St00pidest Things Ever Said...Eighth Iteration

Time once again for the game sensation that's sweeping the nation...

You know, the following is st00pid on so many different levels, it's hard to grasp really.

here... go read... it's short... I'll wait...

So, I guess this is why recruiting is down, huh?

I mean, besides the obvious -- that this is some kind of hoax --I am really kind of amused that a recruiter would actually put that kind of venomous bile in writing. You would think that anyone with a low animal cunning and self preservation instinct might be tempted to just tie off the bloody stump of the relationship instead of practically goading this kid into ... oh, I don't know... saving the emails and making you into a news story...

Also, dosen't it just tell you all you need to know about the current attitude of military personnel about the rest of us hairball civilians? Sure she could be all solicitous when she thought the boy was perhaps fit cannon fodder, but once he is found wanting, then apparently he is worthy of naught but contempt...

mojo sends

Past is Prologue...

DoD Announces Major Unit Deployments to Gulf

DoD Announces Force Adjustments

The Department of Defense announced today additional major units scheduled to deploy in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The announcement involves one corps headquarters, two division headquarters and one brigade combat team consisting of approximately 7,000 personnel

Specific decisions made by the secretary of defense include:

XVIII Airborne Corps Headquarters, Fort Bragg, N.C.

1st Armored Division Headquarters, Wiesbaden, Germany

4th Infantry Division Headquarters, Fort Hood, Texas

1st Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y.

Additionally, the Department announced that the 25th Infantry Division headquarters will have its tour extended by approximately 45 days.

Other combat-support and combat-service-support units consisting of approximately 2,000 personnel have also been identified to deploy in support of operations in Iraq.

More combat-support and combat-service-support units may be deployed should commanders determine additional support forces are required.

These deployments reflect the continued commitment of the United States to the security of the Iraqi people. The Department recognizes the continued sacrifices of these units and their family members.

Well, there you have it...

At the same time, it would appear that the fear pimps are jacking up the Iran nuke fear...

"Iran has more than tripled its ability to produce enriched uranium in the last three months, adding some 1,000 centrifuges which are used to separate radioactive particles from the raw material.

The development means Iran could have enough material for a nuclear bomb by 2009, sources familiar with the dramatic upgrade tell ABC News.

The sources say the unexpected expansion is taking place at Iran's nuclear enrichment plant outside the city of Natanz, in a hardened facility 70 feet underground."

In the event of an emergency, please note the planet's emergency exits... oh, wait...

mojo sends

Never forget...

We've told you so... again, and again, and again...

Here, reposted for your edification, are a couple of bits and bobs from the mojowire from the past two years...[c.f. here from Aug. '05 and here from Sept. '04]

van.mojo: No More Bets Please...

This is President Bush on October 16, 2002:
“Like the members of Congress here today, I've carefully weighed the human cost of every option before us. If we go into battle, as a last resort, we will confront an enemy capable of irrational miscalculations, capable of terrible deeds”

This is President Bush on May 3, 2003:
"The use of force has been, and remains, our last resort," he said. "Yet all can know, friend and foe alike, that our Nation has a mission: We will answer threats to our security, and we will defend the peace."

And this is also President Bush:
"All options are on the table," Bush, speaking at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, said in the interview broadcast on Saturday. Asked if that included the use of force, Bush replied: "As I say, all options are on the table. The use of force is the last option for any president and you know, we've used force in the recent past to secure our country."

However, this statement was made yesterday, August 13, 2005 and in this last quote he is referring to Iran, not Iraq.

That's it ladies and gentlemen, the bones are rolling, no more bets...

mojo sends

------------------------------------
THE CLONE WAR
J. In March of this year, our Maximum Leader took the little noticed action of declaring in executive order 12957 a National Emergency regarding the "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States constituted by the actions and policies of the Government of Iran."

Not much to think about there, these things are generally pretty rote. For instance, an official "state of emergency" has existed with regards to Iran since 1979.

At first glance, the creepy thing about this order is the language that mirrors reasons for the Iraq emergency declration made July 2001, two full months before 9/11. But then you read further, and then something even creepier (at least in retrospect) appears: "the emergency declared by Executive Order 12957 constitutes an emergency separate from that declared on November 14, 1979, by Executive Order 12170."

This creepiness was injected directly into the brain stem last week when the Los Angeles Times and several other papers across the country carried the Max Boot piece about how the President needs to take off the kid gloves regarding Iran and get them to respect our authoritay! In a sparse 760-word essay, specific references to terrorism or terror groups: six. And he was very careful to evoke the 9/11 frame and tie Iran to that heinous crime.

At first, when I brought this to Mojowire Editorial Board, we generally agreed that this was just more of Max Boot's dark military fantasies, wet dreaming their ways onto the nation's op-ed pages, especially given that they want to change the conversation right now given that much of that hive brain is currently embroiled in an Italian-Iranian-Israeli-Neocon spy scandal.

We also thought that this was possibly something out of the West Wing; an attempt to stir the jingo pot given Dick Cheney's assertion that the next plane that flies into a building will be piloted by John Kerry.

Then I started to look around and I came up with a few more disquieting bits of deja vu. The President and his inner circle talking about "Iranian links to 9/11" -- which the CIA has already openly discredited, or at least cast serious doubt upon, and Iran's unremitting push to get the bomb, as well as other weapons of mass destruction, and of course casting a righteous light on Iran's deplorable Human Rights record.

This stuff is not coming from the Political Office, though, much less the hideous belching pipes of the Mighty Wurlitzer. This is coming out of Doug Feith's little kingdom in the Office of Special Plans. Literally, the first rock we looked under, and we find John Bolton sucking a smoldering chair leg and sounding off on the way of the world; action, now, against Iran. Interdiction, interruption and control.

But through it all the language of the administration has not necessarily been that of regime change. Yet that will apparently be the new policy of the Bush Administration if they manage to falsify another election. The same phrases appearing in speeches by Condi Rice, Bolton, W and in the op-ed pieces of the likes of Boot, the "grave and growing threat," "links to the 9/11 attacks," "can't afford appeasement."

From the Sunday Herald in Britain on July 18: "A US government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that military action would not be overt in changing Iran, but rather that the US would work to stir revolts in the country and hope to topple the current conservative religious leadership. The official said: 'If George Bush is re-elected there will be much more intervention in the internal affairs of Iran.' "

This langauge has been ratcheting up all summer, only now to come full circle. On Monday, the President is going to go the IAEA and ask for a declaration of non-compliance as a step on the way to the U.N. Security Council to get one of those resolutions that he can twist into military intervention.

S. You might be remembered, Wireheads, that about this time last year, the dread Doctor Strychnine dropped a beat down on us all, reminding us why such a war on a conventional scale, like we are fighting in Iraq, is going to be a doomed enterprise right out of the blocks in Iran.

Let's revisit the frightful Dr. momentarily... He pointed out that Iran's military is about 4 times the size of Iraq's, it’s a much larger, richer country that has not been suffering under sanctions and unlike the agreeably flat and mostly water rich Iraq, Iran is a a big giant mountain crag surrounded by a completly arid plane and 2.400 miles of coast.

Yeah... geographically, it's Mordor by the sea.

And as the good doctor also pointed out, it is highly likely that this was the "red team" that handed U.S. military geniuses a public beating out on the town square during the Millenium Challenge War games of 2002.

So why on Earth would these stupid gits pick a fight with these guys now?

Well, for one thing, that question assumes a certain amount of reality in the thinking of the people in OSP. But I think our experience with their strategerie in Iraq has been enough to cure of any delusions regarding Doug Feith's relationship to reality.

Then there's the Israel card. Israel is already conducting operations in Northern Iraq, and the Likudniks currently in power in Tel Aviv would love nothing better than a reason to take out Iran, which backs Hezbollah. We already have the troops ready to stage in theater, and the potential assitance of a newly frocked Iraqi army.

Between the American Israeli Committee for Public Affairs, evangelicals in Department of Defense and a Petroleum industry connected to the White House that would love to see $100 bucks a barrel, regardless of what it would do the economy... yeah, that's a recipe for disaster.

The talk of 9/11 connections to Iran will continue to increase as we get closer to the election, along with Iranian intransigence on nuclear inspection. This will help W get a better handle on the electorate by by scaring them with tales of Iranian death rays mounted on the heads of endangered sharks off the eastern sea board.

In the meantime, the Bolton doctrine being run out of the office of special plans and Doug Feith, the actors are being put in place right now to create an incident that might make military intervention plausible or necessary. At the same time, goading the hardliners to crack down on reformers by continually expressing our support, and making reformers distance themselves more and more from Western engagement.

