Month: July 2009

Oh, this is rich (emphasis mine):

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Hussein, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.”

Former president George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. Administration officials at the time also strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that we should have entered into some security pact with Saddam Hussein, but it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper to do that than invade his country and occupy it for ten years. I’m just saying.

The main point is that Saddam was no threat to the United States and the threat derived from our containment policy was manageable in other ways than invading under false pretenses.

I generally admire Helen Thomas and I grant her the right to be cantankerous. But she’s acting like a whiny-ass-titty-baby with her carrying on about Nico Pitney. Let me remind her of something. The White House didn’t call Pitney the night before the press conference and tell him to be prepared to ask a question about Iran the next day. They called him and asked him to ask a question on the behalf of Iranians. They did this because they were reading Nico’s streaming reporting of the goings on in Iran and they knew he had contacts on the ground in Tehran. They didn’t tell him what kind of question to ask or even tell him to ask his own question. They wanted a question from the Iranian reformers on the ground in Tehran who were being shot at and beaten with truncheons.

If Helen Thomas wants to ask a question, that’s fine. But did she have contacts on the ground in Tehran? Was she doing a stellar job of reporting on that conflict?

As much as I admire her, she needs to take a step back and get with the times.

This week’s immigration blog roundup discusses last week’s White House meeting on immigration reform, police chiefs speaking out for reform, a new study about stress on immigration judges, and noteworthy editorials.

Last Thursday’s White House meeting marked what many immigration reform advocates are hoping will be a crucial turning point toward comprehensive immigration reform. President Obama sat down with members of Congress from both parties to discuss next steps about immigration reform. For the past three years with different issues on the agenda, immigration reform has challenged both parties. However, because of an energized campaign and push by many groups invested in comprehensive reform the momentum has finally culminated to a commitment from the administration. The New York Times noted that it now seems more likely than before that President Obama and the administration’s working group on immigration reform are ready to lead the way.

Big-city police chiefs from around the country urged Congress on Wednesday to draft measures that would improve public safety by integrating undocumented immigrants into the legal system. Chiefs John Timoney of Miami, Florida, Art Acevedo of Austin,Texas, and former Chief Art Venegas of Sacramento, Calif., participated in a panel discussion in Miami organized by Americar’s Voice. The Chiefs updated recommendations made in 2006 by the leaders of more than 50 urban police departments. The police chiefs have spent most of their careers in cities with large immigrant communities, and know first hand the need to reform the current immigration system.

A new study called "Inside the Judges’ Chambers: Narrative Responses from the National Association of Immigration Judges Stress and Burnout Survey" finds that many immigration judges trying cases of asylum seekers suffer from symptoms of secondary traumatic stress and job burnout. According to the researchers from UC San Francisco, these symptoms may shape their judicial decision-making processes.The unique study uses direct quotes from judges themselves (immigration judges are prohibited from speaking with outsiders about their nature of their work without Department of Justice permission). The study also includes recommendations for additional resources for the nation’s immigration courts, including improving education and training for judges, and adding adequate support staff and tools.

New America Media’s editorial "Time for Immigration Reform is Now" delivers a poignant message that brings with it a strong sense of urgency.

"Our nation needs comprehensive immigration policies that will replace a broken system of raids and roundups with one that protects all workers from exploitation, improves America’s security and builds strong communities. It’s time to end the division between workers, which has allowed big business to exploit both sides. Clearly, working-class citizens and immigrant workers have much in common; dreams of better homes, education for their families and quality healthcare. There is more that brings us together, than separates us."

Another editorial by Walter Ewing, a senior researcher at the Immigration Policy Center, discusses the persistent blame from local and state governments facing budget deficits placed on immigrants in the current economic climate. Ewing comments on the studies that fail to account for the incomes and tax contributions of immigrants over time, and the various other economic contributions of immigrants, and their children.

Note: The Opportunity Agenda has done work on this issue. We believe to address the economy, we need workable solutions to immigration that move us all forward together. For talking points about addressing immigration in the current economic climate, please contact us at contact@opportunityagenda.org.

Read more at The Opportunity Agenda’s website.

I give Charlie Savage of the New York Times credit for reporting on the many ways in which President Obama has continued national security policies of the Bush administration that are inconsistent with basic civil liberties. I get bored with people who say there is no difference. Obama has banned torture completely, for example, and he has shut down all the black prisons. Rendition and state secrets invocation policy are under review. Obama has a goal of shutting Guantanamo by next February.

