Still More "Bitter" Fallout

Once again, I truly apologize for dwelling on the faux issue of the moment, but there is such an avalanche of media and political spin out there that some of it must be addressed; the fact that Kristol Mess AND BoBo are both chimed in, for example (the latter today) tells you something.

What it tells you, actually, is that our media-political-industrial complex has worked itself into the greatest froth I’ve ever since I started this blog; the only thing comparable was the Terri Schiavo circus, which I fortunately missed (for posting purposes, anyway). And their goal is nothing less that to take remarks uttered by Obama that are absolutely true and use them to make the voters of this country recoil out of umbrage (and of course, since these clowns hold sway over our discourse for the most part, they seem to be doing that).

George Will treats us to a hilarious column where he pretends to care about the middle class (sorry, but find your own link if you want). Bob Herbert criticized Obama for saying voters were “bitter” instead of “angry,” as if semantics are going to matter to someone who has lost his or her job, home, or health insurance.

And not to be outdone by any means, J.D. Mullane of the Bucks County Courier Times tells us the following here…

You may have heard what Sen. Barack Obama thinks of small town Pennsylvanians: They are “bitter” and “cling” to guns, religion and bigotry because they don't have good jobs.

For the record, here is what Obama said, which Mullane actually repeats later in his column…

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

As you can see, Obama clearly said nothing about bigotry; which is actually confirmed by one of the subjects Mullane talks to for this column my bad - of course, we find that out near the end of the hit piece after Mullane disingenuously sticks “bigotry” in the lead…a typically sleazy journalistic trick.

It is nothing short of sickening that we have a ruling executive cabal that has sought to abolish, at the very least, the first and fourth amendments to the U.S. Constitution (totally supportive of torture, abuse of executive privilege, legally labeling NGOs and human rights groups as terrorism supporters, an on and on), that sits idly by while employers in this country shed payrolls while still clamoring to lift restrictions on H1B visas for foreign workers (if anything, Bushco has done all it could do to encourage it), that wages war without end in Iraq, engages in acts of typical deception on the climate crisis, that staffs the governmental agencies under its purview with utterly incompetent party hacks…and yet, it takes some wording about rural PA voters that some consider inappropriate to rankle the sensibilities of a foundering presidential candidate and the media stooges doing her bidding to keep the blood sport going for as long as possible.

Well, just for the hell of it, here is what I did in response.

I did a little digging and found a link to an article written by the director of the Developing Communities Project, described as “an institutionally based community organization on Chicago's far south side,” which was published in 1990. The article, “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” was written by a man who had just recently enrolled at Harvard to study law.

You’ve probably heard of the author, by the way, because the director of the Developing Communities Project was a guy named Barack Obama.

This is what he wrote…

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches. During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, many of these issues became submerged in the face of the clear oppression of segregation. The debate was no longer whether to protest, but how militant must that protest be to win full citizenship for blacks.

Twenty years later, the tensions between strategies have reemerged, in part due to the recognition that for all the accomplishments of the 1960s, the majority of blacks continue to suffer from second-class citizenship. Related to this are the failures — real, perceived and fabricated — of the Great Society programs initiated by Lyndon Johnson. Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.

First, and most publicized, has been the surge of political empowerment around the country. Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson are but two striking examples of how the energy and passion of the Civil Rights movement have been channeled into bids for more traditional political power. Second, there has been a resurgence in attempts to foster economic development in the black community, whether through local entrepre¬neurial efforts, increased hiring of black contractors and corporate managers, or Buy Black campaigns. Third, and perhaps least publicized, has been grass-roots community organizing, which builds on indigenous leadership and direct action.

…

Neither electoral politics nor a strategy of economic self-help and internal development can by themselves respond to these new challenges (facing the inner city and African Americans in particular – my paraphrasing). The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools, although they did achieve an important symbolic effect. In fact, much-needed black achievement in prominent city positions has put us in the awkward position of administer¬ing underfunded systems neither equipped nor eager to address the needs of the urban poor and being forced to compromise their interests to more powerful demands from other sectors.

Self-help strategies show similar limitations. Although both laudable and necessary, they too often ignore the fact that without a stable community, a well-educated population, an adequate infrastructure and an informed and employed market, neither new nor well-established compa¬nies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace. Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.

In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.

As I read the excerpt above, it became crystal clear to me that Barack Obama has a thorough understanding of the root causes of the utter disintegration of our cities and the monumental challenge of restoring economic opportunity through a combination of government-business partnership, civic action, and individual self reliance (and after reading this excerpt, I’m tempted to try and locate the book “After Alinsky…” on Amazon.com and read more of what he has to say).

As far as I’m concerned, this excerpt was written by someone with both the keen mind and knowledge of what it takes to try and resolve complicated issues and the courage to face the daunting challenges that lie ahead of this nation (Obama wrote primarily about African Americans, of course, but his words could apply to those of other races, creeds, ethnicities and gender persuasions also).

It most certainly was not written by an “elitist,” who used the word “cling” inappropriately for some, as well as others who thought it strange that he ordered orange juice without coffee, or wishes to sit down and meet with Hamas (he doesn't, by the way).

(Actually, with this in mind, I wish our corporate media cousins would all get together and come up with a list of behaviors that they consider to be appropriate and give the list to Obama; that way, he would know how to act to please them and they would thus resist the temptation to concoct such utterly ridiculous “stories” about “scandals” with a “-gate” attached at the end.)

And with all of this in mind, I now have a message for Hillary Clinton.

It is apparent that the only way you believe that your campaign can succeed truly is to utterly trash Obama and hope that, by some scurrilous design, the “super delegates” you so desperately wish to possess will flock to you somehow as crows descend to pick at the carcass of a dead animal (God help me, but all in the corporate media punditocracy who said this was the case turned out, despite my ridicule at the time, to be absolutely right).

So, for that reason, go ahead and win your “victory” in Pennsylvania (which I’m sure will be delivered to you by PA Governor Ed Rendell, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, and others– I’m sure you don’t have the qualms about handing out “walking-around money” to local Philly poobahs that Obama does; and I applaud Obama for that, by the way). Rack up your 10-15 percent margin of victory, or whatever it will be. Go ahead and jog a victory lap around the clothespin at 15th and Market if you want. Fire a gun, drink a shot and a beer…whatever.

And the next day, put an end to this utterly putrid, painful exercise of a campaign of yours for good (and take all your preferred “girl chums” with you if you want).

The lost delegates aren’t going to come back. And Florida and Michigan aren’t going to matter either. The only way you could win would be in response to Obama’s electoral destruction, and despite your positively juvenile manufacturing of this non-issue, that won’t happen (if anything, I can’t wait to see how this boomerangs on you in other primaries).