Then after the election, we start the real march, but make no mistake. This war has already started.

How about that oracular gang at the mojowire, huh?

Hey s9, can you find some of the stuff you've written on Iran?

Stay tuned wireheads, there will be a mojowire broadcast this Saturday with all the updated information you will need...

mojo sends

Here we go again..

Kevin Drum offered up a few thoughts on NCLB. A sample here:

[...]Of course, this also leads me to one of my biggest complaints about NCLB and education policy in general. No, not testing. I'm agnostic on that for the moment. What really bugs me is that politically we're forced to create (and fund) a system that applies to every school system in America even though we all know perfectly well that 80% of our school systems are basically OK and could probably be left alone. It's the other 20% -- the low-income schools located largely in urban inner cities -- that need help. But for a variety of reasons, it's nearly impossible to target our reform efforts there. So instead we end up with broad brush efforts that waste lots of money and eventually fail because they piss off suburban voters. Bleh.

But maybe I'm off base on that. I invite our ed experts to chime in[...]

I'm not an expert, but I'll chime in anyway.

Umm..exactly how do we know that 80% of our schools are okay? And what does okay mean exactly? Not to parse his words too carefully here, but maybe we should try to nail some of these assertions down and find out exactly it is that Kevin and many of his commenters are complaining about.

In fact, I truly doubt that 80% of our schools are okay, and that they should be left alone. The unfortunate truth, borne out by the NAEP and those "terrible" testing regimens that are oppressing so many people in education, is many students are far from okay. And why is "okay" enough? What about great? Or "Holy Jesus, we are creating a genration of super intelligent mutant children straight out of village of the damned?" I'm cool with that.

Let's go back and ponder what is really up Kevin's nose. He doesn't like the requirement that all students test 100% proficient by 2016. Which is a perfectly reasonable complaint, it was a bone that the education reformers and Democrats threw the President to get what they wanted. They knew it was crazy, but the reauthorization process, which they knew they would get at least 3 of , could clean that up once they knew how the whole process was shaking out. According to Kevins conversation with EduWonk, they wanted 90% (still high), but the President wanted 100. So they tossed him his bone and waited to the bill got reauthorized to assess it.

BTW, Attention NEA jerkoffs: NCLB is not the product of a GOP corporate conspiracy as you like to argue in your fundrasing agitprop. It's the product of two of the most liberal Democrats in Congress. Feel Free to STFU. Or better yet, get off your asses and do something constructive.

Anyway, lets go through this one more time. NCLB is the reauthorization of ESEA, and it is essentially a Civil Rights law, or a law with a civil rights goal embedded in it. NCLB requires that each state test the students in it's school systems to determine if they are proficient, and if not, get them proficent by 2016. Each state was allowed to choose it's testing method, how they would address less than proficient students, and, here's the kicker, define what proficient is. Not only that, but the state must make the results public, and break down the results by race, among other catagories. Your inner civil rights detector should be clicking right now. Why exactly? Because schools, even those "okay" schools Kevin seems to want to leave alone, are adept at hiding the dismal education their minority students are getting by not breaking them out in their data, or by simply not publishing any data at all. You cannot logically, let alone morally and ethically, claim you are doing okay if a sizable portion of our student population is getting the shaft, even if their white and asian students are doing well.

If Kevin would get off the bong, (and he is trying, props to him), he could have jumped on the real problem, which is that the states took the opportunity given them to apply their own definition of proficient, which is often absurdly low. Couple that with some byzantine testing regime and you can call 80% of your studnets proficient in 2006, like some certain Southern Red States, Mississipi, I'm looking at you. Unfortunatley for them, the Feds in NCLB required that their NAEP test be applied on a large scale, giving them and researchers large amounts of valid data to crosscheck. Turns out many states are cheating their ass of. Therefore they are cheating their students. DOE is forcing the states to use testing standards they think are legit, so that problem might be on the road to being addressed. Still, it is a legitimate gripe.

Kevins complaint about the imposition of a national system on the poor, oppressed states I find bewildering from a liberal. Liberals have been trying to increase the role the Federal Government plays in public education for decades And now that NCLB rolled the Trojan horse into the city you want to climb out, burn it, and go back to laying seige to Troy. WTF?? The problem with NCLB is that is too deferential to the cheating bullshit that states try to pull when they get called on the parts of their school systems that are failing. Everyone knows that urban schools are terrible. But what is less commonly known are the rural schools that are just as bad in some cases. Or the suburban schools that fail to educate their low income and minority students.

And before someone busts out with this favorite, yes, NCLB is underfunded, and that does suck. That is not a reason to stop testing students or holding states and schools accountable. That's a reason to beat on the Bush Administration and the GOP.

The Feds are not oppressing anyone with NCLB. They are doing what should have been done decades ago, trying to generate real empirical data on our students to find out WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON! We demand empirical data in business and other endeavors. Yeah, it's often difficult to figure out EXACTLY what and how to measure something, and how to interpret. But we do it anyway because, it is argued, it is a critical factor in decision-making. That is really what we are doing with the testing and standard portion of NCLB. Trying to figure out where we are, and if our attempts at improvement are working. We can adjust the bar when we need to.

By the way, conservatives across the board DESPISE NCLB. Not that it makes it automatically a good idea, they are idiots for the most part after all, and who can fucking tell how their puny minds work these days. But it pretty much undermines the theory NCLB is a conservative plot to destory public education, that's what their voucher scheme and union busting is supposed to do. There are plenty of other schemes cooked up by the right to occupy even the most conspriacy minded of people. We don't need to invent ones out of whole cloth.

So, if we are going to have a good discussion about the reauthorization of NCLB, can we at least do the work to know what the FRAK we are talking about, PLEASE???

Attention Hebisner!

[Via Avram, at Making Light]

I think we may have found your candidate for President of the United States of America.

The American Secret Service have launched an investigation into one of the candidates for the presidency in 2008 – after he pledged that as President, one of his first acts would be to impale President George W. Bush.
[...]
Sharkey told The Columbia Chronicle about the visit: 'They were telling me, when they were interrogating me, that their job was to protect Bush even after he's out of office. I'm looking at them like, “Oh, you're going to defy me when I become president?”
[...]

Sounds like an interesting Supreme Court case to me.

Ow, My Balls

I have no joke here [via TalkingPointsMemo.Com], I just like saying...

Among the complaints that Rove relayed were concerns among Republican Party officials in various jurisdictions that the Justice Department was not being aggressive in pursuing allegations of election fraud by Democrats.

The thing about this story about purging US attorneys that really grinds is that We Told You Fncking People This Would Happen.

Let me now tell you fncking people what will happen if you let them get away with this shit— just like you let them get away with all the previous shit when we were telling you this would happen. The next thing to go will be the judges. Don't think they can do that? Think again. Judges grow old, they retire or they leave office, and somebody has to replace them. After that, they'll start going after high profile liberal fundraising operations with the most nakedly thuggish tactics. You have been warned.

You cannot imagine where this goes unless you've studied how fascism is a failure mode of republics. If you let these nutjobs get away with the US attorney purge, they'll raise the stakes again. And again. And again. Understand this: they are deadly cold serious when they say they want to eliminate liberals by force. Let them think you'll let them get away with it, and they'll try. You have been warned.

"No, There Is Another," says Yoda.

Just go read this opinion piece in the LA Times by Jonathan Chait today:

'THIS IS NOT Luke Skywalker here," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), discussing his friend and Senate colleague John McCain's second run for the presidency. "This is a totally different campaign."

Graham was looking for a way to reassure his fellow conservatives that they no longer had anything to fear from McCain. His choice of metaphor is one of those windows into the fundamental cultural gap that separates hard-core conservatives from the rest of humanity. To most people, who think of Luke Skywalker as a hero battling an evil and immensely powerful empire, Graham's implication would be seen as an unmitigated insult. In the world of the GOP elite, though, it's a form of praise: No, no, don't worry, McCain's with the empire now.
[...]

Perhaps, now would be a good time to remember when Jonathan Last wrote in The Weekly Standard in an article called "The Case For The Empire" in a similar vein?

STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, "Attack of the Clones." There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.

It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case.

"Checque, please!"

Paging Cassandra, Princess Of Troy...

Once again, the geeks know how to solve a huge problem, but nobody is interested in solving it yet— so, nothing will happen.

HEY! KOOL AID!

