Month: March 2015

The Republicans had a great Election Day in November 2014, which means that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is now the chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space. With NASA being headquartered in Houston, this ought to be an easy marriage, but Ted Cruz is a somewhat deranged ideologue.

This is already causing problems.

Senator Cruz held a hearing today where NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was invited to testify. It did not go well.

Cruz took issue with the Obama administration’s $18.6 billion budget request for NASA. He was particularly incensed that the budget called for increasing the money spent on studying the Earth and a decrease in the money spent on exploring space.

“I would suggest that almost any American would agree that the core function of NASA is to explore space,” Cruz said. “That’s what inspires little boys and little girls across this country. It’s what sets NASA apart from any agency in the country.”

Before I go on here, I’d like to note that when Senator Cruz was a student at Harvard Law, he refused to study with anyone from the “minor Ivies,” meaning anyone who did not get their undergraduate degree from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Despite this, he still begins sentences with “I would suggest…”

With that out of the way, Charles Bolden, who is a retired Marine Corps Major General and former astronaut, was compelled to explain some basics. For starters, you can’t launch rockets from the bottom of the ocean.

“We can’t go anywhere if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater and we don’t know it — and that’s understanding our environment,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Cruz on Thursday. “It is absolutely critical that we understand Earth’s environment because this is the only place we have to live.”

Yes, we also live here. That’s important. I’m glad that Bolden remembered to point that out.

“The fact that earth science [funding] has increased, I’m proud to say, has enabled us to understand our planet far better than we ever did before,” Holden added. “It’s absolutely critical.”

For example, Holden said, NASA supports studies in Cruz’s home state of Texas that measured the effects of emptying out the state’s aquifers on local land elevations.

“That’s just looking at our environment, trying to make sure that we have a better place for all of us in which to live,” he told the senator. “I think that’s critical.”

Here’s a picture NASA produced in 2011 of Texas’s depleted aquifers (red means “no water here”).

Did I mention that Ted Cruz is seriously considering making a run for the presidency?

You can actually get a fuller sense of what an asshole Ted Cruz is by reading The Daily Caller’s coverage of this hearing. Their summary explains it quite well.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told NASA Thursday to stop worrying about global warming and focus on its “core priority of exploring space.”

Politicians from Texas do not want spies in the sky looking at their lack of water or any of the other consequences of burning fossil fuels. They don’t want seismologists looking at the earthquakes caused by fracking.

Science is bad for business.

Putting President Obama on the Supreme Court is sort of a no-brainer, and I expect Hillary Clinton to seriously consider it if a slot opens up while she’s serving as president. Obviously, I am making a lot of assumptions here, including that Obama would be willing to serve on the Court.

I think the biggest obstacle would actually be concerns about Obama having to recuse himself from too many cases, especially in his first few years in service. But I don’t think there would be all that much of a struggle to get him confirmed.

Oh, yes, the right would melt down. But the conflict of interest would be their only legitimate talking point. The country as a whole would strongly approve, and there really aren’t any arguments to make against the appointment.

I do think Obama would be reluctant to take the appointment in Clinton’s first term. He’ll want to relax, see his children off to college, and get his library up and humming. Eventually, however, he’ll want a way to serve his country again.

I can totally see this happening.

In a just world, everything Senator Ted Cruz says would be met with the same stone-faced silence that greeted his inane remarks at the International Association of Firefighters conference yesterday.

And the reaction afterwards would be the same.

“I had to take a shower after listening to that,” said Washington state IAFF leader Ricky Walsh.

But this is not a just world.

… had sent a letter to North Vietnam at the height of the December 1972 Christmas bombings?

That’s the question I’d like to consider in light of the recent letter 47 Republicans sent to the government of Iran while President Obama is negotiating with that country over their nuclear program.

Let’s go back a nearly a half-century to imagine a counter-factual historical event: the sending of a letter by Democrats to the leader of North Vietnam while President Nixon was engaged in peace talks to bring an end to the war.

