brainiac conspiracy

More Media Liberalness

For the past year and a half, Republican political leaders and their media apparatchiks have compared our President to Hitler, Goebbels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and (the horror!) Woodrow Wilson. They've compared his policies to Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags. They've portrayed him as a Kenyan, a Marxist, a secret member of the Weather Underground, and a racist illegal alien. And you know what? It's all Obama's fault because he said something that hurt Republicans' feelings last week.

I swear, a guy like Jack Anderson wouldn't be allowed to work at the Post anymore.

---Vitelius

Austerity: Now For Islamofascists, Too

Here's the grave existential threat that The Dean thinks we should go massive over:

As security forces swarmed Tehran on Saturday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepared his country in a live television interview for deep cuts in subsidies that have kept the price of everything from bread to gasoline artificially low.

Iranian leaders have sought for decades to remove heavy government subsidies on fuel and food. Ahmadinejad has been struggling for months to implement a so-called targeted subsidies law that redirects cash toward infrastructure and the needy and away from middle-class consumers [...]

Already, Iranians have noticed steep increases in the price of heating oil, electricity and water, exacerbating years of spiraling inflation caused in part by the declining value of Iran's currency and the increased costs of imports in the face of international sanctions over Iran's nuclear program.

The changes are palpable. A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of ground beef that cost about $6 five years ago now costs $14.50, while taxi fares that used to cost $2 now cost $5.

The reductions in subsidies are planned over the course of five years, but a fight over the pace of reform continues between Ahmadinejad and rivals in parliament. Among those items to be cut in the first year are utilities, rice, wheat, vegetable oil, sugar, milk, mail services and air and rail services.

The government estimates that it could redirect up to $40 billion toward investment, infrastructure and job creation. But Ahmadinejad has tended to limit spending to flashy projects meant to bolster Iran's image as technologically advanced and populist giveaways to loyalists. He has choked off funds for construction of Tehran's badly needed subway network, for example, because both the city's mayor and the chief of the metro are political rivals.

Ahmadinejad's rivals in parliament, mistrustful of his spending habits, are setting up a special auditing unit to oversee the redirection of the subsidies funding.

But observers say the chances of the government botching the experiment are high.

I'd say they've already botched it up. A country that's slashing price supports for everyday necessities such as food, fuel, utilities and infrastructure while lavishing money on crony construction projects and an extremely costly nuclear program sounds a lot to me like a country on the verge of mass social upheaval. The mention of security forces "swarming" the capital pretty much tips the government's hand, wouldn't you say?

Tehran police commander Gen. Hossein Sajedinia announced that 800 checkpoints would be put in place throughout the capital as part of a "neighborhood watch plan" meant to root out "villains, thieves, drug dealers, people involved in harassing women in streets and those carrying knives and other sharp items."

Witnesses said the security forces were mostly stopping young men on motorcycles and young couples in high-end automobiles, the same middle-class social strata likely to be hurt by the subsidies removal and inclined to support the opposition.

Seems to me they're also the most likely base of another impromptu Green Revolution, whenever and wherever it happens. The government's apparently not taking any chances and is cracking down before people can start organizing mass street demonstrations this time around, but however that shakes out in the future, it seems pretty obvious that this is a country on the brink of unrest---one in which austerity can only be imposed, and order maintained, by the public threat of tear gas and goon squads; a nation that appears to be bankrupting its own economy for the sake of further developing its nuclear power program, weaponized or otherwise, and shoring up the fortunes of a government saddled with runaway inflation. I'm no expert, but a country in that kind of a condition sounds a lot more to me like some impoverished backwater among the Warsaw Pact such as East Germany or Romania in the late 1980s than the imminent Persian Peril™ that Beltway opinon-makers like Broder enjoy making it out to be.

Look at it like this: When unpopular totalitarian governments start jacking up the prices of such staples as meat, milk, wheat and cooking oil in short order, the results are generally something like this. Or this. Or this. Not to minimize the potential threat Tehran might one day pose to the West, but if the last eight years have taught us anything at all, it's that potential threats from shadowy Middle East dictatorships simply do not rise to the level of a legitimate casus belli. Iraq was a potential threat too, remember? And we all know how awesomely that turned out.