If you haven't read the Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker, put aside a few minutes and give it a read. It's quite a bit to digest, but a few things jumped out at me. This in particular:

The Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings.

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.
I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.)

Yeah, I'm sure he declined to comment on this. Negroponte knows you don't betray the family. People who stray might, for example, decide to go kayaking in the middle in the night...in the middle of a thunderstorm, and then..umm..drown.

Hypothetically speaking of course.

You have got to love the absolute myopia here though. What is the lesson of Iran Contra? Hey, we almost got away with it, let's try again. C'mon gang, let's put on a show! That has got to be one of the most appalling things I have read since the day George Bush took the oath of office. The fact that the Iran/Contra scandal almost brought down the Reagan Presidency and almost sent several of them to jail never breaks through the myopia. The true depths of what went on during that time I doubt has ever been truly grasped. I think the closest anyone came was John Kerry's investigation into BCCI, an angle on the opposition to the Kerry candidacy that was not explored by the David Broders and Maureen Dowds because, well, they're worthless. Maureen Dowds little hit piece on Hilary Clinton tells you all you need to know about the Kool Kids and what they will be doing in 2008. Trying to get Rudy Giuliani or John McCain elected President, to be precise. They are so authentic, and sooo dreaammmy.

Sorry..I digress..

Another thing that jumped out at me was the degree the Saudi's are shaping our policies and actions in the Middle East. Help me out here, did I dream the fact that 15 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi's? And, is anyone actually in any doubt where the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, not to mention Al-Queda, are getting the cash to run their operations. Did they hold a bake sale? Is their a lemonade stand on the road to Basra? It's American money, shipped to Saudi Arabia to pay for our oil thirst, and filtered to the members of the royal family who are sympathetic to Al-Queda and other Sunni fanatics. No REDSTATE, it's not the ghost of Saddam Hussein, or the Shia's of Iran. Sunni extremists regard Shia's as heretics, worse than the crusader infidels in Iraq. Iran is not going to provide much support for these people. The Administration position on this makes no sense. At least in terms of any relation to objective reality. I'm sure it would make perfect sense if I put on my Hugh Hewitt tinfoil headset. Perfect clarity for these disturbing times.

It's pretty clear to all but the paste eaters that the Administration is looking for an opportunity to justify an attack on Iran. My suspicion is they would have done it by now, but GOP leaders in Congress and in the party have expressed to the White House that unless they can shore up public support for that idea with a plausible reason that the pubic will accept, they will not stick their necks out. At that point, the President could be in threat of impeachment and removal from office. The pathetic attempts to set the Iranians up as the culprits behind the insurgency is just getting started, as are the hack articles by their pet reporters at the Post and Times. I'm sure TIMMAH is keeping Dick Cheney's seat on Beat the Press warm for him. (Dont ask how, this is a family friendly blog. Sort of.)

I think we might need to brace ourselves.

In Other News, Anna Nicole Smith Is Still Dead

...but pay no attention to that.

Our hero forever, the mighty Spackerman, writes at TPMmuckraker about *tomorrow*'s big news today.

Tomorrow morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee becomes the epicenter of a prospective war with Iran. That's because senior intelligence officials will deliver an annual assessment to Congress known as the Worldwide Threat briefing. Over the past several years, the Worldwide Threat has made for a few days' worth of news at most. Tomorrow's, however, will be more significant than usual: it will be a public forum for the intelligence community to either support or dissent from the Bush administration's increasing insistence that Iran is a greater threat to U.S. interests than al-Qaeda.
[...]

Provider three bids twelve-thousand quatloos on the intelligence officials lining up in full chorus behind the President.

Progress! It's *PROGRESSIVE*, Don't You Know?

It's so nice to know that officially sanctioned rape is no longer happening in Iraq.

Un-FRACKING-believable!

This is absolutely priceless. From Murray Waas at the National Journal:

Because someone had leaked the highly classified information from the NSA intercepts, Cheney warned Graham, the Bush administration was considering ending all cooperation with the joint inquiry by the Senate and House Intelligence committees on the government's failure to predict and prevent the September 11 attacks. Classified records would no longer be turned over to the Hill, the vice president threatened, and administration witnesses would not be available for interviews or testimony.

Having your elected representives overseeing the intelligence hijinks of the Executive Branch is UnAmerican, or Communism, errr...umm..feminism? gay marriage?

On that morning in June 2002, Cheney could not have known that his complaints to Graham about the leaking of classified information would help set events in motion that eventually would lead to the prosecution of his own chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as the result of a separate leak investigation.

Waas goes on to detail how Cheney and his cronies maneuvered Congress into allowing an FBI investigation into the NSA leak. That investigation eventually settled on ranking member of the Committee at the time, Republican Senator Richard Shelby. But, by making such a huge stink about the leaks, they maneuvered themselves into a place where they were forced to accept a similar investigation into their own leaks. An investigation that is on the verge of sending a senior Cheney staffer to prison, and lays suspicion bordering on near certainty, that Vice President Cheney himself ordered the leak. I know it's an apriori assumption among the editors and readers of this blog that this Administration makes the character of the Sopranos look like the Von Trapp family singers, but sometimes the depths of their venality defies augury.

This is yet another Maybery Machiavelli scheme, this time to end in any practical sense the oversight of Congress on the intelligence machinations of the Executive Branch. The timing was well played, the political landscape, shaped by the 9/11 attacks and the grotesquely obsequious press corp in the Beltway made the Vice Presidents threat a plausible one. I cannot imagine a more terrible notion than to allow national intelligence services to be free of oversight, even the sometimes problematic oversight of the American Congress. Props to the Vice President and the Imperial Officer Corps at the Naval Observatory for cooking this one up. It also seems to me that this scheme worked. Oversight of the intelligence agencies has been compromised to the point of absurdity.

But wait, it gets better. It is gospel in the right wing media, indeed in much of the regular media that; A) Plame was not covert and therefore the IIPA investigation was a witch hunt, B) Plames lack of covert status means the national security implications are inconsequential. We can find factual rebuttals to those claims in the Waas story, and in the Sidney Blumental column from today in Salon.
First, in regards to Plames status we find this fact in regards to Plames status from Blumenthals description from Armitages leak of Plames name to Bob Woodward

Armitage had learned of Plame from reading a State Department memo that conspicuously marked an "S" next to her name, indicating that her identity was top secret

Her identity of course was Top Secret because of her work in the Counter-Proliferation bureau of the CIA. Something that was the responsibility of Cheney and the arrogant pricks that worked for him to know before they started leaking her name and employment around to reporters for publication. I find it appalling, but not surprising, that The Vice President has not been excoriated by every pundit and columinst in America for the betrayal of a CIA agent by her senior leadership for cheap political payback.

Next, the oft made claim leaking Plames identity was inconsequential. From Murray Waas again:

Craig Schmall, who was a CIA briefing officer for both Cheney and Libby, has testified at Libby's trial that on the morning of July 14, 2003, when journalist Robert Novak outed Plame's covert identity in his newspaper column, Schmall commented to Cheney and Libby, "I thought there was a grave danger leaking the name of a CIA officer. Foreign intelligence services where she served now have the opportunity to investigate everyone whom she had come in contact with. They could be arrested, tortured, or killed."

You Think?? This was a golden opportunity by foreign intelligence services to crack open the CIA's CPD operations. Something further abetted by Robert Novaks unfathomable followup column to his Plame story where he disclosed the name of the cover business Plame AND her fellow agents were "employed" by in order to give them a plausible cover. Nice work Bob, you made it easier for America's enemies to figure out who Plames contacts and fellow agents were so they could be spaced out the nearest airlock.

I truly believed a few short weeks ago I had seen it all from these people. I thought writing future Mojowires would be difficult, because we clearly had figured out the depths these people had sunk too.

Thank you Bush Administration! For making my job as a Mojowire editor that much easier. You people absolutely RULE!

A done deal?

Apparently, according to this story, there is a general consensus among the elder and wise among the GOP politico machine that a Hilary Clinton Presidency is a "fait accompli". Now, this might be more of the standard psy-ops on the part of the GOP to push for a canddiate they feel will help them, but I think there is some truth to the idea that, to Republican operatives, Hillary will get the nomination and the White House.

The reason for this is that the Clinton machine is modeled after the successful GOP machines that have managed to elect George Bush. Top down, very disciplined, expert at separating donors from their cash, and has a cadre of pretty good political operatives that are not afraid to gouge out the eyes of their opponents. It really is a mirror image of the old Clinton campaigns for Bill coupled with a message discipline that is required for a candidate like Hillary, and that was required for Junior.

