The Vigil

Timely Debate

2012-01-26T08:47:00.001-08:00

What Motivates Republicans

2012-01-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

Republican voters are divided into two categories: informed and clueless. The latter are pawns for the former.

This advertisement, which I found in the comment section of another blog this morning, is an iconic symbol of what motivates informed Republican voters.

Say 'Hello' to the Next (Democratic) Senator from Nebraska!

2011-12-28T11:23:00.000-08:00

Former GOP Senator Chuck Hagel: Republican Party Has ‘An Astounding Lack Of Responsible Leadership’

From Think Progress of 31-August 2011:

Former GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel (NE) can’t muster any praise for his Republican colleagues’ behavior in Congress over the past few months. In an interview with the Financial Times, Hagel blasted GOP leadership for their “irresponsible actions” during the debt ceiling debacle, noting that “I think about some of the presidents we’ve had on my side of the aisle — Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., go right through them, Eisenhower — they would be stunned.”

“Disgusted” with the debt ceiling negotiations, Hagel called it “an astounding lack of responsible leadership by many in the Republican party, and I say that as a Republican.” “Does anyone not believe what’s happened here the last couple weeks in the market was not a complete, direct result of the lack of confidence that came out of that folly, that embarrassment?” he asked. Watch it:

Asked about Tea Party influence, Hagel said the Republican party is too captive to a movement that is “very ideological” and “very narrow.” “I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I’ve seen today,” he said. Later surveying the GOP 2012 field, Hagel said the party may need to rebuild, agreeing that Republicans are now “too far to the right.”

Come on, Progressive Democrats! Swallow your pride! Just ask this decorated Vietnam veteran and revered ex-Senator to come out of retirement and serve his country for six more years. He's not perfect. But everything that comes out of Nebraska is relative.

I Don't "Hate" Republicans

2011-12-22T09:04:00.000-08:00

I say that for the record.

But I love this music

Standing Up for What Is Reich

2011-12-17T16:19:00.000-08:00

Robert Reich has worked in a lot of big white buildings -- in the Senate, as an intern to Robert F. Kennedy; in the office of then-Solicitor General Robert Bork; in the Ford and Carter administrations; and as labor secretary to President Clinton. He is currently teaching at UC Berkeley. His course is entitled "Wealth and Poverty". Patt Morrison published an interview with professor Reich in todays' Los Angeles Times. His answers rang true to me.The Occupy Wall street has had a huge effect on the national conversation.

President Obama's speech [in Kansas] focused on precisely the themes the Occupiers have been emphasizing: the concentration of income, wealth and political power at the top, the failure of big corporations and Wall Street to keep the economy going for the rest of us. I don't think this sort of speech would have happened had it not been for the Occupy movement and the change in public debate it's created.

Class is becoming less and less a dirty word in our lexicon.

Polls show most Americans today don't believe their children are going to live as well as they do. A large percentage feel the game is rigged against them. Upward mobility is now far more difficult to achieve. So the issue of class has emerged as very real and very tangible. For most of us, the America we knew was one in which anyone could make it with enough gumption and guts and drive. We truly believed that America was a place where there were no class distinctions, although we saw the plight of the poor, particularly poor minorities. What's new is this sense that a relatively small number of people have rigged the game or loaded the dice in such a way that their positions of power and privilege are entrenched.

Many wealthy conservatives equate capitalism with democracy, but in fact they are not related.

We think of ourselves as a nation that practices democratic capitalism, but sometimes capitalism and democracy pull in opposite directions .... Essentially, every time the excesses of capitalism threaten to destroy it, we save capitalism from itself. We did it in the Progressive era, we did it in the New Deal, and hopefully we are at least beginning to do it now. Ironically, it's progressives and Democrats who take the lead in saving capitalism from itself.The question is how bad things have to get before average people begin mobilizing.

What happened to cross-party relationships like your good friendship with Wyoming Republican Sen. Alan Simpson?

Newt Gingrich. When Gingrich came to town as speaker, he brought in a group of people who were far more ideological and frankly unpleasant. The tone of Washington changed abruptly in January of 1995.I had never seen anything like it, and remember, I [came] to Washington in 1967. It was as if a dark cloud had descended over Washington and it's still there. I blame Gingrich -- not entirely, but he led the charge.

Will we ever recover economically?

We can't go backward, but the economy of the 1950s, '60s and early '70s was far more equal, and America grew faster in those years on average than it's grown since. If you look at Germany over the last 10 years, until the past year, you see rapid growth combined with a far more equal distribution of [the] gains and very high wages going to average working people. What's the secret? Two things: Germany has focused intensively on public education, particularly skills that are relevant for the new high-tech world economy; and secondly, Germany has a much stronger labor movement than the United States.There's huge skepticism, if not downright cynicism, about any large institution today. Yet the questions being asked are moral questions about what we Americans owe each other as members of the same society, what we should expect from the major institutions of our society, how to reverse trends that seem to reward the wrong people, often for malfeasance or nonfeasance. These are all moral judgments about how lopsided our economy and our society has become.

Are we entering a "Kumbaya" period like the 1960's?

The anti-Vietnam War movement, the civil rights movement -- those were not "Kumbaya" moments. Those were hard challenges. A friend of mine was murdered in Mississippi for trying to register voters. This was the opposite of "Kumbaya."Mickey Schwerner. I was always very short for my age and older guys help[ed] protect me from the bullies, and Mickey was one of my protectors. When he was killed by the real bullies, it was a transformative experience for me. It opened my eyes to how important it is to give people the power to stop the bullies. I date my commitment to these issues to that summer of '64.

Notes on Newt

2011-12-04T21:05:00.000-08:00

Hey, Vig: I need help. Perhaps you or your readers can show me the way to solve my longing.

I want to be able to talk straight with Republicans about the origins of today's nasty political climate. We are, as Chris Hayes recently pointed out, "living in the Age of Newt". I want to see and hear and participate in a dialogue that names without putting the other person on the defensive. I long for a way to truth-tell that might sting, but doesn't drive away the other person who sees our current situation differently.

The thing I'm struggling with is how can I, and we, talk to our fellow citizens about who is really doing what to whom and why?

The Republicans have absorbed Newt Gingrich's strategy for winning politically in America. In the 1980's, Newt used to send out "How to Run Successful Political Campaigns" to his fellow Republican politicians. Newt recommended using positive words to describe oneself: "entrepreneur"; "forward thinking"; "being creative".

When referring to Democratic opponents, Newt exhorted his fellow politicians to call their opponents "corrupt", to "create a scandal" - whether there was evidence of such behavior, or not. This strategy was supplemented by Newt's daily issuance of the "Daily Talking Points" that were to be repeated throughout the day, preferably into a microphone, eventually imprinting upon one's unconscious, even when it was recognizable as merely empty rhetoric.

This conscious demonization of members of the "Loyal Opposition", the Democrats in Congress, consists, too often, of scurrilous attributions of wrong-doing that have no factual basis in reality and which the MSM (main stream media) never bothers to fact-check, having long-ago abdicated their responsibility to hold the powerful accountable to the citizenry.

Because they are never questioned, nor the true facts publicly stated, the Republican Party's Spin Meisters and their constant litany of lies are unchallenged - eventually becoming accepted political history. Worst of all, the incessant repetition of the day's "Talking Points" further cement the new reality.

Today's pale remnants of the once honorable profession of journalism, instead, focus on the "Titillation Factor" that will sell papers. In this age of "fair and balanced" news, the innuendos and the lies are permitted to stand unchallenged - eventually becoming accepted political history. Worst of all, the incessant repetition of the day's "Talking Points" further cement the new reality.

The Republicans speak their distortions and lies with one clear, clever voice. Democrats quibble over minutia, cowering on the sidelines of power they refuse, with one or two notable exceptions, to speak of the "elephant in the room".and fearfully avoid calling out the Republicans. The Democrats, still seem shell-shocked at how the Republicans can so glibly spin their fabricated lies and demonization's of them...picture Lucy snatching away the football after Charlie Brown has committed to kicking it.

Too many Democrats still don't "get it" - the Republican strategists have decided they will send this country into bankruptcy before they will cooperate with Democrats and work together to solve America's pressing problems that are growing worse and more urgently in need of creative and constructive solutions achieved through negotiations and compromising with every passing day.

Newt, and his cohorts, are poised to steal our Democracy from under our noses. The Republican strategizers have scrupulously followed their plan to destroy our government, because to them, government is the problem, not the solution.

Elected to Governorships and state offices by promising to create jobs, what have these Republican governors done with their powers? They have systematically attempted to defund any regulatory body that remains at all viable, to deny a woman the right to control her own reproductive rights, to dismantle all unions, and are arduously scheming to deny the right to vote to as many young people, older people, and all others whom they fear might vote democratic, as possible - this after the debacle of the unregulated banks drove America in its knees, and after sending our sons and daughters into two unfunded and unwinnable wars.

Our beloved country is mired down in mistrust and fury at our elected congressional members who do nothing to acknowledge that our country's government is terribly broken. Nothing is getting done - the tea party circuses blame the growing economic gulf on "lazy people who just want us to pay their way through life"; Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell tell the 99% of us to just "eat cake"and get a job because their fat cat contributors need to have ever more tax breaks to salt away in mattresses so the 99% had better pay their taxes; and the Democrats quibble over which song to play as they stand, fiddle in hand but silent, watching our beloved country go down in flames.

Not Enough, Soon Enough

2011-11-29T08:20:00.000-08:00

News Item from the Chicago Sun-Times:

40,000 troops to leave Afghanistan by end of 2012

Communism Is More Popular than Congress!

2011-11-16T06:56:00.001-08:00

Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, splashes coffee in our face this morning!

Af-Pak: What Is It We Are Fighting for (Again)?

2011-10-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

News Item: Karzai: Afghanistan to back Pakistan If Wars with U.S.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview to a private Pakistani TV channel (Geo Television) broadcast on Saturday:

God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan....If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan's help, Afghanistan will be there with you.

Occupy Together!

2011-09-30T23:28:00.001-07:00

Truth

2011-09-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

9-11 Didn't Change America

2011-09-11T01:19:00.000-07:00

It was 20-March 2003 that changed the USA.

A Skirmish in the Class War Breaks out in Tottenham and Greater London

2011-08-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

Lost is why Mark Duggan was shot. He was, according to some residents, a crack cocaine dealer who routinely carried a gun. So what?

Everyone is taken by surprise. Everyone is blaming the police, short-handed on account of austerity cutbacks. And the United Kingdom's elite were caught on their summer vacations:

David Cameron fiddled with the foil on a bottle of pinot grigio in Tuscany; deputy prime minister Nick Clegg quietly recovered at home from his getaway in sunny France; and chancellor of the exchequer George Osbourne remained ensconced at a hotel somewhere in Beverly Hills.

Not Tottenham's youth who had no place to go on their summer holidays but out on the street, primed for the Metropolitan Police's reviled stop-and-search policy.

A wider context for the riots ... must include the impact of David Cameron's controversial austerity measures. Tottenham is among the communities worst affected by Cameron's budget, which drastically cuts programs for the young, poor and voteless. Funding has been cut from more than 380 youth charities across Britain, and Harringey Council, which covers four of the five riot areas so far, recently closed eight out of its 13 youth centres. The Harringey youth services budget was slashed by 75 per cent.

Don't get me wrong. I don't like class war when it's open and declared. It's ugly and costly. The collateral damage is cruel and extensive among the innocents and bystanders. But the head of the ostrich of the Western world's wealthy classes is deep in the sands of their beach resorts. What happens in Tottenham and other areas in London, are not likely to stay there.

News Item: Worst US loss of life in Afghan War

2011-08-06T08:14:00.001-07:00

Helicopter crash kills 38: Seven Afghan soldiers and 31 US special forces die after insurgents reportedly shoot down Chinook with rocket:

The US suffered its worst single loss of life in the nearly 10-year Afghan war when a helicopter carrying 31 special forces soldiers crashed on Friday night in the east of the country.

Both the Taliban, via a spokesman reached by telephone, and Afghan officials in Wardak province, to the west of Kabul, said insurgents had shot down the Chinook helicoter with a rocket.

Nato would only confirm that "there was enemy activity in the area" and that the US-led alliance was still trying to work out what had happened. US air force captain Justin Brockhoff, a Nato spokesman, said: "We are in the process of accessing the facts."

A western official said 37 people were on board, all of whom were killed. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said the helicopter was carrying 31 US special forces and seven members of the Afghan national army.

It is very unusual for Nato deaths from a single incident to reach double figures. The previous most deadly day for foreign troops was in June 2005 when 16 US soldiers were killed when a Taliban rocket hit a Chinook in the eastern province of Kunar.

The crash happened at 3am when the helicopter was hovering over the town of Tangi Joi Zareen, in the district of Saidabad, according to a spokesman for the provincial governor.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said Nato attacked a house in the district where insurgent fighters were gathering. He said eight insurgents died in the fighting.....

What are we fighting for.....?

Stop Hoping & Draft a Progressive Candidate for the 2012 Democratic Primary!

2011-07-27T07:46:00.000-07:00

Go to StopHoping.Org and vote for a candidate to oppose Barack Obama in the 2012 Primary.( That's next year, Folks!)

StopHoping.Org is searching for a plausible candidate to run in next year's primary and they say:

The majority of U.S. citizens favor protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; taxing the rich; cutting military spending; and protecting the environment. We don't have a candidate . . . yet. Potential candidates supported on this site will be notified and encouraged to run.

I'm plugging for Russ Feingold, who's the most credible candidate on their ballot. Bernie Sanders is currently in first place and Dennis Kucinich is a 2nd. Russ is in third. Personally, as much as I like them, I don't feel that Bernie and Dennis make as marketable candidates as Feingold would.

The perfect candidate, in my way of thinking, would be Howard Dean. So I added him in as a write-in candidate. Of course Governor Dean, along with many of the others, figure to be reluctant candidates: they would have to be drafted by a groundswell of popular support, as yet un-materialized.

I also voted for the option of not running a Progressive candidate in the general election. I Feel if Progressives can't show up enough to capture the Democratic Convention, then they ought at least vote against the Weimar Republicans. And the only way to vote against these proto-fascists is to vote Democratic!

Yes! There is a difference between the parties, even if the degrees of separation are down to the single digits.

The Truth About Jane Fonda's Trip to Hanoi

2011-07-26T07:06:00.000-07:00

I've been invited to publish Jane Fonda's most recent epistle in total. I am not going hesitate to accept an invitation like that. Her article from her own blog appears below. Below that, I will attach a few comments of my own.

I grew up during World War II. My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the Grapes of Wrath, his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day. I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn’t have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism, not just make movies about it. I admired this about him. I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels.

For the first 8 years of the Vietnam War I lived in France. I was married to the French film director, Roger Vadim and had my first child. The French had been defeated in their own war against Vietnam a decade before our country went to war there, so when I heard, over and over, French people criticizing our country for our Vietnam War I hated it. I viewed it as sour grapes. I refused to believe we could be doing anything wrong there.

It wasn’t until I began to meet American servicemen who had been in Vietnam and had come to Paris as resisters that I realized I needed to learn more. I took every chance I could to meet with U.S. soldiers. I talked with them and read the books they gave me about the war. I decided I needed to return to my country and join with them—active duty soldiers and Vietnam Veterans in particular—to try and end the war. I drove around the country visiting military bases, spending time in the G.I. Coffee houses that had sprung up outside many bases –places where G.I.s could gather. I met with Army psychiatrists who were concerned about the type of training our men were receiving…quite different, they said, from the trainings during WWII and Korea. The doctors felt this training was having a damaging effect on the psyches of the young men, effects they might not recover from. I raised money and hired a former Green Beret, Donald Duncan, to open and run the G.I. Office in Washington D.C. to try and get legal and congressional help for soldiers who were being denied their rights under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I talked for hours with U.S. pilots about their training, and what they were told about Vietnam. I met with the wives of servicemen. I visited V.A. hospitals. Later in 1978, wanting to share with other Americans some of what I had learned about the experiences of returning soldiers and their families, I made the movie Coming Home. I was the one who would be asked to speak at large anti-war rallies to tell people that the men in uniform were not the enemy, that they did not start the war, that they were, in growing numbers our allies. I knew as much about military law as any layperson. I knew more than most civilians about the realities on the ground for men in combat. I lived and breathed this stuff for two years before I went to North Vietnam. I cared deeply for the men and boys who had been put in harms way. I wanted to stop the killing and bring our servicemen home. I was infuriated as I learned just how much our soldiers were being lied to about why we were fighting in Vietnam and I was anguished each time I would be with a young man who was traumatized by his experiences. Some boys shook constantly and were unable to speak above a whisper.

It is unconscionable that extremist groups circulate letters which accuse me of horrific things, saying that I am a traitor, that POWs in Hanoi were tied up and in chains and marched passed me while I spat at them and called them ‘baby killers. These letters also say that when the POWs were brought into the room for a meeting I had with them, we shook hands and they passed me tiny slips of paper on which they had written their social security numbers. Supposedly, this was so that I could bring back proof to the U.S. military that they were alive. The story goes on to say that I handed these slips of paper over to the North Vietnamese guards and, as a result, at least one of the men was tortured to death. That these stories could be given credence shows how little people know of the realities in North Vietnam prisons at the time. The U.S. government and the POW families didn’t need me to tell them who the prisoners were. They had all their names. Moreover, according to even the most hardcore senior officers, torture stopped late in 1969, two and a half years before I got there. And, most importantly, I would never say such things to our servicemen, whom I respect, whether or not I agree with the mission they have been sent to perform, which is not of their choosing.

But these lies have circulated for almost forty years, continually reopening the wound of the Vietnam War and causing pain to families of American servicemen. The lies distort the truth of why I went to North Vietnam and they perpetuate the myth that being anti-war means being anti-soldier.

Little known is the fact that almost 300 Americans—journalists, diplomats, peace activists, professors, religious leaders and Vietnam Veterans themselves—had been traveling to North Vietnam over a number of years in an effort to try and find ways to end the war (By the way, those trips generated little if any media attention.) I brought with me to Hanoi a thick package of letters from families of POWs. Since 1969, mail for the POWs had been brought in and out of North Vietnam every month by American visitors. The Committee of Liaison With Families coordinated this effort. I took the letters to the POWs and brought a packet of letters from them back to their families.

The Photo of Me on the Gun Site.

