How Iowa Decides

Iowa isn't just voting next week--they're caucusing. The Wall Street Journal (finally) explains what that means.

Democrats and Republicans gather at various locations in the 1,784 precincts of the state. Republicans make a pitch for their candidates and there is a secret ballot. Democrats gather in clumps around the room according to which candidate they support. But the key item for caucuses in both parties is this:

"Candidates who don't receive support from at least 15% of participants are "eliminated," but their supporters can realign with another group. A final head count at the Jan. 3 gatherings will determine how county-level (not statewide) delegates will be apportioned."

According to this account, the lingo is that more than 15% makes the candidate "viable." But that first vote isn't the last. If your candidate isn't viable, you can join your second choice candidate, or the group that remains uncommitted.

This is why polls ask for "second choice" candidates, but that doesn't say a lot because whether your second choice will matter depends on who your first choice is--that is, if your first choice is a second tier candidate unlikely to get 15%, your second choice matters more than if your first choice is one of the top tier, who are more likely to get 15%. Unless of course your second choice is also a below 15% candidate--then it's your third choice that matters.

Then again, there's nothing preventing anyone from switching for any reason or no reason, from any candidate (viable or not) or the uncommitted, until the final tally is taken.

The big variable is who will attend. Some of the problem is who can attend: even though the caucuses are held in the evening, lots of people work then--in retail, restaurants and other places open until 9, and notably police, fire and medical personnel who often belong to politically active unions. Employers are not required to give time off, because technically it isn't an election--it's a internal party matter.

In all, only about 10% of Democrats and 12% of Republicans are expected to caucus.

As things are shaping up now, if Obama wins it may be because of what some are reporting is a very strong new speech in the closing days, or because college students are able and willing to caucus; if Hillary wins it may be because her experience argument grafts onto concern about events in Pakistan, or because of her ad blitz or women who want to vote for a woman for President once in their lives; if John Edwards wins, it may be because of his strong organization in rural areas and the resonance of his anti-corporate argument where jobs moved offshore have created hardship and insecurity.

If Huckabee wins, it may be because his heavy fundie appeals have worked; if Romney wins it might be because his organization turns people out and some have become leery of Huckabee's weirdness; if McCain does well, it may be because the others seem untrustworthy and unappealing.

Who knows? Nobody. Who cares? Everybody involved. Iowa caucuses on Thursday, and New Hampshire votes the following Tuesday. The difference between who places first and third may be very slim, which may mean it means a lot, or not so much. All the chatter will immediately be about how the outcome will or won't affect New Hampshire. And nobody knows that, either.

At this point, it seems to me that if the top three Democrats finish as close as they appear to be in the polls (and once again the cell phone argument is being raised--the polls don't reach them, and lots of young people use them as their one and only phone), Iowa may not matter as much as it did last time.

But of course no one will be able to say that until a week from Wednesday, when the New Hampshire results are known. If Edwards wins Iowa (and I still think he's got the inside track) then he has to win New Hampshire--but it's not a given. If Hillary clearly wins Iowa, then she is likely to win New Hampshire--but that's not a given either. Last time, John Kerry from neighboring Mass. had an early lead there, and lost it in the Howard Dean (of Vermont) surge. But Kerry winning in the fields of Iowa made New Hampshire feel better about returning to him. Hillary's had a lead there for some time, but New York is not quite so close, and the suspicion has always been that her support was wider there (and nationally) than deep.

If Obama wins in largely rural white Iowa, he's got a better chance in not so entirely rural white New Hampshire. At the moment he's close enough in New Hampshire polls that an Iowa victory could well put him over the top in NH.

Sound like tapdancing? You bet. Personally I'm betting that there will still be three Democrats standing--and three Republicans--by the time I vote in February.

Watching Iowa...Listening to New Hampshire

The Iowa caucuses are less than two weeks away, and the final polls will be starting soon. I have the sense that Hillary has made up some ground, although I totally don't respect the tactics employed. Her campaign has made one voter's decision: I definitely will not vote for her in the California primary. But she is closer to winning Iowa than she was even a week ago, is my guess.

She has been helped, I fear, by John Edwards and Barack Obama going after each other. You'd think they would have learned from Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt knocking each other out last time. While the national talking head consensus has become that the electorate is in the mood for a big change, which doesn't favor Hillary, Edwards and Obama are making it hard for people to feel good about supporting them, while Hillary smiles and smiles.

On the Republican side, the Huckabee boom doesn't seem to have collapsed yet, and it's a question now of whether Iowa Republicans have soured on Mitt Romney even more than they are skeptical of Huckabee, and whether the religious right has actually gone to Huckabee, with sufficient fervor to show up and caucus. Right now I'd say the chances of Huckabee coming in first have improved.

The New Hampshire primary has some markedly different dynamics than Iowa--including the mechanics of a primary (which requires only simple voting) versus the caucus (which requires more time and actual discussion.) But at the moment both Democratic and Republican primaries are so close and in such flux that Iowa could be decisive.

Right now it appears that John McCain is rising and could very well win the Republican contest. He's been endorsed by newspapers and his policy positions are closer to New Hampshire, particularly in recognizing the reality of the climate crisis, which that state is seeing within its borders. McCain's age is a problem, but his biggest ally is the general disenchantment with Mitt Romney.

However, a strong first place for Huckabee in Iowa could present another alternative to those who have soured on both Romney and Rudy. (Huckabee has less of a natural constituency in New Hampshire than Iowa.) If McCain at least places in Iowa, his chances to win in New Hampshire are enhanced. At the moment, I'd suggest he's on track to win NH.

Among the Democrats, the key may be how Hillary's attacks on Obama affect Iowa. Obama is from neighboring Illinois, so his record is more likely to be known in Iowa than in New Hampshire. If Iowa swallows the Hillary campaign's largely false attacks, it could be tougher for him to sustain his current momentum in New Hampshire. A third place showing in Iowa could be fatal to Obama, resurrecting the Hillary coronation scenario. A second place to Edwards won't hurt him, though it won't help him. A second place to Hillary will hurt him, but maybe not fatally. It's hard to see how Edwards wins anywhere else if he doesn't win Iowa.

Not Safe

Making us safe has been a Bushite mantra, but it's mostly been very expensive marketing for a nonexistent product. When it comes to protecting citizens from the effects of disasters and emergencies at home, a new study by the nonprofit Trust for America's Health concludes, "the United States is not safe."

Individual states and the federal government are at fault: Many states still lack a stockpile of drugs, masks, gloves and other equipment needed to battle a pandemic of diseases, despite five years of constant and detailed warning, the Trust for America's Health said in its report. Overall, federal funding for state and local preparedness will have declined by 25 percent in 3 years if the president's FY (fiscal year) 2008 request is approved," the report reads.

The report focuses on pandemics and public health consequences of emergencies. Also out this week, a Washington Post story that lists some (but by no means all) of the possible consequences for health of the climate crisis."We are not dealing with a single toxic agent or a single microbe where we can put our finger with certainty on an exposure and the response," said Jonathan A. Patz, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "Climate change affects everything."

It is the complexity of climate crisis effects that would test even a system ready to respond to known kinds of emergencies--and we still aren't anywhere near that. Public health is still in shambles, and the general infrastructure for emergencies found wanting in the above report applies to more than the health aspects. These effects are already happening, and they will happen more and more in our immediate future.

Months ago, Keith Olbermann quoted Winston Churchill: "The responsibility of government for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence." This basic civics lesson is also a question for 2008 candidates. What will you do to truly prepare, to truly try to make America safe?

Presidential Politics

With about three weeks until the Iowa caucus, Obama and Huckabee are surging, there and elsewhere. But I'm still betting on the following order in Iowa:

Democrats
1. John Edwards
2. Barack Obama
3. Hillary Clinton

Republicans
1. Mitt Romney
2. Huckabee
3. John McCain

The top two swapping in either race wouldn't be too surprising but the questions for Obama and Huckabee are whether their surges continue, and especially whether they have the necessary organization to be effective in the unique Iowa caucus system.