I'm not nearly as covinced as the GOP is that she is such a shoe-in. She has improved as a candidate on the campaign trail. Her machine is, at least to my eyes, organizationally light years ahead of anyone on either side, including McCains. I have serious doubts, so far, that she is up to handling the inevitable shocks and surprises that roll over candidates during their campaigns. Plus there is a healthy skepticism among the Democratic base about her electibility and her center-right positions on Iraq and national security issues, although I can understand why she thinks she needs to be hawkish. I guess we'll see.

In Which, We Chastise The AP For Its Shoddy Reporting

Once again, The Terrorists have struck a blow against the critical infrastructure of the Western technocratic powers, and Associated Press is getting the story wrong. So, we are compelled to ask...

is it deliberate?

Read the main AP report from any of the lovely sources compiled by Google News. Go ahead. We'll wait for you here.

Notice that it tells you the attack was mounted against the "root" DNS servers, but the Truth, which they obviously don't want you to know, is that the attack was really mounted against the TLD servers.

Why can't we have a real press corps, please?

How much longer must we continue to labor with a Main Stream Media dominated by so-called "news organizations" that are functionally equivalent to propaganda outlets for terrorists? When will the silent and long-suffering majority of Real Americans rise up and say they're not going to take it anymore?

When will it finally be time to spit on our collective hands, raise the figurative black flag and commence to the doing of that which we are too polite to commit in writing before the lidless eyes of the Google spiders, whose cold and alien memories will persist long after the stars burn out and fall from the skies?

I ask you— how much longer?

Where Is Conan The Parliamentarian When We Need Him?

A reader over at JMM's place notices one of the things that I find to be a continual disappointment with the Democratic leadership in Congress: they're freakin feckless when it comes to parliamentary procedure. ZOMG, I am appalled.

p.s. Once again, Navy dominates. Just saying.

Today's Thought From Mr.HappyZen™

"Violent ground acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war."
—"Back To School" (1986)

Once again via Digby, we find Quiddity analyzing the the darkness of the Super Bowl ads, and I'm compelled to remind our readers that the one indicator of the rise incipient fascism in America that we haven't really seen much until now is the glorification of violence in the culture for its own sake.

Best Presser Evar!

ZOMG! I am in awe. We are not worthy.

Gratuitous Linkage

I'm vastly amused. (Click on the image to go to the site that sells this and lots of other DirtyFuckingHippie™ messages.)

Those DirtyFuckingHippies™ Again

Via Digby, we learn how those DirtyFuckingHippies™ are spitting in the vicinity of wounded Iraq veterans.

Isn't it just like them?

WTF?

Once again via The Mighty Atrios, where the fsck is Weird Al Yankovic when you really need him?

"Annihilate The Brutes!" (Again? That Trick Never Works...)

Via The Mighty Atrios, we find Roy@Alicublog giving us a gentle lesson in what to expect from Wingnut Nation as 'Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!' gives way to 'Puppet Regime! Unsanitary Drinking Water! Ass Rape!'"

Primary Musical Chairs

Kevin and Ezra both have posted about Californias intention to move up it's 08 primary date with the intent having a larger say in who is nominated. Kevin highlights Ezra's skepticism and offers a mild rebuttal: From Kevin:

Like it or not, modern presidential campaigns are all about raising money and using the media, and I suspect we're better off setting up a system that's most likely to choose a candidate who can win a modern election. That means someone who's demonstrated the ability to win in a big, impersonal state like California, not someone who's demonstrated the ability to hold the most coffee klatsches in a single day.

Mojo has been pretty skeptical about the value of moving primary dates around in the hopes of generating an UberDemocrat that will sweep away GOP resistance. I agree with that sentiment, I have yet to see a compelling argument that provides a specific calendar of primaries that is going to produce a better quality candidate. Most of these arguments are full of assumptions about primary voters that do not really seem to hold water to me.

However, I am not in love with the current calendar of primaries either. It seems reasonable to me to at least examine the primary calendar to see if we are actually giving a broad spectrum primary voters an opportunity to vote on the candidates they want. I also do not think it is unreasonable to object to the apparent outweighted voice Iowas caucus and New Hampshire voters seem to exert as the result of their arbitrary position on the calendar.

My preference would be to divide the country into regions and rotate their position on the calendar. I don't know if that would result in better candidates, but it seems more fair to primary voters outside of New England of both parties. Kevin's comment reminded me of an episode of the West Wing where the GOP candidate, Arnold Vinick, played by Alan Alda, makes a pretty good point about California:

[...]This isn’t some sentimental, home-state thing. This is about winning. I don’t have a 50-state strategy anymore. I have a one-state strategy: the one state that has everything – big cities, small towns, mountains, deserts, farms, factories, fishermen, surfers, all races, all religions, gay, straight – everything this country has. There’s more real America in California than anywhere else. If I can win California, I can win the Country.

He's right of course, and this is largely at odds with the conventional wisdom among pols and pundits in Washington, who dismiss California as a Blue state of hippies and dope fiends completely devoid of GOP voters. It certainly has plenty of hippies and fiends, but has a large pool of conservative and right leaning voters who would respond to a strong republican candidate that spent the time and money to court them. The editors at the wire all spent consideable time in the O.C. in their youth, and know the right wing GOP nuthouse this state can be. It is the great fallacy of the Bush strategy that states like California and the potential competiveness of the state in the general election is ignored and the GOP's long terms chances in the state risked for short term gains and for racist whackiness like the talk radio driven issue of illegal immigration.

Yes California is expensive and big, but it has wide range of voters that would better represent the electorate of both parties than Iowa or New Hampshire. That should at least be a factor in any primary change plan. Will it yield better candidates? It might yield different candidates, but who knows if they will be better in some quantifiable way. There is no silver bullet for better candidates, and reworking the primary calendar to that end seems silly, but that does not mean there is not other debatable reasons to change it.

Why The DirtyFuckingHippies™ Were Right

Kevin Drum goes non-linear:

If anti-war liberals were right about the war from the start, how come they don't get more respect? Here's the nickel version of the answer from liberal hawks: It's because they don't deserve it. Sure, the war has gone badly, but not for the reasons the doves warned of.

Is this true? I wish my memory were more detailed about what anti-war liberals were saying back in 2002, but it's not. I once thought about browsing through old archives to at least see what the high-traffic liberal blogs were saying back then, but that turned out to be easier said than done. Matt, Josh, and I all supported the war for a while, so we don't count. Kos and Tapped seem to have lost their archives from that far back. C&L, Firedoglake, Aravosis, Greenwald, and the Huffington Post didn't exist back then. Atrios still has his archives, but he didn't post obsessively about the war and didn't write the kind of essays where he explained his position in detail anyway.

We started posting our transcripts in January 2003, but our editorial position was pretty staunchly in opposition to George and Dick's Excellent Adventure in Iraq well before then. I checked our archives, and we weren't into dropping tightly worded polemical essays to explain the fucking obvious on the radio back then. I remember posting a lot of comments in other venues, particularly the comments threads at the few jingoblogs that had them and didn't ban me too quickly, but like Atrios, I didn't spend a lot of time trying to write 800-word manifestos against the war. Who the fuck reads those, anyway?

As I recall, as Atrios and Digby allude here and here, the central argument that unified all the anti-war voices, i.e. both on the Left and the collection of drug-addled Internet centrists and weirdos that everyone wants to paint as "the Left," was essentially an economical argument. Sure, some folks were lathering on a good bit of moralism, but the unifying thread that bound everybody together was the cry, "Why Iraq? Why now? How much will it cost, and what good will we get out of it?"

Here at The MojoWire, we were opposed because the answers to those four questions were deeply unsatisfying to us. Let's remember what the liberal hawk answers to those questions were at the time: A) because Iraq is more convenient than the alternatives; B) because we can't go back in time and do it eleven years ago; C) peanuts, and Iraq's oil reserves will pay for it all with plenty to spare for the Iraqis; D) democracy, whiskey, sexy!

The message you would have heard from the anti-war "left" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq— had you been listening to it— was that all of these answers were insulting to the intelligence of civilized people everywhere. They were obvious bald-faced lies, propagated by a venal and corrupt political leadership who couldn't be trusted to use military force in the national interest. There were no good reasons to do it, and there were lots of good reasons not to do it, starting with the canonical WarIsBadForChildrenAndOtherLivingThings meme and moving on from there to bean-counting arguements about dollar returns on investment and social welfare policy.

