Filtered news 9/5
RKing
Download
(1224) | Play
(1438) 
Download
(488) | Play
(803)
And there it is, sir. We’ve caught you.
Your goal is not to bring some troops home — maybe — if we let you have your way now;
Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal;
You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.
I think we’ve reached a tipping point, Ladies and Gentlemen:
“The National Coalition of American Nuns is impelled by conscience to call you to act promptly to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for … high crimes and misdemeanors,” the group wrote in a letter written on behalf of its board members.
The letter says that impeachment is warranted for their “deceiving the public under the false pretense that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction” and “destroying” the reputation of the United States and the good will of other nations.
“The time for impeachment is now — before the example of George W. Bush’s regime is set in stone,” they wrote. “Future generations will thank you for preserving the freedom of our nation and its relation to the entire human community.”
"This administration has undone so much. Not unlike
the Germans in the 1930s.
Civil
liberties, the environment, replacing all the judges...It’s been a grassroots
thing.
Which is what the Nazis did.
Cheney not letting people have access is very Nazi."
-- Viggo Mortensen, Link
The seasonality of violence in Iraq. There are several ways to show this graphically, but all of them present difficulties because the various data series aren't available in a consistent form for the entire course of the war.
That said, here's a chart that shows the seasonality pretty well. It comes
via reader Thomas J., who has graphed U.S. troop deaths per thousand soldiers, a
data series that's (a) available for every month since the beginning of the
occupation, (b) highly consistent, and (c) a fairly decent proxy for the overall
level of violence. 
The "per thousand soldiers" correction helps to
control for the fact that troop fatalities will naturally be higher whenever
there are more soldiers deployed in Iraq. This doesn't necessarily mean the
level of violence is higher, just that the population at risk is larger.
The seasonality is pretty easy to see: violence peaks in spring, then declines during summer, peaks again in fall, and drops during winter. The peaks are probably overstated slightly thanks to unusually deadly April and November months in 2004, but even without that the seasonality is fairly pronounced. Roughly speaking, July troop casualties are typically about 40% lower than their April peak, whereas this year they were only about 30% lower. In other words, violence was worse than usual. On the other hand, August looked a little better than usual this year compared to 2007's spring peak. As always, what this means is that you can't draw any dramatic conclusions based on a couple of data points. However, taken as a whole the evidence pretty strongly suggests that the surge hasn't had any effect at all on overall violence levels. It's just moving in its usual seasonal pattern.
The obvious followup would be a similar chart showing the seasonality of civilian casualties. Unfortunately, there's simply no reliable data series for civilian casualties over the course of the war, and the data for this year in particular gives every indication of being massaged to within an inch of its life (intra-Shiite violence doesn't count, car bomb fatalities don't count, al-Qaeda attacks against Sunni tribes don't count, the figures change mysteriously from one report to the next, the supposedly lower numbers for August are classified, etc. etc.) We do have figures released by various Iraqi ministries, but we don't have a consistent series of ministry numbers for the past four years, and in any case the numbers for 2007 don't show any decline at all between spring and summer. So that doesn't suggest any surge-related decrease in violence either.
Bottom line: you should be skeptical of any claims about reductions in violence unless they take seasonality into account. So far, though, I haven't seen any credible claims of reduced violence that even mention seasonality, let alone adjust for it. That should tell you something.
"Craig was busted for lewd behavior in the men's room? Hell, I'm lucky if I can get the hand dryer to blow.'" -- Letterman,
A license to kill “Newly released documents regarding crimes committed by United States soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.” The documents, which were obtained by the ACLU, “show repeated examples of troops believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.”
A cool parting shot Just before leaving for its August recess, the House of Representatives approved a little-noticed amendment to its energy bill “that would allow members of Congress to lease only environmentally friendly cars.” The House energy bill would require all federal agencies to buy only low greenhouse-gas emitting vehicles for their fleets.
Souter nearly resigned after Bush v. Gore decision. According to a new book on the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin, Justice David Souter nearly resigned in the wake of Bush v. Gore because he was so distraught over the decision that effectively ended the Florida recount and installed Bush as president:
Toobin writes that while the other justices tried to put the case behind them, “David Souter alone was shattered,” at times weeping when he thought of the case. “For many months, it was not at all clear whether he would remain as a justice,” Toobin continues. “That the Court met in a city he loathed made the decision even harder. At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude toward the Court was never the same.”
High school student criticizes McCain on gay marriage. This morning, a high school student challenged Sen. John McCain about his age, causing McCain to jokingly refer to the student as “a little jerk.” The troubles for McCain didn’t end there. Another student pressed him with regards to his stance on gay marriage. Here’s the exchange:
Student: “Do you support civil unions or gay marriage?”
