I protest.

Bush versus Bush.

Steve Gilliard over at the Daily KOS has a good article about Rumsfeld's excess, entitled "Secretary of Everything." He makes some good points, particularly about Rumsfeld himself, but then says

Bush is a weak executive who relies on a small coterie of personally loyal aides and minimizes his interaction with outsiders. He lets Rice serve as his filter to the world and Rummy to serve as his alter ego.

I think that this is true in some ways. Certainly Bush is a weak executive. It's less clear to me that he uses Rumsfeld as an "alter ego," though. Assuming that what I wrote yesterday has at least some truth to it, I'm more inclined to think that Rumsfeld has decided that, given the President's disability, he can do anything he likes and he is therefore using that power. He knows that he won't be stopped, not because Bush approves, but because Bush is blind and indifferent to it. It doesn't impinge on Bush's delusional view of the world.

Steve goes on to imply that he won't do "a deep descent into psychology." Hey, I'm not afraid! Seriously, though, Steve claims that

GW Bush clearly is driven by some kind of internal competition with his father ...

While there may be something to this, I suspect that what may really drive Bush is in part guilt and shame over his many past failures and that he was for so long the "black sheep" of the Bush family, as well as his current delusion. It could well be that in his own mind Bush must succeed, in order to protect his very fragile sense of self. That imperative to succeed would drive out all thoughts of being mistaken or misled; the cost to Bush's ego (that is, his basic sense of self) if he were to fail would be so great that he couldn't allow himself to think for a moment that he might be mistaken or on the wrong path.

Steve implies that Rumsfeld will eventually be fired, as a "liability to Bush" when the current Iraq policy fails. If this happens, I don't think that it will be Bush who fires him. It will more likely be Rove or Cheney, both of whom are in the interesting position of being able to easily manipulate the President of the United States. I'm afraid that, in his delusional state, Bush is nothing more than their puppet. Of course, the difference between this set of circumstances and one in which Bush is not delusional but is merely incompetent, as Steve describes, is probably insignificant.

Microbes on parade!

It's a new week and since things went a little roughly last week, the bear is allowing those to submitted last week to submit again this week. But only if the blog started after May 11, 2003. So I've resubmitted this one, with a pointer to a different article this time.

In the meantime, though, go take a look at some of the other submissions. The Whiskey Bar probably has the most definitive statement about the "weapons of mass destruction" and the runup to the invasion of Iraq. Read it, you'll like it.

Silver Rights is certainly one of the best civil rights blogs around; J. also covers sociological areas, like what would you do if you saw someone shoplifting? What if they were obviously homeless or obviously wealthy?

Less well-known is The Talent Show. Greg is obviously one of us bleeding-heart liberal types and deserves a look. He explains why these cuts suck and asks such questions as "Why the hell are they waving an American flag at a Swedish furniture store?"

Check these folks out, you'll be glad you did!

Weapons of mass self-inflicted destruction.

Activate fan, cue shit.

Tim Dunlop at The Road To Surfdom points us at an article in USA Today, of all places: "Senate to probe use of Iraq arms data."

Two Senate committees will investigate whether the Bush administration misused intelligence to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and justify a war to depose Saddam Hussein.

The two committees in question are the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Republican John Warner from Virginia, and the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Republican Pat Roberts from Kansas. Warner says that "he has not come to any conclusions," but hearings are needed because of what he terms "the depth and seriousness of this issue."

Hearings will mean tough questions before TV cameras for some of the president's top officials — not just from Democrats, but from their fellow Republicans, who control the Capitol. The administration's future credibility could rest on the responses.

I hope to hear a loud "splat" sometime in the near future.

Ironic promises.

Mark Kleiman thinks that all the criticism of Bush for not following through with Afghanistan and for avoiding establishment of democracy in Iraq is unfair. After all, Mark says, during his campaign

Bush criticized the Clinton Administration for engaging in "nation-building" and promised, if elected, not to waste American tax dollars on any such futility. Accordingly, he has made no real effort to build a workable nation in Afghanistan, and seemingly will extend the same practice of salutary neglect to the even graver nation-building task in Iraq.

Mark concludes,

Surely it can't be right to criticize a politician for keeping his promises.

Heh.

"The terrorists have won."

It hit me this afternoon that if what Wolfowitz said last week is true, then the terrorists of 9/11 have, indeed, won, and the neocons, including Wolfowitz, handed them the victory.

One of the key goals of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was the removal of US military bases from Arab lands, in particular Saudi Arabia. Wolfowitz said last week that one of the reasons for the invasion of Iraq was the removal of US military bases from Saudi Arabia. Hmm. So we have done exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do? You can call it "removing an excuse for terrorism" if you like, but the fact remains that this step does indeed accomplish one of the major goals of Al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorists.

So, in a very real albeit limited way, "the terrorists have won." And Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bush and the rest gave them the victory. Does anyone else find that as ironic as I do?

The incoherent right.

Why is it that so much of what I see from the average person on the right is incoherent? As an example, here are a couple of recent comments on my "The Bush Psyche" article:

george rocks, you just can't handle the thought of a man who acts on his convictions and forms policy based on what's good for america instead of what pleases the rest of the world

And

This site must be the long-lost-home of the unknown super achievers. "I suspect" permeates, what does that mean?. It appears that the primary posting and comments come from those who oppose action on any level and revile those who are able to recognize a problem and "my God" do something about it! The humor in the post and the comments is pervasive (perversive?) but the joke is beyond your understanding and I don't have the time or inclination to explain it to you.

When I respond to an article, I try to make certain that my response is clear and articulate. I avoid personal insults and I don't often use sarcasm, unless the context begs for it. I know that my written word is the face I present to the world, at least online. My reputation is based on how well I present myself. I believe that this is true for everyone else, as well. Certainly I think better of those who write clearly, who use proper grammar and spelling and who avoid sarcasm and insults. In general, I see many more on the left writing clear, reasoned, well-thought-out articles and comments, though. From the right by and large I see stuff like the above. Why is this?

Neither of the comments actually address what I said in the article. Rather, they are directed at me. Both ignore what I said and try to attribute some kind of negative thinking to me, in the first case with "you handle the thought ..." and in the second with the assertion that I "oppose action on any level," that I "revile" someone (Bush, I assume) and that some kind of claimed "humor" is "beyond my understanding." What are the commenters trying to accomplish, here? If it was to show themselves as ignorant and intolerant of other viewpoints, they have both succeeded admirably. On the other hand, if it was to intimidate me into silence, they failed miserably.

All I really want to know, though, is what these people think they are doing. They aren't engaged in debate, they are just throwing insults. Why do they bother? Do they really think that such insults can make a difference? Even those who are much more well-know for their insults, such as Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, are inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. They have nothing to contribute except noise; if we ignore that noise, they become irrelevant.

The other question is, why are so many of those noisemakers on the right? I know that there are idiots on the left, no one has a monopoly on stupidity, but the right seems to be trying to corner the market. Not only people like O'Reilly and Michael Savage, but the little ones as well, such as the commenters above, or some really marvelous examples in the comments over at the Daily KOS or TalkLeft. These people make wild, sweeping assertions with not even an attempt at proof; they personally insult those who may have the temerity to disagree and they become more and more strident as people argue with them. Of course, the best tactic is to simply ignore them, since without attention they will go away, but I want to know why they bother in the first place? Is that it, that these people seek attention? I guess that it's possible, although there are much better ways to go about it. (Starting a blog springs to mind.) But this begs the question of why most of these people are on the right rather than being evenly spread across the spectrum. Is it a selection effect, that I see them because I lean more to the left?

I don't know. I just wish that these people would realize that they are defeating themselves. If they were to take the time to think about the issues and to learn how to express themselves clearly, they would be much more effective. And maybe, with a little thought, they might change their opinions, instead of merely regurgitating those fed them by the Limbaughs, Savages and O'Reillys.

One thing is certain about the left, they are by no means monolithic. They are a contentious bunch indeed. This is probably why I like them, since they do at least seem, by and large, to think about what they believe.

DeLay takes a piss on the working poor.

Tom at TBOGG (links are bloggered, see the "Trickle down shamelessness" entry) points us at a New York Times article about Tom DeLay's refusal to consider a bill to extend the increase in the child tax credit for families making from $10,500 to $26,625. This is the increased tax credit that the Republicans denied to that group in the just-passed tax-cut bill.