The Vietnam war was controversial to say the least. It divided this country in ways that are still having aftershocks to this day. Yet during that time, despite criticism by some Democratic politicians – not a majority by any means as a large number of Democrats were defense hawks – President Nixon was given the ability to prosecute the war and ongoing peace talks with North Vietnam as he saw fit.

In December 1972, the talks were at a standstill. North Vietnam wanted an unconditional withdrawal of all US troops, while the Nixon and Kissinger insisted on a mutual withdrawal including all North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops from South Vietnam. At one point in October, an agreement in principle had been reached between Kissinger and North Vietnam’s lead negotiator, Lee Duc Tho, but the South Vietnamese government led by Nguyen Van Thieu immediately rejected the proposed agreement.

A more compliant Le Duc Tho suggested to Kissinger that North Vietnam was willing to consider an agreement recognising the government of South Vietnam, so long as it included processes for free elections and political reform. The pair drafted a treaty, which was completed in late October 1972 and unveiled by Kissinger, with much fanfare, at a White House press conference.

Kissinger and Le Duc Tho’s treaty was enthusiastically received around the world. After almost five years of impasse, it appeared as if a workable peace for Vietnam was in sight. But the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, was outraged by the draft treaty, believing it placed his country at the mercy of the Viet Cong.

Theiu was suspicious of the Kissinger/Le Duc Tho agreement on several grounds. One, it left North Vietnamese troops in place during the period while the Viet Cong and the Theiu government negotiated a final settlement. Second, it required that a final settlement be negotiated by three parties: Theiu’s government (the “Republic of Vietnam”), the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (the “PRG” a/k/a the Viet Cong) and a third party to be selected by agreement Perhaps his deepest concern, however, was that his government would not survive without a continued American military presence in South Vietnam. Whatever his ultimate reasons for rejecting the accord, demanding over 100 changes to the proposal, and then on October 26th he broadcast a speech detailing his opposition to the accord, painting its provisions in the worst light possible.

President Nixon was furious with Theiu. Kissinger’s efforts to obtain an agreement with Tho had been fast tracked in order for a peace treaty could be announced prior to the November election. Theiu, however, refused to back down. Theiu’s rejection of the treaty naturally led the North Vietnamese to suspect that Kissinger had hoodwinked them for political gain. They saw Theiu as an American puppet, and so came back with new demands of their own. The breakthrough announced by Kissinger and Tho was now perceived as a failure, with both sides making further demands and changes and both accusing the other of negotiating in bad faith.

Nixon then made a fateful decision. He ordered Operation Linebacker II – an all out bombing campaign of North Vietnam to begin during the during the month of December, 1972. Also known as the “Christmas Bombing” and among the USAF as the 11 Day War, B-52 bombers and other aircraft began the largest and heaviest bombing campaign against North Vietnam during the course of the war.

During these operations, Air Force and Navy tactical aircraft and B-52s commenced an around-the-clock bombardment of the North Vietnamese heartland. The B-52s struck Hanoi and Haiphong during hours of darkness with F-111s and Navy tactical aircraft providing diversionary/suppression strikes on airfields and surface-to-air missile sites. Daylight operations were primarily carried out by A-7s and F-4s bombing visually or with long-range navigation (LORAN) techniques, depending upon the weather over the targets. In addition, escort aircraft such as the Air Force EB-66s and Navy EA-6s broadcast electronic jamming signals to confuse the radar-controlled defenses of the North. The Strategic Air Command also provided KC-135s to support the in-flight refueling requirements of the various aircraft participating in Linebacker II operations.

Between December 18th – 29th, over 1,500 night time sorties were flown by the USAF against targets in North Vietnam, with the greatest focus on Haiphong and Hanoi. During the airstrikes major protests were held throughout the country. Nixon may or may not have feared what the new Congress would do, as Democrats, despite losing the Presidential race and regained control of both the House and Senate.

