Month: May 2011

Ding-Dong the Witch is dead!

Well, that’s nice, I suppose. But after ten years of wars that we paid for on the National credit card, one of them (Iraq) clearly and unquestionably unnecessary, after trillions of dollars wasted killing hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with 9/11 and destroying the lives of millions more, we still ain’t back in Kansas, Dorothy.

At this point, Osama Bin Laden had been reduced to a curiosity, less important than Mr. Irrelevant (That’s the official title bestowed upon the last football player drafted by the football team who holds the last pick in in the NFL Draft for those unfamiliar with the term). Everyone in the know agrees he was little more than a symbolic figurehead with little to do but evade capture and issue the occasional tape to prove he was still alive.

Hey, I’m happy that a mass murderer and the criminal leader of the gang who attacked the Two Towers, the Pentagon and killed roughly 3000 people on 9/11 no longer is wasting space here on this earth. I’m happy for the victims and the families who lost loved ones in that senseless attack. If I’d been in New York City last night I might well have spent time out in the streets celebrating, too.

However, the response set in motion by our government after that attack, a government who ignored the warning signs of an impending attack, and the by the political party then made hay while the “sun shined” (i.e., convinced Americans that they had everything to fear, especially from Democrats) in order to win elections and impose their reckless policies of privatization, corruption and rewards for war profiteers, is not over.

We still have Wall Street Bankers in charge of our economy, with far too little oversight.

We still have a stagnant economy that has been and will continue to be a massive burden for the poor and middle classes, while CEO’s and executives like Stephen Hemsley of Health Insurance giant Wellpoint earned total compensation last year of $101.96 million.

We still have a war being waged on unions, public education and local control of government by Republican governors.

We still have a Republican budget plan touted as “serious and courageous” by the beltway pundits that would raise taxes on the middle class, slash taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals (many of whom have already gamed the system to avoid paying any taxes) while also eliminating Medicare for anyone under the age of 55, and doing nothing to lower with the deficit (unless you believe the Heritage Foundation, the same group that claimed Bush’s tax cuts for the rich would result in deficit reduction back in 2003).

We have young men and women, highly educated, talented and hardworking kids graduating from College this year, many of whom will have little chance of finding meaningful employment.

We have millions of older worker who have been unemployed or underemployed for months and many now for years.

We have gas prices and oil company profits going through the roof (again).

Exxon announced quarterly profits of $11 billion, up 69 percent from a year ago.

And it’s not only Exxon. Other oil companies are prospering, too. Shares of Chevron rose 1.7 percent after the company said Friday that its net income rose 36 percent, its best quarter since 2008.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC reported $8.78 billion in first-quarter profits, up 60 percent from a year ago. BP PLC’s quarterly earnings rose 16 percent to $7.2 billion. ConocoPhillips said net income grew 43 percent to $3 billion and Occidental Petroleum Corp. said earnings climbed 46 percent to $1.55 billion.

Meanwhile Republicans in Congress refuse to eliminate massive subsidies for those very same oil companies who claim it would hurt Exxon, BP and the other Big Oil companies’ feelings eliminate the massive harm their gouging of the public and other businesses whose fuel prices are skyrocketing harm their shareholders America itself if we forced them to shoulder part of the burden of the cost of our military that is deployed around the world in large part to protect the sources of their massive wealth generating vaccuum machine

:

What ingrates we are. How could we even think of rolling back $4 billion a year in tax subsidies for big oil and gas? Just because the energy corporation-nations are making even more gargantuan profits as they reap the windfall from gasoline prices that are bringing our economy to its knees, we’re whining about their special-favor treatment. Have we no pride? […]

Don’t take my word for it. We can thank the American Petroleum Institute for a brand new study that explains the public service its member conglomerates perform. According to Karl Isakower, who is API’s vice president of regulatory and economic policy, “The oil and gas industry supports millions of jobs and a significant portion of our economy and the retirement benefits of America’s teachers, police officers and thousands of others with a pension or 401(k).”

The API study analyzed four states’ public employee pension plans that invest heavily in energy stocks and therefore benefit from these profits. The API study was publicized to blunt any public anger about soaring oil company profits at a time when gasoline prices are hitting $4 a gallon.

Considering that Republican Governors are balancing their state budget deficits by raiding those very same pension funds even a they claim otherwise makes that a joke in very bad taste, in my humble opinion.

Big Lie by Bob McDonnell: “…The reason I think we’re there [in economic recovery in Virginia] is we made all those really tough decisions last year, David. We balanced a $6 billion deficit without raising taxes, mostly through spending cuts, and it included education and included health. And yeah, there was some short-term pain, but you know we ran a surplus within 5 months, we’re gonna have a big surplus this year, so now we’re coming back, and here’s why…we can’t kick the can down the road…we’ve gotta make tough decisions.”