There is one thing that happened while in North Vietnam that I will regret to my dying day— I allowed myself to be photographed on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. I want to, once again, explain how that came about. I have talked about this numerous times on national television and in my memoirs, My Life So Far, but clearly, it needs to be repeated.

It happened on my last day in Hanoi. I was exhausted and an emotional wreck after the 2-week visit. It was not unusual for Americans who visited North Vietnam to be taken to see Vietnamese military installations and when they did, they were always required to wear a helmet like the kind I was told to wear during the numerous air raids I had experienced. When we arrived at the site of the anti-aircraft installation (somewhere on the outskirts of Hanoi), there was a group of about a dozen young soldiers in uniform who greeted me. There were also many photographers (and perhaps journalists) gathered about, many more than I had seen all in one place in Hanoi. This should have been a red flag.

The translator told me that the soldiers wanted to sing me a song. He translated as they sung. It was a song about the day ‘Uncle Ho’ declared their country’s independence in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square. I heard these words: “All men are created equal; they are given certain rights; among these are life, Liberty and Happiness.” These are the words Ho pronounced at the historic ceremony. I began to cry and clap. These young men should not be our enemy. They celebrate the same words Americans do.

The soldiers asked me to sing for them in return. As it turned out I was prepared for just such a moment: before leaving the United States, I memorized a song called Day Ma Di, written by anti-war South Vietnamese students. I knew I was slaughtering it, but everyone seemed delighted that I was making the attempt. I finished. Everyone was laughing and clapping, including me, overcome on this, my last day, with all that I had experienced during my 2 week visit. What happened next was something I have turned over and over in my mind countless times. Here is my best, honest recollection of what happened: someone (I don’t remember who) led me towards the gun, and I sat down, still laughing, still applauding. It all had nothing to do with where I was sitting. I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed. I got up, and as I started to walk back to the car with the translator, the implication of what had just happened hit me. “Oh my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes.” I pleaded with him, “You have to be sure those photographs are not published. Please, you can’t let them be published.” I was assured it would be taken care of. I didn’t know what else to do. (I didn’t know yet that among the photographers there were some Japanese.)

It is possible that it was a set up, that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know. But if they did I can’t blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it. Had I brought a politically more experienced traveling companion with me they would have kept me from taking that terrible seat. I would have known two minutes before sitting down what I didn’t realize until two minutes afterwards; a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever. The gun was inactive, there were no planes overhead, I simply wasn’t thinking about what I was doing, only about what I was feeling, innocent of what the photo implies. But the photo exists, delivering its message regardless of what I was doing or feeling. I carry this heavy in my heart. I have apologized numerous times for any pain I may have caused servicemen and their families because of this photograph. It was never my intention to cause harm. It is certainly painful for me that I, who had spent so much time talking to soldiers, trying to help soldiers and veterans, helping the anti-war movement to not blame the soldiers, now would be seen as being against our soldiers!

So Why I Did I Go?

On May 8th, 1972, President Nixon had ordered underwater, explosive mines to be placed in Haiphong Harbor, something that had been rejected by previous administrations. Later that same month, reports began to come in from European scientists and diplomats that the dikes of the Red River Delta in North Vietnam were being targeted by U.S. planes. The Swedish ambassador to Vietnam reported to an American delegation in Hanoi that he had at first believed the bombing was accidental, but now, having seen the dikes with his own eyes, he was convinced it was deliberate.

I might have missed the significance of these reports had Tom Hayden, whom I was dating, not shown me what the recently released Pentagon Papers had to say on the subject: in 1966, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, searching for some new means to bring Hanoi to its knees, had proposed destroying North Vietnam’s system of dams and dikes, which, he said, “If handled right- might…offer promise…such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided—which we could offer to do at the conference table.”[1] President Johnson, to his credit, had not acted upon this option.

Now, six years later, Richard Nixon appeared to have given orders to target the dikes—whether to actually destroy them[2] or to demonstrate the threat of destruction, no one knew.

It is important to understand that the Red River is the largest river in North Vietnam. Like Holland, its delta is below sea level. Over centuries, the Vietnamese people have constructed –by hand!– an intricate network of earthen dikes and dams to hold back the sea, a network two thousand five hundred miles long! The stability of these dikes becomes especially critical as monsoon season approaches, and requires an all-out effort on the part of citizens to repair any damage from burrowing animals or from normal wear and tear. Now it was June, but this was no ‘normal wear and tear’ they were facing. The Red River would begin to rise in July and August. Should there be flooding, the mining of Haiphong Harbor would prevent any food from being imported; the bombing showed no signs of letting up; and there was little press coverage of the impending disaster should the dikes be weakened by the bombing and give way. Something drastic had to be done.

The Nixon Administration and its US Ambassador to the United Nations, George Bush (the father), would vehemently deny what was happening, but the following are excerpts from the April-May 1972 transcripts of conversations between President Nixon and top administration officials.

April 25th 1972

Nixon: “We’ve got to be thinking in terms of an all-out bombing attack [of North Vietnam}…Now, by all-out bombing attack, I am thinking about things that go far beyond…I'm thinking of the dikes, I'm thinking of the railroad, I'm thinking, of course, of the docks."

Kissinger: "I agree with you."

President Nixon: "And I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?"

Kissinger: "About two hundred thousand people."

President Nixon: "No, no, no…I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: "That, I think, would just be too much."

President Nixon: "The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?…I just want to think big, Henry, for Christsakes."

May 4, 1972.[3]

John B. Connally (Secretary of the Treasury):…”bomb for seriousness, not just as a signal. Railroads, ports, power stations, communication lines…and don’t worry about killing civilians. Go ahead and kill ‘em….People think you are [killing civilians] now. So go ahead and give ‘em some.”

Richard Nixon: “That’s right.”

[Later in same conversation]

Richard Nixon: “We need to win the goddamned war…and…what that fella [?] said about taking out the goddamned dikes, all right, we’ll take out the goddamned dikes….If Henry’s for that, I’m for it all the way.”

The administration wanted the American public to believe Nixon was winding down the war because he was bringing our ground troops home. (At the time I went to Hanoi, there were only approximately 25,000 troops left in South Vietnam from a high of 540,000 in early 1969) In fact, the war was escalating…from the air. And, as I said, monsoon season was approaching. Something drastic had to be done.

That May, I received an invitation from the North Vietnamese in Paris to make the trip to Hanoi. Many had gone before me but perhaps it would take a different sort of celebrity to get people’s attention. Heightened public attention was what was needed to confront the impending crisis with the dikes. I would take a camera and bring back photographic evidence (if such was to be found) of the bomb damage of the dikes we’d been hearing about.

I arranged the trip’s logistics through the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace talks, bought myself a round trip ticket and stopped in New York to pick up letters for the POWs.

Frankly, the trip felt like a call to service. It was a humanitarian mission, not a political trip. My goal was to expose and try to halt the bombing of the dikes. (The bombing of the dikes ended a month after my return from Hanoi)

The only problem was that I went alone. Had I been with a more experienced, clear-headed, traveling companion, I would not have allowed myself to get into a situation where I was photographed on an anti-aircraft gun.

The Spin

My trip to North Vietnam never became a big story in the Summer/Fall of 1972–nothing on television, one small article in the New York Times. The majority of the American public, Congress, and the media were opposed to the war by then and they didn’t seem to take much notice of my trip. After all, as I said, almost three hundred Americans had gone to Hanoi before me. There had been more than eighty broadcasts by Americans over Radio Hanoi before I made mine. I had decided to do the broadcasts because I was so horrified by the bombing of civilian targets and I wanted to speak to U.S. pilots as I had done on so many occasions during my visits to U.S. military bases and at G.I. Coffee houses. I never asked pilots to desert. I wanted to tell them what I was seeing as an American on the ground there. The Nixon Justice Department poured over the transcripts of my broadcasts trying to find a way to put me on trial for treason but they could find none. A. William Olson, a representative of the Justice Department, [4] said after studying the transcripts, that I had asked the military “to do nothing other than to think.”

But from the Nixon Administration’s point of view, something had to be done. If the government couldn’t prosecute me in court because, in reality, I had broken no laws, then the pro-war advocates would make sure I was prosecuted in the court of public opinion.

The myth making about my being responsible for POW torture began seven months after I returned from North Vietnam, and several months after the war had ended, and the U.S. POWs had returned home. “Operation Homecoming,” in February 1973, was planned by the Pentagon and orchestrated by the White House. It was unprecedented in its lavishness. I was outraged that there had been no homecoming celebrations for the 10s of 1000s of men who had done combat. But from 1969 until their release in 1973, Nixon had made sure that the central issue of the war for many Americans was about the torture of American POWs (the very same years when the torture had stopped!). He had to seize the opportunity to create something that resembled victory. It was as close as he would come, and the POWs were the perfect vehicles to deflect the nation’s attention away from what our government had done in Vietnam, how they had broken faith with our servicemen.

I became a target the government could use, to suggest that some POWs who had met with me while I was in Hanoi had been tortured into pretending they were anti-war. The same thing was done to try and frame former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, whose trip to North Vietnam followed mine.

According to Seymour Hersh, author and journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and, later, the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal, when American families of POWs became alarmed at the news that there was torture in North Vietnam prisons, they received letters from the Pentagon saying: “We are certain that you will not become unduly concerned over the [torture] briefing if you keep in mind the purpose for which it was tailored.”[5]

But, according to what the POWs wrote in their books, conditions in the POW camps improved in the four years preceding their release—that is, from 1969 until 1973. Upon their release, Newsweek magazine wrote, “the [torture] stories seemed incongruent with the men telling them – a trim, trig [note: this is actually the word used in the article] lot who, given a few pounds more flesh, might have stepped right out of a recruiting poster.”[6]

Once the POWs were home, the Pentagon and White House handpicked a group of the highest ranking POWs–senior officers, to travel the national media circuit, some of them telling of torture. A handwritten note from President Nixon to H.R. Haldeman says that “the POW’s need to have the worst quotes of R. Clark and Fonda” to use in their TV appearances, but this information shouldn’t come from the White House.[7] These media stories were allowed to become the official narrative, the universal “POW Story,” giving the impression that all the men had been subjected to systematic torture—right up to the end–and that torture was the policy of the North Vietnamese government. The POWs who said there was no torture in their camps were never allowed access to the media.

Not that any torture is justified or that anyone who had been tortured should have been prevented from telling about it. But the Nixon White House orchestrated a distorted picture of what actually occurred.

In my anger at the torture story that was being allowed to spread, at how the entire situation was being manipulated, I made a mistake I deeply regret. I said that the POWs claiming torture were liars, hypocrites, and pawns.

I said, “I’m quite sure that there were incidents of torture…but the pilots who are saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that’s a lie.”[8]

What I didn’t know at the time was that although there had been no torture after 1969, before then there had been systematic torture of some POWS. One of the more hawkish of them, James Stockdale, wrote in his book, In Love and War, that no more than ten percent of the pilots received at least ninety percent of the punishment.[9] John Hubbell, in P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam, agreed, and affirmed the fact that torture stopped in 1969.[10]

When the POWs came home, some who had been there longest told the press how they clogged up prison toilets and sewers, refused to come when ordered, or follow prison rules. One of the most famous, Jeremiah Denton, said, “We forced them [the guards] to be brutal to us.”[11] I relay this not to minimize the hardships that the POWs endured, nor to excuse it– but to attempt belatedly to restore a greater depth of insight into the entire POW experience with their captors.

Still, whether any torture was administered to certain, more recalcitrant POWs and not to others is unacceptable. Even though only a small percent of prisoners were tortured by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, it wasn’t right. According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s standards, torturing prisoners to get information is justified. It isn’t. Not ever. All nations must adhere to the Geneva Convention’s rules of warfare.

As anyone who knew or worked with me in those years knows that my heart has always been with the soldiers. I should have been clearer that my anger back then was at the Nixon Administration. It was the administration, in its cynical determination to keep hostilities between the U.S. and Vietnam alive and to distract people from the administration’s mistakes, who tried to use the POWs as pawns.

Addressing The Internet lies

By the end of the Nineties, even more grotesque torture lies began to be circulated about me over the Internet—the ones that continue to this day.

Let me quote a former POW, Captain Mike McGrath (USN Retired), president of the POW-NAM Organization. In a letter to Roger Friedman, at the time a columnist for Fox411, on Friday, January 12, 2001 (he gave Friedman permission to make the letter public) McGrath wrote:

Yes, the Carrigan/Driscoll/strips of paper story is an Internet hoax. It has been around since Nov 1999 or so. To the best of my knowledge none of this ever happened. This is a hoax story placed on the Internet by unknown Fonda haters. No one knows who initiated the story. I have spoken with all the parties named: Carrigan, Driscoll, et al. They all state that this particular story is a hoax and wish to disassociate their names from the false story. They never made the statements attributed to them.

In his letter, McGrath also said to Friedman that by the time I went to Hanoi in 1972, treatment of the POWs was starting to improve and that I “did not bring torture or abuse to the POWs,” but that one man [Hoffman], the “senior ranking man in a room full of new guys,” was tortured (“hung by his broken arm”) to make him come to the meeting with me. McGrath wrote:

Why one man (name withheld by request) was picked out for torture of his broken arm is unknown…

The answer is, it never happened!

Will what I have written here stop the myths from continuing to be spread on the Internet and in mass mailings to conservative Republicans? I don’t know. Some people seem to need to hate and I make a convenient lightning rod. I think the lies and distortions serve some right-wing purpose—fundraising? Demonizing me so as to scare others from becoming out-spoken anti-war activists? Who knows? But at least here, on my blog (and in my memoirs), there is a place where people who are genuinely interested in the truth can find it.

[1] PP Vol. 1V, p. 43 (Italics in the original)

[2] As Hitler had done to the Netherlands during World War II. German High Commissioner Seyss-Inquart was condemned to death at Nuremberg for opening the dikes in Holland.

[3] Oval Office Conversation No. 719-22, May 4, 1972; Nixon White House Tapes; National Archives at College Park, College Park MD

[4] Hearings before the Committee on Internal Security, House of Representatives, 92 Congress, Second Session, Sept. 10 & 25th, 1972 (Washington: Government Printing Office): 7552

[5] Hersh, The P.O.W. Issue: A National Issue is Born, Dayton (Ohio) Journal-Herald, 13-18 Feb 1971

[6] Newsweek, 4/16/73

[7] Nixon Presidential Materials Staff, White House Special Files: Staff Mamber & Office Files: H.R. Haldeman: Box 47: Folder: H. Notes Jan-Feb-Mar 1973 National Archives

[8] NYT, 7 April 1973,11

[9] In Love and War, p.447

[10] P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam, John G. Hubbell, 91,430

[11] New York Times, 30 April 1973.

Who can be more American than Jane Fonda? Not me. After the Disasterous 1968 Democratic Convention, I folded my Progressive tent and went AWOL as far as the peace movement was concerned. For all its ineptitude in protecting the lives of great Progressive leaders such as JFK, MLK, I felt that the American Democracy had not evolved much beyond the culture of the O.K Corral. It was not worth my time to save it, I said at the time. I took up tennis - I did - for a couple of decades; the My Lai disclosure, Pentagon Papers and Kent State massacre notwithstanding.

Not Jane Fonda. She went to Hanoi.

I find her testimony correct, honest, truthful, and compassionate.

Truly in the American character, she has stuck to her guns. LBJ's and Nixon's war in Vietnam was our intrusion into someone else's civil war, unwelcomed by all Vietnamese, southern as well as northern. As such, it violated U.S. national interests, recklessly squandering American blood and treasure in the process.

Bad enough that the whole Vietnam mistake has been repeated and doubled-downed in Iraq and Afghanistan by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. That the MIC currently harbors an illusion that it can now 'do Vietnam right' for this generation proves Ms Fonda's memoirs are relevant and timely.

No, I have never thought Ms Fonda had anything to apologize for. However her illustrious cinematic career featured a few early miscues like everything she did before Klute!

They are All WIA's

2011-07-25T07:23:00.001-07:00

The Right Way to Leave Afghanistan

2011-07-08T16:45:00.000-07:00

By Theodore L. Gatchel, The Providence Journal:

.....
Withdrawals are widely recognized as being difficult operations. During a withdrawal, your forces are getting smaller while those of the enemy are remaining constant or growing. At some point, the ratio becomes such that it is very tempting for the enemy to attack in order to claim credit for having driven you out. Exceptional discipline is required to prevent a withdrawal from turning into a rout.

Withdrawals also pose psychological challenges. Individual soldiers may become more risk averse than usual. Who wants to be the last soldier to die in a war, the outcome of which has already been determined?

As is always the case in war, predicting how the withdrawal from Afghanistan will play out is fraught with uncertainty. Although there are an unlimited number of possibilities, three are particularly worth considering.

The best possible outcome, for example, might be similar to that of the British-French evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula in World War I. Following an abortive campaign there in 1915, designed to break the stalemate that had developed in France and Belgium and to open a supply line to Russia through the Turkish Straits, the Allies decided to withdraw.

By the end of 1915, the Allies had more than 100,000 troops at Gallipoli spread between two widely separated beachheads. The problems associated with evacuating such a large number of troops who were in close contact with the enemy were so overwhelming that some experts predicted the operation would end in disaster. Nevertheless, during December 1915 and early January 1916, the entire force was withdrawn with the loss of only one man.

Historians still debate the reasons for this success. The Allies, on one hand, took exceptional care in preparing for the evacuation, slowly reducing the size of the force at night while using a variety of deceptions to hide their moves.

Because available Turkish records are limited, determining why they did not actively oppose the evacuation is more difficult. Although they conducted some limited attacks, the most logical explanation is that, given the need for troops in other theaters, they were unwilling to take more casualties in the process of forcing the Allies to do something they were already doing.

In contrast to the evacuation from Gallipoli, the worst-case situation is illustrated by a British withdrawal in Afghanistan during the first of three wars the British fought in that country during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Having installed and supported an unpopular Afghan leader on the country's throne, the British faced a deteriorating military situation during the winter of 1841. As a result, they decided in 1842 to withdraw their force of 4,500 troops and 12,000 family members and camp followers from Kabul to the relative safety of British-held Jalalabad, a distance of approximately 100 miles through difficult terrain.

Afghan irregulars harassed the force for the entire journey, capturing a number of British officers and their families. With the exception of some deserters, the remainder of the force was almost entirely killed by either the cold weather or enemy action. Only one man, Dr. William Brydon, survived to reach Jalalabad.