Maybe the most daring prediction there is McCain coming in as high as third. If he does come in third, he could win New Hampshire. The question is whether the controversies over Romney and Huckabee drive voters to McCain in Iowa. He's probably pretty strong in New Hampshire already.

Among the Dems, even with a second place showing, Iowa might help Obama the most for New Hampshire. Of course a lot can happen before anyone votes. But the sense of inevitability for Hillary and Rudy has gone overall, at least for the moment. Then again, this could be a very weird year, when what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire doesn't matter as much as it did in 2004.

Through political luck or shrewd planning, who knows at this point, Barack Obama is rising above the pack at just the right moment to give him a credible chance to play dominoes with the primaries and come out the Democratic nominee.

Hillary Clinton's campaign appears to be faltering, and it may be the people she employs that's doing her in. I've always felt that I can live with Hillary as the nominee, but I can't live with her staff. In any case, she can survive losing in Iowa and even New Hampshire, and still win the nomination with a turnaround in February's megaprimaries.

Then again, so could Obama. John Edwards probably has the will, money and muscle to hang around long enough to see if these two bump each other off. (I still think he's as likely as anyone to win Iowa.) The polls show the top three are very close, but Iowa is three weeks away. Three days before the voting will be the first time that the opinion polls may suggest the order of finish. Unless one of the other Dem candidates pulls a surprise showing in the top three in Iowa, they're all pretty much done.

Political analyst Craig Crawford seems to think that Obama's confession of drug use in high school could still hurt him--even though it seems to have hurt the Clinton campaign more at the moment, which has reportedly been feeding the story. I don't think it will. Smirk did worse and at an older age, and voters ignored it. They ignored it with Bill Clinton's 60s youth, despite media frenzy. Obama wrote about it himself a decade ago, in the same context he mentions it today--as a cautionary tale to young people.

Of course, Republicans have no conscience about these kinds of attacks, but Smirk also got away with it because of his born again thing. Voters want to believe in redemption, and I think they really want to believe in it in a black man as well as a white fundamentalist. It doesn't tarnish Obama's image--think of all the white evangelists with a checkered past.

Otherwise, it occurs to me that Obama could turn up the wattage in his favor by making service a keynote of his campaign--service to the country and to humanity, like JFK did with the Peace Corps. It's also a way of channeling voter dismay and disenchantment with Bushworld. The U.S. doesn't have enough diplomats to staff its embassies--a call to service would help. A call to serve the needs of the nation, especially of the poor, of children and the old-- Obama more than any other candidate can do this credibly, especially with young people, who seem to be most enthusiastic about his candidacy. Such a call to service could energize his campaign even more, and jolt Obamamania into high gear.

I don't know when the right moment to do this would be, but if the moment is right, it could do a lot to sweep him to the presidency.

Not Anybody's Finest Hour

It's pretty clear what the Bushite agenda is for the rest of Smirk's term: continued bullying, with special emphasis on pushing their failures into the next presidency, and protecting themselves from future law enforcement.

The "surge" of forces in Iraq was all about keeping that country from collapsing until after January 20, 2009, when the next President is inaugurated. The obstructionism in Bali on the climate crisis was more of the same, though maybe longer term, until it's possible to blame the Democrats for not responding to health and environmental catastrophes caused by global heating.
And of course, the CIA destroying tapes of torture is only the most awkwardly blatant of many furious mannings of the barricades to keep those responsible for horrors that violate laws from ever being held responsible in any court of law.

And the pathetic outcome is that the bullying is working. With an approval rating slightly higher than that for head colds, Bush refuses to compromise at all--in even the most usual ways--on any legislation before Congress, and he's getting away with it. Congress failed by one vote to put some muscle in the energy bill, especially in taxing the outrageous profits of oil companies, and passed a watered-down version. They've acceded to Bushite demands, only to be told that their humiliating obeisance was not craven enough.

And so they're passing Bushite bills, and the Democrats are reportedly fighting amongst themselves.It's crap like this that disgusts the electorate and makes people cynical about government ever working. (Fortunately for corporations, their insidious machinations and incompetence is seldom on the public record.) Fortunately there is an election coming up, so hope springs eternal, but right now it can't come too soon.

What Losing Arctic Ice Means

In his Nobel speech, Al Gore referred to the melting of Arctic ice, and the prediction that summer ice will be gone in seven years. But apart from the likely extinction of polar bears--which is a grim enough legacy-- what does this mean in the context of Climate Crisis effects?

The AP had a story on this, because some scientists, who initially "shocked" the community by predicting that summer Arctic ice could be gone as soon as 2040, are now saying it looks like it could be pretty much gone by 2012--in five years. The story explains some of the significance.

Jay Zwally is a NASA climate scientist: "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming," said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal. "Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."

The story goes on:

What happens in the Arctic has implications for the rest of the world. Faster melting there means eventual sea level rise and more immediate changes in winter weather because of less sea ice.

In the United States, a weakened Arctic blast moving south to collide with moist air from the Gulf of Mexico can mean less rain and snow in some areas, including the drought-stricken Southeast, said Michael MacCracken, a former federal climate scientist who now heads the nonprofit Climate Institute. Some regions, like Colorado, would likely get extra rain or snow.

Melting of sea ice and Greenland's ice sheets also alarms scientists because they become part of a troubling spiral. White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth, NASA's Zwally said. When there is no sea ice, about 90 percent of the heat goes into the ocean which then warms everything else up. Warmer oceans then lead to more melting. "That feedback is the key to why the models predict that the Arctic warming is going to be faster," Zwally said. "It's getting even worse than the models predicted."

NASA scientist James Hansen, the lone-wolf researcher often called the godfather of global warming, on Thursday was to tell scientists and others at the American Geophysical Union scientific in San Francisco that in some ways Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points, based on Greenland melt data. "We have passed that and some other tipping points in the way that I will define them," Hansen said in an e-mail. "We have not passed a point of no return. We can still roll things back in time — but it is going to require a quick turn in direction."

Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Reality Series

Here's the movie/ TV series we're apparently living in: Marty McFly goes back to the future and discovers that in the early 21st century the United States is becoming a totalitarian oligarchical pseudo-theocratic no-nothing paranoid dictatorship, thanks to the accession of George W. Bush to the presidency. Let's hope he's back to the past, figuring out how to prevent it so that this time-line can end.

Those of us inside this sad story are deep into Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the series, updated with cell phones and Internet Newspeak babble. Latest evidence centers on torture and the denial of Constitutional rights, and the astounding fact that Guantanamo, the American Gulag, is still open for business, and the Bushites are still fighting to retain their anti-Constitutional powers. There's the news that the CIA destroyed tapes of a torture session, and at least some outrage about it. It's clear now that so much of the Bushites' furious activity defending torture and spying is to protect their asses against courts to come.

Speaking of which, the Supreme Court is determining at this very late date just what rights those swept up by the Bushite Shock Doctrinaires in their war of terror really should have. On anything before the Court, I've found Linda Greenhouse to be the very best guide. Surprisingly, she seems to sense that the Court is not going to rubber-stamp the Bushite retrenchment to police state barbarism, but the actual decision won't happen until summer.

Another subplot of the series is the skittering towards theocracy and further intolerance, with damage not only to Constitutional freedoms but the unfettered creativity of thought so necessary to our particular future.The Christian Right's political and organizational disarray, and the silence coming from the White House since reelection, may have suggested this is yesterday's news--until Mitt Romney's speech this week showed just how far we've fallen in recent decades.

