January 31
I suppose it's obligatory for a blogger to comment on the Iraqi elections. Then again, maybe readers have gotten enough of that and want something different. Hey, just for fun, how about both! So skip down if you've heard enough about Iraqi elections.
The key thing about the elections is it's too soon to know the effect. We don't what the winners will do or what constitution they'll come up with. The concerns about the elections presaging a civil war are hardly assuaged. The hope for a democratic flowering is as likely as before. The acting president has done a classic spin job, first by acting like elections he opposed were his idea, and then meeting the low bar for success that elections merely had to happen to be a success. There were a lot fewer deaths than feared. That's a relative success. If the US or any other established democracy had 44 deaths (the last number I heard in news updates) at the polls that would be taken as a crisis. The killing was reduced only by massive security, but at least the security worked. The relish many Iraqis had for their first free vote was genuine. If the reports are right, that turnout was 60%, that's what the US managed, and we didn't have anyone shooting at us, so non-voting Americans should be embarrassed by that. The reports would have been higher if turnout hadn't been tiny in the dangerous parts of the country, which might be the biggest factor in holding down the killings.
The insurgents lost a battle. No question about it. They couldn't have ever stopped the elections entirely, but they didn't even disrupt them much. They can claim credit, if credit is the right word, for the need for massive security, so they're not defeated by any means. But they did lose one. If ever they thought it was onward and upward with no setbacks, they were as delusional as US neocons. They and everybody else learned, if they didn't already know, that insurgent support is mostly confined to the Sunnis. Then again, how disturbing that an insurgency in just one-fifth of the country has caused all these problems.
So key questions remaining: will the Kurds be content with autonomy, or demand independence, and if so will Turkey invade? Will the Shiites respect Kurdish autonomy? Will they impose Shiism on the Sunnis and Kurds (who are also Sunni)? Or will they act like US conservatives with civil rights and homosexuality, and assume majorities can vote down minority rights, meaning they got the majority rule part of democracy but not the Bill of Rights?
Bill Moyers wrote about some people who should get the Take the Red Pill award. There are people who believe there's no need to worry about the environment because the rapture index is so high. Some even believe that destroying the environment will bring on the second coming because things like famines and droughts are prophesied. It's amazing how people who believe the prophesies are literally true can believe they can help bring on the end by making the predictions come true. If humans cause the prophesied conditions, doesn't that indicate nothing at all about whether the prophesies were right? If only John had written in Revelations, "Sayest the Lord, self-fulfilling prophesies don't count". Ending the world through man-made environmental destruction is not the will of God, but the stupidity of man.
January 29
Dear Senate Democrats,
I don't know when the vote is on the Gonzales nomination, I'm assuming this coming week, so I wish to point out to you that you have a win-win proposition before you if only you will stick together, avoiding that temptation Democratic elected officials always have to be Republican Lite, thinking that somewhere some conservatives will decide you're not so bad. It never works, and you'll notice Republicans don't feel a similar temptation. This time, if you'll stick together against Gonzales, one of two things will happen, both good. The best one if Gonzales might lose. It's unlikely obviously, but if you have 45 votes against, you might be joined by Republicans genuinely upset about the torture and the nomination of Alberto "Torture Boy" Gonzales to a position where no torturer should go. You might be joined by Republicans who have few principles, but a fear of the electoral ramifications of confirming someone so connected to the torture scandal. If some of you vote to confirm, you provide the Republicans with political cover. If you don't, they'll be out there by themselves, and some might not do it.
Okay, maybe you think that's pie in the sky, and it probably is given how Republicans have a long history of sticking together (and having it work much better than the the Republican Lite strategy works for Democrats) so let's go with the political ramifications. A torturer was confirmed with no Democratic votes: think about going into the next election with that. Great for motivating the grassroots, great for appealing to swing voters and even Republicans disgusted by the whole thing. If more comes out, and as more comes out it's hard to believe we've seen the end, you'll look very good and have more moral authority when you yell about a war criminal being attorney general. You may find your unity poses a threat when you go after Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and dare we say it, Bush and Cheney. Yes the GOP has a majority, but you can pop their mandate bubble and put them on the defensive. We've already made them back off the word "crisis" to describe Social Security. We can do this. On the other hand, those others committed their crimes after getting in office. With Gonzales, how will you call for his removal for a scandal you knew about when you voted for him?