---Vitelius

Why I Read the Post So You Don't Have To

Looks like we're all neoconservatives now:

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

So the Dean of the Beltway press corps has deemed Iran---a nation rife with internal divisions, isolated from much of the world, and surrounded by thousands of US troops---a greater existential threat to the world than:

• The possibility of a nuclear-armed Pakistan falling into the hands of a rogue jihadist government;

• The ongoing insolvency of America's financial system;

• The prospect of irreversible global warming and massive die-offs of species;

• The growing rejection of science and education as instruments of policy, and the continued rise in religious extremism worldwide;

• The destruction of the world's oceans and the contamination of the global food chain;

• The increase in global poverty and hunger, and the continued redistribution of wealth to the superrich; also too,

• A world that is running out of potable water.

Glad to see we've cleared that up.

I am sure that I've probably overlooked another fifty and a half-dozen existential threats that might, just might, pose knottier problems to America, and to our planet in general than Iran's nuclear program. Feel free to add your own here.

Oh, and note to Broder: You're right---the last time a Democratic president attempted a major new military deployment with a sitting GOP majority on Capitol Hill, the results were utterly awesome, and bipartisan consensus prevailed in the end.

---Vitelius

Torture-Enabling We Can Believe In

I guess they're never going to change their tune on this little matter:

The U.S. Department of Justice severely watered down an internal report on the conduct of its lawyers responsible for authorizing torture and has failed to comply with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), depriving the public of necessary information about the conduct of our government. The Robert Jackson Steering Committee (RJSC) has just sent a 13-page appeal for fuller compliance with a FOIA request originally made in January to which the U.S. Department of Justice replied in August with heavily redacted documents. RJSC is seeking information on the process through which an initial report was significantly modified.

"We have determined that the redactions made by the Justice Department were designed to protect CIA interrogators---and those who authorized torture 'at the highest level'---from criminal liability," said Charlotte Dennett of the RJSC, who drafted the appeal.

"Whenever the ethics lawyers in the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) got close to revealing criminal behavior in their report, the CIA stepped in and blacked out the evidence," she added. "Among the items redacted are dates (already made public through other sources) which confirm that illegal torture began in the spring of 2002, months before lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee of Bush's Justice Department concocted their phony definitions of torture to get their superiors off the hook."

"Sometimes the redactors got sloppy, as when they left in a 12th form of torture -- mock burial---in the December 08 OPR report, but redacted it in the July 09 version. At other times, whole pages are blacked out following clear indications of White House pressure on the Justice Department lawyers to approve torture. Large redactions also followed sections where the criminal division of the Justice Department refused to give an 'advance declination to prosecute'---effectively, a 'stay out of jail free card,' to CIA interrogators and their superiors."

David Swanson, Chair of the RJSC, added, "The Freedom of Information Act is based on the premise that we will have a government of the people, and that to do so the people must be informed. There is no exception for covering up governmental crimes, which would largely defeat the purpose."

The group's administrative appeal makes frequent reference to intense public interest in the OPR report, which is one way to contest redactions. The appeal ends with two quotes from the New York Times, which frequently suggested a coverup in its editorials.

Any "official confirmation of wrongdoing," the Times wrote on October 26, 2009, "might be used in lawsuits against government officials and contractors, and might help create a public clamor for prosecution of those responsible. President Obama calls that a distracting exercise in ‘looking back.’ What it really is, is justice.”

I'll never understand what the President and the AG think they have gained on any discernible level by their hands-off approach to war-crimes investigations. It's not as though they've won any friends from the past administration, or from the Jack Bauer Party that's about to take control of the House next week, by giving their compatriots a pass on waterboarding and other atrocities. And by the administration's obstinate refusal to even consider enforcing the Geneva Conventions against its own citizens where they are clearly and obviously applicable, it has all but guaranteed that future GOP administrations will commit similar crimes against humanity, and commit them with impunity, knowing that bipartisan agreement has been reached among our ruling elites in Washington that such actions constitute permissible levels of executive lawlessness. And when the torture commences again---and rest assured, it eventually will---all the florid speeches in Cairo and Oslo and elsewhere won't be able to stop millions of people around the world---Muslim and otherwise---from turning against us yet again, or stem the flow of angry young men into the ever-metastasizing movement for global jihad.

There are some forms of institutional behavior that simply cannot be abetted by a society of laws. Genocide is one. Torture is another. The reason is simple: Even passive acceptance of torture by a society's leadership class sends a strong, clear message, however unconsciously, to its citizens that such aberrant behaviors are legally defensible, and perhaps even necessary, when committed in the cause of defending the homeland. Once this precedent has been established, the ramifications are obvious: If you think that the acts of violence and intimidation that occurred at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo---all of which were carried out in the name of protecting America from its enemies---are completely unrelated to the escalating cycle of violence and intimidation that's being fomented against other "enemies of America" right now, don't kid yourself. These things are completely interrelated: The tacit endorsement of the former by our rulers has justified the existence of the latter in the minds of the ruled.