That the speech was billed as this Mormon candidate's statement mirroring JFK's famous speech to hostile Protestant ministers about being Catholic and running for President--that in fact Romney used JFK's speech as a virtual Cliff's Notes for his--showed how far we've moved from the Constitution.There are a couple of good articles at salon on the subject (and as they point out, Mike Huckabee is an even more direct threat), but getting to them can be pretty annoying. And there's this specific comparison, with links to others. The JFK passage that's so telling is this one:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

Granted, that the "no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote" was a bit tongue in cheek, because even then the more fundamentalist wing was willing to do so. But it wasn't the norm, and it wasn't done openly. Of course now, it's become standard, and because it's accepted, so much more dangerous. Go back another 30 years to Sinclair Lewis warning that when dictatorship comes to America, it will come under the banner of Christianity.

Romney's speech didn't come out and call for America as a Christian nation (nor is Huckabee likely to, though he comes close), but he does attempt to hijack the Founding Fathers to support his notion that we've got no America, no Constitution, without organized religion and belief in God. Which god, whose god, that's never said, but it's part of the tradition to make a few references to "our Jewish friends" and even "our Catholic friends" while meaning the Protestant God.

These days it's a little different than in the Christians vs. Communists 50s--there's more common cause among the most rabidly conservative wings of Protestant, Jewish and Catholic religions, as they come more and more to represent the whole of their bloc. Conservative--meaning traditional-- beliefs are honorable. Intolerance is another matter entirely, and that's where these folks are heading. Some of them are already there, openly. The next step is the Christian police state.

Romney's announced enemy is the "religion" of "secular humanism," a patently political attempt to make common cause with this contortion of categories spawned in the Reagan era that never quite caught on except as fund-raising bait in fundie mega-churches. Maybe a little better than the War on Christmas for rallying the Christian soldiers marching not as to, but to, war. Still, the implication leads to Guantanamo for secular humanists. Far-fetched? Look around, and tell me about far-fetched.

They'll be marching to war against their fellow countrymen, who must no longer be free to muse and make the most personal and most human judgments imaginable on the basic issues of our existence. To differ is to be cast out. It's as totalitarian as you can get, and leads directly to 1984 oppression and, even more directly, to dullness and stupidity.

Too bad. Really too bad. Because if we're going to have a future, we won't get there by mindless adherence to dogma, by blindness, dull comformity and stupidity. It is in enforcing these that religion becomes--in a kind of ultimate irony--soul-destroying. And these days, future-destroying too.

Why Are We in Iraqnam
(RIP Norman Mailer)

With the deal last week between the Bushites and the current Iraqi government to formalize the intention to keep U.S. troops in those huge permanent bases in Iraq, and to "encourage" foreign investment (i.e. U.S. oil companies and related Bushite corporations), two prominent theories--not mutually exclusive by any means--got additional evidence for their answers as to why the Bushites began and prosecuted the war and occupation of Iraq.

One theory is Naomi Klein's in her book, The Shock Doctrine. Basically she outlines a strategy used in various parts of the world to further the goal of enriching large corporations--almost always run by or with strong ties to the folks now identified as Bushites, but who have pulled strings, or assisted their mentors in doing so, in previous Republican administrations. On Thursday she got the opportunity--the first I know of--to explain what she means on U.S. television: on a very well done segment of Countdown with Keith Olbermann. (Her theory aside, Klein should be regularly analyzing geopolitics and the news on U.S. television.) Here's what she said about Iraq:

KLEIN: Well, Iraq is the classic example of the shock doctrine. You had a military strategy that was called Shock and Awe. It was a military strategy designed to maximize disorientation. The theory was—This is a quote from Richard Armitage, the former deputy undersecretary of state, who said that the theory was that Iraqis would be so shocked, they would be easily marshaled from point A to point B. In that moment when they were supposed to be easy to control, easy to martial, you had Paul Bremer waltz in his Brooks Brothers suits and Army beauties, the uniform of the disaster capitalists, and say Iraq is open for business, and create this sort of—an attempt to create a corporate Utopia for American multinationals. It didn‘t work out. Then you saw the emergence of a third shock, not an economic shock, but shocks to body, the shock of torture, as they attempted to control this rebellious country.

There‘s three kinds of shocks in “The Shock Doctrine,” the shock of the crisis, then an economic shock therapy program, and then, if people don‘t behave, a third shock, which is the shock of torture. But didn't it work out? Certainly it's been messy, and so far such favored corporations as Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater have had to take their considerable piles of money and run, but could this latest agreement be the Bushite victory?

Jim Holt in the London Review of Books reverse-engineers the Iraq war and sees how this is entirely possible. First, he outlines the prize Iraq represents. That it's all about the oil isn't a news flash to a lot of people, but probably most don't know just how much oil is involved:

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

To get and keep control of that oil--even if it takes another decade or two--is the purpose of those bases, Holt suggests. He mentions that "Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions." But they are all mini-cities or walled suburbs. He refers to Thomas Ricks' reporting on one of the bases, the Balad air base: "Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks."

(Holt mentions something that I pointed out a couple of years ago--that U.S. bases in Iraq meant that U.S. bases in somewhat unstable Saudi Arabia, that so upset Osama bin Laden, could be closed--and they have been.)

But even if the U.S. and the West can't get much Iraqi oil into their pipelines for awhile, they still win because the U.S. presence deters their major competitor for oil in the world: China. Without more energy, China's economy can't keep growing at its current rate. By denying China this source, the West has a chance to weather the Chinese economic storm.

So Holt wonders: Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth.

Which is why the failure to nurture a strong central government is actually success: If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East?

So if you're thinking in terms of dollars and cents--even in billions or trillions--the whole thing makes sound business sense:The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

In fact the only counter argument Holt can muster is that the Bushites don't appear to be this smart. Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

Yet it makes perfect sense, even rhetorically. When real politik Republicans talk about freedom, they mean the freedom of themselves, their rich cronies and supporters to loot the world unencumbered by law, morality or compassion. (It's also why they're not bothered at all about the missing billions likely used for graft and other payoffs. Or why the current rampant corruption in Iraq is of no concern. After all, China has no problem with it either in their colonies such as Cambodia. It's part of the price of business.) That certainly seems to be what the Bushites mean when they say they're bringing freedom to Iraq.

Blood Sport

In the stories before and certainly the stories after the latest debate among Democratic candidates, the media was vampirish in its desire for blood, specifically Hillary Clinton's. But that the debate itself got nasty was by design, not by the candidates, but by MSNBC, and specifically the twisted beady-eyed ferret, so-called moderator Tim Russert. He led the assault, which was notable for its focus on Senator Clinton; otherwise it was his usual accusatory questioning on about the level of a high school sophomore debater with limited intelligence but an instinct for the jugular. He's perversely entertaining, as we watch him try to make politicians sweat, and as we wait for him to lose it on camera, perhaps begin snarling and chewing on his own claws.

This debate was clearly part of a continuous narrative, begun with TV pundits and their more competitively-alarmed print counterparts (although these days they are often the same guys) and perhaps for the first time carried through deliberately by the so-called "moderator" in the debate itself. This is the final payoff of the switch from candidate debates being sponsored by the likes of the League of Women Voters--non-partisan, issue-oriented, public-spirited--to sponsorship by interest groups and especially by the media itself, in this case MSNBC. They are transforming a fitfully informative forum that explores candidate's positions and allows voters to see and hear the candidates answer questions, to a TV "reality" show. Who will get voted off the island, and who will do what despicable act to gain the advantage? For what those shows are all about is blood sport.

Hillary Clinton is not my candidate, at least not yet. I also don't fault the other candidates for what they said, when they were drawing specific distinctions with her positions, or even when they were pointing out possible problems with her as a candidate. In fact, I thought almost all the candidates were sharper in this debate, in expressing their own points of view. That so much was focused on Hillary was partly foisted on them.