Certainly their was widespread sentiment among both dovish Republicans and Democrats alike that the war must come to an end. During 1972, a number of bills had been proposed to cut off funding for the wars in Southeast Asia, though they generally were contingent on a return of American prisoners of war. Imagine, however, that a group of Democratic Senators and/or Representatives had chosen to take further action, especially in light of what appeared to be a failure of the peace talks and the resumption of massive bombing campaigns. And this was no ordinary bombing campaign. There was no great discrimination between civilian targets and military ones, no surgical drone strikes. This was carpet bombing in the extreme, and its effect on the civilian population in North Vietnam was horrific.

During the 12 days of Christmas bombing, 200 B-52s flew over 700 sorties, and fighters and smaller bombers flew over 1,200 additional missions. Those planes dropped over 20,000 tons of bombs. The B-52s were used for “carpet bombing” the two cities. “Carpet bombing” involves multiple planes, flying in formation, laying down figurative “carpets” of bombs that flatten everything within the area bombed — like a carpet lying on a floor. […]

During the Christmas bombing, as throughout the war, the United States flatly denied that we were bombing civilian targets. This was an out-an-out lie. We bombed schools, hospitals, and civilian population centers. Indeed, carpet bombing is uniquely well suited to targeting civilians who, in military parlance, present less “hardened” targets than do military facilities.

To take but one specific example, during the Christmas bombing — on December 19 and again on December 22 — B-52s bombed the Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi. At 1150 beds, Bach Mai Hospital was the largest civilian hospital in the DRV. We substantially damaged or destroyed the entire hospital. This was not an isolated example, either. The Bach Mai Hospital had been previously bombed by the United States on June 27, 1972; many other hospitals in the DRV were destroyed during the Christmas bombing.

The primary bombing campaign only ended after North Vietnam agreed to return to the peace negotiations in Paris. In the end, a the peace treaty that was signed by the parties was nearly identical in all important respects to the agreement Kissinger and Tho had reached in October, 1972.

But what if before Operation Linebacker II ended, my aforementioned group of Democratic elected officials had taken it upon themselves to denounce the policy of the US government in a letter to the leader of North Vietnam? And what if that letter stated that they would cut off all funding for the war, regardless of whatever terms the Nixon administration proposed at the peace negotiations in Paris, should they resume?

Now we know that no such thing ever happened. But what if it had? What would have been the reaction of the American public, war weary by all means, but one that had just re-elected President Nixon in a landslide of epic proportions? I suspect that any Democratic Senator or representative foolish enough to have taken such an extreme stance would have been prosecuted for treason by the Nixon Justice Department with the full support of a majority of the American people. Of course, we will never know, since the Congressional members of that era did not interfere directly in matters of US foreign policy. They operated constitutionally. In fact, the War Powers Resolution of 1973, whatever you may think of its effectiveness, was a direct result of the proper use of Congress’ constitutional authority as the Legislative Branch of our government. Congress passed it over President Nixon’s veto on November 7, 1973.

My how times have changed. The Republican-controlled Congress refuses to stay within the bounds of its lawful constitutional authority when it comes to its relentless opposition to anything President Obama proposes (the TPP excepted). Not only did they invite the sovereign head of a foreign government to address Congress for the sole purpose of attacking the current negotiations with Iran, but now 47 of these “servant of the people” have taken it upon themselves to directly contact the head of the government of Iran to inform him that any agreement Obama reaches with them will be undone. I can’t recall a time in out history when members of Congress have taken it upon themselves to go beyond their own constitutional role and both usurp and undermine the power and authority of the Executive Branch to conduct foreign affairs.

And yet not one of these Republicans will be prosecuted or charged with any violation of the Constitution or the law. Perhaps that is the better result from a strictly practical and legal standpoint. But if any members of the Congress in Nixon’s day, or even during the last Bush administration, had taken it upon themselves to interfere directly in diplomatic relations with a foreign government, I can easily imagine that those Republican administrations would have found legal grounds for indicting the elected officials who dared to take such steps in opposition to the President.

And we would have never heard the end of the tale of the Democratic traitors and “backstabbers” from our “liberal media.” On the other hand, does anyone doubt these 47 Republican Senators will not suffer any long term consequences, whether individually or to the reputation of their party. No, they will not. Of that you can be certain.