As the date for withdrawing significant numbers of U.S. forces from Afghanistan approaches, Americans can hope that the process mirrors that of the Allies at Gallipoli. At the same time, we should also hope that the administration is prepared to take whatever measures are necessary to prevent the type of catastrophe the British endured in Afghanistan in 1842.

Col. Theodore L. Gatchel (USMC, ret.), is a military historian and a professor emeritus of operations at the Naval War College. The views here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Naval War College, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.

Happy 4th....

2011-07-04T08:55:00.001-07:00

Obama: I Am Opposed to a Dumb War

2011-06-24T06:57:00.001-07:00

Barack Obama made to an anti-war rally in Chicago on October 2, 2002. Here are the parts of the speech which were reverberating in my head as I poured my first cup of coffee this morning:

Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.

.....

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor [He enlisted 1/18/1942; Pearl Harbor was 12/7/41] was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.

I don’t oppose all wars.

After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

.....

I know that even a successful war against ~~Iraq~~ the Taliban will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

..... The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not — we will not — travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

Okay, okay. Some of the words were changed, all right. It was before coffee....

Norm Dicks Wants Out of Af-Pak

2011-06-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

With surprising bluntness, the top House Democrat on defense and appropriations is warning that President Barack Obama can’t ignore the growing “war fatigue” in Congress and must consider steps to accelerate a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Washington Rep. Norm Dicks, an early and enthusiastic supporter of Obama’s policy, says staying in Afghanistan into 2014, as first outlined by the president, will be difficult now given the budget pressures at home and the erratic performance of the chief U.S. partners in the region: Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan.

Between Karzai and Pakistan, I’m looking for a friend in the neighborhood, and I’m having a hard time finding one,I think the military operation has been more successful recently, but all of a sudden — when you are faced with these incredible cuts we’re making in the domestic programs and the social safety net of this country — you know, to do nation building in Afghanistan? I’m having a hard time.

I think it’s like $113 billion on Afghanistan, and there’s Pakistan’s situation, where we know on the border, people are coming across into Afghanistan,” he said. “It’s a serious problem. I just think that there’s a war fatigue setting in up here, and I think the president is going to have to take that into account.”

We need to start seeing if we can do this a little faster,” Dicks said. “I think the American people would overwhelmingly like to see this brought to a conclusion sooner than 2014.

Earth to Obama!

On This Memorial Day, Let's Spend Some Thoughts on the Wounded

2011-05-30T08:39:00.001-07:00

Borrowed from David Wood in the Huffington Post:

American soldiers and Marines walking combat patrols in Afghanistan have suffered a surge of gruesome injuries, losing one or both legs and often their genitals to crude homemade bombs Taliban insurgents bury in dirt roads and pathways.

In some cases, American military surgeons tell The Huffington Post, these traumatic amputations occur so close to soldiers’ hips that it is difficult to fit prosthetic legs, severely limiting the patients’ future mobility and rehabilitation. In addition, the loss of sexual function for formerly healthy young men in their early 20s causes severe anxiety and depression and can wreck new marriages.

The latest wave of severe injuries comes after Gen. David Petraeus ordered U.S. troops in Afghanistan last year to get out of their protective armored vehicles and start walking. "Patrol on foot whenever possible and engage the population," he directed in guidance to his troops last August.

The order was hailed as an essential counterinsurgency tactic used to get closer to the people, pick up intelligence more effectively and demonstrate American resolve to protect local villagers from Taliban insurgents.

But the enemy -- as Petraeus himself is fond of saying -- gets a vote, and the insurgents have attacked the dismounted patrols with a vengeance, planting lethal bombs inches beneath the dusty soil where a footstep can detonate them in blinding flashes.

Insurgents often make the bombs using a plastic bucket packed with explosive ammonium nitrite fertilizer and a simple "trigger" made with two sticks of wood or a discarded plastic bottle that completes a circuit and detonates when crushed. The crude components make the bombs more difficult to detect than those once made with metal parts.

Improvised explosive device (IED) attacks against dismounted troops have skyrocketed, from five in April 2009 to 210 in April 2010 to 376 this past April, according to data gathered and analyzed by the Pentagon’s counter-IED agency, the Joint IED Defeat Organization.

Because dismounted troops walk with their weapons held out in front of them, an IED detonation often blows off the extended arm as well as both legs, according to Army medical staff.

..... the sheer number of IED attacks means that even as troops find more of the bombs, casualties still skyrocket because of all of the devices left undiscovered. IED attacks have caused casualties to dismounted U.S. and allied troops to rise....

Dr. Paul Pasquina, chief of orthopedics and rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., told The Huffington Post:

We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of service members who have not only amputations above the knee but what we call hip disarticulation, meaning they have no femur at all.

So not only are they losing their legs, but half of their pelvis. And we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of casualties returning with testicular injuries or genital loss, and that has severe life-long implications.....

Soldiers and Marines arriving at Walter Reed with both legs blown off usually suffer other extensive injuries. Shrapnel perforates the abdomen, dirt and filth are driven deep into wounds and soft tissue; in some cases, the explosion tears away large patches of skin in an injury called "de-gloving." Heterotopic ossification, or bone growth in fleshy areas, can severely hamper the use of artificial limbs. Infections set in; blood clots can form. And in most cases, the patient arrives with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury, which can hamper rehabilitation.

Pasquina again:

There’s just challenge after challenge, sad story after sad story But at the same time we have had remarkable success, and pretty much 90 percent of it is attributed to the courage our service members have, their determination to recover and reintegrate back into society.

But the loss of sexual function can be "devastating," said Bo Bergeron, chief of physical therapy at Walter Reed. "It’s a pretty big issue when a guy finds out he can’t have any more kids -- and the spouse is sitting there," she told The Huffington Post. In common cases where a young wife has quit her job and flown with the kids a thousand miles to sit at the bedside of her now-disabled husband, "the family situation already is pretty tenuous. It’s just very very difficult," she said. The divorce rate among married patients is above 50 percent.

There's a lot more in David Wood's article. On this Memorial Day, I challenge readers to read the whole thing.

Cost of Wars

2011-05-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Juan Cole's Informed Comment, this is a comparison of the total costs of America's wars in Iraq & Afghanistan to those of the UN /NATO intervention in Libya (which is not illegal in international law).

Guess which one Republicans are angry about.

May Day Announcement: The Real Mission Finally Accomplished.....

2011-05-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan: Lessons Forgotten Are Lessons Unlearned

2011-04-30T07:55:00.000-07:00

The Unpleasant, Uncomfortable, Inconvenient Truth.

We Have Come to This.

2011-04-27T22:54:00.000-07:00

At Long Last, We have Retrogressed a Century Back in Time....

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

April 19th is Branch Davidian Day (Republished)

2011-04-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

What Happened 15 18 Years Ago in Waco, Texas?

Today is the ~~15th~~ 18th anniversary of the U.S. government's storming of the Branch Davidians Mount Carmel compound in Waco, Texas. Federal agents released CS tear gas into the building, and several fires broke out, spreading quickly through the structure. Approximately 76 Branch Davidians, 21 of whom were children, were killed in the ensuing blaze. Autopsies confirmed that many of the victims, including David Koresh, had died of single gunshot wounds to their heads. As I recall, no government agent fired a gun during this assault.

This raid culminated from a costly 51-day stand off which stemmedfrom the murder of four ATF agents while they were serving a lawful warrant on Davidian cult leader David Koresh.

This all-time great Michael Ramirez cartoon adequately expresses my own view at the time as to where the true responsibility for this tragedy lies.
David Koresh, a false prophet, broke the peace. Davidians had attacked my government, back in the days when it actually governed.

Petition!

2011-04-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

I thought you might be interested in this petition. I've signed it.

I am heartsick at Obama's spinelessness and failure to use the Bully Pulpit to change the political discourse in our country. Think of all that he could have done these past two+ years had he had the courage to use these Republian't over-reaches as the "teaching moments" that they are.

I thought Obama was a man of integrity, vision, and courage, but it seems that his courage existed only in my hopeful heart - it seems to have evaporated with his inauguration as our President.

I'm not asking him to blame the Republican'ts. I am asking him to speak the truth to Americans about the lies, distortions, fear-mongering, and the utter contempt for our democracy that permeates today's Republican't party.

I voted for Obama because I believed him when he said he was "all fired up and ready to go".

Sadly for me and ruinously for our country, Obama has turned out to be am empty suit - he gives beautifully crafted inspiring speeches, but when confronted with the Republican't party's obstructionist, revisionist manipulations intended to turn our beloved country into an oligarchy comprised of the Rulers, and the Ruled , he is silent, capitulating to the demands of the Repubs BEFORE negotiations have even begun.

Has Obama pointed out that our country is in danger of becoming a third-world bankrupt nation as a result of Bush's two unfunded wars, and Bush's choice to shower un-necessary tax cuts upon our richest Americans, thereby ensuring that the United States would soon face such a severe and crippling loss of income that the government would be penniless? No, Obama has not.

Instead, he is colluding with the Republican'ts to eliminate/privatize our country's safety nets for seniors and the needy by extending the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthiest one per-cent (let's call it what it is: "CEO-corporate-welfare") and approving the largest budget cuts EVER foisted upon the American people in the history of our nation.

Just as the Republican'ts continually attacked Clinton in an attempt to marginalize him and render him ineffective (which Bill actively aided and abetted through his juvenile behaviors), so Obama has apparently been rendered mute and irrelevant by the continuing barrage of lies that attempt to paint him as alien and illegitimate.

The Republican'ts are well aware that the cuts for which they so loudly advocate are cuts that will completely derail, if not end, our embryonic economic "recovery" from the "Big Recession-Almost-Another-Depression". That is their hidden goal": deprive the government of funding, then declare an economic "crisis"/"disaster" (ignoring the fact that it has been largely created by the Republican'ts) and push through the punitive and destructive social agenda that would undo the social safety net, and establish the United Corporation of America.

The strategies employed by the Republican'ts over the last several decades are the legacies of Reagan's poisonous sound bite that defined government as "The Problem", rather than "The Solution" - a complete rejection of our Founders who envisioned an informed citizenry electing members of Congress who would work TOGETHER for the good of the country - not just for the greedy Corporations and their CEO's. .

Today, Reagan's words are enshrined as the mantra of the Republican't party. More significantly and regrettably, they are hostile and hopeless words which, to this very day, remain completely UNCHALLENGED.

In an "Alice-in-Wonderland" moment, which has been inflicted upon us by the greed and speculation of Wall Street CEO's and their corporate boards, those scoundrels have received huge governmental bail-outs and "bonuses", while non-corporate America is mired in a wasteland of growing income disparity. The increasingly widening income gap between the top one-per cent and the rest of our citizens is slowly but surely turning America into a divided nation of those who have money and power and those who have neither.

The terrible economic disparity which has led to an increasing number of Americans who are jobless and without any economic "bailout", many of whom are losing their homes, while simultaneously being confronted with rising prices for health insurance, food, and gas - to name but three necessities of daily living now moving beyond reach for too many of our fellow citizens.

I thought Obama had the courage of his convictions - sadly, I was wrong - VERY wrong. I am grieving for Obama the Candidate - where is he? What happened to him that he refuses to lead, refuses to inform and educate our citizens?

I did not vote for Obama the Cowardly Appeaser. I want Obama the Candidate to come out of hiding and fulfill his campaign promises to stand up and lead our divided and increasingly despairing nation.

On Bullies & Bullying

2011-04-10T00:05:00.000-07:00

Robert Reich is always right. "Right" meaning "correct". That's the way I see it these days. I know of no one getting the correct view on public events better than he nails down.

His last post addresses the problem of Right Wing Bullies sucking the life out of American democracy.

When I was a small boy I was bullied more than most, mainly because I was a foot shorter than than everyone else. They demanded the cupcake my mother had packed in my lunchbox, or, they said, they’d beat me up. After a close call in the boy’s room, I paid up. Weeks later, they demanded half my sandwich as well. I gave in to that one, too. But I could see what was coming next. They’d demand everything else. Somewhere along the line I decided I’d have a take a stand. The fight wasn’t pleasant. But the bullies stopped their bullying.

I hope the President decides he has to take a stand, and the sooner the better. Last December he caved in to Republican demands that the Bush tax cut be extended to wealthier Americans for two more years, at a cost of more than $60 billion. That was only the beginning — the equivalent of my cupcake.

Last night he gave away more than half the sandwich — $39 billion less than was budgeted for 2010, $79 billion less than he originally requested. Non-defense discretionary spending — basically, everything from roads and bridges to schools and innumerable programs for the poor — has been slashed.

The right-wing bullies are emboldened. They will hold the nation hostage again and again.

In a few weeks the debt ceiling has to be raised. After that, next year’s budget has to be decided on. House Budget Chair Paul Ryan has already put forward proposals to turn Medicare into vouchers that funnel money to private insurance companies, turn Medicaid and Food Stamps into block grants that give states discretion to shift them to the non-poor, and give even more big tax cuts to the rich.

There will also be Republican votes to de-fund the new health care law.

“Americans of different beliefs came together,” the President announced after agreement was reached. It was the “largest spending cut in our history.” He sounded triumphant. In fact, he’s encouraging the bullies onward.

All the while, he and the Democratic leadership in Congress refuse to refute the Republicans’ big lie — that spending cuts will lead to more jobs. In fact, spending cuts now will lead to fewer jobs. They’ll slow down an already-anemic recovery. That will cause immense and unnecessary suffering for millions of Americans.

The President continues to legitimize the Republican claim that too much government spending caused the economy to tank, and that by cutting back spending we’ll get the economy going again.

Even before the bullies began hammering him his deficit commission already recommended $3 of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increase. Then the President froze non-defense domestic spending and froze federal pay. And he continues to draw the false analogy between a family’s budget and the national budget.

He is losing the war of ideas because he won’t tell the American public the truth: That we need more government spending now — not less — in order to get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession.

That we got into the Great Recession because Wall Street went bonkers and government failed to do its job at regulating financial markets. And that much of the current deficit comes from the necessary response to that financial crisis.

That the only ways to deal with the long-term budget problem is to demand that the rich pay their fair share of taxes, and to slow down soaring health-care costs.

And that, at a deeper level, the increasingly lopsided distribution of income and wealth has robbed the vast working middle class of the purchasing power they need to keep the economy going at full capacity.

“We preserved the investments we need to win the future,” he said last night. That’s not true. The budget he just approved will cut Pell grants to poor kids, while states continue massive cutbacks in school spending — firing tens of thousands of teachers and raising fees at public universities. The budget he approved is cruel to the nation’s working class and poor.

It is impossible to fight bullies merely by saying they’re going too far.

Because I am so frickin' pissed off that I don't have sufficient patience, energy, or voice to compose my own outrage, I will allow Secretary Reich to speak for me. Anytime.

The Progressive Agenda Is Progressive Taxation

2011-04-08T09:59:00.001-07:00

Joseph E. Stiglitz rightly calls our United Corporations of America as government Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.

Today, 1% of the people take nearly a 25% of the nation’s income. In terms of wealth as opposed to income, the top 1% control 40% of America's wealth. 25 Years ago the top 1% took in 12% of the income and controlled 33% of our wealth.

The author continues,

One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats.

That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top.

In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran.

While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today.

The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich.

Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance).

Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie.

That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.

First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible.

Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.

Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on.

But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead.

None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.

Economists are not sure how to fully explain the growing inequality in America. The ordinary dynamics of supply and demand have certainly played a role: laborsaving technologies have reduced the demand for many “good” middle-class, blue-collar jobs. Globalization has created a worldwide marketplace, pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled workers overseas. Social changes have also played a role—for instance, the decline of unions, which once represented a third of American workers and now represent about 12 percent.

But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.

When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent.

When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real.

Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that.

Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain.

The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them.

It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.

In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.

As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.

Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

It's so clear to me that where the money must go is on to main street. That's where demand must be created. Investors don't invest in inventory or employees if their bank accounts are swollen with riches saved from taxes. They expand their investments. What crap. They only invest in inventory and jobs if there are people out there with money in their pockets to buy needed products and services. Cutting public employees back is self-destructive.

The crux of the Progressive agenda in this day and age is progressive taxation. What say you, Readers? It's not on the table? Why not? What for did we elect that leader-turned-charlatan president? I don't know about my readers, but I voted for him to set the friggin' table.

The Corporatists call Progressivism, "Socialism". I want to vote for a 21st Century Patrick Henry who will say,

If this be socialism, make the most of it.

Afghanistan????

2011-04-06T07:46:00.000-07:00

Fearguth, over at Bildunblog, always asks rhetorical questions I cannot answer.

Bob Herbert's Last Words (for awhile): "Losing Our Way"

2011-03-27T00:18:00.001-07:00

This is this distinguished columnist's swansong. He's the latest gifted observer to leave the New York Times. We should pay attention to what he has to say.

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.

Mark his words, Brothers and Sisters. They bear repeating.

Who Lost Libya?

2011-03-18T19:45:00.000-07:00

As I finally get down to writing this the United Nations Security Council has voted 10-0 with two abstentions to The UN’s principal policy-making panel yesterday voted 10-0, with five abstentions, to adopt a resolution that establishes a no-fly zone over Libya, demands a cease-fire and allows “all necessary measures” to protect civilians “excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” Brazil, China, Germany, India and Russia abstained.

At this time, so late in the day, I'm inclined towards ambivalence between classifying this decision D.O.A. (dead on arrival) or O.B.E. (overtaken by events). The odious Muammar Qaddafi is about to close exterminate his eastern opponents in Benghazi. One thing about Qaddafi: he's not a dithering intellectual, is he? But, as it always or often said, America often gets around to doing the right thing but not at the right time: always too little, too late.

So, for the last month, I've been burning to ask my readers, who lost Libya? And my regulars know I never ask a question unless I have a plausible answer. Who lost the chance to oust Qaddafi when he was hanging by a little more than threads?

My answer is George Bush, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair and Barack Obama have surged and splurged the Anglo-American military, economic, and diplomatic capital so deeply into the red in Iraq and Afghanistan that the unipolar prerogatives promised us in the 21st Century elude our grasp.

I am of two minds. I have always believed that American armed forces existed for defense of the realm. As John Quincy Adams said,

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy ... she is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

However, in the past quarter century I have enthusiastically supported the full use of American military might

when international aggression had to be repulsed (Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait) and,
when ethnic cleansing forced thousands of civilians to flee across international borders (the wars of Yugoslavian dissolution). Both of these circumstances threatened regional international stability.

