Brainiac Conspiracy

Winning Hearts & Minds with $5 Gas, Or, How to Win the Game by Blowing Up the Board

Has this guy ever been tested for syphilis? I mean, his policy prescriptions have always been a bit batty, but we are in the realm of a dementia that seems almost pathological now.

In an interview with Al Jazeera's Fault Lines program, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich outlined his U.S. policy towards Iran. Gingrich said the U.S. should "sabotage" Iran's oil and gas infrastructure as part of an effort to topple the Iranian government.

Al Jazeera's Avi Lewis told Gingrich, "In the past, you've called for the bombing of Iran's oil refineries. Gingrich clarified, "I called for sabotage, not bombing. Fundamental difference."

Gingrich explained that the U.S. should use "covert operations" against Iran's refineries because they "have only one refinery that produces gasoline in the entire country." (According to the Energy Information Administration, Iran has nine refineries operated by the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company.)

When Lewis pressed Gingrich on the likely disastrous consequences . . . the former Speaker responded by claiming his plan was highly "strategic":

Gingrich: The only purpose of sabotaging them would be to create a gasoline-led crisis to try to replace the regime. I'm against using tactics that don't have any strategic meaning.

I think we have a vested interest, the world has a vested interest, in a responsible Iranian government.

Lewis: Which you can precipitate by provoking a gas crisis with black-ops sabotage? [Laughs] That's the scenario you have suggested here.

Gingrich: Look, I think that's one piece out of many.

If you really stop to think about it, this is Newt's philosophy of governance in a nutshell: To achieve a desired political objective, commit acts of sabotage. It was his practical stock in trade when he was the Speaker of the House, and as is the case with many of his fellow neoconservatives, his repeated failures and screw-ups have only left him even more convinced in the righteousness of his doctrines. How people like him manage to go through life without lapsing into full-blown schizophrenia, I'll never know. Then again, maybe they are already.

---Vitelius

It's Only a Disability If You're a Dyslexic Fireman,Not a Handicapped PGA Touring Pro

The air at the Sotomayor confirmation hearings was so thick with the vapors of Hanta virus today, it's hard to know where to begin dissecting all the insane departures from legal logic that filled the airwaves every ten minutes or so, but this passage from the esteemed junior Senator from Secession Land Texas's opening statement will suffice:

Over time . . . the Supreme Court has often veered off the course established by the Framers. First, the Supreme Court has invented new rights not clearly rooted in any constitutional text. For example, the Supreme Court has micromanaged the death penalty, creating new rights spun from whole cloth. It has announced constitutional rules governing everything from punitive damages to sexual activity. It has relied on international law that the People never adopted.

The Supreme Court has even taken on the job of defining the rules for the game of golf. (If you're curious, the case is PGA Tour v. Martin from 2001). Some people call this "judicial activism." Whatever you call it, it's pretty far from enforcing the written Constitution that the Framers proposed and the people enacted.

Let's get this straight. In John Cornyn's learned opinion, Casey Martin had no right to insist that the PGA revise its tour eligibility rules under the Americans With Disabilities Act because no federal court should have the power to "define the rules" of the game to conform to an act of Congress. Okay, if that's the case, then Frank Ricci similarly had no right to insist that the City of New Haven revise its hiring practices under ADA for the same legal reason.

In which case, Frank Ricci is never hired by the City of New Haven as a firefighter, so there is no lawsuit against the city a decade later over promotions testing, and no appeals court decisions to render, and no phony controversy to be employed in televised hearings to badger Sonia Sotomayor and that scary Muslim socialist who wants to appoint her to the Supreme Court.

In retrospect, maybe PGA v. Martin was not the wisest analogy to infer, no?

Someone should remind John Cornyn that "the written Constitution that the framers proposed" prohibited people like Sonia Sotomayor from voting in federal elections, and consigned people like Barack Obama to legally sanctioned chattel status. If he honestly believes that document, as it was ratified in 1791, still serves as the only relevant legal benchmark in deciding court confirmation cases, he isn't qualified to be an elected public official in any capacity.

Of course, we know the answer to that. He doesn't believe anything of the sort. He has no firm judicial beliefs or political convictions at all. He is a Gingrich-era Republican. The only thing he and his comrades gave a rat's ass about is the hoarding and consolidation of raw political power, and savaging the opposition in the process. He is also, as are most of his cynical and apathetic colleagues, deeply and profoundly stupid. It goes with the territory when you don't give a shit about policy.

---Vitelius

What Will We Tell the Mutants Valley Kids?

Silly people. Someone should remind them they should only be looking forward, never back.

On the morning of July 14, 1959, Sodium Reactor Experiment trainee John Pace received the bad news from a group of supervisors who had, he recalled, "terribly worried expressions on their faces."

A reactor at the Atomics International field laboratory in the Santa Susana Mountains had experienced a power surge the night before and spewed radioactive gases into the atmosphere.

"They were terrified that some of the gas had blown over their own San Fernando Valley homes," recalled Pace, who was 20 at the time. "My job was to keep radiation out of the control room."

Pace set to work sealing doors and windows with clear packing tape and scrubbing the walls with sanitary napkins soaked with special chemicals because, he said, "soap and water wouldn't do the trick" . . .

In August 1959, about five weeks after the accident, the Atomic Energy Commission published a press release indicating that "a parted fuel element had been observed," a reference to damage. But it added that there was no evidence of radioactive releases or unsafe operating conditions.

"They wanted to keep it secret," Pace said.

Lab officials kept switching the reactor off and on until July 26, when it was shut down and dismantled. There was evidence of melting in a third of the reactor's fuel elements. For about two weeks, the facility, which employed several thousand people, had been venting colorless and odorless radioactive gas into the environment.