     Do you remember that uproarious Monty Python sketch where the Dalai Lama, played by John Cleese, sits cross-legged in saffron robes in a mountaintop cave and declares that he won’t have an afterlife, throwing into an uproar the exhausted Chinese Communist Party functionaries who have hiked to the cave?  The officials, played by the other Pythons dressed identically in Mao jackets and clutching little red books, demand that the Dalai Lama reincarnate, dammit, after he dies, but only on their terms.

    “You have no say over whether you will be reincarnated!” splutters the official played by Michael Palin. “That is for our government to decide.”

    Don’t remember the sketch?   That’s because there never was one.

    But in an astonishing example of Life Imitating Python, or something, Chinese party leaders meeting this week in Beijing are in high dudgeon over the 14th Dalai Lama’s recent speculation — think of it as a cosmic cream pie aimed at the party’s collective face — that he might end his spiritual lineage as the most prominent leader of Tibetan Buddhism and not reincarnate.  The party has repeatedly warned the 79-year-old holy man that he must play by its rules–  or else.

    The Dalai Lama’s obdurance would confound the Communist government’s plans to rig a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s deeply unpopular presence in Tibet, which it invaded without provocation in 1950.  The Dalai Lama fled into exile nine years later and remains deeply revered in his restive homeland, which has never accepted — and never will accept — the communist yolk.

    Beijing already has rigged a succession following the 1989 death of the 10th Panchen Lama, another senior figure in Tibetan Buddhism.  The Dalai Lama confirmed a Tibetan boy as the next reincarnation in 1995, but the Chinese government hid away the boy and his parents and installed its own choice as the Panchen Lama, a fate that the Dalai Lama has indicated he does not want.

    The idea of Communist Party officials defending the precepts of reincarnation and calling the Dalai Lama a heretic, to boot, is deeply comedic because the party is atheistic to its red core, but beyond the Python riffs and inevitable late night TV show witticisms, the standoff is deadly serious.  Waves of protests and self-immolations in Tibet and abroad have repeatedly brought to the surface deep discontent with the Chinese gulagization, including its attempts to micro-manage Tibet’s culture and control the Buddhist tradition.  And Tibetans are sure to reject any future putative Dalai Lama picked by the Chinese government.

* * * * *

    If Americans were asked what foreign country they most admired but never visited, doubtless many would answer Shangri La. But since it was foreclosed in the subprime mortgage meltdown, the second choice probably would be Tibet.  Indeed, the mountainous nation nicknamed “The Roof of the World” holds a special place in the popular imagination because of multiple gauzy Hollywood treatments and, of course, the Dalai Lama.

    If you don’t want to disturb your Richard Gere version of Tibet, move along please.  But with Tibet back in the news because of the reincarnation brouhaha, it is worth remembering that Tibet’s own history is riven with wars between competing Buddhist sects, sexual exploitation, usurious taxation, serfdom and other forms of economic enslavement that extended well into the last half of the 20th century; in other words, on the current Dalai Lama’s watch.

    This does not forgive the Chinese occupation, which has cost well over a million Tibetan lives, the jailing of millions more and destruction of most of the country’s 3,000 monasteries, but does provide some perspective.

    And let’s face it, the Dalai Lama is who we want him to be: Head of state. Leader of the best known exile movement on earth. Prolific author. Metaphysician. Cross-cultural icon. Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Oh, and caricature, as well.

    Veteran journalist-novelist Pico Iyer offers perspective aplenty in The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, a book that I would highly recommend.

    The apothegems of the Dalai Lama that appear on buttons, bumper stickers and t-shirts make no more sense “than a single thread taken out of a Persian carpet, an intricate web, and pronounced to be beautiful,” writes Iyer, and one of the Dalai Lama’s longtime translators shouts to him that “It’s nonsense! All these things you see ascribed to him, others are just making up!”

    Indeed, one of the conundrums that the Dalai Lama faces on his world travels (he’s in Australia at the moment) is that it is the magically esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism that is the primary source of fascination for non-Tibetans who want to turn away from their own religions.  

