The Raven' s Blog, Web Log of Eric Ferguson: First Half of August Archive

Russia-Georgia war feels like a Bush operation
August 10

As I read the most recent account of the fighting between Georgia and Russia, it had the feeling of a Bush operation. Maybe it's because the linked article goes deeper into Bush's relationship to the Georgian government, though that's definitely a sidelight of the article. There's nothing in the article that suggests the Bush administration gave Georgia encouragement to attempt to suppress the separatist movement in South Ossetia by sheer force, but it seems consistent with how Bush operates. Besides Bush's invasion of Iraq, he encouraged the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. These show a tendency to ill-conceived invasions leading to disaster, and when including the botching of Afghanistan, there's a pronounced pattern of lousy judgment. I repeat that I don't have any information that anyone in the Bush administration told Georgia to move in force into South Ossetia, but given the pattern, I have to suspect Bush's hand is involved.

Ask the obvious question about Sonia Pitt at DHS
August 10

There's a lengthy article in today's Star Tribune looking into how Sonia Pitt got hired for the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) at the DHS (Department of Homeland Security). I don't know why it's such a surprise this woman hung on so long at MnDOT and then went right to DHS. If DHS has been politicized like every other agency of the executive branch, it's been thoroughly politicized. Pitt probably just had to be a loyal Republican and promise belief in some parts of conservative ideology, and she was hired. How else to explain how she was hired just one week after her firing was final at MnDOT? Does anyone really believe they didn't check her out?

This is what conservative government looks like.

Republicans have a weird definition of "no plan"
August 9

I found this statement on the McCain web site by the offer of a free tire gauge with a donation: "Senator Obama has no plan to address the energy challenges we face as a nation. He has said no to offshore drilling, no to domestic drilling and no to nuclear energy. He has no plan to reduce our dependence on foreign oil." Actually, Obama has a plan far more detailed than McCain's. I guess "no plan" means "a plan I don't agree with", or given how little grasp of the issue McCain has, maybe "no plan" means "a plan to big for me to understand". I would like one of those tire gauges though. It will be a neat souvenir long after the Obama administration is over. Perhaps Obama should have his own gauge, one that says, "Obama: for people smart enough to not drive on flat tires".

Voter arrested for using correct ID
August 8

You read that heading right. Phil Lindsey, a voting rights activist in Missouri, was arrested after producing several types of ID specified in Missouri law when attempting to vote in the August 5th primary. You can read the whole account where he posted it on Democratic Underground, plus he told his story to Thom Hartmann in the third hour of the August 7th show. In brief, the election judge insisted on photo ID even though Missouri law doesn't require it. Lindsey presented several other types of acceptable ID and tried to show the law to the judge in the form of a printout off the secretary of state site. The judge refused to look at the law or check his own references, and called the cops. Lindsey claims one judge got physical with him, and six cops showed up. He was handcuffed and shoved into a squad car, and eventually charged with a misdemeanor. Though higher election officials admitted he had the law right and the judge had it wrong, nothing was done to correct the situation. While talking to Hartmann, Lindsey summed up the republican strategy: "If you cannot pass a photo voter ID [law] to disenfranchise people, then insist upon it anyway at the polls and it becomes a defacto situation."

This reminds me of the precinct caucuses in Minnesota this Winter. I was one of the people signing in caucus attendees, about half of whom came just to cast a ballot. Several people had their drivers licenses out when the came to the sign in table, obviously thinking not just that the caucus was a polling place, but thinking photo ID was necessary to vote. This was even before the US Supreme Court upheld Indiana's photo ID law. I say this to warn all voters that there will be confusion all over the country regarding ID laws, including among election judges as Lindsey's story shows. Missouri had a photo ID law thrown out in court which could explain some greater confusion there, but this hasn't gotten past a proposal in Minnesota and still people are misinformed. Many people will be wrongly turned away from the polls by this misunderstanding, but let's at least be alert and reduce it.

This may sound contradictory, but I recommend people in states that allow registration at the polls bring their ID anyway. You don't need ID to vote, but you do to register, and if you're mysteriously not on the rolls, or of course if you move after the pre-registration deadline, or for whatever reason didn't register, you can still register at the polls. Also, if you haven't voted since pre-registering and you didn't register in person, you need to show ID the first time you vote.

One more related point: while I was typing this and listening to the rest of Hartmann's program, a caller from the south side of Chicago said he had received a caging letter. This is a letter from the secretary of state's office, or maybe it was a county registrar, designed to allow Republicans to challenge your vote and remove you from the rolls before election day and with no notice to you. Check out your junk mail, and return it if you need to. This is one of the old-fashioned but still used means to wrongly remove voters from the registration rolls, and in states without registration at the polls, which is all but seven, you can't vote.

Premise wrong in Coleman editorial
August 7

Norm Coleman had an editorial in this morning's Star Tribune which basically makes the current Republican argument on oil drilling which is an attempt to shoot down the argument that we need to focus on alternative energy, namely that he advocates for doing everything. It's what all the Republicans seem to be saying these days, at least when they aren't claiming Katrina caused no oil spills and that China is drilling off the coast of Florida. Unfortunately the premise is wrong and by now, he and the other Republicans must know it's wrong. When Coleman said, "How high do prices have to get before producing more becomes a viable option?", he deliberately leaves readers thinking the only obstacle to more drilling is legal. This is false. There are 68 million acres, an area the size of Colorado, already opened to drilling. The oil companies who own those leases just need to get started. But they won't. Nor will opening more coastline help, because there's already a five year backlog on the ships needed to set up platforms, which means opening more coastline won't help one bit. Besides, doesn't the backlog indicate the offshore drilling is already expanding, contrary to what the Republicans are saying daily? They say it daily because it's working in the opinion polls, even they're they handing out misinformation, or should we say "disinformation", since by now they must know their talking points have been debunked.

Take the Red Pill Award for anti-semitic bigot
August 7

I'm pushing my rule on awarding a Take the Red Pill Award only to true-believers and not to leaders and con men cynically using the beliefs of fundamentalists. Nikki Tinker is a congressional candidate challenging Rep. Stephen Cohen in today's primary for the Democratic nomination in Tennessee's 9th district, which includes Memphis. She might just be appealing to anti-semitism, but I think she's also a true-believer, though not of the Jewish variety as might be ascertained by her attack ad. If you listen to the voiceover, you hear the phrase, "While he's in our churches, clapping his hands and tapping his feet...", and the word "our" is emphasized. It could be taken as being racial --- how dare this white man come into black churches --- but I think it's religious, as if she's saying, "how dare a dirty Jew come into a church." I think that because the ad also attacks Cohen on a definitely religious issue: "He is the only senator who thought our kids shouldn't be allowed to pray in school." By "allowed", that means of course "forced to pray like a Christian". Presumably a Jew knows what it's like to be the religious minority and why prayer shouldn't be forced. For those of you thinking "allowed" really means "allowed", there's no prohibition on children praying in school now, just a prohibition on the school organizing it. You might think this would be obvious, but to religious bigots, apparently not. At the end of the ad, Tinker prominently refers to herself as a Democrat. Tinker, no Democrat would do what you did, so stop pretending to be part of my party. The early returns indicate your appeals to prejudice failed, so as a consolation, have this Take the Red Pill Award.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who successfully prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg for the crime of aggressive war, thereby establishing the precedent that starting a war is, in and of itself, a war crime.

"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.

"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.

"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.

"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.

"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guant�namo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.

"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.

"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.

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