For the record, we were exactly fucking right about why the war was a bad idea. The war in Iraq has gone off the rails for exactly the reasons we said it would: chaos is the plan (that's Josh Marshall explaining in April 2003 what the freaks have been saying in street protests since 19-goddamn-68, by the way). It was a bad idea because the whole point was to do nothing good and to do lots of damage, for the sake of doing something bad.

Once again, the liberal hawks are happy to keep feeding live babies into the fiery maw of Moloch as long as it means they won't be seen to agree with the DirtyFuckingHippies™. There is, however, an important lesson to draw here. Sometimes you have to blow the 800 words on the obvious just so you'll have a page in the archives you can link when the inevitable opportunity arises for you to show proof when you say "I Told You Freakin People So!"

Update 1.0: If you want to know what "the left" was saying before the Iraq war began, you can grovel through the archives at Common Dreams for days and days. Here's a fine example from August 25, 2002:

[...]
Reasonable chance of success? The just war theory requires stringently weighing in advance the consequences of a military campaign, even though this requirement by itself is not decisive. Any one who has read Tolstoy's War and Peace or who remembers the Vietnam War should know that when success is made to sound too easy, skepticism is the order of the day. Precious human lives and scarce economic resources are at stake.

Would "liberating" Iraq really be a "cakewalk," as Ken Adelman, former U.S. arms control director, has claimed? Or is Immanuel Wallerstein of Yale University correct when he warns that Iraq could become another Vietnam: "Just as in Vietnam, the war will drag on and will cost many U.S. lives. And the political effects will be so negative for the U.S. that eventually Bush (or his successor) will pull out. A renewed and amplified Vietnam syndrome will be the result at home."

According to some estimates, as many as 250,000 U.S. troops will be needed. While other estimates are lower, one Pentagon study has projected an "acceptable" death rate of 20,000-30,000 U.S. soldiers. (The number of "acceptable" Iraqi deaths has apparently not been calculated.) The Iraqi army, estimated at 500,000 troops, will be defending their homeland against a foreign invader who has been bombing them for years. Dissident military analyst Carlton Meyer says: "Ideally, the campaign can be won by sending in 50,000 troops charging in from the air and sea. . . . However, they could get bogged down if the Iraqis fight in the cities and mine the roads. In every military operation there are a hundred things that can go wrong; if you can anticipate half of them, you're a genius."

Arab leaders have warned that a U.S. war against Iraq could destabilize the entire region. Iraq itself threatens to collapse into anarchy. A puppet regime is far more likely to result than a democracy, and even that will be difficult to achieve. Senior U.S. military officials reportedly have serious doubts about whether defeating Iraq would be worth the high military and diplomatic cost. A unilateral war against Iraq would be widely perceived as an American bid for colonial occupation in the Middle East. An occupation of oil-rich Iraq, says Meyer, "will not be about freedom, democracy, or security; just money and power."
[...]

Spocko Finally Has A Piece Of The Action

Via David Neiwert, now comes Spocko with a rousing call to the barricades. Finally, somebody has taken enough bullying from the DisneyHateRadio™ station in San Francisco, and he's stood up and said we're not going to take it anymore. Now, it's time for the rest of us to stand up and show our friend Spocko we've got his back.

I feel confident that I can speak here on behalf of the other MojoWire editors.

We Support You, Spocko!

(...and not just because you look damned hawt in a fedora.)

Find a way to help out, if you can. There is nothing sweeter in this world than seeing a pack of bullies get their just desserts. We can win this one, if we are tenacious about it.

On the right sidebar, you'll see I've added Spocko's Brain to our meager blogroll. You should regularly read his stuff— he's a good blogger.

The Three E's..

I found this via Endichine. At first, I thought it must be a parody, it is so utterly batsh*t crazy, but apparently it is for real, god help us. Your modern American convservatism ladies and gentleman, read it and weep:

The one-world government scenario is dialectically based upon economics, environment, and equity – known as the Three E’s. These Three E’s involve global control of the common man’s labor and money, “sustainable” nature, and forcing all commoners into financial sameness. These same intentions are also documented in the U.N. Agenda 21 game plan for our “sustainable” environmental future.
The feminist movement was crafted by the one-world political initiative and invented to create and sustain global depopulation goals. That is and remains the primary mission of the feminist movement.

So that is what my wife and her friends from college are talking about on the phone. I wonder who her control agent is....

The “governors” are the world’s wealthiest industrialists and bankers. Their one-world government hands all power and control of people, land, water, food, human health, children and education, employment, militaries, and economic potential directly to themselves and their personal fortunes. Over and over and over again, when you tie corporate wealth and power to governing agencies, you have Fascism. However, the long-term goal of a one-world government has always been to bring Communism to fruition on a global scale. So, today, we see a hybrid Fascist-Communist system by Three E design, and it is bitterly obvious in every nation on the planet. Almost all global economies are crashing by design, and particularly America’s economy. Note that America’s elite pulled their investments out of the U.S. years ago.

I'm still laughing about the "hybrid Facist-Communist system" she cooked up. She does realize they are diamtrically opposed systems? All global economies are crashing by design? Umm. the "governors" in your system wouldn't be jews by chance, would they Nancy? Because this whole theory sounds like you cribbed parts of it directly out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There is one theme in this wonderfully mad diatribe I wanted to highlight. And that is the theme of depopulation, to wit:

The feminist piece of the global puzzle deals specifically with depopulation through women’s “healthcare,” big pharma, and the “mental health” industrial complex. Women’s rights are now defined by the right to abort, the right to be drafted, and the right to take drugs that will render women and children incapable of bearing children. And just as many women worldwide earned the right to own property, that right has now fallen to other plans, which state that no “individual” may own private property.
Also, one must note that the industrial and banking powers that be are mostly men – the men whose dynastic families created their one-world government of choice. And these same men also created the feminist movement in order to curb the tendencies of commoners to breed and out-number them billions to one. The feminist movement is based upon political lies and the control of reproduction. “Sustainable” nature is also based upon enforcing a remarkable decline in birth rates. I assure you this enforcement will not fall upon the world’s elite.

A vastly underreported aspect of American christian facism is their obsession with birth control. Media stories about this movement focus on their opposition to abortion, but look beyond that and you will see the higher goal of reversing Griswold vs. Connecticut, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized the pill. This rant may seem high comedy to us, but I absolutely guarantee you that a scary majority of your evangelical friends buy into the assumptions this article is based on. One of which is that birth control is the source of a large amount of our societal problems, and led directly to erosion of the family as they see it. I wonder if Nancy is conscious of how her issues with mental health treatments closely follow those of Scientologists?

The Chris Hedges story that S9 pointed to down below got me thinking about these people again. It is sometimes hard to remember who are our political opponents and who are our enemies bent on our destruction. Republicans and conservatives, (and others) are our opponents, Christian facists are our enemies, right up there with Osama Bin Asshole and the rest of his crew. Articles like this are indicative, truly, of the mainstream thinking and assumptions in the christian facist movement. We cannot forget what these people truly believe.

The LA Times book reviewer who reviewed Chris Hedges book took issue with the alarmist (in his view) nature of the book on the threat posed by Christian Facism.

There are problems with this analogy. First, democracy in America is much stronger than it was in Weimar Germany in 1933. Nor is the Christian right as widespread or powerful as Hedges suggests. Among conservative Christians who are working class or lower class, "a dramatic majority" voted for Bill Clinton for president — that's the finding of sociologists Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout in their recent book "The Truth About Conservative Christians." A 2004 survey for "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" on PBS found that a majority of evangelicals have an unfavorable view of Falwell and that a significant minority of them are more concerned about jobs and the economy than about abortion and gay marriage.

Someone is watching the Coral Ridge Hour and buying Left Behind. And the election o 1992 was twelve years ago, a lifetime in politcs. Not to mention the strength of christian facism isn't the working poor, but the middle class and wealth patrons who fill the mega-churches. The reviewer might want to brush up on the how revolutions actually come about. Hint: The middle class is the key.

While I don't buy into Hedges alleged recommendations at criminalizing speech, which is a cure worse than the disease, I do not think you can just pass this off as another outbreak of superstitious religious nuts, destined to fade away on their own. We need to watch them closely.

You have got to be kidding me.

Via Andrew Sullivan, another fine insight from our friends on the right:

The Democrats may have won the recent election, but they still lack a coherent governing philosophy, according to political scientist Dan DiSalvo. Unable to overcome the legacy of 1968, which represents the collapse of the New Deal coalition, the Democrats are caught between the vital center and radical politics.

