Article V

GA Legislature battle over indigent defense

2010-03-13T21:47:00.001-05:00

The Legislature is still in session--the attack is scurrilous. See other March FCDR articles for informed debate on properly funding the Council.

Georgia Supreme Court blows off protecting the vote, Fulton County Daily Report blows off fully cutting & pasting AP stories

2009-09-28T15:58:00.002-04:00

Lovely Wisconsin blogger post on local healthcare reform debate

2009-08-05T13:36:00.002-04:00

With thanks to Illusory Tenant for drawing my attention to it.

Health reform political twist

2009-07-31T15:26:00.000-04:00

World government crisis watch

2009-07-22T12:30:00.002-04:00

Title link is to the latest developments about Honduras from Reuters. I had hopes for the Arias-led mediation; looks like it's getting pretty rocky.

From the Georgia Blogwire

2009-07-19T22:34:00.003-04:00

The title link is a lovely post of anguish from Cup O' Joe on healthcare reform. He has motivated me to check out a couple of the details of the current bill(s) and think of what Senators I might call that it would make a difference.

From the LeftyBlogs feed: Wilkinson (pop. 10K) gets more transportation stimulus funding than Fulton

2009-07-09T12:47:00.005-04:00

Talk about something crying out for follow-up, as in, what on earth is it being spent on.

EDIT: Mostly on a single highway bypass, it seems. For introductory background on recovery.org, see this interview. Not to be confused with recovery.gov.

Local news: Buckhead boil water advisory & Georgia fatcat Don Leeburn

2009-07-08T11:55:00.003-04:00

It's always something with the water in Atlanta, isn't it.

Also, as ignorant as I am of Georgia politics, I just learned of this charming fellow via Lucid Idiocy.

NYT offers the Washington perspective on the possibility of a negotiated compromise in Honduras

2009-07-07T18:09:00.005-04:00

The title link discusses the hopeful opening represented by Honduras' politicians accepting Costa Rican President Arias as a mediator.

It's a lively world these days, isn't it, what with Honduras, Iran and China's Xinjiang province. I bet there are other political hotspots out there I'm unaware of.

Following the Honduras story revived an ongoing problem I have: finding a decent web site that permalinks AP stories. I like following Salon's AP feed, but those links have a really short weblife; this one, for instance, is bound to disappear soon:

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/2009/07/07/D999RVQG0_us_us_honduras/index.html
Honduras political rivals accept mediation
By MATTHEW LEE Associated Press Writer

If anyone knows an easily searchable site that preserves AP stories, please let me know.

EDIT: I forget whether Bloomberg stories disappear too. I think so.

Well, scandal or not, Andrea Mitchell's theory that Palin is "out of politics for good" seems dead wrong

2009-07-05T13:00:00.001-04:00

Title link to an AP story found on the Drudge Report. Forceful pushback on scandal speculations. We'll see, won't we?

A classic illustration of how an intelligent man falls out of touch once he becomes President

2009-07-05T00:10:00.003-04:00

The title link is a Washington Post story of a conference call Obama held with a couple of his administration officials and half a dozen Congressional leaders on healthcare. He's only been President for 5 months and two weeks, but here he is

1) using the stenographers at the Washington Post to communicate with liberal pressure groups like MoveOn and Democracy for America--not just to communicate with them, but to chastise and express displeasure with them. Your Excellency, if you want to communicate with a group, pick up the phone and call them, or invite them to a conference call. Don't use the corrupt inside-the-Beltway media to try to dictate to them at arm's length;

2) fully embracing the power and insiderhood he has won. Do you remember when you quoted Franklin Roosevelt, Mr. Obama? "I agree with you; now make me do it"? That's what pressure groups are for. That's what good, effective activism is. When our representatives don't represent us the way we want, we become their adversaries. We withhold our support. We go after them no matter what letter they have after their names.

Again, you are squandering one of America's best opportunities so far. You could be a transformational President. Part of that would include dismantling some of the power that your office has arrogated for itself ever since John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, through Thomas Jefferson making the Louisiana Purchase, to Abraham Lincoln preserving the Union rather than contain the supremacy of the federal government, to William McKinley conquering and creating the overseas Empire, to Franklin Roosevelt breaking the Supreme Court and the tradition of voluntarily giving up power, becoming President for life, to Richard Nixon asserting executive privilege, to Bill Clinton abandoning even the fig leaf of United Nations consensus to wage a war that Congress (again) never declared, to George Bush finally asserting that nothing, not even the Constitution, controls the power of the commander-in-chief.

Are you going to continue protecting the office you hold, and consequently all the criminals who used it before you, thus becoming criminal yourself? Or are you going to be the hope you appealed to?

A response to President Obama's latest email to his supporters

2009-05-20T16:55:00.001-04:00

Barack:

1. On healthcare, I need you to move the goalposts further in the country's favor to ensure that whatever compromise ultimately ensues actually accomplishes your goals. I echo Robert Reich's consternation that neither "single-payer" nor "universally-available alternative government plan" seem to be part of the vocabulary any more.

2. On foreign policy, I need you to live up to your campaign promises. I allowed myself to briefly hope that you would become our first transcendent President. The best we have ever had so far (the Roosevelts, Lyndon Johnson) outlined and accomplished truly good domestic agendas, but remained instruments of U.S. tyranny abroad. So far you are replicating that model. You have paid lip service to ending Cheneyism, but from state secrets to escalating unmanned attacks in Afghanistan to many other areas (Glenn Greenwald speaks for me in these matters) you have put a kinder face on essentially the same policy.

Please fulfill the hope and change you championed.

Yours truly,
Blake

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 4:29 PM, President Barack Obama wrote:
> Blake --
>
> The chance to finally reform our nation's health care system is here. While
> Congress moves rapidly to produce a detailed plan, I have made it clear that
> real reform must uphold three core principles -- it must reduce costs,
> guarantee choice, and ensure quality care for every American.
>
> As we know, challenging the status quo will not be easy. Its defenders will
> claim our goals are too big, that we should once again settle for half
> measures and empty talk. Left unanswered, these voices of doubt might yet
> again derail the comprehensive reform we so badly need. That's where you
> come in.
>
> When our opponents spread fear and confusion about the changes we seek, your
> support for these core principles will show clarity and resolve. When the
> lobbyists for the status quo tell Congress to hold back, your personal story
> will give them the courage to press forward.
>
> Join my call: Ask Congress to pass real health care reform in 2009.
>
> After adding your name, please consider sharing your personal story about
> the importance of health care reform in your life and the lives of those you
> love.
>
> I will be personally reviewing many of these signatures and stories. If you
> speak up now, your voice will make a difference.
>
> http://my.barackobama.com/HealthCareOrganizing
>
> American families are watching their premiums rise four times faster than
> their wages. Spiraling health care costs are shackling America's businesses,
> curtailing job growth and slowing the economy at the worst possible time.
> This has got to change.
>
> I know personal stories can drive that change, because I know how my
> mother's experience continues to drive me. She passed away from ovarian
> cancer a little over a decade ago. And in the last weeks of her life, when
> she was coming to grips with her own mortality and showing extraordinary
> courage just to get through each day, she was spending too much time
> worrying about whether her health insurance would cover her bills. She
> deserved better. Every American deserves better. And that's why I will not
> rest until the dream of health care reform is finally achieved in the United
> States of America.
>
> Please add your name to join my call. Then share your personal story about
> why you too will not rest until this job is done.
>
> http://my.barackobama.com/HealthCareOrganizing
>
> Last November, the American people sent Washington a clear mandate for
> change. But when the polls close, the true work of citizenship begins.
> That's what Organizing for America is all about. Now, in these crucial
> moments, your voice once again has extraordinary power. I'm counting on you
> to use it.
>
> Thank you,
>
> President Barack Obama
>
>
>
>
>
> Paid for by Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National
> Committee -- 430 South Capitol Street SE, Washington, D.C. 20003. This
> communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
>
> This email was sent to: *********
>
> To unsubscribe, go to: http://my.barackobama.com/unsubscribe
>

Atlanta mayoral race news

2009-04-06T21:40:00.002-04:00

President of the Grady Health System Foundation and City Council President Lisa Borders has re-entered the race after dropping out last fall for her parents' health. They've gotten better, and she's back in.

For some time all I saw were signs for Kasim Reed. In the last week on one of my usual neighborhood drives I saw a yard sign for Mary Norwood.

