Atomic Bomb

Check it out.  ¶ 9:56 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The World's 4th Largest Military Power

Blackwater.

Watch it all.

[thanks & a tip o' the tinfoil to cd]  ¶ 8:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Funeral for a Friend?

The Hubble Space Telescope is flying partly blind across the heavens, a result of a short circuit on Saturday morning in its most popular instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys.



NASA engineers reported yesterday that most of the camera’s capabilities, including the ability to take the sort of deep cosmic postcards that have inspired the public and to track the mysterious dark energy splitting the universe to the ends of time, had probably been lost for good.



In a telephone news conference, Hubble engineers and scientists said the telescope itself was in fine shape and would continue operating with its remaining instruments, which include another camera, the wide-field planetary camera 2, or wfpc2, and an infrared camera and spectrograph named Nicmos.



“Obviously, we are very disappointed,” Preston Burch, program manager for the telescope, said at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., noting that the camera had basically met its five-year design lifetime. The Hubble telescope, Mr. Burch said, still has significant science capability .

Mr. Burch and his colleagues said it was unlikely that they would be able to repair the camera during the next Hubble servicing mission, which is scheduled for September 2008. On that mission, astronauts will replace the wide-field camera with a powerful new version, wfpc3, which will extend the telescope’s vision to ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths and restore the lost capabilities. They will also install a new ultraviolet spectrograph and make many other pressing repairs.



Noting that the five days of spacewalks for that mission were already full, and that changing things to fix the camera would cost time and money, Dr. Burch said, “At first blush, this doesn’t look attractive…”

Billions if not trillions on wars for oil. Not a penny more to service the most used instrument on a very useful machine. Useful, that is, if you have natural human curiosity, think it's worthwhile knowing how the universe works, and want to accelerate human knowledge. Not so useful if you are TheoConservative, weapons maker, or In-Q-Tel/ CSC/ DynCorp head of NASA looking to please your cronies.

But of course, the onslaught of the ignorant against the 21st century continues on many fronts.  ¶ 5:52 PM 1 comments links to this post

  The NeoConservative

Pot meets kettle and calls it black.

...South Tehran is Ahmadinejad’s heartland. It is here, in the less affluent neighborhoods of the city of 14 million where he was once mayor, that he rose from the obscure end of the seven-candidate roster in 2005, only to become one of the most popular figures in the Muslim world. Because liberal-minded Iranians boycotted the 2005 presidential election, and because Ahmadinejad so adeptly played the populist card, the militants, the unemployed and the cultural conservatives of neighborhoods like this one were in the driver’s seat, steering the politics of this crucial nation while their opponents warned of their presumed doctrinaire views and political naïveté.

Early on, Ahmadinejad’s faction was expected to win last month’s elections handily. But the results contradicted the conventional wisdom about the Iranian electorate. The president put forward his own slate of candidates for the city councils. It was trounced. By some reckonings, reformists won two-fifths of the council seats and even dominated in some cities, including Kerman and Arak. Some conservative city-council candidates did well, particularly in Tehran, but they were not the conservatives associated with Ahmadinejad: rather, they belonged to the rival conservative faction of the current Tehran mayor, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf. And most significant, the vote for Rafsanjani for the Assembly of Experts dwarfed that of Mesbah-Yazdi by nearly two to one. By mid-January, Ahmadinejad’s isolation even within his own faction was complete: 150 of 290 members of parliament, including many of Ahmadinejad’s onetime allies, signed a letter criticizing the president’s economic policies for failing to stanch unemployment and inflation. A smaller group also blamed Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory foreign-policy rhetoric for the United Nations Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran. As if that were not enough, an editorial in Jomhouri Eslami, a newspaper that reflects the views of the supreme leader, accused the president of using the nuclear issue to distract the public from his failed policies. Ahmadinejad’s behavior was diminishing popular support for the nuclear program, the editorial warned. The Iranian political system seems to be restoring its equilibrium by showing an extremist president the limits of his power. But is it an equilibrium that can hold?

In part, last month’s election results reflected the complexity of Ahmadinejad’s skeptical, conditional and diverse constituency. They also demonstrated his isolation within the powerful conservative establishment, whose politics, however opaque, are determinative. At its center, Khamenei commands a faction known as the traditional conservatives. No elected leader can serve, let alone execute a policy agenda, without the acquiescence of the supreme leader and his associates. But was Ahmadinejad one of the leader’s associates? Or was he, like his predecessor, Khatami, something of a political rival? The answer to this question should determine the extent to which Ahmadinejad’s foreign-policy extremism and authoritarian tendencies are taken seriously as a political program. But it is a puzzle that has vexed political analysts since the president took office in August 2005, bringing with him a faction that was largely new to the post-revolutionary political scene. Composed partly of military and paramilitary elements, partly of extremist clerics like Mesbah-Yazdi and partly of inexperienced new conservative politicians, those in Ahmadinejad’s faction are often called “neoconservatives.” But to the extent that they have an ideology, it is less new than old, harking back to the early days of the Islamic republic. Since that time, the same elite has largely run Iranian politics, though it has divided itself into competing factions, and the act of wielding power has mellowed many hard-liners into pragmatists. Ahmadinejad’s faction, on the other hand, came into power speaking the language of the past but with the zeal of the untried...

Born in 1934, Mesbah-Yazdi is an éminence grise among the ayatollahs of Qom, but age has not mellowed him. In the last decade he has become famous less for his learned philosophical exegeses (he posts his entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy on his Web site) than for his jeremiads at Friday prayers against popular sovereignty, free speech, women’s rights and Islamic reform. Public execution and flogging are “a basic principle of Islam,” Mesbah-Yazdi has said, and the government should regulate the content of speech “just as it checks the distribution of adulterated or contaminated foodstuffs.” Because “Mesbah” sounds like the Farsi word for crocodile, he is known by his critics as Ayatollah Crocodile. (A cartoonist was once imprisoned for depicting him as a reptile, shedding crocodile tears as he strangled a dissident writer with his tail.)

At Ahmadinejad’s invitation, members of Mesbah-Yazdi’s Haqqani circle occupy several key government posts. But before Ahmadinejad came to power, they had been pushed mostly to the margins of Iranian politics, where they complained bitterly about the efforts of the reformist Khatami and his colleagues to advance their agenda through the elected branches of government. To the Haqqani scholars, it seemed that the reformists were challenging the doctrine of velayat-i-faqih, which is based on the sovereign power of the chief jurist, the supreme leader. “We shall wait to see what place these foxes who claim to be the supporters of reform will occupy in hell,” Mesbah-Yazdi proclaimed. If Iranians believed in their supreme leader as the agent of God, second-guessing his judgment through elections was tantamount to holding a referendum on whether or not Damavand was the highest peak in Iran. What if 51 percent of the public said that it was not? “It doesn’t matter what the people think,” Mesbah-Yazdi was quoted as saying. “The people are ignorant sheep.” He has also said, “Islam was the government of God, not the government of the people.”

...Young Ahmadinejad led a politically and religiously conservative Islamist student group during the Islamic Revolution, the writers claim. When the leftist Islamist students proposed seizing the American Embassy in 1979, Ahmadinejad opposed the action as imprudent, but he suggested that if they went ahead with it, they should seize the Soviet Embassy as well. His plan rejected, Ahmadinejad found himself excluded from historic events and spurned by the Islamic left, which was at that time a powerful faction within the regime. His opposition to that faction ossified into a vendetta.

Soon after Khomeini’s death, the Islamic left lost the factional battle for dominance. Its members wandered eight years in the political wilderness before returning as the reform movement. That, too, Ahmadinejad was anxious to crush. In that aspiration he would have found ample common ground with the Haqqani circle.

As president, Ahmadinejad looked to the extreme right rather than seeking allies among the traditional conservatives, and in so doing, he exposed himself politically. “They were very arrogant,” Hadian said of Ahmadinejad and his camp. “They didn’t want to make any compromises. He has stood against the entire political structure in Iran, not inviting any of them, even the conservatives, to be partners. You don’t see them in the cabinet; you don’t see them in political positions.”

And for that there was a price to be paid. This fall, Rafsanjani, who had suffered a humiliating defeat at Ahmadinejad’s hands in the presidential election of 2005, was reportedly persuaded to run again for the Assembly of Experts by the supreme leader or people close to him. Rafsanjani is a divisive figure in Iranian politics. He is widely perceived as a kingmaker, the power behind the rise of Khamenei to the position of supreme leader and that of Khatami to the presidency. But though he remains highly respected among clerics, Rafsanjani is not a beloved figure in Iranian public life. During his presidency, he adopted an economic liberalization program that involved extremely unpopular austerity measures; meanwhile, through pistachio exports, he had himself become one of the richest men in Iran. Political and social repression did not ease until Khatami, his successor, came into office.

Nonetheless, in the Assembly of Experts elections in December, Rafsanjani emerged as the compromise candidate of the reformists and traditional conservatives. One reformist activist described him to me as the very last line of defense against the extreme right. And Rafsanjani delivered a staggering blow, winning nearly twice as many votes as Mesbah-Yazdi. The neoconservatives, it seemed, had been slapped down much the same way the reformists had: the traditional conservatives had decided that the threat they posed was intolerable, and the voters had decided that the president associated with them could not deliver on his promises...

The Iranian economy has been mismanaged at least since the revolution, and to fix it would require measures no populist would be willing to take. Under Ahmadinejad, inflation has risen; foreign investors have scorned Iranian markets, fearing political upheaval or foreign invasion; the Iranian stock market has plummeted; Iranian capital has fled to Dubai. Voters I talked to pointed to the prices of ordinary foodstuffs when they wanted to explain their negative feelings about the government. According to Iranian news sources, from January to late August 2006 the prices of fruits and vegetables in urban areas rose by 20 percent. A month later, during Ramadan, the price of fruit reportedly doubled while that of chicken rose 10 percent in mere days. Housing prices in Tehran have reached a record high. Unemployment is still widespread. And Ahmadinejad’s approval rating, as calculated by the official state television station, had dipped to 35 percent in October.

Iran is not a poor country. It is highly urbanized and modern, with a sizable middle class. Oil revenues, which Iran has in abundance, should be channeling plenty of hard currency into the state’s coffers, and in fact the economy’s overall rate of growth is healthy and rising. But as Parvin Alizadeh, an economist at London Metropolitan University, explained to me, what ultimately matters is how the state spends its influx of wealth. The Iranian government has tried to create jobs swiftly and pacify the people by spending the oil money on new government-run projects. But these projects are not only overmanned and inefficient, like much of the country’s bloated and technologically backward public sector; they also increase the demand for consumer goods and services, driving up inflation.

Ahmadinejad has continued this trend. He has generated considerable personal good will in poorer communities, but hardly anyone I asked could honestly say that their lives had gotten better during his presidency. He fought to lower interest rates, which drove up lending, leading to inflation and capital flight. The government cannot risk infuriating the public with the austerity measures that would be required in order to solve its deep-rooted economic problems. But as long as its short-term fixes continue to fail, the government will go on being unpopular. The last two presidents have lost their constituencies over this issue. And so officials seek to distract people from their economic woes with ideological posturing and anti-Western rhetoric. Not only has this lost its cachet with much of the Iranian public, it also serves to compound Iran’s economic problems by blackening its image abroad. “Iran has not sorted out its basic problem, which is to be accepted in the international community as a respectable government,” Alizadeh said. “Investors do not take it seriously. This is a political crisis, not an economic crisis.”

For a Western traveler in Iran these days, it is hard to avoid a feeling of cognitive dissonance. From a distance, the Islamic republic appears to be at its zenith. But from the street level, Iran’s grand revolutionary experiment is beset with fragility. The state is in a sense defined by its contradictions, both constitutional and economic. It cannot be truly stable until it resolves them, and yet if it tries to do so, it may not survive.

  ¶ 8:40 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Nemesis by Misdirection

There is a striking likeness in the expressions of George W Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran as they confront each other over the issues of uranium enrichment and dominance in the Middle East. It falls somewhere between the chastened and defiant playground bully.

This is unsurprising: though not political equivalents, the two are really quite similar. Both had little experience of government or international affairs before being carried to power on a tide of populist, religious conservatism. Neither travelled abroad much, but they both had certain views about the world and the destiny of their nations. They had all the answers, yet there was also a dangerous lack of seriousness in them which has now earned them both the scorn of their people and rebuffs from their elders.

There is a striking likeness in the expressions of George W Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran as they confront each other over the issues of uranium enrichment and dominance in the Middle East. It falls somewhere between the chastened and defiant playground bully.

This is unsurprising: though not political equivalents, the two are really quite similar. Both had little experience of government or international affairs before being carried to power on a tide of populist, religious conservatism. Neither travelled abroad much, but they both had certain views about the world and the destiny of their nations. They had all the answers, yet there was also a dangerous lack of seriousness in them which has now earned them both the scorn of their people and rebuffs from their elders.

We think of Bush as being the more unpopular of the two. His approval ratings are at the level of Nixon's just before he left the White House. After an unconvincing performance in the State of the Union Address, his plans for the troop surge in Iraq were rejected by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and may now be voted down by the entire Senate. Senior Republican senators such as Chuck Hagel and John Warner are furious that sensible suggestions contained in the Iraq Study Group Report have been ignored. Although the President looked receptive when the report was delivered to him by James Baker, there has been no progress in policy, no evidence of any kind of deeper thinking in the White House. Nothing except that familiar foggy, narrow-eyed truculence of Bush Junior in a tight spot.

This would be a depressing but for similar difficulties experienced by Ahmadinejad over the last few weeks. Just as the senior Republican elders have turned on Bush, so Iran's religious leaders are moving to restrain their President. They criticise his bellicose foreign policy and the exceptionally poor record on promised reforms at home. There is a sense of embarrassment among sophisticated Iranians about their President's pronouncements, which surely rings a bell with Americans.

The most important sign-off disenchantment came in Jomhouri Islami, the newspaper owned by Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which said in an editorial: 'Turning the nuclear issue into a propaganda issue gives the impression that to cover up the flaws in government you are exaggerating its importance.'

The paper also suggested that the President should speak about the nuclear issue less, stop provoking aggressive powers like the United States and concentrate on the daily needs of the people - 'those who voted for you on your promises'. Two weeks ago, 150 legislators sent a letter to Ahmadinejad openly attacking him for missing his budget deadline and blaming him for inflation and rising unemployment.

A loss of confidence in both men at home is important because it offers us a brief opportunity to assert diplomacy over the habits of rhetoric and escalation. Although UN nuclear experts suggest the Iranians are at least five years from developing a bomb and delivery system, the Iranians are due to open a large uranium enrichment plant within a matter of weeks. If this goes ahead, a peaceful solution will be much harder to find; to decommission this new facility will require a loss of face for Ahmadinejad...

And this comment, the first of many good ones:

Does anyone seriously believe that Iran would launch a nuclear missile at Israel? And kill not only Jews but hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Muslims at the same time? Israel's neighbours would hardly rejoice in such an attack either as they would be affected by radioactive fallout on their territory. The idea is preposterous - why does anyone believe it?

About the only people who believe it also believe this sorry excuse for a human being.

Or this one:

In his State of the Union address last night, President Bush presented an arguably misleading and often flawed description of "the enemy" that the United States faces overseas, lumping together disparate groups with opposing ideologies to suggest that they have a single-minded focus in attacking the United States.

Under Bush's rubric, a country such as Iran -- which enjoys diplomatic representation and billions of dollars in trade with major European countries -- is lumped together with al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat," Bush said, referring to the different branches of the Muslim religion.

Similarly, Bush asserted that Shia Hezbollah, which has won seats in the Lebanese government, is a terrorist group "second only to al-Qaeda in the American lives it has taken." Bush is referring to attacks nearly a quarter-century ago on a U.S. embassy and a Marine barracks when the United States intervened in Lebanon's civil war by shelling Hezbollah strongholds. Hezbollah has evolved into primarily an anti-Israeli militant organization -- it fought a war with Israel last summer -- but the European Union does not list it as a terrorist organization.

At one point, Bush catalogued what he described as advances in the quest for freedom in the Middle East during 2005 -- such as the departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon and elections in Iraq. Then, Bush asserted, "a thinking enemy watched all of these scenes, adjusted their tactics and in 2006 they struck back." But his description of the actions of "the enemy" tried to tie together a series of diplomatic and military setbacks that had virtually no connection to one another, from an attack on a Sunni mosque in Iraq to the assassination of Maronite Lebanese political figure...

In the two of the most liberal and diverse societies in the Middle East -- Lebanon and the Palestinian territories -- events have undercut Bush's argument in the past year. Hezbollah has gained power and strength in Lebanon, partly at the ballot box. Meanwhile, Palestinians ousted the Fatah party -- which wants to pursue peace with Israel -- from the legislature in favor of Hamas, which is committed to Israel's destruction and is considered a terrorist organization by the State Department.

In fact, many of the countries that Bush considers "moderate" -- such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- are autocratic dictatorships rated among the worst of the "not free" nations by the nonpartisan Freedom House. Their Freedom House ratings are virtually indistinguishable from Cuba, Belarus and Burma, which Bush last night listed as nations in desperate need of freedom...

The problem is, of course, there is an issue even more likely to defuse the World War than the disconcerting tendency towards democracy in the Axis of Evil and totalitarianism among the Faithful:

Iran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium, the material used to make nuclear bombs, are in chaos and the country is still years from mastering the required technology.

Iran's uranium enrichment programme has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved...

  ¶ 5:21 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Afraid of the Sky



Dear Leader just can't get any respect these days. Even Pootie-Pute is telling him the truth:

NEW DELHI (AP) – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday criticized U.S. plans for space-based weapons, saying it was the reason behind a recent Chinese anti-satellite weapons test.

Asked about the Chinese test at a news conference in New Delhi after a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Putin avoided directly criticizing the Chinese, saying only that Russia was against putting any weapons in space.

Instead Putin chose to issue a warning to the U.S. on the dangers of the militarization of space.

“At the same time, I would like to note that China was not the first country to conduct such a test,'' Putin said.

The Jan. 11 test, first reported last week by the magazine Aviation Week, destroyed a defunct Chinese weather satellite by hitting it with a warhead launched on board a ballistic missile.

“The first such test was conducted back in the late 1980s and we also hear it today about the U.S. military circles considering plans of militarization of space. We must not let the genie out of the bottle,'' Putin said.

U.S. President George W. Bush signed an order in October tacitly asserting the U.S. right to space weapons and opposing the development of treaties or other measures restricting them.

Bush has also pushed an ambitious program of space-based missile defense and the Pentagon is working on missiles, ground lasers and other technology to shoot down satellites...

Of course, Dear Leader has his own Battlestar Galactica of space weapons planned. A good recent official lowdown can be found, as usual, at Defense Tech. But these are communications systems, important for intelligence and integration. The real space weapons, UAVs, the space fighters, the rods from god, the anti satellites, the lasers, and the microwave weapons that can be used optimally in space, aren't discussed. You can find out more about them by searching Defense Tech, or this site, if you're interested.

But more on the Chinese situation: basically, Beijing says, it was none of our business.

PARIS — The Chinese government confirmed Jan. 23 that it had sent a missile to destroy one of its own satellites but insisted the test should not be viewed as a hostile act.

In a press briefing in Beijing, Liu Jianchao, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, reiterated that China "has never participated and will never participate in any arms race in outer space," Liu said, according to excerpts of his remarks provided by China's Xinhua News Agency. "This test was not directed at any country and does not pose a threat to any country."

Liu also said China had informed the United States and Japan of the anti-satellite test after the fact.

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Jan 22 that the Chinese Foreign Ministry had discussed the anti-satellite test in Beijing with Christopher R. Hill, assistant State Department secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, who is on a previously scheduled trip in East Asia...