But Obama’s policies still fall far short of respecting a reasonable standard of privacy and the rule of law. And, the risk is, putting a bipartisan imprimatur on these policies will make them a permanent feature of a new surveillance state.

(a natural follow up to my future shock essay)

I remember a line from a book or movie, having no recollection of the source material itself, where someone asked this genius what he thought about most of the day. They were sitting outside, and the genius had this far off look of wonder on his face, staring out into the world. He answered his curious friend, who was sitting there, palpably concentrating, trying to “figure out” the workings of his mind,”Colors, mostly.”

“Colors?”

“Yeah, I like all the greens a lot.”

I really liked that line a lot. I loved the bafflement of the listner, who was so busy trying to figure out the answers to everything, he totally forgot how to live in “time.”

To be fully aware, you have to live in the now, the scents, the colors, the sounds, the tastes, right in your skin, and appreciate the full wonder of the moments that pass before you.

I’m acutely aware of time, I live in time more than space. History is cool and all, but the greatest of philosophies happened because the people living them wrote to their times unheeding of those before them, and only paying minor attention to the future.
Most people since then have been pondering in their shadows, with the weight of what has been said before them altering their perceptions of the now.

This very moment has never happened before, and will never happen again. Existence itself has cycles, and as this one is about to end, or morph wildly into something else we need to be alert and aware more than ever to the moment.  For it is never in one moment that change comes, it is in series of smaller moments.

Never before have we been so globally aware as a species. A whales song may have crossed oceans for  centuries, communicating vast distances to be repeated and new songs learned, but our species is just catching up. This is a Now like no other.

Every where around the World changes are happening in our time.

The shocks are coming, but the people are reacting in unexpected ways.

There is a red-headed woodpecker on my tree, I can see glimpses of it behind the lavender blooms of the hanging basket in the foreground. It means nothing, and everything. It is a reminder that the world outside my head exists totally without impact of my thoughts. It is a reminder to use those thoughts well, for the honor of getting to exist in this World means a responsibility to it. It is beautiful.

Unlike this media, which prolongs moments in that rereading is done back inside our brains, and is done more in a “space” (page) than in time (although the personal time in which the reading is done does effect it) time continues whipping by.

This is this media’s time though, a wondrous tool spreading ideas.

It does negate the 3 dimensional reality in a way. In my mind I see you all first as Writers, for it is by your writing you are defined. Then as political activists, or philosophers, or students of history. I don’t think of you the way you think of yourselves, and that limits reality.

Yet, with all the downfalls and limitations of this tool, I see it as our first whale songs….

It is a new time.

Perhaps it will be the dawn of new philosophies and ways of thinking that are truly global, and based entirely in the NOW.

The pod of humanity is awakening, and if you listen closely, you can hear the earth, reality itself vibrate a new sound of it.

What do I think about most of the time, other than the colors I see?

Other than the colors of my world, and the colors of revolution and the colors of the faces of my suffering relatives?

Heh. TMI. Well, we all have our vices, and I’m trying to break that one. Its a 12-step program. Yum.

You all knew I couldn’t be this serious without throwing in at least one grin. Part of the now is laughter at our own follies.

Dog performance art.

Getting back to the things I wrote about earlier in the day, the election of Al Franken is going to change some of the dynamics in Washington DC. It isn’t going to be anywhere near as dramatic as when Jim Jeffords of Vermont defected to the Democratic Caucus in May 2001, but it comes at a similar point in a new presidency. Jeffords’ defection flipped control of the Senate and all its committee chairs to the Democrats. Franken’s election merely provides the Democrats with a theoretical immunity to filibusters.

The first distinction between these two cases is obvious. Jeffords’ defection provided an early rebuke to Bush’s presidency and temporarily stalled his agenda. Franken’s election strengthens Obama and gives him new momentum at a critical time. Since Franken was actually elected on election day, taking his rightful place in the Senate doesn’t ratify Obama’s approach, but merely gives him a reinforcement for the key battles ahead.

Others have noted that merely reaching the goal of sixty members of the Democratic Caucus doesn’t guarantee that the filibuster is a thing of the past. Two Democrats have major health issues that limits their time in the Senate, and many Democratic senators have major differences with the president’s agenda. To understand how this changes the dynamics in DC, it pays to look at two quotes. The first is from the chairman of the Republican National Senatorial Committee, John Cornyn of Texas:

“With their supermajority, the era of excuses and finger-pointing is now over,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Mr. Cornyn said it was “troubling to think about what they might now accomplish with 60 votes.”