"Radioactivity levels during the accident went off-scale," said Dan Hirsch, a spokesman for the antinuclear group Committee to Bridge the Gap. "We thus do not know to this day how much radioactivity was released." Details of the incident were not disclosed until 1979, when a group of UCLA students discovered documents and photographs that referred to a problem at the site involving a "melted blob" . . .

Home to 10 nuclear reactors and plutonium- and uranium carbide-fabrication plants, it has also been the site of more than 30,000 rocket engine tests, the thunderous explosions serving as a Cold War-era hallmark for nearby residents. Old-timers still talk about being alarmed by experiments that lighted up the night sky, shook the ground and cracked windows.

I don't know if I qualify as an old-timer or not, but either way, I can definitely vouch for this, as a kid growing up the shadows of the Santa Susanas in the 1960s. Once every few weeks, usually in mid-morning, they’d fire up some booster rocket they were testing for a few minutes, and good God, you wouldn’t believe the racket. Its force was so strong, it would shake the asphalt playground at my elementary school---you could actually feel the soil vibrations through the soles of your feet---and this was several miles away from the test site.

Back then, of course, we actually viewed these tests with some degree of civic pride--since, after all, the folks out in Woolsey Canyon were testing rockets for “the space program.” At least that’s what we were all told at the time. Only later did we learn that the federal government's definition of the “space program”---which we assumed was limited to John Glenn and Neil Armstrong and all those brave young astronauts whose wholesome faces adorned our classroom walls---was expansive enough to include Titan II missiles which were to be outfitted with nuclear warheads aimed at the Evil Empire. Ah well, guess they didn’t want us worrying whether the Soviets actually had any real missiles aimed at us when we conducted those lame monthly “take cover” drills.

And, of course, nobody ever really explained to us about the chemicals used to formulate rocket fuel, and where any spilled substances went . . .

Later, in the 1970s, those hills were a popular destination for kids of my generation---high schoolers and college students like myself who would hike up the rocky old Santa Susana stage road, not more than a mile at most from the Rocketdyne test site, perhaps to get away from the ugliness of suburbia to enjoy some wild country---there were still plenty of critters in those hills back then----and drink cheap wine, smoke some reefer, or do naughty things with our girlfriends away from our parents’ prying eyes. (In that sense we were following in the footsteps of some famous bad hombres who used these same rocky redoubts for their own nefarious ends.) Mpore often as not, though, we'd simply hike up in the Susanas to simply enjoy an afternoon of strenuous exercise, with some spectacular views at the top of the pass being the payoff. None of us had any idea that we were essentially hiking over and around a giant toxic waste dump, or that the air that seared our lungs on those triple-digit summer days might’ve been rich in glow-in-the-dark isotopes.

But as has been reported before, this isn't exactly news to the locals. Or at least those who’ve been around long enough, or who, like me, have long memories, or read local dead-tree media besides the LA Times because the '59 meltdown only marked the beginning of the atrocities that took place in Woolsey Canyon for years, which have been litigated for decades, and which we have still not completely cleaned up.

The Rocketdyne facility sits upon 2,668 acres of land in the Santa Susana hills between the San Fernando and Simi valleys and, for decades, used vast amounts of the fuel oxidizer perchlorate in rocket tests. According to government records, nearly a ton of the poisonous substance was burned at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), nicknamed "the Hill." Now the site is polluted with all manner of chemical and radiological contaminants. One spot at SSFL registered 1,600 parts per billion (ppb) for perchlorate. California considers any water registering over 4ppb to be unsafe for human consumption.

Two class-action lawsuits were filed in 1997 against Boeing, which owns Rocketdyne, contending that claimants were made sick or put in harm's way by Rocketdyne's pollution problems. One lawsuit was filed by Erin Brockovich's boss, Edward L. Masry, whose firm helped garner a $333 million settlement against Pacific Gas & Electric over cancers in Hinkley, California, regarding toxic chromium-6 pollution.

However, the Rocketdyne class actions were quashed in October 2000 by Van Nuys-based U.S. District Court Judge Audrey Collins. She ruled that news reports in the Los Angeles Daily News about Rocketdyne's discharge of hazardous and radioactive toxins, published between 1989 and 1991, should have prompted the plaintiffs to file proceedings at that time, despite repeated statements from Rocketdyne that it wasn't responsible for offsite contamination. Under past California law, plaintiffs had only one year to file a lawsuit if they believed they'd been harmed. Since January 1, this period has been doubled to two years.

On November 27, 2002, the Ninth District Court of Appeals overturned a lower court's decision to throw out 18 individual toxic tort cases against Boeing. The Court ruled that the plaintiffs met the statute of limitations requirements since they filed their cases after UCLA released a 1997 toxic contamination study. That survey showed that 4,563 of Rocketdyne's past and present nuke workers had elevated rates of cancer, and that exposure to radiation causes health risks at levels lower than previously known.

Silly people. We need to be looking forward, never back. We know that bad things happened. Bad things that will never be allowed to happen again. Continued prying into matters like this will only damage America's reputation in the world. Or make the Eisenhower administration look bad. Or . . . something.

---Vitelius

But is it a Pony or a Pile?

Already the Internets are a-buzzing at the prospect of a Special Prosecutor:

Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall. At the other is Janet Reno, whose righteousness and folksy eccentricities marginalized her within the Clinton administration. Lean too far one way and you corrupt the office, too far the other way and you render yourself impotent. Mindful of history, Holder is trying to get the balance right. "You have the responsibility of enforcing the nation's laws, and you have to be seen as neutral, detached, and nonpartisan in that effort," Holder says. "But the reality of being A.G. is that I'm also part of the president's team. I want the president to succeed; I campaigned for him. I share his world view and values."