Even the proto-wingnut Barry Goldwater was right on this principle: Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. No matter the rationalization, the administration's decision to give the prior regime a pass on the formulation and execution of policies which every other civilized nation on the planet recognizes as crimes against humanity represents a profound political miscalculation and a grave moral failing. As long as the perpetrators of these indefensible crimes are not held to account for their actions, America is, and will remain, a rogue state among nations.

---Vitelius

Fairness & Balance of Liberal Media Confirmed

Boycott ABC. Do it now.

---Vitelius

About That Employee Free Choice Thingy . . .

Another kind of "voter fraud" that you won't read about in the Post:

When workers in a McDonald’s restaurant in Canton, Ohio, opened their paychecks this month, they found a pamphlet urging them to vote for the Republican candidates for governor, Senate and Congress, or possibly face financial repercussions.

The pamphlet appeared calculated to intimidate workers into voting for Republican candidates by making a direct reference to their wages and benefits, said Allen Schulman, a Democrat who is president of the Canton City Council and said he obtained a copy of the pamphlet on Wednesday.

The pamphlet said: “If the right people are elected, we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above the current levels. If others are elected, we will not.

Nice.

Good to see, then, that some fast-food workers aren't putting up with this kind of exploitive shit for much longer:

The Jimmy John’s restaurants here are known for serving attitude with their sandwiches. Many of their young workers wear nose rings, beards and dreadlocks, and the shops sport mottoes like “The Customer Is Usually Right” and “Subs So Fast You’ll Freak.”

But recently, the employees at the 10 shops here have started to exude more attitude than management would like. Some of the 200 workers wear T-shirts that say, “Wages So Low You’ll Freak,” and many are backing a campaign to unionize the shops, which compete with Subway and Quiznos.

The unionization drive is one of the few efforts to organize fast-food workers in American history. Employees will vote Friday, and if the union wins, organizers say they will seek to unionize fast-food workers in other cities.

The issues that have roused the Jimmy John’s workers are typical of what many low-end service-sector workers face: earning the $7.25-an-hour minimum wage or slightly above that, working unpredictable and often short shifts and dealing with their bosses’ wrath when they call in sick.

Most unions have shied away from trying to organize fast-food workers because the employees tend to be young, with high turnover. But that has not dissuaded the Industrial Workers of the World, which tried to organize workers at Starbucks coffee shops without success.

A century ago, the I.W.W.---better known as the Wobblies---was a swaggering, radical union with 100,000 members and legendary leaders like Mary Harris Jones (known as Mother Jones) and Big Bill Haywood. The union often clashed with police officers and Pinkerton security guards as it organized lumberjacks, dockworkers and miners.

These days, the Wobblies have just 1,600 members in the United States, and have union contracts with a handful of employers. But if they can flex their muscles anywhere, it may be in organizing the Jimmy John’s workers of Minneapolis. Union supporters say more than 60 percent of the workers signed cards asking for a unionization election.

“A union in fast food is an idea whose time has come,” said Emily Przybylski, a bike delivery worker at Jimmy John’s who is also a social work student at the University of Minnesota. “There are millions of workers in this industry living in poverty, with no consistent scheduling, no job security and no respect. It’s time for change."

Mike Mulligan, the franchisee who owns the Jimmy John’s shops here, is pressing employees to vote against joining the I.W.W., which he says is a dangerous “socialist-anarchist organization” that “proudly preaches the overthrow of capitalism.”

“This is a group hellbent on bringing down someone, anyone, in the fast-food industry, and we just happened to be the next on the list,” said Mr. Mulligan, a retired senior vice president with Supervalu, a national grocery company.

Good. You assholes have deserved it since the birth of the Happy Meal.

As it turned out, the Jimmy John's unionization drive fell just a bit short last week, but it seems likely that the employees, and the IWW, will give it another go in the not-too-distant future. And on a related note, it seems to me that if the current administration in Washington really wanted to energize its young voter base ahead of next week's elections, it would have gone to the mat to pass some kind of legislation that, you know, might make it easier for them to become unionized and earn fair wages and get decent healthcare benefits. Why this wasn't attempted when the Ledbetter Act was passed and the President's approval ratings were over 70 percent, I'll never understand, but it might be worth re-visiting in the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress. I don't have any illusions that our Democratic leaders will actually attempt this---because they won't---but it would still be a good idea for some of our higher-profile labor leaders to remind the people in the White House about the unfinished business on their legislative calendar that needs to be addressed, and what their prospects for re-election might be if they don't get off the stick and make a sporting attempt to keep one of the signature promises they made to organized labor two years ago. Just a thought.