I'm ashamed to say that these are all people that I've been marginally aware of for the last few years, but haven't read about or followed at all. I do a pretty bad job of following Atlanta & Georgia politics, which is the main reason that I've never submitted this to LeftyBlogs. I am just barely literate enough to know that the election will be this November, and to hold the tenuous opinion that Shirley Franklin was a big improvement over Bill Campbell. Occasionally I notice some glaring scandal of the legislature, such as when Erick Erickson emailed his readers about the nuclear power boondoggle or Tondee's Tavern did the same about the amazingly regressive elimination of the ad valorem car tax. (The Georgia Power nuclear bill passed.)

I did of course notice that Attorney General Thurbert Baker has declared for governor, which is a potentially very interesting development, and fascinating if only for the ensuing scramble to replace him as AG. And in the course of looking for the web link to Erick's email, I discovered that the car tax is dead! Thank god the bumblefuckedness of Republican Georgia legislators can't be underestimated.

This is not the first time the McCain campaign has shot itself in the foot

2008-10-14T20:05:00.004-04:00

If McCain is personally in charge of his campaign, then he's incompetent. Accept the endorsement of Ayers' Republican funder right before the last debate? When you've gotten wind that your opponent's rebuttal on Ayers is that he was funded by said major Republican? Either that, or McCain is being sabotaged. If, as I've seen hinted, it's by a Palin-supporting group closer to Bush & Cheney than McCain (Schmidt, Kristol, etc.), they're doing a terrible job of introducing her for 2012. She's such an obvious liar, so obviously incompetent and such a tangibly scary religious nut that she's already been defined as unqualified for the Presidency to a large majority of the country.

My God, I didn't expect this

2008-10-10T22:07:00.002-04:00

A little bit of the old McCain. (Thanks Andrew Sullivan.) And thank you, Senator John Sidney McCain III. Second piece of good news all week. Buy more stocks on Monday, kthnx. Consult the Fed for all your borrowing needs. (Except for credit cards; go ahead and just pay those off, you never know when you'll need your full power to delay payments.) Maybe someone won't take a shot at Obama now, because if McCain kept this Ayers shit up it would get likelier and likelier.

Investors, banks, lenders:

2008-10-09T22:42:00.001-04:00

Get over it. The Fed and the Treasury are giving you everything you could possibly need in the shape of money. Now starting lending and spending it! That's your job. Capitalists are not allowed to strike. It's hypocritical.

The Wachovia deal just got more complicated

2008-10-05T16:38:00.002-04:00

How will this end up? God knows I'd rather have a non-government-backed deal.

How to democratise Presidential races

2008-10-05T05:02:00.004-04:00

Wouldn't it be great if Georgia became the third state after Maine and Nebraska to uncouple its Electoral Votes?

If a snowballing number of states did that, that would take care of Electoral College reform as far as I'm concerned. This commenter makes a fair point, though.

NY Times article on Fannie Mae

2008-10-05T04:47:00.001-04:00

I'm not familiar with Charles Duhigg, but I like this article a lot.

A note on how I've been posting the last few days

2008-10-04T14:04:00.002-04:00

I've been treating the posts as works-in-progress, updating them with mostly unnoted edits throughout the day. Ideally, I prefer not to do that, but it has seemed harmless for now. My preferred method is to make a single, final post, then explicitly post edits at the end as amendments.

Declan McCullagh's overview of the bill

2008-10-04T12:54:00.010-04:00

He leads with a sum of the government's "socializing" of Wall Street since Bear Stearns. Four months and a few days (or six months, depending how you count) since the beginning of this mess that is the first thing Obama is going to be forced to deal with.

Others that should be on his list:

Planning drawdown & redeployment of U.S. forces in Iraq (he should do this worldwide, but that's a pipe dream)
Revolutionising Afghan & Pakistani policy
Tax code reform (dare we hope for simplification?)
Investigations/prosecutions of current Administration:
-Guantanamo
-Abu Ghraib
-U.S. Attorneys
-Domestic warrantless surveillance
-Walter Reed
Healthcare
Russian/Chinese/Iranian/North Korean adjustments
Global nonproliferation
Adjustment of world organizations and regimes: WTO, UN
Energy/environmental policy
A complete overhaul of confidential/secret information policy and retention
Repairing the armed forces
Voting mechanics and law (aka making the USA safe for democracy)
Veterans Administration reform: Better and cheaper

Stuff that he should get to but probably won't:
Repeal of Military Commissions Act, chunks of the Patriot Act, most of the FISA amendments
Ballot access

Senate, House and President Agree: This is how we throw money at the economy

2008-10-03T20:58:00.005-04:00

The final bill. Let's see what all's in it.

"President Bush Signs H.R. 1424 Into Law

On Friday, October 3, 2008, the President signed into law:

H.R. 1424, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008, and Tax Extenders and Alternative Minimum Tax Relief Act of 2008, which authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to establish a Troubled Assets Relief Program to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions; provides Alternative Minimum Tax relief; extends expiring tax provisions and establishes energy tax incentives; and temporarily increases Federal Deposit Insurance limits."

I like Andrew Leonard's commentary. Seems right.

SEC Revokes Ban on Short Selling as of Oct. 9

Palin saved her next crazy moment until after the debate. This is one entertaining lady. Are we about to get Andrew Sullivan's long-desired press conference?

Yup, definitely going to pass

2008-10-03T12:22:00.002-04:00

Atlanta's own John Lewis is changing his vote.

Yet every outlet reports that the outcome is very much in doubt. Reporters are such shankers. It's coming to a vote today and it's going through.

Hopefully after 1.20.09 something much better can immediately be passed. God, there's so much to clean up from the past eight years, they'll never get to it all.

Cheat sheet: (Futile) Lobbying for a Better Bailout Bill

2008-10-02T17:07:00.016-04:00

UPDATE II: It looks like there are now at least 13 Representatives publically reported in the various news media as changing their votes. Congratulations. Get to know your new $700 billion toxic assets, and look to see if one of the new tax breaks might be good for you.

Link to the bill on Senate website

PDF of bill at the Wall Street Journal (courtesy of Andrew Leonard)

Is lobbying for a better bill a futile notion, not just because I'm thinking about influencing at the last minute legislators with whom I have no relationship, but because something has to be done, and this is what's possible? (Thanks again to Andrew Leonard.)

UPDATE:

"Emboldened by the feverish bidding for votes, other members of both parties were demanding substantial changes to the legislation before they would vote for it. A group of Republican opponents indicated they'd back it if the price tag were slashed to $250 billion and several special tax breaks added by the Senate—including for children's archery bow makers, imported rum producers and racetrack owners _were removed. Democrats wanted to add a way to pay for the bailout and more help for homeowners staring at foreclosure."

Fun Facts About What's In the "New" Bill

Changing votes to yes

David Dreier (R?-CA)
Zach Wamp (R-TN)
John Shadegg (R-AZ)
Jim Gerlach (R-PA)
Tim Murphy (R-PA)
Patrick Tiberi (R-OH)
Steve LaTourette (R-OH)
Henry Cuellar (D-TX)
Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)
Jim Ramstad (R-MN)
Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO)
Shelley Berkley (D-NV)

Changing votes to yes?

Doc Hastings (R-WA)
Gene Green (D-TX)
Earl Blumenauer (D-OR)
Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ)
Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
Donna Edwards (D-MD)
Other Arizonans?

Changing votes to no?

Spencer Bachus (R-AL)
Some Blue Dog Democrats?
Not changing yes votes: Dan Boren (D-OK), Jane Harman (D-CA), Jim Marshall (D-GA), Jim Cooper (D-TN)

Not changing

Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)
Steve King (R-IA)
Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)
Brad Sherman (D-CA)
Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD)
Pete Stark (D-CA)

Sources

AP 1
AP 2
Bloomberg
Baltimore Sun 1
Baltimore Sun 2
San Fran (Chron?)
Drudge's AP
AZ Republic
Drudge's AP 2

http://news.google.com/?ncl=1253382426&hl=en&rfilter=3&hubgeo=United+States

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008221336_econ02.html

An inside analysis of the Paulson plan (preserved in the current Senate version)

2008-10-01T20:02:00.009-04:00

The bailout's supporters are doing everything they can to get it passed.