...The U.S. Air Force has conducted similar anti-satellite tests in the past, but deputy U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey on Jan. 19 said U.S. policy has changed since the last U.S. anti-satellite demonstration in 1985...

Pefectly clear to me. The Pentagon's clutching its pearls because China can do what it could 20 years ago. Somewhere Dick Cheney huddles in his bunker afraid of the sky, because he knows despite his treasure trove of horror weapons America can't save its own cities like it could 20 years ago much less intimidate China.  ¶ 9:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Denial of History

Perhaps the worst thing about Obama is that he acts as if the divide in this country is a new phenomenon he can blame on his parent's generation alone.

He's made comments to this effect in The New York Pravda and elsewhere.

In his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama is critical of the style and the politics of the 60s, when the psyches of most of his potential rivals for the White House were formed. He writes that the politics of that era were highly personal, burrowing into every interaction between youth and authority and among peers. The battles moved to Washington in the 1990s and endure today, he says.

“In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

Mr. Obama says he recognizes that the flashpoints of the 60s — war, racism, inequality, the relations between the sexes — still animate American politics and society and remain largely unresolved. And he acknowledges, as a child of a white Kansan mother and black Kenyan father, that his own prominence and prospects would have been impossible without the struggles of those who marched in Selma and Washington. But he argues that America faces new challenges that require a new political paradigm.

Aside from the issue of asking, "What's the fraking matter with Kansas?", let me reiterate that those that forget history are doomed to repeat it.

The cultural divide in this country goes as far back as Patriots and Tories. The issue of exploitation and manipulation go to the very embryonic conception of this country: most of the first immigrants were brought here as indentured servants, and when that didn't work out so well, slavery became the economic base of the most habitable part of the country.

The Guilded Age was a product of the same robber barons, who basically wanted all the perks of the Old South without having to bother with the overhead of really holding slaves.

Even Roosevelt's own family had some fault in this. His realization that he had to see beyond the traditions of his own class came from the understanding that their class warfare was destroying the base of their prosperity: the American worker.

Obama's tendency to ignore the reality of the long-term corporatism of the Bush crime family makes him a most unsuitable Presidential candidate, and ensures the Rovian promotion of Clinton/ Obama DINOcratic ticket in 2008.

[Thanks to Lambert for the tip.]  ¶ 6:42 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Cheney's Solution to Global Warming

It's been covered here before. It's Big Science about to go awry in a very big way, fitting for Big Time himself. Since they don't want to stop the profitable process causing global warming, they figure, why not quench the only source of warmth in the world?

This idea is so bad I don't know where to begin:

The US government wants the world's scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be "important insurance" against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday.

The US has also attempted to steer the UN report, prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), away from conclusions that would support a new worldwide climate treaty based on binding targets to reduce emissions - as sought by Tony Blair. It has demanded a draft of the report be changed to emphasise the benefits of voluntary agreements and to include criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, the existing treaty which the US administration opposes.

The final IPCC report, written by experts from across the world, will underpin international negotiations to devise a new emissions treaty to succeed Kyoto, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft of the report last year and invited to comment.

The US response, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, says the idea of interfering with sunlight should be included in the summary for policymakers, the prominent chapter at the front of each IPCC report. It says: "Modifying solar radiance may be an important strategy if mitigation of emissions fails. Doing the R&D to estimate the consequences of applying such a strategy is important insurance that should be taken out. This is a very important possibility that should be considered."

Why does every solution these guys come up with involve more destruction of the natural world?

Why is it this seems likely to lower the possibility of ever using the Sun as an alternate energy source?

And finally, why does this seem just the kind of answer a Dark Lord would choose?  ¶ 9:42 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Pfired Pfree Pfalling

Just ask the Pfizer people- the ex-Pfizer people- in Ann Arbor about how that Pfree market globalization thing is working to improve life for everyone.

Their ex-CEO walked off legally with $180M severance package. It's good to recall Peter Rost's warning about them after he got fired for wanting to do honest business with the government:

...I’m also uninsured for the first time in my life and I have to pay full price for drugs I used to get for free, just like over 40 million other
uninsured Americans. I have to admit that when I started fighting for cheaper drugs for the uninsured I never expected to become part of that group myself.

Contrary to many others, however, I do have a choice. In accordance with federal COBRA law, Pfizer has offered me the opportunity to continue my health care coverage for 18 months. The cost of doing that, straight out of my own pocket would be $15,269 per year.

That’s a shocking amount of money for simple insurance. You know, there used to be a time when insurance meant paying a small amount of money to avoid a big cost later on. But $15,269—how many people can afford to pay that? And even if they can—who’d want to pay that amount?

Ladies and gentlemen. The system we have today isn’t just broke. The system is utterly and completely sick and our weakest citizens are paying the price, every day. And here I get to the important point. I can’t talk about what’s wrong with the drug companies without also talking about what’s wrong with our current system. It’s a system that quite frankly is built on greed.

You know the definition of greed? Greed is an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than someone needs or deserves. Greed is not a corporate executive who builds an organization such as Microsoft and happens to get rich. Greed is coal miners killed because of safety violations. Greed is unaffordable drugs. Greed is underperforming CEO’s with big pay packages.

Let me give you a real-life example of greed. There’s a company where the CEO has secured about a $100 million retirement package, he’s fired 16,385 employees, he also got a 72% pay increase to $16.6 million. And of course this would be great if he had actually increased shareholder value. That’s his job. The only problem is that the company’s stock price has drastically underperformed its peers and dropped 40% over the last five year—twice as much as the AMEX Pharmaceutical Index. So he didn’t do a great job, and still got all that money for himself. The company’s name is Pfizer.

Greed. It’s pretty easy to recognize. And our society is built on it. We
have removed all sense of decency; we have pulled out all the stops.
According to the New York Times average worker pay has remained flat since 1990—sixteen long years—at around $27,000, after adjusting for inflation, while CEO compensation has QUADRUPLED, from $2.82 million to $11.8 million.

So the CEO’s made sure their million dollar compensation increased by 400% while the workers saw virtually no increase. What’s wrong with this? What is wrong is that the CEO’s have been put in a position in which they can basically use our American companies as their personal piggy banks. They have unlimited power, they put in their own board of directors and pay consultants. And then they start robbing our corporations. And this is perfectly legal as long as they get someone else to sign their check. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has remained at $5.15 an hour since September 1, 1997. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, the value of the minimum wage is at its second lowest level since 1955.

And don’t think congress isn’t helping these very rich men. Imagine you get an award from your employer, taking a trip on an airplane to a vacation spot in Cancun. Of course you’ll have to pay tax on the full value of your airfare. But if the CEO flies to the same spot on the corporate jet, at fifty times your cost, he doesn’t have to pay more tax than you did. This is a law courtesy of U.S. Congress, elected by our people. In short, our country, our corporations, our future, is being stolen away by rich men in handmade suits and our elected representatives are helping them.

Anyone heard of the Abramoff affair? Mr. Abramoff's actions have prompted Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher to state, “Government officials and government action are not for sale.” According to the Baltimore Sun, “This was an outrageous lie. Just because the excessive chutzpah and greed of Jack-the-Corrupter Abramoff and his gang got them nabbed does not negate the political reality that government officials and government action have been, still are, and in all likelihood will remain for sale.”

There is nothing cheaper to buy than a congressman or two; or a President. Let me explain; every year we see these tallies of millions spent on lobbying. The pharmaceutical industry in 2003 spent $143 million on lobbying activities according to the Center for Public Integrity. At that time, there were 1,274 registered pharmaceutical lobbyists in Washington, D.C. During the 2004 election cycle, the drug industry contributed $1 million to President Bush.

Did you hear that? One Million!! Is that all it takes to buy a President? You’re asking what’s wrong with the drug industry, when you can buy a president for a million bucks? What industry wouldn’t buy him for that fire sale price? My point is that for an industry that makes $500 billion on a global basis, spending just one million on a President is pocket change. It’s nothing. And hey, just to hedge their bet the drug industry also spent half a million on Kerry. Clearly the drug industry wanted Bush to win, but if Kerry won, they wanted him to be indebted to them too. There is no free lunch, no money without strings, not even for a President.

And what did the drug industry get for this money? Well, they certainly were able to stop cheaper drugs. This money was well spent. It stopped legalized import of cheaper drugs and instead we got a new Medicare drug program. This $720 billion law includes $139 billion in profits to drug manufactures and $46 billion in subsidies to HMOs and private insurance plans. The program has been such a disaster for our poor that at least twenty-four states have enacted emergency measures to ensure access to medications in the last couple of weeks.

That’s what a million dollars buys in Washington. It is probably not surprising that Democratic Leader Pelosi, yesterday asked for a congressional investigation into the role played by the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm closely linked to Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, in the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug Act.

They wrote, “The Medicare Prescription Drug Act, which has caused so much confusion and havoc since January 1, was a product of a corrupt legislative process.”

What a world. And of course the drug industry plays along in this corrupt
reality. They’re corporations; they’re only here to make money. Lot’s of
money. That’s what a corporation does. Just like a lion eats other animals.

But we have a government to makes sure there is a balance in the nature of economics. That the lions don’t eat all the sheep. Only as many as they need for survival. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have lions; we should have lots of healthy lions. I’m simply saying that in the nature of economics there needs to be balance. Reality, however, is that the lions have bribed the caretakers in the Zoo called American politics, and get to feast on however many sheep and lamb they want. And the sheep; our poor, are paying for this with their lives, every day.

The American democracy has been stolen by the lions; our new class of Robber Barons—the CEO’s of our big corporations. A political system dependent on charity from corporations managed by rich men isolated from the masses in chauffeur driven limousines and private jets, with $100 million retirement packages is not a true democracy. It is a kleptocracy...

Pfizer bought out the Ann arbor operation because they'd developed drugs like Lipitor and Troglitizone. But Lipitor's patent is run out, and troglitizone isn't the wonder drug against diabetes they'd hoped for. Now the whole Ann Arbor operation's shutting down, thrown away like a used tissue.

Of course, the VP in charge of soothing the fevered masses while kissing up to the latest CEO sez it's a Wonderful Move to Increase "Our" Entrepreneurial Competitiveness.

Don't get me wrong. The VP's been a good Joe, giving money to the community here and trying to be decent. But, you know, he's kept his job, and it's a choppy sea.

Pfizer's made its billions not by doing basic research, but by buying smaller companies that have invented new drugs. And cleaning them out and closing them down.

If it cuts like a cutlass, it's piracy to me.  ¶ 9:48 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Mouthpieces of the Masters of the Universe

Who's behind our annointed frontrunners?

...Hedge fund money, which now exceeds $1 trillion, has emerged in the last several years as a potentially powerful force in politics, as underscored by the significant role it is playing in the presidential aspirations of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani. During the 2006 election cycle, executives who work at the 30 biggest hedge funds made $2.8 million in contributions to political candidates or party committees, almost double the amount in 2000.

Yet it is not just the money they donate directly that makes people in hedge funds attractive to campaigns. They also offer access to other potential donors in the financial world, which in recent election cycles has become one of the biggest sources of political contributions. That pipeline has made it easy for well-connected candidates like Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Giuliani and Senator John McCain to consider forgoing public funding. (Mrs. Clinton has done so; Mr. McCain is expected to opt out; and Mr. Giuliani has not yet addressed the topic.)

And top candidates for the 2008 campaign are expected to raise a lot of money quickly — at least $100 million each by the end of this year by some estimates.

“Are hedge fund guys going to be happy with their art collections and their houses in Greenwich or are they going to take the next step?” said Byron R. Wien, the investment strategist at Pequot Capital. “As Hollywood once invaded politics, you will see the same with hedge funds.”

Money from Wall Street has long been a factor in Washington and has tended to flow, with a policy agenda, to the ascendant political party. Giving by people in hedge funds, on the other hand, tends to be more personal and ideological. Some of the most aggressive donors have been Democratic supporters like George Soros, David E. Shaw of D. E. Shaw and James H. Simons at Renaissance Technologies, as well as younger executives like Thomas F. Steyer at Farallon and Marc Lasry at Avenue Capital, all of whom gave generously during the 2006 election cycle.

While hedge fund money appears to be tilting toward Democrats of late, Republican donors like Julian H. Robertson Jr., the founder of Tiger Management, who has given more than $700,000 over the last three cycles, and Bruce Kovner at Caxton Associates have backed their party’s candidates and causes.

Still, compared with the billions of dollars that hedge fund magnates have spent on art, mansions and other extravagances, these political donations are a pittance, held in check by federal finance laws that limit personal contributions to $2,100 and by a general reluctance to step into the public limelight.

But with the rapid growth of their money and stature, an increasing number of the hedge fund wealthy are not just putting their money to work, they are forging personal and professional ties with a generation of politicians who have come to spend as much time raising money as they do drafting legislation...

The connections can take different shapes and forms. For John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate, the 14 months he spent as a paid senior adviser at Fortress Investment, a $29.7 billion hedge fund and private equity firm, helped him to bond with the fund’s liberal-leaning executives, several of whom have given money to Mr. Edwards.

As to what Mr. Edwards, a trial lawyer with no previous financial markets experience, did at Fortress, an adviser to the candidate said that Mr. Edwards “advised on where there might be investment opportunities and where he saw the global economy going.” Mr. Edwards resigned from Fortress last month before declaring his candidacy.

And Avenue Capital, a $12 billion fund run by Mr. Lasry, a prominent financial supporter of the Clintons, hired their daughter, Chelsea, last year.

Mr. Singer and Ms. Perry represent different sides of the same coin. Mr. Singer, 62, is the founding partner of Elliott Associates, a $7 billion hedge fund with a conservative, risk-averse bias that has been in business since 1977, making it one of the oldest funds around. A reserved, private man who would answer questions only via e-mail, Mr. Singer is a self-described conservative libertarian who has given millions of dollars to Republican organizations that emphasize a strong military and support Israel.

They include Progress for America ($1.5 million in contributions), a political advocacy group set up to advance the policies of the Bush administration; Swift Vets and P.O.W.’s for Truth; and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which includes Vice President Dick Cheney and Richard N. Perle, an adviser to the former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, among its past and current advisory directors.

Mr. Singer said that his support for Mr. Giuliani sprang from an appreciation of Mr. Giuliani’s work as mayor. “Rudy’s stewardship is primarily responsible for making New York one of the greatest cities of the world,” he said.

A trustee at the Manhattan Institute, the conservative policy group that has been a source of many of Mr. Giuliani’s core policies, like welfare reform and a focus on quality-of-life issues, Mr. Singer sees Mr. Giuliani as the “strongest, most conservative candidate in the race.”

While Kenneth G. Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot, held Mr. Giuliani’s first public fund-raiser last month, a campaign strategy notebook that was leaked to The Daily News of New York this month pointed to Mr. Singer as the locus of Mr. Giuliani’s fund-raising network. “I will be raising money for Rudy in professional and personal circles,” he said.

Asked to describe his political philosophy, Mr. Singer says his conservatism dates back to Barry Goldwater and is founded on free enterprise and a belief that the government should “not be taking from one person and giving to another.” He abhors what he calls social engineering and he has financially supported state propositions that advocate preventing state agencies from collecting racial information.

He believes in the doctrine of American exceptionalism and is wary about United States involvement in “international organizations and alliances.” As for the war in Iraq, he said, “America finds itself at an early stage of a drawn-out existential struggle with radical strains of pan-national Islamists.”

In an industry known for its secrecy, Mr. Singer keeps a particularly low profile. He does all that he can to keep his picture from appearing in the media and does virtually no marketing for his fund, which had a return of 17 percent last year...

A graduate of the University of Rochester and Harvard Law School, Mr. Singer practiced law before he began to dabble in what was then an obscure investment strategy called convertible arbitrage. By buying convertible bonds and selling the attached stock short — or betting that its price would fall — he realized that he could achieve a decent investment return in up and down markets.

Steeled by the bear markets of the 1970s, he worries that managers may have become punch-drunk from a surfeit of happy investment times. “I am struck by the size of the hedge fund community and the amount of money being managed by people who have little experience in risk management and adverse market environments,” he said.

In contrast to Mr. Singer’s quiet approach, Ms. Perry’s embrace of Mrs. Clinton has taken on a more celebratory cast. She has tapped New York’s art world for fund-raising parties and opened up her Long Island house, in Sag Harbor, for gatherings for the senator.

Over the last three election cycles, Ms. Perry, 48, has given more than $1 million to Democrats, putting her in the most elite tier of Democratic donors. Given that she wrote her first check in 1998, when she was a stay-at-home mother, it has been a rapid evolution and one that has been fueled by her belief that there are not enough women senators in Washington...

While her husband, Richard, is also a Democrat, Ms. Perry points out that her giving and fund-raising are driven by her own politics, not his. Still, he, too, is a supporter of Mrs. Clinton.

“He thinks she is one of the smartest people he has ever met,” Ms. Perry said.

But it is her own largess that gives her a sense of pride. “Not a lot of women write their own checks,” she said.

Umm, you don't either, Lisa. But you certainly think you do.  ¶ 9:11 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Komodo Kristmas

MANCHESTER, England - A British zoo announced Wednesday the virgin birth of five Komodo dragons, giving scientists new hope for the captive breeding of the endangered species.

In an evolutionary twist, the newborns’ eight-year-old mother Flora shocked staff at Chester Zoo in northern England when she became pregnant without ever having a male partner or even being exposed to the opposite sex.

“Flora is oblivious to the excitement she has caused but we are delighted to say she is now a mum and dad,” said a delighted Kevin Buley, the zoo’s curator of lower vertebrates and invertebrates.

The shells began cracking last week, after an eight-month gestation period, which culminated with the arrival on Tuesday of the fifth black and yellow colored dragon.

The dragons are between 15.5 and 17.5 inches and weigh between 3.5 and 5.3 ounces, said Buley, who leads the zoo’s expert care team.

He said the reptiles are in good health and enjoying a diet of crickets and locusts.

Other reptile species reproduce asexually in a process known as parthenogenesis. But Flora’s virginal conception, and that of another Komodo dragon earlier this year at the London Zoo, are the first time it has been documented in a Komodo dragon.

The evolutionary breakthrough could have far-reaching consequences for endangered species.

Captive breeding could ensure the survival of the world’s largest lizards, with fewer than 4,000 Komodos left in the wild.

Scientists hope the discovery will pave the way to finding other species capable of self fertilization.

While it wasn’t unusual for female dragons to lay eggs without mating, scientists understood they were witnessing something important when they realized Flora’s eggs had been fertilized.

DNA paternity tests confirmed the lack of male input, although the brood are not exact clones of their mother.

  ¶ 10:19 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Strategery of War

In No Country Larger Than Virginia – No Nation At Peace With Its Neighbors, Evening Pilgrim has captured the essence of the corporate NeoCon plan in the Middle East.

The one they never talk about.

Chaos is their plan, and it likely to be their reward, too.  ¶ 12:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Fronted Runners

Let's screw up the Presidential $election process altogether, she says:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 — The public financing system for presidential campaigns, a post-Watergate initiative hailed for decades as the best way to rid politics of the corrupting influence of money, may have quietly died over the weekend.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York became the first candidate since the program began in 1976 to forgo public financing for both the primary and the general election because of the spending limits that come with the federal money. By declaring her confidence that she could raise far more than the roughly $150 million the system would provide for the 2008 presidential primaries and general election, Mrs. Clinton makes it difficult for other serious candidates to participate in the system without putting themselves at a significant disadvantage.

Officials of the Federal Election Commission and advisers to several campaigns say they expect the two candidates who reach Election Day 2008 will raise more than $500 million apiece. Including money raised by other primary candidates, the total spent on the presidential election could easily exceed $1 billion.

People involved in the Republican primary campaign of Senator John McCain of Arizona say he, too, is beginning to seek private donations for the primary and general elections, albeit with the option of returning them. A longtime proponent of campaign finance change, Mr. McCain has recently removed his name as a co-sponsor of a bill to expand the presidential public financing program.

Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, another Republican primary contender, has already decided to forgo public financing for the primaries. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a rival to Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic nomination, declined to comment, as did spokesmen for several other candidates.

In a sense, Mrs. Clinton was merely confirming what many in Washington already knew: that the public financing system has failed to keep pace with the torrents of money flowing toward the presidential elections. In 2004, President Bush and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, each opted out of the system for the primaries but not the general election. By accepting the public financing, they had to agree not to raise or spend any private money for the period after their nominating conventions.

But when Mr. Bush raised some $270 million, and Mr. Kerry about $235 million, it became clear that major-party candidates could raise far more from private donors than from the public system...

So to the devil with the public system designed to end campaign corruption; after all, the corrupt have figured out how to win the last few presidential $elections in spite of it. The Clintons, the self-proclaimed bastions of the progressive liberals in America, once again have shown that they do an awfully good job of progressing the neoconservative agenda.

Jeff Cohen notices something odd here:

Prominent pundits seem ecstatic over Hillary Clinton's entry into the presidential race just days after Barack Obama's media-created candidacy became official. Media talking heads are having so much fun lately they don't seem to notice that our political system is failing to address ever-worsening problems: social, environmental, fiscal and imperial.

Indeed, our country's political decline in recent decades has been abetted by the decline in mainstream media. The same media outlets that were complicit in the disastrous Iraq War are bent on turning politics into an insular celebrity club in which only they get to anoint front-runners.

If the torch of leadership passes from Bush I to Clinton I to Bush II to Clinton II, it will be a loss for our country - but a victory for a corrupt Beltway press corps that abhors fresh ideas, especially those that challenge its power and privilege. It was a frightened national press corps that vilified the netroots supporters of Democratic outsider Ned Lamont in defense of warhorse Joe Lieberman.

For the coming election season to be fact-based and reality-based instead of just power-based, independent media (online and off) will have to play a bigger role in shaping the debate and correcting the record. For example, a recent San Francisco Chronicle news report (headlined "Obama Emerges as Clinton's Rival for Dems' Left") asserted that Hillary Clinton was "widely regarded as the left's most influential voice inside the now-revered Clinton White House."

Widely regarded? Actually, progressives see Hillary Clinton as having been consistently wrong on the war and a host of other issues, especially trade. Her absurdly bureaucratic health-care proposal in 1993 - shaped by and for big insurance companies - was a slap in the face of unions, Congress members and grassroots forces who'd built a movement for simple, nonprofit national health insurance: In effect, enhanced Medicare for all. She helped set back the cause of universal coverage for years.

And far from being "revered," many Democratic activists see the Clinton era as one of decline in which Democrats lost their strong majorities in the US Senate, US House, governorships and state legislatures. It's simple math.

The 2008 presidential election is shaping up as a test of the power and capacity of new independent media vs. old conglomerate-dominated media. And a test of grassroots/netroots politics vs. corporatized Democratic politics...

Meanwhile, chicago dyke notices that the Congressional leaders are having a little trouble with this "Leadership" concept.

...In the year since top Democrats started demanding their own party leadership not work to stop the war, 907 U.S. soldiers have been killed. Of course, that’s never reported by the Washington press corps when they hear the same Democrats preach a “go slow” approach. But that doesn’t mean those troops didn’t die, and that the people still telling us to “go slow” should be regarded as even mildly credible when it comes to national security. The fact that the people who get things wrong over and over and over again are granted financial and political rewards on the Beltway cocktail party circuit doesn’t mean these people are doing anything other than running the country into the ground...

Yes, but look at those campaign contributions!  ¶ 8:59 PM 3 comments links to this post

  Children of the Human Mind



They have seen strange sunsets for us



in places no human could walk.

Their eyes see deeper



into their world to find things our eyes can appreciate but our minds only begin to understand.



The first tools of humans on Mars continue to exceed expectations, making their parents proud of them. They learn. They function independently.

It may be some time before we see their like again, given the current priorities of the people running NASA. But the kind of people who designed them in the first place are still working out there, even if they no longer have the blessing of the space program.



In Science
Science 19 January 2007:
Vol. 315. no. 5810, pp. 322 - 324
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5810.322:

Thirteen years ago on a sunny spring morning, two divers prepared to descend into what could be the world's deepest water-filled pit: northeastern Mexico's El Zacatón, a 180-meterwide limestone sinkhole filled by hydrothermal springs. The water is 30°C, teeming with strange microbes, and pitch-black below the first 30 meters. One diver was Sheck Exley, then holder of the world's scuba depth record; the other was his friend Jim Bowden, a top underwater caver. They wished each other luck, adjusted their masks, and began free-falling down separate safety lines. Ten hours later, Bowden surfaced with a new world record--925 feet (282 meters)--without ever finding the bottom. Exley did not surface. Three days later, his body was pulled out, tangled in the line. No one knows what killed him.

The sinkhole's depth remains unknown; sonars work poorly in narrow spaces, so readings peter out at about 330 meters. But this week another team is preparing to replumb the mysteries of Zacatón--this time, with an audacious new robot made to probe both its geology and biology. The NASA-funded Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX) is designed to navigate and map deep underwater tunnels, spot living things, grab them, and bring them back--all without direction from the surface. If it survives its first voyage in March, DEPTHX will be a major advance in robotics and exploration of extreme environments. If it survives NASA budget cuts, it could be a model for probing Jupiter's moon Europa, where Zacatón-like cracks or holes in the icy surface may offer the best chance of finding extraterrestrial life.



Compared to other autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), DEPTHX is "well ahead," says Gwyn Griffiths, head of the National Oceanography Centre underwater lab in Southampton, U.K. But like other NASA-funded astrobiology projects, the robot's future is uncertain. Its funding is about to run out, and a follow-up project may be a long shot as NASA cuts back support for such efforts. "Robotic exploration of our planet and the universe has been wildly successful and cheap," says Dana Yoerger, an AUV guru and cheerleader for DEPTHX at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "To cut back on stuff like that for manned exploration is going to give the taxpayers very poor value."

The ringleader of DEPTHX is extreme engineer and cave explorer Bill Stone, who in 1989 made it to NASA's semifinal astronaut-selection round but was nixed as being too independent. During the past 3 decades, he has worked on space and military projects for the National Institute of Standards and Technology and on the side explored some of Earth's most dangerous caverns. Traveling a kilometer or more under the surface, he has stayed down for weeks at a time in air-filled caves. Underwater, he has often dived through twisty, silt-choked passages, re-emerging alive to appear in National Geographic. Finding standard scuba tanks too bulky, he invented a compact rebreather that recycles gases, now used by divers worldwide. In 1998, he made the first high-resolution maps of an underwater cavern, Florida's Wakulla Spring, by inventing a torpedo-like personal propulsion vehicle studded with sonars--the precursor to DEPTHX. He and colleagues drove the devices through 6.4 kilometers of inky-black passages to create three-dimensional (3D) images of the invisible walls. "Deep cave systems are the last terrestrial frontier; they push the limits of human endeavor, technology, and psychology," says Stone.

They are also dangerous. Stone has lost 16 friends to exploration accidents and has dragged out the bodies of seven himself. Exley was his cave-diving mentor. "I've come to the conclusion that there are places where humans cannot travel safely," says Stone, now 54. "We need a surrogate."

At Zacatón, Stone is working with Marcus Gary, a University of Texas, Austin, Ph.D. student who assisted at the fatal 1994 dive and became obsessed with the sinkhole. In a Geological Society of America paper last year, Gary reported that the system owes its vastness to volcanism that adds heat and gases to water running into the limestone. This hastens chemical dissolution of the rock as well as making things cozy for unusual bacteria. In 2003, Stone and Gary joined with a cast of luminaries in space, robotics, and microbiology to win a $5 million, 3-year grant from NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) program to use Zacatón as a proving ground for a prototype robot that could explore Europa. A side benefit would be exploring Zacatón itself.

Another team member is Richard Greenberg, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who helped show that Europa, about the size of Earth's moon, has a hidden ocean covered with an icy crust. Tides crack and puncture the ice from below, creating sinkholelike features on the surface. Like Zacatón, Europa's ocean is also probably heated by volcanism--ideal for the development of life. Many scientists think a robot might have to melt through some 10 kilometers of ice to reach liquid and thus life, but Greenberg says organisms--probably strictly microbes--may also lie in the surficial slushy cracks and holes. "The beauty of this robot is that it would have the smarts to get in there and look itself," he says. (A separate craft would probably melt its way to the bottom of the ice and release one or more DEPTHX-like robots to search the liquid ocean.)

People who NASA find "too independent" to be astronauts will be the ones who find the horizon, and sail over the edge of the Earth, with the children of their minds and hands, finding it round, not flat, and greater than the empires of men.  ¶ 9:26 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Nothing succeeds like success. Or cake.

So by all means, let's avoid funding that at all costs.

It's almost week old news now, but

Cancer deaths in the United States have dropped for a second straight year, confirming that a corner has been turned in the war on cancer. After a decline of 369 deaths from 2002 to 2003, the decrease from 2003 to 2004 was 3,014 - or more than eight times greater, according to a review of U.S. death certificates by the American Cancer Society.

The drop from 2002 to 2003 was the first annual decrease in total cancer deaths since 1930. But the decline was slight, and experts were hesitant to say whether it was a cause for celebration or just a statistical fluke.

The trend seems to be real, Cancer Society officials said.

"It's not only continuing. The decrease in the second year is much larger," said Ahmedin Jemal, a researcher at the organization...

Of course, Dear Leader rushes in at the NIH to take immediate credit, but they know better, and as Think Progess notes from ABC News (watch the video clip):

The total budget for the National Cancer Institute has increased $1.2 billion since 2001. But as ABC News’s Medical Editor (Timothy Johnson) pointed out last night, “most of that occurred in those early years under a Clinton initiative. The budget was actually cut last year and the projected budget for this year is to be cut even further. So, I think it’s a real tragedy that we are cutting the budget for the National Cancer Institute at a time we’re on the verge of many exciting discoveries.”

Nothing succeeds like success, and Dear Leader is definitely the one to end the nightmare of peace, prosperity, and success.

Paul Krugman examines how Dear Leader will bring his Midas touch to the national health care affordability crisis, penalizing those people who commit the free market crime of having good health insurance from their employers:

President Bush's Saturday radio address was devoted to health care, and officials have put out the word that the subject will be a major theme in tomorrow's State of the Union address. Mr. Bush's proposal won't go anywhere. But it's still worth looking at his remarks, because of what they say about him and his advisers.

On the radio, Mr. Bush suggested that we should "treat health insurance more like home ownership." He went on to say that "the current tax code encourages home ownership by allowing you to deduct the interest on your mortgage from your taxes. We can reform the tax code, so that it provides a similar incentive for you to buy health insurance."

Wow. Those are the words of someone with no sense of what it's like to be uninsured.

Going without health insurance isn't like deciding to rent an apartment instead of buying a house. It's a terrifying experience, which most people endure only if they have no alternative. The uninsured don't need an "incentive" to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible.

Most people without health insurance have low incomes, and just can't afford the premiums. And making premiums tax-deductible is almost worthless to workers whose income puts them in a low tax bracket.

Of those uninsured who aren't low-income, many can't get coverage because of pre-existing conditions - everything from diabetes to a long-ago case of jock itch. Again, tax deductions won't solve their problem.

The only people the Bush plan might move out of the ranks of the uninsured are the people we're least concerned about - affluent, healthy Americans who choose voluntarily not to be insured. At most, the Bush plan might induce some of those people to buy insurance, while in the process - whaddya know - giving many other high-income individuals yet another tax break.

While proposing this high-end tax break, Mr. Bush is also proposing a tax increase - not on the wealthy, but on workers who, he thinks, have too much health insurance. The tax code, he said, "unwisely encourages workers to choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans. The result is that insurance premiums rise, and many Americans cannot afford the coverage they need."

Again, wow. No economic analysis I'm aware of says that when Peter chooses a good health plan, he raises Paul's premiums. And look at the condescension. Will all those who think they have "gold plated" health coverage please raise their hands?

According to press reports, the actual plan is to penalize workers with relatively generous insurance coverage. Just to be clear, we're not talking about the wealthy; we're talking about ordinary workers who have managed to negotiate better-than-average health plans...

Incredible, but Dear Leader has this way with words.  ¶ 8:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Because it's good for business?

Why did the Chinese knock down their old satellite?

Because of the mystique? Because inscrutability works better than bravado?

WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 — Bush administration officials said that they had been unable to get even the most basic diplomatic response from China after their detection of a successful test to destroy a satellite 10 days ago, and that they were uncertain whether China’s top leaders, including President Hu Jintao, were fully aware of the test or the reaction it would engender.

...It was more than a week before the intelligence leaked out: a Chinese missile had been launched and an aging weather satellite in its path, more than 500 miles above the earth, had been reduced to rubble. But protests filed by the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia, among others, were met with silence — and quizzical looks from officials in The Chinese Foreign Ministry, who seemed to be caught unaware.

The mysteries surrounding China’s silence are reminiscent of the cold war, when every case of muscle-flexing by competing powers was examined for evidence of a deeper agenda.

The American officials presume that Mr. Hu was generally aware of the missile testing program, but speculate that he may not have known the timing of the test. China’s continuing silence would appear to suggest, at a minimum, that Mr. Hu did not anticipate a strong international reaction, either because he had not fully prepared for the possibility that the test would succeed, or because he did not foresee that American intelligence on it would be shared with allies, or leaked.

In an interview late Friday, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, raised the possibility that China’s leaders might not have fully known what their military was doing...

If Dear Leader's mouthpieces are spreading that, you can bet Hu Jintao knew exactly what they're doing.

Defense Tech has an interesting perspective to extend the Pravda:

This was actually the fourth time the Chinese tried to destroy a satellite, GlobalSecurity.org notes. And as "reckless, self-defeating and stupid" as the test was, adds Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis, the test was legal, because there's "currently no prohibition on destructive ASAT [anti-satellite] testing. There should be."

...Last week's test has given a "shiver of hope" to the "nation’s star warriors, frustrated that their plans to arm the heavens went nowhere for two decades despite more than $100 billion in blue-sky research," Bill Broad says in a tart opinion piece.

You don't suppose the old Cold Warriors at the Pentagon (and Big Time Dick) asked 'em to try again?

Or maybe, since the Chinese own such a big piece of our own defense industries, they're just trying to keep up the price of their stock.  ¶ 10:15 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Mass Murderer

Leftiblog via George at skippy's place:

...Most people who pay attention to things like this probably know that the second person hanged was Saddam's half-brother and former intelligence chief, Barzam al-Tikriti, sometimes described as "one of the most feared men in Iraq." But what about the third victim of U.S. "justice"? That was a man named Awad Hamad al-Bandar, who was the judge in the two-year trial which resulted in the conviction and eventual hanging of 148 men for the attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein. His "crime" was signing the death warrants of 148 people, 4 fewer than signed by George Bush while he was governor of Texas.

  ¶ 5:13 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Our Allies in the War on Terra

QUETTA, Pakistan — The most explosive question about the Taliban resurgence here along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is this: Have Pakistani intelligence agencies been promoting the Islamic insurgency?

Does a bear defecate in the arbor?

The government of Pakistan vehemently rejects the allegation and insists that it is fully committed to help American and NATO forces prevail against the Taliban militants who were driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001.

Western diplomats in both countries and Pakistani opposition figures say that Pakistani intelligence agencies — in particular the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence — have been supporting a Taliban restoration, motivated not only by Islamic fervor but also by a longstanding view that the jihadist movement allows them to assert greater influence on Pakistan’s vulnerable western flank...

So next time you hear all the breathless panic about Iran getting nukes, and what they'll do with them, remember these guys not only financially support Al Qaeda, they airlifted Osama out of Tora Bora and likely smuggled him back to Riyadh, where he hides in the family palace with all the comforts of home.  ¶ 8:10 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Magical Thinking

Dear Leader's Faithful base is still in deep denial that we imported Negroponte into Iraq to organize the death squads- on both Shia and Sunni sides. As well as the sides of mercenaries posing as Shia and Sunni. It doesn't matter that the likes of Rumsfeld called for that just before the installation of Negroponte and the acceleration of the insurgency. It doesn't matter the likes of Sy Hersch extensively documented it. It doesn't matter kidnappers wear police unifroms.

It doesn't matter how much it gets documented.

They, and their cohorts, call reality-based conclusions like that deep paranoia.

I call their assertations at best magical thinking, at all times disinformation, and at worst downright lies.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky  ¶ 7:45 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Keeping only the best prosecutors money can buy.



How unfair. That hardly begins to touch what these crooks have accomplished.



Krugman:

There's something happening here, and what it is seems completely clear: the Bush administration is trying to protect itself by purging independent-minded prosecutors.

Last month, Bud Cummins, the U.S. attorney (federal prosecutor) for the Eastern District of Arkansas, received a call on his cellphone while hiking in the woods with his son. He was informed that he had just been replaced by J. Timothy Griffin, a Republican political operative who has spent the last few years working as an opposition researcher for Karl Rove.

Mr. Cummins's case isn't unique. Since the middle of last month, the Bush administration has pushed out at least four U.S. attorneys, and possibly as many as seven, without explanation. The list includes Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for San Diego, who successfully prosecuted Duke Cunningham, a Republican congressman, on major corruption charges. The top F.B.I. official in San Diego told The San Diego Union-Tribune that Ms. Lam's dismissal would undermine multiple continuing investigations.

In Senate testimony yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refused to say how many other attorneys have been asked to resign, calling it a "personnel matter."

In case you're wondering, such a wholesale firing of prosecutors midway through an administration isn't normal. U.S. attorneys, The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, "typically are appointed at the beginning of a new president's term, and serve throughout that term." Why, then, are prosecutors that the Bush administration itself appointed suddenly being pushed out?

The likely answer is that for the first time the administration is really worried about where corruption investigations might lead...

Move along, move along... while we're raiding Pravda, Frank Rich on the subject:

...The DeLay and Abramoff investigations are not to be confused with the many others percolating in the capital, including, most famously of late, the Justice Department and S.E.C. inquiries into the pious Bill Frist's divine stock-sale windfall and the homeland security inspector general's promised inquiry into possible fraud in the no-bid contracts doled out by FEMA for Hurricane Katrina. The mother of all investigations, of course, remains the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's pursuit of whoever outed the C.I.A. agent Valerie Wilson to Robert Novak and whoever may have lied to cover it up. The denouement is on its way.

But whatever the resolution of any of these individual dramas, they will not be the end of the story. Like the continuing revelations of detainee abuse emerging from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo, this is a crisis in the governing culture, not the tale of a few bad apples. Every time you turn over a rock, you find more vermin. We've only just learned from The Los Angeles Times that Joseph Schmitz, until last month the inspector general in charge of policing waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, is himself the focus of a Congressional inquiry. He is accused of blocking the investigation of another Bush appointee who is suspected of siphoning Iraq reconstruction contracts to business cronies. At the Justice Department, the F.B.I. is looking into why a career prosecutor was demoted after he started probing alleged Abramoff illegality in Guam. According to The Los Angeles Times, the demoted prosecutor was then replaced by a Rove-approved Republican pol who just happened to be a cousin of a major target of another corruption investigation in Guam.

We have to hope that the law will get to the bottom of these cases and start to connect the recurring dots. But while everyone is innocent until proved guilty, the overall pattern stinks and has for a long time. It's so filthy that the Republican caucus couldn't even find someone clean to name as Mr. DeLay's "temporary" stand-in as House majority leader last week. As The Washington Post reported in 2003, Roy Blunt, the Missouri congressman who got the job, was found trying to alter a homeland security bill with a last-minute provision that would have benefited Philip Morris-brand cigarettes. Not only had the tobacco giant contributed royally to Mr. Blunt's various campaign coffers, but both the congressman's girlfriend (now wife) and his son were Philip Morris lobbyists at the time.