---Vitelius

Probably Re-Stating the Obvious

Given recent events, this really is a problem begging for a solution:

Despite the increased scrutiny of people and luggage on passenger planes since 9/11, there are far fewer safeguards for packages and bundles, particularly when loaded on cargo-only planes. The issue has come up in Congress repeatedly and was the subject of a recent report by the research arm of Congress that warned new mandates were not being met.

Industry experts said the latest case suggested that terrorists may have singled out cargo aircraft precisely because they are not subject to the same scrutiny as passenger planes.

Only a small percentage of all cargo from abroad is physically checked on freight planes bound for the United States. A law that took effect in August requiring full screening does not apply.

“The 100 percent screening requirements only pertains to passenger flights that carry air cargo,” said Steve Lord, a director of homeland security and justice issues at the Government Accountability Office.

Hey, I've got an idea: How about if Congress passes a new law and appropriates some more money to the TSA so they can hire a bunch of people to inspect all of those parcels? True, the process would probably delay deliveries of goods somewhat and cause some modest price increases in certain markets, but putting lots of unemployed people back to work and improving a neglected form of border security at the same time seem to me like trade-offs well worth making. Plus, you'd need to purchase lots of new scanners, screening equipment, hazmat gear, motor vehicles for bomb disposal, etc., which would stimulate demand in various industries, so our economy would get a double-bump upward. Too bad nobody in Washington seems to have thought of this yet.

---Vitelius

Your Liberal Media: Fear of a Black Planet Edition

Sometimes I wonder if the Teabag Militia even needs Fox News anymore:

On Election Day, voters standing in line to cast their ballots in Harris County, Tex., will be treated to a cool drink courtesy of a group called "the lemonade brigade." But the group has another motive---curbing voter fraud.

It is one of several Republican and tea party-affiliated groups across the country who are taking their citizen activism to the polls this year to stop what they believe will be rampant abuse of the nation's error-prone election system. In Minnesota, for example, conservative groups are running radio ads and offering $500 rewards to those who turn in anyone successfully prosecuted for voter fraud.

In Wisconsin, someone recently erected billboards depicting people behind bars because they illegally voted. And in Illinois, Senate candidate Rep. Mark Kirk (R) has come under fire for being caught on tape saying he wanted to dispatch "voter integrity" teams to "vulnerable" districts, which critics have noted include some heavily black neighborhoods.

But the conservative alarms have drawn the attention of liberal and voting rights groups, who say the concerns are overblown and the surveillance borders on intimidation. Black and Latino advocacy groups plan to step up their own presence at the polls to make sure legitimate voters won't be deterred from casting ballots.

This latest partisan issue caps an election season that has gnawed at racial divides and exposed raw emotions on the part of American voters, who will cast ballots in Tuesday in a series of close congressional and gubernatorial races. Fears and accusations of election misconduct are nothing new, and stringent laws have been on the books for decades that restrict how close observers can get to voters, or how many of them can be there at all.

But the conservatives' warning that they will be watching, combined with a year of increasingly rancorous public debate, has some election experts on guard for increased hostilities Tuesday.

And on and on and on. If you need any further evidence of how ginned-up GOP pseudo-scandals gain a veneer of respectability by being transformed by a major mainstream media outlet into the "latest partisan issue"---on a parallel with, oh, say, healthcare reform or cap-and-trade, perhaps---look no further.

I have an idea for the Post's managing editor. Just for fun, let's substitute the words "weapons of mass destruction" for "voter fraud" in this story:

On Election Day, voters standing in line to cast their ballots in Harris County, Tex., will be treated to a cool drink courtesy of a group called "the lemonade brigade." But the group has another motive---curbing weapons of mass destruction.

Absurd, isn't it? Well, yes, it is. But let's not forget, in another time and place not long ago, Republicans were warning us without rest that weapons of mass destruction were a real and genuine threat to our way of life, and that we needed to be vigilant and ready to wage all-out war if necessary to stop them. Of course, those weapons of mass destruction weren't a threat to us at all because they didn't really exist. Now, many of these same people are warning us about the dangers posed to us by widespread voter fraud, and imploring their adherents to be vigilant and willing to wage all-out war at the polls to stop it. Now, however, we already know ahead of time that, for all intents and purposes, massive and widespread "voter fraud" as defined by Republicans simply does not exist, and never has. But I guess there's no right-wing talking point that's been so thoroughly debunked and discredited that is beyond the pale of recycling once more in the pages of the Post. No wonder so many of our citizens are so grossly uninformed.