No here's the real beauty of this: you'll have put yourselves in this enviable position not by a brilliant scheme of political calculation, but by sticking with principle come what may. Therefore avoid the temptation to engage in a brilliant scheme of political calculation because, well, it won't work. You'll think you've saved your political capital for the fight over judicial nominations, only to find Torture Boy is the nominee, and having approved him for attorney general, how do you oppose him for the Supreme Court?
If you approve him because you're afraid to be seen opposing an Hispanic, you'll find it won't help. The racism charge has been thrown at you despite approving almost all of Bush's Hispanic nominees. Do you really think denying the Republican propaganda machine something to attack you with will stop them just making up something? The racism charge is just made up, and shown to be so, but they don't stop. All they'll get from your votes for Gonzales is that you'll cave in to lying intimidation.
It was heartening that you denied Condoleeza Rice easy confirmation, and that all of you on the judiciary committee voted against Gonzales. Now take the next step, and do whatever you can to prevent the author of Bush's torture policy being the nation's chief administrator of justice.
Sincerely,
The grassroots who backed you.
Not new information, but so much cleverly phrased that I could put a bunch of cogent quotes from it over there on the right. "We've been Iraq's tsunami."
January 28
If I gave entries titles instead of dates, I'd call call this "Up Close and Personal with Civil Liberties", even though that sounds more grandiose that what actually happened. I had not the big things like being arrested for exercising free speech or being investigated by the feds for no cause, but the small stuff we run into day in and day out.
Wednesday, I accepted a contract to work on someone's web site. It's a big company and I went through a big recruiting firm, both of whom will go unnamed partly because that doesn't matter, partly because I need the job more than I need trouble, which gets to the minor sacrifices of our rights that we make. I had to consent to a credit check even though I'm taking a job, not a credit card. I don't know what employers get from that, and this job will last only about three months, so what right do they have to check on me? If I have debts, how does that affect my ability to code a web page?
I also had to pee in a cup. At least the testing company was across the street from the recruiter. I had to empty my pockets, remove my phone, and let someone look in the phone pouch to make sure it was empty. I'm amazed they didn't do a patdown. At least I could pee in privacy, though the paper towels were outside the toilet, as was the soap, which I couldn't use right away. A portion of the urine was poured into a vial, and I had to date and initial the seal. I suppose that makes it difficult for someone to switch samples, but removing my phone, my keys, not washing hands first, all seem intended to stop me sneaking chemicals I can ADD to the sample. Isn't the idea to get a sample with nothing untoward? What, I might smear a narcotic on my hand so I can scrape it into the urine? What really makes no sense is I'm not in security, I'm not handling classified materials or seeing sensitive documents, and in fact I'm working on a web site so the documents can be displayed to ANYBODY. What is it then, does someone worry my code might be enhanced by steroids? Even if I was using something, I'm not on anyone's company medical insurance, so there's no cost to the employer. If I used something that affected my work that would be one thing, otherwise it's no business's business what I did before I worked for them and what I do in my off hours. So why did I comply with the test? I need to work -- the same reason so many people put up with drug tests, credit checks, abuse from supervisors, or worry about using every minute on the clock when the executives are taking every minute of savings for their own pockets.
The other civil liberties question is more theoretical, though it becomes less so in March when Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, bans smoking in bars and restaurants. It came up during a barbershop conversation with a barber who doesn't smoke or allow it in the shop, but who sees the point of view of a business owner who doesn't want to be told what rules to set in his own business. I can't see the point of view of a customer, which is the only function I serve in restaurants and bars, though I did once work in a restaurant (I was an actor, after all). As a customer, I know what I'm walking into and I can accept reeking of smoke and the damage to my lungs of second hand smoke as the cost of going one place or another. However, for the staff these are workplaces, and they have the same right to workplace safety as anyone else. We don't accept the "if you don't think it's safe don't work here" argument for any other business, so I don't see why bars and restaurants should be exception. I don't have a terribly strong opinion on restaurant smoking, but I do on the importance of workplace safety. On the other hand, the point isn't to get anyone to stop smoking. The point is to make the air safe to breathe. Why not establish indoor air quality standards, and let owners meet them how they will. A smoking ban would be cheapest, but at least the owner would have the option of installing heavy duty ventilation, or banning cigarettes but not cigars and pipes, whatever works.