This is the culture that has given us the government we have. It's a government that has spent more of the taxpayers' money than any since L.B.J.'s (as calculated by the Cato Institute, a libertarian research institution), even as it rewards its benefactors with tax breaks and corporate pork. It's a government so used to lying that Mr. DeLay could say with a straight face that the cost of Katrina relief could not be offset by budget cuts because there was no governmental fat left to cut. It's the government that fostered the wholesale loss of American lives in both Iraq and on the Gulf Coast by putting cronyism above patriotism.

The courts can punish crooks, but they can't reform democracy from the ground up, and the voters can't get into the game until 2006. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the key players both in the White House and in the leadership of both houses of Congress are either under investigation or joined at the hip to Messrs Rove, DeLay, Abramoff, Reed or Norquist. They seem to be hoping that some magical event - a sudden outbreak of peace and democracy in Iraq, the capture of Osama bin Laden, a hurricane affording better presidential photo ops than Rita - will turn things around. Dream on...

Let's sing along together (to the tune of "The Aadams Family"):

They're shady and they're naughty,
Imperious and haughty.
Pretending that they're doughty.
The Bush crime family.

Their crime spans generations.
They've preyed upon our nation,
Through two administrations.
The Bush crime family.

Pop's Iran-Contra pardons,
To bombing Saddam's gardens;
Their lust for war just hardens
The Bush crime family.

  ¶ 7:47 AM 2 comments links to this post

  Conspiracy Fact

Weapons grade anthrax was delivered to Democrats and major news outlets critical of Bu$hCo- not to Rethuglicans or Faux News.

But nothing to see here, move along, move along, these aren't the droids you're looking for.  ¶ 7:40 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Dis Information

Urban Terra Legend category:

WASHINGTON: Reversing itself, the Defense Department now acknowledges that a U.S. government espionage report it produced warning about Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside was not true.

The Defense Security Service said it never could substantiate its own published claims about the mysterious coins. It has launched an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page report about espionage concerns.

The service originally had warned such coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

"The allegations, however, were found later to be unsubstantiated following an investigation into the matter," the agency said in a statement published on its Web site.

Intelligence and technology experts were flabbergasted over the initial report, which suggested such transmitters could be used to surreptitiously track the movements of people carrying the coins...

The now-disavowed U.S. report never suggested who might be tracking American defense contractors or why. It also never described how the Pentagon discovered the purported ruse, how the transmitters functioned or even which Canadian currency allegedly contained them.

The service initially maintained that its report on the spy coins was accurate but said further details about the spy coins were classified.

The government's report was filled with other espionage warnings. It described unrelated hacker attacks, eavesdropping with miniature pen recorders and the case of a female foreign spy who seduced her American boyfriend to steal his computer passwords.

There's another legend that needs debunking out there [via Lambert, who does a great job deconstructing it too]. He has the ears of the Bu$h crime family, just like he served as Sith Lord under Tricky Dicky. He's reluctant about saying too much in public here at home, but he's quite willing to talk to the Royals in the United Arab Emirates. Read his words with care, because he should be treated with some sympathy, and some taste. Use all your well-learned polities or he'll lay your soul to waste:

PRESIDENT George W Bush’s bold decision to order a “surge” of some 20,000 American troops for Iraq has brought the debate over the war to a defining stage. There will not be opportunity for another reassessment. Lie. Every moment we're there we can and should reassess.

The Baker-Hamilton commission has powerfully described the impasse on the ground. It is the result of cumulative choices — some of them enumerated by the president — in which worthy (Lie- no, wait, worth about a trillion dollars so far) objectives and fundamental (as fundamental as the dollar) American values clashed with regional and cultural realities.

The important goal of modernising US armed forces led to inadequate troop levels for the military occupation of Iraq. The reliance on early rigged elections as the key to political evolutionof a puppet government, in a country lacking a sense of national identity that Junior and Poppy approved of, caused the newly enfranchised to vote almost exclusively for sectarian parties, deepening historic divisions into chasms. The understandable if you're doing 300 µgs of LSD-25 — but, in retrospect, premature i.e., dumb as a rock — strategery of replacing American with indigenous forces deflected US forces from a military mission; nor could it deal with the most flagrant shortcoming of Iraqi forces, which is to define what the Iraqi forces are supposed to fight for and under what banner. Whopper. So they didn't want to fight so Cheneyburton could run their oil wells. Encouraging Faith-based government is bound to cause problems when every city block has its own private hot line to God.

These circumstances have merged into an almost perfect storm of mutually reinforcing crises: Within Iraq, the sectarian militias are engaged in civil war or so close to it as to make little practical difference. The conflict between Shias and Sunnis goes back 1,400 years. In most Middle Eastern countries, Shia minorities coexist precariously with Sunni majorities. The civil war in Iraq threatens to usher in a cycle of domestic upheavals and a war between Shia and Sunni states, with a high potential of drawing in countries from outside the region. In addition, the Kurds of Iraq seek full autonomy from both Sunnis and Shias; their independence would raise the prospect of intervention from Turkey and possibly Iran. Perfect, that is, if you make money selling munitions and running private security concerns.

The war in Iraq is part of another war that cuts across the Shia-Sunni issue: the assault on the international order conducted by radical groups in both Islamic sects. Functioning as states within the states and by brutal demonstrations of the inability of established governments to protect their populations, such organisations as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi army in Iraq and the Al Qaeda groups all over the Middle East seek to reassert an Islamic identity submerged, in their view, by Western secular institutions and values. But mostly they really seek that huge pile of cash King Abdullah sits on top of. Any enhancement of radical Islamist self-confidence therefore threatens all the traditional states of the region, as well as others with significant Islamic populations, from Indonesia through India to Western Europe. Of course, we've done an excellent job of that by listening to the PNAC, the AEI, and pompous asses like you, Henry. The most important target is the United States, as the most powerful country of the West and the indispensable component of any attempt to build a new world order, owned largely by major lienholders like King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia..

The disenchantment of the American public with the burdens it has borne alone for nearly four years has generated growing demands for some form of unilateral withdrawal, usually expressed in the form of benchmarks to be put to the Baghdad government which, if not fulfilled in specific time periods, would trigger American disengagement.

But under present conditions, withdrawal is not an option. Or so I, Henry Kissinger, apologist for the Mighty, hope. Without this lovely bloodshed I'd be staring at the walls of a retirement or maybe even a prison cell, thinking about the millions of deaths my bloated self-promotion has caused over the last 50 years. American forces are indispensable. They are in Iraq not as a favour to its government or as a reward for its conduct. They are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend. Jackpot. Money quote. We didn't go in to topple Saddam. We went in to take the oil for our very own. Remember, he's talking to Sunni fundamentalists in the Emirates, and he wants to scare their robes off- and raid their Treasuries, too.

Now, for the Dominos, just like Southeast Asia in the '70s:

An abrupt American departure will greatly complicate efforts to help stem the terrorist tide far beyond Iraq; fragile governments from Lebanon to the Gulf will be tempted into pre-emptive concessions. It might drive the sectarian conflict within Iraq to genocidal dimensions beyond levels that impelled American intervention in the Balkans. Graduated withdrawal would not ease these dangers until a different strategy is in place and shows some progress. For now, it would be treated both within Iraq and in the region as the forerunner of a total withdrawal, and all parties would make their dispositions on that basis. See? I told you he was da Best

President Bush’s decision should therefore not be debated in terms of the “stay the course” strategy he has repeatedly disavowed in recent days. Rather it should be seen as the first step towards a new grand strategy relating power to diplomacy for the entire region, ideally on a nonpartisan basis. Every strategery Henry the K. ever dreamed up was Grand. It was inevitable and natural he would team up with Karl Rove and Big Time Dick. It would have happened sooner, but he and Darth Rumsfeld always got along like sodium metal and water.

The purpose of the new strategy should be to demonstrate that the US is determined to remain relevant to the outcome in the region; to adjust American military deployments and numbers to emerging realities; and to provide the maneuvering room for a major diplomatic effort to stabilise the region. Relevant. Henry, your '70s jargon is showing. But that's a fine fluff paragraph, isn't it?

Of the current security threats in Iraq — the intervention of outside countries, the presence of Al Qaeda fighters, an extraordinarily large criminal element, the sectarian conflict — the United States has a national interest in defeating the first two (in other words, we're going to dream up as many AlQaedaIranofascists as we possibly can, whether they're really there or not. And ignore any evidence that says all the civilians we're murdering are affiliated with neither Al Qaeda or the Iranian government); it must not involve itself in the sectarian conflict for any extended period, much less let itself be used by one side for its own sectarian goals. On the other hand, our Special Forces/ mercenaries death squads private security forces will be doing their best to divide and conquer along these lines.

The sectarian conflict confines the Iraqi government’s unchallenged writ to the sector of Baghdad defined as the Green Zone protected by American forces. In many areas the militias exceed the strength of the Iraqi national army. Appeals to the Iraqi government to undertake reconciliation and economic reforms are not implemented, partly because the will to do so is absent but essentially because it lacks the power to put such policies in place, even if the will to do so could suddenly be mobilised. If the influence of the militias can be eliminated — or greatly reduced — the Baghdad government would have a better opportunity to pursue a national policy. So let's avoid that, and instead use the militias for our own purposes, shall we?

The new strategy has begun with attempts to ethnically cleanse clear the insurrectional Sunni parts of Baghdad. But it must not appear to turn into ethnic cleansing or the emergence of another tyrannical state, only with a different sectarian allegiance. Side by side with disarming the Sunni militias and death squads, the Baghdad government must show comparable willingness to disarm Shia militias and death squads that we don't control, anyway. American policy should not deviate from the goal of a civil state, whose political process is available to all citizens.

As the comprehensive strategy evolves, a repositioning of American forces from the cities into enclaves should be undertaken so that they can separate themselves from the civil war and concentrate on the threats described above. Rock da Casbah, baby. The principal mission would be to protect the borders against infiltration, to prevent the establishment of terrorist training areas or Taleban-type control over significant regions. At that point, too, significant reductions of American forces should be possible. Such a strategy would make withdrawals depend on conditions on the ground instead of the other way around. It could also provide the time to elaborate a cooperative diplomacy for rebuilding the region, including progress towards a settlement of the Palestine issue.

For such a strategy, it is not possible to jettison the military instrument and rely, as some argue, on purely political means. A free-standing diplomacy is an ancient American illusion. History offers few examples of it. The attempt to separate diplomacy and power results in power lacking direction and diplomacy being deprived of incentives. Or like my old buddy Mao used to kid, Power issues from the barrel of a gun.

Diplomacy is the attempt to persuade another party to pursue a course compatible with a society’s strategic interests. Obviously this involves the ability to create a calculus that impels or rewards the desired direction. The outcome, by definition, is rarely the ability to impose one’s will but a compromise that gives each party a stake in maintaining it.

Few diplomatic challenges are as complex as that surrounding Iraq. Diplomacy must mediate between Iraqi sects which, though in many respects mortal enemies, are assembled in a common governmental structure. It needs to relate that process to an international concept involving both Iraq’s neighbours and countries further away that have a significant interest in the outcome.

Two levels of diplomatic effort are necessary:

(1) The creation of a contact group, assembling neighbouring countries whose interests are directly affected and which rely on American support. This group should include Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. Its function should be to advise on ending the internal conflict and to create a united front against outside domination. You suckahs gotta sit down and lissen to me, ya hear?

(2) Parallel negotiations should be conducted with Syria and Iran, which now appear as adversaries, to give them an opportunity to participate in a peaceful regional order. Both categories of consultations should lead to an international conference including all countries that will have to play a stabilising role in the eventual outcome, specifically the permanent members of the UN Security Council as well as such countries as Indonesia, India and Pakistan. Recall his buddy Mao's statement again. He favors negotiation a la Bruce Willis.

Too much of the current discussion focuses on the procedural aspect of starting a dialogue with adversaries. The frakin' table will be round, beotches. In fact, a balance of risks and opportunities needs to be created so that Iran is obliged to choose between a significant but not dominant role (bottoms only!) or riding the crest of Shia fundamentalism. In the latter case, it must pay a serious, not a rhetorical, price for choosing the militant option. An outcome in which Iran is approaching nuclear status, because of hesitant and timid non-proliferation policies in the UN Security Council, coupled with a political vacuum in front of it in the region must lead to catastrophic consequences. And by all means, make 'em choose quick before they get rid of their pro-nuclear figure head.

Similar principles apply to the prospects for settlement in Palestine. Moderates in both the Arab countries neighbouring Israel and in Israel are evolving compromises unimaginable a decade ago. But if the necessary outcomes are perceived as the result of panic by moderates and an exit from the region by the United States, radicals could raise unfulfillable demands and turn the peace process against the moderates. He do love his Dominoes.

In all this, the United States cannot indefinitely bear alone the burden for both the military outcome and the political structure. At some point, Iraq has to be restored to the international community, and other countries must be prepared to share responsibilities for regional peace. Some of America’s allies and other affected countries seek to escape the upheavals all around them by disassociating from the United States. But just as it is impossible for America to deal with these trends unilaterally, sooner or later a common effort to rebuild the international order (i.e., the New World Order, beotches) will be imposed on all the potential targets. The time has come for an effort to define the shoals within which diplomacy is obliged to navigate and to anchor any outcome in some broader understanding that accommodates the interests of the affected parties. And believe it, this chump will navigate dragging his anchor to keep the war at sea.

[Henry A Kissinger, a former US secretary of state, is considered the architect of US foreign policy during the Cold War] That is, in keeping the Cold War bucks rolling on in.

  ¶ 9:22 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Pot, Meet Kettle

China successfully carried out its first test of an anti-satellite weapon last week, signaling its resolve to play a major role in military space activities and bringing expressions of concern from Washington and other capitals, the Bush administration said Thursday.

Only two nations — Russia and the United States — have previously destroyed spacecraft in anti-satellite tests, most recently the United States in the mid 1980s.

Arms control experts called the test, in which a Chinese missile destroyed an aging Chinese weather satellite, a troubling development that could foreshadow either an anti-satellite arms race or, alternatively, a diplomatic push by China to force the Bush administration into negotiations on a weapons ban.

“This is the first real escalation in the weaponization of space that we’ve seen in 20 years,” said Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity. “It ends a long period of restraint...”

In which bubble of the multiverse has Dr. McDowell been living?

The Air Force, saying it must secure space to protect the nation from attack, is seeking President Bush's approval of a national-security directive that could move the United States closer to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons, according to White House and Air Force officials.

The proposed change would be a substantial shift in American policy. It would almost certainly be opposed by many American allies and potential enemies, who have said it may create an arms race in space.

A senior administration official said that a new presidential directive would replace a 1996 Clinton administration policy that emphasized a more pacific use of space, including spy satellites' support for military operations, arms control and nonproliferation pacts...

A new Air Force strategy, Global Strike, calls for a military space plane carrying precision-guided weapons armed with a half-ton of munitions. General Lord told Congress last month that Global Strike would be "an incredible capability" to destroy command centers or missile bases "anywhere in the world."

Pentagon documents say the weapon, called the common aero vehicle, could strike from halfway around the world in 45 minutes. "This is the type of prompt Global Strike I have identified as a top priority for our space and missile force," General Lord said...

45 minutes! Team Xinhua got theirs up in 20!

Obviously, something needs to be done about this!

But as Lambert has noted, Cheney's PNAC said it awhile back:

To ensure America's control of space in the near term, the minimum requirements are to develop a robust capability to transport systems to space, carry on operations once there, and service and recover space systems as needed. As outlined by Space Command, carrying out this program would include a mix of re- useable and expendable launch vehicles and vehicles that can operate within space, including "space tugs to deploy, reconstitute, replenish, refurbish, augment, and sustain" space systems. But, over the longer term, maintaining control of space will inevitably require the application of force both in space and from space, including but not limited to anti- missile defenses and defensive systems capable of protecting U.S. and allied satellites; space control cannot be sustained in any other fashion, with conventional land, sea, or airforce, or by electronic warfare. This eventuality is already recognized by official U.S. national space policy, which states that the "Department of Defense shall maintain a capability to execute the mission areas of space support, force enhancement, space control and force application."

Not that anyone reads in American cable media, anyway.

Again, you can't have a blank check without an endless war, and you can't have an enemy in space unless you make one there.

Yet , anyway.  ¶ 8:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

  It's part of the strategery.

You can not have endless war without someone to fight.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Fighter jet parts and other sensitive U.S. military gear seized from front companies for Iran and brokers for China have been traced in criminal cases to a surprising source: the Pentagon.

In one case, federal investigators said, contraband purchased in Defense Department surplus auctions was delivered to Iran, a country President Bush has branded part of an ``axis of evil.''

In that instance, a Pakistani arms broker convicted of exporting U.S. missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a U.S. company that had bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents say those parts did make it to Iran.

Sensitive military surplus items are supposed to be demilitarized or ``de-milled'' - rendered useless for military purposes - or, if auctioned, sold only to buyers who promise to obey U.S. arms embargoes, export controls and other laws.

Yet the surplus sales can operate like a supermarket for arms dealers.

``Right Item, Right Time, Right Place, Right Price, Every Time. Best Value Solutions for America's Warfighters,'' the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service says on its Web site, calling itself ``the place to obtain original U.S. Government surplus property.''

Federal investigators are increasingly anxious that Iran is within easy reach of a top priority on its shopping list: parts for the precious fleet of F-14 ``Tomcat'' fighter jets the United States let Iran buy in the 1970s when it was an ally.

In one case, convicted middlemen for Iran bought Tomcat parts from the Defense Department's surplus division. Customs agents confiscated them and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold them again - customs evidence tags still attached - to another buyer, a suspected broker for Iran.

``That would be evidence of a significant breakdown, in my view, in controls and processes,'' said Greg Kutz, the Government Accountability Office's head of special investigations. ``It shouldn't happen the first time, let alone the second time.''

A Defense Department official, Fred Baillie, said his agency followed procedures...

This is also why we help dictators build nuclear reactors and subcontract the development of our Star Wars and Future Combat weapons systems to the Russians and Chinese. It is why we guarded the oil but let the locals in Iraq walk away with Saddam's military cache and supplies. Otherwise, peace would break out all over as people simply tried to live their lives normally.

Chaos is the plan.  ¶ 7:17 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Revisionism by Chimps

Smarter monkeys, please.

Remember Amendment IV:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.



Unless, of course, Der Decider decides otherwise.

Abu Gonzales was on a roll today. Since he wouldn't accuse his Congressional budgetary overlords of treason to their face, he accused bloggers of wanting to stop eavesdropping against terrorists. Not true; we simply want the judciary oversight Bu$hCo loathes.

But it's not like we see you eavesdropping on TheoCons who want to blow up Planned Parenthood clinics. You prefer antiwar Quakers who are intrinsically nonviolent. Or maybe you'd prefer Al Gore's non campaign offices.



The Constitution is in crisis as long as these people would rule us all.



Elsewhere we find hearsay can lead to execution, without ever being able to look at the evidence against you.

Only ashes remain...  ¶ 6:57 PM 0 comments links to this post

  "If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it."

Dead, alas.  ¶ 6:25 PM 0 comments links to this post

  They Couldn't Screw It Up More If They Tried

Of course, some people think they've been trying to.