Called Out by David Axelrod: “Look, you’re a good guy and I commend you for trying to wrestle with this problem, and you made some cuts, your predecessor made billions of dollars in cuts right before you left, but you also balanced your budget with $1.7 billion in money from the Recovery Act, you balanced your budget by borrowing $3 billion against future receipts on transportation…you borrowed money from your pension plan that you’re gonna have to return…but those bills are gonna have to be paid…Governor, when you borrow billions of dollars from future receipts and you borrow money from your pension system and you say your budget is balanced, the next governor’s gonna have to wrestle with that, I know you only have one term there, but the next governor’s gonna have to wrestle with that…”

So, yeah, I’m happy we got Osama Bin Laden at long last. But while it may be a feel good story for Americans over the short term, his death does little to improve the lives of Americans. Nor will it eliminate the National Security State and the massive and largely unknown infringement on our liberties that Republicans (and many Democrats too, sadly) instituted “because of 9/11” while doing little to make our country “more secure.”

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. […]

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”

The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. “Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.” […]

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. “Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers,” he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know. “I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to,” he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post’s findings. “After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country,” he said. “The attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”

So pardon me, if in the cold light of day, I’m not jumping with joy that an old, sick man with very little control over active terrorist cells was given his ticket to paradise yesterday. It’s a “Good News” story that I suspect mostly will be trumpeted by the media to obscure the reality of our “Bad News” situation more than its consequences will help improve that reality.

Booman just posted a piece about bin Laden’s (supposed) death. As if we can trust our government, our military and our media to give us the real scoop on anything.

A Very Happy Night.

He wrote:

I am very happy that we finally got Usama bin-Laden.

It’s tempting to gloat that it was a Democrat who finally got it done…

This is a good moment for all Americans.
I’m extremely gratified that a degree of justice has been meted out.

Tonight’s a night to just celebrate.

Celebrate now.

Before the real results are in.

The media will be force-feeding this as another “Mission Accomplished” foofaraw. Only it will be bigger than was the original because it is beginning to look like Obama might be the chosen one again in 2012 and they want to hero him up just in case any ‘a them nutball Tea Party folk might actually begin to think that they have a real chance of unseating him.

Read on.

Bin Laden.

“Terrorist?”

Lemme ask you something.

Whose hands had more blood on them?

Osama or the Bush/Cheney creature?

Osama and his political/military forebears or The Nixon/Reagan/Kissinger/Bush I/Bush II/Cheney zombie?

The Islamic resistance movement that was galvanized into being by the Palestinian question or the Post-WW II Truman/Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan/Bush I/Cinton/Bush II/Obama presidential Frankenstein sew-up.

Really, folks.

Get real.

Celebrate?

Celebrate “getting even” for 9/11?

We don’t even know if Osama was real, nor do we know if other forces…U.S., Israeli…were involved in the 9/11 horror. Whether the whole thing was some kind of a setup.

As the Guru of Defense Sri Rumsfeld once pronounced after he had been visited by the Military Angel in his cave-like bunker:

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

We really do not know about any of this.

But most of us here appear not to know that we don’t know.

Here’s what we do know, kiddies.. (And if you want to celebrate, the following is reason enough.):

On Sept. 11, 2001 those planes flew into the World Trade Center instead of traveling 20 miles further north and dropping on the Indian Point nuclear facility. 20 miles at jet aircraft speed. What’s that? A few minutes? Count your blessings that it was an act of political theater instead of an act of mass murder. As in millons dead, a nation totally broken and quite conceivably a massive nuclear response from the many missile subs that this nation has lying in wait at the bottom of several seas ready to rain destruction on anyone foolish enough to oppose us with real force.

Yes, political theater.

People died. I am sorry that they did. If it had all gone down in the afternoon a couple of weeks earlier I would likely have died too, because I was playing a concert on one of the outdoor balconies of the World Trade Center. So it goes as a resident of this gobbling, international kleptocratic superstate.

Gonna bogart the joint, expect some resistance.

Of course, in a perfected world none of this shit would happen.

There would be no 9/11. No Truman/Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan/Bush I/Cinton/Bush II monster.

No economic imperialism.

None ‘a that.

But it’s not a perfected world, and the villiains is us.

Please remember that.

Every politically aware member of the third world and every politically aware member of a minority in the U.S. is aware of that.

And yet here y’all are, dancing around the death of yet another “enemy.”

Tell you what.

He was just elevated to martyrdom in the eyes of Muslims all over the globe.

Good, bad or indifferent, this is who he has now become.

THE MARTYR

Watch.