Mr. DeLay's position puts him at odds with a growing number of Senate Republicans who have signed on to a measure that would extend the $400-per-child increase in the credit to many families making from $10,500 to $26,625. The Senate had approved the increase for those families last month, but it was removed in final negotiations with the House. Six Senate Republicans now support the measure, along with most Democrats.

According to DeLay,

"There are a lot of other things that are more important than that," Mr. DeLay said in a news conference today. "To me, it's a little difficult to give tax relief to people that don't pay income tax."

Mr. DeLay may not know it (although he damned well should), but all of the families in that income range do, indeed, pay taxes, and could well use an extra $400. As Tom at TBOGG says,

With that extra $400 those $110,000+ families could maybe, I don't know, fill up the Hummer H2 for a week. $400 to those people making $10,500 to $26,625 a year is a windfall and every penny of it would be pumped back into the economy.

Tom hopes that when DeLay dies, the poor will line up to piss on his grave. I quite agree. DeLay gives a whole new depth to the term "ugly American."

They're at it again.

This time the Republicans in the House want to do away with overtime pay: Workday Minnesota: House votes Thursday on bill to take away overtime pay. Bearing in mind that in my chosen profession I don't receive overtime pay, I think that this is an incredibly bad idea. For one thing, the bill, HR 1119, "allows employers to veto employees' decisions about when to use their time off." For another, it removes the longstanding financial incentive for a forty-hour workweek. Worse, it allows employers to withhold overtime pay for up to thirteen months. This pay is not put into any kind of trust fund or escrow account and so would be lost entirely if the company were to fold in that time. The article "The Naked Truth About Comp Time" has many more details of this nasty piece of legislation.

The bill was introduced by Representative Judy Biggert of Illinois and is cosponsored by such notables as Katherine Harris of Florida (yes, that Katherine Harris) and Howard Coble of North Carolina. This is a fairly typical piece of screw-the-poor Republican legislation and deserves to be soundly defeated.

Time to write my representative (Jane Harman, in my case). You should, too.

For a copy of my letter to Ms. Harman (which you may use as a template, although please modify it before you send it), read further:

Rep. Jane Harman
Room 229 CHOB- Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-0536

Dear Ms. Harman,

As your constituent, I am writing today to urge you to oppose House Resolution 1119, the so-called "Family Time Flexibility Act." Although I, myself, will not be directly affected by this Act, being a software engineer who is exempt from the rules governing hourly workers, I find this piece of legislation repugnant in the extreme. It will deny such workers the right to use their time off as they see fit or to be paid more for working more. Further, it reduces pay to such workers and even allows employers to delay paying for overtime by up to thirteen months!

This legislation places much too much power over hourly workers into the hands of their employers. These workers need more power, not less. The Fair Labor Standards Act has worked well for some 65 years and while it may need some fine-tuning, it should be to give these relatively powerless workers more rights, not fewer. Instead, this legislation is an attempt to roll back those rights to a time most of us have never known, a time when the worker was at the mercy of his employer.

Again, I strongly urge you to oppose this legislation. In fact, Ms. Harman, I feel confident that you will do so and have been happy with your voting record so far. I look forward to seeing your vote against this bill.

Thank you.

Looks like we did some good.

Kip at Long story; short pier tells us that it looks like we actually won one today: Updates, faxblasts, petitions, that sort of thing. He points us at this article about the Republican House leadership cancelling the vote on H.R. 1119. They cancelled the scheduled vote after they were unable to come up with the 218 votes needed to pass the measure.

Of course, the sponsors of the bill promised to try again later this year. But at least for now the issue is dead. Score one for the good guys.

Liberal street cred.

Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged asks "You know what I've pretty much had it with?" She is sick of "fashionable despair" and the tendency of those on the left to worry about what those in the center or the right might think. Excellent article, go read it.

I'm a liberal. Fuck you. — Julia

Cafepress mugging.

I've seen Cafepress advertisements around for some time and have generally thought it was a good idea but that the price was too high. Well, it appears that the price is going up while the profit their customers make on those items is going down. I'm linking to, of all things, a comic strip, here, but the important bit is the June 5 news entry entitled "CafeDe-pressed:" Angst Technology Daily Web Comic. (Actually, the comic is pretty good itself, but the real interesting bit for me is the news item. Or should I call it a rant?)

Barry uses a coffee mug as an example. Conservatively, using Cafepress the mug costs the customer $12.99, with $2.00 of that going to Barry. After July 1, that will go to $1.90, since not only is Cafepress gouging on the real price, they will begin charging an additional five percent of the profit.

Barry then priced out the same mugs via a company that produces "promotional materials:"

I did a quick Google search on "Promotional Materials" (you know, all those pens and buttons and tote bags they give out at trade shows) and went with the first site I saw. They have TONS of crap to put your images on. And not all in white either.

The company does a minimum run of 72 mugs. Barry chose the most expensive print job he could find, three-color, wrap around, eleven-ounce mug. His price: $1.31 on a run of 72 mugs. His total cost (see his site for the detailed breakdown) came to $308.17. He decided to charge his customers $9.00 per mug. On the whole run, he will gross $648, out of which he has a profit of almost $340. Even after overhead, this is a lot better than Cafepress and saves the customer some four dollars per mug. As Barry concludes:

That’s a 52% profit margin for me. So more than half of the money goes back into my pocket. And that is with using the most expensive printing options, keeping the sale price relatively low, not buying in bulk, and not even looking for any special deals.

52% vs. 15%.

Gee….which would you choose?

Um, yeah. Cafepress can bite me.

Praise, assertions and logic.

J. at Silver Rights says some nice things about this blog. In particular, she says,

His entry in the New Weblogs Showcase, "Weapons of mass retraction," meets his usual high standards. It is succinct, but gets right to the core of the issue.

Well, I did like the title, but I blush when I read J.'s praise of my article. I just try to call these as I see them. It seems obvious to me that Rumsfeld, et al, have been lying. (I can give Bush himself the benefit of the doubt, but only because I think that he's not smart enough to realize that those around him are lying. I find it easy to believe that he really believes that those "weapons of mass destruction" exist and just haven't been found yet, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)

The rule of thumb I use is to look for who profits from telling the truth and who would profit from lying. It was clear to me last fall that the U.N. inspectors had no reason at all to lie; lying would have destroyed their credibility and the credibility of the whole program, not to mention the careers of most or all of those involved. The risks of lying were therefore very high and what would they have to gain by lying? Nothing that I can imagine, unless they were somehow pawns of the regime in Iraq, which is absurd.

On the other hand, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, et al, felt safe. If nothing else, they could hide behind the "war on terror" and if all else fails they had a patsy who could take the fall for them. If they lied, they risked very little. Their gain was potentially great; they and their rich friends were sure to profit from any war. Said war would also improve approval ratings and distract the media and the electorate from both the ailing economy and the Republican domestic political agenda.

So who lied? It was obvious. Blindingly. Nothing that has happened since last fall has made any significant change in the above scenario. I watched as Bush and the rest ran us up to a war. A war that was, in fact, illegal by any reasonable interpretation of international law; anyone who says otherwise is naive, a fool, or worse.

As far as J.'s praise, well, I don't know, I just try to write clearly and coherently and to avoid saying stupid stuff. When I make an assertion here, it is either backed up by a chain of reasoning that is as strong as I can make it or it is clearly expressed as an opinion without firm fact behind it. To me, this is just part of being honest. How can I honestly make an assertion if I don't believe it myself? Certainly, sometimes I understand things intuitively for which I can't provide a strong chain of logic, but even then I can point at evidence that supports my assertion. When I am certain of something, though, I can provide strong proof, since that is how I arrive at that certainty.

I'm not perfect at this, but I do my best. That will have to be enough.

The Department of Injustice.

According to CNN Online: Gay employees say DOJ blocking 'pride' event. It seems that a group of gay and lesbian DoJ employees want to hold a formal event to celebrate Gay Pride Month, but their bosses have forbidden them from doing so.

Gee, what a surprise. John "religious bigot" Ashcroft strikes again. According to the article, the EPA held such an event last Wednesday and the State Department will hold one later this month. Even the Commerce Department, while not sponsoring or officially participating in the event, still allows employees to use their facilities. But the Justice Department has forbidden the event entirely.

Greg Friel, another member of DOJ Pride, said the department is trying to send a message. "I think they are sending us a signal they want us to go back into the closet, quite frankly," Friel said.

