Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Posted here Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 8:25:18 PM     Juan Cole on the situation between the US and Najaf. http://www.juancole.com/2004_04_01_juancole_archive.html#108188631557107161  The report about Sistani's strongly-worded message to the US warning them against attacking Najaf is now available in English. I haven't seen an Arabic text. Some 2500 US troops surround Najaf, and Muqtada al-Sadr says he is willing to sacrifice himself for Iraq. CNN says that those clerics negotiating with Sadr have warned the US not to come into Najaf, and have darkly intimated that the ones who caused the crisis "must pay." It is not clear if they mean the Army of the Mahdi or Paul Bremer, or both. I put that first because it is so different from Bush's conference, with its bullheaded determination to be god's fist in an unwilling world. Bush, by being loser than normal (some think signs of drink or sedatives), actually revealed more of what and how he thinks, and for those who feels secure with him, he seemed determined and strong. "It is better to fight them over the than over here," said a few of the callers on c-span after the conference. One thing, with the 9/11 hearings and the conference tonight, we are seeing more about this government than usual, and just imagine if we had this kind of "dialog" every week, with the development of everyone's understanding that would follow. It might be a great place to live.   ********

Posted here Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 1:49:46 PM     Thinking about the President's press conference tonight, I would imagine a strategy of starting the event with anouncements of increased acvity and personnel for Iraq, and to answer all questions from that leveage point. Now, let's see if I am wrong, and how. ********

Posted here Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 12:50:52 PM     Important look at income numbers. http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/12/news/economy/election_incomes/index.htm?cnn=yes Median income measure But average income figures can be greatly influenced by larger gains among the wealthy. The median income numbers -- the point at which half the population has more and half the population has less -- are another measure of how the middle-income family is doing. The Census Department's data shows pretax median household income rose 0.6 percent to $42,409 between 2000 and 2002, the most recent year available from that agency. When adjusted for inflation, that gain became a 3.3 percent decline during the same period -- the figure that Kerry has been using in his "misery index." At least part of the reason for the decline in median income at the same time that average income rose is that the wealthy have seen more gains from both the tax cuts and the overall economic climate, according to economists. "It's true there's been a shift of income distribution, with a lot of income gains accruing to upper income individuals. The labor market is paying a bigger and bigger premium for being well educated," said Ethan Harris, chief economist for Lehman Bros. "At the other end of the distribution, if you look at Joe Six-Pack, you've seen a big decline in big paying, low skill jobs in manufacturing." But the decline in median income, which was cited by the Kerry campaign Monday, doesn't take into account the impact of tax cuts or the rise in federal spending on entitlement programs such as Medicaid and Medicare. Census data show after-tax median household income between 2000 and 2002, adjusted for inflation, fell only 2.1 percent, not the 3.3 percent pre-tax decline. The median income family's tax bill fell by $625 during that period. Add in government entitlements, which increased by $560, and the income decline was only 0.6 percent to $42,061. ********

Posted here Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 11:21:04 AM     On Chilabi, by Arnaud de Borchgrave http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20040401-090721-7961r  If Mr. Chalabi's fast track to power is not derailed and he becomes prime minister in July, the president won't be able to fire him unless his two deputies agree.     The provisional constitution seems tailor-made for Mr. Chalabi to call the shots into 2005. As head of the Governing Council's economic and finance committee, Mr. Chalabi already has maneuvered loyalists into key Cabinet positions in the provisional authority -- finance, oil and trade. The Central Bank governor, the head of the trade bank and the managing director of the largest commercial bank also owe their positions to Mr. Chalabi's influence.     While in London exile, he cultivated close contacts with Israeli officials. He has also visited Iran a number of times to confer with leading ayatollahs in a bid for their support. He was given permission to open an INC office in Tehran. His strongest backers in the U.S. are Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and neo-conservative theoretician ("An End to Evil") Richard Perle.     All the bases are loaded for a home run by MVP Chalabi. If successful, it will be an additional campaign issue President Bush could have done without.     Good riddance to sick sadist Saddam. But was Mr. Chalabi a worthy democratic trade? And how will voters react when they become convinced the U.S. taxpayers funded Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to train defectors on how best to convince the Bush administration that Iraq was a clear and present danger? Two hundred billion dollars later, the mind reels.       ********