It’s over, and apparently, you are the last to know. You exist only as a candidate for the amusement of Fox “News,” The Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal editorial page so you can generate the negative force required to eviscerate your own party, which happens to be the only way that their favored candidate, John W. McBush, can actually win.

The stain on our memory left by your “Insult-40-States Express” will be with us for a long, long time. This latest episode of accusing Obama of “elitism” – Obama, someone who worked as a community organizer in Chicago on behalf of residents in desperate poverty – would be laughable if it weren’t so fitting, so emblematic of your utterly failed campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for president.

And after enduring this pitiable farce, I actually cannot imagine how you could ever hope to mount a candidacy of this type ever again.

Update 1: And by the way, Ed's right here; the comment will be forgotten because HRC will only be a memory in November.

Update 2: Funny how The Big Dog gets a pass for making very similar statements here but Obama doesn't.

Update 3 4/16/08: Just for the record, MoDo wasted newspaper ink on this today also (and reap what you sow, Hil).

Monday Stuff

Actress Jennifer Connelly goes to Central Park to find drinking water and dramatize the problem faced by those in poorer nations (more info here)...



...and step right up for that "three trillion dollar shopping spree"...



...and as far as Our Gal Condi Rice running for veep along with "Straight Talk" McCain, Dana Priest of the Washington Post and Richard Clarke have some good advice (though not in a complimentary manner)...



...and this is corny, but clever (and by the way, I officially support him now - say goodnight, Hil).

"...And We're Working For No One But Them"

(A twist on the last line of the song, “Taxman” by The Beatles - Blogger is REALLY acting up at the moment for yours truly, by the way…)

In light of tomorrow’s income tax filing deadline, Parade Magazine tells us the following here…

A 2004 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that 61% of American corporations, including 39% of large companies, paid no corporate income taxes between 1996 and 2000. Last year, corporations shouldered just 14.4% of the total U.S. tax burden, compared with about 50% in 1940.

While companies are getting off easy, thanks to loopholes, ordinary wage earners are getting stuck with the tab. The tax burden on individuals is expected to climb from $1.16 trillion in 2007 to $1.21 trillion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), while corporate tax receipts are expected to decline from $370 billion to $364 billion. By 2013, the CBO estimates, ordinary taxpayers’ bills may climb to $1.86 trillion while corporate tax bills drop to $327 billion.

…

In one recent case, KBR—a former Halliburton subsidiary and the largest Iraq war contractor—admitted to “reducing tax obligations” through two Cayman Islands divisions, reportedly avoiding hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicare and Social Security taxes. A 2004 study by the GAO found that 24 of the largest federal contractors used Cayman Islands units to shave their tax bills.

Oil and other multinational companies also benefit from tax breaks, some specially written for them. Most are perfectly legitimate, but companies sometimes push the envelope too far. Pharmaceutical giant Merck paid $2.3 billion to the government last year for profits related to a Bermuda partnership.

In their defense, businesses say that U.S. corporate tax rates are the second highest in the developed world, making our country less competitive. But a study from the nonprofit group Citizens for Tax Justice found that, because of loopholes, the corporate tax burden in the U.S. is actually the world’s third lowest when measured as a percentage of gross domestic product.

And by the way, the effort to try and close the loophole allowing U.S. companies to maintain offshore “divisions” as a means of tax avoidance was led by the late, great Paul Wellstone in 2002 here; he managed to attach an amendment to a defense bill that would ban the awarding of defense contracts to U.S. companies maintaining an offshore presence, even if it is so much as even a P.O. box, to get out of paying their fair share (and when Wellstone tried to fix this, a veritable army of former-senators-and-now-lobbyists of both parties descended on Capitol Hill to defeat it, as the Times story tells us; they ultimately did of course).

The issue of trying to close the loophole was particularly urgent when Wellstone addressed it because 9/11, which was funded in large part from offshore sources, was still fresh in all of our minds – indeed, Snarlin’ Arlen Specter…running for another term in 2010, unbelievably enough; go, Pat Toomey! And still waiting to hear about that book deal...sponsored legislation on this that probably has about as much chance of passage as I do of entering the Talladega 500.

And on top of this, the AP tells us the following here…

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The tax audit rates of the largest companies are less than half what they were 20 years ago while more small and mid-size businesses are coming under scrutiny, according to an organization that monitors the Internal Revenue Service.

The Syracuse University-based Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse described what it said was a "historic collapse" in audits for corporations holding assets of $250 million or more. About 26 percent of them were audited in the 2007 budget year compared with 34 percent in 2006 and 43 percent in 2005.

The IRS did not dispute the numbers, based on agency data. But it strongly disagreed with suggestions it was easing oversight of the biggest corporations.

Enforcement revenues from large companies rose by one-third in 2007 from the previous year, from $10.6 billion to $14.2 billion, said IRS Deputy Commissioner Barry Shott, who heads the Large and Mid-Size Business Division.

No word on how much of the $14.2 billion came from new assessments versus settlements of outstanding claims (upon reading the story, it sounds like smaller to mid-sized companies are taking the hit here, as opposed to those that constitute "the base" for Dubya and the Repugs).

This will all be comforting to us as we enjoy our Mac and cheese and baloney sandwiches for dinner with a side of strained corn (yum – Wendy’s and Chick-Fil-A constitutes dining out for the Doomsy household pretty much; Friendly’s might as well be Le Bec Fin).

Just thought I’d share that…

Dubya's "Big Bang" For Benny

CNN tells us here that…

A crowd of up to 12,000 is due at the White House on Wednesday morning for (Pope Benedict XVI’s) official, pomp-filled arrival ceremony. It will feature the U.S. and Holy See anthems, a 21-gun salute, and the U.S. Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps. Both men will make remarks before their Oval Office meeting and a send-off for his popemobile down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Uh, excuse me for a second, Your Holiness:

This Wikipedia article tells us the following…

In the United States, the 21-gun salute is used for the President of the United States as well as visiting foreign Heads of State. A 21-gun salute is also fired at noon on Memorial Day to honor the nation's fallen.

And going back to CNN, we find out that…

The president explained the special treatment -- particularly the airport greeting.

"One, he speaks for millions. Two, he doesn't come as a politician; he comes as a man of faith," Bush told the EWTN Global Catholic Network in an interview aired Friday. He added that he wanted to honor Benedict's conviction that "there's right and wrong in life, that moral relativism has a danger of undermining the capacity to have more hopeful and free societies."

“Moral relativism,” huh? Somehow I’m sure that, were Jean-Paul Sartre still alive, he would refer to Dubya as a tas de merde (I’ll let you figure out the translation).

And Three, Dumbya, His Holiness is not a head of state, so a 21-gun salute happens to be inappropriate and thus demeans its solemnity; I’m particularly considering Memorial Day ceremonies here.

But of course, this is part and parcel of what President Stupid Head thinks of our veterans anyway, isn’t it (also considering this)?

