Geodog: Politics

Blogging vacation

Oops, forgot to announce it. Due to family obligations, I am on a vacation from blogging from last week until Labor Day.

For politics, I recommend Tapped, for high energy semi-geek, check out Scott, and for interesting observations on life, see Robert. And there is always Cary to let you know what's happening on the net. Enjoy.

See you after Labor Day,

Thanks,
Tim aka Geodog

Air Marshal program in disarray

McPaper strikes again. Here is a really scary article on how the federal air marshal program, which operates under all kind of secret provisions, is being terribly run, and is putting people who don't have training on airplanes and running them ragged, so we end up with untrained people with guns falling asleep on planes "protecting" us.

Another example of how the Bush administration's passion for secrecy harms us all.

Our hero, Judge Doumar, acts again

Judge Doumar, in a beautifully written decision dissecting the 2 page piece of garbage that the government handed him as justification for Hamdi's indefinite detention, has ordered the Bush administration to provide him with some information as to how the decision to detain Hamdi was made, and on what basis. I can't provide provide excerpts, because the decision is a pdf file, but I strongly encourage anybody interested in it to read the decision itself. We have some judges who are patriots capable of poetry -- Doumar is one of them.

Now, back to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, I fear.

Bush to firefighters: Screw you, we need another tax break

In an amazingly maladroit maneuver, Bush this week refused to spend $5.1 billion the Congress had appropriated for homeland defense, which included $340 million to fund fire departments, angering the The International Association of Fire Fighters so much that they voted unanimously on Wednesday to boycott a [Bush] national tribute to firefighters who died on Sept. 11. Today, Bush Bush told reporters that after what he heard at the economic forum, he would propose even more tax breaks for the wealthy when he gets back from his vacation. Reduce or eliminate the capital gains tax, increase expenses investors can write off ....

Deficit? What deficit? If the Democrats let this one pass I'll vote for Nader myself next time.

How to make friends and influence people

USA Today, which until recently I only knew as McPaper, turns out to have some surprisingly good articles sometimes. I ran across this one, Global warmth for US after 9/11 turns to frost, a couple days ago. The article notes the growing dislike of America and American policies worldwide, and asks why has there been such a growth of anti-american sentiment. Some of the answers they found:

What happened, many Americans are wondering, to that wave of sympathy and stockpile of global goodwill they encountered after Sept. 11?

"It was squandered," says Meghnad Desai ... "America dissipated the goodwill out of its arrogance and incompetence. A lot of people who would never ever have considered themselves anti-American are now very distressed with the United States," he says.

Desai and others blame what seems to be a wave of new U.S. policies that they regard as selfish and unilateral, stretching back to President Bush's refusal last year to support the international treaty on global warming.

Many are enraged by Bush's support for steel tariffs and farm subsidies, his refusal to involve the United States in the new international criminal court and what is widely regarded abroad as one-sided support for Israel and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

The rash of corporate malfeasance and blanket arrest of terrorism suspects after Sept. 11 further fuels critics, who say the United States preaches democracy, human rights and free enterprise — but doesn't practice them.

The Council on Foreign Relations ... issued a biting report warning the Bush administration that it urgently needs to upgrade its efforts at public diplomacy to counteract the country's "shaky" image abroad... "Around the world, from Western Europe to the Far East, many see the United States as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed, self-indulgent and contemptuous of others," Peterson says. "This is not a Muslim country issue. It has metastasized to the rest of the world and includes some of our closest European allies."

Quite an indictment, and there is a lot more in the article that I didn't excerpt. I think a lot of it comes down to the Bush administration's frequently expressed view that they don't really care what anybody else thinks, because they know what is right. People like people in power to at least pretend they care what the other people think, especially when the person in power is capable of causing vast changes in their life. When the world's only superpower claims it that has the right to go into any country and do whatever it wants in the name of "The War on Terrorism", that it doesn't really need its allies, and that it plans to ignores multilateral institutions, people are fearful. It is like living next door to the proverbial 800 lb. gorilla. Who knows what it will do next?

I fear for the time when America needs other countries' assistance. Bush is sowing bitter seeds that America will be reaping for a long time.

Tip o the hat to The War in Context, which does an excellent job of pointing to other countries' media coverage of the war.