Meanwhile, for an in-depth illustration of how much the Paulson plan blows and how scandalous it is, click this post's title; read as much or as little as you want. Not only are the Democratic "reforms" less than window-dressing, it probably won't even work. Not like the government backing up the nation's mortgages would, anyway, or the government directly infusing capital into banks and taking an equity stake in return (an idea George Soros is pushing).

There has to be an alternative to this plan for which opponents can muster a majority in the House. Can Representative DeFazio's plan be made palatable? The first three proposals are nonsense, but the fourth is the obvious meat of the plan, along with the fifth which has already been endorsed by both McCain and Obama and is part of the amended bill that just passed the Senate.

Like Krugman said: "No equity ... no deal."

Will the Blue Dogs help kill the "new" plan?

McCain's attempts to turn the credit crisis to his political advantage backfired.

An immodest proposal

2008-09-29T22:11:00.002-04:00

Insure mortgages throughout the country, as well as auto & small business loans. Make the companies pay for it first out of executive compensation, limiting the compensation of all executives from the VP level up to no more than $1 million a year. Make this involuntary across the board; companies do not get to "opt-in." Give the government the right to renegotiate the mortgages with the holders as it sees fit. This is not voluntary either.

This really just does what has to be done but Paulson is not doing with Fannie & Freddie, as well as making it universal. (See how FDIC is managing IndyMac's mortgages.)

Subsidize this bailout of the taxpayers by the taxpayers further as needed.

Pay a $1000 bonus to anyone who has only missed one mortgage payment; pay a $2000 bonus to anyone who has missed none.

Nouriel Roubini at RGE Monitor thinks we should make a Resolution Trust Corporation for homeowners instead of the banks.

Insuring the mortgages brings needed peace of mind to the banks holding them, allowing at least a rough valuation. It takes care of the major root cause, the feared worthlessness of the home loans underlying all the complex securitized mortage-based instruments. In the meantime both the Fed and the Treasury are ensuring liquidity on a short-term basis. What else is needed to break the financial logjam?

I mean, if we're willing to contemplate $700 billion+ worth of socialism for banks, why not for actual voting people?

I don't understand the House Republicans' "plan"

2008-09-26T22:15:00.003-04:00

The most I've seen of it is a one-page PDF over at Marc Ambinder's blog. How is insurance supposed to keep the costs off the taxpayer? Either we buy it, and if it's worthless we lose the money, or we insure it, and if it's worthless we lose the money. The other details of their program are laughable nibbles around the edges of the problem.

They shouldn't be getting any credit from the angry American people who don't want to bail out Wall Street. Either plan is ultimately a bailout paid by the taxpayers.

The Trinity United Church of Christ Pastor's Pages

2008-06-08T14:48:00.001-04:00

Hugh Hewitt is posting them in an ongoing series; he's posted at least a dozen by now. Check them out to see what a nice church Trinity actually is.

Local news (registration/bugmenot required)

2008-06-06T18:05:00.002-04:00

The title link superficially describes today's sacking of 17 public defenders and 4 of their colleages in Fulton & DeKalb counties, effective by the end of the month. I will try hard to find some follow-up on this.

Why lobbying needs to be outlawed

2008-05-25T12:35:00.002-04:00

When even the mainstream news makes it crystal clear how corrupt it is, there's an opportunity to weaken it.

I read an entry of Glenn Greenwald's yesterday that makes the point in more obvious, precise detail.

Please, god, give up after June 3

2008-05-24T18:34:00.003-04:00

The title links to a Wall Street Journal article that lays out a critical upcoming moment in the Democratic Presidential nomination race: the May 31 meeting of a subcomittee in charge of the Democratic National Party's rules & bylaws. Representatives of Michigan and Florida have submitted compromise proposals apportioning some delegates from each state to both candidates.

On the one hand, Hillary Rodham Clinton has vowed she would support the desires of the two states. On the other, her position is cited to be full, undiminished allocation of all delegates as though their primaries had been legal.

Which will she choose? Whatever the rules subcommittee decides, she (or Obama) can appeal. Will she, if she doesn't get what she wants?

Will she stop if a majority of 2210 pledged and super-delegates declare for Obama?

I really don't know. Maybe she'll stop, but I can imagine that she won't. She has to quit, right? Bosnia; white Americans; Zimbabwe; Kennedy. Surely she realizes it is all over, and she must not contest the decision of the committee or the primaries.

You superdelegates better show some goddamn spine.

Delegate math is hard, or Why I'm not researching pledged Clinton superdelegates any more

2008-05-16T11:22:00.003-04:00

Upon more reading, I discovered weirdnesses in the delegate math I attempted in my last post. For instance: those as-yet unnamed 54 superdelegates? They're Florida's and Michigan's. Obviously their status is in limbo at least until the May 31 DNC rules panel meeting, and depending on how that goes their status could change all the way through the convention.

However, Andrew Sullivan this morning linked to a post at 538 that appears to exhaustively cover all the possibilities, and it seems it's just a matter of when Obama will reach 2209 delegates--the latest likely date being June 1 after Puerto Rico's primary, two days before the end of the primary campaign.

That's just fine with me. My real concern has been whether Hillary Clinton would prolong her campaign beyond June 4. The likelihood now seems that she will have literally lost by that point, under any permutation. Whew.

Hillary's cagey new math

2008-05-11T11:54:00.004-04:00

If you've been following the neverending Democratic presidential nomination saga, you're aware that Hillary Clinton has recently moved the goalposts. Up until a few days ago, the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination, according to her campaign and everyone else, was 2025. This number does not include delegates from Michigan and Florida. However, after months of making noises about insisting on Michigan and Florida being included, Hillary went official, raising the number to 2209.

Far be it from me to question a politician's motives. Let me just note some figures. Obama currently has an estimated 1859 delegates. There remain 217 undeclared named superdelegates. If all these superdelegates decide after June 3 (the last Democratic primaries) that it's time to wrap this up and declare for Obama, he's well past 2025, at 2072. If we include the remaining unnamed superdelegates (54), he's at a maximum of 2126. That's 81 short of 2209, meaning this thing can't end until the convention.

Political wisdom is pretty much united that one of the most damaging things that could happen to the Democratic nominee's chances is to continue this fight between the last delegate voting contests (June 7) and the August convention, including an actual convention fight.

To me, the course of action is obvious. Remove her last excuse. Convince 81 of Hillary's pledged superdelegates to switch to Obama. (Also, let's go ahead and get those Michigan and Florida delegations seated; they'll boost Hillary's numbers, but also Obama's, significantly reducing the number of superdelegates who would need to switch their support to put this frigging zombie out of her misery.)

I'm researching the contact information for Hillary's superdelegates. Call them, fax them, email them. Figure out what makes them tick (a lot of them are corrupt political operators, not likely to budge based on principled appeals--I'm specifically thinking of Dr. Joe L. Reed).

Patti Higgins, Chair of the Alaska Democratic Party
Phone (907) 360-2561
Fax (907) 258-1626
patti@alaskademocrats.org

Dr. Joe L. Reed, Chairman, Alabama Democratic Conference
Associate Executive Secretary, Alabama Education Association
Home (334) 263-2222
joer@alaedu.org
Ph (334) 263-4040 (ADC)
Ph 334-834-9790 (AEA)
Fax 334-262-8377 (AEA)

Rev. (or Rep?) Randy B. Kelley
Home (256) 492-1091

Hon. Yvonne Kennedy
Home (251) 438-9509

Gov. Togiola T.A. Tulafono (American Samoa)
Office (684) 633-4116
Mr. Pati Faiai, Chief of Staff

I've been doing Google searches on superdelegates' names culled from the two links at the end of this post. So far the richest lists of contact information have been the following page for Alabama, as well as Political Base, which has already gathered a lot of contact information.

Sourcewatch's list of Hillary's superdelegates

2008 Democratic Convention Watch's list of superdelegate endorsements

CORRECTION: I referred to June 7 as the last date of "delegate voting contests"; in fact, the last date is June 3.

Monday Drudge: The Obama Photo, or HRC's New Low

2008-02-25T10:40:00.008-05:00

According to Matt Drudge, the Clinton campaign is circulating a 2006 photo of Obama dressed as a Muslim. According to Mike Allen's Politico post with David Plouffe's reaction, the "Clinton campaign did not deny the charge, but did not comment further." I was sufficiently outraged to be motivated to call the Clinton campaign for the first time to urge her to quit. The staffer who answered the phone at her Arlington headquarters denied knowing anything about it, saying that she was seeing it for the first time this morning on the Drudge Report, and that they were looking into it. I asked her whether Drudge's quoted email comment and the Politico's non-denial were untrue, and she said something so vague that I really can't remember it. In any event, it amounted to a denial.