January 27
Seymour Hersh has stirred things up with his revelation that the Bush administration is considering attacking Iran with the intent of destroying nuclear sites, and has already been conducting covert reconnaissance operations within Iran. (Do French-hating neocons have trouble saying "reconnaissance"?) Here's the full article. It sounds like the decision to attack Iran has been made, and carrying it out is a matter of timing. They apparently think it won't take ground troops except commando operations. An opposing opinion, holding that the repercussions would be severe beyond anything the neocons have considered, was given by Shahram Chubin, director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, who said, "It's better to have them cheating within the system. Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and inspections while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before their eyes." The NPT is the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Those of you who don't remember the Cold War may have to imagine harder than those of us who do, but imagine the restraints of the NPT being gone and everyone free to develop nuclear weapons. Under NPT, that's known as cheating. If the treaty unravels, it won't be illegal, there are no inspections, no restraints on trade in nuclear material or technology, and in brief there will be no mechanism for restraining would-be nuclear nations. Bombs aren't easy to build, but they are 1940's technology. If the builders don't have to hide, it gets easier. If the neighbors might be working on bombs, it gets more important. This would be a marvelous occasion to think twice before carrying out a policy. Unfortunately, anyone in the Bush administration who suggests thinking twice about anything gets fired, so that's not likely to happen.
January 26
Hurrah for Mark Dayton, who said what needed saying in the Senate debate on the Rice nomination:
I might as well skip all the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings and meetings and top secret briefings and just read the papers. And thank goodness for a free and vigilant press to ferret out the truth and to report the truth, because we cannot get the truth from this administration.He was referring to information about Iraq which is consistently wrong when gotten from the administration as a member of Congress. He's been getting contradictory, and inevitably correct, information from the press, singling out the Washington post for praise. I'll sing their praises too for really being on top of the torture scandal. Speaking of which...
Human Rights Watch has reported that Iraqi security forces are carrying on that fine Gonzales tradition of routinely torturing detainees. Besides seeking information, they're forcing confessions which don't always hold up in Iraqi courts, which speaks well for some Iraqi judges. At least a bit of the government works. Unfortunately, the revelation of forced confessions comes at the same time the interim government announced the capture of an Al Qaida leader, Sami Muhammad Ali Said al-Jaaf, thought to be responsible for many car bombings in Baghdad. He, um, "confessed". Maybe he did, and I'm not advocating pity for someone like whoever committed the car bombings, but the torture report coming out the same time as the announcement of the capture isn't fortuitous.
Also not fortuitous when the Gonzales nomination is turning into more of a fight than Bush anticipated is the release of more Pentagon documents obtained by the ACLU which document yet more torture. How much torture does there have to be before apologists accept that it's systemic, and shouldn't apologists then take notice of who is in charge?
January 25
The reason to care about this new revelation about Alberto Gonzales, that he did the behind the scenes stuff to get Bush out of jury duty in 1996, isn't that Bush wanted out of jury duty like almost everybody. It might affect a few who thought Bush is some moral man when they find out he got out of it while publicly pretending he was willing to do it, but the point here is Gonzales. He was the one who pulled it off, getting Bush off and pretending he was willing, thereby lying. He compounded it by lying about it again when asked by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It's not that the torture scandal alone isn't enough to disqualify him for any public office, but this is part of a pattern of unethical behavior. It might seem something so minor won't matter, but remember it was dinky stuff in accumulation that stopped Bernie Kerik. Contact your senators, because if enough of us do it, at some point Gonzales just has too many problems even for the Republicans.