    I’ve always been a worship at home guy, so the contradictions don’t bother me, while I’m deeply admiring of the Dalai Lama for his stubborn pacifism.  And Tibet has produced some ass-kicking incense as well as a commonsensical pharmacopeia, including a kidney-cleansing compound that may well have saved if not prolonged the life of one of our beloved dogs.  

    I do have to note that while the 14th Dalai Lama has been moving the world by example for almost half a century, he has not moved China and now Tibet is almost gone.

    But as he has said, “Until the last moment, anything is possible.”

If you’re looking for a good breakdown of how the Israeli elections could turn out depending on slight differences in the result, the Times of Israel had it for you.

I like the sound of Likud in panic mode, but it still seems most likely that Netanyahu will find a way to hang on. It just might take a while for him to recover and get the chance to form a government.

What seems increasingly assured is that no one will emerge with enough seats to easily cobble together a coalition, and Netanyahu may have to wait for Herzog to fail before he can succeed.

You can call this a form of being temporarily deposed.

It would be a real punch in the nose.

Robert Stacy McCain reacts to the shooting of two Ferguson, Missouri police officers in the most predictable way imaginable: “Months of anti-police agitation produce the expected consequences.”

Scared Monkeys is a little less reserved: “ARE YOU HAPPY BARACK OBAMA, ERIC HOLDER, AL SHARPTON AND THE MSM? YOU FINALLY GAVE THE MOB WHAT THEY WANTED … BLOOD…THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GOVERNMENT FANS THE FLAMES OF RACISM. ERIC HOLDER INCITED THIS BY HIS ACTIONS, RATHER THAN ACTING LIKE AN ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR ALL THE PEOPLE.”

As for the Justice Department report that supposedly motivated these attempted murders:

The open season on police officers in Ferguson, MO takes place following the over the top, scathing Justice Department report alleging bias in the police department and court and the resignation of Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson. However, this is what happens when you pander to the mob. This is what happens when Attorney General vows to dismantle the Ferguson police department and at the same time he and Barack Obama fail to mention that “Stand Up, Don’t Shoot” was based on a complete and total lie.

Another right-wing site says, “this is an entirely expected consequence after over half a year of anti-cop agitation.”

This reminds me of something I read in the BuzzFeed profile of Lindsey Graham’s neo-confederate advisor, Richard Quinn.

“King’s memory represents, more than anything else, the idea that institutional arrangement — laws, ordinances and tradition — should be subordinated to the individual’s conscience,” wrote Quinn. “The brand of civil disobedience he preached (and for which he is remembered) exhorts his followers to regard social reform as a process to be carried out in the streets.”

He concluded: “Ignoring the real heroes in our nation’s life, the blacks have chosen a man who represents not their emancipation, not their sacrifices and bravery in service to their country; rather, they have chosen a man whose role in history was to lead his people into a perpetual dependence on the welfare state, a terrible bondage of body and soul.”

The latter argument about welfare dependence is a familiar one, but the thing about subordinating respect for laws, ordinances and tradition to an individual’s conscience is refreshingly frank and revealing.

And if that tradition is Jim Crow and those ordinances are just fines issued to the black community to keep taxes low for white folks? That’s just the “institutional arrangement.”

The most important point may not even be strictly relevant here because we don’t know what motivated the shooting. But the idea, at least, is that since someone shot at the police they must have been reacting to anti-cop agitation. There’s no possibility that they were reacting to their dissatisfaction with the “institutional arrangement.” You can be blamed if you protest the police and then some policemen get shot, but you cannot be blamed if you treat your community inequitably and someone gets angry about it and shoots you.

This finger-pointing can be pretty high school, if you ask me. The right’s anti-government rhetoric puts politicians of all parties at heightened risk, but they think it’s worth the risk. I disagree, but I can tell the difference between expressing a political preference and inciting a riot. It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me here so much as the idea that you fan the flames of racism if you fight for social reform in the streets, or if you tell people about racist policies they are mostly already well informed about.