Update: According to Ben Smith at Politico, Maggie Williams of the Clinton campaign has this to say:

Enough.

If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.

This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry.

We will not be distracted.

That doesn't look like a denial, either.

Hillary, just quit. Now.

Update II: I called the Arlington office back about Maggie Williams' denial, and the staffer who answered the phone first tried to read me her statement. I said yes, I've seen the statement; I don't see a denial in there anywhere. The staffer then denied that it came from the Clinton campaign.

Why didn't Maggie Williams just say that, then? This is ridiculous. I should have asked for the name of the staffer.

Update III: Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic has a latest, anonymous statement from the Clinton campaign, saying they can't be sure it didn't come from them. Which is it, guys?

Ha ... and hmph

2008-01-04T22:32:00.000-05:00

Well, for the record, the Drudge Report Archives have no new pictures since Jan. 1, 2008. However, they do have "snapshots" up from Jan. 2 (under TimeLine) ... which retain the story, broken link and all, making my blogging this year so far completely pointless. Well, I guess there's no better inspiration to keep going; maybe I'll actually catch Drudge out sometime. Hopefully I'll instead write something original and substantive.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-02T20:37:00.001-05:00

I've been wanting to blog a lot, especially in the last month, but I just haven't been balancing work and leisure too well for some time. I really have wanted to post a lot about the extraordinarily fast-moving events in Pakistan. I'm no expert there, mind, so perhaps it's best I not be one of those trying to muddle through the meaning of its hectic current events.

I did notice something far more mundane today--one of those wacky disappearing stories from the Drudge Report. This is possibly the first time I've scored the evidence, though, so I'm pleased to finally be able to document this sort of regular thing that drives me crazy and have wanted to share, but I couldn't substantiate.

So sometime today before 6 PM Eastern U.S. Time, Drudge linked to a really tasteless story, including an image he featured on his own server:

Strangely, the link Drudge provided was not the one above, but a broken one to the Telegraph "journalist" 's blog. In any case, shortly after 6 PM, the image and the dead link were gone from The Drudge Report.

Charitably, Drudge may simply have been lazy, noticed the broken link, and scrubbed the whole thing without bothering to locate the correct link. Uncharitably, I'm going to be surprised if either the story or the image turn up on the Drudge archives tomorrow.

To make the story even more confusing, the "story" is now on Tony Harnden's blog, which it manifestly was not when I looked for it after trying to follow Drudge's broken link.

Dammit

2007-06-28T20:15:00.000-04:00

I have a draft post that has been languishing for a week. Scalia mouthing off in Canada, etc.

For now, I just want to rush in two links (thanks to my girlfriend for both of them!) for the benefit of politically active people out there, specifically, devoted and loyal Republicans (many of whom, no doubt, read my blog). If you still think that this White House is not that bad, that there is no national crisis of government, please consider Andrew Sullivan's detailed "interrogation" analysis, as well as this more recent series on the Vice President. All this is nicely coming to a head, of course.

We have to get the Republicans and Democrats united behind some kind of program to cut off this rising authoritarian golem at the knees--either do that, or unite behind some kind of alternative to get it done. Isn't it about time we ditched the two-party system, anyway?

Israeli tanks enter Gaza

2007-06-19T09:27:00.000-04:00

Well, that was faster than I expected. From the title link: Al-Jazeera quotes the Israeli military as saying they're entering Gaza at the Erez/Beit Hanoun crossing for a "limited time." We'll see.

Dashed-off comments on Democrats, Massachusetts gay marriage, Genarlow Wilson, Venezuela and the Levant

2007-06-17T22:18:00.000-04:00

While making an effort to get caught back up on the news stream the last few weeks, I read this article about the impending political choices Congressional Democrats were facing on Iraq. Now, of course, they've been killed by the evaporation of the antiwar public's support. They have the arguments (which they're not using). They have the political backing; that's proved by their evaporated support. They need to go ahead and find a way to end the war, by whatever practical mechanism, such as by new authorization. Back it up in October with the annual appropriations; refuse to vote on any more separate "emergency" appropriations for it.

Thank god gay marriage is here to stay! Hearing that the legislative amendment-by-ballot had been beaten back is some of the best news I've heard in months.

Genarlow Wilson: It shouldn't even be a crime for two teenagers to have sex. The Georgia Legislature meant to make it the new law changing his sentence retroactive; they just forgot. Thurgood Baker and Sonny Perdue are two of those lawyers who've forgotten that law is a means to justice. Just find a way to rationalise his release and make it happen, for chrissake.

I used to buy my gas at Citgo. I can't support Chavez any more, though. His constitutional amendment abolishing Presidential term limits was a very dangerous, sufficient indication; the parliamentary abdication of rule to the President by decree was just tragic confirmation, and his current suppression of the press is yet more of the same. Just another populist authoritarian and socialist hypocrite; there are no good leaders. How do we make single leaders less essential to the efficient running of government?

Hamas has taken Gaza. I don't know why that doesn't seem more significant to me, since it of course presages a devastating attack by Israel.

Personal news

2007-05-24T22:46:00.000-04:00

Hello again, world.

I have been terribly busy the last several months. I worked selling health and life insurance for some time there; that was a trip. (Quite a few trips, actually--I was fool enough to pursue sales all over the state!) Now, for the last three months, I've been working my first job ever at a law firm. I'm a long way from professional, but I'm not just a legal dabbler any more: I'm a case clerk, I'm in paralegal school, and I have met the billable hour.

It feels like the beginning. If I'm ever going to be a state lobbyist for constitutional reform, a solid legal background is probably a requirement. Clerk today, paralegal tomorrow, attorney the day after that ... then unpaid public interest lobbying. Any suggestions for grants to apply for are warmly accepted henceforward.

Peculiarly, now that I'm working 60-hour weeks, I want to write again, but I'm reading less news than I've done in over twelve years! It's a bit of a handicap.

If you're out there, stay tuned ....

Baghdad ER

2006-09-24T21:31:00.000-04:00

It has been so long since I said I'd write about this amazing HBO documentary. I feel bad, because I don't remember as much now as I did originally. What stuck with me was the feeling of how unequivocally, thoroughly good is the purpose of the jobs of these doctors, nurses and other soldiers in this Baghdad hospital. They treated Iraqi casualties as well as Americans; I did think it was strange that there didn't appear to be any Arabic interpreters, since it was obviously so important to be able to talk to the American casualty soldiers to treat them.

The basic job of an infantry soldier in Iraq, as represented in the documentary, was to go out and patrol roads, in particular looking for IEDs and disarming them.

Two months: renaissance

2006-08-31T20:04:00.000-04:00

Two months to the day since my last visible activity here. Well, it's not like I haven't been busy. :-) Not likely to get any less busy, either.

Still, I've been feeling the burn of withdrawal. With all that's been happening in this small world of ours? Oh, my. So much I wish I'd had time to say.

I've been inspired to post today by the news that I have A Reader (!). It's too joyful an affirmation. One of these days I'll pass my next milestone and get a comment.

I haven't forgotten that I wanted to write about Baghdad ER because of my admiration for its lifesavers in the heart of destruction. In the meantime, the observation that I can't hold back is that the latest Arab-Israeli war isn't over; the middle phase in Lebanon is winding down, but the hostilities began with full-scale operations in Gaza, and Israel is "winning" that war, for now--most of the Hamas government taken into custody, total tactical control, and almost no media attention. The war started down there, with abductions; the kidnapping of a young Israeli soldier, which received a lot of media play--but not nearly so much as the abduction of a Palestinian doctor and his brother the day before, or the steady drumbeat of Palestinian casualties leading up to then. I resent the media conventional wisdom that the Israeli invasions of Gaza and Lebanon were sparked by Hamas and Hezbollah abductions. War isn't a proportionate response to kidnapping individuals.

All right, rant off. Thanks for reading!

Making peace with those "W -- The President" bumper stickers

2006-05-31T13:12:00.000-04:00

Baghdad ER is much more important, but I just wanted to throw in this quick note first.