The excuse? The president of DOJ Pride, Marina Colby, said that

she was informed May 31 that the event, set for June 18, could not go forward. She said she took part in a conference call this week with Justice Department officials in which she was told the group could not hold the event because Gay Pride Month, which is June, has not been recognized with a formal proclamation from President Bush.

Uh huh. And I suppose Ashcroft's religious intolerance has nothing at all to do with it.

If you believe that, would you also be interested in some beachfront property in Manitoba?

Misleading headlines department.

CNN Online has an article with the following headline: "Freedom denied for terror defendant." This suggests that the defendant has either been found guilty or is still awaiting trial on charges related to terrorism.

Actually, though, neither is true, as one immediately discovers upon reading the article:

A Moroccan immigrant acquitted of terrorism charges but convicted of document fraud has been ordered detained until his sentencing.

Attorney James Thomas had asked that his client, Ahmed Hannan, be granted bail, because the 20 months he served while awaiting the terrorism trial may be more than sentencing guidelines will suggest he spend in prison for his conviction.

Hannan was indeed found guilty. Of "conspiracy to engage in document fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other documents." He was acquitted of "conspiracy to support terrorism."

At this point, the man is not a "terror defendant." He's a convicted felon, perhaps, but the time he has already spent in jail is likely to greatly exceed his sentence, suggested by guidelines to be no more than six months. In other words, this is a relatively minor crime. Of course, "prosecutors oppose releasing Hannan, in part because they may ask Rosen to sentence him closer to the five-year maximum." They want to throw the book at him, then deport him.

I guess he made the big mistake of having been born Moroccan, eh?

Michael Weiner's legal temper tantrum.

Don Waller, cofounder of Take Back the Media and editor of Blah3.com has written an editorial about Michael WhinerWeiner's lawsuit of TBTM, SavageStupidity.com and MichaelSavageSucks.com entitled "What is the Weiner lawsuit against TBTM really about?." The subtitle of the piece pretty much says it all:

Here's a hint - if they could, they'd stop me from telling you.

I knew Weiner was a piece of work, his namecalling of Ashleigh Banfield was proof enough that he was not worth paying even a moments' attention to, but this lawsuit goes past the inane into the vile. It's pretty transparently an attempt to spend those whom he doesn't like into oblivion. As the editorial puts it,

We should get something straight here - this isn't about any of the charges in the lawsuit. It's not about loss of revenue, it's not about trademark infringement or defamation or damage to Weiner's reputation. It's not about any of these things.

...

It's about a radio blowhard with pitifully thin skin, whose radio show is failing miserably, and whose TV show can't even finance itself through national advertising due to its toxic, stunted, hateful, pathetic content, taking out his failure on web sites who speak truth to power. It's about boosting ratings, and providing talking points, and throwing red meat to a tiny audience who can't raise themselves out of bed in the morning unless they have a target for their festering hate.

It's about a small-minded bully who has raised professional victimhood to obscene levels. It's about a loudmouth who regularly rants about the evils of 'trial lawyers' hiring batteries of those same evil trial lawyers to intimidate and silence people with a lot less money.

Despite the fact that the Gay and Lesbian alliance has gone after Weiner to a much greater degree, he has targeted these three site because they are tiny:

All three sites are tiny operations. TBTM, with a staff of four people, is the biggest of the three. SavageStupidity is run by a huband and wife, and MichaelSavageSucks is a one-man shop. By filing suit against 3 web sites where the principals barely have two dimes to rub together, the chances are better of a slam-dunk for the plaintiff.

Don continues,

The difference between GLAAD and TBTM is this - GLAAD has the resources to mount a vigorous defense against a harassment suit such as this without bankrupting themselves, and Weiner is quite simply afraid to try and attack someone who might actually be able to fight back.

In the best tradition of bullies everywhere, Weiner is picking on someone whom he thinks can't fight back. It is important that these folks win this or it could well have unfortunate side effects for all of us.

Weapons of mass idleness.

The Left Coaster points out that Bush's WMD Inspectors Have Nothing To Do. In an Associated Press story he learned that

the folks looking for WMDs based on the sites provided by that same intel community have come up dry. So dry, in fact, that they have nothing to do. ... [T]he current group of inspectors are filling their free time by being reassigned to other duties or going on training.

From the AP story:

After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say they are now waiting for a large team of Pentagon intelligence experts to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and documents.

"It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time," said Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 percent. "We're hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future."

Over the past week, his and several other teams have been taken off assignment completely. Rather than visit suspected weapons sites, they are brushing up on target practice and catching up on letters home.

Of course, Bush has no choice but to stick to his story, claiming now that Hussein had a "weapons program." (Well, duh! So do Iran and North Korea, not to mention every other nation on Earth!) Unfortunately for Bush, a "weapons program" is not the same as those "thousands of tons" of various chemical and biological weapons that Bush, et al, used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

According to Condoleeza Rice, "We've interviewed a fraction of the people who were involved. We've gone to a fraction of the sites. We've gone through a fraction of thousands and thousands and thousands of documents about this program." There are at least two problems with this statement, though. One is that if there were anything like the huge amount of weaponry claimed in March, wouldn't we have found it, or at least found some reference to it? So far, we have neither. The other problem is that

Intelligence agents and weapons hunters have been speaking with scientists and experts for the past month, but those interviews have not led the teams to any illegal weapons and none of the tips provided by Iraqis have panned out.

One would think that at this point, three months into the search, something would have panned out. Something would have been found.

The reason we haven't found anything, though, is very simple. As I've been saying since before the invasion, there were no "weapons of mass destruction." At best our leadership deluded themselves into believing they existed; at worst they knowingly lied to us. If the former, they are utterly incompetent and unfit to be our leaders. If the latter, not only are they unfit to be our leaders, they have committed criminal acts and should be tried accordingly.

And finally, to my very great relief, people seem to be waking up to the reality.

Bush lied.

Innocents died.

It appears that the inimitable Billmon has also covered this story.

Donation buttons

I've put a couple of donation buttons over there to the right. Being out of work has its disadvantages, chief among which is the lack of income. If you like what you read here and don't want to see it suddenly disappear, a little help would be very much appreciated. More importantly, though, the Democratic Party also needs your help to defeat Bush in 2004. The "Boot Bush" button allows you to donate directly, giving this site (as well as yourself) credit for the donation. This will not only help the DNC, it will show them how effective the Net can be at things like this. Note that I only get credit, not money.

Thanks to Kos at the Daily KOS for setting this up!

Ashcroft backpedals.

TalkLeft informs us, "Justice Department Reverses Ban on Gay Pride Event." The original article is on the Human Rights Campaign website. While they welcome the news, they are still not completely happy with Ashcroft:

"We are pleased that the DOJ has reversed their decision of the all-out ban on the on-site gay pride event," said HRC Political Director Winnie Stachelberg. "However, the new policy is still a step backward as DOJ Pride is being treated differently than it was in the past, and unequally from other agency groups who have the full sponsorship of the department. This policy marginalizes the department’s GLBT employees."

...

"Attorney General Ashcroft promised in his confirmation hearing that he would not discriminate against DOJ Pride when it was politically expedient, but he made a very serious attempt to go back on his word in canceling this celebration," said Stachelberg.

During Attorney General John Ashcroft’s nomination hearing to head the department, Feingold asked him if he planned to discriminate against gay and lesbian employees or DOJ Pride.

"I would not tolerate discrimination against any employee at the Department of Justice based on sexual preference," said Ashcroft. "I have no intent to … treat this group differently than any other."

In a letter sent to the attorney general today, [Senator Russ] Feingold called on Ashcroft to honor his word.

"Congress and the American people expect the Attorney General to ensure equal treatment and equal protection for all Americans," wrote Feingold. "I urge you to reverse the Department’s decision immediately and allow DOJ Pride to use Department facilities to hold meetings and events."

(Aren't Cabinet nominees under oath during those confirmation hearings? If not, they certainly should be, for just such occasions as this.)

While I'm happy for the employees of the DOJ, I'm still incensed at Ashcroft's blatant bigotry and lies. His promises notwithstanding, the man imposes his narrow religious outlook on everyone he can, without compunction or hesitation. This is not a man who should be running such a powerful governmental department.

With a name like that ...

Welcome "Hi. I'm black!" to the blogroll. With a blog name like that, how can I not keep an eye on it. Unfortunately for Glenn, though, he entered the New Blog Showcase late last week and so never managed to be noticed.