What a revelation! Errr..wait a minute, any political party in this country that seeks to build a governing coaliton in a diverse population of 300 Million people is going to face the quandry of balancing different and often opposing points of view. I think we can classify this observation under NO SH*T Sherlock! Is this wonderlic seriously suggesting to me that the GOP has not been utterly subverted by it's own radical wings? Their solution to this problem was to embrace the madness. Now we have the unholy alliance of corporate power and Dominionist christian facism. Isn't that the coherent governing philosophy the GOP has pimped? Is that the model we are supposed to follow?

What are the properties of a coherent governing philosphy, while we're on the subject? The Gingrich/Bush governing philosophy has been revealed to be "Entrust us with your democratic institutions so we can trash them. Oh, and use the power of the regulatory state on the behalf of our corporate enablers against our constituents. God Bless America!". If that is a coherent philosphy, we don't need one. Facism has a very coherent view on governing, that does not mean I want facists elected to govern.

I absolutely could not give a crap what anyone associated with the American political right or the Republican party has to say about governing. They have had 6 years to demonstrate their "coherent philosophy". It is pretty clear their governing philosophy sucks ass. For the most part, because it is not a philosophy of governance. Look, if your philosophy of governance is centered around contempt for the organization you seek to operate, and you hold the very mission of the organization in contempt, what do you think the outcome is going to be? If the CEO of UPS hated delivery services as a core part of his ideology, and filled the management ranks with people who shared that view and sought to undermine the company at every opportunity, all the while attempting to enrich themselves and their friends with the companies money, what do you think is going happen? Anyone? Just look at the record of the GOP Congress and Bush Administration for your answer. It is as close to an utter repudiation as you will find.

And for Chrisakes, can we stop harping about the freakin 60's. 1968 was almost 40 friggin years ago, get over it. Stop looking for easy to point to watershed moments to prove your pet theories please. If there was a watershed movement in the 60's, it wasn't the yippies or the anti-war movement. Sorry folks, I like the music and the romance of it all too. Deal with it hippies. Memo to Boomers, we were tired of your nostalgia and bitter recrminations in the 80's. Just think how our cups overflow in 2007. Just for your information Boomers, the 1968 campaign was not the most important political milestone of the 1960's, it was arguably the civil rights legislation of that decade. Look at the electoral map of 1964, and the maps of 2004. What could possibly have brought that change about?

The correct answer is of course many things, but the switch of conservative southern democrats to the GOP is more important than the political chaos of 68. And by the way, anyone who thinks that "leftist Intellectuals" are running anything in the Democratic party, or even in most liberal groups needs to switch off Fox News and put the bong away. That is yet another canard fed like a peeled grape from the rights agitprop machine into the beltway media to be manufactured into conventional wisdom. In fact, the truth is that the Democratic party needs to do MORE, MUCH MORE, to connect with their liberal base and the intellectual and political energy they provide. Integrating those people and their ideas into the party is the key to continuing growth and success. They need to embrace their inner hippies and leftists, not run away like pack of whiney pussies. Clintonism is a road to nowhere without the heart of American liberalism to make it more than a series of political strategies.

If the Democratic party wants to build a coherent governing philosophy, well, Go Left young man.

Blood For Oil

Well, what do you know? It is all about the oil, after all!

Those Darn Xtianists...

Chris Hedges fills us in on some of the latest developments...

The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement.
[...]

I deeply resent how the Bush administration and its military brass make me feel like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist.

On Your List Of Problems That Need Solving...

Guess what? Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, but Internet Neutrality is still endangered. A lot of Democrats are on the wrong side of the progressive position on this. Do what must be done.

Entitlement Reform

Oh, good grief...

"...What we really expect out of the Democrats is for them to treat us as they would like to have been treated," [incoming House Minority Leader John] Boehner said.

We seriously need to reform the entitlement system in the Republican Party.

Bitchy Snark For No Good Reason

Jerry Ford's pastor in Palm Desert annoyed me yesterday.

Dude is a reverend in the Episcopal church, and obviously a veteran— because he decided to wear his ribbons on his vestments during the funeral ceremony. That's not what annoyed me. I'm all good with veterans wearing their ribbons on civilian clothes under appropriate circumstances, and I have no problem seeing how the circumstances here were appropriate.

But you'd think if the dude were going to be all that and wear his ribbons on his vestments (right below an ostentatious diamond studded cross), he'd at least have the good sense to remember he's not wearing a uniform when the color guard hoists the flag on the steps outside the church. Saluting the flag when in civilian attire is poor form. It also makes you look really goofy when you do it under bright sunlight without wearing a cover, exposing your bald pate with a nice shine visible from space.

For a moment there, I was seriously starting to wonder if the chaplains corps had developed spiffy new dress uniforms that look absolutely nothing like other military uniforms and look for all the world like priestly robes. Normally, that wouldn't be an idea that would be worth considering, but times being what they are...

Dear proud veterans, please try harder to keep from confusing us poor, benighted civilians. I know it's a tough slog, and it often feels like teaching pigs to sing, but kicking your civilians around for being ignorant goobs will be so much more satisfying once you've gotten your own act together. Thanks.

Love, S9.

YouTube Wars

Atrios started it, but we're not going to roll over for it anymore. Take this, you wankers:

A Christmas Wish from the Mojowire...

Here are a couple of Christmas videos for you to ponder...



And who could forget...



So on behalf of S9, Hebisner, and myself, have a happy Christmas/Kwanza/Chanukah/Saturnalia/Solstice, etc., blissfully unaware of the madness and horror lurking just on the edge of our perception of the thin veneer of reality that shields us from the unholy shrillness and insanity of the Great Old Ones...

...Or perhaps you did vote Republican...

The Editors

More Tin-foil Hat Theater

Have a look at this video of a purported FEMA detention camp I found via Another Day In The Empire, linked from the invaluable Cursor.Org [see sidebar].

I'm really not sure what I'm seeing in that footage, but if it's what David Neiwert has been writing about, then well, um, uh…

This stuff appears to be originating from Alex Jones and the very strange people at prisonplanet.com. I have no idea who these people are, or what planet they'd like to be living on instead of this one, but there's something about the smell of the place that doesn't look wholesome. Anybody else know where these geeks came from?

The Surreality-Based Community

At PressThink, Jay Rosen writes once more about Ron Suskind's excellent scoop on the senior adviser to the President who said this:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality— judiciously, as you will— we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Rosen is writing about the end of empiricism as policy in the Bush administration, and I cannot recommend this latest piece highly enough.

Incidentally, amid all the amazingly useful, timely and important insights he provides, there is also a bit that might help to explain why I chose to modify the MojoWire blog template to declare that we are "proudly serving the surreality-based community" in the header.

That passage caused a sensation when it was published, and the sensation introduced a new term, the reality-based community, into political talk. Two things happened right away. Many on the left adopted the term. “Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community,” their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (They’re reality-based? Yeah, right.)

Spooked Republicans

Neither of those responses highlights the fact that in Suskind’s reporting it was Republicans spooked by Bush and his anti-empiricism who were beginning to speak out. After his portrait of Karen Hughes, after his book with bounced Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, after he wrote about Karl Rove’s operation, Suskind’s phone began to ring. His sources, he has said, were people who had been left out of decision-making or put off by the Bush team’s projections of certainty. Republicans, insiders. They had a disturbing pattern to report.

“By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality.”

“The circle around Bush was tightening.”

“The president would listen without betraying any reaction.”

“The president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.”

“By summer’s end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch.”

Suskind had a lot of it figured out:

A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush’s White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners.

That “cluster” is not idealism. In the current New York Review of Books, Mark Danner talks of a “war of imagination” that Bush and his advisers preferred to fight. The thing is, it takes a leap of imagination to realize they did it that way. As Danner puts it, anyone trying to understand how the current mess in Iraq started “has to confront the monumental fact that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, invaded Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what it was going to do there, and then must try to explain how this could have happened.”

I have a theory that goes along with Mr. Rosen's observations here.

The Bush people aren't retreating from empirical reality so much as they're engaging in a "retrograde advance" into a surrealist fantasy where action is its own prelibation. There's a lot of hundred-euro words in there, but the basic distinction I'm trying to draw is that they aren't really running away from the observable facts so much as they're captivated by the seemingly unlimited potential of unfettered imagination. I think Mr. Rosen is saying the same thing.