Tonight, for your consideration, a lucid moment from the Twilight Zone, Jeff Wells:

...Early in his you ain't seen nothin' yet speech of last week, George Bush sited the bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque as the principal trigger event for Iraq's sectarian violence: "Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq's elections posed for their cause, and they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam — the Golden Mosque of Samarra — in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq's Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked." Yet even though they never made America's front page, there were always compelling reasons to suspect a different calculus, and other hands on the trigger. For instance, Kurt Nimmo noted that "at least two witnesses saw 'unusual activities by the Iraqi National Guard in the area around the mosque.' Two mosque guards reported four men in ING uniforms had blindfolded them and planted explosives. A second witness, Muhammad al-Samarrai, the owner of an internet cafe in the area, was told to stay in his store and not leave the area. From 11 pm until 6:30 am, ten minutes before two bombs were detonated, the area surrounding the mosque was patrolled by 'joint forces of Iraqi ING and Americans,' according to al-Samarrai."

In April 2004 Michael Karem, then special adviser to Paul Bremer, voiced concern over the exceptional corruption and thuggish sectarianism of Bayan Jabr, the Shia Minister for Housing and Construction in Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority pajama parliament. A few days after composing a memo detailing his concern, Karem and senior aide Robert Clay were called to a meeting with the CPA's deputy administrator, Vice Admiral Scott Redd. "We were thrilled at the end of the meeting," said Karem. "Everybody was shaking their head about the corruption. They said that they were going to get rid of the minister."

But something else happened, because some else - somebody very high up, to borrow Guillory's words - had other plans:

Days later, he and Clay were asked to return to Redd's office. They walked in expecting to hear that Jabr had been fired. Instead they were told that their services with the CPA were as of that moment terminated; the minister would stay on. “We were told that we had lost effectiveness because we couldn't work with the minister,” Karem recalled. “We were in shock.”

Jabr was promoted to Minister of the Interior and, according to Harper's Ken Silverstein, his appointment "corresponds almost precisely" to the rise of Iraq's death squads. (A coincidence doubled-up soon after by the arrival of the Death Squad's own Goodwill Ambassador, John Negroponte, as the next Green Zone bully boy.)

Of course the Golden Mosque and Bayan Jabr are already old stories by the measures of Iraq's dissolution and our own time's seeming acceleration, but almost daily new filigrees of outrage are added to them. In Baghdad's latest "pacification" campaign, government-backed militias are withholding food and preventing the evacuation of wounded, while US troops make no effort to intervene. "This military siege is killing us," said Sunni Abu Sady. "The Americans are doing nothing, as if they are backing the militias."

It was evident even before the invasion that the war's intention included making a failed state of Iraq. That that's not yet conventional wisdom shows just how much too many still want to believe bad policy is made in good faith. As Keith Gottschalk gingerly asked Canada's mainstream left last week:

"...isn't it even barely possible, although it seems mad, that everything that has happened in Iraq, this “progressive destructive chaos,” has been the plan from the get-go and that civil war was not only expected but hoped for? If you must rule a people or a nation for the benefit of their natural resources and geopolitical value, would it not be a possible tactic to allow them to destroy themselves first without committing too many of your own people to the effort?"

Was Bush's speech, as Xymphora speculated, code to enact a Sunni genocide? Will the atrocity about to fall upon Iran become a Shia holocaust? I think the vision from the White House is grander than either proposition. There's a Mansonic logic at play here, and it's been playing since Bush's first stolen election.

Despite multiple offenses and parole violations, Spahn Ranch wasn't raided before Tate-LaBianca because the police were expressly told they should not arrest Manson or his followers. Despite the grievous injuries they've inflicted upon the nation and the constitution, George Bush and Dick Cheney will not be impeached because Democrats have elected, for some reason, to take impeachment "off the table." Like an unmolested Manson sending his family on "creepy crawly" burglaries of canyon homes Bush will not be stopped by the law, because behind the law are the gods of Helter Skelter who are not yet finished with him. As Guillory said of Manson, so Bush is "a very ready tool" who currently enjoys the unprecedented and seemingly unaccountable permission to do the unthinkable. And because he can, something big is coming down...

Accidents will happen, especially if you believe official explanations.

BAGHDAD, Jan. 15 — Iraq’s turbulent effort to reckon with the violence of its past took another macabre turn on Monday when the execution of Saddam Hussein’s half brother ended with the hangman’s noose decapitating him after he dropped through the gallows trapdoor...

On the one hand, King Abdullah supports his Little Boots.

...earlier on Tuesday, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, issued a more guarded and carefully worded endorsement of the new Bush strategy.

“We agree fully with the goals set by the new strategy, which in our view are the goals that — if implemented — would solve the problems that face Iraq,” he said.

Prince Saud said he could not comment on specifics of the plan, which Bush administration officials acknowledge relies heavily on the actions of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, a Shiite political leader who has shown a reluctance to crack down on violent Shiite militias. Yet he also declined to be drawn into a discussion of possible Saudi action to protect Sunni Arabs in Iraq in the event of a full-blown sectarian civil war...

On the other hand, his minions supports their own interests.

WASHINGTON - Sheik Saleh Al Luhaidan, seen in video seated to the right of the crown prince, is chief justice of Saudi Arabia's Supreme Judicial Council. His sermons and words carry great significance.

In an audiotape secretly recorded at a government mosque last October and obtained by NBC News, Luhaidan encourages young Saudis to go to Iraq to wage war against Americans.

"If someone knows that he is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight, and if his intention is to raise up the word of God, then he is free to do so," says Luhaidan in Arabic on the tape...

Ah, but who is this god of which you speak?  ¶ 9:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Protection Racket

Michael T. Klare is doing a series at TomDispatch on the financial service of the future- if you're a multinational oil corporation. It's link-rich, with a substantial introduction, not reproduced here.

The Pentagon: A Global Oil-Protection Service

The most significant expression of this trend has been the transformation of the U.S. military into a global oil-protection service whose primary function is the guarding of overseas energy supplies as well as their global delivery systems (pipelines, tanker ships, and supply routes). This overarching mission was first articulated by President Jimmy Carter in January 1980, when he described the oil flow from the Persian Gulf as a "vital interest" of the United States, and affirmed that this country would employ "any means necessary, including military force" to overcome an attempt by a hostile power to block that flow.

When President Carter issued this edict, quickly dubbed the Carter Doctrine, the United States did not actually possess any forces capable of performing this role in the Gulf. To fill this gap, Carter created a new entity, the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), an ad hoc assortment of U.S-based forces designated for possible employment in the Middle East. In 1983, President Reagan transformed the RDJTF into the Central Command (Centcom), the name it bears today. Centcom exercises command authority over all U.S. combat forces deployed in the greater Persian Gulf area including Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. At present, Centcom is largely preoccupied with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has never given up its original role of guarding the oil flow from the Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine.

The greatest danger to the Persian Gulf oil flow is now said to emanate from Iran, which has threatened to choke off all oil shipments through the vital Strait of Hormuz (the narrow passageway at the mouth of the Gulf) in the event of an American air assault on its nuclear facilities. In possible anticipation of such a move, the Pentagon recently ordered additional air and naval forces into the Gulf and replaced General John Abizaid, the Centcom Commander, who favored diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria, with Admiral William Fallon, the Commander of the Pacific Command (Pacom) and an expert in combined air and naval operations. Fallon arrived at Centcom just as President Bush, in a nationally televised speech on January 10, announced the deployment of an additional carrier battle group to the Gulf and warned of harsh military action against Iran if it failed to halt its support for insurgents in Iraq and its pursuit of uranium-enrichment technology.

When first promulgated in 1980, the Carter Doctrine was aimed principally at the Persian Gulf and surrounding waters. In recent years, however, American policymakers have concluded that the United States must extend this kind of protection to every major oil-producing region in the developing world. The logic for a Carter Doctrine on a global scale was first spelled out in a bipartisan task force report, "The Geopolitics of Energy," published by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in November 2000. Because the United States and its allies are becoming increasingly dependent on energy supplies from unstable overseas suppliers, the report concluded, "[T]he geopolitical risks attendant to energy availability are not likely to abate." Under these circumstances, "the United States, as the world's only superpower, must accept its special responsibilities for preserving access to worldwide energy supply."

This sort of thinking -- embraced by senior Democrats and Republicans alike -- appears to have governed American strategic thinking since the late 1990s. It was President Clinton who first put this policy into effect, by extending the Carter Doctrine to the Caspian Sea basin. It was Clinton who originally declared that the flow of oil and gas from the Caspian Sea to the West was an American security priority, and who, on this basis, established military ties with the governments of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. President Bush has substantially upgraded these ties -- thereby laying the groundwork for a permanent U.S. military presence in the region -- but it is important to view this as a bipartisan effort in accordance with a shared belief that protection of the global oil flow is increasingly not just a vital function, but the vital function of the American military.

More recently, President Bush has extended the reach of the Carter Doctrine to West Africa, now one of America's major sources of oil. Particular emphasis is being placed on Nigeria, where unrest in the Delta (which holds most of the country's onshore petroleum fields) has produced a substantial decline in oil output. "Nigeria is the fifth largest source of U.S. oil imports," the State Department's Fiscal Year 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations declares, "and disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to U.S. oil security strategy." To prevent such a disruption, the Department of Defense is providing Nigerian military and internal security forces with substantial arms and equipment intended to quell unrest in the Delta region; the Pentagon is also collaborating with Nigerian forces in a number of regional patrol and surveillance efforts aimed at improving security in the Gulf of Guinea, where most of West Africa's offshore oil and gas fields are located.

Of course, senior officials and foreign policy elites are generally loath to acknowledge such crass motivations for the utilization of military force -- they much prefer to talk about spreading democracy and fighting terrorism. Every once in a while, however, a hint of this deep energy-based conviction rises to the surface. Especially revealing is a November 2006 task force report from the Council on Foreign Relations on "National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency." Co-chaired by former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger and former CIA Director John Deutsch, and endorsed by a slew of elite policy wonks from both parties, the report trumpeted the usual to-be-ignored calls for energy efficiency and conservation at home, but then struck just the militaristic note first voiced in the 2000 CSIS report (which Schlesinger also co-chaired): "Several standard operations of U.S. regionally deployed forces [presumably Centcom and Pacom] have made important contributions to improving energy security, and the continuation of such efforts will be necessary in the future. U.S. naval protection of the sea-lanes that transport oil is of paramount importance." The report also called for stepped up U.S. naval engagement in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of Nigeria.

When expressing such views, U.S. policymakers often adopt an altruistic stance, claiming that the United States is performing a "social good" by protecting the global oil flow on behalf of the world community. But this haughty, altruistic posture ignores crucial aspects of the situation:

* First, the United States is the world's leading gas guzzler, accounting for one out of every four barrels of oil consumed daily around the world.

* Second, the pipelines and sea lanes being protected by American soldiers and sailors at risk of life and limb are largely those oriented toward the United States and close allies like Japan and the NATO countries.

* Third, it is often specifically American-based corporations whose overseas operations are being protected by U.S. forces in turbulent areas abroad, again at significant risk to the military personnel involved.

* Fourth, the Pentagon is itself one of the world's great oil guzzlers, consuming 134 million barrels of oil in 2005, as much as the entire nation of Sweden.

So while it is true that other countries may obtain some benefits from the activities of the American military, the primary beneficiaries are the American economy and giant U.S. corporations; the primary losers are the American soldiers who risk their lives every day to protect the pipelines and refineries, the poor of these countries who see little or no benefit from the extraction of their natural resources, and the global environment as a whole.

He forgot somebody.

What about the millions of Americans, participants in the Dream Machine, living a reality they've sold themselves on, losing what they never realize they had in the first place?  ¶ 9:21 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Video Game Atrocity



Frida Berrigan:

...Even though today the Armed Forces can't recruit enough soldiers or adequately equip those already in uniform, the Pentagon is committing itself to massive corporate contracts for new high-tech weapons systems slated to come on-line years, even decades, from now, guaranteed only to enrich their makers.

The typical soldier in Iraq carries about half his or her body weight in gear and suffers the resulting back pain. Body armor, weapon(s), ammunition, water, first aid kit -- it adds up in the 120 degree heat of Basra or Baghdad.

Ask soldiers in Iraq what they need most and answers may include: well-armored Humvees (many soldiers are jerry-rigging their own homemade Humvee armor); more body armor (an unofficial 2004 Army study found that one in four casualties in Iraq was the result of inadequate protective gear), or even silly string (Marcelle Shriver found out that her son was squirting the goo into a room as he and his squad searched buildings to detect trip wires around bombs).

The same Army that can't provide such basics of modern war is now promising the Future Combat Systems network (FCS), a "family of systems" that will enable soldiers to "perceive, comprehend, shape, and dominate the future battlefield at unprecedented levels." The FCS network will consist of a "family" of 18 manned and unmanned ground vehicles, air vehicles, sensors, and munitions, including:

* eight new, super-armored, super-strong ground vehicles to replace current tanks, infantry carriers, and self-propelled howitzers;

* four different planes and drones that soldiers can fly by remote control;

* several "unmanned" ground vehicles.

Put together these are supposed to plunge soldiers into a video-game-like version of warfighting.



The FCS will theoretically allow them to act as though they are in the midst of enemy territory -- taking out "high value" targets, blowing up "insurgent safe houses," monitoring the movements of "un-friendlies"-- all the while remaining at a safe distance from the bloody action...

Who knows? If Jenna and Not-Jenna can do it in their party room with some friends, maybe they'll be able to make some kills of their own in the War on Terra.  ¶ 2:13 PM 0 comments links to this post

  With Friends Like These...

Yglesias:

Brookings Institution scholar Michael O'Hanlon, who I'm given to understand would have received a high-level appointment in a Kerry administration, and co-author of a recent book on "what the Democrats need to do" about national security policy, feels the urge to surge. As we've seen previously, O'Hanlon's Brookings colleague Ken Pollack feels much the same way.

My advice to Democrats in congress and hoping to run for president would be to stop listening to these guys.

UPDATE: Elsewhere in the liberal hawk multiverse, Jeffrey Herf explains that the Bush administration's long record of incompetence is a good reason to support the surge.

Assuming, of course, the Democrats and the Republicans have different objectives.

Elsewhere, administration spokesmen ask how can people be so sure the urge to surge won't succeed in Iraq?

Because, perhaps, all your best generals and officers think it won't work, maybe? Because the people you're putting in charge of things are the ones who've bolluxed it up tremendously "training" police and death squada already? Perhaps because a Navy man who knows carriers and aircraft isn't the one who should oversee combat resembling Stalingrad more than anything else? Because, maybe, the Iraqi "government" doesn't want it? Because, maybe, all the people who were wrong about the war in the first place think it's a good idea, and all the people who were right have hundreds of good reasons not to do this?

You know, there are other plans out there. The progressive Democrats have one. The Iraq Study Group has another; in fact, some of your old friends even liked it better.

But I forget. You and your bases' definition of $uccess is a little different from the vulgar masses.  ¶ 11:03 AM 0 comments links to this post

  The Sacrifice



TomDispatch:

They

...grew up in places with vanishingly small populations but even those who didn't came from places you're likely to have heard of only if you grew up there yourself. As Lizette Alvarez and Andrew Lehren put it, in examining the last thousand American deaths in Iraq for the New York Times:

"The service members who died during this latest period fit an unchanging profile. They were mostly white men from rural areas, soldiers so young they still held fresh memories of high school football heroics and teenage escapades. Many men and women were in Iraq for the second or third time. Some were going on their fourth, fifth or sixth deployment."

All you have to do is look through the most recent of these Pentagon announcements of deaths in Iraq to find more evidence of that parade of places you just haven't heard of: Vassar, Michigan (pop. 2,823), Paris, Tennessee (pop. 9,763), Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 5,470), Tamarac, Florida (pop. 55,588), New Castle, Delaware (pop. 4,836), and Vancouver, Washington (pop. 157,493).

This isn't new. You could say, in fact, that here, as elsewhere in the American experience of war in Iraq, the Vietnam analogy seems to apply, at least to a degree. Historian Chris Appy in his book Working-Class War comments:

"Rural and small-town America may have lost more men in Vietnam, proportionately, than did even central cities and working-class suburbs… It is not hard to find small towns that lost more than one man in Vietnam. Empire, Alabama, for example, had four men out of a population of only 400 die in Vietnam -- four men from a town in which only a few dozen boys came of draft age during the entire war."

But in the present all-volunteer military at the height of an increasingly catastrophic, ever less popular war, this trend toward sacrificing the overlooked young from overlooked American communities seems especially pronounced.

It's expecially striking if you travel there. Small town America, not the suburbs and exurbs, but the infrastructure in little towns tucked away in the hills and plains that 50 years ago served a strong agricultural base look and feel as ramshackle as slums in an industrial seting. The lifestyle is marginally better because of the lack of crowding, but the poverty and ignorance of the world is largely the same. Such youth are loaded guns themselves, full of energy and hostility to a world they misunderstand.

Digby posts on the nature of the conservative mindset that produces and depends on a lifestyle that victimizes the unwitting to do the unthinkable:

There are always a smattering of Republicans who don't follow the party line on a particular issue like stem cell research or mental health coverage. When you look beneath the surface it's always because they personally know someone, usually a family member, who would benefit from the program. (You can often see this in national emergencies where they suddenly clamor for federal help after disdaining the same requests by people in other parts of the country and constantly voting against such measures on a programmatic level.)

I think this is one of the defining aspects of conservatism. They have a stunted sense of empathy and an undeveloped ability to understand abstract concepts. It makes them unable to fashion any solutions to common problems, which they blame on "poor character" because they cannot visualize themselves ever being in a vulnerable or unlucky position through no fault of their own. Until it happens to them or someone they know, in which case they never question their philosophy as a whole but merely apply a special exemption to whichever particular problem or risk to which they have personally been exposed.

Empathy is not some altruistic concept. In fact, it's quite selfish and designed to make humans better able to survive. It allows a person to walk in another's shoes so that they might have an inkling of what it would be like if that person's experience became their own. It is necessary to understand how to head off problems that you might someday have to confront and it is certainly necessary to fully understand other necessary concepts such as justice, fairness and love.

I'm not drawing any conclusions from this, but it's interesting. It seems that when they test psychopaths, they find that they can't understand abstract concepts. I'm just saying.

This is why fundamentalism draws so heavily on the uneducated and depends on so much disinformation. It produces a pool of cheap inexpensive labor motivated to follow the Word. It is a vicious cycle the oligarchs depend on to make Empire.  ¶ 8:18 AM 0 comments links to this post

  If You Build It, They Will Come

Build first, ask questions later . Like how to aim it, for example.

...the Airborne Laser isn't mean to win beauty contests. It's being to blast ballistic missiles -- using a chemically-powered, megawatt-class laser -- as they're first climbing into the sky. That's when missiles are slowest and most vulnerable.

This is called boost-phase intercept. Mid-course intercept is up to the Navy's SM-3 missile and the Ground-Based Interceptors based in California and Alaska. Terminal interception -- right before the suckers hit -- is left to Army Patriot missiles, Navy SM-2s and the Army's forthcoming Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense missile, or THAAD. It takes defenses in all three phases to make a fully-functioning missile shield.

The boost-phase intercept is the hardest. There's just a short window before a missile accelerates, noses over, deploys decoys and gets a lot harder to kill. Some folks in the military think the job is so difficult, we shouldn't even bother, going with "pre-boost phase" defense instead -- blowing up the missiles before they ever get off the launching pad, with lightning-quick attacks. But with three Airborne Laser jets, you could maintain a 24-hour orbit near a launch area and zap the missiles mere seconds after launch. Theoretically.

Problem is, the 747's chemical laser and delicate sensors don't quite work yet, despite about a zillion tests, and planning going back the Reagan Administration. The first was supposed to enter service in 2002, then 2005. Now, the target date has been pushed back at least until 2009, and further production is on hold. Obering says he hasn't lost hope -- yet. "Airborne Laser, if it pans out, is very capable," he said at the Surface Navy Symposium, held yesterday in Crystal City near Washington, D.C. "[It is] our primary boost-phase program -- but it's a high-risk program. If it doesn't pan out, we [still] need a boost-phase capability."