One question he asks is "Am I black enough?" As far as I'm concerned, however he defines "black enough" is fine with me. (I have to say that I don't often ask if I'm "white enough," although I must admit that I've wished I could change my skin color a time or two, to avoid sharing it with certain unmentionables.) I don't think that it's anyones duty to represent their "race" or to constantly bear witness to the sins of the past. It's important not to forget, of course, but it seems unfair that each and every individual should bear the whole burden of a political message, no matter how important.

Best to just be the best damned person it is possible to be and to forget the rest. And as far as blog critiques go, only pay attention to the ones that deal with facts. Opinions and viewpoints vary wildly, and the Mac Diva, while generally a good writer who says some stuff that does need to be said, seems to have gone a bit off the deep end lately.

Walks like a duck ...

"Manis2society" at the Cosmic Iguana (links bloggered, scroll down to the article entitled "MORE ON CRYPTO FASCISM IN AMERICA") points to an article in the Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times by David Rozelle: "David Rozelle: Drifting toward fascism." Rozelle wonders aloud what "this new America-in-the-making" is becoming. He then proceeds to make a pretty good case for his theme of American drift toward fascism.

I don't know if I agree entirely with Rozelle, but I think he has a point. It's certainly true that there seems to be a group of people who are engaged in acquiring as much power and wealth as possible, without regard for those that might be hurt in the process. It's also true that those people have made some major gains. Just the fact that the vile William Pryor is in confirmation hearings this week is indication enough, not to mention the rollbacks of civil liberties (in the name of "safety") or the American contempt for international systems of law such as the United Nations. There is a long, long list of actions made by the Executive that are nasty in one way or another, from Ashcroft's war on any activity he dislikes to the lies that Bush and his Cabinet used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Any of these individually would not be cause for accusations of fascism. Unfortunately, taken together, they form a whole that is very disquieting indeed.

On the other hand, though, we do have individuals in various places who are actively fighting this "drift," if such it is. Our best and strongest defense is Congress, in particular the Senate. Senators, unlike Representatives, aren't so easily cowed by bullies. I am at least somewhat relieved to see various Senators and a few Representatives, on both sides of the aisle, begin to take notice of the seamier Bush Administration activities. I'm also relieved that the media seems to be waking up at last, at least in small ways. (Although CNN isn't doing much to reassure me that they'll stay awake; I have seen no articles at all there about the Pryor confirmation hearings and almost none about the continuing deaths in Iraq.)

Ultimately, though, it is up to all of us to make the difference. It is made more difficult by an uncooperative, restricted media, but we do at least have a few mechanisms that haven't been available in the past. I write my Senators (Feinstein and Boxer) and my Representative (Harman) with almost clockwork regularity. I have supported the Dean campaign with money (what little I can afford while I'm unemployed) and the Democratic Party with that "Boot Bush" donation button over there on the right.

Most importantly, I vote.

This is not a "right" versus "left" thing, or a "liberal" versus "conservative" thing. I know an almost lunatic-fringe Libertarian who lives in Austin, who was as against the invasion of Iraq and as unhappy with the erosion of civil rights as I am. These are probably the only things about which we agree, but we do agree. This is more important than petty political differences. This is about the right to have and express those differences in the first place. No matter your political leanings, if you are unhappy with the state of things, write your Senators and your Representative, and VOTE!

Indebted until hell freezes over.

Kos gives us "National Debt and Bush: the numbers," a breakdown (by one of his readers) of the magnitude of the national debt since Bush has been in office. On June 9 it was almost $6.6 trillion. The debt when he took office? About $5.7 trillion. On June 9 Bush had been president for 870 days, giving an increase in the national debt of almost one billion dollars per day. If Bush is reelected in 2004 and he continues to increase the national debt at the same rate (a fair assumption, considering that he's outdoing every President in history on deficit spending), we will owe, as a nation, almost $8.6 trillion.

When Bush took office, every man, woman and child in the United States owed about $19,700 (their share of the national debt). Today, that number is close to $22,600. Using the above numbers, in 2008 it would be nearly $30,000. Each.

Three years ago we had a $200 billion surplus. Today the national debt could be at or around $5.5 trillion, but instead the fiscally insane Republicans decided that tax cuts were more important than getting out of debt. Now we're at $6.7 trillion and the clock is ticking at the rate of $980 million a day. We will probably never see the end of this, and there's a damned good chance that our children won't, either.

Unbelievable.

A proto-"pundit?"

A few days ago, Ogged at Unfogged.com wrote about one Kyle Williams, a fourteen-year-old so-called "conservative pundit." Ogged is freaked out by Kyle; as she asks,

What does it mean for a 14 year-old to have deeply held political convictions? What can his words mean? How am I supposed to read them? If a computer program could produce coherent pieces of political rhetoric, would we take them seriously?

With a sample of Kyle's writing, Ogged proved to herself that the text is, basically, empty. While it makes sense syntactically, there's nothing behind it, no depth to it.

I agree. In fact, I said as much in a comment there. As I said, it isn't difficult for a reasonably well-educated and intelligent person to put words in the proper order and have coherent sentences pop out. As you note, though, those sentences could come in almost any order and make as little sense. As I read your quoted paragraph, it struck me that it doesn't really make any sense. Yeah, the words are in the proper order, but as you say, there isn't any coherent message behind the words.

To me, experience is what gives a person depth. One can be intelligent but still almost two-dimensional in outlook. It is experience that gives one the background against which to measure the world around one. Facts in isolation are meaningless, and it is only facts that Kyle Williams has. My gut reaction is that the kid is parrotting the viewpoints of one or more of the adults around him. Sure, he can spew facts to support his argument, but his opinions have no depth.

As I was thinking about this article I went to Kyle's archive of articles and discovered the following gem in Kyle's discussion of the book by Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media?:

Eventually, I did buy this book, I did read it, but my opinion of the bias of the news media hasn't changed.

That's the way I have always looked at politics: I approach both sides of the argument, conduct my own research, and arrive at my own conclusions. Sometimes I change my stances on issues, other times I don't. From a very early age, I have always had a hard time accepting what people say as truth. The arena of politics is filled with rhetoric, backstabbing, spin and boldfaced lying. Therefore, I have always questioned politicians on both sides of the aisle and anywhere in between.

"That is the way I have always …." "From a very early age …." "I have always …."

Eh? What does this mean, from a fourteen-year-old? He has "always" done so-and-so since when? He was thirteen? Twelve? Ten? He has done such-and-such "from a very early age?" How early? Six? Eight? I don't think so. These statements, which he used to lend himself an air of authority, are utterly meaningless. When an adult says "I have always …," they mean "since I have been an adult." "From a very early age," in the context that Kyle uses it, may mean "since childhood" but when used by an adult it means "and carried into adulthood." For me, at 43, "I have always been skeptical of superlative claims by child prodigies" means "since I learned what childhood means from a developmental standpoint." And I learned that as an adult.

The problem is that Kyle still has a lot of growing up to do. He has barely entered adolescence, which appears simple only to someone who has yet to experience it. Neurological connections are still being made in his brain, he is only now really beginning to have the capability to think as an adult. From a developmental perspective, that he would cast himself as "conservative" is no surprise, since he is most certainly still in the "conventional morality" stage of moral development, where right is right, wrong is wrong and there are no gray areas. He has a lot of shaking up and perspective-changing ahead of him. He's only now encountering the wonderful, heady mix of hormones that can make adult life so damned interesting.

Can a fourteen-year-old have "deeply held political convictions?" Well, they can think they do, but no, they really can't. I'm not sure that a fourteen-year-old can be said to have convictions at all in the sense that an adult does, and it is certain that those convictions have not been tested by experience. Deeply-held political convictions are, almost by definition, those that one holds for a significant portion of ones lifetime, those around which one shapes ones life and those which have been tested by experience. Kyle established his political opinions perhaps a year or two ago, at most. He has no experience.

I tend to pity Kyle more than I am "freaked out" by him. For one thing, it takes maturity to write in this medium without succumbing to narcissism and many adults can't manage it. How should an ego-centered boy be able to? He has no such maturity, nor should he. He should be busy being a boy, doing boy things, not wasting his time writing for the "World Net Daily." I am speaking as one who was not able to have that kind of boyhood himself, unfortunately. Kyle should be thinking about school and girls, not getting his ego inflated by people who should know better.

I'm not freaked out by Kyle. I'm saddened.