McCain: “I do not. I think that they impinge on the status and the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.”
Student: “So you believe in taking away someone’s rights because you believe it’s wrong?”
McCain: “I wouldn’t put that interpretation on my position, but I understand yours.” […]
Student: “I came here looking to see a leader. I don’t.”
As with all campaigns, the coverage of the 2000 election would be driven by a small number of beat reporters. In this case, two women at the most influential newspapers in the country: Seelye from The New York Times and Ceci Connolly from The Washington Post.
A prominent Washington journalist describes them as "edgy, competitive, wanting to make their mark," and adds that they "reinforced each other's prejudices."
....The disparity between [Seelye's] reporting and [Frank] Bruni's coverage of Bush for the Times was particularly galling to the Gore camp. "It's one thing if the coverage is equal — equally tough or equally soft," says Gore press secretary Chris Lehane. "In 2000, we would get stories where if Gore walked in and said the room was gray we'd be beaten up because in fact the room was an off-white. They would get stories about how George Bush's wing tips looked as he strode across the stage." Melinda Henneberger, then a political writer at the Times, says that such attitudes went all the way up to the top of the newspaper. "Some of it was a self-loathing liberal thing," she says, "disdaining the candidate who would have fit right into the newsroom, and giving all sorts of extra time on tests to the conservative from Texas. Al Gore was a laughline at the paper, while where Bush was concerned we seemed to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations."
It's a pretty good piece. It covers fairly familiar ground for most blog readers, I think, but does a nice job of summarizing Campaign 2000 for magazine readers who haven't heard all this stuff before. It's worth revisiting.
Chertoff promised right-wing group charges against Clinton. The LA Times reports that in 2001, Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, met with the conservative group Judicial Watch and “personally assured” them that he would pursue criminal charges against Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) “in connection with a lavish fundraising event in Los Angeles.” Chertoff is now one of the names mentioned to take over the Justice Department, which has been criticized for a lack of independence.
A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to “dissolve Saddam’s military and intelligence structures,” a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happen.”
The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. In releasing the letters, Mr. Bremer said he wanted to refute the suggestion in Mr. Bush’s comment that Mr. Bremer had acted to disband the army without the knowledge and concurrence of the White House.
I don't remember the precise specifics. But in pretty much all the books on the Iraq fiasco it's clear that this was a decision that came with Bremer from Washington. And my recollection at least is that this very much came out of the Chalabi/Feith/Wolfowitz 'clean slate' approach that dominated the early days of the occupation. So the idea that Bremer somehow came up with this on the fly or that the Americans were forced to confirm some sort of fait accompli flies in the face of all the evidence and, it would seem now, ample documentary evidence in Bremer's possession.
NPR is running a story celebrating Paul Harvey's eighty-ninth birthday and his seventy-four years in broadcasting. For many people, Harvey has been at his microphone so long that he's acquired a kind of defacto status somewhere between radio saint and national grandpa. His fat salary shows that, no matter how little attention we may pay to the man, his reach is still extensive and his ability to pitch ideas -- as shown in the sales he racks up with his oh-so-sincere product placements -- undiminished by time.
It's hard to be angry at a man older than my father, much less a man who my grandfather used to listen to daily, but I have a special disdain for Harvey. Despite the praises sung to his salesmanship, and the plaudits given his years behind the desk, Paul Harvey is a mean-spirited old cuss who has done more to push selfishness, division, and vilification into the political process than any ten other commentators combined.
I'll admit it, when I was young I listened to the man every day. After all, he was on the only radio station in my home town, and the station was owned by the same man who paid my salary as a photographer for the local weekly (see, we were doing media consolidation long before Rupert). I even bought a couple of Harvey's books, taken in by the clever historical teasers that often bumpered his broadcasts. It took me years to realize that far from giving "the rest of the story," what Harvey was delivering was "his half of the story," an edited, often distorted view of both American history and current politics, shaped to ignore any truth that didn't fit his own extremely conservative viewpoint. He made no effort to sort fiction from fact, and never missed an opportunity to blame the left for the nation's problems.
And often it wasn't all that subtle. I still remember well the day that John Lennon was shot, not only for the sadness that swept over so many on that day, but for the outrage of how Harvey reacted. Rather than finding sympathy for Lennon's widow or child, Harvey sneered at the "whining" of Lennon's long-haired fans. He then went on to speculate just how much crying there would be "when someone kills Paul McCartney." That's America's grandfatherly broadcaster at his purest -- a man full of disdain and hate for anyone that didn't toe his own political line. There's nothing that Rush Limbaugh ever said during the Clinton years that Harvey didn't say first -- and meaner -- about Jimmy Carter.