MSNBC evidently decided that because the polls say Hillary is the frontrunner, she was to receive more of the attention than anyone else, followed by Obama and Edwards. And she was to be the prime target for the ferret attacks. Those are judgments new to the debate format, and we'd better notice them. And notice their function: to increase conflict and get a little violence into prime time, which is normally when MSNBC likes to turn America's prisons into entertainment.The TV networks make enormous amounts of money from presidential campaigns. They need to juice up the conflict, so they can dangle the audience numbers before the candidates, and continue to reap those millions, the lion's share of political contributions that prostitute the candidates and the electoral system.

The result is to twist the campaign into a sham that is harmful to the process and the country, and our shared future. By emphasizing violent conflict, they emphasize the supposed necessities of violent behavior in a president. They call it toughness but what they really are promoting is violence.Ironically, this works to the ultimate advantage of Hillary, whose campaign is apparently predicated on "strength," and to the detriment of Barack Obama, who is trying to bring some sanity back to the political dialogue, instead of this bipolar insanity over strength v. weakness, and stereotyping everyone as one or the other. In the New York Times blog on the debate, Katharine Seelye actually wrote these sentences about Senator Obama: "he has an amiable quality about him that seems to resist the whole messy business. That might raise questions about how tough he would be in the Oval Office."

That's insane, and dangerously so. There is no other support for this allegation. But it is also typical of the after-debate swarm. Obama talked in the debate about how "we are all in this together" and how we must turn away from "the politics of fear." Indeed, the NY Times columnist Paul Krugman just lambasted Republican candidates for engaging in that very thing. But the media wants to see Obama's 'killer instinct,' his willingness to attack--not his willingness to draw distinctions, to show where and why he disagrees, but to 'take a shot' at Hillary.

This is the kind of bloodlust bullshit that made it so easy for the Bushites to lie us into what may well turn out to be the war that most threatens our future of any in our history. It's no small thing--it's the culture of violence that makes violence, including torture and the antiseptic discussion of mass violence by airplanes and missiles, so acceptable, and so easy to do.

Finally, it is a dangerous mood to encourage in a campaign that is bound to touch on sensitivities and prejudices. I don't mean to pick on the Times, for their coverage is merely characteristic, but I select this metaphor to caution against this way of speaking about a process of deciding on our leadership and our future: In discussing Senator Obama's interview with the Times in which he drew distinctions between himself and Hillary, Adam Nagourney wrote that viewers should "watch for" whether Obama would repeat these statements in the debate. His metaphor was this: "Will he pull the trigger? "

I remember when someone did pull the trigger on a presidential candidate. His name was Sirhan Sirhan, and the candidate was Robert Kennedy. It was 1968, months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the period that saw Malcolm X gunned down, and George Wallace crippled by a bullet. It was a violent time, and a time of violent language. Robert Kennedy was trying to change that. Someone pulled the trigger on him, and our nation has suffered ever since. The time to think about that is now, before it happens again.

From The Hollow Men Series by Howard Penning.

The Hollow Men (A Hollow-een Story)


Here's a spooky story that tells you why Iraq is related to Christmas toys. It takes us to Baghdad and China, Washington and Wal-Mart, and ends (or begins?) under the Christmas tree. It's our 2007 version of the 1925 poem by T.S. Eliot:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpieces filled with straw

It starts with the scary mercenaries of Blackwater and the evil sorceror Rumsfeld...

Episode 1: The Hollow Military (Read on if you dare...)

The response of the Iraqi government to armed members of Blackwater USA, a for-profit corporation, killing 17 Iraqi civilians in one incident in September has led to an avalanche of attention on the role of private contractors, armed and not, in Iraq. This led to a number of revelations, including the recent U.S. government study that could not account for about a billion dollars paid to another for-profit security company, DynCorp International, ostensibly to train police in Iraq.

Yet these firms have operated in Iraq from the beginning of the war through the occupation. There are an estimated 180,000 civilian contractors in Iraq, at least 45,000 in armed roles (according to Joan Walsh of Salon in a TV interview), while there are 160,000 U.S. troops.

Moreover, this use of contractors is not, as some media reports would have it, an accidental byproduct of a tiff between the Defense and State departments, forcing State to hire private security when the Pentagon refused to protect their diplomats in Iraq. It is the result of deliberate policy, articulated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It is part of his philosophy of the "hollow military."

Here's what Naomi Klein writes in her book, The Shock Doctrine:

"...Rumsfeld saw the army shedding large numbers of full-time troops in favor of a small core of staffers propped up by cheap temporary soldiers from the Reserve and National Guard. Meanwhile, contractors from companies such as Blackwater and Halliburton would perform duties ranging from high-risk chauffeuring to prisoner interrogation to catering to health care." [p.285]

But the reality in Iraq has turned out to be even more extensive than Rumsfeld's dream. In his detailed report in Salon, P.W. Singer wrote:"The use of contractors in Iraq is unprecedented in both its size and scope...What matters is not merely the numbers, but the roles that private military contractors play." They "handled logistics and support during the war's buildup," built and operate massive U.S. bases, maintained and even operated sophisticated weapons systems.

"Private military firms...have played an even greater role in the post-invasion occupation," he writes. "Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown and Root division, recently spun off into its own firm, currently runs the logistics backbone of the force, doing everything from running military mess halls to moving fuel and ammunition. Other firms are helping to train local forces, including the new Iraqi army and national police."

It's also worth noting also, that according to A Pretext for War by James Baxter, these same corporations--whose infamous work in Iraq first came to light in the Abu Ghraib scandals--were influential in Pentagon circles before the war started.

"As it has been planned and conducted to date," Singer asserts, "the war in Iraq would not be possible without private military contractors." Apparently the armed contractors are so essential that AP is reporting the Blackwater mercenaries accused of those killings will get immunity. Singer quotes an estimate that over 1,000 contractors have been killed and 13,000 wounded, but they aren't counted in official casualties.

So it should not be surprising that, as Singer writes, "Halliburton's contract has garnered the firm $20.1 billion in Iraq-related revenue and helped the firm report a $2.7 billion profit last year. To put this into context, the amount paid to Halliburton-KBR is roughly three times what the U.S. government paid to fight the entire 1991 Persian Gulf War."

Episode 2: The Hollow Government

Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

The Hollow Military is not only a strategy, it is part of an ideology. Conservatives who want the smallest possible government are getting their wish with the Bushite government, but in a perverse way. The Bushites have shed actual government employees, either by underfunding government agencies and functions, or by replacing real managers, experts, technicians and career public servants with appointees hired for their political party activism and ideological fervor. But they have not cut government spending. In fact they've turned the Clinton surplus into a huge deficit, financed by a foreign power with a putatively Communist government: China.

Under Bush, the basic function of government has become to distribute taxpayer money to select corporations. As Naomi Klein points out, this is a process that G.W. Bush began as governor of Texas. Klein writes: "The future president's commitment to auctioning off the state, combined with Cheney's leadership in outsourcing the military and Rumsfeld's patenting of drugs that might prevent epidemics, provided a preview of the kind of state the three men would construct together---it was a vision of a perfectly hollow government." [294]

9/11 provided them their major opportunity, so untold billions went through the hollow Homeland Security department to favored corporations, and billions more to Iraq. This was part of "a straight-up transfer of hundreds of billions of public dollars a year into private hands. It would take the form of contracts, many offered secretively, with no competition and scarcely any oversight, to a sprawling network of industries: technology, media, communications, incarceration, engineering, education, health care."

It is the realization of a "radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture." [298]

Conservatives laud privatization for the efficiency supposedly inherent in for-profit ventures. But it hasn't worked out that way, partly because of the dynamics of monopoly capitalism, and partly because the Hollow Military and the Hollow Government depends on the Hollow Corporation.

Episode 3: The Hollow Corporation in Iraq

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

The money from the Hollow Goverment to supplement the Hollow Military goes to the Hollow Corporation. Just as the Hollow Government doesn't actually do the public business, and the Hollow Military doesn't conduct the war, the Hollow Corporation doesn't do the work. They all hire somebody else to do it. And often enough, the people they hire, hire somebody else. And so on.