John Negroponte on Meet the Press said something that must be the start of one of those "Big Lie" propaganda campaigns. The "Big Lie" is when the propagandist says something blatantly false about something big, and tries by repetition to make it believed. The big lie in this case is, "Well, we are here at the invitation of the Iraqis, and we are here in complete respect for their sovereignty." Over in the quotes column I joked that he is just crying out for someone to explain the meaning of "invasion", but really it sounds like an attempt to get the public assuming we were asked in to Iraq.
On that same Meet the Press, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Bill Thomas raised a stir with his remarks about adjusting Social Security by race and gender. He hedged, like with everything he suggested, by saying it should just be discussed. He didn't bother explaining how this would work, who loses, or of course how to identify race by Social Security number. Once we get past the awfulness of the suggestion (from a guy who went on the program to do damage control from the "dead horse" remark), we then each of us will declare ourselves to be the race with the biggest benefits, thereby ending racial division. At least in the Social Security Administration's records.
Don't think that was all he said. He denied Bush has been calling it a crisis, saying he called it a "problem" repeatedly during his forum on the issue. I don't know if that's so, but in other places, Bush has definitely been calling it a crisis. Maybe they realized the "crisis" isn't selling. Later, when Tim Russert asked about lifting the income cap on the tax, Thomas dodged, talking about how raising the payroll tax didn't make sense. He had a point about raising the 12.4% rate being a disincentive to job creation, but not a point relevant to the question. He didn't even suggest, like every other idea, that it be talked about. Republicans seem awfully unwilling to talk about raising or lifting the cap. Could it be it would bring in enough revenue to end the "crisis" in one simple move?
There was one frightening moment where Russert got a basic thing wrong and Thomas corrected him. Granted it is a common misconception, but I certainly thought journalists knew better. Russert said, "As you well know, $150 billion last year that was taken in from the payroll tax for Social Security was spent as part of our deficit." The money has not been spent. The trust fund has been used to buy federal bonds, which many pension systems buy including foreign national pension funds. The bonds cover the deficit. There is also a bookkeeping trick where the trust fund is counted with the general treasury, even though it isn't available for use, with the result that the surplus in the trust fund makes the deficit look smaller. The trust fund is borrowed for the treasury, but it has to be repaid with interest. Effectively, the trust fund has been invested in federal bonds, considered the world's safest investment. Safety is considered a good thing in money needed by retirees and those soon to retire. The only way this goes bad is if the government defaults on its bonds, in which case Social Security is the least of our problems.
January 24
If you're looking for reassurance some conservatives are finally listening, The Economist took Bush and Blair to task for dodging responsibility for torture, and about the Gonzales nomination said, "And the man who commissioned memos justifying torture, Alberto Gonzales, has been punished by being nominated by George Bush as his new attorney-general. He is likely to be confirmed even with the support of Democrats. They don't appear to care about his association with torture. They support him simply on the grounds that he is a Latino."
In the same issue, there's an article about how the election might precipitate the civil war, specifically in Kirkuk. Though the election might provoke civil war, it might be restraining it as much. The Shiites seem rather patient in the face of Sunni insurgent attacks, and the most likely reason seems to be their hope the election will let them take power. It's complicated, which is normal in a war. History shows wars rarely go as those who start them predict. I'd say the neocons have learned this the hard way, except that assumes they can learn.
Not only can't they learn, they can't follow up either, because guess where women can go to jail for leaving home? Afghanistan, including about the only part the government controls, Kabul.
One of these days, the wacky right has to overreach. I thought they had when they stonewalled the 911 commission, when they were proven wrong on everything about Iraq, and when they redistricted in the middle of a decade, and I was wrong, at least in electoral terms. Maybe this is it, because Rumsfeld must be offending even Republicans by having his own private spy service. The reporter of the linked article, Barton Gellman, said a Republican and Democratic member of the House intelligence committee knew nothing about it. This CIA copy answers only to Rumsfeld. Of course, he thought anarchy was a good thing when Iraq was being looted, so why not some anarchy of his own.
He also doesn't answer to military families, especially those pesky gold star families from the war he helped trick the country into.
If you want to do something about it, you can sign the new statement from Not In Our Name. Near the beginning they say, "No election, whether fair or fraudulent, can legitimize criminal wars on foreign countries, torture, the wholesale violation of human rights, and the end of science and reason."