How far to the right is Paul Harvey? Far enough that his once (and quite probably future) stand in is Fred Thompson a man who was described as having the same "homespun appeal" as Harvey.
Unlike Harvey's hate for those not on the right, I don't wish the man any ill. I hope he lives to be two hundred. I hope we all do. But celebrating seventy-four years of Paul Harvey at the mike is only elevating three quarters of a century of vitriol and distortions that have warped the rural view of America, of history, and of politics.
You may have noticed the Iran boomlet over the last few days, the pitter-patter of rumors and hints that either a major military action or an Iraq-style PR/agitprop roll-out is set to start this week. Spencer Ackerman is looking into this over at TPMmuckraker.com. And his reporting suggests that the 'source' of all this chatter is an order Dick Cheney has sent out to his proxies at the right-wing thinktanks to start laying the ground work for war with Iran. In the short run, the aim is to open up a new front in his struggle with Bob Gates and the Joint Chiefs (who think two wars are enough for now). In the medium term, the goal is getting the war started well ahead of the end of Bush's term.
For the moment, however, my attention is fixed on one of those 'hints', Reuel Marc Gerecht's piece in the current Newsweek, in which he argues that war with Iran is most likely to come not because of Bush-Cheney warmongering or a breakdown in negotiations but rather "an Iranian provocation."
It is worth stepping back for a moment to savor this claim in its full flavor. Clearly, this must be the kind of 'provocation' comparatively weak states again and again through history seem to make against extremely powerful states -- just before the latter provides a thorough beating to the former. One can of course think of various examples over the decades and centuries.
As the agitprop engines start churning again, it is worth stepping back and considering an undeniable fact. Iran is not a rival power to the United States. The idea that Iran is a threat to the United States in conventional military terms is laughable. A terrorist threat? Sure. But that's a very different kind of threat.
Another point: Iranian meddling in Iraq. Some points are so obvious that to state them seems almost redundant. But what exactly are we doing? This isn't to put our efforts in Iraq and Iran's on equal terms. The mullah's regime in Iran is brutish, illiberal and thuggish (though the comparison was a bit more helpful before Dick Cheney was our poster-boy of the rule-of-law, western civilization and democratic values). Like most people I put intervention based on my ideals on a different footing with that of those whose ideals I don't agree with. But to say that Iran -- which has deep historical and religious ties to Iraq and is ... well, right there -- is meddling while we've been occupying and running the country for four years is just silly. You may say that these are just aggressive ways of phrasing the issue and these fact are all known. So what's the difference? But the slow build up of lies and misdirections, over time, affects our thinking and our ability to reason at all coherently.
Whatever else we decide about Iran, we would do ourselves a big favor by wiping away the cobwebs of lies, distortions and various ways of up being down. We're running Iraq. We want it to model itself after us and suit our interests. The Iranians don't want that and they're trying to throw sand in our gears. And we're going to threaten them to try to make them back down. And since they are a revisionist power we don't want them to exist anyway so we may just attack them regardless. These are all terms and explanations that at least have some bare relation to the situation at hand. They might be too cynical about our national aspirations and ideals if it weren't for the fact that the people controlling the US government today don't believe in our national ideals. So it's the same difference anyway.
As we prepare to be ginned up into a 'debate' about whether we should embark on an insanely misguided war with Iran (since we don't have our hands full as it is), it is well to remember one of the many -- but one of the most important -- lessons of the Iraq catastrophe.
When applied to Iran, that lesson, I believe, is as follows ...
There is no question of our policy to Iran. That is to say, no question of the issue in the abstract or the issue if conducted in the hands of sane and/or experienced foreign policy practitioners. There is only our policy over the next eighteen months as conducted by George Bush and Dick Cheney. For that reason, even hypotheticals or abstract discussions about threats of force to prevent the progress of the Iranian nuclear program are profoundly misguided and dangerous.
Given the track record, who would trust these incompetents to expand our military involvement in the Middle East for almost any reason whatsoever? And relatedly, who would trust that a 'threat of force' as a leverage to diplomacy is not what it has usually been with the Bush White House: a feint toward diplomacy to leverage the use of force?
It's like handing a drunk the keys to yet another car. Where he says he's going is really beside the point.