These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell Newsweek that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision." (Emphasis added.)

What Digby sez. And I think she articulates the hopes of quite a few of us:

I think nobody will expect Holder to follow through on this until the moment he announces it, especially given the record of the Obama Justice Department. But there's at least a glimmer of hope that in the documents of the Bush era, the abuses crossed, in the mind of the Attorney General, a bridge too far. And if this is a trial balloon, it's one of the first in the direction of accountability and justice. Perhaps they're looking for some agreement.

For the sake of the Republic, I hope this is so. On the other hand, I've been around long enough to figure out how the Leaking Game is played, and it seems to me that if you're an Obama loyalist, and you wanted to ensure that no Special Prosecutor is ever appointed, at any time, for any reason, your best chance of success lies in preempting any DoJ surprises and leaking this shit to the media now. The wingnut blowback will be deafeaning and will be allowed to dominate next week's news cycle by their dutiful MSM enablers, followed by an utterly predictable defensive stance on the part of White House. Which will have the net effect, of course, of ceding the imagined high ground to the GOP, and foreclosing any possible future investigation into Bush-administration criminality. Hell, just read the highlighted passage again---it is almost as if Dan Klaidman is tipping off the nutjobs tonight so they can cobble up the appropriate talking points to trot out in time for tomorrow's talk shows. I mean, how the fuck do we know that this would "roil the country" and imperil health-care reform? Because some Newsweek guy says it would?

Put it this way: if you wanted to blackmail Eric Holder into backing off the Bushies once and for all for fear of imperiling the administration's entire social agenda, could you do a better job of it than this?

Then again, I am a cynical old fart and could be wrong. I certainly hope that is the case.

---Vitelius

Nobody Could Have Predicted This, Either

Not much time for blogging today. I'm too busy shooting someone in the face.

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency's director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

---Vitelius

Nobody Could Have Possibly Predicted

That a bunch of people who cut their teeth working for Richard Nixon would think that spying on people for any reason they wanted was a good idea.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Ca., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.

Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs during an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.

"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.

This person was the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee when all this shit was going down. And she believed Alberto Gonzales was an honest man.

Make a move for positive change. Click here now and donate to Marcy Winograd, a Democrat who won't ape Claude Rains two years after the fact. Jane Harman needs to be sent deep into the cornfield next year.

---Vitelius

Friday Happy-Hour Mix-o-Blog

The USDA recommends five servings of fruit per day. Which includes apple juice, right?

---Vitelius

That'll Cinch the 65-and-Older Vote in 2010

I am beginning to wonder if Republicans in Washington aren't acting out some collective unconscious death wish:

Mike Ferguson: What is the proper role of government, and what are the potential impacts of the direction that we're going right now?

Sen. Roy Blunt: Well, you could certainly argue that government should have never have gotten in the health care business, and that might have been the best argument of all, to figure out how people could have had more access to a competitive marketplace.

Government did get into the health care business in a big way in 1965 with Medicare, and later with Medicaid, and government already distorts the marketplace.

A government competitor would drive all the other competitors away. What we should be doing is creating more competition. One of the reasons the marketplace doesn't work the way it should work right now is we really don't have the competitive marketplace that I'd like to see put in place.

In a sane and rational world, a twenty-something blogger---who wasn't even born when Medicare was created---wouldn't have to lecture a US Senator on either American history or market dynamics, but:

It's crucial to understand that Medicare, in particular, didn't just come about because of some random bleeding heart impulse. The reason there was political muscle to get Medicare passed even though it wasn't possible to move to a true universal system is that private health insurers wanted nothing to do with the senior citizen client base. Insurance takes advantage of risk-pooling and risk-aversion to offer people security at a price that's both profitable and attractive. When the whole pool is bad risks, as senior citizens are, there's no real business opportunity.

Considering that the John McCain lost to Obama among every age demographic except voters age 65 and older, you'd really think that a savvy operator like Blunt would know when to keep his mouth shut. But again, like I said, that would assume the GOP's seniormost leadership inhabits a sane and rational world. They don't.

---Vitelius

Fighting Fire With Fire Lawsuits

Joe the Firefighter: Affirmative-action hire.

The lawsuit, filed recently in federal court, could shed light on the selection process used by the city, which has been beset with criticism over politics and nepotism.

Frank Ricci charges in the lawsuit that the city violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities.

Ricci, a Wallingford native who now lives in Maryland, was one of 795 candidates who were interviewed for 40 openings. Ricci told interviewers that he has a learning disability, the lawsuit says.

Fire commissioners have said that although Ricci was qualified, many others also were qualified because they passed the Civil Service examination.

---Vitelius

Joe the Firefighter

I think we can see where this is leading:

Republicans will call two New Haven firefighters to testify in the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor next week, making clear the GOP's intent to place affirmative action at the center of the Senate battle over Sotomayor's nomination.

A Judiciary Committee press release lists Frank Ricci and Ben Vargas as expected Republican witnesses. Ricci was the lead plaintiff in Ricci v. DeStefano, the controversial case in which Sotomayor ruled the New Haven fire department acted constitutionally when it discounted the results of a qualifying test for promotions after too few black firefighters scored as high as their white counterparts.

---Vitelius

"Police, Protect Us"

While spoiled and delusional children wage jihad from their PCs against imaginary dictatorships in our country, let's not forget the thousands upon thousands of brave men and women who are not afraid to demonstrate, to agitate and to protest, nonviolently, against the forces of repression and for the liberating tonic of pluralistic democracy. Their cause is ours.

Thousands of protesters streamed down avenues of the capital Thursday, chanting "death to the dictator" and defying security forces who fired tear gas and charged with batons, witnesses said.