In both instances, our military objective stopped short of regime change; both military campaigns sought a change in our enemy's policies. Saddam Hussein was forced to withdraw from his occupation of Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was forced out of Bosnia and Kosovo. Both campaigns involved extremely few American Casualties. Both campaigns contained obtainable exit strategies. Neither of these violated the agent dictum of General Douglas MacArthur, not to get involved in a land war in Asia; a dictum which has been violated every day we stay in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This air war over Libya may become Obama's only non-inherited and elective war. Perhaps by whacking on a little guy like Qaddafi so accessible as he is right on the shoulders of the Mediterranean maritime freeway between Southern Europe and North Africa, Obama can have his Grenada.

As I said, I am of two minds.

My second thought is founded on the need to shrink the pentagon budget to the extent that we drown our misguided Iraq and Afghan expeditionary occupations in a bath tub. When I hear advocates of intervention in Libya express opinions to the contrary, I'm convinced that we can't even afford taking cheap shots at Qaddafi. Just think what it will lead to. Take John McCain, who's never seen a war he doesn't like, before the Atlantic Council in Washington on Tuesday, for example:

Of course we have to have a no-fly zone. We are spending over $500 billion dollars, not counting Iraq and Afghanistan, on our nation’s defense. Don’t tell me we can’t do a no-fly zone over Tripoli.

I love the military, I love it, it’s been my life, but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can.

Add McCain's name to my list of Bush, Cheney, Blair, and Obama: this clique of myopic and spendthrift crusaders, together with their corporate sponsors, represent a far bigger threat to American national interest than does little Mo' Qaddafi from Libya.

The Mass Devastation in Japan Is Personal

2011-03-15T17:43:00.000-07:00

We can make a difference by donating to Doctors Without Borders (minimum donation $35) or to the American Red Cross (minimum donation $10).

Game Over: Obama Will Never Become a Transformational Leader

2011-03-15T07:13:00.000-07:00

I'm not an Obama-Hater. I am just no longer a fan. I do not regret campaigning and voting for him in the last general election. I still figure him to have been a better POTUS than John McCain. By far. But I have more than a slight case of buyer's remorse for my not having loved Hillary Clinton more in the 2008 primary. Oh well. I still believe Barry's last name starts with an 'Oh' and not a 'zer0'.

I liked what Max Hastings said about Barry O so much yesterday (As Afghanistan falters and the Middle East burns, how Obama is missing in action), that I just have to amplify parts of his article.

.... Obama’s foreign policy is characterised by caution: towards Iran, China and now Libya.

.... America’s allies are bemused by the almost Trappist silence of this U.S. President, his reluctance to engage with many of the huge things that are happening both to his own country and to the world.

.... He entered office proclaiming ‘yes, we can’, and declared a nobly ambitious agenda.

.... The President, like his Democratic Party, has set his face against doing anything meaningful about America’s unsustainable burden of debt.

.... He proclaimed a commitment to peace in the Middle East, but Israeli stubbornness, endorsed by much of Congress, has confounded him.

.... This cool - indeed cold, cerebral - man understands the world’s and his own country’s problems better than almost any American President in history.

He entered office as a crusader mantled in a glittering white cloak. Yet he lacks a vital political gift, which empowered Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan: the ability to make the American people feel good about themselves.

His remoteness reflects an arrogance rooted in a curious lack of interest in people save as a political study. While the world welcomed Obama as a transformational figure, he shows no sign of wishing to fulfil any such grand role.

Indeed, the White House is obsessed with a single issue: how to get its man re-elected in November 2012.

..... Americans who inhabit the real world - which means the majority - recoil from the Republicans’ excesses as much as we do from the extreme Right in Britain.

They look with gratitude upon a President who, whatever his limitations, never speaks or acts less than rationally. But it is dismaying to see this brilliant man’s accomplishments fall so far short of the world’s hopes.

..... I am still convinced of the power of American creativity and energy to pull this country through its current troubles, to maintain pole position in the world for some decades yet.

I am much less sure, however, about whether Barack Obama will fulfil his extraordinary potential as a national leader.

A Washington admirer of the President urged me: ‘Don’t lose faith. If he gets re-elected, Congress will have to give him a break whether the Republicans like it or not. He may still do fine things that astonish us.’

Yet to do great deeds, a leader must fight tough fights. Obama has sat on his hands while many of the policies he trumpeted when he came to power ... have vanished into the sand.

A warm admirer of the President in 2008 says: ‘I must admit that I’m disappointed in him.’ Millions of Democrats share this view, while millions of Republicans hate him.

For those of us who embraced Obama’s professed idealism and high intelligence back in 2008, his passivity is depressing and frustrating.

Given the way the American system of government works - or often does not work - maybe this would-be visionary President was bound to succumb to the sordid demands of machine politics.

We dreamers will keep hoping Obama may still lay claim to greatness. But he is leaving it awfully late.

Let me explain why I have not included criticisms of specific foreign policy decisions or indecisions.

It used to be said that the occupant of Oval Office in the White House is the most powerful man in the world. That is no longer the case. In this century, armed expeditions into nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan have squandered our national military and economic resources such that the unipolar world promised Americans was D.O.A.

Now we have Lillputin image of - putively - the world's largest and most powerful democracy merely witnessing historic events instead of rising to the challenges they pose.

Down with the Dictatorship of the Corporatariat!

2011-03-13T12:53:00.000-07:00

Alan Grayson is calling out for action against the Dictatorship of the Corportariate.

He reminds us of the bloodshed in Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886, Homestead, Pennsylvania in July 6, 1892 and in Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914.

Then Grayson asks, Did They Die in Vain?

Here and around the world, many people have fought and died, so that you and I would have the right to organize.

And so that 250,000 public workers in Wisconsin would have that right, too.

This is not exactly a new idea...

During Franklin Roosevelt's first term as president, he signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. [protecting] the right to organize. That was over 75 years ago....

I want to see an America that is healthy and wealthy.

They want an America that provides cheap labor to our corporate overlords. An America where the middle class is chained by debt.

We didn't ask for this fight. But we have no choice except to fight back. For the survival of the middle class in America. For us, for our children, and for our grandchildren. And so that the victims in Haymarket, in Homestead and in Ludlow did not die in vain.

As Cardinal Spellman said 45 years ago, "it is a war thrust upon us, and we cannot yield to tyranny."

I'm ready to fight for what's right. What about you?

This Old Earth Is an Angry Planet

2011-03-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

We can barely cope its calamitous natural disasters, not to mention afford man-made catastrophes. I understand that sometimes necessary wars happen; but we should never engage in elective wars. Specifically, we don't have the coin for COINs.

Robert Reich Is Not a Potted Plant

2011-03-03T21:46:00.001-08:00

Where is it? I can't find my Progressive, Republican-hating, red meat blogging voice.

I even started watching teevee. Well MSNBC, anyway. Very all very unsatisfying. For one thing, I am not a planted plant. I'm an interactive dude, especially when I'm sitting in my living room watching or listening to some useless idiot reiterating drivel. I'm even frustrated by the MSNBC pundits Big Ed, Chris Mathews, Larry O'Donnell. I'm glad they're there, of course. But only Sister Rachel cleans off the fat off the bones. There's just so much trivia and distracts even the best-motivated programmers and consumers of the main street media. That's new and old media.

In terms of the newer media, there's a lot more 'Rachels' out there. I'm a big fan of one of them: Robert Reich, Clinton's Secretary of Labor. This guy is right - er, make that 'correct' - on everything. Where has he been wrong?

His voice seems a lonely one and I feel like taking every opportunity to amplify it. Reich is especially impatient with today's Democrats:

Where are the Democrats? Shuffling their feet, looking at the floor.

“Please oh please give us four weeks before you shut us down,” they ask.

“No,” say the Republicans, “you’ll get only two.”

“Well, alright then,” say the Democrats.

Reich says Democrats should be saying:

Hike taxes on the super-rich. Reform the tax code to create more brackets at the top with higher rates for millionaires and billionaires. Absurdly, the top bracket is now set at $375,000 with a tax rate of 35 percent; the second-highest bracket, at 33 percent, starts at $172,000 for individuals. But the big money is way higher.

The source of income shouldn’t matter – salary, wages, capital gains, other unearned income – all should be treated the same. There’s no reason to reward speculators. (Don’t penalize true entrepreneurs, though. If they’re owners who have held their assets for at least twenty years, keep their capital gains low.)

And while you’re at it, raise the ceiling on income subject to Social Security taxes. And bring back the estate tax.

Do this and we can afford to do what we need to do as a nation. Do this and you prevent Republicans from setting the working middle class against itself. Do this and you restore some balance to a distribution of income and wealth that’s now dangerously out of whack.

Do this, Democrats, and you have a chance of being relevant again.

Is anyone listening? Not in the frickin' White House!

Afghanistan: And Another Republican Hits the Dust In the Moonscape...!

2011-02-23T23:28:00.000-08:00

Former Republican Gov. and ex-presidential candidate Mike Huckabee became one of the most high-profile Republicans to express skepticism with the war in Afghanistan, telling reporters on Wednesday that he sees no "end game" in sight, has no confidence in President Hamid Karzai, thinks the country looks "like the surface of the moon" and believes the time has come for an honest, non-political conversation about the next steps.

Huckabee said at an afternoon talk organized by the Christian Science Monitor,

I don't know what to do next.

I don't think any of us know exactly. We are there.

The question is, I'm asking people, 'Tell me, what is it we do to say we are done? Help me to understand that because I'm not sure.'

.... My doubts about Afghanistan happen from being there in January 2006. And when I say my doubts I believe our military is capable of doing whatever they are assigned to do given the resources to do it. But I came away from that experience wondering: What does the end game look like here? I can't see a conclusion.

.... You go to Afghanistan, you look around and you say, 'My gosh, am I in a country or on the surface of the moon? You honestly could not see what it is that can happen here. You can't grow anything but poppies. The cash crop is essentially developing the basis of heroin for Europe... and the government is so incredibly and hopeless corrupt. And I don't see that changing any. I don't know of anyone who says 'what a great bunch of people we have over there, running the thing.' I mean we all, even our own administration, whether it is Bush or Obama, kind of throws up their hands and thinks that the Karzai government is mindlessly corrupt.

It's Quicksandistan, Mike. Whatsa' matter? Don't want any part of being President until we're out?

What Benjamin Frelka says.....

2011-02-22T21:56:00.000-08:00

People from all over the world, including Cairo and China, have been ordering pizzas for the Progressives in Madison, but Scott Walker's a cheap guy.

Progressives Need a National Leader

2011-02-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

No need to cast about any longer looking for one.

Watch This Space: Russ Feingold's New PAC!

2011-02-16T08:20:00.001-08:00

Overthrowing our Dictatorship of the Corporatariat

Russ Feingold is teaching law school at Marquette University and writing a book on foreign policy. In his spare time he has launched Progressives United, a PAC aimed at mitigating the effects of, and eventually overturning, the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to corporate spending in the U.S. electoral system. This PAC will engage in online mobilization, support for progressive candidates at the local, state and national levels, and hold the media and elected officials accountable on the group's key priorities.

Feingold Says:

In my view -- and the view of many people -- it's one of the most lawless decisions in the history of our country. The idea of allowing corporations to have unlimited influence on our democracy is very dangerous, obviously. That's exactly what it does ... Things were like this 100 years ago in the United States, with the huge corporate and business power of the oil companies and others. But this time it's like the Gilded Age on steroids.

I have signed on but could not get very far because their file-server has been overwhelmed with other Progressives flooding into the site.

I'll be back for more.

It's deja vu All Over Again

2011-02-15T23:01:00.000-08:00

Which Republican aspirant for President said these words?

We have seen tax-and-tax spend-and-spend reach a fantastic total greater than in all the previous 170 years of our Republic.

Behind this plush curtain of tax and spend, three sinister spooks or ghosts are mixing poison for the American people. They are the shades of Mussolini, with his bureaucratic fascism; of Karl Marx, and his socialism; and of Lord Keynes, with his perpetual government spending, deficits, and inflation. And we added a new ideology of our own. That is government give-away programs….

If you want to see pure socialism mixed with give-away programs, take a look at socialized medicine.

No, I don't give answers here anymore; just the questions. Readers wanting the answers have to go here.

Obama Has Turned Me into a caveat lector Blogger.

2011-02-08T09:40:00.000-08:00

Yes, that's
caveat lector:
let the reader beware.

A lot of developments have conspired to squelch my propensity to blog. But nothing, no one has stifled my pretensions as a pundit than Barack Obama. I'm glad he's POTUS, proud that I supported him from the beginning, and all that biz.

But I wanted, hoped, and expected so much more than what we got.

I was taken in. Above and beyond everything else, this embarrassment has all but silenced me. I got nuthin' left, Dear Readers.

Fool you once, shame on me; fool you twice, shame on you.

I Love This President!

2011-02-04T09:01:00.001-08:00

I can't help it. Inspite of all that has happened, I'm glad and proud to have put his signs up in my front yard in February of 2008. Don't like his appeasement of the Weimar Republicans. Don't like his appeasement of the Military Industrial Complex. Not a bit. But I still love him.

Maybe there's a little smidgeon of buyer's remorse that Hillary didn't get nominated. Would she have been a better fighter from the get-go? Don't know. Maybe. But this guy can talk the talk better than anyone current. Even if he can't - or won't - walk the walk.

He's still a keeper.

Get Off Mubarek's Fence, Obama!

2011-01-30T07:59:00.001-08:00

The people of Egypt are working to unseat a murderous dictator who has long been armed and supported by the U.S. government at U.S. taxpayer expense.

Mubarak has installed as vice president the man who has overseen the torture of U.S. prisoners at the behest of the U.S. government.

This will not do. Mubarak and his appointees must go, and the people of Egypt must be left free to elect their leaders.

Many myths about what this means are dispelled by this recording of a conversation on Friday with an activist in Cairo: audio.

Readers, please contact the White House and encourage President Obama to take the side of Egypt's people and urge the Egyptian military to refuse illegal orders to attack civilians.

The Party of Abraham Lincoln Is No More

2011-01-27T08:01:00.000-08:00

From Abraham Lincoln's first State Of The Union on December 3, 1861:

In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class--neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families--wives, sons, and daughters--work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class.

.....Again, as has already been said, there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years back in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.

The GOP has morphed into social Darwinism.

Julian Assange on Bradley Manning

2011-01-25T07:21:00.001-08:00

In an exclusive interview with msnbc’s Cenk Uygur, the WikiLeaks chief denies that he conspired to commit espionage with U.S. Army Specialist Bradley Manning, asserting that such claims are “absolute nonsense.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Republican Plays the Racist Card Face-Up

2011-01-20T07:51:00.000-08:00

Speaking of the 'unborn' on the C(hristian)NS network, Ex-Senator Rick Santorum, openly said, what is contemporaneously spoken of only in code:

The question is, and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer -- is that human life a person under the constitution? And Barack Obama says no. Well if that human life is not a person then I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say 'now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people.'

I'd say that this ol' boy was holding trump in his hand for some time. So, I got nothin' to say.

2nd Amendment Remedies

2011-01-18T07:26:00.000-08:00

What Would Martin Have Said?

2011-01-17T08:06:00.001-08:00

In the decades since civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated, we’ve seen some pretty brazen appropriations of his legacy.

But Pentagonistas have topped even the most outrageous of these.

Last Thursday, Jeh C. Johnson, general counsel for the Defense Department, at a commemoration of King’s legacy asked and answered his own question:

I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.

..... I draw the Good Samaritan parallel to our own servicemen and women deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes. [They] have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people. Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness -- the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968.

No, they can't get away with this: sanitizing this bad war with their sanitized Martin Luther King: MLK would have said of BHO's Afghanistan-Pakistan project the same thing he said about LBJ's Vietnam-Cambodia project: that it is counter-productive of American national interests.

I'll let the un-sanitized Dr. King speak for himself:

Afghanistan. Out. Now.

2011-01-13T07:43:00.000-08:00

63% of Americans agree.

General Petreaus' Potemkin Strategy

2011-01-08T09:06:00.001-08:00

According to the myth, Russian minister Grigory Potemkin directed the erection of fake settlements to fool Russian Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. According to this story, Potemkin, who led the Crimean military campaign, had hollow facades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of her new conquests, thus enhancing his standing in the empress' eyes.

Flash forward to the 21st Century. Now we have the Pentagon's project in Afghanistan: a transplant of Western parliamentary democracy into medieval Afghanistan. This project is starting its 11th year.

The newest wrinkle in this Panglosian adventure is an effort to graph on to Afghanistan an international corporate presence.

According to a fantastic (my carefully chosen adjective) article in Business Week magazine, General David H. Petraeus is inviting international corporations such as, General Electric, Daimler, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Honeywell International and Boeing for more than a Pentagon-funded look-see. He's trying to sell corporate bosses on Afghanistan as a virginal investors' land of opportunity.

Never mind the protracted violence, embedded corruption, absent infrastructure and 90% illiteracy that afflicts Afghanistan.

I'm not sayin' - just askin' - if we ought not to take a huge chunk out of the Pentagon's elective budget and apply those extra investment dollars stateside?

How's the Surge Going?

2010-12-27T19:52:00.001-08:00

Dial 1-800-NOT-WELL!

As we enter the tenth year of our Afghanistan War/Occupation/Nation-Build, taking stock is as timely as it is inevitable. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published two maps of Afghanistan depicting the progress of NATO's counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.

The contrast was striking!

These maps are used by U.N. and NGO personnel to measure the dangers of traveling and operating in Afghanistan's districts. Nic Lee, director of the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office was quoted:

The country as a whole is dramatically worse off than a year ago, both in terms of the insurgency's geographical spread and its rate of attacks .... Vast amounts of the country remain insecure for the unarmed civilians, and more and more areas are becoming inaccessible.

Happy New Year.

Hope, From Now On, Will Look Like This

2010-12-23T20:35:00.000-08:00

Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state.

Chris Hedges gave this speech to the assemblage of Anti-war veterans and activists preparing to be arrested for civil disobedience at the White House gates on Thursday, December 16. Hedges was among the 130+ who were arrested:

Hope, from now on, will look like this.

Hope will not come in trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It will not be realized by chanting packaged campaign slogans or attempting to influence the democratic party. It will not come through our bankrupt liberal institutions-- from the press, to the withered stump that is the labor movement.

Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state. All who resist, all who are here today, keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become an enemy of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice.

