brainiac conspiracy

The GOP Honor Roll

Yes, it's true, for one day only: Lamar Alexander, Scott Brown, Richard Burr, Susan Collins, Mike Enzi, Chuck Grassley, Judd Gregg, Mike Johans, Mark Kirk, George LeMieux, Dick Lugar, Lisa Murkowski, Olympia Snowe, David Vitter (!) and George Voinovich, today you did something good for America. The food safety bill is not a perfect piece of legislation, but it is big step in the right direction in ensuring that the stuff we put in our mouths (and our stomachs) every day won't kill or incapacitate us. So at least this once, thanks for putting your country's interest ahead of your party's. History will judge you kindly for it.

Also too, a special added thanks to Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu for not using the occasion to behave like petulant little assholes. At least you helped to bring the 111th Congress to a close on a somewhat positive note.

Update (12/1): And Harry Reid is still deserves to lose his job.

---Vitelius

The Wiki Cables and American Exceptionalism

The timing of this non-story in the Post, which appeared online yesterday, and the Wikileaks diplomatic cable dump could really not be richer in irony. In the Post article, we learn that Republican presidential contenders are planning to make an issue of Obama's alleged rejection of "American exceptionalism," though none of them are able, or willing, to define specifically what this belief system actually is or how it manifests itself in America's daily conduct with other nations beyond the projection of an intemperate bellicosity abroad buttressed by right-wing religious fervor at home. Much discussion ensues as to whether or not this Republican critique of Obama is warranted.

Yet in the real world, i.e., one that's not defined by the collective sum of Sarah Palin's Facebook posts, one only need skim through virtually any of the leaked Wiki cables composed within the past year and a half to see that the Obama administration, like every other administration in Washington since the end of World War II, devoutly adheres to a doctrine of exceptionalism in foreign policy that exalts America's stature above all other nations, and which grants itself virtually unlimited powers to intervene in the affairs of others. As former Army colonel Andrew Bacevich explains in his devastating critique of America's national-security policy, Washington Rules, "American exceptionalism" has been the guiding principle behind the concept of "American global leadership," and it has been firmly ingrained in the collective psyche of America's leadership class for the last 60 years as wholly representative of the Natural Order of Things (lengthy excerpt follows):

Once installed in office, President Obama and his chief lieutenants wasted little time in signaling their allegiance to this consensus and to the four assertions on which it rests. Every President since Harry Truman has faithfully subscribed to these four assertions and Obama is no exception.

First, the world must be organized (or shaped). In the absence of organization, chaos will surely reign.

Second, only the United States possesses the capacity to prescribe and enforce such a global order. No other nation has the vision, will, and wisdom required to lead. Apart from the United States, no other nation or group of nations (and certainly no supra-national institution) can be entrusted with that role. Leadership in this sense implies that Washington demonstrate a voracious appetite or taking on new obligations, never acknowledging that limits exist on how much Americans can afford. Once shouldered, obligations become permanent---the consequences of pulling out of Afghanistan after 1989 demonstrating the penalty that results from violating this dictum.

Third, America's writ includes the charge of articulating the principles that should define the international order. Those principles are necessarily American principles, which possess universal validity. That specific American principles may themselves evolve in no way compromises their universality. However much American attitudes regarding nuclear weapons or noncombatant casualties or women's rights may change, the most recent articulation of principle is the one that counts and to which others must conform.

Finally, a few rogues and recalcitrants aside, everyone understands and accepts this reality. Despite pro forma grumbling, the world wants the United States to lead. Indeed, what keeps world leaders up at night is the possibility that Americans may someday tire of the responsibilities that history plainly intends them to bear and which they are so admirably equipped to fill.

Mainstream Republicans and mainstream Democrats are equally devoted to this catechism of American statecraft. Little empirical evidence exists to demonstrate its validity, but no matter. When it comes to maters of faith, proof is unnecessary. In American politics, adherence to this creed qualifies as a matter of faith. In speeches, state papers, and official ceremonies, public figures continually affirm and reinforce its validity. Like the sale pitches woven into commercial TV programming, it is both omnipresent and hidden in plain sight.