Up until two days ago, those square white-font-on-black-background bumper stickers put out by Spalding Group in 2004 that say "W -- The President" have always bugged the crap out of me. I mean, they just seemed so pointless.

We've got a gubernatorial election coming up here in Georgia, and dear Mr. Perdue has picked up on the idea and created bumper stickers that read, "Sonny -- Georgia's Governor." I thought, "Great--now the virus has spread!"

Then I thought about it a bit. The 2002 Georgia election, brought to you entirely and exclusively by Diebold, has been plagued by accusations of fraud, fueled by the precise reversal between polls taken at the election and the results: approximately 60-40 for Barnes and Cleland in the polls, followed by reported 60-40 results for Perdue and Chambliss. Sonny in 2006, like Bush in 2004, is serving under the cloud of a questionable result.

So the bumper stickers that simply link the man's name and his office, by my new way of thinking, implicitly recognize that the officeholder's legitimacy is in question, and feel the need to reply to it.

Okay, some people might call it a stretch, but it makes me feel better.

The Bush-Blair press conference and the Separation-of-Powers Scandal, or Other bloggers beat me to it

2006-05-30T12:49:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in a bit because I've had a full-time gig the last few weeks, and my can that cut into your blogging time. Frankly, I've also been a little intimidated: I finally went exploring the blogosphere, and boy are there a lot of people out there doing it better than I think I ever could. Of course, it's silly to compare oneself to someone who's been blogging for a long time and has presumably turned it into a paying job of its own, but still, it's humbling.

Moreover, there were a couple of topics on my mind, but before I could write about them I found other people who had written about them as well or better than I could. :-) The first is the Bush-Blair press conference from last Friday; this post at Upper Left, which I found through the Daou Report, articulates my outrage quite nicely.

The second is this unprecedented action by the Executive Branch against the Legislative Branch, namely the FBI's search of Representative William Jefferson's congressional offices. I had gotten about as far as thinking, "well, despite this unusual bipartisan outrage against the Executive, I don't think the Constitution can be construed to bar this sort of action--still, it's a bad precedent, and it would be better if the House simply did what it is supposed to and policed itself"--and then, while catching up with Mark Kleiman and friends, I found a much more detailed analysis with quite a bit of useful information, including analysis of leaks that reflects quite badly on the FBI/DoJ.

I do have a little original blogging in mind--I watched HBO's Baghdad ER yesterday....

Whether war with Iran

2006-05-18T22:51:00.000-04:00

There should be imminent news from Iran: today or tomorrow the deadline elapses for Iran to reply to the International Atomic Energy Agency with a timetable for resolving all remaining issues from the IAEA's Director General's report (Adobe Acrobat file) dated February 27, 2006. If indeed Iran were to resolve all remaining issues, in theory the IAEA could issue it a clean bill of health, and its compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty would no longer be Security Council business. Clearly, any announcement is a significant diplomatic step that could buy Iran a great deal more time.

The stakes are as high as they can be right now, I think, without Israel taking unilateral action. Perhaps this is obvious, but I haven't read anyone else point out that the reason Russia and China are remaining so stubborn about passing a resolution now under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter (which would allow punitive action, basically either economic sanctions or military attack) is that this crucial step was the legal fig leaf by which the United States pursued war with Iraq in March 2003. Passing this sort of resolution (Adobe Acrobat file) is supposed to be a preliminary move, after which if there's further noncompliance the Security Council finally lowers the axe by means of an operation organized pursuant to a second resolution.

I'm beginning to think that Iran has fought this one off. The United States has gotten progressively weaker on diplomacy as this crucial Security Council meeting approached, not stronger. Up until this week, they resolutely refused to offer Iran any carrots, only the stick. They've finally conceded that ground, and Russia and China are still firmly stating their opposition to any possibility of military enforcement. Bush and his lieutenants have repeatedly said, "All options are on the table," meaning that they refused to rule out force, even nuclear force; but now that Iran has forced them by means of its historic "rambling 18-page letter" to publically state and restate their refusal to begin direct negotiations, the Administration appears more and more baldly hypocritical and/or dishonest.

In the meantime, Bush will never again receive from Congress ~~a declaration of war~~ an authorization to use military force (AUMF). That ship has sailed. Not being able to get a specific authorization to attack Iran, he might try to rely on the September 18, 2001 AUMF, but he has already tried to use that to assert broad presidential power, and that argument is being hotly contested. Would Bush/Cheney, even at 30% approval and with the possibility of impeachment in the immediate future, bomb Iran?

I have to think not, since even the most egregiously inflated estimates of time till Iranian nuclear weapon capability by American and Israeli intelligence are about two years, the broader consensus figure being more like five to ten. Moreover, if the media were to air a free, extended discussion of a hypothetical nuclear-armed Iran, I suspect American public opinion would find it relatively easy to live with. Despite the current Iranian president's wild rhetoric, I doubt a serious analysis would conclude that a nuclear Iran would move to destroy Israel. How can they destroy Israel and not the Palestinians? They want credible defense and a seat at the Asian nuclear table: they cannot afford not to have nuclear weapons surrounded by Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel, along with the United States.

That's in the worst-case scenario of the perpetuation of Iran's current theocratic regime administered by a willing executive. In reality, the bottom-up pressure to reform or replace Iran's government and official culture is enormous and still growing. By the time Iran has nuclear weapons, it could easily have a different President, possibly even a changed balance of power between the supreme council of clerics and the parliamentary government.

News updates: Impeachment, NSA and Egypt

2006-05-18T15:14:00.000-04:00

1. John Conyers' op-ed in the WaPo demonstrates that the influential Democrats are all determined to defuse impeachment as a 2006 campaign issue and to give the Administration every opportunity to formally respond, rather than proceed with their (already more than adequate) current evidence. So much for my idea of getting started on it now, when it still might mean something. I'm back to considering it pointless.

2. Interesting new news about the NSA that could feed the nascent trend toward finding fault with General Hayden's actual record, rather than opposing him based on faulty hypotheticals like "militarizing the CIA." (Thanks to Sauron at Freethought Forum for the tip, who got it from Talking Points Memo.

3. Egypt ramps up its brutal repression. Hundreds of demonstrators for judicial independence were beaten and arrested, one of the two particular judges in question was disciplined, and an court denied Ayman Nour's appeal of his five-year sentence.

Animal language: Fresh evidence

2006-05-18T11:01:00.000-04:00

Mostly I focus on politics and law, but I'm interested in most everything, especially advances in scientific knowledge. This article in the London Times says that "the putty-nosed monkey in Nigeria ... sometimes communicates by combining sounds into a sequence that has a different meaning from any of its component calls, an ability that was thought to be uniquely human." Now that's freakin' cool.

(via Drudge Report--the guy's a right-wing hack and his "scoops" usually aren't worth the electrons they're displayed with, but his links are always worth checking)

Overlooked news: Georgia same-sex marriage ban ruled unconstitutional!

2006-05-18T01:40:00.000-04:00

I meant to post about this earlier. I'm very excited by it. The Georgia feed from LeftyBlogs has good coverage of the decision and its immediate consequences. I don't like the coverage of it that has called Judge Russell's decision one of "technicalities": she ruled on a real procedural question, and those kinds of questions are extremely important. Without them, it's tyranny of the majority through unscrupulous and/or incompetent leadership, which was precisely the case here.

We have to rely on a lawsuit and a judge here after the fact; in Wisconsin, I think they're going to beat it! Georgia's campaign suffered from delayed, limited organization; Fair Wisconsin already has coordinators in each of its 72 counties. (I admit the comparison is a little unfair, since Wisconsin is a lot more progressive and Georgia has 159 counties, with quite a few more people in them.) On, Wisconsin!

A Note on Language and Fact

2006-05-17T21:30:00.000-04:00

The basic definitions and uses of words have been part of the political battlefield for some time now (decades? centuries?), and there's a few words I need to rip apart: Global War on Terror (GWOT). As many people have already pointed out, one can't fight a tactic or a feeling, so it is a dishonest phrase. There is a way that it can be made true by substituting "Al Qaeda" for Terror. The United States has fought Al Qaeda worldwide, starting (and continuing) in Afghanistan, since October 2001.