Posted here Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 10:36:38 AM     When an article has a tone, it is always worth while thinking of how another tone, based on different facts, can play out. Her is one I think worth experiencing, but to realize there are different experiences possible, still with truth. We really have no idea who pays for this privilege of superficiality, but those billions who are doing the paying -- far out of our reified view -- are getting a clearer idea all the time. Of course, this culture is pure charade. We can pretend we are as disembedded as we like, but we are invariably physical -- diaphragms heaving incessantly, articulating gases in our guts, dissipating heat, concentrating urine, sloughing off dead cells, yawing and eating and scratching and sleeping and fucking and finally, dying. Inside-Outside. Inside this whole charade, where money “grows” and media-stunned young women aspire to be models for Victoria’s Secret, resides liberal hypocrisy. Outside it resides imperial militarism -- the last refuge of capitalism as it devours its own social and material bases like a vampire stranded alone on a desert island. from www.counterpunch.org what is wrong about this kind of article is that there are different cultural streams each defining a reality that leaves out the reality of what actually happens, which is the balance achieved by the balancing of the real forces of these various streams. A discourse that is inside a stream is not going to get at the "reality" of what happens, because it deals with the "reality" that fits the stream's image. So this article can be correct, but what will happen is a balance of the weak, who are not so weak, and the strong who are not so strong. But there are actually many streams flowing at the same time. Reality is all of them. ********

Posted here Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 8:27:38 AM     From the new New York Review of Books. Volume 51, Number 7 · April 29, 2004 The Failure By Thomas Powers The challenge facing investigators now, and historians later, is to explain how the evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction collected by the CIA—wrong in almost every instance—was used by President Bush and his principal advisers to describe an urgent and growing danger which justified a preemptive war. Can the White House plausibly claim that its loud misreading of the evidence was not driven by a determination to go to war? Can the President plausibly claim that the war policy was not his, or that he did not know he and his spokesmen were exaggerating the dangers they cited? It is these questions which define the crisis confronting the CIA. January 17, 2002: The Trouble with the CIA Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda In Search of Hezbollah By Adam Shatz Beirut used to be known as the Paris of the Middle East, and in the well-to-do Christian and Sunni quarters of the city, the capital of Lebanon still manages to cast a spell. The cafés are thick with smoke and conversation in Arabic, English, and French, techno music blares from clubs until four in the morning, and everywhere there are women in miniskirts. But "Haririgrad," as downtown Beirut is sometimes called, is hardly representative of the country. If you take a ten-minute drive to the city's southern suburbs, a series of dingy, overcrowded slums, you will see another country, where hejabs are more common than miniskirts, liquor is hard to find, and you're less likely to see posters of Prime Minister Hariri than of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the forty-four-year-old secretary-general of Hezbollah, the Party of God. August 16, 1990: Beirut: The Hamra by Jean Said Makdisi The Disintegration of Palestine By Edward R.F. Sheehan Nablus is a pleasing city, the most populous in the West Bank. A visitor is struck by the limestone dwellings on verdant mountainsides that surround the ancient town, first settled three millennia ago in the northern part of the West Bank. The city is now inhabited by nearly 200,000 Palestinians who are suffering badly from the Israeli occupation and the growing disintegration of their society. ********

Posted here Tuesday, April 13, 2004 at 8:19:29 AM     Billmon asks this morning (the them in the quote is the nazi's). The question is whether the average American is more like them or more like us -- and which way he or she might lean if the war against terrorism continues to degenerate into a war against the Islamic world. That's one question I really don't want to see put to the test. ********