Category: Issues of the Day

GOLD HAT: We are Federales . . . You know, the mounted police.

DOBBS: If you’re the police, where are your badges?

GOLD HAT: [puzzled pause] “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! [angry] I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!

Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

The thinking at the White House, as noted at Whiskey Bar.

So big deal, the National Security Agency is reading email. Surely they are only reading the email of the “bad guys,” right?

Think again. I would suggest that the NSA is fully capable of scanning every email of every person.

The president’s emphatic defense yesterday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program’s dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress.

Report in Sunday’s Washington Post

Digby makes an excellent point in the aftermath of the Miami Airport shooting Wednesday:

The marshalls were obviously persuaded that it was quite possible that this man had a bomb in his carry on bag. And apparently, the marshalls went through the plane after the fact, looking for accomplices, pointing guns at the passengers and knocking cell phones out of their hands ostensibly because they thought they might contain guns.

Now I know that the marshalls are taught to shoot first and ask questions later and all that, so no lectures please. But I still find it amazing that after all this time, they automatically assume that a group of people could get a bomb and “cell phone guns” through the gate security in a US airport. Goes to show you how useful all that boarding gate crap really is, doesn’t it?

This is a good one. Read Eric Alterman:

Good evening, my fellow Americans:

Tonight I want to talk to you on a subject of deep concern to all Americans and to many people in all parts of the world the war in Iraq.

Read to the end and see his source. And they say history doesn’t repeat itself.

“One might also argue that untruthful charges against the Commander-in-Chief have an insidious effect on the war effort itself. I’m unwilling to say that ….

Vice President Richard Cheney, November 21, 2005

Um, didn’t he just say that? Isn’t that sort of like McCoy saying something outrageous, having defense counsel object and the judge sustain and then looking over to see how the jury took it?

Paul Krugman:

Most commentary about G.M.’s troubles is resigned: pundits may regret the decline of a once-dominant company, but they don’t think anything can or should be done about it. And commentary from some conservatives has an unmistakable tone of satisfaction, a sense that uppity workers who joined a union and made demands are getting what they deserve.

We shouldn’t be so complacent. I won’t defend the many bad decisions of G.M.’s management, or every demand made by the United Automobile Workers. But job losses at General Motors are part of the broader weakness of U.S. manufacturing, especially the part of U.S. manufacturing that offers workers decent wages and benefits. And some of that weakness reflects two big distortions in our economy: a dysfunctional health care system and an unsustainable trade deficit.

Key point: “Since 2000, we’ve lost about three million jobs in manufacturing, while membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 50 percent.”

“Sixty three percent of those surveyed were in favor of bringing US troops home from Iraq in the next year….”

Yahoo! News reporting on a Harris Poll.

First, these stories from Representative Murtha’s statement last Thursday:

I have a young fellow in my district who was blinded and he lost his foot. They did everything they could for him at Walter Reed, then they sent him home. His father was in jail. He had nobody at home. Imagine this. A young kid that age, 22, 23 years old, goes home to nobody. VA did everything they could do to help him. He was reaching out.

So they sent him — to make sure that he was a blind, they sent him to Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins started sending bills. Then the collection agency started sending bills. Well, when I found out about it, you could imagine they stopped the collection agency and Walter Reed finally paid the bill. But imagine, a young person being blinded, without a foot, and he’s getting bills from a collection agency.

I saw a young soldier who lost two legs and an arm, and his dad was pushing him around.

I go to the mental ward; you know what they say to me? They got battle fatigue. You know what they say? “We don’t get nothing. We get nothing. We’re just as bruised, just as injured as everybody else, but we don’t even get a Purple Heart. We get nothing. We get shunted aside. We get looked at as if there’s something wrong with us.”

Saw a young woman from Notre Dame. Basketball player, right- handed, lost her right hand. You know what she’s worried about? She’s worried about her husband because he lost weight worrying about her. These are great people. These soldiers and people who are serving, they’re marvelous people.

I saw a Seabee lying there with three children. His mother and his wife were there. He was paralyzed from the neck down. There were 18 of them killed in this one mortar attack. And they were all crying because they knew what it would be like in the future.

I saw a Marine rubbing his boy’s hand. He was a Marine in Vietnam, and his son had just come back from Iraq. And he said he wanted his brother to come home. That’s what the father said, because the kid couldn’t speak. He was in a coma.

He kept rubbing his hand.

He didn’t want to come home. I told him the Marine Corps would get him home.

I had one other kid, lost both his hands. Blinded. I was praising him, saying how proud we were of him and how much we appreciate his service to the country. “Anything I can do for you?” His mother said get me a — “Get him a Purple Heart.” I said, “What do you mean, get him a Purple Heart?”

He had been wounded in taking care of bomblets, these bomblets that they drop that they have to dismantle. He had been wounded and lost both his hands. The kid behind him was killed.

His mother said, “Because they’re friendly bomblets, they wouldn’t give him a Purple Heart.”

I met with the commandant. I said, “If you don’t give him a Purple Heart, I’ll give him one of mine.” And they gave him a Purple Heart.

I think we should stop letting this happen to our American warriors. I do care if oil goes to $100 a barrel because Iraq has a civil war, but I care much, much more about continuing to waste our national treasure — human and — on this counter-productive war. Giving the benefit of the doubt to those who began the war, the United States went in to remove Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Hussein is captured; there were no weapons. Mission Accomplished.

Bring the American troops home as quickly as feasible. Murtha says it would take six months; sounds right to me.

Paul Krugman today on leaving Iraq:

Representative John Murtha’s speech calling for a quick departure from Iraq was full of passion, but it was also serious and specific in a way rarely seen on the other side of the debate. President Bush and his apologists speak in vague generalities about staying the course and finishing the job. But Mr. Murtha spoke of mounting casualties and lagging recruiting, the rising frequency of insurgent attacks, stagnant oil production and lack of clean water.