Sometimes this results in luxurious overspending and immense waste, as in the Green Zone and military installations in Iraq. As Singer writes, "The operation is one of the most lavishly supported ever, and most of that has been due to contractors to whom we have outsourced almost all the logistics, and the protection of that enormous supply chain. But it has proven to be remarkably inefficient, all the while undermining our counterinsurgency efforts. According to testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Defense Contract Audit Agency has identified more than a staggering $10 billion in unsupported or questionable costs from battlefield contractors -- and investigators have barely scratched the surface."

In other situations, such as the billions wasted on the supposed "reconstruction" efforts in Iraq, it's a chain of subcontracts leading to no results at all, except waste and fraud, and to such situations as Bechtel being contracted to fix the electricity system, and after years, leaving Iraq with the electricity system in worse shape than when it arrived. Much of this travesty is a matter of public record through congressional investigations. As Klein writes:"Freed of all regulations, largely protected from criminal prosecution and on contracts that guaranteed their costs would be covered, plus a profit, many foreign [non-Iraqi] corporations did something entirely predictable: they scammed wildly. Known in Iraq as 'the primes,' the big contractors engaged in elaborate subcontracting schemes."

Money would pass through one subcontractor after another, each taking their cut, until there was little left for the actual work, so it isn't too surprising that the materials were cheap, the work shoddy, and nothing was accomplished--while conditions got worse, and insurgency grew.

Didn't you ever wonder why a country that was capable of building electrical and water systems, bridges, schools, etc. before they were destroyed by U.S. bombs, couldn't re-construct these very same things? I recall reading riverbend's blog early in the occupation in which she wrote about Iraqi firms eager to reconstruct their own country, and with the skills, knowledge and creativity to do it quickly and cheaply--but they were being ignored. These were the same people who constructed all this infrastructure in the first place--but U.S. based multinationals saw Iraq as a major opportunity to get richer quickest, and so Iraqis were rarely hired to rebuild their own country, especially not professionals. Which of course added immensely to the frustration and emnity of the Iraqi people, who had no electricity, no water, and--with all that work to be done--no jobs.

But the story of the Hollow Corporation does not begin in Iraq--nor does it end there. It has come home.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Episode 4: The Hollow Corporation at Home

Donald Rumsfeld did not invent the concept of the Hollow Military out of thin air. It came, as Naomi Klein asserts, from the Hollow Corporation of 1990s America. Companies that had previously manufactured their own products and "maintained large, stable workforces" in America went beyond moving factories to the South (the 1970s) or to Mexico and Asia (1980s). They stopped owning and maintaining factories at all. This became known as the "Nike model: "produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors, and pour your resources into design and marketing." The other Hollow model was based on Microsoft: a small, tight workforce concentrating on "core competencies," while everything else ("from running the mailroom to writing code") is outsourced to temp workers. [Klein, 284-5.) Rumsfeld came from this business background, and came to the Pentagon (Klein quoting Fortune magazine) "to oversee the same sort of restructuring that he orchestrated so well in the corporate world." [Klein, 285.]

By now--by 2007--the Hollow Corporation is a global fact. Another large factor in spreading it in the consumer goods area has been the spectacular rise of Wal-Mart, which as several books show (for instance,The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman) has transformed the companies that supply the products it sells. Because Wal-Mart insists on huge quantities at low cost, companies have been forced to find the very cheapest materials and labor. In the vast majority of cases, they can't find labor cheap enough anywhere in America. They must subcontract to China.

As Wal-Mart grew to become "both the largest company in the world, and the largest company in the history of the world" (Fishman), so did the number of products supplied from China, so that as one scholar told Frontline, "China and Wal-Mart are a joint venture." And most big U.S. corporations that sell products must sell a lot of them through Wal-Mart, so they restructure to please Wal-Mart, and so they become part of that joint venture.

But just as a scandal involving Blackwater alerted many to the Hollow Military, the current scandal over the safety of products manufactured in China is alerting the public to just how much of what we buy is made (in whole or in part) in China, and how little is made by the American company whose name is on the label--including traditional and trusted names such as Fisher-Price, Mattel and General Foods.

The news came fast and furious, in a bewildering array of products, from deadly pet food and tainted toothpaste to leaded toys. It turned out that something like 80% of imports stopped by U.S. officials came from China, and close to a fifth of China's export products did not meet China's own health and safety standards.

At first, Americans were very alarmed, and they became extremely wary of Chinese products, especially food products. But then it became clearer that avoiding processed foods, vitamins and health products that don't have some ingredients made in China (including ascorbic acid in Vitamin C) is almost impossible.

Then such trusted American companies as General Mills announced they would be doing more testing (while quietly admitting they hadn't been doing much before, or testing additives at all.) Whether the public was reassured, or simply in despair and denial, this storm passed. But it was a teachable moment in the extent of the Hollow Corporation.

For there are no Colgate Toothpaste factories in Anytown USA, not Anymore. (When U.S. Customs seized a supply of toxic Colgate, it was marked "Made in China" and "Made in India.") There are no Mattel or Fisher-Price toy factories with happy American elves at their workbenches. There is just a board of directors and a flotilla of managers coordinating subcontractors, including the well-paid ones (advertising and marketing agencies) and the very poorly paid ones (the workers who actually make the products.) That's American Know-How in 2007. Welcome to Hollow-een.

Long-term, doesn't it concern anyone that the skills and infrastructure to actually make things are disappearing from America, and that if anything happens to short-circuit the supply line from Asia, this nation may become a pitiful helpless giant?

But in the short-term, Christmas approaches, and problems with toys made in China continue. Just last week, Mattel recalled another 38,000 toys imported from China by Fisher-Price, as part of a larger recall of 665,000 toys for containing too much lead.

China has rightly pointed out that checking for the health and safety of products is the responsibility of the importing country. But our Hollow Government doesn't have a sufficient number of expert personnel to do it anymore. Our Hollow Corporations would rather not spend the money on it, preferring to concentrate on marketing and advertising. They import from China because the products are made there as cheaply as possible--and they are shocked, shocked that corners are cut affecting health and safety.

And even if the U.S. government had the capability to protect the consumer, just how far they could afford to push China is a real question, since China owns so much U.S. government debt--in effect, owns so much of the Hollow United States and its future.

This leaves a real conundrum for many Americans this Christmas, especially for the millions whose hold on the middle class is tenuous: without the good wages for actually making things that these corporations used to pay, they work several lower-paying jobs to make ends meet. Paying for more expensive toys and gifts for Christmas from smaller exclusive U.S. firms is not a good option, assuming such toys and gifts can be found.

For those with sufficient discretionary income, there are continuing ethical problems of buying from companies dependent on sweatshop labor. Recently another trusted brand--The Gap-- has been tarnished by evidence of child labor sweatshop abuse exposed by journalists, forcing them to drop a subcontractor in India: they are shocked, shocked that 10 year olds were virtually enslaved by a lowest-bid subcontractor. The Gap reassures American consumers that the clothes they sell for Christmas will not include any tainted by this company. There are many roads from the Hollow Corporation and the Hollow Government to a hollow Christmas.

So as Americans cross their fingers and shop for Christmas, they may know that in the companies they once trusted for quality, and in the government they depend on to protect them, there is no there there. They are all hollow.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Happy Holloween!

It Only Looks Like Suicide: The Politics of S-CHIP

As Rescued at Daily Kos and frontpaged at E Pluribus Media.

Why would the very unpopular lame duck President lead Republican members of Congress to defeat a bill to expand SCHIP, a successful program favored by 81% of Americans (according to CBS) to save the lives and health of children?

It's counterintuitive, even for Republicans. Next to advocating arsenic for babies, this was the most daringly callous, profane and seemingly brain-dead political stand possible. It seems like political suicide.