The real Rudy At a recent debate in Iowa, Rudy Giuliani was asked, “In 30 seconds, what is a defining mistake of your life and why?” He made a joke about how he couldn’t possibly list all his mistakes in 30 seconds. Ha! So we gave it a try. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMveQ1sG9QU
Download
(2174) | Play
(2533) Download
(969) | Play
(1402)
Different cultures make this country great. Tancredo smeared every Latino with his “Miami is a third World country” statement and in essence all cultures. It’s sad to see a man who’s family came from another country attack “brown people ” in such a heinous fashion. Geraldo points out how fast right wing blogs use these types of stories to further their racism, but only when it suits them. I give Geraldo some props for calling out Michelle further with this Malkin rant:
“Michelle Malkin is the most vile, hateful commentator I’ve ever met in my life,” he says. “She actually believes that neighbors should start snitching out neighbors, and we should be deporting people.
Wow, that’s pretty harsh. And it gets better:
“It’s good she’s in D.C. and I’m in New York,” Rivera sneers. “I’d spit on her if I saw her.”
Pay-Per-View? Malkin is O’Reilly’s new fill in host so what does that say about him?
Mixed Messages We've become so desensitized to Bush Administration bamboozlement that it's almost easy to overlook the ironic juxtaposition of the White House pumping up claims of improvement in Iraq while the President makes yet another secret trip there this weekend in which he is unable to leave the confines of a U.S. base.
That's not to say that once American officials start publicly announcing their trips in advance and venturing into Iraqi-controlled territory we can conclude that Iraq has improved. These guys would not hesitate to stage such trips just to drive home the point that Iraq is now safe and stable. But the fact that the Administration cannot engage in those kinds of theatrical stunts tells you all you need to know about how bad the situation in Iraq really is.
This is what I’d call a good start. What about the Presidential power grab of the Bush/Gonzales cabal? No more secret prisons and torture, sure, but let’s add to that: no more signing statements, no more evading Congress, no more no-bid government contracts to companies that clearly have interested parties in the administration. And Democratic contenders? We want specifics on how you’ll go about rolling those powers back.
Ain't great to work for a living? NPR:
American workers stay longer in the office, at the factory or on the farm than their counterparts in Europe and most other rich nations, and they produce more per person over the year…. The average U.S. worker produces $63,885 of wealth per year, more than their counterparts in all other countries, the International Labor Organization said in its report.
On the other hand, NorthJersey.com:
CEOs in large American companies averaged $10.8 million in total compensation in 2006, more than 364 times the pay of the average U.S. worker, based on data from an Associated Press survey of 386 Fortune 500 companies.
However, you may have heard of a scandal involving Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a less-than savory character named Norman Hsu. According to reports from the LA Times, Hsu skipped out on a 1991 plea agreement in San Mateo Co. CA, in which he was to serve three years for grand theft. Hsu, who turned himself in to authorities in CA on Friday and awaits a September 5th bail hearing, became a top Democratic fundraiser and contributor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well as other Democratic candidates, including Senator Barack Obama, much of which was laundered through others. The Clinton campaign has agreed to return $23,000 in campaign donations from Hsu, and Obama has agreed to donate his $2,300 donation to charity.
While both scandals hold equal potential for damage to the respective candidates involved, the media, for unknown reasons, gave Mitt Romney a pass, while devoting ample time to Hsu and the Clinton campaign. According to Media Matters, NBC, CNN and FOXNews all covered the Hsu scandal, but none of the aforementioned networks dedicated any time to the Romney/Fabian scandal that can be found in the Nexis database. More from Media Matters:
Summary: In recent days, NBC, CNN, and Fox News have all aired reports or discussed the case of Norman Hsu, who The Wall Street Journal suggested may have funneled illegal campaign contributions to Sen. Hillary Clinton. However, when Mitt Romney’s national finance committee co-chairman Alan Fabian was charged with mail fraud, money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice, the three networks did not report or discuss it during programs available in the Nexis database.
| 
| | 
| 
| 
| 
| 
Tags: 
Comments
TIME TO RAISE HELL
WE DO NOT NEED TO TALK ABOUT LARRY CRAIG!
WE DO NOT NEED TO TALK ABOUT MICHAEL VICK!
WE DO NOT NEED TO TALK ABOUT FRED THOMPSON!
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE WAR IN IRAQ!
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT BRINGING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW!
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT HOLDING THIS CONGRESS ACCOUNTABLE!
AS MOLLY IVINS SAID:
We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. ... We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"
---From her last column, published January 12, 2007, two days after President Swagger Codpiece McHero's surge speech and 19 days before she died.
THE TIME IS NOW; WE DO NOT HAVE THE LUXURY OF DISTRACTION. OUR TROOPS DESERVE OUR ENTIRE ATTENTION TO GET THEM HOME SAFELY.
PROUD PROGESSIVE
DAN R. TAYLOR
Post new comment