An alternative view of the war in Afghanistan

Robert Fisk of the Independent has written 2 long articles with a lot of scary details on how American actions in Afghanistan are turning many Afghans against the US. If you are interested in learning more, here are links along with excerpts:

Afghanistan is on the brink of another disaster: The Americans now leave the beatings to Afghan allies, but the CIA are there during the beatings.

It was the Special Forces man in the south who saw things a little more globally. "Perhaps the Americans can start withdrawing if there's another war – if they go to war in Iraq. But the US can't handle two wars at the same time. They would be overstretched." So to end America's "war against terror" in Afghanistan – a war that has left the drug-dealers of the Northern Alliance in disproportionate control of the Afghan government, many al-Qa'ida men on the loose and absolutely no peace in the country – we have to have another war in Iraq.

Return to Afghanistan: Americans begin to suffer grim and bloody backlash:

"The Afghan people will wait a little longer for all the help they have been promised," the local district officer in Maiwind muttered to me a few hours later. "We believe the Americans want to help us. They promised us help. They have a little longer to prove they mean this. After that ..." He didn't need to say more. Out at Maiwind, in the oven-like grey desert west of Kandahar, the Americans do raids, not aid.... As long as Washington goes on paying the private salaries of local warlords, including some who oppose President Hamid Karzai, a kind of truce will continue to exist, but Afghans take a shrewd interest in America's activities here and their anger has been stoked by US bombing raids that left hundreds of innocent Afghans dead.

It is starting to sound a lot like a place in Asia that America got involved in trying to pick winners and losers in the 1960's, notably a place where today's most aggressive hawks found ways to avoid serving.

The war in Afghanistan in not going well

Newsweek had a cover article this week about how Al-Quaeda fighters slipped away from pursuing US troops. Buried in the article is the revelation that the war in Afghanistan is not going very well, and that we have achieved few of our objectives:

Our operational evaluation today is that the threat is a lot greater than it was in December. That is to say, the worst is ahead of us, not behind us.

At a time when leaders in Washington are agitating to move on to the next war—to remove Saddam Hussein—it’s perhaps surprising that few if any are critiquing the Afghan campaign. Criticism is deemed to be almost unpatriotic. But the Afghan war is not over, and the primary mission is not accomplished. The fledgling regime of Hamid Karzai has little power beyond the capital, and Karzai himself needs U.S. Special Forces to ensure his safety...

It surprised me to see this evaluation in the mainstream media -- it seemed the media concluded "the war is over" after the bombing of Tora Bora and the installation of American candidate Hamid Karzai as president. And it scares me that this Bush administration may well turn out to be The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight, incompetent as it is secretive. It's our lives, and the lives of our children they are playing with. What do they think the long term legitimacy of president installed by America, guarded by American soldiers, is going to be in an Islamic country? What would we have said twenty years ago about an Afghan president guarded by Russian troops? This administration really is clueless.

Richard Perle, the Prince of Darkness, is evil

In a story in today's NYT, Richard Perle, late of the Let's invade Saudi Arabia briefing flap, and currently head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, is quoted as saying:

"The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said would produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism."

So now we need to invade Iraq so that the world doesn't lose faith that George W. Bush means what he says? This kind of thinking is what kept us in Vietnam for years after it was clear that no good was going to be accomplished there. Perle's statement is an evil attempt at creating a self fulfilling prophecy, by subtly attacking George W's manhood. Excuse the language, but in Junior High I heard this kind of thing all the time, expressed as "You said you'd fight him, if you don't you are a p##sy". Anybody but a moron outgrew this kind of logic, but I fear our moronic president is probably very susceptible to it. And who better to push that button but an elder from the Reagan administration.

Richard Perle is evil and scary. No wonder he is referred to as the Prince of Darkness.

And I thought that William Saletan was funny about the Bush "economic summit"

Arianna Huffington's latest column, "The Wacko in Waco" is hilarous. It starts off:

At the behest of their charismatic leader, the cult members gathered in Waco, a hot, dusty town on the flat, featureless central Texas plain. They had been summoned to hear an endless series of droning sermons from the leader himself and his fellow fanatics.

Thunderously denouncing all doubters, all those who didn't believe as the cult members did, the speakers put forward a bizarre religious vision, one that no sane person could accept. As the hours passed, the group became more and more isolated from the real world until it was incapable of dealing with it.

The only thing missing was Janet Reno and her flamethrower.

George W. Bush's economic forum ended with the steady whoosh of departing corporate jets instead of a fiery apocalypse ...

and it just gets better from there. Highly Recommended.