It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

If the enemies of hope are finally victorious in this nation, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.

Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state which saturates our airwaves with lies seeks to obliterate. Hope is what this corporate state is determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don't resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations. No. Above all do not think. Obey.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the privileged and the weak. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress.

They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Kandehar or a child in the blighted urban pocket of our nation's capitol diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, enthralled by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics.

Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. And this is because they kneel before the idols of greed and money.

If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. If all we accomplish today is to assure a grieving mother in Baghdad or Afghanistan, a young man or woman crippled physically and emotionally by the hammer blows of war, that he or she is not alone, our act will be successful. But hope cannot be sustained if it cannot be seen.

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair

Show an affirming flame.

(from Auden)

Richard Holbrooke

2010-12-21T20:26:00.001-08:00

I always hearted Richard Holbrooke and mourned his untimely death. Greatly. Even before I read Christiane Amanpour's
Eulogy for Holbrooke. The latter is actually more an eulogy for the times in which Holbrooke contended in behalf of his Nation's interests.

My emphasis added:

What can you say about a problem like Richard Holbrooke? You either loved him or hated him or both. Myself, I loved him. Most of the press did. There is no embarrassment in this. He took us seriously and we took him seriously. We knew how much he valued the platform that we gave to him, but we were not fools and he was not a knave: He plainly wanted the platform just as much, or most of all, not for himself but for his mission. Holbrooke was the rare diplomat who understood the need to make his case publicly—that the press was not always an adversary, but was sometimes an effective method for advancing America’s goals. This was a delicate negotiation—who was the user and who the used, and why; but there were times when America’s goals seemed so obviously right that our professional relationship with Holbrooke, or at least my own, was nothing to trouble our journalistic conscience. He was a very clever man, but in his work he also never lost sight of the moral dimension. He was not a moralist, not by a long shot; but he was a moral man, and he was genuinely committed to using American persuasion and power to lessen the cruelty in the world.

We understood that when Holbrooke told us stuff, he was often spinning madly—as though the sheer force and quantity of words, said loudly and often enough, would change things on the ground or around the bargaining table. It was our job to get beyond the spin. Bluff, burly, profane, unexpectedly sensitive, and hilariously funny, Holbrooke was the quintessential opposite of the pin-striped organization men and women who often populate government service at home and abroad. He was flamboyant. His diplomatic sophistication came in blazing Technicolor. I saw this most unforgettably in Bosnia, where I learned that a reporter sometimes has to be morally engaged, and where Holbrooke experienced his great triumph.

In Bosnia we were a kind of team, the press and the president’s man. Those of us who chronicled the daily outrage of ethnic cleansing—a new genocide, and in Europe—were torn between anger and hope in our feelings about the United States: anger, because the administration in Washington, along with the other Western governments, seemed content for so long just to watch the catastrophe unfold and do nothing to stop it, and hope, because we believed unreservedly that only America could put an end to the slaughter of the innocents. We could not believe our luck when Richard Holbrooke, a trouble-seeking missile, was deployed to the wrenching scene. If anybody could beat the rampaging Serbian dictator who set the sights of his gunners even on small children, Holbrooke could. And he did.

I have heard some people wondering why Richard Holbrooke is being so noisily and universally eulogized. After all, he was never even Secretary of State. As one who witnessed and covered the finest hour of his career, let me try to explain. The story starts in Sarajevo. In 1984, it had been the city of the Winter Olympics. It was a well-known capital of European diversity: Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived there for centuries, intermingled, even intermarried. Throughout the cold war, Yugoslavia was the least Soviet of the Soviet-bloc. But by 1992, with communism overthrown, diversity turned ugly and took up arms, as the extreme assertion of ethnic identity—more specifically, Serbian and Croatian identity—led to war. When, like Croatia, Bosnia sought its own post-communist independence, it brought down upon itself the xenophobic wrath of Serbia, which directed Orthodox Christian Serbs in Bosnia to carve out their own ethnically pure statelet, and to terrorize and even destroy the Muslim population of Bosnia. They set up concentration camps. They made systematic rape into an instrument of war. They besieged and bombarded Sarajevo and other cities for three and a half years.

I remember the blood-spattered snow that first freezing winter of war in Sarajevo; the rosettes made by mortars crashing into streets, sidewalks, playgrounds, hospitals, homes, and marketplaces. I remember the men, women, and children shot by snipers as they walked to work, or ran to school, or stood in line to collect water. (The Serbs had cut off the water and the electricity.) That winter we watched the people of Sarajevo—including the former Yugoslavia’s cultural and educated elite—cut down trees to drag home for firewood, to stay fed and to keep warm. Little food made it past the siege. The city’s old Lion’s Cemetery quickly filled up. The graves, hastily dug with small wooden markers, spilled into the soccer fields and empty ground around the Olympic Stadium, where Torvill and Dean had skated to stardom in better, almost unimaginable days. I would lie awake at night wondering what motivated men to put a child’s head in the sights of their guns. Weren’t they fathers, too? And I wondered bitterly what kind of a world we lived in that could tolerate this for so long.

We journalists were also on the frontlines. We, too, were shelled and sniped at. We lost many friends and colleagues. It was the first time journalists were deliberately targeted, though now this seems a matter of course. We were bloodied in Bosnia, physically, mentally, and morally. I say morally, because from the start of the war none of the great or even small powers, none of the liberal democracies whose societies were founded on the principles of justice, tolerance, and religious equality, showed any interest in intervening to stop it. We heard endlessly that this was just a civil war. “Centuries of ethnic hatred,” “Balkan ghosts,” “all sides are equally guilty”: I can still hear the chilling excuses.

It was in Bosnia that I learned—I do not mean to make my tribute to my friend too personal, but Bosnia, and his role in it, was inseparable from my own education—what it means to really see what you are witnessing and to call it by its right name. When asked why there was not more balance in my reports from Sarajevo, I asked whether balance should mean making a story up, because there was no balance in the story I was covering. Genocide is an imbalanced situation. Should I, in the name of fairness, have drawn a false moral equivalence between victim and aggressor? I could not, and I would not; but I learned that in Sarajevo. It was there that I learned about objectivity—that giving all sides a fair hearing does not mean treating all sides equally, especially in situations of gross humanitarian violence. Treating all sides equally in Bosnia would have made me into an accomplice.

Richard Holbrooke knew this. His gift for listening attentively to all sides was second to none, but he took a side. It was the side of peace and decency—which, in the Balkans in that conflict, meant the side of Bosnia. Even before he became President Clinton’s envoy to Bosnia, he had gone to Bosnia as a private citizen to study the problem and to bear witness. He called it genocide long before governments would. In Sarajevo we kept hearing European diplomats lecture the miserable victims of the siege, “Don’t think that the cavalry is coming over the hill to save you.” But they were wrong. The cavalry did show up, in the person of Richard Holbrooke.

Just as Sarajevo and all of us were plunging into deep despair and exhaustion, the United States finally rallied and down swooped Richard Holbrooke, deployed by President Clinton. For three years Milosevic and his men called the world’s bluff, and then Holbrooke came and called theirs. Armed with the full weight of American resolve—there is no greater, or sadder, example of “better late than never” than America’s entry into the Bosnian conflict—he began to get things done. It would take more than another year—and 8,000 more killed, Muslim men and boys slaughtered in the tiny Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Soon after the massacre the United States and its allies launched a brief bombing raid on Serbian military targets in Bosnia. Milosevic and his thugs quickly caved. Holbrooke was then tasked by President Clinton to negotiate an end to the war. At Dayton, Ohio he did just that. His reputation as a bulldozer with sharp elbows and a gift for knocking heads served the cause of peace. It has held to this day. Richard died the day before the fifteenth anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords.

Two years ago I went back with Holbrooke to Bosnia. In Sarajevo we walked across the bridge where a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and started an earlier slaughter. Ordinary Sarajevans came up to him. They had not forgotten what he did, and they wanted to shake his hand. Women and men had tears in their eyes as they thanked America for saving them, for restoring honor and humanity to their country, and to our world. They thanked America by thanking Richard Holbrooke

Is this not an eulogy for professional journalism also?

Julian Assange Is Arrested on Another Day in Infamy

2010-12-07T08:34:00.001-08:00

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was today refused bail and remanded in custody until 14 December over claims he committed sex offenses in Sweden.

Assange writes today in the The Australian. My excerpts & emphasis:

In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia , was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.

If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.

WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain ‘s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.

Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.

..... Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, ... politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: “You’ll risk lives! National security! You’ll endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes.

It can’t be both. Which is it?

It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US , with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan . NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting....

.... In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said
“only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

This is the second time I have posted on Julian Assange in these pages. The first was back on 26 July when I nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not sure I have much to add at this time, except to point out the irony, not to mention the mindless hypocrisy of the self-righteous western media and political leaders when they moralize over Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo's incarceration. He is serving 11 years in China for "inciting subversion of state power".

News Item: More Fraggin' in Afghanistan Goin' On

2010-11-29T07:50:00.001-08:00

Afghan police officer kills 6 NATO service members.

ABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An Afghan border police officer opened fire on NATO troops during a training mission in the east of the country Monday, killing six NATO service members before he was shot dead, NATO and Afghan officials said.

The shooting — the highest toll for NATO forces since nine Americans died in a Sept. 21 helicopter crash — was the latest in a series of shootouts in which Afghan security forces have turned on their NATO partners.

NATO declined to identify the nationalities of the victims. The majority of forces in Nangarhar are American.

NATO is investigating an incident in which two U.S. Marines were killed earlier this month in southern Helmand province, allegedly at the hands of an Afghan army soldier.

Six NATO Soldiers Killed by Man in Afghan Border Police Uniform

....so the headline reads. Have you noticed how American soldiers killed in Afghanistan are now being described as 'NATO Soldiers'? Softens the blow, doesn't it? That's how propaganda works.

People Keep Trying Give Obama Some Spine....

2010-11-24T21:14:00.000-08:00

Read David Cay Johnston's Advice to Barack Obama: Call their Bluff, Mr. President.

Stop the War Coalition

2010-11-22T09:40:00.001-08:00

Thousands of protesters took to the streets to march against the war in Afghanistan today as Nato leaders discussed bringing an end to the nine-year conflict.

Demonstrators were led by military families as they carried anti-war placards and banners against cuts to government spending.

As the march moved from Hyde Park, central London, protesters chanted: 'When they say warfare, we say welfare'. The coalition government has stated that Britain's combat role in Afghanistan will end by 2015.

Guardsman Christopher Davies, who was killed on Wednesday in Helmand, was the 100th British member of the armed forces to die this year after being deployed to Afghanistan.

Many of the protesters said the Government's commitment to end Britain's combat role over the next four years was not soon enough.

Clara Torres, 62, said: 'That's far too long for them to be there. They shouldn't be there in the first place.

Ms Torres, a retired nurse from Richmond, Surrey, who marched with her daughter and baby granddaughter, said: 'We don't own them, Afghanistan is nothing to do with us.

'We should leave now.'

Protestors take part in the Afghanistan: Time to Go demonstration, organised by Stop the War

The demonstration came to a halt in front of the fashionable Cookbook Cafe, on Park Lane.

Diners inside the expensive restaurant looked unsettled as they continued with their lunch.

At Trafalgar Square the rally was addressed by a series of speakers.

Seamus Milne, a commentator for the Guardian, said: 'In Lisbon today the Nato leaders will try to make it appear that they are bringing an end to this war, a war that is now in its 10th year

'This talk of an exit strategy is clearly a sham.'

He continued: 'They're stating that their aim is to withdraw combat troops by 2015.

John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want said: 'We have a message for David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat allies.

'Do not dare to tell us that there is no money for public services and public sector workers.

'We want the £11bn that is being spent on the war in Afghanistan to go on things we need in this country.

'Bring home the troops and bring justice to the people of Afghanistan.'

'Bipartisanship' Is a Filthy Word which Will Bleed Us Dry

2010-11-20T15:16:00.001-08:00

and Obama is a counterfeit Progressive.

I don't care how often the article I post below may have been reposted. I clipped it days before, as soon as I saw it because it perfectly expresses what wakes me up at 2:35 A.M. every morning until I can find my Crane radio (product placement!) and tune it in to real news on the BBC.

Joseph A. Palermo is Associate Professor, American History, California State University, Sacramento. His realm of expertise includes political history, presidential politics, presidential war powers, social movements of the 20th century, social movements of the 1960s, civil rights, and the history of American foreign policy.

I have shortened his original article, D-Day in the Class War, just a tad, adding a little emphasis of my own.

After a decade of stagnant or declining real wages, "bipartisan" schemes are proliferating to shift the burden of Washington policymakers' own catastrophic mismanagement of the nation's fiscal policies right onto the shoulders of working people. The press commentary has been abysmal. All "serious" thinkers out there on television or in print are in full agreement that "entitlements" must take a big hit, along with education and health care.

President Obama's "bipartisan" deficit commission, co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, (sometimes referred to as the "Cat Food Commission" because of the likely dietary changes some senior citizens will have to make if its prescriptions are implemented), wants to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. Another high-profile group, headed by Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin, (which might be called the "Kibble Commission"), wants to strip $650 billion out of the Social Security trust fund with a payroll tax holiday (to be paid back later!) that they believe will create economic growth. So the Cat Food Commission views Social Security in crisis and bordering on insolvency, while the Kibble Commission believes that Social Security can absorb a $650 billion hit. And these are the best and the brightest.

Both "bipartisan" bodies claim that "tough decisions" must be made. Yet their policies are only really tough if you happen to belong to America's struggling working middle class. They want to inflict the "pain" on the government programs that have traditionally given working people a slight leg up. In these "bipartisan" schemes the financial services crooks who wrecked the economy come away smelling like roses.

Are we forgetting that it was working- and middle-class taxpayers who bailed out Wall Street's biggest investment banks in what could be the greatest gesture of working-class benevolence toward the super-rich in American history? Working-class taxpayers also paid for the unemployment insurance and infrastructure projects that were needed following the pillaging of America's housing sector. Working-class taxpayers continue to foot the bill for the bloated military budget and two wars. (They've also sent their sons and daughters off to fight.) And about eight million of them who had jobs in 2005 didn't have them anymore by the middle of 2009.

And how are working taxpayers repaid for the assistance they've given to their fellow citizens of the investing class? They get "commissions" and "foundations" and elite "study groups" that are orchestrating the next giant rip-off of America's middle class.

Few in the press seem to want to educate the public about how we got into this fiscal crisis in the first place or why projected budget surpluses at the beginning of the Bush years were so needlessly squandered. And remember:
Those surpluses were turned into deficits through "bipartisan" agreements, such as the Bush tax cuts, the wars, and the bailouts.

There's also precious little mention of the grotesque inequality in American society these days, which is worse than even during the Gilded Age.

The establishment press seems determined to avoid the obvious conclusion: The rich, the super-rich, and the super-duper rich (as well as the conglomerates) must pay more in taxes to get the United States through the crisis.

Ending the two debilitating wars and rolling back what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" should be next.

And the billions of dollars wasted in corporate welfare each year must be diverted to human needs.

These steps should be the top priorities before any "deficit-reduction plan" is seriously considered -- "bipartisan" or otherwise. At this moment in American history, after large swathes of the middle class have been wiped out, the last thing we need is another elite-driven assault on the living standards of working people.

Even though it was Wall Street that fostered the conditions that produced our current economic state, we're told from pundits across the political spectrum that we mustn't tax the rich because it will stymie job-creating investments. But I'm sure Lloyd Blankfein, Hank Paulson, Angelo Mozilo, and their ilk can afford to kick in a little more in taxes to save the country they claim (when under oath at least) to love so much.

In the 2010 midterm elections, the super-rich and their business associations threw around hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign cash like it was so much chump change. And they're gearing up to set new spending records in 2012. They appear to be very civic-minded plutocrats. Yet where is their "pain" and "sacrifice" when it comes to reducing the federal deficit? What "tough decisions" that affect their bottom lines are they being asked to make? And what happened to the quaint notion that those who have so greatly benefited from the opportunities American society has bestowed upon them having a special obligation to pay a little more when their country is in crisis? We're all in this together, right?

President Obama and the Tea Party Congress will most likely end up culling the absolute worst elements from the deficit reduction plans put forth so far, tie them together into a "package," slap a "bipartisan" label on it (which inside the Beltway is close to godliness), and then ram it down our throats by triangulating against what remains of the progressives in Congress.

Politicians, pundits, commentators, and citizens must choose a side now. You're either on the oligarchy's side or on the people's side. It's D-Day in the class war.

We've been told lately, again from "bipartisan" sources, that American soldiers will be fighting and dying in Afghanistan well past Obama's July 2011 "deadline," and the war will continue until at least the end of 2014, (at which time they'll just move the bar to 2018 or 2020 or 2030). Newly-minted "deficit hawks" should ask the question: Is it worth it to drop another $350 billion into Afghanistan? Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute, and others like him, think so, but they aren't making an argument for staying in Afghanistan -- they're manufacturing consent. Now the Peter Petersons and the rest of them are manufacturing consent on the deficit too.

The Republicans have already successfully painted the Democratic president as being outside the mainstream. They've vilified his every move and have suggested that there's a huge conspiracy behind his agenda aimed at extinguishing everything that is great and wholesome about America. With control of the House of Representatives they'll go on fishing expeditions to dredge up anything that can be construed as "corrupt." They'll dirty him up while they block any progress that might improve the lives of ordinary Americans. The people will continue to be perpetually angry and disappointed.

It's not surprising that in 2010 Democratic base voters couldn't match the Republicans vote for vote. We're told that the progressives must organize and mobilize to fight back in the coming years against the right-wing onslaught, which is true. Workers in France and Greece and college students in London are engaging in the kind of protests against austerity that should be happening here.

I guess we're going to find out if a career legislator (in the Illinois State House and the U.S. Senate) can make the adjustment from being one voice among many to take command as president. On the campaign trail it seemed self-evident that Obama would make an extremely effective chief executive. But two years later, it appears he has the temperament of a legislator. He was a great campaigner, but in power he has been a very weak leader ...accepted far too many a priori limits on moving his legislative agenda forward ....It's time for President Obama to tap into his inner community organizer.

Personally, I think the professor is just trying to end his otherwise excellent and objective essay by spinning us an up-note note. I think we've see Obama's inner community organizer. It's too late to tap into it. And there's not much there, there. Now is the time to search for a new horse to switch to, if even in mid-stream; because in two more years of this bipartisanship, our current mount will be hopelessly down stream.