Turning garbage bins into burning barricades and darting through choking clouds of tear gas, the opposition made its first foray into the streets in nearly two weeks in an attempt to revive mass demonstrations that were crushed in Iran's postelection turmoil.

Iranian authorities had promised tough action to prevent the marches, which supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi have been planning for days through the Internet. Heavy police forces deployed at key points in the city ahead of the marches, and Tehran's governor vowed to "smash" anyone who heeded the demonstration calls.

In some places, police struck hard. Security forces chased after protesters, beating them with clubs on Valiasr Street, Tehran's biggest north-south avenue, witnesses said.

Women in headscarves and young men dashed away, rubbing their eyes in pain as police fired tear gas, in footage aired on state-run Press TV. In a photo from Thursday's events in Tehran obtained by The Associated Press outside Iran, a woman with her black headscarf looped over her face thrust her fist into the air in front of a garbage bin that had been set on fire.

In another image, a man dropped to his knees, overcome by the effects of tear gas.

But the clampdown was not total. At Tehran University, a line of police blocked a crowd from reaching the gates of the campus, but then did not move to disperse them as the protesters chanted "Mir Hossein" and "death to the dictator" and waved their hands in the air, witnesses said. The crowd grew to nearly 1,000 people, the witnesses said.

"Police, protect us," some of the demonstrators chanted, asking the forces not to move against them.

The protesters appeared to reach several thousand, but their full numbers were difficult to determine, since marches took place in several parts of the city at once and mingled with passers-by. There was no immediate word on arrests or injuries.

It did not compare to the hundreds of thousands who joined the marches that erupted after the June 12 presidential election, protesting what the opposition said were fraudulent results. But it was a show of determination despite a crackdown that has cowed protesters, who have not held a significant rally for the past 11 days.

Onlookers and pedestrians often gave their support. In side streets near the university, police were chasing young activists, and when they caught one, passers-by chanted "let him go, let him go," until the policemen released him. Elsewhere, residents let fleeing demonstrators slip into their homes to elude police, witnesses said.

---Vitelius

The Politics of Personal Responsibility®:Now With 50-Percent More HypocrisyThan the Leading Responsibility

Whatever did happen to the "politics of personal responsibility"?

Let's see: you're a Senator who's been caught cheating? Pay your mistress to go away. Don't have the money? Hey, that's hat mom and dad are for!

Sen. John Ensign's parents shelled out big bucks to pay off their son's mistress, the latest twist in an unfolding scandal that has upended the political career of the one-time rising GOP star.

The scandal has also touched Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), another prominent conservative, who revealed that he had confronted Ensign about the affair and urged him to end it, but says he will refuse to divulge any conversations with Ensign -- even under inquiry from ethics investigators.

On Thursday, Ensign's attorney said that the senator's parents gave Doug Hampton, Cynthia Hampton and their two children gifts worth $96,000 in the form of a check. The attorney, Paul Coggins, said that each gift was limited to $12,000 and "complied with tax rules governing gifts."

The disclosure of the April 2008 payment seemed intended to head off growing questions about whether Ensign violated federal law by failing to report what Doug Hampton called a severance package worth more than $25,000 to his wife Cynthia, who left Ensign's campaign staff on April 30, 2008.

Ensign was not required to report the giving of such gifts, and on Thursday, his attorney went to lengths to point out that the payments were made and "accepted" as gifts from personal accounts rather than as a severance package for their dismissal from his staff. It's unclear whether the Hamptons view the payments as a gift or as severance, and an attorney for the couple wasn't reachable for comment.

And that good and trusted friend? A fine Christian man, and a paragon of Senate ethics. He could certainly shed some light on this. Or, he could, if he were in any way ethical or a Christian.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on Thursday said he would not testify in court or before the Ethics Committee about any advice he gave Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) on how to handle his affair with a former staffer, citing constitutional protections for communications during religious counseling, as well as the patient confidentiality privilege.

"I was counseling him as a physician and as an ordained deacon. ... That is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody. Not to the Ethics Committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody," Coburn said.

Finally, what to do when the story blows up? Blame the media!

And the senator lashed out at the media for continuing to focus on the matter and for helping "tear apart" the Hamptons and the Ensigns, who each have three kids and have known each other for years.

"You've got two families that are back together and you guys are going to help tear them apart. What do you think their kids are thinking about what you're writing right now? You're helping tear apart two families that are back together -- you need to quit."

Now, it doesn't surprise me to hear that John Ensign is a philanderer and a goldbrick, or that Tom Coburn is both stupid and corrupt. My only question is: who the hell votes for these people?

---Vitelius

Green Shoots Everywhere!

This must be seen to be appreciated:

Dear Friend,

Welcome to Wall Street Prison Consultants. My name is Larry Levine, and I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce "Fedtime 101", a revolutionary new program tailored specifically for white collar offenders entering the Federal Prison System.

Fedtime 101 is a unique "Survival Program" on Federal Prison life, that I designed and put together while serving time behind prison walls. Fedtime 101 provides, direct one-on-one counseling and guidance, to ensure you have a complete understanding of the issues lying ahead of you and your family. Furthermore, my assistance continues after you're incarcerated, to address and/ or rectify any concerns your family may have. My commitment is to provide the most accurate, up-to-date information, addressing all key issues concerning BOP Policy,  pre- and post-custody policy, and what really happens when goes inside.

---Vitelius

Palin's Willing Enablers

If you've wondered, like me, how a pathological liar such as Sarah Palin can continue to be viewed as a credible national political leader by a sizable segment of the population, consider this series of hard-hitting questions for the Moose Whisperer from Time this week:

I wanted to start out somewhat philosophically: Did you feel that the institution of government was no longer the best way to bring change about?

