percent, say it should not be done."

h/t to Matt Yglesias

Mark Evanier on Hidden Persuaders

2006-10-21T08:55:00.000-07:00

Dungeons & Dragons was a series about six kids who were transported to a dimension filled with wizards and fire-snorting reptiles and cryptic clues and an extremely-evil despot named Venger. The youngsters were trapped in this game-like environment but, fortunately, they were armed with magical skills and weaponry, the better to foil Venger's insidious plans each week.

The kids were all heroic all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric. Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn't like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do. Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in. He was the one thing I really didn't like about the show.

So why, you may wonder, did I leave him in there? Answer: I had to.

As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of childrens' television. We call them "parents groups," although many are not comprised of parents, or at least not of folks whose primary interest is as parents. Study them and you'll find a wide array of agendum at work...and I suspect that, in some cases, their stated goals are far from their real goals.

Nevertheless, they all seek to make kidvid more enriching and redeeming, at least by their definitions, and at the time, they had enough clout to cause the networks to yield. Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain "pro-social" morals in our shows. At the time, the dominant "pro-social" moral was as follows: The group is always right...the complainer is always wrong.

This was the message of way too many eighties' cartoon shows. If all your friends want to go get pizza and you want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority and go get pizza with them. There was even a show for one season on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which was dedicated unabashedly to this principle. Each week, whichever member of the gang didn't get along with the gang learned the error of his or her ways.

We were forced to insert this "lesson" in D & D, which is why Eric was always saying, "I don't want to do that" and paying for his social recalcitrance. I thought it was forced and repetitive, but I especially objected to the lesson. I don't believe you should always go along with the group. What about thinking for yourself? What about developing your own personality and viewpoint? What about doing things because you decide they're the right thing to do, not because the majority ruled and you got outvoted?

We weren't allowed to teach any of that. We had to teach kids to join gangs. And then to do whatever the rest of the gang wanted to do.

What a stupid thing to teach children.

Now, I won't make the leap to charge that gang activity, of the Crips and Bloods variety, increased on account of these programs. That influential, I don't believe a cartoon show could ever be. I just think that "pro-social" message was bogus and ill-conceived. End of confession.

http://www.povonline.com/cols/COL145.htm

Sisters

2006-10-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

Dk (Devil Kitten, on the left) and Ek (Evening Kitten, on the right) attentively watching something only cats can see....

Damn I'm Good!

2006-10-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

Opinions differ as to the value of the Air Force, but...

This is all pretty much a moot point because nobody is going to attack us with their airforce anyway. We are already deep into the age of post-military warfare, and what you're seeing in Iraq is about as militarily or strategically significant as the Crimean War.

What is more likely is that the myth of air power will be as fatal to us as the myth of the Southern Cavalier was to the ante-bellum South. The US has become too accustomed to attacking, with no real provocation, nations small enough for us to bombard while the world stands by. In all likelihood, just as happened with Hitler's invasion of Poland, there will come a time when we do not believe the world will intervene, and they will believe that they absolutely must.

Our Foreign Policy...

2006-10-18T08:01:00.000-07:00

Reminds me of a patient I took care of years ago. This fellow had broken both hands, and when I asked him how it happened, he said "I was in a bar, and I wanted to fight this guy. So I threw a punch at him and he ducked and I hit the brick wall behind him and broke my hand. So, then I threw another punch at him with my other hand. And he ducked again, and I hit the brick wall behind him and broke the other hand."

Peas in a Pod

2006-10-16T16:48:00.000-07:00

Conspiracy? Nuts!

2006-10-14T06:39:00.000-07:00

In the weeks to come, the MSM will mock those who think there may be a conspiracy to keep gas prices low for the election- usually starting by putting the word "conspiracy" in quotation marks. Too bad these big-time news commentators can't actually read the news:

In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS, Woodward, a Washington Post editor, said that Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, had promised President Bush that the Saudis would cut oil prices before November to ensure the U.S. economy was strong on election day. Woodward is the author of the new book "Plan of Attack" on Bush's preparations for the Iraq war.

You talkin' to me?

2006-10-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

Liddy, Queen of the Jungle.....

Clinton's Fault?

2006-10-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

Republicans are blaming Clinton for the North Korea explosion. Let's be clear- that's like having your vasectomy reversed, having intercourse for four years with no contraception, and then blaming the doctor who did the vasectomy when your girlfriend gets pregnant.