The Republican Plan is the Same Ol' Deal

2010-11-18T20:41:00.000-08:00

Obama Betrayed Himself

2010-11-07T18:51:00.000-08:00

And the rest of us, too!

Marshall Ganz helped devise the grass-roots organizing model for the Obama campaign. His most recent book is "Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement." He is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University.

Ganz Tells Us How Obama Lost His Voice, And How He Can Get It Back:

President Obama entered office wrapped in a mantle of moral leadership. His call for change was rooted in values that had long been eclipsed in our public life: a sense of mutual responsibility, commitment to equality and belief in inclusive diversity. Those values inspired a new generation of voters, restored faith to the cynical and created a national movement.

Now, 18 months and an "enthusiasm gap" later, the nation's major challenges remain largely unmet, and a discredited conservative movement has reinvented itself in a more virulent form.

This dramatic reversal is not the result of bad policy as such; the president made some real policy gains. It is not a consequence of a president who is too liberal, too conservative or too centrist. And it is not the doing of an administration ignorant of Washington's ways. Nor can we honestly blame the system, the media or the public — the ground on which presidential politics is always played.

It is the result, ironically, of poor leadership choices.

Abandoning the "transformational" model of his presidential campaign, Obama has tried to govern as a "transactional" leader. These terms were coined by political scientist James MacGregor Burns 30 years ago. "Transformational" leadership engages followers in the risky and often exhilarating work of changing the world, work that often changes the activists themselves. Its sources are shared values that become wellsprings of the courage, creativity and hope needed to open new pathways to success. "Transactional" leadership, on the other hand, is about horse-trading, operating within the routine, and it is practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.

The nation was ready for transformation, but the president gave us transaction. And, as is the case with leadership failures, much of the public's anger, disappointment and frustration has been turned on a leader who failed to lead.

Obama and his team made three crucial choices that undermined the president's transformational mission.
He abandoned the bully pulpit of moral argument and public education.
He chose to lead with a politics of compromise rather than advocacy.
He chose to demobilize the movement that elected him president.
By shifting focus from a public ready to drive change — as in "yes we can" — he shifted the focus to himself and attempted to negotiate change from the inside, as in "yes I can."

During the presidential campaign, Obama inspired the nation not by delivering a poll-driven message but by telling a story that revealed the person within — within him and within us .....

On assuming office, something seemed to go out of the president's speeches, out of the speaker and, as a result, out of us. Obama was suddenly strangely absent from the public discourse. We found ourselves in the grip of an economic crisis brought on by 40 years of anti-government rhetoric, policy and practices, but we listened in vain for an economic version of the race speech. What had gone wrong? Who was responsible? What could we do to help the president deal with it?

And even when he decided to pursue healthcare reform as his top priority, where were the moral arguments or an honest account of insurance and drug industry opposition?

In his transactional leadership mode, the president chose compromise rather than advocacy. Instead of speaking on behalf of a deeply distressed public, articulating clear positions to lead opinion and inspire public support, Obama seemed to think that by acting as a mediator, he could translate Washington dysfunction into legislative accomplishment. Confusing bipartisanship in the electorate with bipartisanship in Congress, he lost the former by his feckless pursuit of the latter, empowering the very people most committed to bringing down his presidency.
Seeking reform from inside a system structured to resist change, Obama turned aside some of the most well-organized reform coalitions ever assembled — on the environment, workers' rights, immigration and healthcare.
He ignored the leverage that a radical flank robustly pursuing its goals could give a reform president — as organized labor empowered FDR's New Deal or the civil rights movement empowered LBJ's Voting Rights Act. His base was told that aggressive action targeting, for example, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee — where healthcare reform languished for many months — would reflect poorly on the president and make his job harder. Threatened with losing access, and confusing access with power, the coalitions for the most part went along.
Finally, the president demobilized the widest, deepest and most effective grass-roots organization ever built to support a Democratic president. With the help of new media and a core of some 3,000 well-trained and highly motivated organizers, 13.5 million volunteers set the Obama campaign apart. They were not the "usual suspects" — party loyalists, union staff and paid canvassers — but a broad array of first-time citizen activists. Nor were they merely an e-mail list. At least 1.5 million people, according to the campaign's calculations, played active roles in local leadership teams across the nation.
But the Obama team put the whole thing to sleep, except for a late-breaking attempt to rally support for healthcare reform. Volunteers were exiled to the confines of the Democratic National Committee. "Fighting for the president's agenda" meant doing as you were told, sending redundant e-mails to legislators and responding to ubiquitous pleas for money....

During the 2008 campaign, transformational leadership defied conventional wisdom. Funds were raised in wholly new ways. Organizers set up shop in states that no Democratic president had won in recent times. Citizens were engaged on a scale never before imagined .....

Now Obama must take a deep breath, step back, reflect on the values that drew him into public life in the first place and acknowledge responsibility for his mistakes. He must reverse the leadership choices of the first half of his term. His No. 1 mission must be to speak for the anxious and the marginalized and to lead us in the task of putting Americans to work rebuilding our future. He must advocate, not merely try to mediate in a fractious, divided Washington. And he must again rely on ordinary citizens to help us move forward.

Although the stakes are greater than ever, only by rediscovering the courage for transformational leadership can he — with us — begin anew.

Let it be so.

Will the Real 'Citizens United' Please Stand Up?

2010-10-25T17:46:00.000-07:00

I feel as if I've wandered with Alice down the rabbit hole and into the midst of "Wonderland". I am heartsick to think that the prognosticators who predict a Republican't sweep on 2 November could be correct.

As Nancy Pelosi has pointed out, this election is about saving our Democracy from the rabid Republican't-Tea Party-ers who want to return us to the nineteenth century. The right is totally energized, the Democrats largely silent. Sadly, the Democrats continue to behave as if they were the victims of spousal abuse, trying to minimize themselves so that they won't incur the verbal attacks inflicted upon them by the vituperative, cynical, hypocritical, obstructionist Republican'ts.

How many of us know that we received a tax cut from the Obama administration? Not many because Obama did what was policy-right - not what was politically expedient and crass (like W did). Obama chose to NOT send out a check to everyone as Bush did - a check that gratuitously stated "From President GW Bush". Instead, Obama's tax cut put money into people's paychecks so that they immediately had more money in their own hands. Bad re-election politics, good economic policy.

Did you know that numerous Republican't governors and Republican't members of Congress publicly rail against Obama's stimulus money while privately imploring the Federal government to give them some of the stimulus money for their states, acknowledging in their letters of request that the effect of the stimulus monies Obama managed to push through Congress (without bipartisan support) are necessary and helpful for their states?

Did you know that most, if not all, of America's largest corporations paid NO taxes whatsoever last year, but the Republican'ts continue to hammer Democrats with being anti-corporations and pro-taxes, and constantly tell us that corporations in America are over-taxed and need relief. How do you give relief to large corporations who pay exactly NOTHING in federal taxes? Note that there is no comment in the MSM to point out that these ads are NOT TRUE.

Nancy Pelosi made a significant statement Friday night on Keith Olbermann's show which needs to be shouted from the rooftops: In the first eight months of 2010, more jobs were created under the Obama administration than were created during all of Bush's eight years in office!

Even more frightening is the fact that members of the Republican't party are so certain they will be in control of Congress once again, that they are openly appealing to white voters using racist and fear-mongering scare tactics, blaming minorities for the country's economic woes, and are openly planning to challenge and intimidate minority voters who attempt to vote in various swing districts and states, and most egregiously, in some states running ads urging minority voters NOT to VOTE. They are publicly declaring their intent to launch impeachment proceedings against Obama (as a way of rendering him politically impotent) and are gearing up to begin holding hearings immediately in 2011, while also promising to return the country to their failed policies which created the economic mess in which we are still mired.

What angers me the most is that after obstructing Obama at every opportunity, and offering NO solutions of their own, is the frighteningly real danger that the very people responsible for all the financial carnage bequeathed to Obama, the lying, hypocritical, Republican't nay-sayers will be rewarded with control of Congress so they can finish the demolition of our Constitution and our democracy begun under Reagan and almost completed under Bush II, unless we get Democrats to understand the extreme urgency of voting on Tuesday, 2 November 2010.

Please don't let that happen. Vote to save our Democracy. Vote Democratic on Tuesday 2 November 2010.

Hillary Speaks up on Progressive Taxation!!!

2010-10-14T08:51:00.001-07:00

When I heard Hillary Clinton's voice on BBC this morning, I woke up with a start. She was saying:

It's absolutely unacceptable for those with means in [inaudible] not to be doing their fair share to help their own people while taxpayers in Europe, the United States and other contributing countries are all chipping in....The most important step [inaudible] can take is to pass meaningful reforms to expand its tax base. [Inaudible] cannot have a tax rate of 9 per cent of GDP when land owners and all the other elites do not pay anything or pay so little it’s laughable. The government must require that the economically affluent and elite support the government and people of [inaudible].

I was excited. I thought she was speaking of my own, native, banana republic. Then as I became fully awake, I discovered she was just talking about Pakistan.

The BBC's Syed Shoaib Hasan in Islamabad went on next to explain that Pakistan's tax system has come in for a great deal of criticism in recent years. Tax collection remains abysmal, he said, and Pakistan's elite routinely evade taxation by using political influence. The worst offenders include landlords and industrialists, some of whom are part of the current government.

Well, I'm still glad Hillary spoke up. I just think she could have gone further. Maybe she could have gone a little global?

Fire Teachers? Wrong Idea! Demobilize the Troops!

2010-10-09T09:32:00.001-07:00

News Item: States Lay Off 58,000 Teachers In September:

State and local governments laid off nearly 58,000 teachers and other education workers in September, the government announced on Friday.

This is symptomatic of the wrong direction our sorry-ass political system is moving in. The greatest danger to our national security comes from our broken economy: we need more trained and better educated workers. Working! And we are firing teachers?

Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the progressive Economic Policy Institute, says,

What the payroll numbers show is unambiguous: teachers were cut. A lot of them. States should have gotten more fiscal relief to keep this from happening. The job loss was 58,000 jobs in state and local education in September. These are teachers and other education workers who would have been expected to come back after the summer -- or start new jobs -- with the new school year.

We need to balance the budget? Reduce the deficit? Then fire the troops. Demobilize them and bring them home. One US soldier in Afghanistan costs $1 million per year. Killing each Taliban soldier costs $50 Million. We can't afford that now.

Convert them to teachers. Troops to Teachers is 16-year-old program which needs to enlarge its talent pool in order to attract the waves of younger troops returning from hot spots such as Iraq and Afghanistan and making the not-always-easy transition to civilian life.

TTT is funded by the Department of Education to the tune of about $14.4 million a year and run by a Defense Department outfit called Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support. Essentially a referral and placement service, TTT provides up to $10,000 for military personnel to obtain their teaching certification; they must be retired or have left their service with at least six years of active duty. Many of the more than 11,000 men and women who have participated in the program are nontraditional first-time teachers, middle-aged former officers, sailors, soldiers and Marines who hope to parlay their skills into a very different kind of service career.

Bring our troops home - alive - and train them to serve in our country's national interests.

Af-Pak: It's Logistics, Stupid!

2010-10-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

“Amateurs talk strategy.
Professionals talk logistics.”

What’s really important in war is to keep the troops supplied with ammo, food and fuel.

The modern US Army uses about 10 times as much fuel as did Gen. Patton’s troops in World War II. And Patton’s army used about 10 times as much fuel per capita as did the American Expeditionary Force in France under Gen. Pershing in World War I.

Fuel logistics is critical when the campaign is in distant Afghanistan.

The enemies of our International Security Assistance Force's (ISAF) now titrate truck traffic into Afghanistan.

Obama's War/Occupation in Afghanistan is far from over in terms of years. But the result? That's been decided.

The results are in.

Af-Pak: Good News from the Front(s)

2010-10-03T09:35:00.001-07:00

Only 35% of International Security Assistance Force's (ISAF) logistics for this occupation or war are dependent on Pakistan.

Suspected militants in southern Pakistan set ablaze more than two dozen tankers carrying fuel for foreign troops in Afghanistan on Friday, highlighting the vulnerability of the U.S.-led mission a day after Pakistan closed a major border crossing.

And on the same day, another supply route to Afghanistan was closed by the Pakistani government after fighting that led to the deaths of three Pakistani soldiers.

The story behind this was that Pakistani soldiers manning a post fired upon American helicopters. Fire was returned and obliterated the outpost.

But the really good news is that only about half the cargo that flows into Afghanistan comes in via one of the two gates from Pakistan. Another 30 percent uses two major routes through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, one via Russia and the other via the Caucasus. The remaining 20 percent -- mostly sensitive items like weapons, ammunition and other critical equipment -- comes in by air.

Whew!

Petraeus or Betrayus?

2010-09-22T07:55:00.000-07:00

What was that? What did he say? In his newest tome of yellow journalism, Obama's Wars, Bob Woodward quotes General David Petraeus as saying,

You have to recognize also that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It's a little bit like Iraq, actually. . . . Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives.

That's what he said and that's why we are where we are: Baraquagmire.

The San Bruno Catastrophe Goes to the State of Infra-Structure in America

2010-09-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

This morning, Huffington Post connects the same dots as my initial reaction did to the San Bruno calamity earlier this week on 9/11/2010.

...natural gas pipeline did fuel a fireball that reached 1000-feet in the air and sparked a frightening blaze. It was no less a tragedy to a community that lost at least four lives and found dozens of their neighbors instantly homeless. And it was no less a reminder that infrastructure improvements are still needed to save lives throughout the United States.

As residents began returning to inspect the damage on Sunday night, they were greeted by a scene almost unimaginable in suburban America. There was no trembling ground that preceded the wrath of mother nature, no trembling hand that preceded the wrath of a bomber. Instead, authorities are still trying to figure out how a 30-inch pipe that was installed in 1956 could do this...

The prime suspect is all too familiar. Terrible infrastructure failures have grabbed headlines in recent years, but not just in the third world countries. They've happened all over the U.S., from New Orleans, La., to Webber Falls, Okla., to Kilauea, Hawaii. On Thursday, it was San Bruno, Calif.

The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the probe to determine what happened. The California Public Utilities Commission has ordered PG&E Corp., the utility company involved, to inspect all of their 5,700 miles of pipeline statewide.

(Read More.)

The U.S. is crisscrossed with more than 2.5 million miles of fuel pipelines, or enough to circle the earth about 100 times. U.S. regulators may now step up inspections and increase the industry’s maintenance costs.

Mark Easterbrook, a pipelines analyst with RBC Capital Markets in Dallas, says,

Regulators will probably look for more integrity spending on pipelines. We’re probably going to see incremental increases in the future, with more attention on older pipelines.

Blaine Leonard civil engineer in Utah and president of the American Society of Civil Engineers says,

Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s in bad shape, but the risk is certainly increased. There’s a lot of hidden infrastructure and we can’t be complacent about it. So much of our economy and quality of life depends on it.

Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, says:

Older pipelines are much more at risk because we didn’t have the protective technology that we do now. Old pipes had either no corrosion protection or were wrapped with material that looked like tar paper.

Pipelines can be inspected using devices called pigs that run through sections of pipe, deploying sensors and cameras to detect cracks, corrosion and other defects from the interior. Companies can also pump fluids through the pipe at high pressure to test integrity, or dig up sections for visual inspections.

If only we could find extra manpower and financial resources, not currently employed in our national interests, to assign to this vital need.

Why I Don't Listen to Obama Any More (Part II)

2010-09-10T19:22:00.000-07:00

News Item: Tony Blair

2010-09-08T09:34:00.003-07:00

Culled from various headlines:

Blair cancels book launch party over protest fears

London, England (CNN) -- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair canceled a launch party for his new book in London Wednesday because of planned protests, his spokesman said.

Of his second London cancellation this week, the unnamed Spokesman said, Blair

did not want to put guests through the unpleasant consequences of the actions of demonstrators of what should have been an enjoyable evening for friends and family .... The party has been postponed indefinitely, (and) will be held sometime in the future. Guests were informed yesterday evening.

Blair's decision came after police made some arrests Saturday in Dublin, Ireland, where he was due for another signing event for his book. A crowd of people, some of them anti-war demonstrators, had gathered outside the shop to protest Blair's role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there were unconfirmed reports of eggs and shoes being thrown at Blair.

Blair said in the statement Monday,

I very much enjoyed meeting my readers in Dublin and was looking forward to doing the same in London. However, I have decided not to go ahead with the signing as I don't want the public to be inconvenienced by the inevitable hassle caused by protesters.

Lindsey German, convener of the Stop The War Coalition, which had planned the protest, said

it was a big victory ..... It shows he is running scared. The people who say we should not protest are denying us the right to persist in asking questions about the war and denying the rights of Iraqis who are still suffering because of Blair's policies.

He will not now attend a function at the Tate Modern gallery in London later, having already pulled out of another book signing in the city.

Paul Conrad, R.I.P.

2010-09-05T08:44:00.001-07:00

Obama: Don't Turn the Page Until You Have Read (Out Loud) What's Written On It

2010-09-03T19:28:00.000-07:00

90 months of war in Iraq come to an end for America? Maybe. Just to open the endless occupation to follow? I don't think so!

Let's review the pages Barack Obama wants to turn:

A Bush-neoCon stampede into war, based upon the mythology that Saddam was tied to al-Qaeda and had a role in 9/11, that he had VX gas, botulism, mustard gas, sarin and anthrax, and was acquiring nuclear weapons.
An American invasion of nation that did not attack us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us — to strip it of weapons it did not have.
4,416 American KIA, 35,000 WIA, more than 25,000 with life-changing injuries and life-long disabilites.
$700 billion in treasury squandered with the meter still running on funding the 50,000 troops still garrisoned there..
Estimates - conservative - of Iraqi war dead run from 70,000 to 100,000.

The new myth is that the surge worked. It has not.

Terrorism has returned.
Iraq’s casualties are back up to where they were before the U.S. surge.
Electricity is off much of the time.
Six months after elections, no government exists; no political consensus has emerged. Iraqi statistics dead, wounded, widowed, orphaned, homeless and exiled continue unabated.

But Purge Success is the myth that Obama wants to perserve. That's why he is in a hurry to turn the page. He is a major stakeholder in mythogizing a surge for Afghanistan.

Why I Don't Listen to Obama Any More

2010-08-14T22:47:00.001-07:00

Whatever would be the point?