Shit gonna hit the fan even harder now.

Get your dancing over and prepare to pay.

At the pump if nowhere else.

Among other things, I think that we just lost the Middle East.

Go buy a moped.

You gonna need one.

AG

Imagine it is exactly eight years ago. President Bush has just stood in a flight-suit on an aircraft carrier and told us that major combat operations in Iraq are over. In the backdrop was a giant banner with ‘Mission Accomplished’ written across it. Then Marty McFly shows up in a DeLorean and shows you the following headline from eight years in the future:

President Who? It took that long?

It’s never easy to predict the future; that is for sure.

I am very happy that we finally got Usama bin-Laden. It’s tempting to gloat that it was a Democrat who finally got it done…Dick Cheney was too busy shooting his friends, etc. But that’s kind of petty. This is a good moment for all Americans. I was touched personally by the attacks. A co-worker lost his brother. My secretary lost a family friend. People were killed from my parent’s church. One of the heroes of Flight 93 lived in the town next to mine. I grew up in the New York suburbs. My father commuted there every day. It was always my playground and my first love. I’m extremely gratified that a degree of justice has been meted out.

I could talk about how much 9/11 warped our country and screwed up our priorities and even our morals. I could talk about how little this one death will matter in the bigger picture. But you know all that. Tonight’s a night to just celebrate. Tomorrow we can talk about what it all means in context. And about whether Mitt Romney still wants to run for president.

.

The President in address to the nation …

US president Barack Obama said bin Laden, the most-wanted fugitive on the US list, has been killed on Sunday in a US operation in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, about 150km north of Islamabad.

“Tonight, I can report to the people of the United States and the world, the United States had carried an operation that has killed Osama Bin Laden, a terrorist responsible for killing thousands of innocent people,” Obama said in a statement.

“Today, at my direction, the United States carried out that operation… they killed Osama Bin Laden and took custody of his body.

“The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date against Al Qaeda.

Osama killed in mansion outside Islamabad

WASHINGTON GC (AFP) –  Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead, and President Barack Obama will announce his death, nearly 10 years after the September 11 attacks in a televised address, a senior US official said.

The official said that Bin Laden was dead, but did not provide details of how his death occurred.

US media quoted sources as saying that Bin Laden was killed in an operation based on actionable US intelligence targeting a mansion outside Islamabad.

Obama was imminently to address Americans in a highly unusual Sunday night appearance on television.

The death of Bin Laden will raise huge questions about the future shape of al Qaeda and also have steep implications for US security and foreign policy 10 years into a global anti-terror campaign.

The hunt for Osama bin-Laden in Northwest Territory

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

I’m having trouble finding anything that I want to write about today. I like Cedwyn’s piece over at the Great Orange Satan. Of course, she’s talking about Nate’s piece on Obama’s DW-Nominate score. It’s information people should have in their minds when they analyze what they’re seeing in Washington, but I don’t have much to add.

I see The Donald got his comeuppance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner last night. His act is still more sad than funny.

I’ve mentioned this before, but atheists are less likely to get elected than gays. People rarely talk about this kind of discrimination. In any case, I prefer the term “non-theists” because it is less loaded and it has, I think, a subtly more accurate meaning. It has to do with the difference between not being something and actively opposing it.

Oh, good. We can call the Teabaggers “Stalinists” without fear of contradiction.

I think I am going to introduce a bill to sterilize rich people and take their money. Also, too, compulsory abortions!!

This is why I am introducing that bill.

What’s on your mind tonight? The Borgias? Treme? Sports? The end of a very nice weekend?

We are afraid to raise revenue by taxing people, so we have a gigantic debt. Kudos to Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post for pointing it out. Her paper is generally unhelpful in informing people about such basic facts. Bush wrecked our economy and looted our treasury. But he had a lot of help. Find the people who helped him, and get rid of them. Figure out who is standing in the way of fixing the mess and make them pay for it. Poor people didn’t do this to our country. Middle class people can’t afford to fix the problem. More importantly, they shouldn’t be asked to fix the problem.

David Roberts has everything right. He has everything right except for his understanding of Obama’s strategy and his explanation for how American politics work.

We do, indeed, live in a post-truth environment. It’s true that the Republicans’ haven’t moved right so much substantively as tactically. It’s true that we no longer have any effective referees to fairly arbitrate factual disputes between the two parties. Roberts pretty much nails the current situation exactly. But, here is where he goes too far.

On policy after policy, Obama began with grand, magnanimous concessions (see: offshore drilling) and waited in vain for reciprocation. He adopted center-right policies … and was attacked as a radical secular socialist Muslim babykiller. Every Dem proposal, no matter how mild, has been a government takeover complete with confiscatory taxes, death panels, and incipient tyranny. The fusillade of lies began early and has continued unabated.