So, when the rest of Left Blogovia was busy trumpeting their membership in the Reality-Based Community, I thought it was important to stay more focused on the surreality that animates the Bush administration policy apparatus than in the reality actually created in the wake of its actions. Other blogs and news aggregators are very good at covering the trail of wreckage and viscera left behind by movement conservatives, and we link to some of them from time to time. What I want to do is highlight the direction they're headed, the trends in their thinking, so maybe you too can imagine what horrible crimes they will find it necessary to commit next.

Meanwhile, the rest of Mr. Rosen's essay is lip-biting good. Go read it. Now.

Let Us Now Gather On The Veranda...

...and watch the U.S. dollar gradually lose its reserve currency status while we nibble on Cheez-Whiz™ and Saltines™ and drink down a six-pack of Budweiser™.

That didn't take long...

Via Ezra Klein, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden just proposed a comprehensive reform of the U.S. Healthcare system

Here's how it would work: The Healthy Americans Act of 2007 would begin by dissolving all employer-based insurance. Instead, it would mandate that every employer who had covered his employees in 2006 convert the total they spent on insurance into salary increases creating, in one day, the single largest pay raise America has ever seen. Now, why would employers go along with that? Well, legislatively they'd have to, but, as Len Nichols explained to me, they'll also want to: Health costs are accelerating, every year costs 10 or so percent more than they ear before. By freezing the total at what employers paid in 2006, Wyden's plan would exempt them from 2007's increase.

Meanwhile, an individual mandate would be implemented, forcing every American to purchase one of the options offered by their state's newly formed Health Help Agency (HHA). The HHA's will have a menu of private insurance plans, all of which must provide coverage equal to or better than the Blue Cross Blue Shield Standard Plan used by Congress. All plans will be community rated by the state, meaning an end to adverse selection and preexisting condition problems. The only acceptable variables for price will be geography, family size, and smoking status. Subsidies will be offered up to 400 percent of the poverty line, will full coverage provided to those below 100 percent. Employers will contribute through a set equation related to business size and yearly profits. There's quite a bit more, but that's the basic outline.

This makes good sense to me not only on a policy level, but on a political level as well. This is what I want Democrats to be talking about, workable policy solutions on a problem that is a) real and in need of addressing, b) moves the political debate into a place where Democrats can control the agenda. I want them to be in the governing business, not just picking a fight with the Bushies. (Although I want them to do that too)

In the past, the insurers killed the effort as a threat to their business model, which is basically stick the other guy with the bill. Has the climate changed enough for them to believe that gravy train might be coming to an end? There is an upside for them here. Everyone will have insurance of some kind, the pool of potential customers would consequently expand, and could concievably increase profits without having to chase people around in collections.

The problems I foresee are for Health Care providers who have built their business model around the employers. What mechanisms would or could be put in place for them to want to support this without threatening their business model. I think most of those could compete in this new market, but the devil will be in the details.

Wow, those hippies sure are eager...

It was the soy all along...

Okay, so I've been debating whether this qualified as STES material or not...

I mean, blaming soy-based food products for "feminizing" the populace and making young men choose to be well groomed and tasteful decorators is certainly about as stoopid as it gets without actually having to be hospitalized... although as comedian Ron White says "you can't fix stupid..."

But generally, we (or perhaps, just I) have been trying to get quotes from the powerful; those who are actually part of the power structure in some significant or perhaps self-important way...

So while sentences like: Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. Does it rise to the level of STES, in that it comes from what should ordinarily perhaps be a more cogent or at least thoughtful source in a reality-based world, or is this simply the raving of yet another WND crank who can't come to grips with the how badly their team has cratered in the recent past and the complete trainwreck that is the conservative movement.

Editors? What do you think? Do we bestow the precious tin foil hat on the dread Dr. Rutz?

mojo sends

The truth grenade

I've been trying to put my finger on what is truly missing in the ISG report. While there are a few things I think are a good idea, such as their suggestions about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and it's importance in the Middle East, something essential was missing. Joe Galloway, a former DOD beat reporter for Knight Ridder who has covered several conflicts, reminds me of what that something is

What we need to do is what none of the commissions and their reports dared to suggest: Begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq right now. Not in 2008. Not after the American death toll has crossed 5,000. Not just in time for a presidential election.

Here is the reason I more or less agree with this. There is no strategy, no matter how brilliant or well conceived, that this administration is competent enough to pull off. They are simply incapable of it. Not to mention, they are incapable of telling the truth. They lie constantly, and for ridiculous reasons. Yes, all Administrations have lied. These people have taken it to a whole other level. Even Nazi Propagandists would have been impressed at the level of schadenfreude this Administration and it's enablers conjure up. They are venal, mendacious and criminally stupid, they cannot be trusted to pull off the amount of sophisticated decision making it would take to salvage Iraq.

I want our troops out of Iraq period. I am open to strategies to minimize the subsequent carnage. I am absolutely opposed to the idea of increasing troop strength. What the fsck is 20,000 more troops going to accomplish? Or even 50,000, on the unlikely chance they could be scraped up. The escalating violence and the apparent inability of anyone to stop makes me truly afraid of the possibility of American troops retreating under fire.

And please, spare me the "we might appear weak" to our enemies. What an utter load of crap. What the hell does that mean anyway? This has got to be the biggest farce in American policy discussions today. How can that be possibly worse than wasting lives and resources in a futile effort? Answer: It's not. Retreat in the face of certain failure is not weakness, it's how you preserve your forces to fight another day if need be. This appearing weak to our enemies is crazy right wing crap that should have died with the Cold War. I don't care if Osama Bin Laden thinks we are weak. I do care if we actually are stupid. Are you seriously pimping me Bin Laden attacks the United States because he thinks we are weak? He does it because he hates us and what stand for, or used to. He keeps telling us that, I don't why some people will not believe him, its no secret.

I assume that readers of this blog assume we are more or less in this camp, but I wanted to lay my view clearly, leave as soon as possible. Cut whatever deals are neccesary to accomplish this that we can morally and ethically stomach. Anything else is a tragic policy Kabuki.

This Is Really Pissing Me Off

Step right up. Today's contestant is Atrios with a bit about the gasoline tax that just goes off the rails.

I once shared Matt's opinion about the gasoline tax - that it was a good idea to raise it, no politician would dare do it, so finding some way to provide cover for them to do so would be smart.

But it's really not a good idea. [...] What's needed isn't a blue ribbon panel to provide political cover for politicians, what's needed is better leadership on these issues. [...] ...adding, to be clear I think raising the gax tas is a good idea. If I were the Decider I'd stick on $3/gallon [...]

Kill me now.

Atrios! You're a moron.

There is a perfectly sensible way to raise taxes on petroleum fuels (why stop at gasoline? why not hit natural gas, diesel, JP, coal and basically everything that requires an extraction right to feed the refinery?) Here's what you do: you cut the payroll tax by an equal amount.

People who commute short distances get their payroll taxes cut by more than they pay in fuel taxes, but let's be honest, not by that much. Fuel taxes have a way of propagating through the economy because they have to be paid by commercial shippers and they'll show up in retail prices for everything that gets shipped to a store near you. Obviously, you can't just flip a switch and have the new tax structure go into effect overnight. It needs to be gradually introduced over a multiyear period, like we've done with other major changes to the tax code.

The problem is this idea encourages conservation and lower consumption of petroleum fuel products. Oil and gas companies wouldn't actually be hurt, but they're too stupid to foresee that. It may be a perfectly sensible idea from a pragmatic view, but oil and gas companies are often completely anti-pragmatic, c.f. the ongoing denial of greenhouse gas effects on the climate.

The real reason raising the gasoline tax isn't going to happen is that it can't be done in a pragmatic fashion by a government completely controlled by anti-pragmatic businessmen and corporate elitist pseudo-intellectuals.

St00pidest Things Ever Said... Act VII (oh God, make them stop edition)

Apparently, this feature has become a staple of right wing intellectual circles, such as they are, and the competition for one of these shiny tin foil hats with "I'm With Teh_St00pid" embossed on the front that we are bestowing on the truly worthy, is quickly becoming firece and cutthroat. Seriously, there's a lot of low-hangning fruit out there, and all three editors could spend 24/7 knocking these ducks out of the yard on a frozen rope... no, we are looking for something a little more.

Less than a week has transpired since we had David Frum decrying populism in college education than we find he is hotly followed by local Los Angeles radio gas bag and wing nut archangel Dennis The Menace Prager.