America's Summer of Hysteria

2010-08-01T14:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times op-ed page has an article written by Tim Rutten who has just returned from a month spent out of our country. Rutten lists but a few of the many conspiracy theories and regressive policy proposals now openly promulgated not just by right-wing "fringe figures", but by mainstream Republican't congressional and gubernatorial candidates, and by current Republican't office-holders. I strongly encourage your readers to read the complete piece on A25. Here are parts of Rutten's column:

..... it's hard not to conclude that hysteria is now the dominant characteristic of our politics and civic conversation.

How else to explain the fact that questions like secession and nullification — issues that were resolved in blood by the Civil War more than a century ago — have come alive again and are routinely tossed around, not just by fringe figures but by Republican officeholders and candidates?

For example ... a Tennessee congressman who opposes the recently enacted healthcare reforms and is running for governor, told an interviewer that he hopes "the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government."

... GOP candidates for statewide office in various Midwestern and Southern states are promoting the notion that states ought not to enforce any federal law not approved by at least two-thirds of their state legislators. It's as if John C. Calhoun suddenly had risen from the grave and had a talk show

In Nevada, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate has discussed abolishing Social Security and darkly mused over whether Washington's alleged overreaching may require a "2nd Amendment solution." That means guns, a prospect that could be facilitated in one state after another by an outfit called Appleseed, which holds weekend seminars whose participants are given a mix of Minuteman pseudo-history and instruction on marksmanship.

... attempts to repeal sections of the Constitution continue apace. The so-called 10thers, who want to roll back 100 years of federal law and regulation in order to assert rights under the 10th Amendment, are almost unremarkably ubiquitous in the GOP.

Candidates across the country pining for "tea party" support have endorsed repeal of the 17th Amendment, which would end popular election of U.S. Senators and return their selection to state legislatures, a step that theoretically would "restore states' rights."

The most popular such movement involves abolishing or gutting the 10th Amendment as a way to deny American citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. . . . speculates that such children actually are terrorist moles planted here to grow up as U.S. citizens as part of a long-range plot.

Nothing quite tops the anti-Muslim hysteria, which has led people to organize opposition to the construction of new mosques in places from Lower Manhattan to Temecula. One candidate for statewide office in Tennessee ... argues that the 1st Amendment does not cover Muslims.

Some inclined toward therapeutic explanations of history might attribute all this to a kind of collective post-traumatic stress syndrome engendered by the lingering, still-unresolved aftermath of the horrific events of 9/11. Others might point to the dislocating effect of electing an African American president to govern a society in which strong currents of racial anxiety still eddy beneath the surface of everyday life. Perhaps both forces act in unseen concert.

And, Rutten concludes:

Back in the early 1970s — an era whose tumult we yet may come to regard as benign — social scientists here and in Britain coined the term "moral panic" to describe what can happen when groups of people are seized by an exaggerated fear that other people or communal forces threaten their values or way of life. The scholars described those who promoted the panic's spread as "moral entrepreneurs" — a term that takes on a deep resonance when you consider the commentators and politicians who have attached themselves, and their interests, to the "tea party" and its attendant movements.

In the midst of moral panic, inchoate indignation stands in for reason; accusation and denunciation supplant dialogue and argument; history and facts are rendered malleable, merely adjuncts of the moral entrepreneur's — or should we say provocateur's — rhetorical will. As we now also see, a self-interested mass media with an economic stake in the theatricality of raised and angry voices can transmit moral panic like a pathogen.

He "nailed it", noting that today's "politics and civic conversation" is pure "hysterical moral panic" - a virulent virus that is threatening to destroy our cherished political system.

How do we fight such an out-of-control mortal virus? How do we inoculate those of our citizenry whose immune systems are engaged in fighting off this new and deadly plague?

Julian Assange: My Nomination for Nobel Peace Prize in Journalism

2010-07-26T09:35:00.001-07:00

The statement by National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones condemned Julian Assange's Wikileaks as endangering lives of our soldiers and their mission in Afghanistan:

The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents - the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted. These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.

What endangers lives is stupidity. What Jones is saying is that leaks endanger Obama's mission.

Personally, I believe military and intelligence services' secrecy should be maintained and guarded as a matter of national security. I am also not opposed to all wars in general. For example, the solutions to problems presented to the world by Iran and North Korea elude me. I am not a bully: I would not kick a good war in the teeth when it's already down on its knees. But I would take any and every opportunity to kick a bad war in its teeth.

Stupidity risks Lives. And it has been the height of stupidity, after all the experience of Vietnam and Iraq, to expect that a democratic and open society will indefinitely support and sustain a prolonged and costly war which does not address core national interests. The height of stupidity.

But on to support my nomination of Julian Assange who is behind Wikileaks' Afghanistan: The War Logs. (Good luck getting in!) This interview from TED will cost my readers some 19 minutes of their valuable time but it reveals Assange's contribution of document journalism is larger than Afghanistan-Nam. (I availed myself of the subtitles):

I rest my case. res ipsa loquitur.

Open Letter

2010-07-22T07:30:00.001-07:00

Mr. President,

PLEASE: be the man of your speeches.

Please, please, please: appoint a "Truth Squad" to de-construct and explicate these utterly false, fabricated "news/stories" that frighten, inflame, and incite our fellow citizens. Sadly, we Americans no longer have a viable "Fourth Estate" to do the requisite fact-checking and the necessary investigative reporting they once did. So, YOU must confront these lies and distortions.

First impressions, especially when they appeal to our fears, are long remembered. The bigger and more outrageous the lie, the easier it is to remember. The right has learned these lessons well. They magnify the effectiveness of their machinations by repeating the lie over and over and over.

Right now, there is no one to say: "the emperor is wearing no clothes." We need truth-speakers. We need a president who stands up for his appointees, not a president so intimidated by right-wing talk-show hosts that he acts without all the facts.

Please, please, please: give up your fantasy of changing the Washington atmosphere. It is too toxic, and only getting more so as you refuse to name their destructive tactics. Republican'ts know only how to obstruct and to manipulate. They are incapable of negotiating in good faith and they have made their goal patently clear: Obama must fail. Stop colluding with them. Find your backbone...Please.

Stop giving away YOUR power to the enemy. They are winning the war to capture the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans - because our president is minimizing the damage that the right's lies are doing to our body politic.

By trying to ignore their obfuscating and reprehensible political machinations, trying to "take the high road", you have ceded the national dialogue to the right.

Please, stop trying to "look presidential". You must fight for us. This is a war for the hearts and souls of our fellow citizens, and you are on the sidelines. Get fired up, Mr. President. Mount your stallion! GO! Fight the good fight with all that is within you. NOW. PLEASE.

What Would Be Worse than Failure in Afghanistan?

2010-07-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

Howabout Success?

James Carroll, Boston Globe columnist and author of the bestselling Constantine’s Sword, wrote the following in review of Tom Engelhardt's current book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s:

.... the Pentagon-driven mistakes, myths, self-deceptions, and crimes ... have wreaked havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the American wars are proving to be as fruitless now as they were then unnecessary keeps them from rising to the level of actual tragedy....

Well, I don't know about that. Judging from Engelhardt's current perspectives, American statecraft is well on its way toward tragedy of Shakespearian proportions:

..... The question is: So what? Or rather, could success in Afghanistan prove worse for Americans than failure?

Let’s imagine that, in July 2011, the U.S. military has tenuous control over key parts of that country, including Kandahar, its second largest city. It still has almost 100,000 troops (and at least a similar number of private contractors) in the country, while a slow drawdown of the 30,000 surge troops the president ordered into Afghanistan in December 2009 is underway. Similarly, the “civilian” surge, which tripled the State Department’s personnel there, remains in place, as does the CIA surge that went with it -- and the contractor and base-building surges that went with them. In fact, the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands will undoubtedly have only escalated further by July 2011. Experts expect the counterinsurgency campaign to continue for years, even decades more; the NATO allies are heading for the exits; and, again according to the experts, the Taliban, being thoroughly interwoven with Afghanistan’s Pashtun minority, simply cannot in any normal sense be defeated.

This, then, would be “success” 10 years into America’s Afghan war. Given the logistics nightmare of supporting so many troops, intelligence agents, civilian officials, and private contractors in the country, the approximately $7 billion a month now being spent there will undoubtedly be the price Americans are to pay for a long time to come (and that’s surely a significant undercount, if you consider long-term wear-and-tear to the military as well as the price of future care for those badly wounded in body or mind).

The swollen Afghan army and police will still have to undergo continual training and, in a country with next to no government funds and (unlike Iraq) no oil or other resource revenues on the immediate horizon, they, too, will have to be paid for and supplied by Washington. And keep in mind that the U.S. Air Force will, for the foreseeable future, be the Afghan Air Force. In other words, success means that, however tenuously, Afghanistan is ours for years to come.

So what would we actually have to show for all this expenditure of money, effort, and lives?

We would be in minimalist possession of a fractious, ruined land, at war for three decades, and about as alien to, and far from, the United States as it’s possible to be on this planet. We would be in minimalist possession of the world’s fifth poorest country. We would be in minimal possession of the world’s second most corrupt country. We would be in minimal possession of the world’s foremost narco-state, the only country that essentially produces a drug monocrop, opium. In terms of the global war on terror, we would be in possession of a country that the director of the CIA now believes to hold 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives (“maybe less”) -- for whom parts of the country might still be a “safe haven.” And for this, and everything to come, we would be paying, at a minimum, $84 billion a year.

.....In any case, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be telling a rather different story. The singular thing the Iraq War seems to have done politically is promote Iranian influence in that country. Economically, it’s made Iraq a safer place for the state-owned or state-controlled oil companies of China, Russia, and a number of other non-western nations. In Afghanistan, in terms of those future natural resources, we seem to be fighting to make that country safe for Chinese investment (just as the recently heightened U.S. sanctions against Iran are helping make that country safe for Chinese energy dominance).

The Question Mark over Afghanistan

All of this leaves the massive American investment of its most precious resources, including lives, in Afghanistan an ongoing mystery that is never addressed. Somewhere in that country’s vast stretches of poppy fields or in the halls of Washington’s national security bureaucracy, in other words, lurks a great unasked question. It’s a question asked almost half a century ago of Vietnam, the lost war to which David Petraeus turned in 2006 to produce the Army counterinsurgency manual which is the basis for the present surge.

.....Why are we in Afghanistan? Why is our treasure being wasted there when it’s needed here?

It’s clear enough that a failed counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan will be an unaffordably expensive catastrophe. Let’s not wait a year to discover that there’s an even worse fate ahead, a “success” that leaves us mired there for years to come as our troubles at home only grow. With everything else Americans have to deal with, who needs a future Petraeus Syndrome?

It's refreshing that some Republicans in Congress are beginning to see that an ascendant Petraeusian Syndrome offers the U.S.A. only a road to further perdition. Where are the Democrats?

Richard Holbrooke

2010-07-16T08:06:00.001-07:00

I've always had the greatest respect for Richard Holbrooke. His skill set in diplomacy and statecraft has proved to be unparalleled. He certainly delivered the goods during the Wars of Yugoslavian Dissolution. And I always thought he was this generation's Best and the Brightest.

But I'm not buying an 8½ year-old war from him.

To get his non-verbal cues in his sale pitch, skip ahead in this video to 2.33:

Here are the money lines he's putting across the table to Rachel Maddow:

Holbrooke:

Why we're in really matters. we're in Afghanistan because if we fail in Afghanistan, it will have a direct, immediate danger to us. it will increase Al Qaeda's worldwide reach. they will come back with the Taliban in all likelihood and they will gain a worldwide success, which will be very dangerous for our national security interests so we have to be clear, the American public needs to be clear on why we're in Afghanistan. this is not Vietnam. a war which I participated in as a state department civilian when I entered the government. this is not the Balkans. it's not Iraq. this is quite different. this one relates directly to our safety at home.

Maddow:

We tried to do counter insurgency in Vietnam, too. pretty explicitly. you look back at those efforts, all those years ago, do you really have confidence that a foreign country can help create a state somewhere else, that we really can stand up an Afghan government?

Holbrooke:

I think we can, if ? we do it right. the fundamental difference is the one you and I have already mentioned. it matters to our homeland security. Vietnam did not, although at the time, the administrations in power did say it did, but they were wrong.... it's a process which is not easy, and you only embark on it if you decide that it is absolutely critical for the u.s. national interests, which it is.

Rachel's not buying this antique Déjà Vu counter-insurgency war. Neither am I.

Afghanization of the Occupation: Variation on a Theme

2010-07-13T08:09:00.001-07:00

Three British Troops Are Fragged

Armed with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an automatic rifle, a rogue Afghan soldier attacked a group of British troops early Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, killing three of the soldiers and wounding four others before escaping.

The Afghan soldier was assigned to a patrol base shared by NATO troops and the Afghan National Army in the volatile southern province of Helmand, according to NATO spokespeople and Afghanistan's Defense Ministry.

Helmand is where American troops mounted a large-scale offensive earlier this year to uproot Taliban insurgents from a stronghold in the town of Marjah.

The motive for the attack in the Nahr-e-Sarraj district remained unclear.

U.S. military leaders have stressed the importance of ratcheting up the training of Afghan security forces so that they can gradually take on more responsibility for securing their own country.

The Associated Press reported that Afghan President Hamid Karzai sent a letter of apology to the British government. Karzai's spokesman, Waheed Omar, said Karzai

was upset to hear this. … It's a very regrettable case, and we hope that this is thoroughly investigated.

Yeah! Let's get to the bottom of this!

On Afghanistan, Ann Coulter and I Agree!

2010-07-10T23:16:00.000-07:00

Well, agree somewhat, anyways...

In her July 7th column, Coulter agrees with me when I said that Michael Steele was on to something when he hung our fools' errand in Afghanistan around the President's neck as a war of Obama’s choosing. Of course, it makes me uncomfortable to agree with anything that Ann Coulter says. It's just that it's come to me that I'm feeling even more uncomfortable with General ~~Stanley McChrystal'~~s David Petraeus' "tough sell".

Therefore, I'm only quoting the portion of Coulter's words with which I am in agreement. In turns out that I agree with a large portion:

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele was absolutely right. Afghanistan is Obama's war and, judging by other recent Democratic ventures in military affairs, isn't likely to turn out well.

It has been idiotically claimed that Steele's statement about Afghanistan being Obama's war is "inaccurate" -- as if Steele is unaware Bush invaded Afghanistan soon after 9/11.

Yes, Bush invaded Afghanistan soon after 9/11. Within the first few months we had toppled the Taliban, killed or captured hundreds of al-Qaida fighters and arranged for democratic elections, resulting in an American-friendly government.

Having some vague concept of America's national interest -- unlike liberals -- the Bush administration could see that a country of illiterate peasants living in caves ruled by "warlords" was not a primo target for "nation-building."

..... (literacy rate, 19 percent; life expectancy, 44 years; working toilets, 7).

..... Obama hasn't ramped up the war in Afghanistan based on a careful calculation of America's strategic objectives. He did it because he was trapped by his own rhetorical game of bashing the Iraq war while pretending to be a hawk on Afghanistan.

At this point, Afghanistan is every bit as much Obama's war as Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's war. True, President Kennedy was the first to send troops to Vietnam. We had 16,000 troops in Vietnam when JFK was assassinated. Within four years, LBJ had sent 400,000 troops there.

.....Republicans used to think seriously about deploying the military. President Eisenhower sent aid to South Vietnam, but said he could not "conceive of a greater tragedy" for America than getting heavily involved there.

As Michael Steele correctly noted, every great power that's tried to stage an all-out war in Afghanistan has gotten its ass handed to it. Everyone knows it's not worth the trouble and resources to take a nation of rocks and brigands.

Based on Obama's rules of engagement for our troops in Afghanistan, we're apparently not even fighting a war. The greatest fighting force in the world is building vocational schools and distributing cheese crackers to children.

But now I hear it is the official policy of the Republican Party to be for all wars, irrespective of our national interest.

What if Obama decides to invade England because he's still ticked off about that Churchill bust? Can Michael Steele and I object to that? Or would that demoralize the troops?

Our troops are the most magnificent in the world, but they're not the ones setting military policy. The president is -- and he's basing his war strategy on the chants of Moveon.org cretins.

Nonetheless, Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney have demanded that Steele resign as head of the RNC for saying Afghanistan is now Obama's war -- and a badly thought-out one at that. (Didn't liberals warn us that neoconservatives want permanent war?)

I thought the irreducible requirements of Republicanism were being for life, small government and a strong national defense, but I guess permanent war is on the platter now, too.

Of course, if Kristol is writing the rules for being a Republican, we're all going to have to get on board for amnesty and a "National Greatness Project," too – other Kristol ideas for the Republican Party. Also, John McCain. Kristol was an early backer of McCain for president -- and look how great that turned out!

Inasmuch as demanding resignations is another new Republican position, here's mine: Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney must resign immediately.

It's yesterday's conventional wisdom that our 44th President had his Harry Truman moment in firing Stanley McChrystal. Barack Obama still has his Lyndon Johnson's date with destiny looming before him when he has to accept a single-term presidency.

I'm not just askin'... I'm sayin'...

The Essential Michael Hastings

2010-07-06T09:33:00.001-07:00

As everyone in this universe knows, Michael Hastings has published a major essay in Rolling Stone chronicling how a runaway general Stanley McChrystal seized control of the war by never taking his eye off his real enemy: The wimps in the White House.

I have excerpted and re-arranged Hastings epic essay, shortening it to its essence in 1,275 words.

....Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States.

Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

.....Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan."

.....From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.

.....As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq.....After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of "mission failure." The White House was furious.

McChrystal ... was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass ..... In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted....

Today ..... the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn'thampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose.....

Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal says

It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win. This is going to end in an argument.

In a classified cable Ambassador Eikenberry wrote in January was leaked to The New York Times warned,

We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos.

Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal says,

The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people. The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.

McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren't buying it.....

..... facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan. a senior adviser to McChrystal says.

If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular.

Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further.

But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region, says

It's all very cynical, politically. Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there.

..... After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan, warns,

Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem ... A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers.

[And that's] a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible....

Michael Hastings did not do a hatchet job on Stanley McChrystal. The creeping mission Afghanistan is his real target. And he nailed it.

Michael Steele Calls Obama Out for Being Bush Lite

2010-07-05T05:37:00.000-07:00

"Out of the mouths of babes oft times come gems."

