The Raven' s Blog, Web Log of Eric Ferguson: First Half of March 2006 Archive

March 15
Let me justify the time you're spending visiting my little blog by putting together a couple things you probably haven't seen together. Early last year we learned the term "Salvador Option", which I'll warrant most of us subsequently forgot. It refers to fighting the Iraqi insurgency through death squads committing extrajudicial executions against suspected supporters of the insurgency, just like the war in El Salvador during the Reagan administration (even if Reagan's face goes on Mt. Rushmore and every coin, I will never stop pointing out the innocent blood on his hands). Bear in mind that the man in charge of intelligence is John Negroponte, who during that war was ambassador to Honduras and helped build the Contras, one of the best funded terrorist groups ever. Now look at recent news from Iraq about the daily discovery of bodies of people executed by some unknown executioners.Both Sunnis and Shiites are using death squads. You'd like to think Americans are better than that, but then I think of the idea a year ago to fight the insurgency through the "Salvador option", and I wonder. Something I'd like all the hawks to ponder when they ask why terrorism is OK for others but wrong for the US is that neither the Sunni insurgents nor the Shiite militias speak for me nor, if you're American, do they speak for you. Neither Al Qaida in Iraq nor the Mahdi Army are my government, so while I damn terrorists just as much as anyone reading this, it's not the same as when the terrorism is committed by people who supposedly represent me. So yes, it is worse when done by the US government.

March 14
I haven't had time to write lately and it's late now, but this must be said. Russ Feingold is the bravest of the Democrats in the Senate. Read his speech on the floor when he introduced his censure resolution, and you are either dead or a right wing-nut if you don't find it as logical as it is passionate. All the presidential wannabes in the Senate lost my support when they failed to support the resolution. Obviously I'd vote for these gutless wonders in the general election because I need only one hand to hold my nose and I want the culture of corruption gone, but when I donate what money I have to give to a presidential candidate, I'm heading first to Feingold's campaign site. Tell me, those of you who wonder if Feingold was right to take such a political risk, do you think the senator who tried to censure the acting president, and was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act, will be lacking the guts to stand up to terrorists, or Iran, or China, or any other potential bad guys? As for the rest of the Democratic senators, if you won't stand up to Republicans and a flailing failing fake president, why would we expect you to stand up to Islamists? Why would we expect you to stand tough when China threatens to dump our economy by dumping our bonds?

March 10
Now that the takeover of six seaports by Dubai Ports World seems to be stopped, let me ask a question I haven't heard asked. Why has the running of our seaports been outsourced to private companies in the first place? Isn't that what port authorities are for? Maybe those living on a coast already knew this was the case, but it was news to me. So now that we've gotten past the issue of this one company running ports, why are these not public operations in the first place? We don't give our airports to private companies.

On a side note, has the Bush administration gone politically tone deaf not to realize what a disaster this would be? The bad news is they could screw up national security even more than they have. The good news is that if the incompetence has gotten this bad, maybe they'll blow the midterm elections. Maybe. Campaigning is unfortunately the one thing they're good at.

Last Tuesday Minnesota had it's precinct caucuses. Those are where the state parties start the process of choosing candidates. The debate over caucuses versus primaries is an argument over the breadth of participation versus depth and party building.We have a primary anyway, except for president, so the caucuses start the process of picking who gets the party endorsement for the primary.

It is certainly the case that many more people vote in the primary than attend caucuses, and the primary determines the candidate for general election. It is also the case that endorsed candidates for governor and US senator have a mixed record for winning primaries, and on the DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor) side we usually have the endorsed candidates for those two offices lose either the primary or the general election. Why then have caucuses? Because while all states have party endorsements, in a caucus system there is more grassroots control over the party. As one of those grassroots activists, I feel some measure of control over who runs the party and what the party stands for. By "activists", I mean the people who make the $50 donations, man the phone banks, drop the literature, set up the chairs, and participate in the caucuses.

At the precinct level, we pick the low level party officials, the level where you get the work but not the power and glory, and debate the resolutions that eventually become the party platform. I doubt any office holder ever refers back to the platform before making a decision, but the platform is a statement of where the party stands on many issues, and our principles are expressed thereby. Starting at the precinct level as the source of the resolutions that become the platform gives the grassroots the ability to control the overall direction, even if candidates feel free to ignore it for their own campaigns. At least they know by taking contrary positions, they buck the will of the pool of campaign volunteers. This year I'm more involved than the prior years I went to caucuses, and I have a better appreciation for all the work that makes many activists demand to know of candidates whether they will respect the endorsement process.

Now before I make such a sweeping statement as the caucus system is why the DFL is stronger than most state Democratic parties, I would need to know a lot more about how other parties organize themselves and how strong they are. However, I suspect that's the case. For one thing, the Republicans are strong too, using essentially the same system. So suffice it to say that I suspect the reason the DFL is stronger than other state parties because we have this mechanism for local control and grassroots involvement that builds the party base the national party is really just starting to work towards.

In case you were wondering, I did offer a resolution at my caucus, and if you've been reading this blog at all it won't be a surprise that my resolution regarded paperless voting, and the prohibition thereof. Touchscreens aren't used in Minnesota where we usually use optical scanners, and the same will shortly be true in Maryland too, but touchscreens are used in other states and are the primary reason I believe Bush stole the election in 2004.

March 5
Hope you missed me while I was gone. The raven moved to a new nest and I write this amidst a plentitude of packed boxes. So, let me start out with that awkward action of patting my own back, or think of it as pointing out to anyone interested that I was way ahead on this one. I asked all the way back in September if former FEMA director Michael Brown was being scapegoated, and noted that surrisingly little blame was being assigned to Brown's boss Chertoff, his predecessor Jim Albaugh, and the big boss who picked Brown, the acting president. The newly released (leaked?) video shows Brown among others trying to say how serious the situation could get in New Orleans. Bush and Chertoff were sitting there and heard the warnings. A few days later, Bush blatantly lied by saying no one anticipating the breaking of the levees. Maybe you could buy that no one in the Bush administration had noticed any of the non-governmental warnings, but this is too much.

Now take notice of something else. While Brown was made the butt of jokes, Bush and Chertoff said nothing. When congressmen heaped abuse on Brown at hearings, they said nothing. When Brown was ridiculed for coming from a horse association before joining FEMA, did they defend his pre-horse job qualifications? No, they said nothing. Brown did do one foolish thing though. He didn't give any substantiation to his claims he did a decent job, and loyally allowed himself to be verbally pummeled. The Republicans in Congress (they're the ones with the subpoena power remember) didn't make Chertoff sit there for some abuse, thereby helping to give the impression Brown was entirely to blame while Bush let them do it. For a Minnesota angle, because in case you're new here I live in Minnesota, Brown might have given the DFL a campaign commercial when he asked Norm Coleman what he wanted from him, as Coleman sat there berating Brown and as Brown pointed, declined to ask a question. I suggest the commercial be entitled "How a Bush Toady Behaves", and I also suggest Coleman stop grandstanding at these hearings. Given how so many of his findings about the UN Oil for Food program were wrong and George Galloway made him look pretty small, he should learn to avoid these things.

"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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