Is that because you feel you don't have a mandate anymore?

When you resigned from the AOGCC (Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission), that was a huge catapult for you. Do you think this might catapult you as well? Or do you see it as kind of a selfless move, more for the state than for you?

Why make the announcement on July 3? Because I think that date more than anything set people off -- right before the three-day weekend. People assume scandal.

At one point during the campaign you said Hillary Clinton whines a little bit too much about being in the public eye. Do you now sort of sympathize with her?

Now that you've thought about Alaska, what do you think might interest you moving forward?

You sound a lot like someone, campaigning for other candidates, perhaps fundraising for them, who's going to run in 2012. Is that an interest?

So you wouldn't rule it out?

What do you think is particularly wrong with what Obama is doing now?

Two of his big platform issues now are universal health care and your favorite issue, energy, his global-warming plan. What do you think of his positions on both?

And health care?

A reader at Andy Sullivan's blog cuts through the crap:

Those questions read as if Palin wrote them herself. They aren't even subtle; they are blatantly setting up her talking points. How can anyone who works as a professional journalist ask questions like that and still have a job?

---Vitelius

Excuse Me, But This is Not What I Voted For

The Baron calls unmitigated horseshit on the Barack W. Obama administration:

Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, Johnson said that "as a matter of legal authority," the administration's powers to detain someone under the law of war don't expire for a detainee after he's acquitted in court. "If you have authority under the law of war to detain someone" under the Supreme Court's Hamdi ruling, "that is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side."

Martinez looked surprised. "So the prosecution is moot?" he asked.

"No, no, not in my judgment," Johnson said. But the scenario he outlined strongly suggested it is. If an administration review panel "determines this person is a security threat" and "for some reason is not convicted of a lengthy prison sentence, I think we have the authority to continue to detain someone" under "law of war authority" as granted by the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, Johnson said. And beyond that source of authority "we have the authority in the first place."

Christ. Not even Bush tried floating this argument. Forget the war-powers crutch---if a detainee actually wins acquittal in a court of the government's own choosing, we can still detain him anyway?

Fine. Let's take Johnson at face value, and take it on faith that the AUMF authorizes the executive to detain anyone, anywhere, indefinitely for any reason, regardless of what some judge or jury might have to say about it. I can think of no better reason to repeal this heinous bit of legislation than this specious, and frankly dangerous, line of reasoning. Click here to find out how you can add your voice to the multitude, and to pressure the Congress to repeal AUMF once and for all. This simply cannot stand.

---Vitelius

Hump Day Health Blog

The man the Bushies genuinely feared in 2004 lays it on the line:

Esq: Speaking of the Obama plan, you're even stronger than he has been lately in support of the public plan. You say that without it, it's not reform.

Dean: It's not. It's a waste of time. Don't pretend you're going to do health-insurance reform unless you're really going to change the system. The discussions in the Senate have not been about changing the system.

Esq: They seem to be worried about preserving the status quo.

Dean: Washington is the most conservative town in America. Its culture is the most resistant to change except a few religious cults.

Esq: [Laughter]

Dean: It's true! It's absolutely true.

Esq: You say that the public plan shouldn't be able to dip into general government reserves to subsidize its operations. But the Republicans say it will.

Dean: The Republicans just make things up out of whole cloth. Nothing they say about health care is true. It's all just nonsense and fears and what-ifs. It doesn't happen. First of all, Medicare doesn't dip into government reserves. It has never happened. It might happen in 10 years if they don't cut benefits or raise taxes, but so far, never in the history of America has a program like Medicare used public reserves. The Republican tactic is to raise objections because they never have anything positive to say themselves.

This reflects on something I've thought for awhile now, and which I touched on briefly yesterday---namely, that the country as a whole is quite a bit more liberal than it's own government, and has been for some time. Not only on health care, but on environmental issues, Social Security, abortion rights, labor rights, voting rights and the regulation of markets. The whole concept that we are a "center-right" nation is, I suspect, just another talking point that the Republicans have made up out of whole cloth, and which has assumed the mantle of truth simply because it is parroted over and over again by various right-wing pundits, polemicists and think-tankers, to convince our rulers in Washington that the collective id of the electorate is wedded forever to the Ethos of Reaganism, never to progress beyond the psychic stage of development symbolized by the year 1984.

The fact that 72 percent of the public is receptive to the concept of "socialized medicine", as Howard Dean points out, is just another of the many anecdotal bits of evidence that the country as a whole has moved on and matured, beyond the empty boilerplate that passes for conservative discourse, and is actually ready once again to embrace the notion of a mixed public/private economy, with wider social safety nets and stiffer top marginal tax brackets. You know, like what they have in Western Europe, or in Canada, or Scandinavia. Like the one that governed the country and ran the economy from the New Deal until the late 1970s, and which somehow didn't prevent America from becoming the richest, most prosperous superpower in the history of human civilization. Yeah, that one.

Unfortunately, when the predominant school of political etiquette demands---as it has for over a decade now---that our rulers give equal weight to the arguments of birthers, creationists and climate change deniers to those of rational human beings, you end up dragging the rest of the nation into a mythic and nonexistent "center-right" region of the political spectrum. But that doesn't even remotely make it true.

---Vitelius

Palin & The Politics of Personal Destruction

Sarah Palin: Martyr for the cause.

One trusts there'll be 72 virgins awaiting her in the Holy of Holies when she departs this vale of woe. None of whom obviously will be related to her also.

At least we can glean some further insights into her decision to render herself unto lame-duckery today:

"Especially when all these lawmakers are lining up for office. Their desire would be to clobber the administration left and right so that they can position themselves for office. I'm not going to put Alaskans through that."