The United States has also been fighting a war in Iraq since March 2003. Our government says this is also part of the GWOT; I think this is also basically dishonest, since I believe nearly everyone (except our government & its most ardent supporters) recognizes that the proportion of non-coalition foreign combatants in Iraq is extremely low, less than 10%. In terms of casualties, it is almost completely a U.S.-Iraqi war, with the British in the sole featured roles and a few other countries literally playing bit parts.

So we're fighting two wars right now. One is in Iraq. The other is centered in Afghanistan (just can't seem to win anywhere these days, can we? We can take territory, but we can't hold it), but conveniently, the war is Global, so it can be anywhere, anytime. Soldiers and paramilitary CIA-types still get inserted here and there, but a lot of it is done by satellite, unmanned surveillance and missile or drone attacks--a sort of real-life 24-hour video game run from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, CA--in places like Yemen and Pakistan.

My point is, these being the facts, and given that we're not being asked to materially sacrifice for these wars, not subject to any of the usual privations, demands or inconveniences on the "home front"--why is it nonetheless necessary to strip us of so many of our rights, and to continue to eliminate so many more of them in secret? So far as I've been able to glean, there have been very few thwarted terrorist attacks on the United States. I don't think there have been enough to justify creating a proto-police state.

All Cheney, all the Times

2006-05-14T02:05:00.000-04:00

Is the Times working off institutional guilt for how much they've let this administration get away with?

Notes Are Said to Reveal Close Cheney Interest in a Critic of Iraq Policy--information from a Fitzgerald court filing reveals handwritten notes by Cheney on a copy of Joseph Wilson's 2003 NYT op-ed.

Cheney the Decider

2006-05-13T19:46:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reports today on Cheney's influence on the Echelon-type program General Hayden designed for the NSA to implement at home after 9/11/2001. The article mentions David Addington, who aside from "Scooter" Libby is the closest thing there is to Cheney's alter ego.

Is it unoriginal for me to think that in their co-sovereign arrangement, Cheney's office is the policy wing and the White House is merely reduced to operations?

Free Alaa: Blogging, Activism and Human Rights

2006-05-13T19:13:00.000-04:00

Well, start reading a few decent blog and blog-info pages, and challenges to freedom will confront you just like almost anywhere else. More than one today has told me about the latest repressive acts in Egypt, which this time imprisoned among others a famous Egyptian blogger. One of the campaigners cooked up this Flash pamphlet, and it doesn't really fit in my sidebar! Sign the petition, Google-bomb and let Manal and Alaa tell you about one of our longest-standing low friends in high places, Hosni Mubarak.

EDIT: My faithful reader informed me that there's some annoying audio that comes along with the Flash. Sorry, guys, but I can't abide that. If you still want to check out the pamphlet, click here.

The Blog Formerly Known As "Yet Another Lefty"

2006-05-13T17:29:00.000-04:00

I've made a bunch of changes to my blog template, but probably the only obvious one is the new title. It refers to Article V of the U.S. constitution, of course, and its provisions for amendment including the constitutional convention. I wasn't initially thinking of A3G, or Article III Groupie, but I couldn't help but be reminded of her. I thought the blog was defunct following the exposure of A3G's identity, but it's alive and kicking! All the best with the new format, you sexy counsel you.

Impeachment now (updated)

2006-05-12T23:46:00.000-04:00

I was reading Brad DeLong's blog today, and his urgent refrain "Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Him Now" made me rethink. The specific reasons are so poignant--and could be multiplied so far beyond the destruction of the CIA and the Executive's arrogant disregard for the law--that I decided to return to my fantasy realism and imagine what it would take to impeach Bush/Cheney as soon as possible. (If I had to pick just one reason for impeachment, I think it would be for the signing statements. They're just such obvious and fundamental violations of the Constitution's separation of powers.)

My rough recollection is that any Representative can file articles of impeachment, whereupon they would go to a committee. If an absolute majority of the House agrees to a petition to discharge the articles from that committee, I believe the petition succeeds.

1) If Nancy Pelosi is pressured into changing her newly articulated stance that impeachment is off the table, and

2) a majority of Democrats unify with sufficient Republicans who somehow or other put nation above party,

George Bush and Richard Cheney can be impeached with relative speed.

I'm open to suggestions for designing a successful campaign!

UPDATE: Looking at Rule 15 of the House, the situation seems substantially as I remembered it. A motion becomes vulnerable to discharge from a committee after the committee has held it for thirty legislative days. So for example, if I've interpreted the House calendar accurately, a motion for impeachment filed today and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary would be liable for discharge Monday, June 26. If a simple majority of House members voted for it to be discharged, it would be, and then a simple majority could vote again to pass it. Some parliamentary trickery could intervene; multiple motions to discharge could be filed before this one, and there would also be at least a couple of chances to adjourn which could allow it to be put off and strangled behind the scenes. But I'm sure it's nothing Senator Byrd couldn't advise Nancy and Steny how to take care of, after he'd browbeaten them into action in the first place. ;-)

Is it officially "civil war" now?

2006-05-12T20:32:00.000-04:00

Clashes erupt between Two Iraqi Units

At first I thought this might be a historical marker in the making, but the actual story as known is murky and confounding. Kurds, Shia and Americans. I sure hope there's follow-up.

Impeachment revisited

2006-05-09T22:09:00.000-04:00

So last year, in my fitful start on this blog, I wondered whether a minimum condition for impeachment could be met: Democrats retaking the House. I started reading about it again this week, and if you've paid any attention you already know it's looking much more likely. There are some close races coming up in places like Ohio and New Hampshire that might lead me to donate Democratic for the first time. I should try to engage with and support the local Georgia candidates, too; I hold grudges against each of them, but we need 'em, and they need the help. Though they're incumbents, they're running against experienced former congressmen, out thanks to redistricting if I'm not mistaken, which puts them a notch above the average challenger.

So now the question becomes more practical. Nancy Pelosi has said that in the event of a takeover, there will certainly be investigations, and if they lead to impeachment, then Democrats will consider it. Will they actually have the will and unity to do it? Would enough Republican senators join enough Democrats voting to convict? There would, of course, have to be a sustained public campaign in favor of it against whatever organized G.O.P. operation were mounted against it.

At the moment I'd like to skip over all those demanding intermediate activist steps actually requiring hard work (not least of which, repeatedly stiffening the official Democratic backbone) and notice from my armchair that for impeachment to have meaning and effectiveness, it has to include the Vice President. It's as much or more his administration as Bush's--and could there be anything more pointlessly symbolic than replacing Bush with Cheney?

Ach, it's all pointless anyway. Any Congressional investigation that would pass the fair test would take at least a year, no doubt, and at that point there's only a year left. The Senate would take a nice chunk of that to deliberate conviction--multiply it by two for condemning both the President and Vice President, in this ideal parallel world of justice--at that point, is it still worth it?

Speaking of Cheney ...

2006-05-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

I remembered that I saw a brief item on Cheney recently, which turns out to have been a portion of a preview of this whole little overseas trip with a massive focus on Russia. I hadn't heard of the Adriatic Charter before, which of course has bipartisan support in Congress. (Note the explicit, blatantly captured imperial bribe in that last document concerning relocating overseas military bases to Albania. The Adriatic Charter conveniently serves a dual purpose: expanding American influence in the former Soviet sphere and further isolating Serbia.)

It's yet another one of those below-the-radar expansions of the pax Americana; NATO has become a sort of soft reverse Iron Curtain, turning back across Europe toward Russia in a moving line of economic exclusion, absorbing former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Socialist Republics and causing Russia encirclement anxiety. (The Russian press is speaking of Cheney as a latter-day Churchill, demarcating with this speech the launch of a new Cold War.) Expanding NATO's membership to include nearly all of Europe helps neutralize a huge swath of nations' foreign policy toward an increasingly renegade United States by allying with them militarily, and the countries want it because it is very much a lever for entrance to other treaties such as the EU, the WTO, etc.

It all bodes well for the Security Council talks on Iran, donchathink. Russia and China have been stubbornly recalcitrant up to this point about passing a resolution under Chapter 7, which would authorize follow-up punitive action. The two-headed Presidency decides to pursue a foreign policy trip that aggressively targets Russia, attempting to extend and consolidate past injury to its prosperity and prestige and continuing to lay the groundwork for future military threat, jeopardizing an important upcoming G8 summit in St. Petersburg. What possible happy outcome is there in this scenario?