---Vitelius

Your Liberal Media: Caucasian Butthurt Edition

Outsourced today to the Post steno pool:

The Justice Department has tried to hide the involvement of high-level political officials in the dismissal of a controversial voter-intimidation lawsuit against members of the New Black Panther Party, a federal commission concluded in a draft report.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said the department's reversal in the case, which drew criticism from conservatives, indicates that its Civil Rights Division is failing to protect white voters and is "at war with its core mission of guaranteeing equal protection of the laws for all Americans.''

The Justice Department strongly denied the allegations in the report based on the commission's year-long investigation into the Obama administration's handling of the 2008 case. The Bush administration had filed a voter-intimidation lawsuit against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia who were videotaped outside a polling place, one carrying a nightstick. The Obama Justice Department dismissed most of the case.

Missing from this scintillating exposé is a bit of contextual analysis:

A scholar whom President George W. Bush appointed as vice chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Abigail Thernstrom has a reputation as a tough conservative critic of affirmative action and politically correct positions on race.

But when it comes to the investigation that the Republican-dominated commission is now conducting into the Justice Department’s handling of an alleged incident of voter intimidation involving the New Black Panther Party---a controversy that has consumed conservative media in recent months---Thernstrom has made a dramatic break from her usual allies.

“This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers; this has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration,” said Thernstrom, who said members of the commission voiced their political aims “in the initial discussions” of the Panther case last year.

“My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring Eric Holder down and really damage the president,” Thernstrom said in an interview with Politico.

The criticism has focused attention not just on Thernstrom, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, but on the partisan nature of the Civil Rights Commission and on a story that, like the controversy over the anti-poverty group ACORN, has raged almost completely outside the mainstream media [...]

Many people who do not watch Fox News or follow conservative media have never heard of the issue.

There's an obvious reason for that, but apparently the Post's newsroom whizzes haven't figured it out yet. Thus another GOP disinformation initiative gets regurgitated over the wires for yet another news cycle, and the Issa Committee gets free additional fodder for another round of hearings in the spring. With uncritical reporting such as this emanating from one of our nation's leading news outlets---which seems quite happy to lend credence to utterly unfounded GOP conspiracy theories---we as a people are going to be totally, irredeemably fucked by our leaders in Washington, and their hapless media vassals, for the next couple of years. My bet's on an impeachment vote on the floor of the House by the 2012 summer recess. Any takers?

Update: We now have bipartisan consensus to the effect that the US-CCR is patently full of shit:

The commission, which is controlled by a bloc of conservative and liberterian members, was scheduled to vote on the report Friday morning. But it could not reach a quorum because commissioner Michael Yaki, a Democratic appointee and a former senior adviser to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refused to participate. The commission needs five members present to meet quorum.

"This has been a procedural and partisan farce from the beginning," Yaki said in an impromptu news conference. "It's not my responsibility to make a quorum for this kangaroo court ... they want to score political points against the Obama Justice Department."

Warning: irony-free zone at conclusion of article.

The commission's findings are based mostly on the testimony of two Justice Department attorneys involved in the case, as well as media reports, including a recent article in The Washington Post. That article said the case tapped into deep divisions within the Justice Department over whether the agency should focus on protection of historically oppressed minorities or enforcement of laws without regard to race.

Simple formula: GOP operatives spin absurd yarn to Post reporters. Post reporters dutifully publish it. Right-wing mouth-foaming ensues. GOP operatives spin additional absurd yarn, Post reporters publish, lather, rinse, repeat. Can't anyone in the Post's newsroom see how they get played for suckers by these people, or are they in on the fix too?

---Vitelius

Bovine Flatulence Never Sounded So Benign

If the prospect of a Teabag blowout at the polls next week hasn't got you down already, the prospect of another kind of blowout should do it:

251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed more than 96 percent of all life on Earth. Experts agree that what is known as the Permian extinction event was the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world.

55 million years later another methane bubble ruptured causing more mass extinctions during the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum (LPTM).

The LPTM lasted 100,000 years.