Mainstream Republicans and Democrats are also committed to the proposition that implementing this creed entails the exercise of power. In this regard, singular responsibilities require singular prerogatives. Not content simply to deflect threats, Washington seeks to remove them. Rather than waiting on events, national security elites favor an activist posture. The misleadingly misnamed Department of Defense serves in fact as a Ministry of Global Policing.

When it comes to projecting power, the United States exempts itself from norms with which it expects others to comply. The notorious Bush Doctrine of preventive war provides the ultimate expression of the prerogatives to which Washington lays claim. Yet in promulgating the doctrine that bears his name, George W. Bush was adhering to a well-established practice. Ever since 1904, when Theodore Rosevelt enunciated his famous "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine--asserting authority to "exercise international police power" throughout the Caribbean whenever the United States found evidence of "chronic wrongdoing"---his successors have played variations of TR's theme. The eponymous doctrines of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Carter, and Reagan number among the results.

That the United States should also maintain a far-flung network of bases and other arrangements to facilitate intervention abroad emerges as an essential predicate. Whereas the United States once erected bases in places like Hawaii, Panama, or the Philippines to defend outposts of empire, for decades now a central purpose of "forward presence" has been to project power anywhere on earth. As a result, Americans have long since become accustomed to the stationing of U.S. troops in far-off lands. The global military presence is ostensibly essential to the defense of American freedom, even in places where the actual threat to American freedom is oblique or imaginary.

Precisely because American purposes express the collective interests of humankind, Washington expects others to view U.S. military power, the Pentagon's global footprint, and an American penchant for intervention not as a matter of concern but as a source of comfort and reassurance. The good intentions inherent in the credo of American global leadership render the triad of principles defining U.S. military presence benign.

Americans take this all for granted and so are blind to its significance. Like corruption or hypocrisy, this national security consensus has long since become part of the wallpaper of American life, attracting attention only when some especially maladroit escapade comes to light.

So we don't waterboard detainees or plot out wars against Middle East nations based on doctored evidence anymore, and Obama's approach to foreign policy is a bit more deliberative than his predecessors'. This is all well and good as far as it goes. But the fundamental doctrine of American exceptionalism in our dealings with other nations has not been significantly altered or even questioned under the current administration. Whether we are committing espionage operations against the leadership of the United Nations, claiming the right to hold prisoners of war indefinitely without charge or trial, or violating the sovereignty of friendly nations in a never-ending War on Terror, America continues to grant itself unilateral powers and authorities in the conduct of its foreign policy that would be considered outrageous breaches of international protocol if they were implemented by any other nation. Far from rejecting a robust "American exceptionalism," the Obama administration has, like all of its postwar predecessors, embraced its policy aims and prerogatives without reservation. Every Pakistani village that's been decimated by a Predator drone attack, and every Guantanamo detainee who's been trapped for years in legal limbo, are living proof of this essential fact.

Republican presidential aspirants are, as usual, crafting political narratives based on pure fantasy. The fact that one of the Post's most esteemed political analysts would devote any amount of time attempting to provide a fig-leaf of context to their paranoid projections, and the fact that these projections are considered worthy of serious discussion by members of our Washington policy establishment, are further evidence of the advanced state of decay that has riddled our nation's leading political institutions and the media apparatus that serves them. Meanwhile, our empire marches onward, overlooked and unexamined. Next stop: Tehran.

---Vitelius

Obama Gets Tough on Runaway Federal Salaries

Makes a great headline and nothing else. Regardless, the real problem in this country isn't that government workers make too much money but that too many people in the private sector don't make anywhere near enough. And this has been going on for a very long time.

---Vitelius

Why I Blog

Originally, it was to give myself an outlet every now and then to vent my spleen after spending eight to ten hours every day in a workplace dominated by wingnut political views. But now that those same views of our government are being slowly co-opted by our Socialist-in-Chief, I'm really starting to wonder why I fucking bother anymore.

Two days ago I dared to suggest that the President start thinking about picking fights with Republicans. So today he chose to pick a fight with his own party instead.