So, why do it?I believe the answer is this: the Republicans are gearing up to fight Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee (in Bush's eyes), and they are going to do so on the issue of government-run health care, the issue they defeated her on before.

Here's briefly what the debate is about, as summarized by Keith Olbermann: SCHIP currently covers six million children too poor for insurance but not poor enough for Medicaid. But a growing number of Americans, two out of five, are not covered by employer insurance; 47 million don‘t have any health insurance. That number is also up. The uninsured children increasing by 600,000 last year alone. So Democrats want to expand S-CHIP to cover four million more kids. The cost, seven billion dollars a year.

Last week the White House and Republican congressional leadership fought hard to deny Congress enough votes to override the Bush veto. Moreover, they did it by distorting what the law would actually do, including who it was intended to cover. And by the viciousness cited here in the previous post.

The answer to "why" is partly in the White House statement, and partly in exactly how they distorted the bill. And the most direct part of that answer is this: the Republicans are gearing up to fight Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee (in Bush's eyes), and they are going to do so on the issue of government-run health care, the issue that they won against her before.

Bush said his opposition to SCHIP was partly on principle, because the bill goes down the road of "socialized medicine." That's been a regular Republican refrain for at least a half century; they used it to oppose what became Medicare in the Kennedy administration. Now it's being linking directly to Hillary Clinton's health care reform proposal, not only by Republicans in Congress, but by the leading Republican presidential candidates, as reported by Brian Tummulty for Gannett and published in USA Today:

At a forum for Republican presidential candidates Wednesday in Detroit, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani sparred on some issues, but they were united on Clinton's health care plan."If we do HillaryCare or socialized medicine, Canadians will have no place to go to get their health care," Giuliani quipped, referring to the Canada's single-payer national health system."HillaryCare is government gets in and tells people what to do from the federal government's standpoint," Romney said.

Ironically, the "socialized medicine" charge was not made so often or so boldly against President Clinton's universal health care plan, which was organized in a very public way by Hillary Clinton. Universal health care was immensely popular, and one of the issues that elected Clinton. (Its potency was first discovered a couple of years before when one ad on the subject virtually propelled Harris Wofford into the U.S. Senate in a Pennsylvania special election.)

Clinton's proposal was defeated, not by Republican political bombast, but by a very well financed campaign against it by the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries. When a series of TV ads began changing the poll numbers, Republicans eagerly pounced on the issue again.But though the term "socialized medicine" wasn't so prominent, the arguments behind it were. They were prominent in the ads especially: individuals and families would lose their right to choose their doctor, and their doctors would not decide on their treatment--government bureaucrats would. Further, a huge, faceless, powerful but unresponsive federal bureaucracy would waste billions of taxpayer dollars, driving up health care costs.

So the Clinton proposal for universal health insurance was defeated, and the private corporate HMO and health insurance industry grew so fast and so big that few seem to remember when it didn't totally dominate medicine in this country. The reality that everyone knows is that everything the opponents of the Clinton plan said did come true--but it is the huge, faceless, powerful corporate medical insurance system that routinely decides what doctors patients can see (or if they can see any), and what treatments and services doctors and hospitals can provide. They spent a high percentage on "administration," and they have driven health care costs higher and higher, until now they are bankrupting middle class families and small businesses, and threatening the financial viability of large and otherwise successful corporations.

Yet the Republicans are using exactly the same arguments. And they may be successful. And they know it.Why is that possible--when health care is emerging as the domestic issue that voters care the most about? Because Hillary's health care plan--as well as those of most of the other Democratic candidates--include private insurance companies. They mostly funnel taxpayer dollars to those companies. So it is very hard for these Democratic candidates to point out the obvious: corporate run health insurance has been a cruel travesty.

One of the reasons that it never made sense was the demonstrably false argument that corporations could run health care for their own profit, and do it cheaper than the government, which does not seek to make a profit. But for-profit healthcare has amassed not only huge profits, but huge amounts of money these companies use to destroy and buy up their competitors, and--very much to the point--to lavishly lobby government officials and finance their increasingly expensive campaigns. All paid for by that chump, the consumer, otherwise known as the taxpayer.

The amounts of money are huge because of another fallacy in the Republican argument, trotted out for every attempt to "privatize" a formerly public responsibility, but used especially to argue against government financed health insurance. Corporate care is more efficient because corporations compete, and have to be efficient to make a profit. But corporations compete, not by efficiency, but by destroying or absorbing their competitors--then they expand, and keep expanding until there is no competition, unless limited by regulation.

This has happened to private health insurance, which means that the amounts of consumer-dollars they have to spread around to politicians are huge. No presidential candidate can apparently afford to offend them.So that's the second part of the answer to "why." Republicans are representing the interests of medical insurance and related corporations, such as Big Pharma.

It's also likely that Republicans will actually do much the same on health care should their candidates be elected (this same USA Today article points out that Mitt Romney's plan is not very different from Hillary's.) After all, the most successful innovation of the Bush administration was turning the federal government into a funnel, transferring taxpayer dollars to selected corporations, as Naomi Klein has shown so well. Eventually they will pass laws that will further enrich the criminal enterprise known as health insurance corporations. They are already passing such laws in the states, making it against the law not to do business with them.

So while the Republican "death to children" march seems like suicide, and indeed it may turn out to be politically fatal, it had a purpose--to breathe life into their Get Hillary campaign. And it's not going to be pretty.

It's Not Just the Heat

It's also the humidity, among other things. The planet is getting more humid as well as hotter, according to a new study. "This humidity change is an important contribution to heat stress in humans as a result of global warming," said Nathan Gillett of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, a co-author of the study. According to this AP report:

The finding isn't surprising to climate scientists. Physics dictates that warmer air can hold more moisture. But Gillett's study shows that the increase in humidity already is significant and can be attributed to gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

And that's just One More Thing. The same story says that climate scientists have now seen the man-made fingerprint of global warming on 10 different aspects of Earth's environment: surface temperatures, humidity, water vapor over the oceans, barometric pressure, total precipitation, wildfires, change in species of plants in animals, water run-off, temperatures in the upper atmosphere, and heat content in the world's oceans.

The Climate Crisis will continue to offer surprises to nonscientists and scientists alike, because one big shift like this leads to consequences that result in other changes. Some, like drought, are big and obvious. Others, like excessive pressure on plants (including trees) and animals, play out over time, but when plants and animals leave an ecological niche, a cascade of effects can follow fairly quickly.

High humidity causes physical stress to humans, but as we all know it also shows up in behavior---people get short-tempered and miserable, and their judgment is often impaired. The Nobel committee officially recognized the part that the Climate Crisis can have in causing warfare over resources. But it is also likely to cause other stresses that can make warfare an impulsive choice, when cooler heads don't prevail, because there might not be any.

Right now humidity isn't rising everywhere. Australia, South Africa and the western U.S. are getting very dry. There's drought in the American southeast and now in the Great Lakes region (although that is probably caused by warmer winters and less ice melt.) But the humidity is getting higher in the eastern U.S.--you know, where New York and Washington are.

Normal Viciousness

For Bushites, (right) winger pols, media bobbleheads, bloggers, and often enough, Republicans in general, no "new low" stays new very long, before they take themselves and the political dialogue even lower.

There's the latest attacks on the children and their families who provided their stories to support what's called the S-Chip program, that helps working families pay extraordinary medical bills for their children. A couple of families made commercials explaining how the program made a major difference in their lives, and supporting its expansion to other families.The attacks include the usual viral lies but also a call for them to be hanged. These are children severely injured in an accident, and even after extensive care, the boy speaks with a lisp and the little girl is blind in one eye.

When Keith Olbermann asked New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (who'd just written about why Al Gore drives Republicans insane) if this attack didn't just leave him speechless, Krugman said it was not really exceptional, that it was "normal in its viciousness."