January 23
Remember I said we don't have to twist the words of conservatives to make it sound like they think the tsunami was punishment from God, because we just had to wait? Found another one for Take the Red Pill award. The Star Tribune asked some ministers whether God uses disasters to punish people. One minister from a local Pentecostal church, Mark Marxhausen, doesn't even address the question, just assuming he does, and then goes on to justify God's action. It must be nerve wracking to worship such a capricious god. Screw up and he drops a tornado on you, or some such natural-seeming disaster. Seems like a monotheistic throwback to when people thought their problems were caused by some god unhappy with the goat they sacrificed. If you think the tsunami was God's punishment for something, ask which is more likely: God sent a big wave to punish hundreds of thousands of people with death, homelessness, and the loss of family for some sin committed by all these disparate people but not by the rest of the world; or, in the normal working of plate tectonics, two continental plates ground against each other, and the force released when they moved caused a shock wave that hit several countries' coastlines which, like in most of the world, are heavily populated.
In the same issue of the Star Tribune, Sen. Mark Dayton is the prime target of the GOP in 2006. Not a surprise for an unabashed liberal freshman senator in a close state. He hasn't raised huge amounts of money yet, which apparently is considered an opportunity. Perhaps they think it shows weakness. I think it shows the difficulty of raising money in 2004 when liberals were pulling out the stops to beat Bush, including digging deep in their pockets. Dayton was trying to raise money, but we just weren't thinking about 2006 before election day 2004. Senators normally raise funds their whole six years, so Dayton may have a slow start. If I could reassure him, I'd point out that liberals remain motivated, and in his state we feel a sense of success from the state House races and Kerry's win. If someone wants to help him get a monetary edge, here's his campaign web site donation page. The last campaign is still recent, but remember that our best chance of hobbling the acting president is to retake Congress, and Dayton's seat will be one of the hardest fought.
January 22
Donald Rumsfeld is opting to skip a security conference in Munich next month because of the possibility war crimes charges will be brought against him in a German court. As nice as it would be to think he is worried about being arrested, it seems more likely he's just PO'd over it. Instead he's sending undersecretary Douglas Feith who, despite his obscurity, is one of the leading neocons behind the false premises for selling Iraq War II, and he may have to worry about war crimes charges himself one day.
Speaking of war crimes, Amnesty International published an appeal to the acting president to live up to his rhetoric on human rights, and pointed out that so far he hasn't done so. Here's a telling quote:
"Your administration has as a matter of policy for more than three years denied international human rights monitors, including Amnesty International, access to detainees held by the USA in the 'war on terror', in addition to routinely denying detainees access to the courts, legal counsel and relatives. In addition, US personnel have staged deceptions in order to subvert basic human rights protections and the rule of law."I call it "telling" because people committing human rights abusers are unsurprisingly unhappy to have human rights observers poking around, but generally realize that refusing access to prisoners looks awfully suspicious. Amnesty International didn't say this in the appeal, but refusing access to prisoners puts Bush in the same group as China and Myanmar. The appeal does however make a damning case against Bush. If he led a small country instead of the US, he would have to seriously worry about being dragged before the permanent war crimes court, and as the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic shows, sitting presidents aren't immune anymore.
Bush repeated the word "freedom" so much because some protestors missed it while being arrested for displaying signs. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds) |
If Bush can't do much in the second term, then we know his legacy for the immediate future will be the massive debt he leaves behind, Iraq War II however it turns out, and torture with, let us hope, eventual trial for war crimes. He may also be like Julius Caesar in a way he hadn't foreseen. Despite all his "accomplishments", one specific act history remembers Caesar for is burning the library at Alexandria, which was easily the biggest of the ancient world, believed to hold many unique books. Bush may be remembered above all else for the destruction of the Baghdad Museum, which held antiquities going back 6,000 years, and the Baghdad Library, holding many manuscripts from the middle ages, which were looted and vandalized right after the invasion. Some objects have been recovered, but hardly most. Those are somewhat well known, but the destruction of antiquities didn't end there. US troops made a base out of the site of ancient Babylon, which to be fair probably saved the place from looting, but then they proceeded to destroy plenty of the site themselves. How much history and archaeology would someone have to know to realize digging up a site like that would be dreadfully destructive?