Those subterranean seas of methane virtually reshaped the planet when they explosively blew from deep beneath the waters of what is today called the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, worried scientists are increasingly concerned the same series of catastrophic events that led to worldwide death back then may be happening again-and no known technology can stop it.

The bottom line: BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years.

The oil giant drilled down miles into a geologically unstable region and may have set the stage for the eventual premature release of a methane mega-bubble.

Hyperbole aside, there does appear to be scientific confirmation of a massive methane buildup of some sort in the Golf.

As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday.

Texas A&M University oceanography professor John Kessler, just back from a 10-day research expedition near the BP Plc (BP.L) oil spill in the gulf, says methane gas levels in some areas are "astonishingly high."

Kessler's crew took measurements of both surface and deep water within a 5-mile (8 kilometer) radius of BP's broken wellhead.

"There is an incredible amount of methane in there," Kessler told reporters in a telephone briefing.

In some areas, the crew of 12 scientists found concentrations that were 100,000 times higher than normal.

So, worst-case scenario and the gas explodes? Biggest species die-off in 50 million years.

Best-case scenario? Irreversible global warming and slow death by drought and starvation.

Time to go get smart, once again. (H/t A.B.L.)

---Vitelius

And I Thought it Was Because I'm a Journalist

All those years I spent in psychotherapy trying to understand some of my more inexplicable behavioral traits, and these guys had the obvious answer all along:

The next time you're inclined to enjoy an extra glass of wine, consider that it may be a reflection of your intelligence.

That is one of the findings from data from the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States.

Childhood intelligence, measured before the age of 16, was categorized in five cognitive classes, ranging from "very dull," "dull," "normal," "bright" and "very bright."

The Americans were revisited seven years later. The British youths, on the other hand, were followed in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Researchers measured their drinking habits as the participants became older.

More intelligent children in both studies grew up to drink alcohol more frequently and in greater quantities than less intelligent children. In the Brits' case, "very bright" children grew up to consume nearly eight-tenths of a standard deviation more alcohol than their "very dull" cohorts.

Researchers controlled for demographic variables---such as marital status, parents' education, earnings, childhood social class and more---that may have also affected adult drinking. Still, the findings held true: Smarter kids were drinking more as adults.

---Vitelius

Nobody Could Have Possibly Predicted

That this crack outfit would ever fuck up a job. Remember where you heard it first.

---Vitelius

Our Awesome New Rulers

I can certainly see why the Golden State power elite is so enamored of this guy:

Berggruen, whose reading matter tends toward Sartre and Confucius, says in California he will be promoting common sense. For him, that means more constitutional controls on state spending, a halt to runaway pension costs, more authority for local government and new accountability measures for government programs.

Awesome ideas! More budget cuts for social services, and more much-needed union-smashing. Everything but, uh, tax increases on wealthy people and corporations, apparently. At least we'll have good books to read while chowing down our nightly catfood dinner.

Whatever. This is the face of our new Benefactor Class:

Flying in his private jet, staying at luxury hotels and hosting parties at the Chateau Marmont with guests such as Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio are part of his lifestyle. Forbes magazine pegs Berggruen as America's 164th-richest person, worth $2.2 billion [...]

California, he says, presents an ideal test case for reform: There is demand for change and an apparatus---the initiative process---for implementing it.

Considering how many of California's problems stem from the wholesale abuse of the initiative process---not to mention already existing constitutional controls on state spending---this seems like the perfect way to go about fixing our broken state. On the subject, I'd only suggest a ballot initiative that would cancel future state elections and cede control of the government to our Plutocrat overlords: Just codify in writing what's already happened in fact, basically.

---Vitelius

Welcome to Somalia

Despite any braying you may hear to the contrary, our own government doesn't much care about public safety anymore:

One of the ATF's chief concerns is missing guns. Guns that stores cannot account for cannot be traced to buyers and are a red flag for potential off-the-books dealing.

Nationwide, dealers lose track of an enormous number of guns. Since 2005, 3,847 inspections have documented 113,642 guns that cannot be found. (The Bushmaster rifle used in the D.C. sniper killings in 2002 had gone missing from a gun store in Tacoma, Wash.)

The process is complicated because dealers by law do not have to take inventory. In a 2003 provision authored by Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), Congress prohibited the ATF from requiring dealers to do inventories. As a result, ATF inspectors sometimes have to spend days or weeks poring through a dealer's paperwork and physically matching it to the guns on hand.

"An annual inventory is part of every business," said Zammillo, who retired this year after four decades with the ATF. "Congress said we forbid you to require a business to take an inventory.