Roaring Mice

2006-10-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

Well, we've now reached our "Mouse that Roared" moment with North Korea, with George Bush as the zombie reincarnation of Peter Sellers. Bush, of course, suffers from the disadvantages of being a 'slow zombie', no small thing in attempting to reprise the hyperactive Sellers, but in other respects he mimics the bumbling, the broken English, the exquisite gaffe de jour of Sellers quite well.

As dismaying as it may be to watch the grey pallor (alternating with pancake rouge) of Bush as he jerkily attempts to read (why bother? we've heard it all before) the teleprompter script, occasionally becoming totally unable to even finish the sentence before him, the important thing to remember is, it's just a performance. And frankly, a pretty good one- for a zombie.

A Letter to the Editor

2006-10-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

(The kind of letter a real newspaper will always print.)

Shelton Mason County Journal

Letters to Editor

To understand how bad things are under George Bush, you have to go back to 1689. That's the year that the English Parliament passed a Bill of Rights that prohibited what George Bush calls a "signing statement"- 1689.

But you knew that already. The religious forces supporting George Bush reach even further back, rivalling the Catholic Church in the days when it condemned Gallileo and led a Holy War, sometimes against the Turks, sometimes against the Protestants. Good times, good times.

In 1689 the Star Chamber was still dispensing justice in England. The men who founded the United States did their best to ensure that no Star Chamber would ever happen here, but they're dead now and can't help us stop George Bush, if we don't read what they said and understand what they meant.

The colonists despised the English Parliament because of the rotten boroughs that packed the Parliament with placemen. The placemen were candidates like Mike McGavick, who bought elections with huge sums of money from wealthy lords who, by law, could not themselves sit in Parliament. Like today's Republican Congress, the Parliament of George III acted as a rubberstamp for the tyrant. Like George Bush, George III appointed fools, incompetent fops who lost for the British Empire the richest part of the North American continent.

The lesson Republicans draw from all of this is, hey, George III may at times have lapsed into stuttering imbecility, but he never lost his job. Modern Republicans think actions have no consequences. If you owned Fox News, CNN, and ABC, you might feel the same way.

Of course, that's an oversimplification. When Dennis Hastert, Republican Speaker of the House, inserted an "earmark" to build a highway past land he owned, he knew his profits would be somewhere around $2.5 million on his original investment of about $350,000. He probably didn't know the exact numbers, but it was a good guess, and he did make more than $2.5 million in pure profit, showing he can understand cause-and-effect when it profits him.

When Hastert learned about Mark Foley (R- Florida) soliciting teenage boys for sex, though, Hastert thought he could keep the lid on it. Instead of sending the matter to the House Ethics Committee, the Republicans consulted their congressional campaign committee. The National Republican Campaign Committee decided they needed Mark Foley's seat to maintain a majority, and persuaded Foley, who had actually decided not to run again, to seek office for one more term.

Then Foley, who was running in what was considered a safe seat, contributed $100,000 to the campaign of Tom Reynolds, chair of the NRCC which had just decided that the news about Foley could probably be kept secret. This contribution, using a campaign as a money-laundering operation to pass contributions, that would otherwise be illegal, on as a bribe, is the Republican governing philosophy in a nutshell.

In our state we have Mike McGavick raking in $25 million as an "executive bonus" from Safeco, not for what he did, but for what they hope he will do- replace your Social Security with your "personal" account in a Safeco retirement fund. McGavick now says he wants the "personal accounts" to be managed by the government, which will protect them just like the Republicans protected Congressional pages.

Yup, it's deja vue all over again. Star Chambers, suspension of habeus corpus, signing statements that nullify the meaning of the law Congress passed- it's all been tried before. Give Republicans one more term in office, and we won't be able to quote Patrick Henry, so let's say it now- The tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants.

So haul out your copy of the Declaration of Independence, read it again, and ask yourself if anything you're reading seems to resemble our times. Secret trials? Suspension of habeus corpus? Rendition to foreign lands? It's all there- the reasons the Founding Fathers risked their lives and fortunes to establish a nation where those things couldn't happen.

Is we learning yet?

Repeal the 22nd Amendment

2006-10-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

And now, a modest proposal- Democrats should move to repeal the 22nd Amendment. Let Bush run for a third term.

Would that put the fox in the henhouse, or what? Would Republicans let the Bush goons keep control of the party and run Bush for a third term? Could they oppose repealing the 22nd Amendment with their own man poised to reap the fruits of doing so?

The best possible outcome, of course, would be for Bush and his goons to steal a third election, and reap themselves the catastrophic and worldwide defeats that are accumulating in our future. This is the best, and possibly the only way to watch the Republican party collapse on itself like the WTC towers, leaving only an atomized and toxic dust in its wake.