Iraq isn't the only place where historic sites are being destroyed before archaeologists can do their work. Much of Afghanistan is being looted too (this is an excerpt -- the whole article is only in print). Who knows how much might have been prevented had Bush chosen to retard Afghanistan's slide into chaos and build a modern state there, rather than put his resources into invading Iraq. Don't take it that I'm blaming Bush more than the looters, blackmarket antiquities dealers, or greedy warlords. Just notice how it fits a pattern with what he let happen in Iraq. Also understand that the problem isn't just that artifacts may never find their way into the hands of archaeologists, but even if they do, much of the information is in the context in which they're found and that is lost forever.
In that same issue of National Geographic, there's an article on the Pashtun region straddling the Afghanistan/Pakistan border which explains why it's such a difficult job finding Bin Laden. Then think of how Bush, with his usual incompetence, let Al Qaida and the Taliban escape from the trap in Tora Bora rather than commit enough resources.
January 19
There's been plenty of coverage of the man whose dentist discovered a four inch nail in his head, except for one aspect that points to a much bigger problem with this country's medical "system", if that word can be used. Patrick Lawler didn't wait six days to get treatment because he was dumb. He didn't have insurance. I've spent much of my adult life without insurance too, so take my word for it that what he did is typical of uninsured people, namely, we put up with a lot of discomfort or pain and do a lot to self-medicate before we break down and see a doctor. If I had his injury and was currently uninsured, I would probably have done the same thing, unless I knew I had a nail in my head, but I don't claim to be any smarter than Mr. Lawler. Like him then, I would have had six days of pain followed by $80,000 of medical bills. Since people without insurance overwhelmingly tend to have low incomes, he presumably can't pay this, and in fact medical bills are one of the biggest if not the biggest cause of personal bankruptcies. If we had a sane system, like any other industrialized democracy, none of that would happen.
Hurrah again for Barbara Boxer, for giving Condoleeza Rice what for. The only other Democrat on the foreign relations committee to vote against Rice was John Kerry, though he conceded she would be confirmed. The other Democrats actually voted to confirm. Looks like Senate Democrats are still searching for their backbones. Cudos then to Mark Dayton, who has said he'll vote no.
When I wrote about the subject of evolution and creationism last month, I mentioned that the subject had come up in Georgia. It's come up again, when the Cobb County school board voted to appeal a judge's ruling that the stickers have to come off the textbooks. In the New York Times today, there's an article about why the stakes are so high in this issue for fundamentalists. The author, Susan Jacoby, shows why historical assumptions have to be challenged. She described the reaction of most people to the Scopes Monkey Trial, that fundamentalism was discredited except for a few holdouts, as fundamentally wrong. Something she says most of us missed, including me until she pointed out what now seems obvious, was it was a seminal moment for fundamentalists too, who determined science was against them and determined to fight it. The fight against evolution now isn't a phenomenon of the late 20th century, but something that has gone on since creationism was discredited in the eyes of non-literalists during the Scopes trial. Jacoby says fundamentalists are feeling confident enough to go beyond preventing any mention of evolution to inserting creationism, lately under the guise of "intelligent design". To beat it back, the reality based community will have to be willing to fight harder, like the father of a student in Cobb County who sued to remove the stickers.
What's at stake is science, and basing our politics on science instead of whatever conservatives find comfortable to believe. It's not always the issues important to fundamentalists, like evolution, that are at stake. Particularly in environmental issues, science gets denounced and disbelieved when it clashes with moneyed interests. Conservatives have a dreadful time finding scientists outside the oil and coal industries who doubt global warming, but that doesn't stop them refusing to believe it. If scientific evidence isn't respected, it's easy to believe whoever you feel more comfortable with. By that reasoning it's a matter a faith, and faith requires no proof, so believe what you want and you have as good a chance of being right as those with proof. Even if it's not made a matter of faith, without the ability to evaluate facts, each side might be equally as likely to be right, even when the evidence is overwhelmingly on one side, and important matters of public policy are at stake.