"There is a clear need for it for public safety, based on the number of missing guns."

The NRA said requiring inventories would impose a huge cost on the industry and raise prices for consumers.

New legislation, pending before Congress, would further limit the agency's ability to regulate dealers, former and current ATF officials said. Pushed by the gun lobby and called the "ATF modernization bill," it would require a higher standard to prove violations by dealers. The agency, for the first time, would have to show that a dealer knew the law and intentionally disregarded it; in other words, the ATF would have to establish the dealer's state of mind at the time of the violation.

Which for all intents and purposes will put ATF out of business once and for all.

I've often wondered why Democrats in Congress conceded the issue of gun control to the GOP over the last ten years or so. Oh, I remember now---it was so we could help elect a bunch of Blue Dog Dems in Republican-leaning districts in suburban and rural America. We can certainly be proud of that, considering how they've helped us form an enduring Democratic majority, and how they'll continue to help out in the future.

Oh well. Our soon-to-come warlord-militia style of government is going to be one heck of an experience. Hey, it's in the Constitution, now isn't it?

---Vitelius

Your Liberal Media, Phony Controversies Edition

There used to be a time when the members of our national media elite considered the function of crap detector to be one of their most pressing public duties:

You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist"---out of bounds.

It's really too bad we don't live in those times anymore.

---Vitelius

Opinions Differ Over Best Way to DismantleLast Remaining Vestiges of Social Safety Net

Why a campaign "issue" that didn't matter to our rulers in Washington in 2001, in 2003, in 2005, or 2008 should suddenly matter now is something I'll never understand. Particularly when could simply, oh, raise taxes on some very wealthy people, pass a sensible carbon tax, adopt a single-payer healthcare system and probably have the whole deficit paid off in five or six years. But those types of laws are trademarks of liberal government, which obviously we're no longer allowed to have in this country, no matter who or what we think we're voting for every two years. Sometimes I wonder why I still bother writing out checks to Democrats when all I'm going to get for my contributions is a bunch of corporate-friendly half-measure legislation that's only going to be abolished the next time the juvenile delinquents take over the sandbox, but I guess that corporatism with a social conscience---which is pretty much what the Democratic Party has become in our lifetimes---is preferable to conscience-free Galtism, though it's not nearly as entertaining to watch.

On the bright side, our catfood dollars will go a lot farther in places like Panama City and Montevideo, so I'd guess it's a good time for us 50-somethings start brushing up on our high-school Spanish, wouldn't you say?

---Vitelius

What He Said

The sorry state of America’s infrastructure is a hard-core reflection of what is really going on in this increasingly hapless society, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Otherwise, I got nothin'.

---Vitelius

The Awesomeness of Kaplan Test Prep

Bite me:

Three months ago, right-wingers clipped a video of Sherrod to make her look like a racist. They circulated the video on the Internet, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture fired her.

Now it's happening again. This time, left-wingers have done the editing. They clipped a video of Juan Williams, a commentator for Fox News and NPR, to make him look like an anti-Muslim bigot. They circulated the video on the Internet, and last night, NPR fired him.

Talk about false equivalencies. The only things---and I mean the only things---that these two incidents share in common are (1) the people who got fired are both African-American, and (2) manufactured right-wing outrage was allowed to frame the discussion of the incidents.

To recap, Juan Williams was fired for violating NPR company policy---which he'd been repeatedly warned about in the past. Shirley Sherrod was fired for reasons that turned out to be utterly bogus. Only in the cynical world of Beltway contrarianism would these two outcomes be perceived as being ethically indistinguishable.

Oh, this also too: After embarrassing himself on Fox News and getting fired from NPR, Fox welcomed Williams into its media fold by offering him a $2 million annual contract. After Shirley Sherrod was fired from the Agriculture Department after being defamed by Andrew Breitbart, he gladly welcomed her into his media fold by . . . blaming the NAACP for his actions. Same difference, I guess.

---Vitelius

America's Hessians at Work & Play

Just remember, kids: Always look forward, never back:

For all the contractors’ bravado---Iraq was packed with beefy men with beards and flak jackets---and for all the debates about their necessity, it is clear from the documents that the contractors appeared notably ineffective at keeping themselves and the people they were paid to protect from being killed.

The documents seem to confirm a common observation on the ground during those years in Iraq: far from providing insurance against sudden death, the easily identifiable, surprisingly vulnerable pickup trucks and S.U.V.’s driven by the security companies were magnets for insurgents, militias, disgruntled Iraqis and anyone else in search of a target.