Well, a guy can dream....

Troublemakers

2006-10-06T07:20:00.000-07:00

Doughnut Hole In A Nutshell

2006-10-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

The doughnut-hole gap in coverage results from the bills authors desire to cap the overall price of the program. After they made it way too expensive by allowing their drug company friends to charge high prices, they had to cut a gaping hole in the seniors coverage in order to save money. Economist Dean Baker has calculated that if the Part D program had been structured to get the best, lowest prices from the drug companies as the Veterans Administration does today -- we could have saved enough money to eliminate the donut hole without raising the cost of the Part D program.

A Few Notes...

2006-10-05T14:08:00.000-07:00

From that "unsustainable" Bolivarean Revolution....

Caracas, Venezuela, October 2, 2006According to the president of the National Confederation of Ranchers and Farmers (Confagan), Venezuela has tripled the amount of land that is under agricultural cultivation in the past eight years.

According to Campos, In the next five years Venezuelans will be complete masters over agro-alimentary security in the areas of milk, meat, and food oils, due to the economic support that is being provided to workers in the fields, the struggle against latifundios [plantations], and the investment and confidence of the private sector in the government.

Campos also pointed out the pork production increased by 40% between 1999 and 2006.

According to government data, Venezuelas land reform program, which was launched in 2001, has distributed over 2 million hectares of land to over 200,000 families.

Other headlines from VNews state that government oil profits are up 44% and that government oilfields will be cutting production by 50,000 barrels per day. OPEC producers feel that $50-$60 a barrel is an appropriate price and Venezuela was joined by Nigeria in announcing cuts.

Updating the Majority

2006-10-04T05:18:00.000-07:00

Considering the results of the P-I poll, let's update our majority-

70% of Americans want us out of Iraq
70% of Americans want national healthcare
70% of Americans want marijuana legalized
70% of Americans have no problem with gay marriage

70% of Americans do not go to church.

Maybe you want to quibble with that last, but remember the church-car conundrum- people tell you they go to church, but when you ask them which days they use their car, Sunday is at the bottom of the list. If they'e actually going, an awful lot of them are walking. Have you ever seen anyone walking to church? Didn't think so.

Fall Colors

2006-10-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

Our autumn colors are in our streams......

(Photo from Seattle Times)

Carry on, Constable

2006-10-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

A council has withdrawn a parking ticket issued after double yellow lines were painted under a parked car. Marketing consultant Nasser Khan was tipped off by office workers in Salford, Greater Manchester, who filmed the incident. Design engineer Geoff Blackburn said: "We saw a group of workmen and two traffic wardens surround the car - one man crouched under the car to paint the yellow line, then the warden issued the ticket."

Another Sunset

2006-10-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

Geezer E-mail

2006-10-02T15:22:00.000-07:00

Again, I've been hit by an "old geezer" e-mail that goes around every few months. The pith of the e-mail is "I'm not voting for my Congressman until Congress junks their pension system and uses Social Security like the rest of us- then they'll fix Social Security".

For starters, Social Security does not need to be "fixed". We could all get an extra half hour of sleep a night if we could rest assured they would not "fix" Social Security.

Beyond that- what is wrong with these people? I for one do not want my Congressman to be dependent on a war contractor for a cushy job and stock options, with gravy and all the 'fixins', to furnish his old age.

Republicans have perfected the art of buying a seat in Congress and then making that investment back in spades by peddling earmarks, finding their wives and relations nice jobs with lobbyists and companies that sell to the government, and themselves ending up with a similar job when they leave Congress. This is not behavior I wish to encourage.

And, in case you haven't noticed, Congressmen get paid more than you or I do. They have more important jobs with more responsibility, would pay more into Social Security, and would draw larger pensions than you or I if that was their pension plan. Get over it. If there is one country in the world where you and I have an equal chance of going to Congress, this is it.

Well, that won't stop the dumb e-mail, but I feel better. Maybe you do too.

Squeaky Wheels...

2006-09-29T06:32:00.000-07:00

.....get the grease. The Montlake neighborhood in Seattle organized. Boy did they organize. They didn't want any more freeway in their neighborhood, and eventually the DOT obliged. As seen in the photo (from the Seattle Times under Fair Use doctrine) the DOT took some of the Arboretum, some of the University of Washington, and has resurrected the once-defeated RH Thompson by simply dumping an exit ramp on Lake Washington Boulevard, which also runs through the Arboretum.

In conjunction with the state effort to rebuild the Viaduct, this is simply the highway planning of the mid-60s. Voters then thought they had driven a stake into the heart of efforts to use the Arboretum as a highway, but the project has risen from the dead.