January 18
Hey, look at this: this first indictment has come down for the Oil for Food Program scandal, and the indicted person is --- an American! Well well well.
At least one resident of Washington DC wants the city to recover the $12 million in security costs of the inauguration by taxing people coming from out of town. Sounds fair, since for the first time in history the federal government is stiffing the city for the expense. Much simpler though would be for the city to tell Bush that if he won't pay, he can handle his own security. This would unfortunately throw a big wrench in the inauguration at the last moment. My heart bleeds.
Will this finally put an end to many conservatives delusion that WMD were moved from Iraq to other countries before the war? Intelligence officials working on the final report on Iraq's WMDs say there is no evidence anything got moved. None, just like everything else Bush said about Iraqi weapons and Al Qaida ties to sell us a phony war. In the linked article, they quote neocons saying they knew there was a lot of traffic over the Syrian border. They generally hedged their bets saying they weren't sure weapons were moved, just that there seemed good reason to think so, even though there never was any reason to think so. Remember when they were trying to tell us the Russians moved them? It turned out that, of course, they made it up.
January 17
Sadly, I heard a caller to Talk of the Nation today who provided evidence Bush's disinformation campaign on social security reform is working. The caller said he was 60 and had heard quite a bit about social security, but didn't know what to believe, and he asked in all seriousness if the program would be there for his retirement. Even someone about to retire thinks the program is about to collapse. I can't believe he's the only one. This confusion is exactly what Bush wants in order to sell the private accounts. Informed people will never fall for it unless they ideologically just don't like a government pension system and don't care about the facts.
Something you have to like about public radio talk shows is that opposing views not only get aired, but get some time to speak. During this same program, a privatizing proponent got debunked to his face and with the audience that just heard his lies finding otherwise. The lies came from one of the conservative chattering class used for propaganda, Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth. He repeated the usual lies about the trust fund falling short by $10 trillion without saying that was over infinity, and the certainty that private accounts would produce higher returns despite evidence being overwhelmingly to the contrary. He said the trust fund money once borrowed is gone, and he had the gall to say it isn't invested. It's invested in government bonds. Other countries' pension funds buy those same bonds, apparently having more confidence in the solvency of the US government than American conservatives.
If you've heard the Republican propaganda, you might believe that the district attorney in Austin, Texas, whose investigation of campaign finance violations has indictments of associates of Tom DeLay and may be closing in on the big boy himself, is doing this for political purposes. Maybe you've heard he's gone after Democrats too. NPR interviewed lawyers of people he went after, as well as Ronnie Earl himself. It appears Earl smells a rat, which is proof positive his nose works normally.
January 16
I hope the revelation of the payoff to Armstrong Williams will wake up some people to the willingness of the acting president to use propaganda, because then they might realize that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is being turned into a propaganda outlet. Employees are expected to help sell the public on privatization. A downside, and it's doubtful Bush can see this, is that the SSA will no longer be seen as objective information. This distrust must already be affecting the Department of Education which has been willing to lie to sell No Child Left Behind, and of course the Defense dept. hasn't told the truth about much of anything since it had to sell the war with Iraq. It's quite consistent. The inevitable result is an eroding of trust in the government, and Bush's successors will be hampered by it, even if they tell the truth and properly keep the civil service apolitical. For the short term, maybe this will tell a few more people that what Bush says about social security simply can't be believed.
Speaking of the lies of privatization, an interesting thing is happening in Britain, whose privatization is touted as a model. Their pension system is in a terrible mess, and even British business is looking at a foreign system with an admirable cost structure --- ours. The article quotes the CEO of The National Association of Pension Funds, Christine Farnish, saying, "It doesn't have to make a profit, and it delivers efficiencies of scale that most companies would die for." Privatization proved confusing to British workers, many of whom bought into plans that have hurt them, and the costs of the system are enormous. The effect is expected to be a bailout by the general treasury. The companies selling the plans did just fine though. This mess is the legacy of privatization-mad Conservatives back in the 80's, and now our version wants to repeat the mistake.
See the archives for earlier entries.