What happens to a democracy when viciousness becomes normal? Some say it has always been so, but I wonder if that's much consolation. I think we all wonder what happens to a society when viciousness really becomes normal. The answer would seem to be: it ceases to be a society. There is a continuum between civilization and savagery, and we are clearly moving towards savagery--faster than we realize.

But apart from the pragmatism of those like Krugman who are exposed to this political viciousness pretty much every day, this savagery can be seen to follow logically from the belief that this is a dog eat dog world, that the winners are those who destroy their competitors by any means necessary. Ironically, it is a twisted variation of Darwinism, a natural selection based on the simplistic but (to some) viscerally convincing criteria that the winners win by being clever (including deceptive) as well as by using power (including violence) without conscience.

Our "entertainment" these days is often about those situations in which survival depends on using any means necessary, especially violence. There is something reassuring about these movies and TV shows, in an elemental way--the way that children are reassured by stories in which the hero and heroine survive the wicked witch in the forest, the ghosts, the monster. It reassures us that the bad forces aren't all powerful, and in this bewilderingly complex society, we aren't powerless.

But we all know that these situations are relatively rare--that more often, in our human-dominated world, we survive through non-violent means--through responsibility and keeping our word, through negotiation, conciliation, cooperation--as well as by helping each other. That's the basis of every civilization, including (ironically again) the ones we consider primitive. It's not the kings and the armies--they change things, they destroy, but they mostly serve the rulers, not the society. For most people, it's playing fair and expecting fair play, it's empathy and altruism, and there's no getting around it. It's the Golden Rule, it's "you'd do the same for me."

And not very ironically, in fact both sadly and grandly, civilization depends on precisely the people the wingers are going after now: the families who are grateful that their government helped them literally save their children's lives, and provided them with help towards something like a normal life, but who haven't just taken what they were given--they want it for others, as many others as possible. And they have the courage to say so.

It's absurd to think we can't afford such a program. There are other reasons for Bushite opposition, which I'll get into later, but this isn't about the program--it's about who we are, what we value, and what kind of a society we want to live in. We might start with a civilized one. We're going to need it.

"Good Germans"

The earliest reference the Wikipedia has to the expression, "good Germans," is a New York Times report from 1945: "There's a saying among our troops, that there are no real Nazis in Germany, only 'good Germans.'" The phrase dripped with hypocrisy, and came to mean Germans who claimed not to have supported Hitler, but did nothing to oppose him.

The truth is, for a long while, that described many people in Europe and elsewhere, but the phrase stuck, and as the Wikipedia says, "The term has come to be used to refer more generically to people in any country who observe reprehensible things taking place — whether done by a government or by another powerful institution — but remain silent, neither raising objections nor taking steps to change the course of events."

Like anything to do with Hitler and the Nazis, the phrase is heavily weighted. And so when on Sunday New York Times columnist Frank Rich used it to describe contemporary Americans, it ignited a controversy that still rages across the Internet.But it is an historical analogy that is work taking seriously, especially given the case Rich assembles. “BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves, he begins.

That the Bushites have been able to perpetrate a dizzying array of policies and activities that for at least the past few generations would have seen impossible, that no Americans would stand for torture, rendition, domestic spying, armed thugs, better equipped and much better paid than U.S. troops, acting beyond any laws in Iraq and then brought back to the U.S. to patrol the streets of New Orleans; the attempted hijacking of the justice system for partisan and ideological gain; the suffering being caused or tolerated in Iraq, Africa, so many places...the list just goes on and on. And a President, with the support of less than one quarter of the country, continues without effective public outcry. How in the world can this be explained?"Good Germans" comes as close as anyone has. Maybe because people don't want to lose what comforts they have--and those closest to centers of power have quite a lot.

Rich begins at the centers of responsibility: Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top. But he does not absolve the rest of us, nor should he: As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

He brings the analogy closer to the source: Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Sometimes such a shocking analogy cuts through the fog, helps us find a moral definition. The analogy of the Good Germans is much too close for continued comfort.

The China Syndrome

Bringing the Dalai Lama to the White prior to officially presenting him with the Congressional Medal of Freedom was a welcome distraction for the Bushites. Photographs with one of the most respected and beloved people in the world and especially in the U.S. helps diffuse the image of the vetoer of life-saving medical care for children, and it draws attention to the 1989 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and away from this year's winner, Al Gore, whose honor is yet to be acknowledged at the White House.

But it sure pissed off the Chinese government. Like most imperialists, it goes nuts when its brutal aggression and even more brutal colonial administration is even implictly, even theoretically or possibly questioned. In this case, China's armed takeover of Tibet included the murder of thousands of Buddhists, and its war against the Dalai Lama (the traditional political as well as spiritual leader of Tibet) has forced it into absurd embarrassments, the most recent of which is outlawing reincarnation without government approval.

But the White House doesn't want to piss them off too much. "We in no way want to stir the pot and make China feel that we are poking a stick in their eye for a country that we have a lot of relationships with on a variety of issues," said press secretary Dana Perino. " No, not with China financing the Iraq war and the further mega-enrichment of Bushites and their cronies, and leaving the piper to be paid by future American generations, one way or another.

Besides, China has become a kind of model for the Bushites: it has shown that a nation can get good p.r. for coming out against tyranny and murder in Darfur and Burma while still do nothing to endanger profits gained in relationships with those countries. And above all, the greatest lesson of China today, though no one wants to say it out loud, is that capitalism without democracy works just great. Something that the Bushites have certainly taken to heart.

Signal v. Noise on Iran: S.O.S.!

The noise is killing us in more ways than one. We keep missing the important stories. Sometimes because they're deliberately hidden and those whose job it is to discover and tell these stories just aren't doing it. When the Bushites sneaked a provision into the huge Defense Authorization Act last October that allows the President to declare martial law--to override state and local officials and use the military as domestic police in response to unspecified "emergencies"-- virtually no one reported it. It remains what it was supposed to be, a secret.

In this case, one which potentially makes dictatorship legal. For the entire history of the Republic, every President could declare martial law only if threatened with an armed insurrection. That's how seriously this nation's founders considered it, and not in the most perilous times in our history has this law changed, until last October.

But right now we're missing a crucial story that's totally public, that in fact President Bush announced in a media-covered speech. Even most of the lefty blogs, currently feasting on the Idahomosexual story, ignored it. Fortunately one of the more respected bloggers, Glenn Greenwald, didn't.

Perhaps Bush's threat against Iran sounded like the same old. Greenwald calls it "the most disturbing speech of his presidency." It sounded to me when I heard just the soundbite that it was tantamount to an announcement that this administration is going to militarily attack Iran, very soon (as reflected in my post yesterday.)

Nobody wants to believe Bush will do it. It's too much of an utter nightmare. The military is overstretched to the breaking point in Iraq. There's some question as to whether orders would be followed, although Bush--or should we say Cheney--is likely to depend on the Air Force and Navy who have paid less of a price and may want more of the action. And nobody wants to contemplate what a disaster it could very well begin.

It seems in fact like madness. Apart from the rising guilt over needless death in Iraq, the Washington and media establishment is apparently willing to tolerate a crazy President and an insane Vice-President for a year and a half more, assuming they will confine their looniness to surreal speeches and delusional press conferences. We wish. But it seems increasingly like we're not going to get off that easy.

So far the human price of Iraq has been paid (at least directly) by a relative few, and the bulk of the cost has been pushed into the future. Bush's design in Iraq seems to be to push obvious failure past the expiration of his term, so Republicans can blame Democrats should they win the White House and retain Congress. But a sustained bombing of Iran would likely begin a sequence of events that would make Iraq pale by comparison. The calculation might be that an even greater war, a regional war with global reach, would force voters to support the war party and its candidate, Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson.

Such an attack and such a war have endless possibilities for catastrophe that might transform the country, and could very well destroy it. A wrecked domestic economy, energy rationing, a military draft--it could well end up with the realization of that first untold story: martial law in America, brought to you by Halliburton and Blackwater.