It'll knock down a missile and punch through steel plating, but you have to have a 747 full of hardware and powerplant to fire it.

There might be better ways to do this. Just a suggestion. I'm sure the Chinese- and the British- have already figured it out.

Many of the links to the 2005 story have been removed, but a news release at the time is here.

The Federation of American Scientists has more links on this story here.  ¶ 7:50 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Dominion Death Cult

Jeff Sharlet at Harpers' via xan

... In the pantheon of fundamentalist history, the man revered above all others is General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, perhaps the most brilliant military commander in American history and certainly the most pious. United States History for Christian Schools devotes more space to Jackson, “Soldier of the Cross,” and the revivals he led among his troops in the midst of the Civil War, than to either Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant; Practical Homeschooling magazine offers instructions for making Stonewall costumes out of gray sweatsuits with which one can celebrate his birthday, a homeschooling “fun day.” The Vision Forum catalogue offers for men a military biography and for the ladies a collection of Jackson’s letters to his wife; both books extol his strategic and romantic achievements as corollaries to his unparalleled love of God.

Fundamentalists even celebrate the Confederate hero as an early civil rights visionary, dedicated to teaching slaves to read so that they could learn their Bible lessons. For fundamentalist admirers, that is enough; this fall saw the publication of Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man’s Friend, by Richard G. Williams, a regular contributor to the conservative Washington Times. Jackson fought not to defend slavery, argues another biographer, but for religious freedom; he believed the North had usurped the moral jurisdiction of God. “The North seemed to be striving to alter basic American structures,” writes James I. Robertson Jr. “Such activity flew in the face of God’s preordained notion of what America should be.”

Jackson’s popularity with fundamentalists represents the triumph of the Christian history that Rousas John Rushdoony dreamed of when he discovered, during the early 1960s, the forgotten works of the theologian Robert Lewis Dabney, including Life and Campaigns of Lieut.- Gen. Thomas J. Jackson (Stonewall Jackson). Dabney had served under Jackson, but, more important, he was a theologian in the tradition of John Calvin—that is, he believed deeply in a God who worked through chosen individuals—and he wrote the general’s life in biblical terms. Rushdoony imagined the story as transcending its Confederate origins, and so helped make it a founding text of the nascent homeschooling movement. [5]

In 2003, Vision Forum sponsored a national essay contest and awarded first prize to a pretty, freckle-faced young woman named Amanda Freeborn for her essay, “How Stonewall Jackson Demonstrated a Biblical Vision of Manhood.” “There is a name,” writes Freeborn,

"that casts upon the screen of our imaginations the image of the personification of godly manhood. That name is Stonewall Jackson. . . . His life was a testimony to the world of what God can do through a man consecrated to his purposes."

Freeborn goes on to admire Jackson’s reverence for authority and his commitment to prayer—in battle, wrote a fighting pastor who knew him, Jackson would give up the reins of his horse “to lift up his hands towards heaven.” And she admires his Job-like acceptance of suffering—in civilian life he was shy, inept, and so physically fragile that he spent much his time investigating ascetic diets and taking the waters at miracle spas around the country. With his wife, Anna, he loved to dance secret polkas when no one else was watching, but he felt so out of place in “society” that he was deathly afraid of public speaking. Absent enemy fire, he did not know how to take a stand. He watched John Brown hang with his own eyes and marveled at the strength of the man’s Christian conviction. And yet when his own time to fight came, he proved just as devoted. “Draw the sword,” he told his students at the Virginia Military Institute, “and throw away the scabbard.” In All Things for Good: The Steadfast Fidelity of Stonewall Jackson, fundamentalist historian J. Steven Wilkins opens a chapter on Jackson’s belief in the “black flag” of no quarter for the enemy with a quotation: “Shoot them all, I do not wish them to be brave.” The only path to peace, he believed, was total war.

“Today,” writes Freeborn,

"Mr. Jackson’s life stands as a witness to a new generation of what God can and desires to do in each of His children. Let us rise up and follow the shining example of this stern soldier, loving husband, devoted church officer, and Christ-like man."

Civil War buffs study his military maneuvers and wonder whether, had he not been mistaken for a Yankee and shot by his own men in 1863, he might have outflanked the Union Army and fought the North to a standstill. But Freeborn chooses as case study not a Civil War battle but his first victory as a lowly lieutenant out of West Point. Sent to the Mexican War, he defied an order to retreat, fought the Mexican cavalry alone with one artillery piece, won, and was promoted, later commended by General Winfield Scott, commander of the U.S. forces, for “the way in which [he] slaughtered those poor Mexicans.”

Many of the poor Mexicans Jackson slaughtered were civilians. After his small victory had helped clear the way for the American advance, Jackson received orders to turn his guns on Mexico City residents attempting to flee the oncoming U.S. army. He did so without hesitation—mowing them down as they sought to surrender.

What are we to make of this murder? Secular historians attribute this atrocity to Jackson’s military discipline—he simply obeyed orders. But fundamentalists see in that discipline, that willingness to kill innocents, confirmation of Romans 13:1: “For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.” Obeying one’s superiors, according to this logic, is an act of devotion to the God above them.

But wait—fundamentalists also praise the heroism that resulted from his defiance of orders to retreat, his rout of the Mexican cavalry so miraculous—it’s said that a cannonball bounced between his legs as he stood fast—that it seems to fundamentalist biographers proof that he was anointed by God. Is this hypocrisy on the part of his fans? Not exactly.

Key men always obey orders, but they follow the command of the highest authority. Jackson’s amazing victory is taken as evidence that God was with him—that God overrode the orders of his earthly commanders. And yet the civilian dead that resulted from Jackson’s subsequent obedience of those very same earthly commanders are also signs of God’s guiding hand. The providential God sees everything; that such a tragedy was allowed to occur must be evidence of a greater plan. One of fundamentalist history’s favorite proofs comes not from Scripture itself but from Ben Franklin’s paraphrase at the Constitutional Convention: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”

To put it in political terms, the contradictory legend of Stonewall Jackson—rebellion and reverence, rage and order—results in the synthesis of self-destructive patriotism embraced by contemporary fundamentalism. The most striking example is a short video on faith and diplomacy made in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, by Christian Embassy, a behind-the-scenes ministry for government and military elites. It almost seems to endorse deliberate negligence of duty. Dan Cooper, an undersecretary of veterans’ affairs, announces that his weekly prayer sessions are “more important than doing the job.” Major General Jack Catton says that he sees his position as an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a “wonderful opportunity” to evangelize men and women setting defense policy. “My first priority is my faith,” he says. “I think it’s a huge impact. . . . You have many men and women who are seeking God’s counsel and wisdom as they advise the Chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] and the Secretary of Defense.” Brigadier General Bob Caslen puts it in sensual terms: “We’re the aroma of Jesus Christ.” There’s a joyous disregard for democracy in these sentiments, for its demands and its compromises, that in its darkest manifestation becomes the overlooked piety at the heart of the old logic of Vietnam, lately applied to Iraq: In order to save the village, we must destroy it...

"...had he not been mistaken for a Yankee and shot by his own men in 1863"- a likely euphemistic excuse for the first fragging of a barking madman officer by an enlisted man.  ¶ 9:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Preznit Who Cried "Wolf"

Bush's Legacy: The President Who Cried Wolf
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC "Countdown"
(with You Tube Video feed)
Thursday 11 January 2007

Olbermann: Bush's strategy fails because it depends on his credibility.

Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran.

Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me" - only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake ... in Iran.

Only this president could extol the "thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group," and then take its most far-sighted recommendation - "engage Syria and Iran" - and transform it into "threaten Syria and Iran" - when al-Qaida would like nothing better than for us to threaten Syria, and when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to be threatened by us.

This is diplomacy by skimming; it is internationalism by drawing pictures of Superman in the margins of the text books; it is a presidency of Cliff Notes.

And to Iran and Syria - and, yes, also to the insurgents in Iraq - we must look like a country run by the equivalent of the drunken pest who gets battered to the floor of the saloon by one punch, then staggers to his feet, and shouts at the other guy's friends, "Ok, which one of you is next?"

Mr. Bush, the question is no longer "What are you thinking?" but rather "Are you thinking at all?"

"I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended," you said last night.

And yet - without any authorization from the public, which spoke so loudly and clearly to you in November's elections - without any consultation with Congress (in which key members of your own party, including Senators Sam Brownback, Norm Coleman and Chuck Hagel, are fleeing for higher ground) - without any awareness that you are doing exactly the opposite of what Baker-Hamilton urged you to do - you seem to be ready to make an open-ended commitment (on America's behalf) to do whatever you want, in Iran.

Our military, Mr. Bush, is already stretched so thin by this bogus adventure in Iraq that even a majority of serving personnel are willing to tell pollsters that they are dissatisfied with your prosecution of the war.

It is so weary that many of the troops you have just consigned to Iraq will be on their second tours or their third tours or their fourth tours - and now you're going to make them take on Iran and Syria as well?

Who is left to go and fight, sir?

Who are you going to send to "interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria?"

Laura and Barney?

The line is from the movie "Chinatown" and I quote it often: "Middle of a drought," the mortician chuckles, "and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.!"

Middle of a debate over the lives and deaths of another 21,500 of our citizens in Iraq, and the president wants to saddle up against Iran and Syria.

Maybe that's the point - to shift the attention away from just how absurd and childish this latest war strategy is (strategy, that is, for the war already under way, and not the one on deck).

We are going to put 17,500 more troops into Baghdad and 4,000 more into Anbar Province to give the Iraqi government "breathing space."

In and of itself that is an awful and insulting term.

The lives of 21,500 more Americans endangered, to give "breathing space" to a government that just turned the first and perhaps the most sober act of any democracy - the capital punishment of an ousted dictator - into a vengeance lynching so barbaric and so lacking in the solemnities necessary for credible authority, that it might have offended the Ku Klux Klan of the 19th century.

And what will our men and women in Iraq do?

The ones who will truly live - and die - during what Mr. Bush said last night will be a "year ahead" that "will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve?"

They will try to seal Sadr City and other parts of Baghdad where the civil war is worst.

Mr. Bush did not mention that while our people are trying to do that, the factions in the civil war will no longer have to focus on killing each other, but rather they can focus anew on killing our people.

Because last night the president foolishly all but announced that we will be sending these 21,500 poor souls, but no more after that, and if the whole thing fizzles out, we're going home.

The plan fails militarily.

The plan fails symbolically.

The plan fails politically.

Most importantly, perhaps, Mr. Bush, the plan fails because it still depends on your credibility.

You speak of mistakes and of the responsibility "resting" with you.

But you do not admit to making those mistakes.

And you offer us nothing to justify this clenched fist toward Iran and Syria.

In fact, when you briefed news correspondents off-the-record before the speech, they were told, once again, "if you knew what we knew … if you saw what we saw … "

"If you knew what we knew" was how we got into this morass in Iraq in the first place.

The problem arose when it turned out that the question wasn't whether we knew what you knew, but whether you knew what you knew.

You, sir, have become the president who cried wolf.

All that you say about Iraq now could be gospel.

All that you say about Iran and Syria now could be prescient and essential.

We no longer have a clue, sir.

We have heard too many stories.

Many of us are as inclined to believe you just shuffled the director of national intelligence over to the State Department because he thought you were wrong about Iran.

Many of us are as inclined to believe you just put a pilot in charge of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because he would be truly useful in an air war next door in Iran.

Your assurances, sir, and your demands that we trust you, have lost all shape and texture.

They are now merely fertilizer for conspiracy theories.

They are now fertilizer, indeed.

The pile has been built slowly and with seeming care.

I read this list last night, before the president's speech, and it bears repeating because its shape and texture are perceptible only in such a context.

Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said nation-building was wrong for America.

Now he says it is vital.

He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control.

Last night he promised to embed them in Iraqi units.

He told us about WMD.

Mobile labs.

Secret sources.

Aluminum tubes.

Yellow-cake.

He has told us the war is necessary:

Because Saddam was a material threat.

Because of 9/11.

Because of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaida. Terrorism in general.

To liberate Iraq. To spread freedom. To spread Democracy. To prevent terrorism by gas price increases.

Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.

Because - 439 words in to the speech last night, he trotted out 9/11 again.

In advocating and prosecuting this war he passed on a chance to get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

To get Muqtada al-Sadr. To get Bin Laden.

He sent in fewer troops than the generals told him to. He ordered the Iraqi army disbanded and the Iraqi government "de-Baathified."

He short-changed Iraqi training. He neglected to plan for widespread looting. He did not anticipate sectarian violence.

He sent in troops without life-saving equipment. He gave jobs to foreign contractors, and not Iraqis. He staffed U.S. positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.

He and his government told us: America had prevailed, mission accomplished, the resistance was in its last throes.

He has insisted more troops were not necessary. He has now insisted more troops are necessary.

He has insisted it's up to the generals, and then removed some of the generals who said more troops would not be necessary.

He has trumpeted the turning points:

The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam. A provisional government, a charter, a constitution, the trial of Saddam. Elections, purple fingers, another government, the death of Saddam.

He has assured us: We would be greeted as liberators - with flowers;

As they stood up, we would stand down. We would stay the course; we were never about "stay the course."

We would never have to go door-to-door in Baghdad. And, last night, that to gain Iraqis' trust, we would go door-to-door in Baghdad.

He told us the enemy was al-Qaida, foreign fighters, terrorists, Baathists, and now Iran and Syria.

He told us the war would pay for itself. It would cost $1.7 billion. $100 billion. $400 billion. Half a trillion. Last night's speech alone cost another $6 billion.

And after all of that, now it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Democrats, Republicans, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November and the majority of the American people.

Oh, and one more to add, tonight: Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

Mr. Bush, this is madness.

You have lost the military. You have lost the Congress to the Democrats. You have lost most of the Iraqis. You have lost many of the Republicans. You have lost our allies.

You are losing the credibility, not just of your presidency, but more importantly of the office itself.

And most imperatively, you are guaranteeing that more American troops will be losing their lives, and more families their loved ones. You are guaranteeing it!

This becomes your legacy, sir: How many of those you addressed last night as your "fellow citizens" you just sent to their deaths.

And for what, Mr. Bush?

So the next president has to pull the survivors out of Iraq instead of you?

  ¶ 9:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

  About the Shell Game, Again...

One can't help but wonder who's playing whom.

...If I had my foil firmly on, I’d remember the nuclear submarine that collided with the tanker in the Straits of Hormuz. And I’d remember that the submarine carried cruise missiiles. And I might think that attacking Teheran with cruise missiles right before, or even during, his Iraq speech would be exactly the kind of bellicose gesture that would excite Bush’s manly firmness. Unfortunately, the collision prevented all that. Reminds me of Jimmy Carter’s problems with helicopters in the desert. With immeasurably larger stakes, of course.

This theory would account for the delay of many weeks to make the speech. The delay wasn’t to consult at all; everybody knows Bush doesn’t do that. The delay was to get the forces positioned. And the massive screwup in the Straits would account for Bush’s bizarre demeanor during the speech as well.

UPDATE Interestingly, Bush did attack an Iranian embassy during the speech.

What if the sub wreck was absolutely intentional? It’s not like sub drivers are blind or stupid. It might not have been Dear Leader's intent.

Remember, it's not in the Company interest to have World War III. Not with nukes, anyway. It's good to have a market to sell to instead of radioactive embers.

Poppy knows it, but Junior keeps forgetting, because he likes bright fireworks and noise.  ¶ 9:43 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Do the Name "Custer" Mean Anything to You?


The Crusader strikes back! Arkin:

If there's anything in the President Bush's remarks tonight that we didn't already know or didn't anticipate him saying militarily about Iraq, it is his evident willingness to go to war with Syria and Iran to seek peace.

Speaking about the two countries tonight, the president said that the United States wiill "seek out and destroy" those who are providing material support to our enemies.

It is only a threat. But it is a far cry from the diplomatic proposals floated just last month for making Syria and Iran part of the solution. Can the president really be saying that we are willing to risk war with the two countries, and even attack elements inside them, to achieve peace in Iraq?

Yes, indeedy do, and they're gonna blame it on you, DINOs.

SEN. BIDEN: Secretary Rice, do you believe the president has the constitutional authority to pursue across the border into Iraq (sic/Iran) or Syria, the networks in those countries?

SEC. RICE: Well, Mr. Chairman, I think I would not like to speculate on the president's constitutional authority or to try and say anything that certainly would abridge his constitutional authority, which is broad as commander in chief.

I do think that everyone will understand that -- the American people and I assume the Congress expect the president to do what is necessary to protect our forces...

Love that riding crop, honey.

Meanwhile, Black Spot's doing his part to re-focus the War on Terra on Al Qaeda SyrIran before Secretary Supertanker goes down:

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaida poses the gravest terrorist threat to the United States, and an emboldened Hezbollah is a growing danger, the U.S. intelligence chief said Thursday.

In his annual review of global threats, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte highlighted an increasingly worrisome assessment of Hezbollah — backed by Iran and Syria — since its 34-day war with Israel last year.

“As a result of last summer’s hostilities, Hezbollah’s self-confidence and hostility toward the United States as a supporter of Israel could cause the group to increase its contingency planning against United States interests,” Negroponte told the Senate Intelligence Committee...

He depicted a more multifaceted terrorist threat than in years past. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. spy agencies have stressed the threat from al-Qaida and associated Sunni extremist groups, rather than from Hezbollah and other Shiite Muslim groups.

Hezbollah has a global fundraising network but has not directly attacked U.S. interests in years. It was responsible for the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed hundreds of American servicemen. The group’s Saudi wing, in coordination with the larger Lebanese Hezbollah, is blamed for the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996.

A separate report by a government task force predicted that attacks against America and its allies probably would increase in the next few years because terrorists’ intentions have not diminished and their methods are “very nimble and very complex.”

The panel said al-Qaida is a diminished organization overall...

Hold on boys (girls, too)! The Calvary's comin'!

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.

The President may have started a new secret, informal war against Syria and Iran without the consent of Congress or any broad discussion with the country.

The bare outlines of that order may have appeared in President Bush's Address to the Nation last night outlining his new course on Iraq:

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

We're also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence-sharing and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies. We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border. And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.

Adding fuel to the speculation is that U.S. forces today raided an Iranian Consulate in Arbil, Iraq and detained five Iranian staff members. Given that Iran showed little deference to the political sanctity of the US Embassy in Tehran 29 years ago, it would be ironic for Iran to hyperventilate much about the raid.

But what is disconcerting is that some are speculating that Bush has decided to heat up military engagement with Iran and Syria -- taking possible action within their borders, not just within Iraq.

Some are suggesting that the Consulate raid may have been designed to try and prompt a military response from Iran -- to generate a casus belli for further American action...

Of course, Iran doesn't have to hyperventilate, the Kurds (our best friends in Iraq and no friends of Iran) are doing that quite nicely for them.

A U.S. raid on an Iranian government office in the Iraqi city of Irbil is a violation of the region's sovereignty and of international immunity laws, says the Kurdish regional government.

Kurdish officials expressed "concern and condemnation" over the pre-dawn operation, urging the U.S. military to release Iranian staff arrested during the raid, which came hours after President Bush's speech Wednesday night.

The Kurds have been one of the United States' top allies in Iraq...

[thanks Syntallic- whereever you are]

Lambert's right. Greenwald's right.

There's no last stand in Iraq, the Little Big Horn is in Iran.  ¶ 8:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Even the Sock Puppets have Sock Puppets



It's just some are better puppeteers than others.

But first, a diversion into the latest in puppet technology, but you have to be very smart to use it correctly.