The second is from Markos Moulitsas:

[W]e’re already seeing signs that the Democrats’ supporters aren’t about to cut them any slack if they can’t pass their agenda now — or if they have to make the kinds of compromises, on the public option and other issues, that progressives believe are no longer necessary. “Let’s do what the American people have asked Democrats to do, and let’s not use any excuses like this 60-vote nonsense, which is now obviously [no] longer an issue,” Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos, said on MSNBC yesterday.

Something new is afoot when John Cornyn and Markos Moulitsas are singing from the same hymnbook. But what is really going on?

There are different kinds of politicians. Most politicians come from very safe districts. A huge percentage of incumbents are reelected in every election cycle, and most of them are challenged only nominally, if at all. What makes the gears grind in Washington is not the overwhelming majority of safe politicians. It is the handful of vulnerable politicians who decide what is possible and what is not possible in Congress. And vulnerable politicians are predisposed against change. In effect, they are temperamentally conservative. Every significant vote that they take could spell the end of their political career. And the Democrats have dozens of these timid creatures in Congress. How does Al Franken and reaching 60 votes in the Senate affect them?

Basically, Al Franken screws them, plain and simple. A timid, vulnerable, conservative Democrat wants anything but to be put on the line in a contentious and significant vote. Their first instinct is to figure out if a piece of legislation is going to pass. If it is not going to pass, they want to make sure their Democratic base is happy, and they will vote for it. If it is going to pass, and it is either going to anger big donors or become a painful campaign issue, they will vote against it. In each case, they are ignoring the merits and voting to create for themselves the least amount of pain.

A third category exists where it is their decision which is decisive in determining whether something will pass. This is their least favorite circumstance, because it means they cannot avoid angering their base if they vote against it, but the business community will not give them a wink-and-a-nod-pass on it if they vote for it.

So long as the Republicans had 41 votes in the Senate, the timid, vulnerable, conservative Democrats could get away with voting for progressive legislation that wouldn’t pass and against progressive legislation that did. But now that the Democrats have sixty votes, every single bill the Democrats introduce should pass. Every nominee should be confirmed. And each Democrat that votes ‘nay’ on an issue is giving the Republicans the ability to stop the president’s agenda. They can no longer hide. And that is that last place they want to be.

A big part of this changed dynamic is related to visibility. The Senate has cloture votes all the time. The 110th Congress set the record for cloture votes. And timid, vulnerable, conservative Democrats voted with the Republicans all the time to sustain filibusters. But these were mainly low-visibility votes because the Democrats’ votes were not decisive. Even Democratic activists have a hard time maintaining a level of outrage about a vote that had no material effect on the outcome. It is only when a Democrat casts the deciding vote that sustains a filibuster that people really stand up and notice. But, guess what?

With sixty members in the Democratic caucus, every single time any Democratic senator votes against cloture, they are casting the decisive vote to kill the president’s (and the Senate leadership’s) agenda. It doesn’t matter if 10 Democrats vote against cloture. In that case, each and every one of them is guilty of casting the decisive vote that obstructs passage of a bill (because Vice-President Biden can cast the tie-breaker in a 50-50 tie).

There is no longer any cover, because the assumption is that all Democrats should be willing to at least give the president and their own leadership the benefit of an up or down vote on their priority legislation. They cannot escape responsibility and consequences if they oppose the Senate calendar. This is the major change that Al Franken brings to Washington DC.

Senators like Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson like to thwart the Democratic agenda quietly. They reassure their corporate donors by voting against anything that might threaten their interests unless it is already a foregone conclusion that it will pass. But they can’t do that anymore. They can’t get free votes against the progressive agenda that will be forgiven by both sides of the issue. They must now choose between their corporate masters and their fear of Republican campaign smears on the one hand, and the president’s agenda on the other hand. All wiggle room is gone. There are no more free votes.

So, what’s it going be? Who really runs this country, when you come down to it? Keep your eye on timid, vulnerable, conservative Democrats in the Senate. They will let you know shortly.

Does Mark Sanford realize that if his wife accepts him back and he doesn’t have to resign as governor then his sons will learn that there are no consequences for adultery?

I mean, he claims to want those two things.

I wish there was some legal way to make the Republicans stop making shit up about ACORN. But there isn’t. So, the only thing to do is to keep decimating their numbers every time we have elections.