And I'm disgusted by those who would hold him up as some kind of paragon. They are taking advantage of a child.

Reinventing the obvious.

Today's Los Angeles Times has a story by Bob Drogin, "Banned Weapons Remain Unseen Foe," about the people who are conducting the so-far fruitless search for "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. It's hardly news that they have not been successful. They are also unhappy about missions like this one:

The latest U.S. intelligence, presented at a morning briefing here Friday and backed by satellite photos and reconnaissance reports, was specific and unnerving.

Saddam Hussein, a team of U.S. and Australian weapons hunters was told, may have built drone aircraft rigged with nozzles to spray poison gases, plus two short-range missiles with warheads designed to carry deadly chemicals or germs, at the former Ibn Firnas aeronautics research center.

…

Donning flak vests and helmets, and loading their weapons, the 26-member team climbed into six Humvees and SUVs and sped to the sprawling complex just north of the reeking trash mountains of the Baghdad city dump.

They quickly found the "drones": five burned and blackened 9-foot wings dumped near the front gate. "It could have been a student project, or maybe a model," the team's expert, U.S. Air Force Capt. Libbie Boehm, said with a shrug.

The "missiles" were found too, after a bit of searching through a junk heap: two discarded casings of artillery rockets.

Their "intelligence" resulted in the discovery of a few pieces of a model or student project and a couple of artillery rocket casings. No wonder they're unhappy. But it gets worse. Most of the more than 300 sites that the teams have investigates "were so heavily bombed or looted that any potential evidence was long gone."

Moreover, the teams have largely visited the same sites that U.N. inspectors searched last winter without result. They were never given any of the U.N. reports, so knew little about what was there before. Commanders have made such comparison more difficult by changing the names of some long-known U.N. sites.

Now the teams are reorganizing, with the new "Iraq Survey Group" taking responsibility for the search. Meanwhile,

Several of the seven current "sensitive site teams," or SSTs, conducted their last mission June 2 and have been told not to expect another until June 25 or later. Dozens of team members now spend each day washing clothes, taking naps and fighting boredom.

"We're here to answer the big question," said Lt. Cody Strong, a tactical intelligence officer. "You'd think if this was really a priority, we'd have nonstop missions."

Yeah, you would think that, wouldn't you? Even worse, those who are still working are working from a list created before the war; these lists have not been updated and are inaccurate:

In many cases, intelligence folders prepared for each site failed to note that bombing had turned the target to rubble.

"It's kind of frustrating -- futile really -- for us to drive eight hours to check out a crater," said Marine Lt. Col. Robert Q. Rowsey, commander of the team. "All of our targets were put on a list before the war."

Other team leaders complained that most intelligence folders appeared to be based solely on analysis of satellite imagery. Again and again, the intelligence proved wildly off-base.

Probably the best story is this one:

"The target folder for Uday's palace at Lake Habbaniyah was real clean," said U.S. Army Maj. Ronald Hann Jr., a highly decorated arms control expert who heads SST-6, referring to a complex for Hussein's older son. " 'There's the warehouse. There's the poison gas storage tanks.' Well, the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."

Cars in a carport, propane in propane tanks. One person said it best:

"I'm sitting here, and frustrated isn't the word anymore," said the official, who has a senior role in the hunt and spoke on condition of anonymity. "I feel almost duped."

Join the rest of the American people, man. Anyone who believed Bush, Cheney, et al, that Hussein had these weapons were, indeed, duped. But they are still hoping:

The Iraq Survey Group hopes to change all that. Instead of revisiting old U.N. sites, the group will focus on interviewing Iraqis and analyzing documents that already fill three warehouses. The goal is to find fresh clues about any lethal microbes or chemical agents, long-range missiles or enrichment technology for nuclear weapons -- all forbidden to Iraq under U.N. resolutions.

The [anonymous] intelligence officer [quoted above] said that common-sense approach should have been taken long ago. "These guys are reinventing the obvious," he said. "And that means they didn't see the obvious before."

So far, though, all they have found are conventional weapons, allowed under the U.N. resolutions. I will be very surprised, even shocked, if they do eventually find unequivocal evidence of recent (post-1991) nuclear, biological or chemical weapons activity. They aren't there, they weren't there before the war and I'm convinced that the President and his cronies either knew that and lied directly, or ignored the evidence that would have proven them wrong in their assertions.

They sent people to fight and die in Iraq, killing innocents and combatants alike, on the basis of the false claim that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States and other nations.

Patterns of perception.

In "Racism, or, Why they don't understand us," Prometheus 6 suggests an experiment in which one approaches ten random people for a noun of their choice, then, later, approach any number of others and have them divide those nouns into two categories by whatever quality they wish. Earl suggests this experiment to point out the fact that every person asked to categorize the words was able to do so, despite the fact that none of the nouns had any a priori relationship to any of the others.

As Earl indicates, intelligence "finds or creates patterns in events and memories." (Emphasis mine.) I would go further and say that we can find patterns in anything, even in random noise. Our brains have evolved to be very, very good at finding patterns; this pattern-matching touches everything from recognizing the faces of our loved ones (face-recognition is something that we are particularly good at) to noticing the relationship between the seasons and the positions of the stars.

Earl takes this process a step further, though, and asks,

… what if you and I, the people who are trying to figure out why something that affected both of us happened, had no significant experiences in common?

He suggests that although both of us would come up with an explanation, those explanations may well be very different.

And if our explanation is used to determine our response to the event, what are the chances that we'll find ourselves at odds?

Earl asserts that we "always find a reason for things that fits into our knowledge," whether or not that reason is objectively accurate and that to find the truth, that knowledge must be as complete as possible. Further, we cannot rely only on our own perspective, since it is by definition biased. He concludes,

… justice requires the recognition of absolute values and relative knowledge, with the most relative knowledge being that which we claim for our own.

Although I disagree somewhat with his concept of "absolute" values, this is nonetheless a very interesting insight. The very basis of our differences may be in our adeptness at pattern-matching. While we have an inherent ability to recognize many kinds of patterns, other, more abstract patterns we only recognize based upon our experience. Individuals vary in their experiences, and groups can vary much more. The experience of an Iraqi Sunni muslim, for example, is quite different from a wealthy Texas born-again Christian. Despite the fact that they see the same events, they find in them completely different patterns. If they don't realize this difference and allow for it, chances are that they will not be able to communicate effectively, or perhaps not at all.

Perhaps "culture" is, in a way, the sum of the experience of a large group of people? The basic commonality they share and the unspoken agreement they have reached based upon their shared experience? I have had to learn that my Chinese wife sees the behavior of others in a very different way than I do, since to her those behaviors are part of a pattern of relationship and interpersonal hierarchy that is not at all a part of my world. That pattern, however, is a part of Chinese society, a very important part.

So a full understanding of these differences is not only important if we want to find the truth of a thing but also if we want to communicate about that thing. Without that understanding, it may not even be possible for us to agree as to the existence and nature of the thing in the first place.

An interesting insight.

UPDATE: Earl fixed his permalink so I added it and removed the (incorrect) date reference.

Protestations of fatigue.

Can I be done, now? The story about the so-called "weapons of mass destruction" is gaining steam in the media, particularly in the U.K. The situation in Iraq is spiralling down into chaos and violence, becoming the morass that those of us against the war warned against last March. Despite a few twitches, the economy remains moribund. And Bush condemns himself from his own mouth, without realizing it. "Revisionist historians," indeed.

Okay, I guess that the so-called "USA PATRIOT" Act is still in force, and despite the assertions of so many on the right, it does indeed infringe upon our essential liberties in ways that did not exist or were much less pernicious before its passage. I must only look at Ashcroft and his statements that while the first Act was "useful," more is needed. This alone tells me that those infringements came with the first Act. Not only that but despite those infringements, Ashcroft, good fascist that he is, is doing his best to frighten Congress into granting him even more sweeping powers. All in the name of keeping us "safe."

Then there is Michael Powell, who wants to aid his fascist buddies by turning over the media to a handful of huge corporations. He's doing this probably all unwittingly, believing instead that he's helping out his corporate buddies, but it amounts to the same in the end. If we're all very fortunate, tomorrow the Senate Commerce Committee will vote to send legislation to the floor that will roll back Powell's little gift. I've done what I can, but I'm still afraid that even some Democrats will go along with their rich benefactors and vote against the legislation. I expect this from the typical Republican but I tend to expect at least a little better from the Democrats.