In other words, now that she's an incumbent up for re-election, she has no desire to subject Alaskans herself to the kind of negative campaigning that she has specialized in throughout her political career.

Palin, asked why she allowed the ethics complaints to consume her so much, said she did not take the complaints personally, and that for her it was about state resources being spent on attacks that followed her run last fall as the Republican vice presidential nominee.

"That huge waste that we have seen with the countless, countless hours that state staff is spending on these frivolous ethics violations and the millions of dollars that Alaskans are spending, that money not going to things that are very important, like troopers and roads and teachers and fish research," Palin said.

Smooth. Attacks on me are really attacks on you. And your safety (fewer troopers), and your kids (crappy schools), and your livelihood (dwindling fish species). I'll tell you one thing---she really is good at a certain old-school brand of Republican politics.

"President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it's immoral and it's uneconomic, his plan that he tries to sell America," Palin told Time. "His plan to 'put America on the right track' economically, incurring the debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we're passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn't even make economic sense."

Got that? Obama’s policies are not simply wrong, they are immoral. Which means, they are, by definition, evil and illegitimate. This line of logic has been a staple of GOP political campaigns since Barry Goldwater’s time, and it’s one of the biggest contributing factors to the continued debasement of our political discourse over the past 40 years. It has spawned a multibillion-dollar cottage industry of think tanks, syndicated radio shows, and at least one 24-hour cable news network, and its sole purpose is to discredit opposing messages, and to destroy the messengers.

As Rick Perlstein points out in his landmark Before the Storm, this trope traces its roots to the death throes of a failed presidential campaign:

Goldwater was also trying out another set of lines that were new to conservative campaigning--and these were catching fire. Lines such as "We want to make it safe to live by the law; enough has been done to make it safe to live outside the law"; and "Our traditional values of individual responsibility . . . have been slipping away at a quickened pace"; and "Why do we see a flood of obscene literature?" These statements got applause from people who found themselves surprised to find themselves applauding Barry Goldwater. Crime, lax judges, individual responsibility, pornography; rarely did he bunch them together as a unit. He saw civilizational decline everywhere, and these things were no more evidence than were the surging power of the executive branch, rotting weapons systems, Social Security numbers, the Administration's failures in faraway countries whose names people barely recognized, and all the rest. "The theme of our campaign is clear," he would thunder in town after town: "Peace through strength. Progress through freedom. Purpose through constitutional order"---and then damn the torpor, full speed ahead, he would plunge into the laundry list of things he thought americans needed to hear whether they wanted to or not. When he did squish the "morality" themes together, his argument for why they had anything to do with why a person shouldn't vote for Lyndon Johnson was so dubious as to vitiate the power of the appeal. "Moral decay of a people begins at the top," he would say, "from the highest offices into all walks of life" . . .

Only once did he devote an entire speech on how "the moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay." It was broadcast on TV from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. It was the highest-rated nonpresidential political address in the history of television--a fact, of course, that the candidate likely ignored as a point of pride. But "morality" was political gold. It was the only Goldwater theme that the White House felt compelled to react to. But Johnson's people weren't exactly sure
how . . .

No other presidential candidate had tried staking a political claim to these issues before Goldwater. They had never been at issue before. (Emphasis added.)

This is why it cracks me up to hear an idiot like Sarah Palin bemoaning the politics of personal destruction. That’s been the GOP’s preferred presidential election strategy since the Birchers commandeered the party's political wing in 1964. Having failed to convince a majority of the voters on matters of policy, on temperament and trustworthiness, they played the immorality card. And for the most part, it has served them rather well over the ensuing 40 years, bypassing the cognitive front-brain functions of logic and reason and burrowing directly into our "lizard brain", that primal netherworld of the collective unconscious that is triggered to act on our basest fears and dreads. Unfortunately for them, we are now two generations removed from the '60s culture wars, and nearly 20 years departed from the end of the Cold War. The enemies they've crusaded against for decades---the Communists, the abortionists, the pornographers, the gays---have either turned into phantoms or been increasingly welcomed into the mainstream. Osama and the Legion of Scary Muslims® served their purpose for a season, but by and large, the Sarah Palins of American politics have been reduced to inveighing against enemies which, for the most part, no longer exist, if they ever did. Which I think explains their escalating shrillness in recent years.

America today can defiantly be described as a post-modernist society. Post-modernism is the essence of Liberal ideology. Post-modernist social Liberalism in America today serves the interests of corporate America and is a product of capitalist culture. Post-modernism is effectively the secular form of anti-Leftism---it is ultimately the true embodiment of post World War II Liberalism. The "conservative" movement in America today is greatly misguided because it aligns itself economically with the interests that contribute to the social conditions that the conservative movement opposes.

Likewise then, many of the most socially liberal members of society, who are improperly viewed as being "Leftists" in American popular politics, are in fact the people who have bought into, and are the most supportive of, corporate capitalism. Post-modernism creates a disempowered society of factionalized and atomized individuals with no grounding in an objective common reality, which is an essential starting point for any meaningful political movement. Capitalism in America has both created the existing post-modernist society and benefits from its continued existence.

Liberal, post-modernist, American society is not "Leftist" in the least. There is no significant Left in America at all.

If there is anything that the election of Barack Obama last year would indicate, it's that the old right-wing definitions of Marxism, Socialism and Leftism that have driven so much of our political discourse over the past 40 years are all but culturally obsolete by now. That's not to say the holdouts can't continue to gum up the machinery of government purely out of spit (they can), or that their ability to influence substantial numbers of voters is sharply on the wane (it isn't, quite yet), but as the decades of the 21st Century progress, the purveyors of political "immorality" are destined, I suspect, to be relegated to the same eventual fates as befell other political defenders of public "morality"---the Anti-Masons, the Know-Nothings, the Prohibitionists---and that another, less nutty, conservative party will reformulate from its detritus. At least let's hope so.