Update 4/15/08: Try saying this in Boston, Your Holiness, instead of on a plane.

I Think We Have Our Answer

And I’m referring to the question of whether or not George W. Milhous Bush intends to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Beijing this August (and of course, we hear about it from a lackey and not the actual horse’s ass commander-in-chief himself)…

A top White House official on Sunday criticized foreign leaders who plan to skip the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing following China’s crackdown in Tibet, calling such actions a “cop out” far less effective than the “quiet diplomacy” the United States is pursuing.

I believe, in an earlier era under another Republican president, “quiet diplomacy” was once called “constructive engagement,” by the way.

“The whole issue of opening ceremonies is a nonissue,” said the official, Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser. “I think it is a way of dodging what really needs to happen.”

Mr. Hadley did not single out any foreign leaders by name. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have said they will not attend the opening of the Games on Aug. 8. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has said he may boycott the ceremony if China refuses to open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet.

“This issue is in some sense a bit of a red herring,” Mr. Hadley said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think, unfortunately, a lot of countries say, ‘Well, if we say that we are not going to the opening ceremonies, we’ve checked the box on Tibet.’ That’s a cop out.”

Typical Bushco – come up with the wrong answer and insult as many people in the process as possible (though, as that “elitist” Barack Obama so correctly observed here, “it’s hard to tell your banker that he’s wrong” – I for one have no desire to play a game of economic “chicken” with a country that is becoming the biggest economic power in the world…”you liquidate our debt and you lose the value of trillions in T-Bills; but meanwhile, our economy takes that ‘big slide’ into the hopper once and for all”).

Update: More glorious AP stenography here...

More “Bitter” Fallout

I almost feel like I should apologize for continuing to waste people’s time with this stuff…

Thanks to Hillary Clinton’s continued parsing of Republican Party talking points, the supposed issue of Barack Obama’s view of small-town America continues to play out in our corporate media; as I noted last night, that was the lead in the story of the “Faith Forum” in Harrisburg last night instead of the fact that John W. McBush didn’t even bother to show up.

Today, though, we learn the following from here…

In the wake of the uproar following Barack Obama's comments about how some voters "get bitter" and "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," the Obama campaign has released a so-called "robo-call" featuring York, Pennsylvania mayor John Brenner. In the call, Brenner defends Obama and says "he's got it right."

"Barack Obama understands us," Brenner says. "He's got it right, we are frustrated -- frustrated with polices that enable businesses to leave our community, pensions to be stripped, health care benefits to be taken away and homes foreclosed. Unlike his opponents, who have been part of the Washington establishment that are out of touch with us, Barack Obama will change Washington. It is policies that hurt us. He will take on the special interests and fight for us."

And not to be outdone, “Kristol Mess” piles on accordingly in the New York Times today (pathetic that this man even has a job with these people). However, in the process of selectively quoting Obama and trying to attach some nonexistent meanings to what Obama said, K.M. doesn’t mention the quote in the speech about “anti-immigrant sentiment” in Hazelton, Pa. in particular (I mean, of course K.M. doesn’t, because that would mean acknowledging the fact that Obama is actually right).

Update: Nice one by BarbinMD here...

Also, I think it’s instructive to note the following concerning the Clinton and Obama campaigns; when HRC’s campaign is in spin mode, we are likely to hear from any one of a number of individuals (Phil Singer, Howard Wolfson, Mark Penn – who is still with the campaign, by the way – HRC’s husband, maybe Chelsea, or even Hillary herself), and what they say could be all over the place when it comes to either complementing Hillary or contradicting her.

When some kind of a media dustup involves Obama, you are likely to hear from the candidate himself about 90 percent of the time on the matter, or on the rare occasion when you hear from someone else involved with the campaign, that person is unequivocal in his support of Obama and leaves nothing open to interpretation (the only exception I can think of is the case when former aide Samantha Power called Hillary a “monster,” and afterwards, she left the campaign almost right away).

That tells me a lot (and a huge hat tip to The Daily Kos for this from Robert Reich; I haven't made it all the way through it yet, but this should be memorized by every political phony and pundit demagogue currently trying to pillory Obama over this utter distraction).

Update 4/14/08: Uh...yep.

HRC Runs Out Of Propaganda Ammo

In a shameless attempt to resurrect every bit of Repug demagoguery against Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton tells us the following here (re: the ridiculous Clinton charge that Obama is an "elitist" for speaking the truth)...

“You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl,” she said.

“You know, some people now continue to teach their children and their grandchildren. It’s part of culture. It’s part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it’s an important part of who they are. Not because they are bitter.”

OK, "Calamity" Hil (apt, considering your campaign), we get the picture.

But when pressed on the point here...

After a weekend spent making direct appeals to gun owners and church goers, Hillary Clinton said Sunday a query about the last time she fired a gun or attended church services "is not a relevant question in this debate” over Barack Obama’s recent comments on small town Americans.

“We can answer that some other time,” Clinton said at a press conference held in a working class neighborhood here. “This is about what people feel is being said about them. I went to church on Easter. I mean, so?”

Am I crazy, or is this Hillary’s “meaning of the word ‘is’” moment we have here (“some other time” being after November 5th of this year, I’m sure).

Because, when she was running for the Senate from New York in 2000, she said the following (here)…

The first lady reiterated her support to require trigger locks on handguns, to hold adults responsible for their children's use of guns, to raise the youth handgun ban from age 18 to 21, to limit gun sales to one per month per adult and to have the Consumer Products Safety Commission regulate guns.

"It doesn't make much sense that we regulate toy guns but not real guns," Mrs. Clinton said.

And she also supported the following, originally endorsed by former Repug New York governor George Pataki…

Mrs. Clinton also announced her support for the creation of a "ballistic database" for all new guns, requiring gun makers or sellers to fire guns before sale and send that "ballistic fingerprint" to law enforcement.

All good ideas that I wholeheartedly support, by the way, among others.

But getting back to the supposedly “not relevant” question of when she first fired a gun – did she do so before she turned 21? I mean, she must have if her grandfather “taught her to shoot when she was a little girl.” And since he practiced gun safety, he could not have started her out with a rifle, could he?

Well then, if she was firing a handgun at that early age (and there’s no way she could have obtained a license yet, even in this state – I think you can actually get a license to hunt at 12…read that on a bulletin board from ’04…but I’m not positive), then her childhood recollection now stands in direct opposition to her stated common-sense gun policies articulated in 2000 when she first ran for the U.S. Senate.

Which leads me to believe that Senator Clinton would talk common sense to her home states’ constituents (speaking what I believe to be her true sentiments, which I applaud), but then in turn shamelessly pander to the voters of this state, apparently believing that our votes could be won so easily with some cheesy photo-op in a blind with camouflage hunting small game or, absent that, some now-unverifiable recollection of a childhood encounter with a loaded weapon.