Now in the last few days, Dennis has been bloviating about a Muslim Congressman-elect, Keith Ellison from Minnesota, who has apparently decided that he will swear his oath on a Quran, not a KJV Bible.

"America, Not Keith Ellison, Decides What Book a Congressman Takes His Oath on." sayeth the Dennis. This was on the bubble, and nearly rated an entry of its own, but as is so often the case in all contact sports, the foul gets called on the pushback, not the original infraction.

Prager's turgid fornication of American history, tradition and constitutional law seemed to have set off something of a semi-literate circle jerk in certain circles of East Blogistan, as well as drawing fire from many of us here in the West. This lead Prager to respond today with another column "explaining" his take.

As he attempts to clarify he gives us the following beautiful bit:

"Why wouldn't Ellison bring a Bible along with the Koran? That he chose not to is the narcissism of multiculturalism that I referred to: The individual's culture trumps the national culture.

You don't have to be Christian to acknowledge that the Bible is the source of America's values. Virtually every founder of this country knew that and acknowledged it."

The secret is to allow the quote sit on the back of the pallet until the gag reflex forces the fruity esthers into the sinus passages...

I swear I don't know where to start with this one. I guess with full disclosure, would be a good place. I am a Christian, Roman Catholic to be specific, and about as liberal as it gets. I mention this because the relflex will be to dismiss this take as, "oh it's just another God-hating liberal."

But this is about more than religion. This is about cultural primacy, and the idiocy of statements like Prager's is tantamount to declaring himself the arbitor of a mythical collective "American culture" that is rooted in the Christian bible.

"The individual's culture trumps the national culture..." Forget his apocryphally shrill assertions about the Biblical foundation of this "American culture" of which he speaks, his statement doesn't even parse logically. How can the national culture be trumped by individual culture when the national culture explicitly acknowledges the individual's right to freedom of religious expression and thought?

So even while he attempts to lamely turtle up over charges of racism, bigotry, anti-Islamic prejudice, he at least comes out as an apparently irony-impaired cultural supremacist, by making baseless assertions that there is an American mono-culture that is firmly grounded in Biblical principles.

This is possibly the lamest part of this. He attempts to get around it all by saying that he doen't mind Ellison taking his oath on the Quran, only that the Bible should be there too... you know, to supervise.

So how about it Dennis? How is the culture trumped? There is a right answer here. The culture can only be trumped, as it is meant here, if there is a cultural imperative for the primacy of European Christian tradition as superior to all other cultures.

So at the end of the day, Dennis doesn't really believe in a free society, he believes that you are free to an extent to pray to whatever two bit kitchen gods you call almighty, but at the end of the day you and your culture and spirituality will always be second rate to Dennis, and not really American.

The thin veneer civility he tries to trowel over the gaping abattoir of his own disdain and contempt for anyone slightly less European and white, cannot cover up the smell of fear and loathing oozing out his pores at every moment of the day. Congratulations Dennis, your tin foil hat is in the mail...wear it with pride. And watch out for Larry Elder, he's been wanting one for a while, I wouldn't put it past him to snag it from you when you weren't watching.

mojo sends

St00pidest Things Ever Said... Part The Sixth

So, serioulsy... could this occasional feature have gone much further without hearing from AEI shill and all around neocon ass-monkey David Frum?

No, of course not... and his entry, while perhaps not quite on par with hall-of-lamer Falafel O'Reilly, is nevertheless quite the stunning piece of dada, if for no other reason it demonstrates how fast and how savagely the wheels have come off the logic bus over at AEI.

With no further ado, I present to you: Federal Student Aid Is Ruining Our Nation's Educational System

Now, this, in and of itself is not anything really new, especially from the hivebrain over at AEI. However, when I heard him spewing this on NPR, what really got me was the following bit that he was using as intro.

"Imagine if the Republicans had retained their Congressional majority and the first thing they did was suggest big new subsidies for, say, the oil industry. Would there no public outrage?

But that's exactly what the Democrats are now offering their staunch supporters in academia. The Democrats are proposing big new subsidies for college tuition: new loans, new grants, new tax deductions. Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, promotes these giveaways as a way to make college more "affordable." "

This bit of horrific sophistry is what qualified this for St00pidest Things Ever Said.

Because in one fell swoop, it claims that subsidies and give aways to the politically connected, already fabulously wealthy petro-chemical industrial giants is the moral, political and economic equivalent of helping poor kids afford college... I especially love the sneer quotes around the word "affordable." What's weird, is that when he read this on air, you could actually hear the sneer quotes.

Don't worry, it gets better. He actually posits an arguement that kids are encouraged to forget all that great high school AP material by getting subsidies to attend expensive colleges ... according to a "recent survey.

You know, the intellectual dishonesty of these people is stunning. Even a cursory examination of the survey shows what everyone already knows, American college kids are not into history and civics, so much. Somehow, Frum manages to focus his massive coal fired difference engine with laser-like precision to deduce that this is now a national crisis directly being caused by Pell Grants and low interest student loans.

But there is a much uglier reality that Frum only hints at, but the initiated know, and you kinda have to read between the lines. The problem is that college should only be for the star-belly sneetches, and the rest of you should just get on with flipping our burgers and cleaning our kitchens... We are dilluting the intellectual and social gene pool of academia by making college accessible to the unwashed masses, and these surveys prove it...

Not that Frum would come right out and say that. No, he is too circumspect for that. Instead, he will simply make bogus, and unfounded claims that the federal government is ruining the nation's colleges by helping young people afford it, who might otherwise just end up in the tire-retreading factory.

mojo sends

The cart before the horse

Big Media Matt has an interesting post about the NY Times Tough article on Education. Matt says in reference to the conclusion of Toughs article:

This seems to me to involve assuming a can opener. Schools full of poor kids could do just as well as schools full of middle-class kids if they had more resources at their disposal than the middle-class schools had. But why would they have more resources? It's hard to imagine suburban homeowners voting for a politician who promises to raise their taxes in order to pay their kids' best teachers to go teach in inner city schools, thereby making it harder for their kids to get into selective colleges and reducing the value of the homes they own.
To really make this work, you'd need to totally change the way the American education system works and gets paid for.

Before we even can get to changing the funding mechanisms of education, we need accomplish a few things. First, we need access to accurate and relevant empirical data on student and school performance. That is a key goal of NCLB. But many of the states have failed to act in good faith to implement them. The most glaring flaw in NCLB in my opinion was to allow the states to come up with their own systems. What we currently have is some states with decent statewide testing methods producing useful data, some states trying to get there, and some states, either deliberately or not, using testing methods that are deeply flawed. DOE is attempting to force those states into compliance. We need solid data to know what the hell is going on and if our reform efforts are working.

Next we need to game out a variety of school governance, teacher related reforms, pedogical strategies, and community strategies to name a few before we go to the taxpayers and ask them for more money. Tough discusses some of the success stories of the Charter movement, but to achieve the kind of education system we want, we need in my opinion to be creative and more than a bit daring in trying out various reforms. That takes money, which the federal government could play a key role, and that takes real leadership to forge the kind of political consensus that allows that sort of environment to be created. That last part is the most difficult and the failure thus far to create it is broadly shared, from voucher advocates who want to create an analog of the parochial system on the public dime to paranoid dimwits at groups like the NEA who only recently seemed to have grasped the publics deep unhappiness with the education status quo. There has to a broad consensus for reform and experimentation. Everyone needs to ante up. That means Unions as much as it means tax demagogues and voucher geeks. That is why I view NCLB as a largely good thing. The Federal Government can play a key role in helping to forge that consensus by providing leadership on a national level. That might be as important a contribution as the fiscal resources.

I think Matt is not quite correct about how funding for schools would have to be played out. Obviously, it will be a tough slog for anyone to try to convince taxpayers to take money out of the schools their kids go to and send it somewhere else. No one is going to try to sell it that way. Instead you sweeten the pot for them as well as your underperforming schools. But you need to have a credible plan for using their money, and some plan of accountability. Schools are something that I think we have seen people willing to accept some measure of increased taxation for, but there is legitimate skepticism about the status quo, as there should be.

Getting solid data and some effective reform strategies tested by that data will be a big achievement. I would argue it's a terrible argument to simply dismiss these efforts as worthless because we haven't achieved Education nirvana yet. Demanding huge gains in resolving the intractable problems associated with racial and economic related differences in education outcomes out of the gate is at best unfair, and at worst the result of a deliberate effort of certain stakeholders in the status quo and outright enemies of public education to derail the whole effort. Let's not allow these people to get away with it.