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele referred to our counter insurgency war in Afghanistan as "a war of Obama's choosing" and implying that the effort is doomed to fail:

The McChrystal incident, to me, was very comical. I think it's a reflection of the frustration that a lot of our military leaders has with this Administration and their prosecution of the war in Afghanistan ... this was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not - this was not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. It was one of those - one of those areas on the total board of - of foreign policy of the middle east, that you would be in the background, sort of shaping the, the changes that were necessary in Afghanistan, as opposed to directly engaging troops. But it was the President, who tried to be cute by half, by flipping the script, demonizing Iraq while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well if, if he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan. Alright? Because everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan...

I have nothing to add. Steele said it all.

Happy Independence Day!

2010-07-04T07:54:00.000-07:00

Don't try this at home!

Obama is a Useful Idiot for the Military-Industrial Complex

2010-06-30T07:44:00.001-07:00

Over the past decade of the Bush-Obama administration, Paul Craig Roberts has blown hot and cold for me. But, in the matter of McChrystal firing charade, Roberts is compellingly true as the noon day sun when he asks: Is Petraeus McChrystal’s Replacement or Obama’s?

As always, Roberts goes a wee bit too far on the hyperbolic scale for my tastes so I'll try to be discreet about how much I quote with approval:

....Generals have to fight wars that civilians start, either from the incompetence of their diplomacy or the arrogance of their hubris. Generals have to get young troops killed because of the stupidity or ambition or corruption of civilian government officials.

.... McChrystal didn’t restart America’s aggression against Afghanistan ....

People elected Obama, because they were tired of Bush’s wars based on lies. So Obama ... re-ignited the Afghan war. No one knows what these wars are about or why the bankrupt US government is wasting vast sums of money, which it has to borrow from foreigners, in order to murder the citizenry in two countries that have never done anything to us.

Just as Bush/Cheney and their criminal neocon government deceived the world that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened white people everywhere, Obama has conflated the Taliban with al Qaeda. Obama has sold the tale to ~~white~~ NATO countries that unless the US determines how Afghanistan is ruled and by whom, white people are in danger of being exterminated by al Qaeda Taliban terrorists.

The most telling aspect of the McChrystal-Obama contretemps is that it has caused no one in the US government, or media, to ask why the US is still killing women and children in Afghanistan after 9 years ....

Once the Roman senate, the legislative branch, collapsed, the caesars, the executive branch, became the captives of the military. Now with Gen. Petraeus once again moved to the fore as McChrystal’s replacement in Afghanistan, we have the Obama moron elevating Petraeus to the Republican presidential nomination in the next election. Thus has Obama replaced himself with a man who will unify the military and executive branch .....

Petraeus is an evolved form of general. He “won” in Iraq by paying protection money to the Sunnis who were effectively resisting the US occupation. Petraeus figured out that it was far cheaper and more efficient to put the Sunnis on the US military payroll and to pay them to stop fighting, which is how the war between the Sunnis and the Americans ended. To keep the Americans out of the ongoing large scale sectarian violence that continues to slaughter Iraqis, the US military was confined to remote bases.

If history is a guide, the Afghans will also accept Petraeus’ protection money, and Petraeus has just enough time to buy the Afghan war before the next presidential election.

The Afghans will, of course, take the money and wait us out, just as the Iraqis are doing.

All of this drama is playing out despite the continuing lack of any valid reason for the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Washington idiots, trying to dictate how Iraq and Afghanistan are governed, are destroying constitutional government in the United States. In our hubris to determine how Iraq and Afghanistan are ruled, we are losing our own government.

There you have it. What better evidence do you need than these two statements from opposite ends of the tweedle-dee/tweedle-dum spectrum?

First from Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein we can see which way civilian-military relationships are evolving:

If he can't work with the ambassador, the ambassador should be changed. If he can't work with Holbrooke, that should change. ... I think we put all our eggs in the Petraeus basket.

Neocon William Kristol agrees:

Let us now praise Barack Obama... The only thing Obama could have done to more dramatically minimize the significance of the July 2011 date would have been explicitly to repudiate it. He should do that, and in a few months he may.

History will record that the American dream started its transition into an American nightmare during the Bush-Obama epoch.

Logistics in Afghanistan

2010-06-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

There's Gold - er... Lithium In Them Thar Obamanamistan Hills !!!????

2010-06-14T09:40:00.001-07:00

The real reason for Operation Enduring Freedom emerges after our American prospectors have ~~sacrificed~~ squandered their blood for eight (8) years in this barren and remote land.

Well if it's not gold, maybe it's lithium. Or maybe it's bauxite. Igneous-related lead and zinc?

Tell me Reader(s), if we weren't there already, would we go to Afghanistan for its Clay?

How about its potentially lucrative glass sand & stone quarries?

These newly revealed riches make it more palatable and understandable as to why we have poured the blood of 6,700 American KIA's and WIA's into this rich soil of Afghanistanam? And $400,000,000,000? Is that it?

If we need lithium for our Blackberries, wouldn't be a little cheaper to obtain it the old-fashioned way? By buying it from the Talibanistan corporate government?

Because - bet your ass - that's what we'll be doing in twenty years, whether or not Obama has a second term. Because it's looking like it's like LBJ-deja vu all over again, as Yogi would say.

It was always a bad year to get out of Vietnam, as Daniel Ellsberg says.

The Longest War

2010-06-10T08:36:00.001-07:00

Beware of Russian Bears, Bearing Advice (Part II)

2010-06-06T08:41:00.001-07:00

Last January, I counseled against taking Russian Advice on Afghanistan too seriously. Yesterday, the Ruskies were again offering their unsolicited advice to members of US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The occasion was an Asia security conference - an annual forum known as the Shangri-La Dialogue which concluded in Singapore Sunday.

Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov's audience was composed of defense ministers, military officials and scholars. From various news sources I have tried to cobble together enough of his words to reach a semblance of coherency. In the Q & A Ivanov addressed Russian interests which pertained to the export of heroin:

The most popular is the northern route. It's rather easy to cross the Afghan-Tajik border. As soon as you cross the Afghan-Tajik border, it's easy to move it to Moscow, to London, to Paris, to Berlin, to elsewhere.... A lot should be done in just starting very primitive social-economic life in Afghanistan. If we don’t do that, any military presence would be in vain.... the duty rests those who took responsibility for ensuring peace and stability in Afghanistan..... By the way, next year I think the ISAF will break the Soviet record of the duration of stay in Afghanistan...

I can't give advice, particularly publicly .... I have to confess... meeting American defense secretaries, central intelligence chiefs, state department chiefs, we discussed it ...If we are asked, we answer, but it's difficult to comment publicly, really difficult. We are already helping a lot in ISAF operations in Afghanistan, providing logistic support, transport support, intelligence support -- whatever.

Except one thing: Never again a Russian soldier would enter Afghanistan. I think you understand why. It's like asking the United States whether they will send troops to Vietnam.

It's something like that. It's totally impossible.

The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which lasted from from 1979-1989, cost over 13,000 Soviet lives and contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Give POTUS a Chance

2010-06-05T16:48:00.000-07:00

Today's local paper contains an article by Maureen Dowd in which she rakes President Obama over the coals for losing control "of his own narrative".

She praises "...the passion, lyricism, empathy and exquisite understanding of character and psychological context" that he shows in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, but then states that it is these very qualities that "...he has stubbornly resisted showing as president."

I am not completely happy myself with some of President Obama's behaviors as President - for example, his continuing efforts to placate and pander to Republican'ts who only want to obstruct, not to engage constructively in seeking solutions to the disastrous financial, military, ecological, legal, disasters ensuing from the Busheney years,

But given the number and ferocity of the many fires threatening our nation's very survival which he inherited, I believe is doing the very best that he can. His attempts to bind up the nations' overwhelming number of grievous wounds inflicted upon us by Busheney and the Stepford-wives-Republican'ts, deserve our appreciation and our gratitude.

In addition to all his many efforts to right the nation's Ship of State, President Obama is being subjected to nonstop personal attacks and criticism (just and unjust) from all sides. I admire his strength of character that permits him to get out of bed and go to work every day. It cannot be easy to live with such a constant barrage of innuendo, outright made-up lies, and snarky character assassination as he is subjected to on a daily basis.

It is easy to criticize; it is not easy to seek solutions to thorny problems that require real adults who actually care about helping solve America's problems more than they care about scoring political points. It is impossible to heal our broken government when there is no desire or willingness from the members of the minority political party to do anything other than obstruct, defame, and destroy.

Today's "Opposition Party" is just exactly that - not a "Loyal Opposition Party", but an obstructive oppositional ideologically driven unitary political party bent on destroying our President, the middle class, and our Constitution - so that they can complete their goal of establishing the corporatist theocratic kingdom they envision.

Accidental Acuity

2010-06-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

I don't know who Bob Somerly is. Know nothing about him except to say he is not universally loved by those I unconditionally love. But I do think he nailed something to the oak when he wrote this in the Daily Howler:

Indeed, the liberal world is increasingly adopting the core values of the mainstream press corps. We run on silly sexy-time tales, and on invented lies by opponents. This is low-IQ tabloid work, pure and simple—and it’s a culture which will never serve progressive interests. By the way: This is the culture of the mainstream press—the punishing culture with which the mainstream chased down, first Clinton, then Gore. ... Will progressive interests ever prosper within such a brain-dead culture? We strongly doubt it...

Anyone who elbows Rachel Maddow is not my guru. But these lines constitute a credible signpost marking the highways and byways of our descent a from the city on the hill: had to save them from being covered by the ongoing ooze of American crude.

Towards a Real Memorial Day

2010-05-31T09:06:00.000-07:00

Historian Andrew J. Bacevich's son was killed in action in Iraq three years ago. Today, Bacevich publishes in the Los Angeles Times, in part:

.....His death changed many things, among them my own hitherto casual attitude toward Memorial Day.

Here in New England, where we now make our home, deejays and local news anchors still proclaim Memorial Day weekend the unofficial start of summer, as if unearthing some fresh discovery. Folks with cottages to open up take to the highways, pushing through traffic toward seashore or mountains. Our trek will be considerably shorter and simpler: We will make the five-minute drive to our son's gravesite.

For us, personal loss has rendered the last Monday in May into the day of remembrance that it was originally intended to be. Yet loss has also invested Memorial Day with political significance, posing uncomfortable questions.

The fallen gave their lives so we might enjoy freedom: However comforting, this commonplace assertion qualifies at best as a half-truth. Who can doubt that the soldier killed in battle at Gettysburg or on Omaha Beach died while advancing the cause of liberty? Whether one can say the same about the Americans who lost their lives assaulting Mexico City in 1847, suppressing Filipino demands for independence after 1898 or chasing rebels in 1920s Nicaragua is less clear, however.

In recent decades especially, the connection between American military intervention and American freedom has become ever more tenuous. Meanwhile, competence has proved notably hard to come by. Rather than being a one-off event, Vietnam inaugurated an era in which the United States has routinely misunderstood and repeatedly misused military power. Even as political authorities sent U. S. forces into action with ever greater frequency, decisive results — what we used to call victory — became more elusive. From Beirut and Bosnia to Iraq and Somalia, the troops served and sacrificed while expending huge sums of taxpayer money. How their exertions were helping to keep Americans free became increasingly difficult to discern.

The ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, already the longest shooting war in U.S. history, embodies these trends. Just about no one, from the senior field commander on down, considers the war there winnable in any meaningful sense. Arguments for perpetuating the U.S. military commitment resemble those once offered to justify Vietnam: We can't afford to look weak; American credibility is on the line.

How exactly did we get ourselves in such a fix, engaged in never-ending wars that we cannot win and cannot afford? Is the ineptitude of our generals the problem? Or is it the folly of our elected rulers? Or could it perhaps be our own lazy inattention? Rather than contemplating the reality of what American wars, past or present, have wrought, we choose to look away, preferring the beach, the ballgame and the prospect of another summer.

So while politicians promise peace and Congress ponies up the money for war, the troops head back for yet another combat tour. And more American families will be given the opportunity to experience Memorial Day in ways they never expected.

Bacevich's new book, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," will be out this summer.

Memorial Day 2010

2010-05-30T09:42:00.001-07:00

Do the Brits Have a Plan B for Afghanistan?

2010-05-23T08:38:00.001-07:00

To get out!

The new Foreign Secretary William Hague arrived in Afghanistan Saturday with a warning that Britain wants to withdraw its troops as soon as possible.

But the new Tory Defence Secretary Liam Fox accompanying Hague went further in a yet-to-be-published interview with The Times newspaper before arriving in Kabul.

Fox made clear the visit would focus on speeding up the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan, and that no new troops would be deployed:

We need to accept we are at the limit of numbers now and I would like the forces to come back as soon as possible. We have to reset expectations and timelines.

National security is the focus now. We are not a global policeman. We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened.

Is there a new deputy sheriff in town?

Afghanistan Is Radioactive

2010-05-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

I was party to a bone scan today. In the early moments of the procedure a conversation broke out. It went like this, verbatim:

Patient: Do you ever get any wise guys in here?

Radiologist: What do you mean? You were in a couple of years ago....

Patient: Wise guys who complain that you're using the same ol' technology?

Radiologist: We do what we do. What would a wise guy complain about?

Patient: Wiseguys -- I'm not one of them -- might complain that you're using pre-Obama technology ....

Radiologist: That oil spill? Is that post-Obama, isn't it?

Patient: No, that's a Bush-era oil spill. Bush set it up.

Radiologist: Well, it's just too bad that the government doesn't have enough money to inspect every single oil well and coal mine, isn't it?

Patient: Fuck if we don't! We have enough money to inspect every godamned toilet and out-house in Afghanistan! Huh??

Radiologist: [Pressing down firmly on patient's chest]: Calm down. We can't have you shaking up the old equipment in here until this is over. This country has been 'round a few centuries. It's going to be okay.

Patient: Which country? the USA or Afghanistan?

Radiologist: USA, but I get your point. The USA is becoming more like Afghanistan every day. Bombs and bullets going off like elsewhere.

Enough said.

End the Occupation/War in Afghanistan

2010-05-07T07:30:00.001-07:00

This month, we have a rare opportunity to fundamentally change the course of U.S. policy towards Afghanistan: Senator Russ Feingold, Representative Jim McGovern, and Representative Walter Jones (a Republican!) have introduced legislation -- H.R. 5015 in the House and S. 3197 in the Senate -- that would require President Obama to establish a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces. If this legislation attracts enough support, it could reach the House floor as an amendment, allowing Congress a fundamental -- and widely reported -- vote on the direction of U.S. policy.
The key idea of the Feingold-McGovern-Jones bill is straightforward. By January 1 - or within 3 months of the enactment of the bill, if that is earlier - the President is required to submit to Congress a plan for the redeployment of the U.S. military from Afghanistan, with a timetable for doing so. After submitting the plan, the President has to update Congress every 90 days on how the implementation of the plan is going.

Mark your calendar: May 11th, National Call-In Day on the Feingold-McGovern Bill

To prepare for this date enlist in this campaign and:

Call your representatives in Congress – (call the switchboard at 202-225-3121 and be transferred to the Rep or Senator’s office) – try to get a staff person who handles Afghanistan on the phone, and:

For Members of the House:

If their office has not co-sponsored the McGovern-Jones bill (current 64 co-sponsors are shown in this spreadsheet), ask them to co-sponsor it.

Ask them to oppose the $33 billion war supplemental for Afghanistan.

For Senators:

Urge them to co-sponsor the Feingold bill. (so far, the Feingold bill has no co-sponsors.)

Ask them to oppose the $33 billion war supplemental for Afghanistan.

Take notes. Email your information back to NoEscalationOrg. Only by taking names and numbers do we get any leverage!

Kent State Remembered

2010-05-04T22:32:00.001-07:00

A New Low for Seditionists in America

2010-04-29T08:11:00.001-07:00

I am assuming I am speaking of Americans. But, who's to say?

Apparently a Facebook group has put up a page, praying for Barack Obama's demise:

Dear Lord, This year you took my favorite actor, Patrick Swayzie. You took my favorite actress, Farah Fawcett. You took my favorite singer, Michael Jackson. I just wanted to let you know, my favorite president is Barack Obama. Amen

This Facebook group has passed 1,000,000 members. That's what they say. I say their presence on Facebook violates rules:

.....You will not post content that: is hateful....

..... You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious ....

Happily, another group has posted a Facebook account which petitions To Clean Up Facebook, starting with the removal of the seditionists. I have signed their petition (with real name). No more Facebook for me. Either the scum goes or I go.

Open Carry -vs- Open Society

2010-04-26T07:29:00.001-07:00

A News Item: Armed Man, Arrested At Airport Where Obama Was Leaving

An armed man was spotted at Asheville, North Carolina airport parking lot just after Air Force One departed Sunday. When confronted by a police officer he wanted to see the president.

Joseph Sean McVey, 23, of Coshocton, Ohio, is charged with "going armed in terror of the public", a misdemeanor, said Asheville Regional Airport Police Capt. Kevan Smith.

Security was heightened at the airport because President Barack Obama was leaving after spending the weekend vacationing in Asheville. He was headed to a memorial service for 29 West Virginia coal miners killed in an explosion.

At about 2 p.m., airport police saw McVey get out of a maroon car with Ohio plates and that he had a sidearm, a Springfield XD 40 handgun. Both airport police and the Secret Service questioned him and he was taken into custody.

The suspect was nowhere near the president's plane, which had just departed, and was in a rental car return lot that is open to the public.

His car was equipped with clear LED law enforcement-style strobe lights in the front and rear dash, Smith said. The car also had a mounted digital camera in the front window, four large antennas on the trunk lid, and under the steering wheel was a working siren box. Smith said McVey was not in law enforcement.

When McVey got out of the car, he was listening to a handheld scanner and radio that had a remote earpiece, Smith said. Police said he was monitoring local agencies and had formulas for rifle scopes on a note in his cup holder.

McVey gave authorities an Ohio driver's license, but a computer check failed to show the number was valid, police said.

When Officer Kaleb Rice asked him what he was doing, McVey told him he heard the president was in town and wanted to see him.

Max Henkel, a resident who was at the airport to see Obama's departure, told the newspaper,

They searched him and it looked like he had an empty pistol holster on his side, and I think I heard one of the officers say he had had a gun. When I realized what was going on, I was flabbergasted.

Investigators have yet to determine whether he was attempting to target the President.

Yes! there must have been many other possibilities which would occur to a reasonable person as to McVey's intended business with the President.