Registered Democratic ladies and gentlemen of the state of Pennsylvania, I have news for you – Mrs. Clinton truly thinks that you and I are stupid.

Now who’s the elitist (and kudos to Bob Casey for this).

Update 4/14/08: Another "elitist," I suppose...

Saturday Stuff

Here's a plug for "Turn Around America 2008" (more info. here - have to turn the volume up a bit)...



...and Iraq, Halliburton, war, destruction, and situation comedy - yes, it all really fits for a change...

Update 4/13/08: Wow, that got pulled in a hurry...



...let's try this instead (not bad, from SNL).

Saturday Military Madness

The Bucks County Courier Times tells us today (no link)...

Thumbs Up to the Bush administration for reducing the tours of duty for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan from 15 to 12 months.

We already ask so much of our soldiers, and we're glad to applaud anything that gives them a bit of relief. We're sure that three months less of combat per tour is a welcome change for them and their families.

Ummm - WHAAAA????

Here is Steve Coll from his column in The New Yorker last week...

Last week, (General Richard A. Cody) appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and testified that this method of engineering (tasking our military to fight terrorism, quell the Taliban, invade and pacify Iraq, and, at the same time, prepare for future strategic challenges, whether in China or Korea or Africa all at once) has failed. “Today’s Army is out of balance,” Cody said. He continued:

The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply, and limits our ability to provide ready forces for other contingencies. . . . Soldiers, families, support systems and equipment are stretched and stressed. . . . Overall, our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it. If unaddressed, this lack of balance poses a significant risk to the all-volunteer force and degrades the Army’s ability to make a timely response to other contingencies.

...

In this environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that General Cody’s plainspoken, valedictory dissent about the Army’s health attracted little attention. His testimony marked a rare public surfacing of the contentious debates at the Pentagon over the strategic costs of the surge. These debates involve overlapping disagreements about doctrine (particularly the importance of counter-insurgency), global priorities (Iraq versus Afghanistan, for instance), and resources. At their core, however, lies Cody’s essential observation: the Army is running on fumes, but (Gen. David) Petraeus and his fellow surge advocates are driving flat out in Iraq, with no destination in sight. It hardly matters whether Petraeus would recommend keeping a hundred and thirty thousand or more combat troops in Iraq for a hundred years, or only ten. Neither scenario is plausible—at least, not without a draft or a radical change in incentives for volunteers.

Flag officers in the Bush Administration’s military have learned that they can be marginalized or retired if they speak out too boldly. The Administration does not romanticize the role of the loyal opposition. Last month, Admiral William J. Fallon, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, announced his early retirement, under pressure from the White House, after he argued privately for a faster drawdown from Iraq, to bolster efforts in Afghanistan and to restore a more balanced global military posture. Publicly, Fallon also described the “drumbeat of conflict” against Iran as “not helpful.”

Besides, if George W. Milhous Bush and his Repug cronies gave a damn about the mental and physical well being of our forces, the least they could have done was support Sen. Jim Webb's amendment last year limiting deployments and mandating more downtime before our troops are returned to battle.

But that of course was impossible because it would have amounted to giving a Democrat who had served recognition at the Repugs' expense, even though the "welcome change" for our troops and their families would have come a hell of a lot sooner.

Friday Stuff

As I noted earlier in the post about "Straight Talk" McCain blowing off the “Compassion Forum” at Messiah College in Harrisburg this Sunday, I just can't imagine why he and "Pastor" John Hagee wouldn't want to participate...



...as well as Rod Parsley, McCain's "spiritual guide"...



...oh, and by the way, when is he going to decide to support the new G.I. bill? (FINALLY an appropriate use for a song by Rick Astley)...



...and Barack Obama talks about the injustice of compensation for CEOs whose companies go in the tank, as well as what he's trying to do about that (the volume fades in and out a bit, but these are welcome words).



(And man, is Obama "talkin' my language" here; he's not quite correct about HRC and the Bankruptcy Bill though - she didn't vote for it, but she didn't vote against it either.)

Friday Mashup (4/11/08)

I don’t know if Repug U.S. House Rep Patrick McHenry of North Carolina (pictured here with Incurious George) is the stupidest, most arrogant politician in the country (lots of competition of course), but based on this story, I’d say he’s made it to very near the top of the list.

This is the guy who criticized one of our military for not allowing him to work out at a gym inside Iraq’s “Green Zone” when he visited last March 22nd as part of a congressional delegation (McHenry called the person who told him he didn’t have the proper credential “a two-bit security guard”).

Now, we learn the following…

The Pentagon told a North Carolina lawmaker Tuesday that he couldn’t re-air a video he'd shot in Baghdad after accusations surfaced that he breached operational security in detailing enemy rocket attacks.

…

The new criticism stems from a video that was featured on his Web site last Friday. Shot in the Green Zone, it showed McHenry gesturing to a building behind him and saying that one of 11 rockets “hit just over my head.” Then he named two other places struck by the rockets.

On Monday, a veterans group called VoteVets.org accused McHenry of giving away intelligence information that could have aided terrorist organizations in targeting the Green Zone.

“The bottom line is that whoever launched that strike could take the information McHenry provided and use it to kill Americans in the Green Zone,” wrote Brandon Friedman, vice chairman of VoteVets.org, a veterans advocacy group that has called for troop withdrawal and promoted veterans for political office. “This is why professionals operating in a combat zone are trained not to reveal any battle damage after an attack.”

McHenry pulled the video after Friedman’s post appeared (I would say that the gentleman from North Carolina is a total asshat).

So what kind of a greeting did Jackie Speier, the new California Dem U.S. House Rep taking over for Tom Lantos who recently passed away, receive today as she gave her first speech in Congress?

mcjoan at The Daily Kos tells us here…

…Speier spoke out about Iraq, and the boos and hoots began from the Republican side of the aisle.

"When will we get out of Iraq?" was the most frequent question she heard, she told the House, while campaigning in the special election she won Tuesday to succeed the late Rep. Tom Lantos.

"The process to bring the troops home must begin immediately," she said, as several Republicans loudly booed. Rep. Darrell Issa, a Vista Republican, bolted from his seat and left the floor.

The hoots grew in volume as Speier, a Hillsborough Democrat, continued....

"Why are they booing my mother?" Speier's middle-school daughter Stephanie asked, according to a staffer.

All class, those House Repugs (and by the way, in case you'd forgotten, Issa is the fool who once threatened Henry Waxman...and yes, "do you think he really wants to investigate directly" about Blackwater constitutes a threat).

This story from the Times of London tells us about a new book soon to be published on “the health and medication of world leaders,” and it apparently contains some revelations on the medications administered to former president John F. Kennedy…

In his riveting volume In Sickness and In Power, former Foreign Secretary and medic David Owen reviews the health and medication of leaders over the last century. The chapter on Kennedy is jaw-dropping.