---Vitelius

Monday Night Foodie Blogging

Time tonight for Persian comfort food! Khoresh Gheimeh is a slow-cooked hearty split pea-and-meat stew from Iran---and yes, I know, they're terrorists who hate America, and we should already be bombing them, or giving the Israelis another $3 billion in foreign aid do it for us, but heck, let's enjoy their food before we kick their asses and start another war. Kinda like the way we enjoy Mexican food while we're planning to deport them all. I've taken a few liberties from the "authentic" recipe----don't I always?---but this is a sublimely delicious cold-weather dish. (So why am I cooking this in the middle of July? Good question.)

This recipe comes courtesy of my friend and fellow foodie Belinda Rachman, Esq., an attorney in San Diego of proud Persian ancestry who specializes in family law. Belinda is also living proof that you do not, repeat not, need to be a hostile litigious asshole to be a good and effective attorney. Long ago, she learned that mediation and cooperation, not confrontation and coercion, were the most productive (not to mention humane) means to resolve divorce disputes for the overwhelming majority of married couples with property and custody issues, and she's been putting her philosophy to good and positive use for many years now for folks in the San Diego area. So if you know anyone in Southern California who is in the process of filing for divorce, or even thinking about it, ask them give her a call. You can find her online at Divorce in a Day. They can avoid a lot of grief and heartache later, for their children and themselves, if they're willing to communicate honestly now. Nooshe jan!

Khoresh Gheimeh
Meat & Split Pea Stew

3 tbsp olive oil
2 medium onions, peeled and chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 lb lamb or beef rump or shoulder, cut into 1-in cubes
2 tsp tomato paste
2 cups dried yellow split peas, rinsed and drained
1 tbsp paprika
1 tsp tumeric
1 medium cinammon stick
Pinch of saffron
Salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup dry white wine
1 1/2 qt best-quality vegetable stock or water
1 tbsp dry lemon (substitute preserved lemon if you can't find the dry stuff) 1 medium potato, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch-thick french-fries
Oil for deep frying

In a heavy stockpot or Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until translucent, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook until aromatic, 1 minute. Add the beef and cook, stirring occasionally, until the pieces are browned on all sides, 7 to 8 minutes. Add the tomato paste; stir to combine. Add the split peas and fold into the other ingredients. Add the spices, stirring again to combine. Turn up the hat and add the wine. Cook over high heat until the wine has nearly evaporated, 2 minutes. Add the 1 quart of the vegetable stock and bring to a boil. Then turn the heat to low and simmered, covered, for approximately 2 hours, stirring occasionally and adding more stock as needed until the split peas have softened. Add the dry lemon and cook 20 minutes more. The peas should have broken up by now, and the contents of the pot should have a thick and soupy consistency.

Prepare the potatoes 10 minutes before serving. In a frying pan, heat the oil to 360 degrees for deep frying. Add the potato pieces and cook until golden brown all over, 6 to 7 minutes. Drain on paper towels; add salt if desired. Ladle the split pea mixture in a broad-rimmed soup bowl; top with the fries. Serve accompanied by saffron rice. (I cooked up some Moroccan stewed carrots and cabbage instead.) Serves 8 to 10 as a main course at a Persian wedding or birthday feed.

---Vitelius

Your Liberal Media OSX Jaguar

Watching Morning Joe today, would you have any idea that Sarah Palin was part of a team that actually lost an election last year by nine million votes?

Look at the polls out there. Look at where people stand on life. Look what real Americans think . . .In the cities where there are a little more liberal, elite populations, you're not going to find what's representative of America.

And where do all those real Americans live? Actually, sweetheart, more than 80 percent of us live in those elite liberal cities that aren't really representative of, oh, the 20 percent of us who are.

Just to recap for the benefit Mika Brzezinski: In last year's presidential election, Sarah Palin was the running mate of a celebrated and respected former war hero who enjoyed widespread national name recognition based on his nearly 30 years of public service. They lost decisively to a black guy, named Hussein, who only two years ago was a political unknown outside his home state. Real Americans don't like Sarah Palin. Nearly half of the voters in her home state don't like her.

Proof yet again that these mass-media outlets don't need bloggers or the Internets to dig their grave for them. With the kind of societal disconnect that's seen on display on programs such as Morning Joe each day, they're perfectly capable of digging their own---with the masses of Real Americans who switch off their sets and tune them out.

---Vitelius

There Are No Bad Policies, Only Bad Management

I can't say I have much to add to what's already out there over the life (and death) of McNamara today, other then the obvious: That smart guys, given an unfortunate set of circumstances, can make some genuinely disastrous mistakes. Really smart and perceptive guys, however, generally learn from them, and smart he most surely was. Sharp as a tack, too, as he was here at age 80.

And they're generally sharp enough to carry those lessons along with them when parallels to the past make themselves apparent:

"We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."

While he did not want to talk on the record about specific military decisions made Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the United States is fighting a war that he believes is totally unnecessary and has managed to destroy important relationships with potential allies. "There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position, the United States' position vis-a-vis the other nations of the world."

Chief among the discoveries that led him to see Vietnam as a mistake, he said, was his realization that the United States could not, by itself, properly analyze the actions and ground-level conditions necessary to achieve the complex and ambiguous goals of a war -- reversing the influence of communism in Asia, in Vietnam's case, or bringing democracy to the Arab world, in Iraq's.

"And the reason I feel that is that we're not omniscient," he said. "And we've demonstrated that in Iraq, I think." He pointed to Washington's failure to appreciate the complexities of Iraqi culture, and therefore to anticipate the extended guerrilla war it is now engaged in -- a chief mistake of Vietnam. Without the full involvement of other major nations, he said, such mistakes will always be made.