Count on Molly Ivans to tell it like it is

Molly Ivan's latest column addresses the Shrub solution to our economic problems, cutting capital gains taxes again, with some frightful statistics from Kevin Phillips' book, Wealth and Democracy:

In 1999, the average after-tax income of the middle 60 percent of Americans was lower than in 1977.
The 400 richest Americans between 1982 and 1999 increased their average net worth from $230 million to $2.6 billion, over 500 percent in constant dollars.
By 1999, over one decade the average work year had expanded by 184 hours
Less than half of all Americans have any pension plan other than Social Security.

She goes on to point out, in her indomitable style: "The health care system is falling apart in front of our eyes; schoolteachers should be paid at least twice what they make now; lack of low-income housing is making life hell for the working class; and now the right wing wants to cut taxes for the rich yet again? That's class warfare."

I wonder why Molly Ivans isn't more widely syndicated. She writes well, she is funny, and she is usually right. If you see her in person, she is even funnier than in print. She tells a great story. This column is recommended.

Thanks as usual to Tapped for the link.

Subscribed to The American Prospect

Regular readers of this blog (Hi Mom) know that since discovering Tapped a few months ago (in a link from Eugene Volokh, praising them for their intellectual honesty), I have turned to Tapped more and more often for links and stories. It is now first on my daily reading list. It is like reading The New Republic before Andrew Sullivan, when TNR was actually a liberal magazine, and TRB made sense.

Today I decided to put my money where my mouth was and to support Tapped by subscribing to its parent magazine, The American Prospect. At $14.95 for a year, it is affordable, even for the marginally employed. Chances are that it will join the backlog in the bathroom, along with old copies of Wired, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and countless freebie Tech trade rags, but maybe I'll read every issue in paper. Maybe.

The Ministry of Homeland Security

Micah Wright has put up this wonderful site with posters done in the style of US WWII propganda posters. Here are reduced versions of two of my favorites that he did. Go to his site to see the full size versions. Recommended (although he says that the site, hosted on Apple's iMac service, is frequently taken down towards the afternoon as it exceeds bandwidth limitations).

The Economic Summit

This is William Saletan's take on Bush's so-called economic forum:

This afternoon at the President's Economic Forum in Waco, Texas, President Bush and Vice President Cheney sat side by side on the stage of a packed auditorium for more than an hour. That's the first time they've been that close together for that long in public since Sept. 11. Evidently they're no longer afraid of terrorists. What they're afraid of is Americans.

Like plantation owners, the employers on hand spoke for their employees." One CEO told Bush, "they are so happy to have jobs."

I wish I could write like that, funny, with an edge, and concise.

Tip o the hat again to Tapped, who has some good coverage of the summit.

Scooped by Tapped

I had the experience tonight of spending about an hour writing up my thoughts about Judge Doumar and the Hamdi case, because I feel strongly about it. Then I start my nightly troll through news sources, and what's the first thing I run accross? A write-up on the same subject, but better written, exceprting even more of the Post article, and calling Doumar a hero, by Tapped. Today's issue of Tapped is really good.

What does this mean:

Great minds think alike?
I should apply for a job with Tapped?

I should just go to bed earlier and leave the journalism to professionals?

Feedback (email is fine) wanted.

Some other people get it too

It is nice to see the broader segments of our society opposing Bush's war on civil liberties.

The Washington Post, in an editorial today, Two Pages Are Not Enough, asked "What burden does the government have to shoulder before it can lock away an American citizen indefinitely without charge as an enemy combatant?" and concluded that it was certainly more than a two page declaration consisting entirely of assertions by a government official who does not purport to be offering firsthand information.

The American Bar Association voted yesterday to oppose the Bush administration's secret detention of foreign nationals after the Sept. 11 attacks, urging that their names be disclosed and they be given immediate access to lawyers and family members.

And there was the previously blogged Newsweek story about the paucity of evidence that Jose Padilla was up to anything besides coming to the US to see his kid.

Update: and there is this LA times Op-Ed piece, Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision by somebody who evidently feels even stronger than I do. Tip o the hat to Tapped.

While I don't labor under the misapprehension that the Bush administration pays a lot of attention to what the Washington Post or Newsweek or the ABA say, it seems like wider and more mainstream groups are starting to see the danger in the usurpation of legislative and judicial power by the Bush administration. That's gotta be good.