Owen starts by convincingly asserting that Kennedy was much sicker than is commonly appreciated and certainly much sicker than was appreciated at the time. His Addison's disease was very debilitating and needed constant attention.

…

In particular, without the knowledge of his other doctors and at the same time as they were giving him other drugs, he was being tended to by Max Jacobson, a doctor known as "Dr Feelgood" because of his reputation as a provider of amphetamines and pep pills. In time Jacobson's drug treatment became almost a recreational drug for Kennedy. Jacobson was later struck off.

Owen shows that is quite likely that Dr Feelgood, specially flown to Vienna, injected Kennedy with intravenous amphetamine just before he met Khrushchev.

Then later in the year Dr Hans Kraus took control of Kennedy's medication. He demanded total control and began using massage rather than injections to treat the President.

The review tells us that when Dr. Kraus took over, Kennedy regained his stability (from what the book claims as a bit of incapacitation around the time of the Bay of Pigs, when Kennedy was under Jacobson's "care") enough to lead the nation through the Cuban Missile Crisis, that little dustup Dana Perino didn't know about.

Interesting stuff, though; I’m sure we’ll receive a response from a Kennedy spokesperson at some point.

And finally, David Brooks told us earlier that, as far as he’s concerned, “memory is the new sex.”

Well, based on this story, I think the old one is doing just fine, thank you.

Is Saint McCain Beyond Redemption?

Cenk Uygur tells us the following here…

Reverend John Hagee has called the Catholic Church the "Great Whore." He has said that the Anti-Christ will rise out of the European Union (of course, the Anti-Christ will also be Jewish). He has said all Muslims are trained to kill and will be part of the devil's army when Armageddon comes (which he hopes is soon). John McCain continues to say he is proud of Reverend Hagee's endorsement.

Reverend Rod Parsley believes America was founded to destroy Islam. Since this is such an outlandish claim, I have to add for the record, that he is not kidding. Reverend Parsley says Islam is an "anti-Christ religion" brought down from a "demon spirit." Of course, we are in a war against all Muslims, including presumably Muslim-Americans. Buts since Parsley believes this is a Christian nation and that it should be run as a theocracy, he is not very concerned what Muslim-Americans think.

John McCain says Reverend Rod Parsley is his "spiritual guide."

Well, then, I'm glad these “men of God” will have an opportunity to communicate these beliefs (with “straight talk” McCain in tow) to an upcoming gathering of their peers, and that would be at the “Compassion Forum” at Messiah College in Harrisburg on Sunday the 13th (noted here).

Oh, wait; I just reread this press release, and it notes the following…

Senator McCain has thus far declined the invitation, which is still open.

Gosh, I wonder why.

I mean, I know McCain is the de facto Repug nominee for president and it’s not as if primary votes actually matter to him at this point.

But he’s the candidate of the high-minded, holier-than-thou, values-voters-comprised Republican Party for Christ’s sake (oops – sorry). How can he even imagine passing up this chance to meet with other spiritual leaders and watch them utterly eviscerate interact with these self-righteous phonies upstanding spiritual counselors?

I’ll ponder this as I turn on my cable news channel this evening and see the thousandth or so rehashing of the Rev. Wright “scandal” (or perhaps something just as stupid – and Cenk’s question in the headline is absolutely appropriate).

Update 4/13/08: No mention that John W. McBush blew off the invitation here, but of course the headline is over an utterly laughable charge of "elitism" against Obama by Clinton - unbelievable (no, on second thought - typical).

Where The Rubber Meets The Road (4/11/08)

As reported in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, here is how Philadelphia-area members of Congress were recorded on major roll-call votes last week (back from a brief hiatus)...

House

HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB. By a vote of 308-116, the House authorized spending $50 billion over five years for U.S. support of global programs to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. The bill discontinues a mandate that one-third of AIDS spending be allocated to abstinence programs.

A yes vote was to pass the bill (HR 5501).

Voting yes: Robert E. Andrews (D., N.J.), Robert A. Brady (D., Pa.), Michael N. Castle (R., Del.), Charles W. Dent (R., Pa.), Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.), Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.), Tim Holden (D., Pa.), Patrick Murphy (D., Pa.), Allyson Schwartz (D., Pa.), Joe Sestak (D., Pa.) and Christopher H. Smith (R., N.J.).

Voting no: Frank A. LoBiondo (R., N.J.) and Joseph R. Pitts (R., Pa.).

Abstinence programs don’t work anywhere, and certainly not in sub-Saharan Africa, so the logical move is to remove funding for one of Dubya’s pet projects (yet another in a long line of failures). Given that, you just knew Pancake Joe Pitts was going to nix that common sense idea, didn’t you?

And by the way, to help Bruce Slater, click here.

HIV/AIDS funding cut. By a vote of 175-248, the House refused to cut the spending authorization in HR 5501 (above) from $50 billion to $30 billion over five years.

A yes vote backed a 40 percent spending cut.

Voting yes: Castle, Dent, Gerlach, LoBiondo, Pitts, Saxton.

Voting no: Andrews, Brady, Fattah, Holden, Murphy, Schwartz, Sestak and Smith.

Typical petty, cheap Repugs and their one-upsmanship (and another gutsy vote by Chris Smith, realizing that trying to save lives in some of the most destitute places on earth is more important than partisan politics)…

Senate

Mortgage counseling. In a 44-40 vote, the Senate failed to reach the 60 votes needed to double funding in a House bill (HR 3221) for mortgage counseling by nonprofit agencies. The amendment sought to increase the outlay from $100 million to $200 million in order to extend counseling to an additional 250,000 holders of problem mortgages.

A yes vote backed the amendment.

Voting yes: Thomas Carper (D., Del.), Bob Casey (D., Pa.), Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) and Arlen Specter (R., Pa.).

Not voting: Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D., Del.) and Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.).

And just as a reminder, that “60 vote needed for passage” rule is needed because that is the vote total that prevents the automatic filibuster by the Repugs against any Senate action they don’t like (e.g., 60 votes weren’t needed to confirm Mukasey as AG). As a result, the Repugs have already set a record for filibusters in this, the 110th Congress.

And as the Repugs quibble about whether or not homeowners caught in the subprime mortgage debacle should get $100 million or $200 million for counseling, I would ask that you keep in mind that the Iraq war is costing about $411 million a day (here).

Subprime loans, bankruptcy. Voting 58-36, the Senate killed a measure that sought to give bankruptcy judges authority to change the terms of subprime mortgages on primary residences. The proposal, offered as an amendment to a housing-related bill being debated in the House (HR 3221), would have given the judges power to cut interest rates and principal to help borrowers keep their homes.