Now, on the naive, positivist view, the media and other elite referees of public debate should have called a foul. Republicans should have been penalized for opposing and maligning policies that they’d supported not long ago, for brazenly lying, and for rejecting all attempts at compromise. They chose the strategy; the strategy should have been explained plainly to the public.

But the crucial fact of post-truth politics is that there are no more referees. There are only players. The right has its own media, its own facts, its own world. In that world, the climate isn’t warming, domestic drilling can solve the energy crisis, and Obama is a socialist Kenyan. (Did you see Obama’s birth certificate yet? If he had that much trouble convincing people he was born in the country, how did he expect to convince them he’s a reasonable moderate?) Obama can back centrist policies all day, but there is no mechanism to convey that centrism to the broad voting public. There is no judge settling disputes or awarding points. His strategy — achieve political advantage through policy concessions — has failed.

Everything about this is correct except for the last sentence. Obama’s strategy is to get bills passed that move the ball in a progressive direction. On some bills, like the Cap and Trade climate bill, he failed. On others, like the historic Affordable Care Act, he succeeded. But the strategy is not aimed at winning political advantage. It’s aimed at passing legislation. And Roberts does recognize the problem with passing legislation in our modern Congress. He lays it out beautifully.

The policy, the motive force among conservative elites, is a defense of America’s oligarchic status quo and a redistribution of wealth upward. It is those voices that speak in the ears of our political class and that agenda that commands the assent of one and a half of America’s two parties. It’s not hard to see why: our political system is choked with veto points, vulnerable to motivated minorities, insulated from public opinion, and flooded with money.

It is genuinely difficult to say what, if anything, can rally the left’s diverse constituencies into a political force capable of counterbalancing the influence of the country’s oligarchy.

One of those “veto points” is the U.S. Senate. We’ve been over this before, but even when Obama had 59 (and, briefly, 60) senators in the Democratic caucus, he had to deal with the fact some of those senators are very conservative, or represent states that did not vote for Obama. Those senators have to face the dominance of Republican talk radio and the ubiquitous presence of Fox News in their home states, and the need to raise buttloads of cash from poor, rural, and lightly-populated regions. That’s why senators like Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, and Blanche Lincoln weren’t signing off on any public option. That’s why Joe Manchin is joking around about destroying the country’s credit rating.

The veto of the oligarchy is a fact. It is a plain reality. It is not something that Obama can overcome through pretty rhetoric or through angry and frustrated complaint. His strategy is not to create this reality, or to take credit for it. His strategy is to make progress within its limitations.

His “only adult in the room” positioning is, indeed, designed to place him above the partisan bickering. But any president is required to do some of this symbolic separation from their own party. It allows them to be seen as the president of the whole country, not as a mere prime minister who can be tossed out as soon as his party’s policies grow unpopular. But however he does the optics, he spent his first two years constrained by the fact that nothing could pass through Congress that didn’t have either Olympia Snowe or Ben Nelson’s consent. He couldn’t lose the vote of Jay Rockefeller on a climate bill and he couldn’t lose Joe Lieberman on an insurance bill. This is why his policies have a less-than-satisfying flavor to them.

But the president has to be a pitchman for his policies and his accomplishments. He can’t go around saying that he’s powerless and his legislation is weak-tea. He has to take credit for his accomplishments, and he has had many accomplishments.

This is why progressive anger at the president has been misplaced from the beginning. At least in the legislative field, where he is completely shackled, the anger should have been placed at the people and media and laws and rules that have constrained him.

Much has been said about his negotiating style. Why offer any concessions up front? Perhaps Obama could wring more out of the system with a more combative style. But we are talking about the margins here. The fossil fuel industry is protected. The insurance industry is protected. The outcome is certain, only the details are in dispute.

The system is what it is. Changing it is a long-term project, and not the responsibility of the person charged with running the day-to-day operations of the government.

It’s beyond frustrating, but two things should focus the mind.

First, imagine what Obama’s record would look like if every bill crafted in the House over the last two years had not had to be designed to at least have a shot of passing in the Senate. And imagine that all of it passed and was signed by the president. How would Obama’s progressive credentials look then?

Second, imagine what would happen if the House Republicans could pass any bill they wanted and have it signed by the president. Imagine what would be left of our social safety net, our treasury, and the rights of women and minorities. Imagine their product on education and research and development and foreign aid and funding for women’s health and public broadcasting. Imagine the foreign policies of John McCain and Sarah Palin during the recent uprising in the Middle East.

When you keep those two things in your mind, things begin to take on a different perspective. Don’t you think?