As if those weren't enough issues with which to contend, we still have the scumbag Pryor in confirmation hearings, and no, CNN still hasn't run a story on him. Not to mention the two other ultraconservative idiots up for confirmation. And then there's the "RAVEIllicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act," which as Ampersand tells us in "The RAVE Act - yes, I'm sure it's worse than nothing," is now being used to suppress the speech of those who oppose anti-drug laws. Plus the continuing antics of that vile member of the leech family, Tom DeLay, who is doing his best to make his assertion that he is the federal goverment become literally true. Here's a man who is out to grab all the power he can and who is interested in nothing else, at all.

And on, and on.

So, no, I can't be done quite yet. Despite the fact that I'm becoming damned tired of this mess, it won't go away by itself. I started this weblog to express my anger and dismay at the current state of things, in particular the invasion of Iraq, and since then things haven't gotten better in any measurable way. They may even have gotten worse.

The thing that really gets me, though, is the fact that those on the right do their damnedest to justify all of these things. As if anything Bush or his administration does is the "right" thing, by definition. I guess it's the same kind of thinking that made anything Clinton or his administration did the "wrong" thing. Well, I believed that Clinton was a reasonably good President who did some stupid things, then compounded that stupidity by lying about it. He couldn't keep his dick in his pants, but that alone didn't make him any worse than any other President, Democrat, Republican or otherwise. He didn't lie about anything that related to his Presidency and so should not have been impeached. I'm convinced as well that history will prove me right about this.

Now, today, I believe that George W. Bush is a hideously bad President who not only does stupid things but is too dim to understand that they are stupid. So far, the only thing he has done that I respect in the least is to reprimand Israel for attacking Hamas recently. That's one thing in more than two years. That's not enough. Meanwhile, too many Americans seem to think that he's a saint and vilify anyone who has the temerity to criticize him, calling them "traitors," or at least "unpatriotic." To the contrary, I would be "unpatriotic" and a "traitor" to remain silent when I believe that Bush is leading us down a path to potential ruin.

Dissent is the essence of liberty. If you can't handle it, move to Iran.

The country of the blind.

The Guardian reports about "just another day in Baghdad." A day in which fathers were killed because they were angry and desperate. A day in which a young man was killed for being in the wrong place, working for the wrong people.

Neither the Iraqis nor the Americans ever dreamed that Baghdad would be like this, ten weeks to the day after Saddam Hussein's regime was finally toppled.

The people of this city are still gripped with the deepening problems of poor security, interminable power shortages and unpaid salaries. Their frustration is spilling over into a spate of attacks on the US military, which are met with heavy-handed raids and mass arrests which, in turn, spark yet greater frustration.

Hussein Saber was one of a huge number of men who were supposed to receive yesterday a $50 "emergency payment." Instead, he was shot when he became part of the protest that erupted when the money didn't arrive. Why did he protest?

All the junior ranks within Iraq's 400,000-strong military, which was formally dissolved last month, have been promised a one-off payment and the chance to apply for a job in the new Iraqi national army.

In reality none have been paid since their last wages from the regime in February or March. …

Hussein was lucky, he was only wounded. The two men beside him were killed. This happened because the occupation forces didn't make sure that they had the money they promised. These men have become desperate.

Until the war [Khadum Hussain Hani, a former soldier] was paid 75,000 dinars a month (then worth $37). Since March he has received nothing and has had to borrow thousands of dollars to pay the 30,000 dinars monthly rent on his small apartment. "I have borrowed and borrowed and all I have left in my pocket today is my identity card," he said yesterday. … Now he has to explain to his children why he has no work and no money. "Sometimes they ask: 'Did you bring home any apples today father?'" he said. "I tell them I will bring apples one day when I have some money."

Why does he have no money? To answer that, see who has the responsibility for his circumstances. I'll give you a hint: It's not Saddam Hussein. We as a nation put Khadum into this position and we are now responsible for him and for all the men like him. I argued against taking that responsibility because I knew we were being lied to, and now that we have it the same ones who lied to us are failing in that responsibility. Instead of governing, Bremer is having meetings:

The al-Shawaf crossroads outside the Republican Palace, the bloodied site of yesterday's killings, has become the touchstone of the failings of the military occupation. Here there are queues of the articulate and the plain angry. The US officials who should be listening to their very simple and very real complaints are locked in a cycle of meetings from dawn until after midnight in the palace complex, behind the heavily guarded, barbed-wire entrance at the palace gates.

I don't think Bremer even knows the people for whom he is responsible. The Bush administration replaced the idiot to whom they first gave the responsibility with someone even less competent. Bremer is expert only in riding the coattails of the truly competent.

Honestly, I could do a better job, without a moment of experience in governing. At least I know that meetings aren't how goals are met or tasks are accomplished. Of course, meetings are all Bremer knows.

Meetings.

Where is the money that was promised? Where are the peacekeepers that are needed in Iraq now? Sorry, soldiers who have been on constant duty for months just won't cut it. Hell, why not hire some of the out-of-work police that are so common these days (since so many municipalities are laying off police and firefighters due to lack of money), send them to Iraq and have them do the policing? It's what they were trained to do, after all! Sure, they don't speak the language and that is a real problem, but that would be a problem no matter who they used. Unless they used Iraqis, of course, but the chances for that happening are, as we have plainly seen, zero.

Why the hell don't those damned "US officials" stop with their useless meetings and just get out and listen to some of those complaints? Hell, Bremer could probably pay all of those who queued yesterday out of his own pocket, without feeling it! Simple complaints very often have simple solutions. Problems like the ones in Iraq right now aren't solved by some grand plan, nor all at once. They are solved one at a time, an individual at a time.

Hell, if nothing else, pair each soldier with a former Iraqi soldier! This would take the pressure off the American and would help a lot with relations between Iraqis and American soldiers in general.

But no. Bremer would rather have meetings. Bush would rather cut funding for veteran's benefits. Tom DeLay would rather give rich Americans another $83 billion in tax cuts. Condoleeza Rice would rather babble about "revisionist historians." Donald Rumsfeld would rather compare Baghdad to Washington, DC. And CNN would rather publish stories about fake religious relics.

If you think by "the country of the blind" I meant Iraq, you lose. As do we all.

Another good Robert Fisk interview.

Since the Independent has made its articles by Fisk pay-only, I haven't been reading them. So it's nice to see this interview with Robert Fisk by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! As usual, he has a good and quite independent perspective on the never-ending conflict in Iraq. Apparently he has been in Iraq recently, chronicling the rise of resistance to American occupation. I seem to recall that I said something about remembering Viet Nam not so long ago. Well, it's happening. As I said then, Iraq really can't truly be a Viet Nam, since there's no true freedom fighter there, but it can still be a nasty little guerilla war that eats young American men and excretes body bags. Fisk relates the reports of some of those American soldiers:

Some of the soldiers spoke very frankly about the situation in Baghdad. One man told me [ … ] — they all say that Baghdad airport now comes under nightly sniper fire from the perimeter of the runways from Iraqis. Two of them told me that every time a military aircraft comes in at night, it's fired at. In fact some of the American pilots are now going back to the old Vietnamese tactic of cork screwing down tightly on to the runways from above rather than making the normal level flight approach across open countryside because they're shot at so much.

If I were a pilot about to land at that airport, I would certainly try to make my approach over as much safe territory as possible. A couple of bullets in the wrong place can really ruin your whole day.

Of course, there is the occasional soldier who actually knows what he's doing.

It's important perhaps to say — I did mention it in [a recent] article that a number of those soldiers who were attached to the 3rd infantry division who were military policeman, American ordinary cops like one from Rhode Island, for example — they had a pretty shrewd idea of what was going on. You got different kinds of behavior from the Americans. You got this very nice guy, Phil Cummings, who was a Rhode Island cop, very sensitive towards people, didn't worry if people shouted at him. He remained smiling. He just said that if people throw rocks at me or stones at me, I give them candies.

Didn't I say something in my last article about hiring out-of-work police to do the work in places like Baghdad? That's too simple a solution, I guess. So instead we get

There was another soldier who went up to a middle aged man sitting on a seat and he said, "If you get out of that seat, I'll break your neck," and there was quite a lot of language like that as well.

Yeah, that's going to win friends.