While searching around for links to the stuff I'd seen, I found this nugget from CBS that really wraps it all up in a nice small Orwellian package. American news isn't that bad if you read it right.

This guy really broke the mold of his office, hasn't he? No other Vice President has been co-sovereign. What a fig leaf this request is. "President Bush asked Vice President Cheney ...."

A day in the life of geopolitical morality

2006-05-05T23:19:00.000-04:00

Hi. Ain't been motivated in a long time (he said, to the two people who read his previous posts). Well, today's the day. :-)

So Sith Lord Cheney addressed some former Soviet countries in Vilnius yesterday, in which he accused Russia of backsliding toward authoritarianism and suppressing rights. This has seriously enraged the Russian press and government. Today, in Geneva, the United States began to answer to the world for its most recent human rights violations.

In the meantime, on my drive home from work, I heard on Marketplace that Cheney wasted no time moving on to Kazakhstan--access to its oil currently being dominated by Russia.

It's nothing deep, it just struck me as a particularly bald moment of the hypocrisy of these governments toward their citizens and each other and their real struggle for current and future power: Cheney is perfectly right that the Russian government has not evolved into a democracy, and the Russian government is perfectly hypocritical in rejecting Cheney's criticisms, but Cheney lacks any moral authority as part author of policies that created a torture gulag in violation of multiple countries' sovereignty. In the meantime, one gets on with the real game of fighting for future supremacy through control of dwindling energy resources.

Impeachment?

2005-07-02T18:52:00.000-04:00

So some of the more strident voices on the left have been calling for Bush's impeachment for a while now. After only a little thought, I initially dismissed these ideas as pointless pipe dreams. It doesn't matter in the least what this President might deserve; politically, Congress is Republican, and they'll remain so until 2008. Coverage like Salon's left me yawning; I already knew this, I thought, I wish people would stop wasting their voices on it.

However, Robert Parry's latest article (not to mention Zogby's poll) led me to rethink this. Okay, I thought. If an impeachment campaign would successfully support and mesh with recognizably worthwhile projects, and we decide to wax optimistic--what would it take to make it real?

In my opinion, an impeachment could only succeed if two unlikely conditions are met: the Democrats regain control of the House in 2006 and they gain bipartisan support for impeachment. This of course would be most crucial in the Senate, since if we remain the slightest bit realistic, we write off the Democrats regaining the Senate in 2006, let alone winning a pie-in-the-sky unified two-thirds majority.

I didn't find anybody doing a systematic page on the 2006 House contests yet, so I did some research of my own, in which I found the Swing State Project the most helpful. Assuming the Democrats lose no seats, I think I've found a minimum of 15 Republican seats they should try to take. Many of these at the moment appear hopeless, but at least a few are already competitive.

A few I have some hope for:

California, Duke Cunningham v. Democrat
Colorado, Rick O'Donnell v. Ed Perlmutter or Peggy Lamm for an open seat, and Marilyn Musgrave v. Democrat
Illinois, Henry Hyde v. Christine Cegelis
Pennsylvania, Don Sherwood v. Greg Skrepenak or Chris Carney
Texas, Tom DeLay v. Nick Lampson

A few I think should be contested:

California, Richard Pombo v. Democrat, and open seat of Chris Cox
Connecticut, 3 moderate Republicans, including Nancy Johnson v. Christopher Murphy or J. Paul Vance, Jr.
Florida, Republican v. Les Miller for open seat
New York, Vito Fossella v. Democrat
Ohio, Jean Schmidt v. Paul Hackett for an open seat (Aug. 2 special election)
Washington, Doc Hastings v. Democrat

The Democratic leadership has already announced a nationally themed campaign, running on broad ethical violations by the governing GOP and trying to tie local candidates to national leaders, especially Majority Leader Tom DeLay. I think this could be potentially profitable--almost all of the Republicans mentioned above, and a number more beside, have specific allegations of corruption against them, many tying directly back to people like DeLay--as long, of course, that local conditions are given their proper, primary place. However, I think it ought to be accompanied by positive Democratic steps in the direction of ethical reform: things like exhaustive self-audits to ensure complete compliance, proposing and implementing where possible more reforms to House ethics procedures and regulations, etc. Rhetorically, Democrats should draw the link between ethics and values; remember, seize ground for yourself as the "party of values"?

I guess a few other things happened lately too; did I hear that Justice O'Connor touched off the expected Court confirmation war? ;-) (Cagey of her, wasn't it. Everybody was watching Rehnquist, and when no news had come by Wednesday, we all started to think there wouldn't be any. Now, it's already on: the ad campaigns, the supporter turn-out emails, a march!...) Oh, and that thing about some reliable reporters and lawyers blabbing prematurely that the notes of Time magazine journalist Cooper name Karl Rove as the Valerie Plame leaker. It's going to be a long, hot summer.

In the under the radar department, the day the Supreme Court found in New London's favor for expanded eminent domain, an activist developer filed to take possession of Justice Souter's home; and in an encouraging development, Bush's latest primetime address appears to have been quietly postponed from Friday June 24 to Tuesday June 28 because of networks' noncompliance, with most of them further leaving the White House hanging on their decisions whether to broadcast Tuesday. A saucy move and a promising sign!

Why the United States need a constitutional convention

2005-07-02T15:33:00.000-04:00

Here's another article (originally published at Freethought Forum) that provides some more of the background thinking in my perspective.

*****

Based on what I know of how the U.S. government has behaved so far, I think we need a revolution to replace its government, as soon as possible, for its own sake and for that of the rest of the world. I don't think the rest of the world could (or should) impose a reorganization; I don't think a successful military rebellion from within is a real scenario, either. That leaves, however unlikely, a political or legal revolution.

I think there are too many powerful, interconnected ruling groups of people--political incumbents, the party machineries, lawyers, lobbyists, revolving-door CEOs/senior bureaucrats, top managers of capital--for anything but a knockout blow to succeed. Maybe a very strong, cunning and intelligent president could Executive Order and legislate us partway there, but I doubt it. He (who knows, maybe she) would probably be blocked by Congress, if not then by the courts. Such a person might also be very unlikely to accomplish the necessary curb of the power of the presidency itself.

Consequently, I think that however improbable-seeming, the only viable solution is to organize from the grassroots to bring about a constitutional convention to reorganize the federal government. Article V says that one must be held if called for by two-thirds of the states. (Quite a few already have active resolutions calling for a convention floating around.) The convention would then have a chance to redraft the government completely; they might not think up a completely new brilliant system, but at least they could place limits on the executive, stiffen the powers of the representative assembly, break the duopoly of the major parties, establish a truly independent judiciary, guarantee universal health care, etc. etc. etc....

If that new constitution survived its transition to embodying its first government without being largely co-opted by the reactive ruling elites, then we'd have managed to take another huge step forward in our political evolution, with long-lasting widespread beneficial consequences.

I recognize that a convention might not necessarily produce something better than what we have now, but I think the chances are high of improvement. I don't think the convention would be destroyed by thousands of special interests pursuing their individual supremacy. The two-step process of agreeing on proposed fundamental law and then having to approve it by a supermajority of three-quarters of the states by their legislatures or in convention makes a very strong force towards ignoring particularist concerns in favor of broad, basic unanimity. The 1787 convention settled their particularist concerns by means of general compromises, not insertion of innumerable small agendas. Congress has seen an incredibly heavy stream of proposed amendments ever since it first met; of those many thousands, only twenty-seven have eventually passed.

I also think any convention would treat the standing constitution with something approaching ginger reverence; I can easily imagine one of the first things they might do is resolve to re-include the Bill of Rights unchanged. I think their conservatism would run much deeper than that; the Preamble might stay just the same, too, as well as Article V, the means of amendment, and other portions of the text.

As I see it, the government is gradually but effectively disposing of the Bill of Rights, occasionally slowed down by the Supreme Court but not often. In order to make things work the way the current constitution intends them, I think you need to have the power to restate what it said more forcefully and clearly. In addition to strengthening the intention of the original document, I think it could use some additions. We haven't been keeping up with all the advances over the last two hundred years in fundamental rights and law.