Most of the documents are incident reports and match what is known of the few cases that have been made public, although even this cache is unlikely to be a complete record of incidents involving contractors. During the six years covered by the reports, at least 175 private security contractors were killed. The peak appeared to come in 2006, when 53 died. Insurgents and other malefactors kidnapped at least 70 security contractors, many of whom were later killed.

Aegis, a British security company, had the most workers reported killed, more than 30. Most of those were Iraqi drivers, guards and other employees. Not only the military, but journalists and aid workers as well relied on contractors to help protect them.

The security contractors seemed overmatched, often incinerated or torn apart by explosions their vehicles had no chance of warding off. In August 2004, the corpses of two men who had worked with Custer Battles were found charred and abandoned in a truck that was still burning on the road between Tikrit and Mosul, after it was struck by an improvised explosive device and fired upon from a Volkswagen, one report said.

In July 2007, another report said, two were killed when a gun truck operated by ArmorGroup, a British company, flew like a wobbling discus 54 yards through the air, flipping approximately six times, after a huge I.E.D. exploded beneath it in northern Iraq.

And in May 2009, three Americans, including a senior Navy officer, were killed outside Falluja when an I.E.D. overturned a vehicle escorted by Aegis contractors during a visit to a water treatment plant financed by the United States, according to another report and American government statements at the time [...]

The contractors also suffered horrific traffic accidents with multiple fatalities all over Iraq, seemingly as a side effect of driving at high speeds on bad roads where a threat can appear at any moment.

The threats were not limited to insurgents, the documents show: private security contractors repeatedly came under fire from Iraqi and coalition security forces, who often seemed unnerved by unmarked vehicles approaching at high speeds and fired warning shots, or worse. Even as the war dragged on, there seemed no universal method for the military to identify these quasi soldiers on the battlefield.

To cope, the contractors were reduced to waving reproductions of coalition flags from inside their vehicles, the documents show---but even that did not always work. After being shot at by an American military guard tower near Baiji in July 2005, contractors with Aegis first waved a British flag. When the shooting continued, the contractors, who said they were transporting a member of the American military at the time, held up an American flag instead. “THE TOWER KEPT SHOOTING,” a report said, although no one was injured in the episode.

But whatever the constellation of reasons---from war-zone jumpiness to outright disregard for civilian lives---the security companies are cited time after time for shootings that the documents plainly label as unjustified. This has blackened their reputation, even if it has not lessened the military’s dependence on them. “AFTER THE IED STRIKE A WITNESS REPORTS THE BLACKWATER EMPLOYEES FIRED INDISCRIMINATELY AT THE SCENE,” read one report from Aug. 22, 2006, referring to the company, now known as Xe Services, that the following year would become notorious for an apparently unprovoked killing of 17 Iraqis at Nisour Square in Baghdad.

It sure would have been nice----don't you think?---if a few of our Wise Leaders in Washington had at least convened a Truth & Reconciliation Commission to address nagging little issues such as these before Wikileaks did us all a favor and published this ream of documents that our very own government felt we didn't need to know about. Then again, since most of our elected officials in Congress voted in favor of going to war in the first place, and nearly all of them voted to keep funding it off the books for years, they'd have run the obvious risk of implicating themselves directly in the feeding and care of the most massive systemic clusterfuck that our nation has hatched in the last hundred years. Heckuva job, y'all.

And the next time some President wants to start another war, maybe someone in Congress should consider re-instating the draft instead of outsourcing the job to a bunch of highly paid amateurs?

---Vitelius

Your Liberal Media, Left Coast Edition

I'm still trying to figure out why a story like this one appears in my local paper only ten days out from the election. It appears to convey no useful information, other to tell me that some firefighters, police officers and a few assorted department heads in the city of Oakland---all of whom appear to have served vital public interests---earned generous overtime pay when Jerry Brown was the Mayor there. There's no accusation of malfeasance here---the officials all appear to have been performing necessary functions at a time when the city was short-staffed. Some of them were even hailed by their superiors as model employees. So why is this a story at all?

Oakland's generosity with overtime during Brown's terms, his critics say, played a significant role in boosting his popularity with public employee unions, a key ally in his future runs for higher office, including his current campaign for governor.

This story would never have seen the light of day if the Chandlers still ran this paper. The new owners, however, conduct the business of journalism in a slightly different fashion, and the editorial emphasis they've brought to the Times of late has yielded some totally awesome outcomes.

---Vitelius