Fisk casts a Rumsfeld pronouncement (to which I didn't pay much attention at the time) in a new light:

He made a speech which I thought was very interesting, rather sinister in the big hanger at Baghdad airport. He said we still have to fight the remnants of Saddam and the terrorists in Iraq, and I thought, hang on a minute, who are these people? And it took me a few minutes to realize I think what he was doing, he was laying the future narrative of the opposition to the Americans. I.e. when the Americans get attacked, it could be first of all laid down to remnants of Saddam, as in remnants of the Taliban who seem to be moving around in Afghanistan now in battalion strength, but never mind.

This makes too much sense to dismiss, unfortunately. Rumsfeld expected these attacks and the rise of resistance, so he laid the groundwork to "spin" (that is, lie about) it. Is there a resistance? Well, Rumsfeld's "spin" and pronouncements from the Pentagon notwithstanding, I don't for a second believe that all of these attacks are carried out by "Ba'athist elements" or "Saddamists." Even if they are, though, with atrocities such as those in Fallujah, people who weren't disaffected earlier will become so.

It was very interesting that in Fallujah, the young men came out to see me from a shop just after the American searches there had ended and said some people came from the resistance a few nights ago and asked me to join. I said, what did you say, and he said, I wouldn't do that. But now, he said, I might think differently. [ … ] The guy in Fallujah said that the men, the armed men who came to invite him to join the resistance had weapons, showed their mukhabarat intelligence identity card and said, we're still being paid and we are proud to hold our I.D. cards for the Ba'ath Party.

So the young men become disaffected and then realize that they can actually get paid by the resistance. The real irony here is that with only a little effective effort, Bremer or his precedessor could have avoided this situation easily. But instead, Bremer is becoming the same kind of tyrant our military toppled:

[ … ] Paul Bremer now asked the legal side of the coalition provisional authority to set up the machinery of Iraqi press censorship. In other words, Iraqi newspapers are going to be censored. Controlled I think is the official word they use, but that means censorship.

That is the kind of language that Saddam used. Iraqis are used to a censored press; after all, they lived with it for more than 20 years under Saddam Hussein.

Fisk talks quite a bit about the new Iraqi press, that it is publishing "wild stories" and actually making things worse.

But you can see how the occupation forces [ … ] are troubled by this kind of publication because it seems to them to provoke or incite animosity towards the liberators of Iraq, which it is not meant to do. But of course the problem is that the Imams in the mosques are saying the same thing about the Americans. Now, the last quote I read from American official said that it may be necessary to control what the Imams were saying in the mosques; well, this is preposterous. I sat on Rashid Street in Baghdad a few days ago and listened to the loud speaker carrying the sermon of the imam from within the mosque.

I think he was saying the Americans must leave immediately, now. Well, under the new rule presumably he's inciting the people to violence. What are we going to do? Arrest all the Imams in the mosques, arrest all the journalists who won't obey, close down the newspapers? I mean what Iraqi journalists need are courses in journalism from reporters who work in real democracies.

He suggests actually teaching the members of the new Iraqi press to pay attention to the problems in their own society while they criticize the Americans.

But Bremer is not interested in this. What Bremer wants to do is control, control the press, control the Imams, and it doesn't work.

Fisk points out that so many of the relatively small incidents don't make it to the record, the press often doesn't report it (if they see it at all) and of course it isn't making it back those who most need to know. I would assert, though, that this really doesn't matter, since those in control, those with the authority to make a difference, don't care about these incidents. They have accomplished their goal, whatever that might have been, and they really don't care that six Iraqi children were hurt by a grenade, or that an elderly Iraqi man was held in cruel conditions for hours, for no obvious reason, before being released.

I do think that Fisk's point that Bremer is interested only in control, not in being an effective leader (or even an effective administrator), is a good one. I suspect, too, that this is not limited to Bremer.

Read the interview. As usual, Fisk has probably the most clear view of what is really going on in Iraq. I just wish our own media had such reporters.

Stupid computers.

I haven't had a chance to do much catching up with the State of Things this evening, or to write here about them, due to an outbreak of extreme inanimate perversity. My wife uses Windows 2000 and Outlook for its support of Chinese input methods. Her mother doesn't read or speak English and they correspond via email constantly. Well, this afternoon my wife's computer wouldn't boot. "Disk error."

After hours of various attempts to fix things, I finally gave her my (nearly unused) Windows 98 box so she could at least take care of her email while I continue to try to diagnose the problem with her system. Since I don't use email on it, though, I had to install the various Microsoftian bits and pieces, which took more hours. My entire evening was eaten by a combination of recalcitrant hardware and just plain broken software. As a software engineer, I loathe the crap that Microsoft sells. Unfortunately, its ubiquity means that that's what the uninitiated know how to use.

But this is a rant for another time. Enough for now to say that of my eight currently running systems (including a couple of single-board computers), not one of them is running Microsoft software.

Despite tonight's great waste of time, though, I did want to point out a couple of good reads. First off, Natasha at "the watch" has a very informative two-parter about what it's like to grow up with Asperger's Syndrome. I'm glad to say that, from the attributes she describes, I do not suffer from Asperger's, although I'm almost certainly on the continuum somewhere toward the extremely mild end. This is just as well, since I already have enough to deal with.

I also want to point out the ever-entertaining (and often extremely cutting) wit of Tom of TBOGG. Today's chuckle was generated by this bit (links are broken again, someone please shoot the programmers who wrote and maintain Blogger, okay?):

Looks like the Bush administration unfurled the "Mission Accomplished" banner a bit too early. Someone needs to needlepoint a sampler for Karl Rove's office wall that says:

Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony." - Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Heh. Indeed.

While I'm blogging around, I want to cast a quick vote for another under appreciated blog: Hi. I'm black!: Bret Boone on Steroids? You're welcome, Glenn, and with this vote you tie my showing of a couple of weeks ago. I find that I've already voted for Earl's entry a few days ago, without intending to do so at the time. I also want to cast votes for a couple of other bloggers on the left side of the aisle, first "Where We're Bound : lefty geek talks politics, macintosh, and community media," and second "archy." Fortunately, this archy can use the shift keys.

Finally, to do my part to get folks off that nasty Blogger software, if you run a low-traffic weblog like one of those above, want to leave blogspot behind and can afford to chip in a few bucks every now and then against hosting costs, drop me a line.

Good guys, bad guys.

This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder which is which: As U.S. Retreats, Iran Puts Its Money Into Afghan Province. (Via Cursor.) See, it just so happens that the United States is supposed to be rebuilding Afghanistan, after bombing the hell out of it to defeat the Taliban and ferret out Osama bin Laden and his merry band of terrorists. Unfortunately, we've been dropping the ball.

So Iran has picked it up:

Two months ago, Iran began supplying electricity to streets, government offices and the hospital in the city of Herat, a boon in a country where the vast majority of people have no regular access to electric power. The Iranian government spent $15 million to extend power lines to Herat and is selling the electricity at a loss, according to Iranians and Afghans familiar with the project.

Construction on a 76-mile road that Iran is building from the Iranian border town of Dugharun to Herat -- at a cost of $38 million thus far -- has accelerated recently. A few months ago it took four hours to drive from Herat to Iran. Now it takes two.

Iran built a railway line to its border with Herat last year and is awaiting permission from the Afghan government to extend rail service into Afghanistan.

The Iranian government has pledged to spend $560 million over five years to help rebuild Afghanistan.

Iran, of course, being a member of that "axis of evil" with which we're all so familiar these days. It's beginning to look like Iran has also replaced Syria as our next target for, um, "regime change."

And meanwhile, in the same part of the world, the United States can't even keep the lights on in Baghdad. The title of that Independent piece, by the way, is "Powerless Iraqis rail against ignorant, air-conditioned US occupation force." That pretty much says it all, I think. Unfortunately, I don't think that every American there is ignorant, some are just lying through their teeth:

Asked about Baghdad's lack of electricity at an air-conditioned press conference, Paul Bremer, the American head of the occupation authority, looking cool in a dark suit and quiet purple tie, simply asserted that, with a few exceptions, Baghdad was now receiving 20 hours of electricity a day. "It simply isn't true," said one Iraqi, shaking his head in disbelief after listening to Mr Bremer. "Everybody in Baghdad knows it."

It's hardly surprising to me that he is described as "living in an air-conditioned fantasy world." Bremer is in so far over his head that daylight is a distant memory.