"And if we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."

One wonders what life lessons, what insights gleaned from mistakes past, will be forthcoming from another former Secretary of State in the near future. Something tells me we'd better not set the bar of revelation too high:

With the passage of time, Rumsfeld has come to recognize that he made a mistake, although he sees the error as one of process, not basic judgment. He faults himself for taking too legalistic an approach initially, saying it would have been better if senior Pentagon officials responsible for policy and management matters had been brought in earlier to play more of a role and provide a broader perspective. As he explained in an interview in late 2008, policies were developing so fast in the weeks after the September 11 attacks that he did not follow his own normal procedures. "All of a sudden, it was just all happening, and the general counsel's office in the Pentagon had the lead," he said. "It never registered in my mind in this particular instance--it did in almost every other case--that these issues ought to be in a policy development or management posture. Looking back at it now, I have a feeling that was a mistake. In retrospect, it would have been better to take all of those issues and put them in the hands of policy or management."

---Vitelius

Palin Redux v2.0

I take back my previous post. It all makes sense now---Obama made her do it.

---Vitelius

Sarah, Bailin', Redux

It took me a few hours, but I finally got around to watching the Palin speech in its entirety, and like everyone else, I am astonished by the sheer incomprehensibility of it. The only thing that I can ever recall seeing that comes reasonably close would be Dick Nixon's bleary-eyed departure speech in '74 ("My mother was a saint"), but considering everything that had occurred in the year-and-a-half or so that preceded it---the Ervin hearings, the Agnew plea, the impeachment vote, the Supreme Court rejection---at least Nixon's on-air meltdown could be appreciated as a coda to an narrative that had gripped the nation for a good two years in a sense of epic tragedy: A Willy Loman moment, if you will.

But Palin's performance yesterday was simply beyond the realm of human understanding---an out-of-the-blue pastiche of talking points and self-puffery that proceeded in no logical fashion. It was obviously written in a hurry, and with very little thought.

One thing I did notice was Palin's, well, breathlessness throughout her address. Maybe she had just completed one of her beloved 5K runs, but whatever the reason, she seemed to be gasping for air between sentences. It's the kind of reaction you'd expect from someone who's feeling trapped and claustrophobic in a shrinking room, and who's looking for an escape hatch as quickly as possible. How come? Well, Blumenthal floats the possibility of a looming federal indictment, and the scenario he sketches certainly seems plausible on its face, given what we already know about the day-to-day conduct of Alaska politics.

Naturally, the Usual Morans® have already found the pony in the barn:

If Palin wants to run in 2012, why not do exactly what she announced today? It's an enormous gamble - but it could be a shrewd one.

After all, she's freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues - and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska.

Riiiiiight.Flaking out in the middle of her term is not the same thing as "neglect of duties." Only in Kristol-land.

Speaking of quitting, here's my favorite part of the speech, courtesy of Hilzoy:

"Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me -- sports: Basketball. I use it because you're naive if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win. And I'm doing that -- keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities -- smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom! And I know when it's time to pass the ball -- for victory."

Well, I suppose (as a friend of mine suggested last night) that the best way to put the principles of smaller government into practice is to physically remove yourself from the government altogether---but one wonders how on earth any basketball team ever wins a single game when its star point guard bolts from the team in the middle of the third quarter in a game she's trailing by 20 points. It's not like her squad has a really deep bench to start with.

Either way, like Hilzoy, I can't see any reason for Palin's speech---or her behavior---beyond an imminent major scandal or a serious health crisis. For her sake, and for her family's, let's pray it isn't the latter.

---Vitelius

Sarah, Bailin'

At least she didn't say she was going for a hike on the Haul Road.

---Vitelius

Dept. of Lost Irony, v10.1 Jaguar

Turdblossom on the Obama admin's media relations, today on Fox:

This White House has carried pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted events to a new height, and they're getting away with things that in any previous White House, the media would have eviscerated the press secretary and the White House for it.

The mind reels.

---Vitelius

Thursday Night Mini-Thread

• The latest jobless numbers were released today. If this chart doesn't scare you, nothing will.

Looks like we'll need a lot little more stimulus, please.

• Somebody at the Washington Post devised a fantastic new way to raise much-needed revenues in a down economy. Unfortunately, it would spell the end of the Post as a newspaper if it had been implemented. I'm not a big fan of the people who run Politico, but kudos to them for dropping the hammer on their former bosses.

• As promised, the administration has rolled out a new Website dedicated to showing taxpayers where and how each dollar of our Federal money is spent: usaspending.gov. It's a terrifically informative resource, though if you're like me, you may find yourself getting pissed off after you take a look at the numbers.

Top 100 Recipients of Federal Contract Awards for FY 2009

Lockheed Martin Corporation: $20,362,164,557
The Boeing Company: $14,730,265,990
Northrop Grumman Corporation: $8,672,131,373
General Dynamics Corporation: $7,794,041,496
Raytheon Company: $5,951,997,077
United Technologies Corporation: $4,708,822,003
Bechtel Group, Inc.: $3,456,275,666 . . .

It goes on. That's over $60 billion for the seven biggest Federal contractors---and nearly all of it is for military spending. That's only a tenth of the $651 billion allocated for military spending this year, and it nearly equals the entire defense budget of the second-most profligate spender: China, with roughly the same land mass and four times the population, and which somehow manages to secure its borders and defend itself on a paltry $70 billion per year.

Now does anyone want to tell me exactly why we're having this ridiculous argument over whether or not we can afford national health insurance? I'm all ears.

---Vitelius