I don’t know who shot these police officers or why they did it. They were in no way justified regardless of what motivated them. But if you feel like you have to place some blame, place it on the people who made the Ferguson police department the enforcement arm of a very bad “institutional arrangement.”

I have my differences with him, but William Saletan does trolling pretty well.

It’s such a Princeton thing, and it annoys me. What is it that gives (or gave) John McPhee so much satisfaction in using his erudition as a kind of secret hand shake to the one reader in ten thousand who would get his reference?

What I am talking about?

Well, okay, so Playboy sent McPhee to Wimbledon back in 1970, right about the time my parents moved my brothers and me into a house a few miles down the road from McPhee’s home. And he did his own version of Hunter S. Thompson’s romp at the Kentucky Derby, which came out the same year in Scanlan’s Monthly. In fact, for all I know Thompson’s article may have prompted Playboy‘s editor Arthur Kretchmer to foot the bill for McPhee’s trip.

So, McPhee went over to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and hobnobbed with the upper crust there, which really wasn’t that much of a stretch for the Princeton and Cambridge-educated writer.

With that introduction, here you go:

The editor of the piece was the affable Arthur Kretchmer, who was soon to become Playboy’s editorial director, a position he held for thirty years. My conferences with him, always on the telephone, were light and without speed bumps as we made our way through the strawberries, the extinguishings, and the resurrections, until we came to the Members’ Enclosure.

Right.

McPhee is talking about the following excerpt from that 1970 article:

In the Members’ Enclosure, on the Members’ Lawn, members and their guests are sitting under white parasols, consuming best-end-of-lamb salad and strawberries in Devonshire cream. Around them are pools of goldfish. The goldfish are rented from Harrods. The members are rented from the uppermost upper middle class. Wimbledon is the annual convention of this stratum of English society, starboard out, starboard home.

Did you get that he’s referring to members of the Lawn Tennis and Croquet club here?

Good, because these were not the hoi polloi.

I think he got that across with the rented goldfish and Devonshire cream, don’t you?

But what’s with that “starboard out, starboard home” reference, his editor wanted to know.

Arthur Kretchmer said, “What does that mean?”

Assuming a tone of faintest surprise, I explained that when English people went out to India during the Raj, they went in unairconditioned ships. The most expensive staterooms were on the port side, away from the debilitating sun. When they sailed westward home, the most expensive staterooms were on the starboard side, for the same reason. And that is the actual or apocryphal but nonetheless commonplace etymology of the word “posh.” Those people in the All England Members’ Enclosure were one below Ascot: starboard out, starboard home.

I didn’t have a stopwatch with which to time the length of the silence on the other end of the line. I do remember what Kretchmer eventually said. He said, “Maybe one reader in ten thousand would get that.”

I said, “Look: you have bought thirteen thousand words about Wimbledon with no other complaint. I beg you to keep it as it is for that one reader.”

He said, “Sold!”

Which really brings me back to my whole “don’t hate me because I’m from Princeton thing.”

Because, you know, I was osmotically trained to view the world this way. By which I mean, who wouldn’t want to put something so esoteric in their Playboy feature that only the best-read cleverest one-in-ten-thousand reader would understand it?

But I think it’s a fucked up attitude. And I eventually very self-consciously rejected this and let the pendulum swing back quite a distance in the other direction.

So, in my writing, I quite deliberately set out never to attempt this kind of show-off business.

And it’s ironic that McPhee ends this piece talking about his vanity here without the slightest wink of apology. Because the article is about allusions and elicitation, and how ephemeral the shared experience between author and reader can be.

So, the wink is there, but it’s so deep down that you can easily miss it, which is sorta playful in an arrogant kind of way.

That’s not the only way the piece is brilliant yet inaccessible. He’s an artist well-honed in his craft.

And I doubt he cares whether or not you hate him for it.

The jackass Ferguson, Missouri police chief is resigning, which follows on the resignations of the city’s municipal judge and city manager. You can pretty much thank Eric Holder for this, if you’re into the whole giving credit where it’s due thing.