The United States Navy has 51 nuclear powered Los Angeles Class submarines, 16 in the Pacific Fleet and 32 in the Atlantic Fleet. The first was commissioned in 1976 and the latest of the class, the USS Cheyenne, was commissioned in 1996. The ships have been built by Northrop Grumman Ship Systems (formerly Newport News Shipbuilding) and General Dynamics Electric Boat Division.

Nine of the Los Angeles class submarines were deployed in the Gulf War in 1991, during which Tomahawk missiles were launched from two of the submarines. 12 Los Angeles submarines were deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March/April 2003. All 12 launched Tomahawk TLAM missiles.

The Los Angeles class submarine is an attack submarine equipped for anti-submarine warfare, intelligence gathering, show-of-force missions, insertion of special forces, strike missions, mining and search and rescue.

Los Angeles Class submarines built since 1982 are equipped with a vertical launch missile system with twelve launch tubes. The submarine is fitted with a Raytheon CCS Mark 2 combat data system. This is to be replaced with a further development, the Raytheon AN/BYG-1 Combat Control System, also to be fitted on USN Virginia and Seawolf classes and Australian Collins Class submarines. The first system will be fitted on SSN68 Los Angeles in late 2005.

The submarine is armed with both the land-attack and anti-ship version of the Tomahawk missile from Raytheon. The land-attack Tomahawk has a range of 2,500km. A TAINS (Tercom Aided Inertial Navigation System) guides the missile towards the target flying at subsonic speed at an altitude of 20m to 100m. Block III improvements include an improved propulsion system and Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS) guidance capability. Tomahawk can be fitted with a nuclear warhead which is not normally carried on the Los Angeles class. The anti-ship Tomahawk missile is equipped with an inertial guidance and an active radar and anti-radiation homing head. The range is up to 450km.

First underwater launch of the new Raytheon Tactical Tomahawk Block IV missile with a live warhead took place from USS Tucson (SSN 770) in July 2003. Block IV includes a two-way satellite link that allows reprogramming of the missile in flight and transmission of Battle Damage Indication (BDI) imagery. The missile entered service with USN surface ships in September 2004.

The Los Angeles class also carry the Harpoon anti-ship missile from Boeing. Sub-Harpoon uses active radar homing to deliver a 225kg warhead. The range is 130km and the speed is high subsonic...

Last week one of Olmert's pet NeoCons leaked that Israel had plans to nuke Iran. It doesn't matter that most of the brass of the Israeli military think it's a really bad idea. It doesn't matter that most of the Israeli people think tossing nukes at Iran is a really bad idea. Nor does it matter that Israel does its best to convince the world it doesn't have nukes, much less that the nuke threatened was an experimental low yield bunker buster form that breaks all the nuclear ban treaties. And of course, it certainly doesn't matter that the existance of such a weapon is totally hypothetical, its existence only speculated by Donald Rumsfeld a few years ago.

As a matter of fact, the only concrete thing in this post is the Los Angeles class of nuclear submarine, a fast attack sub, that is perfectly capable of firing nuclear missiles. Among other things.

You see, one of these craft, offically operating off the African coast aiding in the Somalian action, hit a Japanese oil tanker off the coast of Iran on Monday night.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — An American nuclear-powered attack submarine has collided with a Japanese commercial vessel in the Arabian Sea. Initial reports from the area said there were no injuries and only slight damage, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday night.

The collision, south of the Strait of Hormuz, was first reported by the Kyodo news agency in Japan, which said the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo had been officially notified of the accident by American officials.

A Pentagon spokesman identified the submarine as the U.S.S. Newport News. The Japanese vessel was thought to be a tanker. American military officials in Washington were seeking a fuller accounting.

The U.S.S. Newport News is a nuclear-powered, fast-attack submarine in the Los Angeles class of vessels, and was commissioned in 1989, according to Pentagon records.

The Japanese oil company Showa Shell Sekiyu K. K. said the ship involved is the tanker Mogamigawa, operated by Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Ltd., The Associated Press reported, citing a report from the Kyodo news agency. It was traveling from the Persian Gulf to Singapore and was carrying a crew of eight Japanese and 16 Filipinos.

It seems the sub was not in Omani waters at the time- meaning it was in Iranian waters {nice catch xan].

One wonders if this sub had the "Israeli" missiles intended to do the dirty work on Iran.

You have to be smart to use an attack sub as a sock puppet. Unless, of course, you install windows in the bow.


[Thanks to Lambert for reminding me also the diameter of the sub is 10 meters, but the Straits are 40 meters max. Talk about trying to march a camel through the eye of a needle...]  ¶ 9:37 PM 0 comments links to this post

  It's a National Security Issue, Capisci?

Via Crooks and Liars, two posts of interest:

The White House and the Secret Service quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public.

The Bush administration didn't reveal the existence of the memorandum of understanding until last fall. The White House is using it to deal with a legal problem on a separate front, a ruling by a federal judge ordering the production of Secret Service logs identifying visitors to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney...

!

Because, as Justin Rood's post suggests, if they told you, they'd have to kill you as a matter of National Security and Company policy...

The CIA is refusing to cooperate with federal prosecutors investigating the Duke Cunningham scandal, the Wall Street Journal's Scott Paltrow reports today.

Before getting caught in 2005, Cunningham was involved in a sprawling corruption ring between Congress and the national security community. The scandal allegedly enjoyed the participation of current and former CIA officials, including Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the executive director of the agency. Foggo would be the highest-ranking CIA official to be prosecuted in the agency's history, according to Paltrow.

Prosecutors had expected to indict Foggo several months ago, but the Agency's refusal to declassify important documents has hampered their efforts, Paltrow reports.

Of course, prosecutors haven't received much help from Congress with their investigation, either. Last month they were forced to serve subpoenas to several powerful committees in an effort to force them to turn over documents.

Foggo's indictment -- and possible plea bargain -- would be a notable triumph for the Feds. For many months the case has stagnated, and observers have wondered if the investigation was hopelessly compromised. Nailing Foggo would also be important for prosecutors, as it would give them leverage to go after alleged Cunningham briber Brent Wilkes. Wilkes, who ran a government contracting business, was close with Foggo and is said to have worked closely with him. Despite being identified by Cunningham as a major briber, Wilkes has refused to plead guilty or cooperate with prosecutors.

Of course, Dear Leader is always thinking about security. In fact, he's so preoccupied with security, he wants to block the new Congressional efforts to disrupt global black markets for nuclear weapons technology and to enhance cargo inspection.

If you found out why he's against it, , he'd have to deal with you afterwards as a matter of National Security.  ¶ 8:21 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Whom the Gods Would Destroy...

...they motivate to escalate a land war in Asia.

Robert Parry:

On Jan. 4, Bush ousted the top two commanders in the Middle East, Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, who had opposed a military escalation in Iraq, and removed Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who had stood by intelligence estimates downplaying the near-term threat from Iran’s nuclear program.

Most Washington observers have treated Bush’s shake-up as either routine or part of his desire for a new team to handle his planned “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq. But intelligence sources say the personnel changes also fit with a scenario for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and seeking violent regime change in Syria...

Bush’s personnel changes also come as Israel is reported stepping up preparations for air strikes, possibly including tactical nuclear bombs, to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, such as the reactor at Natanz, south of Tehran, where enriched uranium is produced.

The Sunday Times of London reported on Jan. 7 that two Israeli air squadrons are training for the mission and “if things go according to plan, a pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down through the layers of hardened concrete [at Natanz]. Other pilots will then be ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole.”

The Sunday Times wrote that Israel also would hit two other facilities – at Isfahan and Arak – with conventional bombs. But the possible use of a nuclear bomb at Natanz would represent the first nuclear attack since the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II six decades ago.

While some observers believe Israel may be leaking details of its plans as a way to frighten Iran into accepting international controls on its nuclear program, other sources indicate that Israel and the Bush administration are seriously preparing for this wider Middle Eastern war...

Whatever Iran’s intent, Negroponte has said U.S. intelligence does not believe Iran could produce a nuclear weapon until next decade.

Negroponte’s assessment in April 2006 infuriated neoconservative hardliners who wanted a worst-case scenario on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, much as they pressed for an alarmist view on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Unlike former CIA Director George Tenet, who bent to Bush’s political needs on Iraq, Negroponte stood behind the position of intelligence analysts who cited Iran’s limited progress in refining uranium.

“Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade,” Negroponte said in an interview with NBC News. Expressing a similarly tempered view in a speech at the National Press Club, Negroponte said, “I think it’s important that this issue be kept in perspective...”

As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, a number of senior U.S. military officers were troubled by administration war planners who believed “bunker-busting” tactical nuclear weapons, known as B61-11s, were the only way to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities buried deep underground.

A former senior intelligence official told Hersh that the White House refused to remove the nuclear option from the plans despite objections from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Whenever anybody tries to get it out, they’re shouted down,” the ex-official said. [New Yorker, April 17, 2006]

By late April 2006, however, the Joint Chiefs finally got the White House to agree that using nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, less than 200 miles south of Tehran, was politically unacceptable, Hersh reported.

“Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” one former senior intelligence official said. [New Yorker, July 10, 2006]

But one way to get around the opposition of the Joint Chiefs would be to delegate the bombing operation to the Israelis. Given Israel’s powerful lobbying operation in Washington and its strong ties to leading Democrats, an Israeli-led attack might be more politically palatable with the Congress...

One Israeli source told me that Bush’s interest in spreading the war to Syria was considered “nuts” by some senior Israeli officials, although Prime Minister Olmert generally shared Bush’s hard-line strategy against Islamic militants. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush Wants Wider War.”]

... An Israeli assault on Iran could put the region’s remaining pro-American dictators in jeopardy, too. In Pakistan, for instance, Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaeda have been gaining strength and might try to overthrow Gen. Pervez Musharraf, conceivably giving Islamic terrorists control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

For some U.S. foreign policy experts, this potential for disaster from a U.S.-backed Israeli air strike on Iran is so terrifying that they ultimately don’t believe Bush and Olmert would dare implement such the plan.

But Bush’s actions in the past two months – reaffirming his determination to achieve “victory” in Iraq – suggest that he wants nothing of the “graceful exit” that might come from a de-escalation of the war...

On Nov. 6, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent Bush a memo suggesting a “major adjustment” in Iraq War policy that would include “an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases” from 55 to five by July 2007 with remaining U.S. forces only committed to Iraqi areas that request them.

“Unless they [the local Iraqi governments] cooperate fully, U.S. forces would leave their province,” Rumsfeld wrote.

Proposing an option similar to a plan enunciated by Democratic Rep. John Murtha, Rumsfeld suggested that the commanders “withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions – cities, patrolling, etc. – and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance.”

And in what could be read as an implicit criticism of Bush’s lofty rhetoric about transforming Iraq and the Middle East, Rumsfeld said the administration should “recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) – go minimalist.” [NYT, Dec. 3, 2006]

On Nov. 8, two days after the memo and one day after American voters elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Bush fired Rumsfeld. The firing was widely interpreted as a sign that Bush was ready to moderate his position on Iraq, but the evidence now suggests that Bush got rid of Rumsfeld for going wobbly on the war.

On Dec. 6, when longtime Bush family counselor James Baker issued a report by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group urging a drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq, Bush wasted little time in slapping it down.

Instead, Bush talked about waging a long war against Islamic “radicals and extremists,” an escalation from his original post-9/11 goal of defeating “terrorists with global reach.”

At his news conference on Dec. 20, Bush cast this wider struggle against Islamists as a test of American manhood and perseverance by demonstrating to the enemy that “they can’t run us out of the Middle East, that they can’t intimidate America.”

It's probably not surprising Black Spot has greater loyalties to his old time Chief, Poppy. He's canny enough to realize the Fixer's word is Law from the Royal House. If Parry's analysis is right, his change in hats was in no small part due to Dear Leader's contempt. Still, it would be really surprising if Negroponte's job change doesn't serve the Company's purpose, and his own, and not necessarily Dear Leader's.

As mind boggling as it may be if this analysis is correct, Darth Rumsfeld's resignation may have been forced because Dear Leader felt Rummy was simply too soft and not because everyone thought he was a maniac. On the other hand, Rumsfeld may have also felt safer on the Consigliere's suggested golden path. If this is true, one wonders how the Family and its Company will react as Dear Leader's Kool-Aid continues to sour and he continues to plan for his own glory over Company profit.  ¶ 9:24 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Back on the air, to Ricky Rat's Chagrin

I'm sure Tinkerbeotch will be hell to live with.

But she can't help it, she's drawn that way.  ¶ 3:28 PM 1 comments links to this post

  Black Spot as the Secretary of State with Glowing Attitude...

There had to be a motivation behind his dodge behind Secretary Supertanker other than his disdain for constantly briefing the C average cheerleader from Yale.

Jeff Stein at CQ via TPM via Attaturk:

On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.

“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week....

...He’s figured out the job. Which is to say, he really doesn’t have much control over the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

So why not hang at the University Club?

Negroponte spokesman Carl Kroft takes serious issue with that portrayal.

“He’s the hardest working person in U.S. intelligence,” Kroft said. “He’s hard at work from the early hours of the morning to late every night. The job never ends.”

Attaturk figures Condi may be changing hats herself soon. Black Spot will fill her shoes with no Congressional friction whatsoever. Regardless of what he's involved in he's the smoothest operator in town.

Wherever Black Spot operates, chaos, confusion, and catastrophe follow. So his elevation sideways back into the international arm of government means one thing. The road is about to get appreciably rockier.

Defense Tech:

"The Bush administration is expected to announce next week a major step forward in the building of the country’s first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades," the Times is reporting.

The $100 billion effort is called the Reliable Replacement Warhead. Back in August, our own Haninah Levine took a four-part look at the program. Go read up: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Reliable Replacement Warhead. Bu$hCo names go like this: Clean Air Act, the law that lets industries toss whatever they like out of their smokestacks. And as you might expect, according to Haninah Levine, the Reliable Replacement Warhead will be none of those things, but will serve as an excuse for Bu$hCo to junk all of the nuclear test ban treaties.

Oh, and one more thing, incidently. Israel has plans to nuke Iran. Just an itty bitty one, really, from a country that officially has none. And oh, yes, it's an experimental "bunker buster" one designed to penetrate underground that nobody's used before, or even by international law should have developed, but Rumsfeld suggested a few years back. No big deal, really.

Now, seeing as the bovine fecal material is about to hit the fan in a really big radioactive way, what options does Congress really have, if it's promised to be a good bipartisan Congress and not cut off money for the party time in the Middle East or impeach Dear Leader?

Well, none whatsoever apparently. But that's what bipartisanship is all about. Date rape.  ¶ 6:32 AM 4 comments links to this post

  doubleplusungood thoughtcrime

Xenophon notes:

The “lower –upper-class” and the Billionaire upper class are heating up for a global war for feudal territory and serfs. The geography of networks of dominion are subtly shifting away from the perceptible skirmishes of nation states and are inscribing themselves in the ubiquitous, pervasive infrastructure of global commerce.

He points to an older post where he references this CNN note last October that has a strange through-the-looking-glass feel about it:

...Not long ago an investment banker worth millions told me that he wasn't in his line of work for the money. "If I was doing this for the money," he said, with no trace of irony, "I'd be at a hedge fund." What to say? Only on a small plot of real estate in lower Manhattan at the dawn of the 21st century could such a statement be remotely fathomable. That it is suggests how debauched our ruling class has become.

The widening chasm between rich and poor may well threaten our democracy. Yet if that banker's lament staggers your brain as it did mine, you're on your way to seeing why America's income gap is arguably less likely to spark a retro fight between proletarians and capitalists than a war between what I call the "lower upper class" and the ultrarich.

Here's my outlandish theory: that economic resentment at the bottom of the top 1 percent of America's income distribution is the new wild card in public life. Ordinary workers won't rise up against ultras because they take it as given that "the rich get richer."

But the hopes and dreams of today's educated class are based on the idea that market capitalism is a meritocracy. The unreachable success of the superrich shreds those dreams...

Lower uppers are doctors, accountants, engineers, lawyers. At companies they're mostly executives above the rank of VP but below the CEO. Their comrades include well-fed members of the media (and even Fortune columnists who earn their living as consultants).

Lower uppers are professionals who by dint of schooling, hard work and luck are living better than 99 percent of the humans who have ever walked the planet. They're also people who can't help but notice how many folks with credentials like theirs are living in Gatsby-esque splendor they'll never enjoy.

This stings. If people no smarter or better than you are making ten or 50 or 100 million dollars in a single year while you're working yourself ragged to earn a million or two - or, God forbid, $400,000 - then something must be wrong...

There's only so much of this a smart, vocal elite can take before the seams burst - and a bilious reaction against unmerited privilege starts oozing from every pore. Especially when it's clear to lower uppers that many ultras are reaping the rewards of rigged systems: CEOs who preside over tumbling stock prices, hedge fund managers who barely beat the market.

It may seem far-fetched to think a revolt against extreme inequality will be led by posh professionals. But the conversations above suggest there's a potent political opening for a "comeuppance agenda."

Eliot Spitzer, an ultra by birth (like F.D.R.), has shown the power of turning against the sleazy self-dealing of his class. Once Spitzer's crusades against greed sweep him into the New York governor's mansion next month, imitators may follow. Shame as a strategy to constrain avarice may come back into fashion.

Like I said, it's just a theory. It could be sour grapes. But if I were in this for the money, I'd bet there was something to it.

Shame as a strategy to constrain avarice. How Democratic of them. Spitzer did win, incidently. But in an age where the chief opponent of the Rethuglicans in the Senate has the MGM Grand Casinos as a major legal donor, one wonders about the effectiveness of such a strategy. It feels much more like a strategery to me.

Which brings me around to my thinking about 9-11-01. What is the connection?


On 9-11 one group of lesser billionaire Saudi Royals made war on the economic base of King Fahd, a greater billionaire.

There was a lot of smoke and mirrors about the motivations behind the loss of the Twin Towers (+1, WTC7). You've read them before on this site maybe. But the biggest motivation was as always taking the money and running. You will notice a few American billionaires profited quite nicely from the result.

Taking the money and running is the best explanation for the war in Iraq. The reluctance to stop it certainly is best explained by this motivation. They might write letters, those earnest Democrats in Congress, but the cash must flow regardless.

Just try to tell people the War on Terra is a diversion to separate the rubes from their money. It will get you in trouble in polite company every time.



[thanks to scarshapedstar for the title!]  ¶ 12:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A non-profit, non-political, for educational purposes only post.

¡El Gato Negro! has posted the MP3 versions of the KSFO DJs advocating murder and assasination of their political enemies and the racist elimination of minorities it dislikes.

Please note that this is a Fair Use of the material, and posted for non-profit, non-political, and educational purposes only. No political position is taken on their posting; any appearance of any other purpose is pure coincidence. In fact, you can extend that to this entire website.

Brian Sussman tells caller to say 'Allah is a whore'.

KSFO caller suggests bombing Syrian mosques.

Brian Sussman wants military weapons in his home.

Brian Sussman says he doesn't have to tolerate Islam.

Brian Sussman says we should cut off detainee fingers and penises.

Melanie Morgan and Ann Coulter say liberals should be executed.

Coulter and Morgan say Bill Keller should be executed - sound effects by Officer Vic.

Brian Sussman says Islam is a false religion.

...

Officer Vic wants to send a hit team after photojournalists.

More laughter about Bill Keller in the electric chair.

Honky talk-show host is offended because Sen. Obama is a 'halfrican'

Paint a bullseye on Rep. Nancy Pelosi?

More bullseye talk about Rep. Pelosi

Morgan accuses SF Chronicle of 'blacking up' Richard Pombo. Btw, Melanie - how did Pombo do in that election?

KSFO crew says 'dig up Rachel Carson and kill her again'

Coulter says 'at least they hit some UN peacekeepers'.

Morgan says 'hang the NY Times editors'.

KSFO crew wants to kill liberals.