And don't forget, the plans for attacking Iran as initially revealed involved the U.S. using tactical nuclear weapons. It is a particularly dangerous moment, when the fundamentalist neocon ideology still drives the Bush-Cheney government, and when that government has little power beyond blackmailing Congress to continue the Iraq war and using military power against anyone it chooses. The dirty secret of declining American power in the world under Bush is that this government is forced more and more to consider, if not rely on, its trump: the world's most obscenely powerful stockpile of nuclear bombs.

But even without nuclear weapons, a sustained air campaign against Iran could turn the tinderbox of the Middle East into a raging fire of regional war, with consequences too long-lasting and too extensive and damaging to contemplate.

Four More War

President Bush, true to form, ignores reality but has the power to create his own. In his speech to yet another ancient veterans group, he virtually declared war on Iran.

If Bush attacks Iran, Republican candidates like Guliani will run on the warmaking platform. If he is elected, the US will essentially destroy itself in the next four years with war in the Middle East. It's war we can't afford and which this time the nation will not survive intact.

Mark my words. Look back into time on this blog and see what I said about Bush in the beginning.

Don't let this happen.

A Dream Darfured

Everybody talks about the killing in Darfur but nobody does anything about it. When Joe Biden repeated the fact that people are being killed every day there at a Democratic presidential debate, his fellow candidates stood in embarrassed silence. Clearly, China bears a lot of responsibility for international sanctions not working. But Western countries don't want to send a peacekeeping force there, which some observers (including Biden) say could stop the killing virtually overnight. Instead we send them to Iraq where it contributes to more death, including more dead and maimed Americans. And even though the UN is expected to authorize a peacekeeping force, and the Bush spokespeople--including most recently, Condi Rice--talk a lot about genocide and how the world is failing Darfur, it's the U.S. and its failure to pay its UN dues that threatens the peacekeeping effort before it starts.

Broken

The United States of America is founded on two basic functional principles: our democratic system and our rule of law, both set forth in the U.S. Constitution. In both categories, thanks to the Bush administration, this nation is in grave danger of failing. And by failing I mean setting itself up for chaos and blatant dictatorship, which in effect will threaten the future of the civilized world and perhaps life as we know it on Earth.

Our rule of law is challenged again and again, so obviously this past week when the Bushites try again to override a court decision that denies them their ability to destroy constitutional and international rights. The principle of habeus corpus is obscurely named --perhaps it should be repeated as "the right to your day in court" or to be charged and put on trial according to law. But its bad branding shouldn't obscure how fundamental a right it is--basic to every other right in the Constitution, including free speech and freedom of religion. As Constitutional law expert said on Countdown: "...it is actually the foundation for all other rights. When the president—when the government throws you into a dungeon for what you say or who you pray to, it‘s habeas corpus that‘s the right that allows you to see the enforcement of the other rights."

We learned more last week about the lengths to which the Bushites go to deny these rights, in the effort to circumvent the law by appealing to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft when he had relinquished his authority temporarily to have surgery and recover from it.

But these are not new efforts--the Bush administration has been doing all this persistently, and yet they continue to do so, with no one effectively stopping them. Such brazen success emboldens others to defy the rule of law, such as the Republicans who lined up last week to demand the immediate pardon of Scooter Libby, despite his lawful prosecution and conviction, despite the fact that he was convicted of obstructing justice by preventing effective investigation and possible prosecution of larger, underlying crimes in the Valerie Plame affair, and despite contravening the established procedures for pardons in the most outrageous ways. Pardons are normally given after the sentence is served or at least begun, and after the convicted admits guilt, repents and asks for mercy. But Republicans want the law and the courts to simply be ignored and overpowered by the executive.

What if President Clinton had looked at the Supreme Court decision of Gore v. Bush that gave the election to Bush in 2000, rightly concluded that it was a flawed decision, against precedent, and made by justices with political conflicts of interest, and simply voided it? The principle is exactly the same.

But from this, we get supreme irony. Clinton respected the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary. And so we got a guy who doesn't.

In other times, actions of which President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are accused or have admitted would be sufficient cause to bring articles of impeachment against them. But no such congressional action is forthcoming.The Bushite challenge to the rule of law is an aspect of their challenge to the fundamentals of our democratic system. The Iraq war is opposed by three-fourths of the American people, yet it goes on. Three-fourths of the American people believe the country is on the wrong track, and yet the Bushites persist. Even though the Bushites are legitimately in power until the next election, this indecent ignoring of the opinions of citizens is very dangerous to democracy.

More serious still are the Bushites direct threats to electoral democracy. The pattern of firing and hiring officers of the law in the U.S. Justice system based on political party and ideological loyalties is itself a major threat to our system. Yet the people responsible for this have not been held accountable. After many calls for his firing, after many predictions that he would not last out the week or the month, Alberto Gonzales is still the Attorney General of the U.S., despite evidence which continues to mount that he has been dishonest, incompetent and acted against the rule of law, and against fairness necessary for the democratic electoral system to function.

Moreover, the intent of these manipulations of justice seems more and more clearly to be to suppress votes that may go to Democrats, by appointing judges who would prosecute charges of voter fraud against Democrats, no matter how dubious those charges might be, and to ignore charges of voter suppression and fraud against Republicans, no matter how substantial the evidence might be.

The intent clearly is to create a permanent majority for Bushites, who might more properly be called Rovians, because they intend to continue beyond this administration (possibly with Fred Thompson.) So simply waiting for Bush to leave office won't be enough. The intent is to subvert the electoral system.

The Bushites have so far successfully acted like a dictatorship, and no one has stopped them. There are ongoing investigations but they are painfully and perhaps fatally slow. The Bushites, the Rovians seek to establish the means for further dictatorship, and no one is preventing them. The U.S. is in deep trouble, and so is the future.

Ever Learn?

Once again, we had no phony Memorial Day around here. All the false and misguided pieties can't obscure the conviction that a people that truly cares about fallen soldiers would be intent on making sure needless war never takes another. We're very far from that these days.

The reflex to call such sentiments pacificism and ask the sophomoric question about standing by while your grandmother gets attacked is so bitterly out of place these days, in view of the kind of war we're sending soldiers to die in. And dying they are, at record speed. All you need to know about the disposition of this war now is in this report on what soldiers in Iraq told a blind warhawk senator and his response.

That this war is so obviously wrongheaded that even soldiers are speaking out, and that this war was founded on lies from the start--the most recently one to be exposed being that the "intelligence" was faulty.

The soldier defending the homeland from attack is so seldom the actual cause of war--and hasn't been in the wars America has fought since at least World War II, not counting at least the intent of military action in Afghanistan. The cynicism of those in power who speak piously of patriotism and supporting the troops for political and monetary advantage and nothing else is disgusting. The awful truth is that many if not most warfare is to make the rich richer, and for that, the non-rich will die and be maimed, and their families and the rest of the non-rich are tricked and manipulated into believing it's all for a noble cause.

The noble cause is developing, acquiring and using the skills of peace. It is facing the real threat to our people, like the climate crisis. It is facing the future together, rather than repeating the terrible patterns of the past that benefit the undeserving few.

No Crook Left Behind

Just when you were beginning to forget the Bushies are ultimately about stealing huge profits, the ends to which the obsession with partisan politics is just the means, comes more news about old fashioned money-grubbing corruption in one of those programs with weepy names, No Child Left Behind. According to the Washington Post, it's so blatant that even this Justice Department can't ignore it.

The disclosure came as a congressional hearing revealed how people implementing the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program made at least $1 million off textbooks and tests toward which the federal government steered states.

Since this program was all about these tests, the intent is clear. Now we know for sure what "compassionate conservatism" means to the Bushies. It means you sound compassionate as a way to rob the Treasury and privatize for personal profit.