It will be interesting to see if the people who saved Seattle in the 60s and 70s have all moved out of town, leaving only a disgruntled rabble easily manipulated or bullied into accepting the rule of the roadbuilders. If the city had the spunk of the Montlake neighborhood, this whole project would be binned, and the planners sent back to the drawing board- with instructions to actually solve a problem by including a light-rail solution.

Will Wonders Never Cease

2006-09-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

Well, this has certainly been the most remarkable week in my life. The Congress appears to be ready to suspend or repeal habeus corpus. Habeus corpus, of course, is simply the core of law as we know it. But, what did you expect?

Let's review for a minute-
70% of Americans want us out of Iraq
70% of Americans want national healthcare
70% of Americans want marijuana legalized
70% of Americans have no problem with gay marriage

What's a poor minority to do? The only way the Republicans can stay in power is to suppress the majority.

Well, don't look so glum. First of all, marijuana smokers have lived with these dictatorial powers directed against them for years. Second of all, as the time we have to deal with global warming becomes shorter and shorter, it may be that these new-fangled dictatorial powers will come in handy.

So maybe, instead of screaming at your Republican neighbor, you might quietly sympathize with him about having elected a Saudi-hugging big-government unfunded-mandate peabrain to preside over the dismantlement of the safeguards of private property. Who knows, maybe he feels as bad about it as you do.

Nice Long Cuts

2006-09-28T08:58:00.000-07:00

Let 'Em Roll by Big John Patton- Big John on the organ, Grant Green, guitar, Bobby Hutcherson, vibes, and Otis Finch, drums. Blue Note CDP 0777 7 89795 2.

So, if it's Blue Note, and it's a jazz quartet, you would expect all of the cuts, but one, to weigh in over six minutes. And so it came to pass.

I Did Not Know That

2006-09-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

Governor Gregoire sure has her finger on the pulse of the state.

A group of us have been arguing on the P-I Comment threads about the viaduct, about 8 or 9 regular commenters who show up for each new thread. Naturally, when Gregoire dropped her 'tolls' bombshell, I clicked on the new thread to give the rest of them an elbow in the ribs and a big guffaw.

Instead, I found about 40 new commenters, never before seen, who thought tolls were a good idea. Yes, an overwhelming majority, with absolutely no interest in the reasoning or details of the actual project, but ready to pay a toll! Talk about one born every minute!

I'm still trying to figure out if I would have wanted to know this about my fellow citizens 30 years earlier. Yes, it does open new career opportunities, such as selling bottled water- if you consider that kind of thing to be a career.

Eye Candy

2006-09-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

Sunset on the Tahuya Plateau.....

The Faith and The Sword

2006-09-25T15:32:00.000-07:00

An important reminder, coming to us via Mercury Rising-

The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: How did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to "spread the faith by the sword"?

Well, they just did not.

For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

[...]

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith - and they were the forefathers of most of today's Palestinians.

THERE IS no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

WHY? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service - a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes.

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.

We've Changed All That

2006-09-23T17:29:00.000-07:00

In Moliere's The Doctor, the 'Doctor' at one point suggests the problem is with the patient's heart, and moves to listen to the heart by placing his stethoscope low on the patient's abdomen. "But Doctor," another person asks, "isn't the heart up here?"

"Oh no," the 'Doctor' replies, "we've changed all that!"

In that spirit, I present White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's new interpretation of the Constitution- with an intro by Mark Evanier-

This morning, Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow was asked if it isn't true that it's the Supreme Court that's supposed to decide if something is constitutional. His reply was as follows...

No, as a matter of fact, the president has an obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. That is an obligation that presidents have enacted through signing statements going back to Jefferson. So, while the Supreme Court can be an arbiter of the Constitution, the fact is the President is the one, the only person who, by the Constitution, is given the responsibility to preserve, protect, and defend that document, so it is perfectly consistent with presidential authority under the Constitution itself.

Enough With The Scholar Defense

2006-09-20T04:46:00.000-07:00

The Pope is no more a scholar than George Bush is an historian.

A scholar does not take one sentence, centuries old, and present it with no context to listeners with no background. This is doubly, triply, or quadruply true when the sentence, uttered by a critic and foe of a religion, is used to characterize the religion. Nothing, in fact, could be further from any possible meaning of scholarship.

You knew that, of course. That the church of the Inquisition, the church of the Irish civil wars, the church that smuggled Nazi priests out of Croatia after WW II, that this church should remind us of the past, is the height of imprudence. We're having enough trouble dealing with what that church did to little boys in our own state in the 50s and 60s. That's what the Pope would do well to remember.