Wikileaks got you embarrassed, Mr. President? What goes around, I reckon.

---Vitelius

Espionage We Can Believe In

Holy effing shit:

Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.

A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to US diplomats under Hillary Clinton's name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications.

It called for detailed biometric information "on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders" as well as intelligence on Ban's "management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat". A parallel intelligence directive sent to diplomats in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi said biometric data included DNA, fingerprints and iris scans.

Washington also wanted credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and even frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures and "biographic and biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives".

The secret "national human intelligence collection directive" was sent to US missions at the UN in New York, Vienna and Rome; 33 embassies and consulates, including those in London, Paris and Moscow.

The operation targeted at the UN appears to have involved all of Washington's main intelligence agencies. The CIA's clandestine service, the US Secret Service and the FBI were included in the "reporting and collection needs" cable alongside the state department under the heading "collection requirements and tasking".

The leak of the directive is likely to spark questions about the legality of the operation and about whether state department diplomats are expected to spy. The level of technical and personal detail demanded about the UN top team's communication systems could be seen as laying the groundwork for surveillance or hacking operations. It requested "current technical specifications, physical layout and planned upgrades to telecommunications infrastructure and information systems, networks and technologies used by top officials and their support staff", as well as details on private networks used for official communication, "to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys and virtual private network versions used".

The UN has previously asserted that bugging the secretary general is illegal, citing the 1946 UN convention on privileges and immunities which states: "The premises of the United Nations shall be inviolable. The property and assets of the United Nations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of interference, whether by executive, administrative, judicial or legislative action".

The 1961 Vienna convention on diplomatic relations, which covers the UN, also states that "the official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable".

I think this means, among other things, that the Beltway Cold-War mentality that has championed the necessity of American global predominance for the past 60 years, and which has largely provided the strategic blueprint for waging our nine-year-and-running War on Terror, is still alive and well and continuing to warp our nation's foreign-policy priorities:

Washington wanted intelligence on the contentious issue of the "relationship or funding between UN personnel and/or missions and terrorist organisations" and links between the UN Relief and Works Agency in the Middle East, and Hamas and Hezbollah. It also wanted to know about plans by UN special rapporteurs to press for potentially embarrassing investigations into the US treatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, and "details of friction" between the agencies co-ordinating UN humanitarian operations, evidence of corruption inside UNAids, the joint UN programme on HIV, and in international health organisations, including the World Health Organisation (WHO). It even called for "biographic and biometric" information on Dr Margaret Chan, the director general of WHO, as well as details of her personality, role, effectiveness, management style and influence.

On the positive side, it certainly looks like the change we were promised a couple of years ago is finally going to come to America, at least in the realm of our foreign-policy establishment---it's just not going to come in a way that the current administration had envisioned.I don't know what else to say, but as far as I'm concerned, we as citizens are all better off to have learned of this shit now, rather than years-after-the-fact as is so often the case, and draw our own conclusions about the escalating ambitions and the expanding reach of our ascendant National-Surveillance State and its latest caretakers and enablers, i.e., the Obama administration.

Finally, out of curiosity, why in the world wasn't any of this mentioned at all in the New York Times' reporting? Are the peccadilloes of Ghaddafi and mafia weddings in Dagestan more significant, really, than this?

---Vitelius

Salonen was Here

And it was good to have him back. Lindberg and Bartok last week, Hindemith and Wagner this week. Both shows were totally, neo-classically awesome. Last night's concert was recorded for iTunes (and it's a shame that "Bluebeard's Castle" wasn't), and when it's available, everyone should buy it for the Wagner alone. Bryn Terfel is a monster, and Salonen attacked the overtures like a hungry man at a Thanksgiving table. I'm already counting down the days until he graces us with his presence at the Rodent Room podium again.

---Vitelius

Eat Your Heart Out, Digby

I've got one, still shrink-wrapped in the original box!