A yes vote was to kill the amendment.

Voting yes: Carper and Specter.

Voting no: Biden, Casey, Lautenberg and Menendez.

Here is more on HR 3221; if Carper has a spine, he’ll make it official and change parties to Republican at the end of this session (votes to increase funds for mortgage counseling, then votes against allowing a judge to restructure the terms so it can be paid off - unbelievable; and by the way, he voted for the Bankruptcy Bill, of course).

And as always, screw you, Arlen.

Gulf Coast aid. Voting 74-5, the Senate expanded HR 3221 (above) to include a projected $1 billion for homeowners suffering major losses in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The amendment would fund grants of up to $150,000 designed to narrow the gap between insurance payments and home values.

A yes vote was to adopt the amendment.

Voting yes: Biden, Carper, Casey and Menendez.

Not voting: Lautenberg and Specter.

And as we consider the question of $150,000 for homeowners suffering from Katrina and Rita, keep in mind – again – that the Iraq war is costing about $411 million a day (here - and the five cretins who actually voted against this were Jon Kyl, Judd Gregg, Jim DeMint, Bob Corker, and John Barrasso, from here – and I don’t need to mention their political party, do I?).

This week, the House took up a bill on ocean pollution near shorelines, while the Senate continued to debate a housing bill.

Doan Still A Pill At The GSA

The New York Times tells us here that many government employees have been abusing credit cards issued to them, running up such charges as $360 to buy lingerie before heading off to drug enforcement training in the Ecuador jungle, as well as hundreds of laptops, iPods and digital cameras to the tune of $1.8 million (all on our dime, of course).

And here’s more on this from the AP…

Agencies often could not provide the required paperwork to justify questionable purchases. Investigators also found that federal employees sometimes double-billed or improperly expensed lavish meals and Internet dating for many months without question from supervisors; the charges were often noticed only after auditors or whistle-blowers raised questions.

"Breakdowns in internal controls over the use of purchase cards leave the government highly vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse," investigators wrote, calling the government-wide failure rate in enforcing controls "unacceptably high."

"This audit demonstrates that continued vigilance over purchase card use is necessary," the 57-page report stated.

The report calls for the General Services Administration and Office of Management and Budget, both of which help administer the government's credit-card program, to set guidance to improve accounting for purchased items, particularly Palm Pilots, iPods and other electronic equipment that could be easily stolen.

OMB and GSA were also urged to tighten controls over convenience checks, which are a part of the credit-card program, and to remind federal employees that they will be held responsible for any items if the purchases are later deemed improper.

The head of the OMB is Jim Nussle; the following was noted about him from here…

Half the time he was Budget Committee chairman, Nussle couldn’t even pass a budget -and he played a key role in approving the president’s policies that ran up the debt, mostly to pay for tax cuts for the very wealthy. With Nussle at the helm of OMB, Bush’s fiscal policy loses even more credibility.

And the head of the GSA is none other than Lurita Doan (pictured) who, as noted here by Think Progress last May, appeared completely befuddled before the Henry Waxman’s House Oversight Committee over whether or not she and/or her employees violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits government resources – including employees' time or space in a government building – from being used for partisan politics.

I know this is yet another example of Bushco stuffing government agencies with partisan cronies who have not a clue when it comes to effectively managing budgets or personnel as well as formulating or implementing policy to enable efficient operation of their departments, but these stories (small by comparison to the Iraq war or the teetering of our economy towards collapse, to say nothing of our infrastructure in a similar state), in total, paint the picture of a branch of government that has totally abdicated its mission of service on our behalf.

Also, Sen. Charles Grassley has sponsored what I believe to be an utterly pointless related bill called “The Government Credit Card Abuse and Prevention Act of 2007” (here).

Instead of crafting legislation trying to mandate common sense, though, I believe the correct thing to do is to put people in charge of OMB and GSA who actually are not total hacks and let them do their jobs to the best of their ability.

To sum up, here are some more credit card charges…$14,000 for Internet dating services and a dinner at a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Orlando, Fla.; $45,000 at Brooks Brothers and similar stores for tailor-made suits — $7,000 of which were purchased a week before Christmas; and $642,000 from 180 convenience checks written by an Agriculture department employee for a live-in boyfriend over a six-year period.

January 21, 2009, with a Democratic president newly sworn into office and Bushco gone from our lives forever?

Priceless.

Friday Mind Games With BoBo

Part of me wants to ignore completely the latest musings from David Brooks that appear in the New York Times today, but it probably behooves me to communicate some of them anyway. He sets it up with a description of interaction with friends and acquaintances at social gatherings, giving us a peek into the “smart set” of guiltless extravagance where, apparently, the primary points of discussion are the dates and times of upcoming jaunts to fashionable resorts and the appreciation of each other’s investment portfolios (think pre-Anschluss Vienna about 70 years ago in terms of obliviousness to wartime reality).

And I say that because, though Brooks feigns memory loss in an attempt to be humorous, he does manage to work in the following…

They say the 21st century is going to be the Asian Century, but, of course, it’s going to be the Bad Memory Century. Already, you go to dinner parties and the middle-aged high achievers talk more about how bad their memories are than about real estate. Already, the information acceleration syndrome means that more data is coursing through everybody’s brains, but less of it actually sticks. It’s become like a badge of a frenetic, stressful life — to have forgotten what you did last Saturday night, and through all of junior high.

In the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex.

Wow, dude, I’m really sorry to hear that. And as if that weren’t enough…

The dawning of the Bad Memory Century will have vast consequences for the social fabric and the international balance of power. International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they’ve forgotten God. And, in the Middle East, they forget everything but their resentments.

Well, for a nation that has supposedly “forgotten God,” I believe the story noted here shows some truly honorable compassion in His name…

ABLAIN ST. NAZAIRE, France After 148 Muslim war graves were desecrated on the weekend, Muslims, Christians and Jews prayed yesterday in the Muslim section of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery in northern France to protest what a local Islamic leader called an "odious and irresponsible act." Abdelkader Aoussedj, deputy head of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, said his community was very touched by the "mobilization of national and regional" authorities and by the "marks of sympathy" from other religions. Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders, along with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, have expressed anger at this latest vandalism of Muslim war graves…in France's biggest war cemetery.

And BoBo sums up as follows…

As in most great historical transformations, the members of the highly educated upper-middle class will express their suffering most loudly. It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most. First they lose the subjects they’ve only been pretending to understand — chaos theory, monetary policy, Don Delillo — and pretty soon their conversation is reduced to the core stories of self-heroism.

Their affection for themselves will endure through this Bad Memory Century, but their failure to retrieve will produce one of the epoch’s most notable features: shorter memoirs.

Memo to Clark Hoyt and Andrew Rosenthal of the Times editorial board: is this supposed to be funny? If that’s the intention, then I can tell you that it isn’t.