An Unfinished Essay

2006-09-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

George Bush, the greatest proponent of the Big Lie technique since Hitler, is now the head of a movement that accuses Clinton of stabbing us in the back by allowing 9/11 and claims that anyone who questions the wisdom of Bush is a traitorous appeaser.

Considering that Bush has led the nation well down the path of secret prisons (remember when he claimed they didnt exist?), torture, unprovoked aggression against nations that had no intention of attacking us, and a dictatorship in which he regards the Constitution as a "piece of paper", maybe we should look at what happened to the Germans when they traveled down a similar path.

There is general agreement that Hitler rose to power because the Germans came to believe two Big Lies- one, that they had lost WW I because their army was stabbed in the back by civilian politicians, and two, that a worldwide conspiracy of Jews had attacked and subjugated Germany in accord with their secret plan, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In the spring of 1918 the Allied powers believed it would take another two years to invade and defeat Germany, and were massing huge armies for this final task. What they could not know was that Hindenburg and Ludendorf, by then the de facto rulers of the German military, would gather the remaining German troops and waste their lives by sending them directly into the firestorm of Allied artillery and machineguns. When the final German offensive on the Western Front had ended, the German army was totally destroyed. This is the truth about who stabbed the German army in the back.

After the Armistice American firms rushed to invest in German industry and take advantage of the helplessness of German workers. As an illustration of their success, in WW II a full half of the vehicles used by the Wehrmacht were constructed in Ford and GM factories in Germany.

Henry Ford, an anti-semite who hated unions as much as he hated Jews, soon realized that Hitler could be his best friend. (Ford was so pro-Nazi that he actually employed a Nazi to head his company secret police in Dearborn.) Ford paid for the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Like the confessions exhibited in the show trials of Stalin, or the evidence gathered by U.S. torturers in our modern "War on Terror", the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were completely bogus. Many Germans, however, could not face the fact that Hindenburg and Ludendorf had destroyed their army, and they felt the desperate need for a strong figure to protect them and make them feel safe.

And so they turned, from the great German history that brought forth Einstein and Thomas Mann, to the pitiable drug-addicted slime that constituted the Nazi party. To these Germans it seemed entirely believable that the Jewish cobblers and tailors and butchers, who were their neighbors, were part of a hidden world conspiracy to defeat Germany, a conspiracy that could only be defeated by attacking, first, Austria, their former ally in WW I, and then, many other countries. Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, France, England- all of these were nations in which "international Judaism" plotted to overthrow innocent Germany.

We can see a pattern here- a pattern of outright gibbering insanity that rested its case on two Big Lies, lies that never had a shred of evidence to support them. A pattern of naked aggression, at first unchecked because Germany had secretly rebuilt the most powerful military in the world at that time. A pattern that finally united the people so the world in a hatred of Germany so strong that, 60 years on, the Germans still walk with their heads held down in shame.

There are striking parallels between the German worker of 1939 and the American worker of today. In 1939 the German worker thought their standard of living had risen under Hitler. It hadnt, just as our average wage has not risen since 1970. The German worker could buy no more butter in 1939 than he could in 1930, but he could buy ersatz butter made from coal-oil (we call it margarine), just as the American worker today thinks the daily combo from a fast-food restaurant is better than the fresh fruit and vegetables we can no longer afford.

Like todays American, who worships the cargo-cult of the freeway, the German worker believed the building of the autobahn proved the superiority of German culture. The Germans, like us, lacked the oil resources to power their economy, and, like us, were ruled by nincompoops who actually might, at several points of the war, have seized the most strategic oil fields, but failed to do so.

So, at this critical moment, when we have the grandest military and the grandest roads in the world, but lack the oil to power them, when the standard of living has stagnated for 30 years and Americans are beginning to ask why workers in other countries live better than we do, what is to be our fate?

2006-09-10T16:58:00.000-07:00

One year, long ago, my parents took us down the coast to Los Angeles. We went to some places they wanted to go to, driving the 101 where it perches on the edge of the continent, eating Chinese in San Francisco, and visiting the small town where they got married in 1945.

We also went where the children wanted to go- Disneyland, where we waited in line for rides, ate some cotton candy, and were not terribly impressed by the amusement park, in spite of having seen it on tv.

And that, in a nutshell, is the 'magic of Disney'- crap and cotton candy that can't hold a candle to real life. Some people prefer it, and worship little mouse statues that don't even look like mice.

Me, not so much.