This is what happens when you have a (non-wingnut) family member who enjoys giving kitschy gag gifts for Christmas, which is how I acquired this treasure two years ago. For some reason, I've never had the desire to do anything with it, so it's been sitting on top of my refrigerator, performing some kind of non-function as a kitchen totem. I have no idea if this sort of thing would actually fetch a lot of mint-condition money in 20 or 30 years, but since some 25-year-old fund manager gambled away most of my 401(k) on Irish mortgage securities last year, I guess I'll hold onto it awhile longer. For all I know, this could be my retirement nest egg.

---Vitelius

Paging Dr. Pavlov

Steve and Digby are both wondering today if the Fox webmasters have lost it:

Fergawdsake. Did Fox Nation put the interns in charge over the week-end?

Of course they didn't. Nor did they post this shit because they actually believe it themselves. It's like this: If a guy like Glenn Beck can convince three million viewers a night into believing that they need to start stockpiling gold and crop seeds in anticipation of the Obamapocalypse, the brain trust at Fox has come to realize that a big chunk of their viewership will believe literally anything they post about the President. I'm also fairly certain they know how such bogus nonsense can be tailored to further their agenda on any given day. In this case, it isn't designed to generate talking points for next week's radio yakkers, as Fox's memes usually are---it's to generate millions of viral e-mails, on an otherwise slow news day, from credulous Fox fanatics who will reflexively cut and paste the Onion excerpt as soon as they see it online, and send it off to dozens of their closest (and sometimes long-suffering) friends and relatives. And I'd be willing to bet that their little gambit has already succeeded in its intended mission. It's the kind of thing that keeps sites like Snopes and Politifact in business, year after year, so keep an eye on your Inbox for the next few days.

---Vitelius

Answering Your Own Question

There must be something in the DC municipal water supply that renders its residents incapable of recognizing self-inflicted irony:

Missing from Milbank's book is how, exactly, the groundwork was laid for a character like Beck. When and why did our culture become so coarse? And who else is responsible for this dumbed-down blood sport we see daily on TV? Glenn Beck didn't arrive in a vacuum, and he's hardly alone. Watching him masquerade as Tom Paine, a leading revolutionary-era patriot, may make one queasy, but it's no worse, really, than watching Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's leading blowhard, masquerade as Edward R. Murrow.

Perhaps a mindset that seems pathologically incapable of drawing the factual and ethical distinctions between the deceptive rants of a serial fabricator and the indignation of a TV newsman whose occasionally dyspeptic outbursts are grounded in reality might have something to do with the debasement of our political discourse, no? When deranged fantasy-spinning can no longer be distinguished from informed (if ill-tempered) commentary, is it any wonder why so many of our citizens are confused by current events?

---Vitelius

Your Tax Dollars at Work Throughout History

Ah, to return to the America that John Boehner grew up in:

The CIA is notorious for its Cold War-era experiments with LSD and other chemicals on unwitting citizens and soldiers. Details have emerged in books and articles beginning more than 30 years ago.

But if military veterans have their way in a California law suit, the spy agency’s quest to turn humans into robot-like assassins via electrodes planted in their brains will get far more exposure than the drugs the CIA tested on subjects ranging from soldiers to unwitting bar patrons and the clients of prostitutes [...]

In 1961, a top CIA scientist reported in an internal memo that "the feasibility of remote control of activities in several species of animals has been demonstrated . . . Special investigations and evaluations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man," according to “The CIA and the Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” a 1979 book by former State Department intelligence officer John Marks.

“[T]his cold-blooded project,” Marks wrote, “was designed for the delivery of chemical and biological agents or for ‘executive action-type operations,’ according to a document. ‘Executive action’ was the CIA's euphemism for assassination.”

The CIA pursued such experiments because it was convinced the Soviets were doing the same.

Now, some of this stuff---the LSD and other drug experiments conducted under the MK-ULTRA program, for example---are fairly old news. What's still shocking, however, is the apparent fact that neither the CIA nor the Pentagon has ever made a concerted effort to contact and/or compensate the thousands of "volunteers" (most of whom were Army recruits who simply signed a consent form after being offered various inducements but who were never informed about the nature of the experiments, nor about the specific drugs to be administered to them), aside from settling some individual lawsuits. Hopefully, this is about to change.