KFSO crew says 'liberal tree should be pruned'.

KSFO crew says liberals should be 'stomped to death'.

KSFO crew says 'gonna track that e-mail down and do something unpleasant to his cojones'... then Melanie does a live spot for Brite Smile.

KSFO crew says 'then, attack the NY Times'.

KSFO caller says Bill Keller should be 'lined up and shot'. KSFO crew says 'skip the trial'.

KSFO says 'unpleasant things are going to happen to stupid liberals'

mp3 audio clips in zip (with KSFO contact info)

wma audio clips in zip (with KSFO contact info)

If you have audio/video updates, send them to Rip at ripley>zencabin.com. Thanks!

Also, Mike Stark has an update here.

Spread this far and wide: Tinkerbeotch buggers Ricky Rat. For your non-politcal educational information purposes, only.

& We are all Spocko's Brain.  ¶ 7:09 AM 0 comments links to this post

  One of the Company Boys



It looks like the new DHS Chief will be one of the Company's down home farm boys. It's good that there are so many in private sector that can be depended upon to do what must be done when Congress cuts off funding.

Via Defense Tech:

"John Michael McConnell, the retired vice admiral slated to become America's new top spy, [has some] longtime associations [which] may cause him headaches during Senate confirmation hearings," Newsweek.com notes."One such tie is with another former Navy admiral, John Poindexter, the Iran-contra figure who started the controversial 'Total Information Awareness' program at the Pentagon in 2002.

"The international consultancy that McConnell has worked at for a decade as a senior vice president, Booz Allen Hamilton, won contracts worth $63 million on the TIA "data-mining" program, which was later cancelled[kinda sorta -- ed.] after congressional Democrats raised questions about invasion of privacy... While his role in the TIA program is unlikely to derail McConnell's nomination, spokespeople for some leading Democratic senators such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Ron Wyden of Oregon say it will be examined carefully.

"McConnell was a key figure in making Booz Allen, along with Science Applications International Corp., the prime contractor on the project, according to officials in the intelligence community and at Booz Allen who would discuss contracts for data mining only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "I think Poindexter probably respected Mike and probably entrusted the TIA program to him as a result," said a longtime associate of McConnell's who worked at NSA with him...

"Intel experts agree that McConnell will need all the good will he can get from the intelligence and defense communities. "It's a good appointment for a bad office," says John Arquilla, who teaches intelligence at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "The directorate of national intelligence should not exist. It's very redundant." Insiders say Negroponte was frustrated by his lack of budgeting control over Pentagon intelligence, and the resistance of the CIA to his direction since his office was created in 2004 as part of the Bush administration's post-9/11 reforms."

And by the way, Rutty asks in the comments (I'm paraphrasing heavily here): What was McConnell's role in Echelon -- the NSA's massive information sweeper, which got some much attention during the Clinton years? (The project had been around for decades, remember.)

Remember? How could one forget! And most of this work was done in the '90s, when our brave new boy was on the watch. Or the take. Or most likely, both.  ¶ 9:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Sacrifice

What Olbermann says.

... You have dressed it up in the clothing, first of a hunt for weapons of mass destruction, then of liberation ... then of regional imperative ... then of oil prices ... and now in these new terms of "sacrifice" - it's like a damned game of Colorforms, isn't it, sir?

This senseless, endless war.

But - it has not been senseless in two ways.

It has succeeded, Mr. Bush, in enabling you to deaden the collective mind of this country to the pointlessness of endless war, against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

It has gotten many of us used to the idea - the virtual "white noise" - of conflict far away, of the deaths of young Americans, of vague "sacrifice" for some fluid cause, too complicated to be interpreted except in terms of the very important-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrase, "the war on terror."

And the war's second accomplishment - your second accomplishment, sir - is to have taken money out of the pockets of every American, even out of the pockets of the dead soldiers on the battlefield, and their families, and to have given that money to the war profiteers.

Because if you sell the Army a thousand Humvees, you can't sell them any more until the first thousand have been destroyed.

The service men and women are ancillary to the equation.

This is about the planned obsolescence of ordnance, isn't, Mr. Bush? And the building of detention centers? And the design of a $125 million courtroom complex at Gitmo, complete with restaurants.

At least the war profiteers have made their money, sir...

  ¶ 9:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Hate Speech is Exactly as Powerful as We Allow It

Spocko's Brain is dead. Long live Spocko! More here.

Mike Stark tells the story, and Spocko comments from an undisclosed location from a Romulan-infested San Francisco, several hundred years before it becomes the Capital of the Federation of Planets.

It seems Spocko wrote a letter to AT&T complaining about hatespeech on the ABC-Disney affiliated KSFO that got back to Mickey Mouse Ricky Rat [audio links go to Spocko's old site and don't work, but I have the originals and will post them as soon as I can figure out a way to do it that won't get me hammered]:

To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

Dear Ms. Clark:

Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

"Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

Officer Vic: Yeah.

Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

"Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged. (Audio link)

On Nov. 14th Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

"We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes."

(Audio link)

Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products. Listen as he:

* calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)
* suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)
* pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

"Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

Or when Lee Rogers says,

"Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. " (audio link)

Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints? Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you. If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?
I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc. heather.rim@abc.com.
Sincerely,

P.S. I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

Spocko posted about it on his site, and mobilized a letter writing campaign to KSFO's sponsors that got... his ass sued and his site shut down.

That Tinkerbell is one mean beotch when she's pissed.

Here's what happened, in his words:

ABC Radio Lawyer tells Spocko to Shut Up
Two days before Christmas I got a Cease and Desist letter from ABC regarding my use of audio clips from KSFO radio hosts Melanie Morgan and Lee Rogers on my blog, Spocko's Brain (see attached PDF).

KSFO is a Disney affiliate whose radio hosts broadcast violent rhetoric directed toward journalists, liberals, Democrats, Arabs and Muslims all over the SF Bay Area and to the world via the Internet. I commented about the content of these host's broadcasts on my blog and informed KSFO's advertisers about what they were supporting by letting them listen to the exact audio quotes from the hosts.

Why the C&L Letter Now?
In mid-December I got confirmation that a major national advertiser, VISA, pulled their ads from the Melanie Morgan and Lee Rogers show, based on listening to audio clips I provided them. I also think that FedEx, AT&T and Kaiser are considering pulling their ads. Visa isn't the first advertiser who has left KSFO, multiple advertisers have left the station, especially from the Brian Sussman show. In July of this year when KSFO lost MasterCard as an advertiser someone from KSFO "outed" me on a counter-blog (which I won't link to). This same person has also threatened me with local and federal criminal action for using the audio (which I clearly used under the fair use portion of copyright law). And because they have suggested violence toward me (in addition to talking about suing me "for everything I have") I have chosen to remain anonymous.

As Thers has said, 95 percent of blog fights don't mean anything, but I think this one does since KSFO is using the full weight and force of an ABC/Disney lawyer and copyright law against a private citizen blogger. I dared to use the audio content in question for nonprofit educational purposes (I don't even have ads on my blog!), and thus under the protection of the Fair Use Doctrine set forth in Section 107 of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.§107.

It's about Money not Ideology
Talk Radio is a multi-billion dollar industry. It is also a regulated industry because the public gave the broadcast airwaves to radio stations. There are rules. First there are FCC rules with fines of $325,000 for obscene and indecent speech, thanks to the Christian Right. Interestingly, the radio union, (which KSFO hosts hate so much) worked very hard to stop those fines from being directed to individual radio hosts. So the corporation will bear the burden of any fines. Next, there are guidelines at the local station level, the network level and the parent company level. So even if the inciting of violence and hate speech is ignored by the FCC, the continued violent rhetoric has been, and continues to be, approved at the station level (KSFO) the group level (KGO-KSFO) the company level (ABC Radio) and the parent company level (Disney). They are ALL aware of this speech, and because they have not acted in a meaningful way, they all are giving approval for it to continue.

No Management Action
When Keith Olbermann and Media Matters ran Melanie Morgan's comments about "putting the bull's-eye on" Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, management did nothing. Morgan did a jokey non-apology where she never even mentioned she used the term bull's-eye.

I'm guessing Lee Rogers may have gotten a memo telling him to stop talking about burning people alive, torturing them and blowing their brains out, because on November 30th, he defiantly said to management and advertisers, "Nobody is gonna tell me what to talk about or not talk about or in what fashion on this radio program. It ain't gonna happen!"
ABC/Disney acted only when they lost revenue. Then they went after ME with a cease and desist letter.

Why me? I'm not the one saying journalists should be hanged, thieves should be tortured and killed, people should be burned alive, stomped to death or have their testicles cut off. I'm not the one saying that millions of Muslims should be killed on the presumption that they are extremists or just because they live in Indonesia. I'm not the one who says that lying is as natural as breathing to Egyptians and Arabs or demanding that a caller "Say Allah is a Wh*re" to prove he is not an Islamist. I'm simply documenting this speech and providing it to the people who are paying KSFO hosts on commercially supported broadcast radio.

They have Lawyers, Guns and Money. I've got a 5th tier blog and no money
Because I and some other listeners hit right-wing talk radio in the pocket book, they are acting like wounded animals and brought out the big guns, Corporate Lawyers. Am I scared? Hell yes. They can easily squish me like a bug and tie me up in legal battles for the rest of my natural life (and Vulcans live a long time), not to mention that unlike KSFO radio hosts, I'm not getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and generating millions of revenue for a multibillion-dollar parent company. If I pursue this further I expect the next step is a "CyberSLAPP" suit.

I don't want to consider the possibility of Morgan's good friend Michelle Malkin deciding to publish my address and real name so that her minions can send me death threats or "white powder" in the mail. Chad Castagana, was charged with mailing more than a dozen threatening letters containing white powder to liberals. He got the idea from someone that journalists, liberals and democrats were the enemy and deserved to die.

Brian Sussman proudly poses with his handgun in KSFO publicity shots and says that he thinks that everyone should have the right to have a machine gun. Maybe I'm over reacting, why would they attack me? I'm not famous, I'm not an elected official, I tried very hard to be accurate about what THEY said BY USING THEIR OWN WORDS.

I tried to help companies protect their brands from being tainted with the violent rhetoric and anti-any-religion-but-right-wing-christianism speech. I wanted to help the VPs of marketing avoid being associated with Lee Roger's "testicle talk" or Sussman talking about cutting off a finger and a penis of an Iraqi in his imaginary torture sessions.

It's about Brands: All the Blessings, None of the Taint
I have found out that KSFO is sold to advertisers as "a Disney affiliate" with all the associated family-friendly connotations. So KSFO is getting all the benefit of the Disney name as well as the massive infrastructure of ad sales at the national level. Clearly ABC Radio doesn't want KSFO hosts' horrific comments to actually reach advertisers. Advertisers are kept in the dark so KSFO can benefit from the Disney brand glow (ABC Radio News creditability glow?).
Advertisers should be able to decide if they want to keep supporting this show based on complete information. We already know that management at ABC and Disney support these hosts, which means that the ABC/Disney Radio brand now apparently includes support for violent hate speech toward Muslims, democrats and liberals.

But instead of directing the hosts to refrain from violent rhetoric and hate speech, they go after the weakest person with the fewest resources. It's cheaper and easier.
Bottom line: ABC/Disney is supporting and profiting from this violent speech, they should at least also accept any negative connotations or financial impact it might have to their image.

What can you do?

1. As El Gato Negro suggested, let's distribute the audio clips of violent rhetoric and hate speech to multiple locations on the internet so that the ABC/Disney lawyers will have to find and send cease and desist letters to ISPs with stronger policies than the nice people at 1&1.
2. Crank this up around the blogosphere, if you have a blog link and post about this.
3. Let's see if anyone in the mainstream media cares. Sadly they have a hard time writing about people who want them dead. I would think that at least the PUBLISHERS and MANAGEMENT at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associate Press would want to at least defend their own journalists and photojournalists. To date only the LA Times has called Morgan out for accusing them of photojournalist misconduct...

Some members of the press HAVE covered this. When Joe Conason at Salon did a story about Morgan and KSFO he got called a hack by Morgan. When Todd Milbourn of the Sacramento Bee did a story about Move America Forward he got called a liar by Morgan.
4. Donate to groups who would defend bloggers, journalists and others that Morgan, Rogers and Sussman attack. Specifically I'm recommending you donate money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists , and Media Matters.

You can also support the journalists who are doing their jobs and are threatened with death from talk radio hosts.
5. Write the advertisers of KSFO. I have a list of SOME of the advertisers who advertise on KSFO. Drop me a line at spockosemail @ gmail.com and I'll send you a link to an updated list.

As always, be polite, let them know what they are supporting and how it is impacting their brand in your eyes. They often times have their own stated values that they want to maintain, you may want to ask if their corporate values align with what is being said on KSFO (often times the hosts are the VOICE of their brand in the Bay Area, so it's not just the fact that their ad is run right after some violent hate speech, but that the person who is reading their copy is the person who is spewing the violent rhetoric.)

I'm open to other ideas too.

I'd like to thank everyone who has written letters to advertisers, especially PTcruiser and BP. Thanks Blog-Integrity folks for the forum, and special thanks to El Gato Negro.
LLAP,
Spocko

Spread the word. Ricky Rat and his friends have rabies. It's past time we put them out of our misery.  ¶ 8:16 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A Dodge Behind Secretary Supertanker as the Iceberg Looms

...before leaving the sinking ship.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- National Intelligence Director John Negroponte will resign to become deputy secretary of state, a government official said Wednesday night.

Negroponte took over in 2005 as the nation's first intelligence chief, responsible for overseeing all 16 U.S. spy agencies. He will return to his roots as a career diplomat to become the No. 2 to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the official said.

The official said that the timing of Negroponte's departure was uncertain but that it was expected soon. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because there has been no announcement of the move.

Negroponte, 67, is stepping down as President Bush develops a new strategy on Iraq...

Robert Zoellick resigned as Rice's deputy in July to take a position with Goldman Sachs. She is said to have approached several candidates for the plum assignment, going for months without any takers...

It was not immediately clear who would fill Negroponte's position. The job of his No. 2 has been vacant since Gen. Michael Hayden became the CIA director in May.

NBC News, which first reported Negroponte's resignation, said his likely successor is retired Adm. Mike McConnell, the director of the National Security Agency from 1992 to 1996. McConnell is now a senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, a government contractor and consulting agency.

They're outsourcing the job of National Intelligence Director to a private contractor from the Clinton Era! Mike McConnell got his start under the Reagan/ Poppy Bush administration, but remained on through the first Clinton term as head of the NSA. Once again, the Company ranks have closed.

But anyone who thinks Negroponte has any less clout or remains any less than head spook of the Cheneyburton administration is fooling themselves. Negroponte simply doesn't like the front desk- you make a good target there. That, and it probably irks the hell out him to have to talk to a C average cheerleader from Yale who's too stupid to know who's really in charge for 2 hours every morning.  ¶ 10:07 PM 1 comments links to this post

  "...this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one"

Last night on NBC News, Jim Miklaszewski reported that the new strategy will be announced next Tuesday, and that an administration official “admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one...”

...Just weeks ago, CentCom commander Gen. John Abizaid told Congress “I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the corps commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American Troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no.”

Dear Leader is making some interesting noises during the pre-announcement warm-up.

The BBC says:

The speech will reveal a plan to send more US troops to Iraq to focus on ways of bringing greater security, rather than training Iraqi forces.

The move comes with figures from Iraqi ministries suggesting that deaths among civilians are at record highs.

The US president arrived back in Washington on Monday after a week-long holiday at his ranch in Texas.

The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush's Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week.

Its central theme will be sacrifice.

The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers...

As long as there are at least a couple more sent it'll be fair.

But who am I kidding? It's like the heretik says:

  ¶ 9:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Resolve to Remember

Uncle $cam has a good list.

I resolve to remember:

1. In America, we elect Representatives not leaders or kings
2. Corporations are not living breathing natural persons and thus should never enjoy Constitutional rights as persons.
3. The first ten amendments of the Constitution of the United States (also known as the Bill rights) are not amendable.
4. Taxes collected and then spent against the will of the people constitutes taxation without representation.
5. The Constitution of the United States of America contains no language declaring America "Policeman to the world".
6. True American Patriots support and defend the United States Constitution NOT a political party or even FOX news.
7. Defending the United States Constitution is not a criminal terrorist act regardless of any legalese contained in the Patriot Act.
8. A fascist government by definition cannot enact the will of the people.
9. If George Bush could become President ANYONE of us could also be President.
10. Electing lawyers to serve in congress is akin to appointing Mark Foley Boy Scout Troop leader.
11. The original intent of the FCC was to prevent monopolization of the air waves, not to squelch free speech or hide Janet Jackson's nipples.
12. Jesus is not a republican.
13. Jesus is GW Bush's favorite philosopher not his God.
14. Statutory law often runs ruff-shod over the United States Constitution.
15. There is no measurable difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Items #13 and 15 can be argued.

No, I don't disagree with the gist of #13, the man who gave the Sermon on the Mount is not Bu$hie's God. Bu$hie's God presents to the President more like but in reality looks more like But to have a philosophy you have to, you know, think about the words.

Finally, regarding #15: there is the difference between bad and worse, which is always sharper than between good and better.  ¶ 9:30 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Incompetence Overdrive

What happens when close to an entire world reacts in repulsion to a failed psychological operation?

Assume seventh grade responsibility, and throw the hot potato into someone else's lap.

Bu$hCo sez it's not its fawlt! Its Iraqi sock puppet sez it dint do it neither! And Condi still sez who woulda knowed!

Not so fast, Mr. All Hat and No Cattle. No matter how fast you try to spin it, here's a question:

...if a head of state can hang by the neck until he is dead for having ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or not punished, or failed to countermand the torture and killing of 148 Iraqis guiltless of any great crime, what will happen to the generals, bureaucrats, prime ministers and heads of state who ordered, or countenanced, or signed off on, or did not punish, or did not countermand, the killing of 150,000 Iraqis guiltless of any great crime (this is now the Iraqi Government's estimate of the dead) and the torture of ten thousand more of them in Abu Ghraib? And how many Americans - Bremmer, Abizaid, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Bush - should on this precedent be charged and hanged?

They may also ask, as many legal experts have, how much was fair about a trial in which three of the defence lawyers were shot dead and those who survived forbidden to see the prosecution's written testimony before it was unveiled in court, and only those parts of the proceedings the Government liked were telecast - lest Saddam "grandstand" his cause and gain followers. And how wrong it was this trial was not aborted, and another trial begun in The Hague.

They may ask as well why Saddam died so soon. Something to do, perhaps, with his coming genocide trials and the complicity of Germany, France, the US and Britain in the manufacture of his nerve gas, anthrax, cluster bombs and helicopter gunships, and his amiable business relationships with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush snr, once head of the CIA, in past decades, and how his genocidal methods back then did not greatly annoy them, not so long as he paid his bills.

And these are the freedoms we fought for. The freedom to ask, and not be told - lest we encourage terrorists - what really happened, and who was in the loop when it happened. Such were the freedoms Nixon encouraged in Chile when he helped Pinochet to censor, torture and kill those inconvenient to the many, many secrets America wanted to keep.

These are the freedoms we fought for, and will now defend in Iraq for decades if Bush and Howard, brothers-in-arms for "freedom", get their way.

In Saddam's hanging we saw them all at once.

Chris Floyd points out that despite the warning of the U.S. military, somebody in Washington had to authorize the physical transfer of Saddam to the Shia death squad.

Juan Cole recounts a history of Rethuglican support for Saddam, which of course couldn't be why we rushed his execution expedited the Democratic process in Iraq.  ¶ 8:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A Happy New Year

The future remains open; it's only the consequences of nature and the schemes of men that can be forseen.



May peace, love, and happiness find you all in the days ahead.  ¶ 8:42 AM 0 comments links to this post