The next time Brooks finds himself without something legitimate to propagandize about as a deadline approaches, he should just either recycle some tired narrative from past columns or just call up his boss and say, “Hey, I got nuthin’ – maybe you could let O’Hanlon and Pollack write another column in favor of the Iraq war or something.”

Because, unlike the trendy sort of memory loss that Brooks describes while one is tossing aside witty bon mots after sipping the Chardonnay and passing the sweet and sour shrimp, I can tell you that I have seen actual degenerative memory loss suffered by a family member, and there is nothing whatsoever about it that is clever or desirable in any way.

Grudgingly, though, I will admit that Brooks has a bit of a point about his so-called “great forgetting.” Though it is a flimsy excuse, I can think of nothing else to explain the two-term candidacy of Bushco and the continuation of the Iraq war.

Thursday Stuff

Another casualty of the "war on terror" - this exclusive report from The Onion gives us the details...



...and speaking of casualties, K.O. tells us that Faux News pretty much ignored the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war (no surprise, I guess...tying into the post from earlier about the draft and the practically-non-existent reporting of this carnage).

John W. McBush Solves The Subprime Mortgage Mess!

(Not sure about posting for tomorrow, by the way...)

Leave it to that “straight-talking maverick” to come up with something like this…

McCain's speech outlined a plan to help struggling homeowners restructure mortgages that have gotten out of control and provide lenders with federal backing to support the new loans. He also called on the Department of Justice to investigate wrongdoing in the mortgage market.

Wowsers!

But before we are all overcome with glee, boys and girls, please allow me to interject the following reality from here…

In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.

Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.

Deferred prosecutions have become a favorite tool of the Bush administration. But some legal experts now wonder if the policy shift has led companies, in particular financial institutions now under investigation for their roles in the subprime mortgage debacle, to test the limits of corporate anti-fraud laws.

So…under a John W. McBush presidency (gasp!), how far do you want to bet that those “wrongdoers” would “test the limits of corporate anti-fraud laws”?

Oh, I dunno…2012? 2016? 540160?

It’s a shame there’s no “anti-fraud” laws for presidential candidates. My suspicion is that, if there were, “Senator Honor And Virtue” would be disqualified immediately.

A New Hope To Fix An Old Mistake

Earlier this week, the Philadelphia Gay News was pretty upset with Barack Obama here for not accepting an invitation to grant an interview (Hillary Clinton did – “Straight Talk” McCain was invited also…don’t ask).

Well today, Obama tells us here…

The Democratic presidential front-runner favors repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays, which was instituted during the Clinton administration. He said his priority for the Joint Chiefs will be that they make decisions to strengthen the military and keep the country safe, not their position on the policy.

"I would never make this a litmus test for the Joint Chiefs of Staff," Obama said in an interview with The Advocate, a gay newsmagazine.

I got into this a little over a year ago here, but unlike then, there is now hope that we may see a commander-in-chief who lives in the real world and cares foremost about how well our troops serve our country, as opposed to intrusively poking around in an effort to learn about their bedroom habits instead.

Smerky Concern-Trolling On Immigration Again

(I hadn’t used this pic for a little while – I was beginning to miss it.)

Today in the Philadelphia Daily News, our intrepid freeper pundit is telling us here that (wink, wink) Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could (wink, wink) reach white, blue-collar male voters (wink, wink) if they both visit Geno’s in South Philadelphia, the establishment owned by Joey Vento (which I sounded off about here), and also visit Hazleton, Pa. (wink, wink), all for the purposes of talking about illegal immigration (wink, wink).

And gee, Smerky must be right, because Dem pollster Neil Oxman basically told him that… I just repeated it.

Of all the issues facing this country, illegal immigration is way down the list as far as I’m concerned (granted, I don’t live in the Southwest region of this country, but there you are). This is partly because in my line of work, my employer has no trouble going offshore to find people to do the jobs they want, and I don’t hear enough people crying about that (and Smerky certainly isn’t one of them, anyway) as opposed to individuals risking their lives to cross our border in an effort to better themselves.

Besides, as Smerky himself noted, the whole matter is currently under adjudication by a U.S. Court of Appeals. Why on earth should anyone say anything and turn out to be wrong, to say nothing of possibly prejudicing a case?

Illegal immigration is the number one issue in the minds of Smerky’s right-wing following that would never even bother to get past their Clinton hatred or obsession over whatever new faux Barack Obama controversy was cooked up this week long enough to listen to either one of them (and besides, the Repugs had a chance to sponsor legislation that provided a common-sense path to citizenship for those who did the right thing, but their knuckle-dragging followers hooted it down; they have only themselves to blame for the current stalemate here).

And one more thing: as long as Smerky has brought up this issue, I’d like for him or anyone else to explain to me their opposition to providing driver’s licenses for illegals. Is the thinking that, somehow, these people are worse than the other clueless meat sacks out there who are primping themselves, eating fast food take out, texting, watching TV, or doing just about anything besides PAYING ATTENTION TO THE DAMN ROAD WHILE THEY’RE DRIVING??!!

(Sorry, had to vent…).

This tells us that the law in Michigan related to denying driver’s licenses to illegals is being challenged by the ACLU. This is a good thing, because providing licenses for these people has two benefits; 1) Depending on the laws by state, they will have to pay auto insurance – I don’t know if that’s uniform across the country, but it should be, and 2) In the event that we ever figure out how to implement REAL ID fairly, their licenses could serve as the basis for their ID cards.

Besides, if we don't allow them a means to get to their jobs by granting a license, all we'll end up doing is hastening their entry into the underground economy of this country, which doesn't do anyone any good.

Until someone (Smerky or anyone else) can provide quantifiable numbers across this country proving conclusively that illegal immigrants are involved in more vehicular accidents than legal citizens, this is where I will stand on this issue (and hopefully, both Clinton and Obama will join me there, and stay put).

Pimp My Draft, Arianna

Frank Schaeffer over at The Huffington Post presented the following in which he called for a return of civilian conscription. I would like to reply to some selected passages…

Why don't people protest (John) McCain's lack of patriotism? Because, the all-volunteer military means that civilians have to play the game of military hero worship. Most civilians never volunteer, and so they are hesitant to be critical of military policy articulated by military heroes like McCain.

I think it is highly inappropriate to question John McCain’s patriotism in light of his service to our country about 40 years ago, in particular the captivity he endured as a prisoner of war. Besides, there are many other ways McCain can be criticized over his stated perceptions concerning the Iraq war and the policies he support that make him totally indistinguishable from George W. Milhous Bush.

What I didn't know when I started to write on the subject of the military was that I would find that some people in the military perceive themselves as having been forgotten, underrated or disparaged by the larger society, even while at the same time there is a sense of superiority.