The constitution has been shredding almost as long as we've had it. Some of the abuses cited on this page are conspiracy theories, but they're labeled as "suspected"; just consider the documented ones above them. Along with constant minor and major cuts, the constitution has suffered two catastrophes: amendment by bayonet after the Civil War, the effects of which the country has only recently recovered from, and the political assassination of the principle of strict construction after Roosevelt's court-packing assault in the 1930s, from which we have not recovered. Moreover, reading the plain text of the constitution only tells you a fraction of its effect: it has been thoroughly encrusted by Supreme Court decisions that have the force of amendment as long as they are not reviewed and superceded by actual amendments.

The only way to reverse the holding that a corporation is a person entitled to the inclusive protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, or to re-establish the plain meaning of publishing a "regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money" and do away with secret military and intelligence budgets, is to pass an amendment. There are so many similarly significant examples that it just doesn't make sense to try to pass them one at a time. (Please, for the love of humanity, could D.C. finally get representation, instead of a token three-fifths of the presidential electoral power they're entitled to?)

There are also three compelling cultural reasons for a convention. The first is that our constitution has been fetishized, turned into a relic and worshiped as an object rather than studied and reasoned about by the broad population. It needs renewal to be the "living document" it is so often called. The second is that it would force a huge elevation in the political discourse and public involvement in it. No one could any longer suppose that politics and the composition of laws was too remote from them; every part of the conversation would bear upon the life of every citizen and national. The delegates to the convention, on the other hand, would be in the uncomfortable position of being daily evaluated in comparison to Washington, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton. The third is that there is a real culture war tearing us apart on the inside, and it needs to be settled, or at least pacified by means of some compromise less dishonorable than the one that silently acquiesced to slavery in 1787.

There are many specific but large-scale problems besides our dysfunctional government, such as media concentration. However, many of them, including this one, can be directly connected to government power and regulation, which would still require very high-level coordinated government action to fix. Here too, I think the chances of a convention are better than a president taking the right lead, being supported by Congress, and not being undermined by the judiciary. In this case, the disposition of all communication frequencies as a fundamental public asset could be affected by constitutional language.

In the end, when one is talking about reining in corporations or how to best avoid prolonging the U.S. government's terrible policies, one's talking about taking a huge chunk of power out of the hands of the ruling class. That's going to need something on the scale of a long-term, nonviolent mass revolution. A new constitution could be both part of the means to the goal and the means for consolidation of the new situation against the inevitable enormous backlash that would follow.

The noosphere and futurism

2005-07-01T21:09:00.000-04:00

I'm looking back over the Journal I kept for a while at Freethought Forum, and this looks good enough to republish! I posted it originally in mid-August 2004.

*****

The name I gave to my particular field of interest is the "noosphere": the sphere of ideas, what according to my definition is the "spiritual" world, everything that exists that is immaterial. (I’ve discovered since that others coined it first; I’m not using it in Teilhard de Chardin’s specialized sense, although his ideas are intriguing.) Regardless of whether a notion is true or not, if someone believes in its truth and acts on that basis, it exists--thus I need to be interested in it. This represents an evolution from my similar childhood magical thinking that even a single person believing in a religion called it into material existence. (I try hard to think about everything coherently, but this stubborn difference between things and ideas remains a challenge to me. It’s one of the few areas of philosophy in which I’m still interested.)

A little reflection on the noosphere will reveal two significant things: one, it has exponentially expanded in size and density, viewed over the last 500 and particularly over the last 100 years; two, that along with this expansion has come unbelievable pollution (thank you so much, Edward Bernays). In fact, in the United States in particular, the ratio of immaterial substance to material substance has grown so astonishingly that to some extent the expansion is itself a sort of pollution; I think that it is partly thanks to the growing labyrinths of the media world’s funhouse mirrors that the United States is able to fool itself into thinking of itself as a world unto itself, with much less justification than an actual subcontinent such as India, or the largest nation built on the ruins of the largest, longest-running civilization, China.

Religion is certainly a significant and long-standing element of the noosphere, but more interesting to me right now is essays in futurism. Even if such documents are utterly bogus, they matter because they represent part of the mindset of key ruling decisionmakers; they’re going to act partly on the basis of conclusions they draw because they think this stuff is true, so it’s good to be aware of it. The point, too, is that there are lots of key people actively working on what’s going to happen next; by their creations, the future doesn’t have to be quite as much of a mystery, since you at least know something about how some leaders are going to react to it, depending on how it actually turns out. (Sometimes, of course, they just tell you what they’re going to do, regardless of what they think the future holds; so if they come to power, you can count on them to do certain things no matter what.)

Anyway, one such document discusses the possible effects long-term demographic trends will have on geopolitics. It’s a (mostly) declassified document, so it doesn’t pack the same juice as stuff like National Security Council Memorandum 68 or Policy Planning Study 23 (yes, I learned about these by reading a Noam Chomsky compilation. What? Stop looking at me like that). However, it is fairly frank, even envisioning a worst-case scenario for the near future in which the “natives will get restless” (yes, the report self-consciously reuses that phrase; p. 96). Among other details, the report sees demographic trends continuing to bolster the United States’ lone superpower status (both through a far more liberal immigration policy than that of almost all other industrialized nations and its seniors’ willingness to continue to work long past the typical retirement age) and a youth population bulge throughout the Middle East that will pose both large terrorist and potential state security threats to U.S. interests. (Duh; still, this was July 2001, so I guess that’s half reassuring that not everybody in government is completely moronic.) Also, the report projects that as of about 2015, for the first time in history the majority of the world’s population will be urban.

Overall, there seems to be a pessimistic outlook for the world’s future overall, but it seems to me that it’s overlaid and obscured by a pretty cheerful outlook for the maintaining of complete U.S. global dominance for the foreseeable future. Hence I was surprised to run across this National Intelligence Council document, which projects four possible future scenarios and sees U.S. global influence waning in all of them. I haven’t fully read that one yet, so maybe the contradiction is only apparent.

First post

2005-07-01T18:10:00.000-04:00

Hello, world. This is my first blog. However, I wrote something like this last year over at freethought-forum.com in one of their journals, but those are down at the moment. [July 2: they're back up now! viewable to registered members] I'll retrieve the data, bring it over, and then there'll be a little background about me. For now, I just want to catch up in medias res ....

The fact is, naked geopolitical maneuvering seems to be taking place everywhere one looks these days; I just can't ignore it. China is the bigger story, of course, but Iran is frying hot right now, and about to go radioactive. Behind them both sits a very friendly Russia, which I suppose is supporting them both with an eye toward rapid evolution to a truly multipolar global regime. If you can't compete all alone anymore, why not try to help some of the others in second place, right?

So a fellow lefty posted a link over at FF to Scott Ritter's latest major piece about Iran, saying that following the usual U.S. model, war has already begun, before official declaration of hostilities. I've noticed a few commentators (for instance, in Salon's War Room) supposing that war with Iran is impossible, since we're so tied down in Iraq. At this point we ought to remember Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article from January; the war is going to be possible because it won't be an invasion and occupation, but short-lived, simultaneous strikes against multiple nuclear-relevant targets. I suspect the coalition this time would be the U.S., Israel, and whatever miscellaneous countries would sign up on paper only--Poland, Vanuatu, etc. I would dearly love to know the source(s) of Ritter's information.

In any case, it has taken no time at all for Norman Solomon's warning to incarnate: a widely-disseminated Thursday morning AP story on a few 1979 Tehran embassy hostages claiming Iranian President-elect Ahmedinejad was a ringleader/torturer among their captors by the evening had become a serious question for the White House. This is the answer to shills like Scott McClellan who dismiss things like the Downing Street Memos as purely past business, while the Administration is focused on the future: Their relevance is to the present with Iran. The White House would in this case be right, of course, that Iran is pursuing nuclear capability; however, where they would be provably wrong is in their contention that striking Iran would lead to positive regime change. Iran's electorate has already confirmed by a narrow margin a candidate aligned with the retrograde supreme Guardian Council; any military attack will only strengthen the people's support for the conservatives, and give the clerics the excuse to cripple or wipe out nascent Iranian progressive movements.

Russia's support for Iran was thrown into sharp relief for me by this article: Russia wants to build a half-dozen more nuclear reactors for Iran. I think the U.S. can only delay this action, not prevent it; once they're built, Iran will rapidly obtain nuclear capability, and a small but effective pole in opposition to the U.S. empire will be born.

With consequences for world oil! Oh boy, isn't oil a fun story? Even bigger than China. Something else to write about soon.

By the way--Happy Dominion Day. :-) 138 years ago, Canada became half a country.