Doing anything about the state of things in Baghdad is unthinkable, I'm afraid:

The obvious solution for the US is to set up an Iraqi provisional administration, operating under ultimate American control. But attractive though this might be, it would also mean ceding some power to Iraqis, something Mr Bremer is loath to do. … The main reason why Washington does not want to give up any power is the fear that this would ultimately open the way for a takeover by Iraq's Shia Muslims … .

And of course allowing Iraqis to provide their own services and local government would lead instantly to a Shia takeover of the country. Right?

So we let Iraq stew. I wonder how many Iraqis will die this summer when the temperature in Baghdad reaches 140 or so and there's still no electricity.

You know, when I was growing up, I always thought Americans were the good guys. Even as a young adult I clung to that belief, although it was pretty tattered after Viet Nam, Watergate, the Reagan years and the Iran-Contra scandal. Today, though, I know for certain that I was wrong. The good guys don't do things like this.

We're the bad guys.

Is there an echo in here?

Hesiod suggests a way to deal with the Bush fascists. Specifically, he says (among other things),

… "You know? You're right. If you stop supporting McCarthyite rightwingers and policies...I'll stop. Deal?" If they don't agree … go back to pitbull mode and tell them that they are unworthy of living in this country and they ought to move to Iran where protest of the Government is considered a crime and is suppressed.

Gee, didn't I just say that?

Great minds think alike. Or something.

Two words.

A number of idiots on the right apparently expected an apology from those of us who were appalled by the looting of the Iraqi National Museum of Antiquities. I have just two words for those idiots: Fuck you.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have confirmed the theft of at least 6,000 artifacts from Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities during a prolonged looting spree as U.S. forces entered Baghdad two months ago, a leading archaeologist said yesterday.

University of Chicago archaeologist McGuire Gibson said the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement told him June 13 that the official count of missing items had reached 6,000 and was climbing as museum and Customs investigators proceeded with an inventory of three looted storerooms.

A captured ... spy.

This is insane and barely believable. Via The Agonist, the Telegraph tells us that the "al-Qa'eda man they captured was an FBI spy." First they tell us that this guy had planned to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. Tonight, though, we find out that he has been under the thumb of the FBI for months.

US authorities waited until last week to announce a plea bargain struck with Iyman Faris, a Pakistani-born lorry driver ordered to scout out terror targets, including the New York landmark.

They did not say that Faris, who was also ordered to study ultralight aircraft, and the possibility of derailing a train into a chemical storage facility in Washington, had been under FBI control for months.

Now, it's not quite as bad as it sounds, since it appears that he was "secretly detained" (let's just call it "arrested," okay?) two weeks after Al Qaeda's chief of operations was captured in Pakistan, on March 1. Since then, he has apparently been "sitting in a safe house making calls for us" to his superiors in Al Qaeda. Still it would have been nice if they had actually told us the whole truth about him in the first place. A lie of omission is still a lie.

It's about time for us to hear truth rather than lies, isn't it?

Not good guys.

Jeanne over at Body and Soul (permalink is working for the moment, better hurry) quotes a big chunk of a story from ABC News, "Burned Iraqi Children Said Turn Away" for good reason. The story is horrifying:

On a scorching afternoon, while on duty at an Army airfield, Sgt. David J. Borell was approached by an Iraqi who pleaded for help for his three children, burned when they set fire to a bag containing explosive powder left over from war in Iraq.

Borell immediately called for assistance. But the two Army doctors who arrived about an hour later refused to help the children because their injuries were not life-threatening and had not been inflicted by U.S. troops.

Apparently the children, a boy and two girls, ten and eleven years old, are residents of Bihishmeh, a village near the base. According to their father, they set fire to a bag of explosives in the street, which, of course, exploded, injuring them. Their father took them to a hospital in Balad but they were turned away because the hospital was unable to treat them. In desperation he took his children to the military base. When Borell understood this, he called his superiors who sent two doctors, both majors. Get this:

One of them, according to Borell, "looked at [the boy] ... didn't examine him, didn't ask him questions."

"(He) never looked at the girls," said Borell.

"Through the interpreter, one of the doctors told the father that we didn't have any medicine here ... and were not able to provide them care," said Borell. "And he also expounded on the fact that they needed long-term care."

Borell said the combat hospital was fully stocked.

"Right before they left, I looked at the one doctor, asked him if he could at least give them comfort care," said Borell. "He told me they were not here to be the treatment center for Iraq."

Right. We'll kill, mutilate and maim children, but we won't "be a treatment center" for them. There are a couple of doctors who should lose their right to practice medicine. I would say they should lose their freedom, as well.

Borell did what he could, giving the father bandages and IV solution from his first-aid kit. The children were eventually treated. In Baghdad, the next day, after going another day without treatment. The father and children are, ironically, in good spirits. Borell, on the other hand, seems to have lost his faith in the Army:

Borell said he felt betrayed by the Army, which he joined after high school. Besides the letter to his wife, he also wrote to his congresswoman and several media outlets describing the incident.

His superiors have not said a word, said Borell, "although I get the impression that they're probably not very happy."

…

"After today, I wonder if I will still be able to carry the title 'soldier' with any pride at all," said Borell.

Certainly I don't feel very proud to be an American these days. I can only imagine how Borell feels.

The media lies, too.

I don't have much time tonight, between repairing computers and searching for a job, but I want to express my outrage at yet another set of lies. Amp at Alas, a blog tells us about "The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney." McKinney was widely quoted as saying that " President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war." This quote cost her reelection to the House. The only problem is that she never actually said that, according to this Alternet story by Greg Palast. It appears that someone just made the statement up and the New York Times, among others, just ran it, without checking. And, of course, when faced with the fact that McKinney didn't actually say that, they have yet to publish a retraction or an apology.

So McKinney loses her seat in the House because of a lie, published because the so-called "liberal" media were too lazy or incompetent to check their facts first. What does the Congressional Record report her as saying?

George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11.

Some "liberal media."

Argh.

A convenient list of lefty blogs.

Tonight I noticed traffic from a new source in my list of referrers over there on the left: "Blogs of War." It turns out that this is a list of, as the owner puts it, "loony leftists on the web." This blog is there, as well as such notables as Talk Left, Calpundit, Body and Soul and a bunch of others. Ironically, it's actually a pretty good resource if you're looking for liberal blogs.

And, hey, we may as well let the other guys do the work, right?

Surprise, surprise.

Victor has a short piece at his blog Balasubramania's Mania quoting this Washington Post story. The story is about the unsealing yesterday of a hearing transcript in the case of Mohamed Atriss, who was falsely accused of being a terrorist. It seems that the allegations that were "so sensitive that they had to be kept from Atriss despite his constitutional right to confront evidence against him" was based on inaccurate information, that could have been easily rebutted if Atriss and his lawyer had been allowed to see it.

"We are glad to expose these transcripts for what they are -- slanderous, hearsay, double- and triple-hearsay, unsubstantiated allegations," said attorney Miles Feinstein, with Atriss at his side in his law office. "It illustrates the dangers and irreparable harm that comes from secret evidence."

This is the classic problem with this kind of secret evidence. The evidence was garbage, but no one could know that because it was kept secret. And, of course, the claim that this evidence was "sensitive" was simply absurd.

Now, put this situation together with the revolting policy of trying non-citizens in military tribunals. Even worse, the only oversight or review of the results of these tribunals will be by Donald Rumsfeld. And, I assume, George W. Bush, who is certainly a man I would not want reviewing my case.

To say that this situation is vile is insufficient. It shouldn't be happening. Secret allegations and military tribunals are features of a tyranny, of fascism, not of a free democracy.

A little good news for civil rights.

I'm very happy to see from the BBC this story: US court overturns gay sex ban. The Supreme Court overturned a Texas law criminalizing sex between consenting homosexual adults. CNN has the story as well, and goes into a little more detail. Unsurprisingly, the three dissenting opinions were those of Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas, the three ultraconservative partisans on the Court.

Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft covers this as well, among other rulings, and far better than I ever could, in her "Open Thread for Supreme Court News."

This decision has dire implications for the twelve other states that have similar (if not identical) laws. It may also mean that Bush will be forced to comment on the matter, coming down on one side or another of the issue, and thereby alienating either his loony religious right supporters, or most of the rest of mainstream America. "A consummation devoutly to be wish'd."

Finally, according to CNN:

"The court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," [Justice Antonin] Scalia wrote for the three [dissenters], according to the AP. He took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench.

"The court has taken sides in the culture war," Scalia said, adding that he has "nothing against homosexuals."

Liar.