I think Schaeffer is referring to individuals such as Marine Col. Jessup (think, "you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall!!"), the character portrayed by Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” who demanded unquestioning loyalty from his charges and communicated a highly demeaning attitude towards anyone who was not a member of his beloved Corps (or even towards some who were). To say that they thought little of civilians is an understatement.

These people, rightly or wrongly, have been part of the military culture forever. I cannot possibly imagine how bringing back the draft is going to “soften their edges.”

Schaeffer also tells us of the following communication in which a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel told him…

Problems [in the military] are only exacerbated by the propensity of Congress to micromanage and meddle, by media and academia seething with overt, relentless hostility, by political correctness, and by an irresistible tendency to treat the military as no more than a playpen for social engineering experiments."

Schaeffer interprets this as part of the disconnect between civilians and the military, and I would tend to agree with that (particularly regarding the “political correctness” and “social engineering” stuff), though is response Schaeffer tells us…

Civilian leadership of the military is weakened as civilian leaders without military experience are hesitant to tell those with experience what to do, as is in pathetic evidence in Congress, while at the same time people in the military wonder if their civilian leaders have their best interests at heart.

At this point, I think it’s time for Schaeffer to remove the phrase “civilian leaders” and replace it with “George W. Bush and the Republican Party.” The Democrats have tried over and over to rein in this renegade, war-mongering cabal on the issue of troop strength, withdrawal timelines and whether or not the Maliki “government” in Iraq has any actual intention of meeting the milestones set for it with the time bought for it to do so by our forces with their talent, bravery, and blood, and in many cases, their lives.

America was founded by farmers, tradesmen, statesmen (and bankers) who were military men when circumstances called for it. Washington, Jefferson, Madison and others did not want a country with a military culture, but they expected their countrymen to serve the nation when needed, when asked legitimately, without reservation.

That’s actually a good argument for an all-volunteer army, though Schaeffer reaches the directly opposite conclusion…

Progressives need to push for the reintroduction of the draft. It is fair, it is democratic, it will help prevent stupid wars. And that is why people who are determined to start wars don't want the draft back. A draft will confiscate their toys.

This is dangerous, willful naiveté of the highest order.

Do you know what George W. Bush and his fellow war criminals would have done differently in Iraq had there been a draft? Nothing, that’s what. KBR, DynCorp, Parsons, Blackwater…they all still would have run amok absent accountability. And Schaeffer laments the fact that our “contractors” (don’t understand his use of quotes) don’t “count” when it comes to casualties, which to me is merely the flip side of the free rein they have enjoyed in Iraq for over five years (if they want to act like cowboys, or something far worse at times, then that’s the price they some of them should pay).

I’m tired of reading communication like this from people who think that the return of the draft is somehow supposed to be a remedy for the almost biblical destruction on so many levels wrought by George W. Milhous Bush and his war of choice in Iraq. I suppose the rationale goes that the “answer” to the evil abuse of our military by these blundering ideologues is to give them a bigger military to abuse…?? (and here's Exhibit A).

And when Schaeffer wants to look for villains on the issue of civilians in this country out of touch with what’s going on in Iraq, why don’t you cast some blame in the direction of our corporate media which will give us voluminous coverage of the sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama’s bowling mishap (I posted on the latter, but it was a joke, people!), but which will tell us virtually nothing about the war (I still can’t get over the fact that I had to find a news report from al jazeera to post last night because nothing comparable was available from the alphabet soup of news outlets in this country).

All of this is actually a setup, believe it or not, to what I want to note about a recent column in The New Yorker by Eric Alterman (in addition to the American Progress link above) about The Huffington Post and the rise of online media versus the decline of paper and print journalism (in terms of circulation; any consideration of quality of the product as a whole as a result is another discussion I know).

Alterman tells us…

Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.”

Speaking of which, I may give the Inky a pass on this occasion; even though every other Thursday is a “high holy day” with the appearance of Little Ricky and his “Elephant Poop In The Room” column, he is in full “onward Christian soldiers” mode today over the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI (which would be fine if we were talking about the Catholic Standard and Times, which of course we’re not).

That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

…

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

I have not lost sight of that fact either, by the way; sourcing corporate news organizations is a big part of what I try to do, and I suspect that this site would be considerably less interesting (depending on how interesting one thinks this blog is anyway, I know) if those organizations no longer existed.

The web will never offer a replacement to the experience of sitting down in the morning with a cup of coffee and something for breakfast while reading a newspaper. Learning about the world this way, to say nothing of challenging a preconceived point of view with an intelligent counter argument, is one of the fundamental means of obtaining information to make informed political decisions. That is why I do not celebrate what looks to be the eventual demise of “dead-tree media.”

Though Huffington has a news staff (it is tiny, but the hope is to expand in the future), the vast majority of the stories that it features originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or on someone’s video camera or cell phone. The editors link to whatever they believe to be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose it with a catchy, often liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section beneath it, where readers can chime in. Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers—more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid. The over-all effect may appear chaotic and confusing, but, (Kenneth) Lerer (one of HuffPo’s founders) argues, “this new way of thinking about, and presenting, the news, is transforming news as much as CNN did thirty years ago.” Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

…

Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself.” If only in this respect, the Huffington Post is a great newspaper. It is not unusual for a short blog post to inspire a thousand posts from readers—posts that go off in their own directions and lead to arguments and conversations unrelated to the topic that inspired them. Occasionally, these comments present original perspectives and arguments, but many resemble the graffiti on a bathroom wall.

The notion that the Huffington Post is somehow going to compete with, much less displace, the best traditional newspapers is arguable on other grounds as well. The site’s original-reporting resources are minuscule. The site has no regular sports or book coverage, and its entertainment section is a trashy grab bag of unverified Internet gossip. And, while the Huffington Post has successfully positioned itself as the place where progressive politicians and Hollywood liberal luminaries post their anti-Bush Administration sentiments, many of the original blog posts that it publishes do not merit the effort of even a mouse click.

I definitely wouldn’t say that about Schaeffer’s post; his arguments show some thought and reflection even though I think he’s fundamentally wrong. But it is fortunate that he can make his case and receive feedback in real time, which is one of the few advantages I would give to online media versus its print counterpart.

And the point of this post is also not to slam Arianna Huffington, by the way. Even though I grow ever more annoyed by her site’s preoccupation with quasi-literate celebrity pontifications (should I really care what Larry David thinks of Dick Cheney?), gossipy celebrity tripe and an ever-escalating amount of intrusive popup ads, I know she’s “altering the landscape” in favor of a participatory exchange of ideas tilted somewhat towards a progressive point of view.

And if our corporate media as a whole bothered to give the time of day to those with our political orientation, then there might not be a need for her site (or many blogs I guess, possibly even this one also) to even exist. But we do, and she does, and more often than not (but not always), her voice is ours as well.