Mr. Murtha – a much-decorated veteran who cares deeply about America’s fighting men and women – argued that our presence in Iraq is making things worse, not better. Meanwhile, the war is destroying the military he loves. And that’s why he wants us out as soon as possible.

Key point:

Pessimists think that Iraq will fall into chaos whenever we leave. If so, we’re better off leaving sooner rather than later. As a Marine officer quoted by James Fallows in the current Atlantic Monthly puts it, “We can lose in Iraq and destroy our Army, or we can just lose.”

Tom at Functional Ambivalent concludes a fine analysis of patriotic criticism of one’s country with this:

I was raised to respect veterans, to honor their service and listen to their voices. Jean Schmidt clearly was not. She could have made her point without insulting the service of a brave man. She could have explained in passionate words the importance of the war to this country and the world. But she didn’t. Instead, in the service of politics, not patriotism, Schmidt said what she said. Make no mistake about why she said it, and how little it had to do with patriotism.

Go read the whole essay.

From Paul Krugman:

“Lots of things in life are complicated.” So declared Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, in response to the mass confusion as registration for the new Medicare drug benefit began. But the complexity of the program – which has reduced some retirees to tears as they try to make what may be life-or-death decisions – is far greater than necessary.

One reason the drug benefit is so confusing is that older Americans can’t simply sign up with Medicare as they can for other benefits. They must, instead, choose from a baffling array of plans offered by private middlemen. Why?

Here’s a parallel. Earlier this year Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill that would have forced the National Weather Service to limit the weather information directly available to the public. Although he didn’t say so explicitly, he wanted the service to funnel that information through private forecasters instead.

Mr. Santorum’s bill didn’t go anywhere. But it was a classic attempt to force gratuitous privatization: involving private corporations in the delivery of public services even when those corporations have no useful role to play.

The Medicare drug benefit is an example of gratuitous privatization on a grand scale.

With this introduction, Knight Ridder addresses the administration’s main assertions.

The administration’s overarching premise is beyond dispute: Administration officials, Democratic and Republican lawmakers and even leaders of foreign governments believed intelligence assessments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That intelligence turned out to be wrong.

But Bush, Cheney, and other senior officials have added several other arguments in recent days that distort the factual record.

Earlier today, Lee, one of two official brothers of NewMexiKen, and known on these pages primarily as SnoLepard, posted a comment that I thought was ill-considered. It wasn’t that anything was particularly wrong with what was written, it just seemed to me that what he wrote did not fit with the positive nature of the original entry, which was announcing the “hope to bring every child in the world a computer.”

I deleted the comment and sent my brother an email explaining what I had done and why. My action — deleting the comment — troubled me when I thought about it during the day, though.

Fortunately, Lee has replied:

Every day, more than 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes—one child every five seconds. Every day about 3000 children in Africa die from malaria. A new UNICEF report shows that more than half the world’s children are suffering extreme deprivations from poverty, war and HIV/AIDS.

There are about 1.8 billion people below the age of 15 in the world today. About 83% live in poverty. That’s about a billion and a half poor children world-wide. At $100 per computer that comes to $150 billion. …

Even the city of Portland is still arguing about how to make its downtown wireless. In Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, only one person in 200 has access to the Internet. Believe me, the Internet is not as ubiquitous worldwide as it is in developed countries. Only cities and large towns have it and even Internet cafes are beyond the price range of the vast majority of people.

Again I say, it is a tender notion but far from being practical. I appreciate the need for education, but I’d say people who are without food, potable water, medical care and proper shelter have more pressing needs and that the money will be better spent taking care of those problems first.

Ever since the voting results started coming in a few days ago, showing what the Liberian women had done, I’ve been unable to get one image from Bukavu [Congo] out of my mind. It is of an old woman, in her 30’s. It was almost twilight when I saw her, walking up the hill out of the city as I drove in. She carried so many logs that her chest almost seemed to touch the ground, so stooped was her back. Still, she trudged on, up the hill toward her home. Her husband was walking just in front of her. He carried nothing. Nothing in his hand, nothing on his shoulder, nothing on his back. He kept looking back at her, telling her to hurry up.

Helene Cooper in a fine op-ed essay in The New York Times.

What the Liberian women have done is elect a woman president, the first woman elected to lead an African country.

Worth it: 38%

Not worth it: 60%

No opinion: 2%

USATODAY.com

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 — something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The Washington Post

Denied last week; no wonder they didn’t want to appear under oath.

Those oil company executives better be careful, what with their pants on fire and hanging around all that gasoline and oil.

Scott Adams continues his discussion of Darwin and Intelligent Design (see below), though this is more about the inability of people to think and write clearly than it is about the issue.

Adams and his critics should read Edward O. Wilson.

Update: Adams has more.

“In a specific comparison with President Clinton, those surveyed by 48%-36% say they trust Bush less.”

— USATODAY.com

And those polled included Hillary and Laura.

Dan Froomkin sums up the current state of political affairs:

But Bush’s argument is deeply flawed. Far from being baseless, the charge that he intentionally misled the public in the run-up to war is built on a growing amount of evidence. And the longer Bush goes without refuting that evidence in detail, the more persuasive it becomes.

And his most prized talking point — that many Democrats agreed with him at the time — is problematic. Many of those Democrats did so because they believed the information the president gave them. Now they are coming to the conclusion that they shouldn’t have.

Like other Bush campaigns, this one will inevitably feature the ceaseless repetition of key sound bytes — the hope being that they will be carried, largely unchallenged, by the media — and virulent attacks by the White House on those who dare to disagree, even going so far as to question their patriotism.