Either way, the plaintiffs' complaint is well worth reading in full, simply to remind us of the kind of shit that was being done in our name, and with our tax dollars, during the Cold War, and of the terror that our government inflicted on its own citizens to keep us free from the clutches of Soviet tyranny:

Plaintiff Bruce Price (“Bruce”) joined the U.S. Army in May 1965. Bruce was assigned to duty at Edgewood Arsenal for approximately two months in 1966---from February 27, 1966, to April 28, 1966. Before being assigned to Edgewood Arsenal, Bruce was stationed at Ft. George G. Meade and that was where he returned until he was discharged in May 1967. Bruce was trained as a helicopter crew chief, and also had other assignments, such as a door gunner.

Bruce first went through a battery of physical and mental evaluations at Edgewood before being used as a test subject. Bruce and three other volunteers were taken into a room where four doctors were present. Two of the doctors were dressed in civilian garb and two were military doctors, including a colonel. The colonel, who seemed to be in charge, described the program and in substance said: “We know you have heard rumors we use drugs here. Well I am here to tell you that is true. We cannot tell you what they are. We do not know if the drugs will have any harmful effects on you. But we have the finest medical facilities. Now, we can’t force you to take these drugs, but if you do not, you will be sent back to your home unit with a bad recommendation and it will be put in your DD Form 201 file and follow you for the rest of your life.”

At some point, Bruce was asked to sign a general consent form that did not state any information about the drugs to be given. When he started to read the forms, Bruce was berated and told to hurry up and sign them. Bruce never received a Volunteer Booklet explaining the details of the Edgewood assignment.

Bruce participated in several different experiments involving unknown substances. Many decades later, he heard that some of the substances he was administered included BZ, LSD, sarin, and ethanol. He is still not sure what he was given or in what doses. One of the drugs that was administered to Bruce was given on a Monday, and Bruce did not begin to recover from the drug’s effect until Friday. He thought it was still Monday.

At one point, Bruce was ordered to visit a building with a chain link fence that housed test animals, including dogs, cats, guinea pigs and monkeys. After reporting, Bruce was strapped across his chest, his wrists, and his ankles to a gurney. Bruce occasionally would regain consciousness for brief moments. On one such instance, he remembers being covered with a great deal of blood, and assumed it was his own, but did not really know the source. Also portions of his arms and the backs of his hand were blue. His wrist and ankles were bruised and sore at the points where he had been strapped to the gurney. Bruce believes that this is the time period during which a septal implant was placed in his brain.

Defendants placed some sort of an implant in Bruce’s right ethmoid sinus near the frontal lobe of his brain. The implant appears on CT scans as a “foreign body” of undetermined composition (perhaps plastic or some composite material) in Bruce’s right ethmoid, as confirmed in a radiology report dated June 30, 2004.

Upon leaving Edgewood Arsenal, Bruce was debriefed by government personnel. Bruce was told to never talk about his experiences at Edgewood, and to forget about everything that he ever did, said or heard at Edgewood.

Within days or weeks of returning to Ft. George G. Meade, Bruce began to have trouble with his memory. For example, things as simple as filling out a maintenance report on his chopper and how to spell certain words suddenly became troublesome.

After being discharged from the service with an honorable discharge, Bruce returned home to rural Tennessee. Within a few days Bruce suddenly left for the mountains with a gun with intentions of killing himself. Bruce’s brother finally found him, and talked Bruce into returning home.

Before Bruce revealed his experiences at Edgewood Arsenal, his family did not know why he acted so strangely at certain times. Bruce finally told his wife about Edgewood, and the fact that he would have flashbacks or visions where the road suddenly changed colors and how he would get lost while trying to go to work. Bruce disclosed to his wife that he gets lost easily, and did not remember places he had been to hundreds of times previously. Bruce’s wife suggested that he avoid being close to radio waves, and when he did so, his symptoms seemed to improve. Bruce’s wife also helped him to find out more about what was going on at Edgewood Arsenal. A VA medical diagnostics test ruled out the possibility of Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia.

In addition to memory problems, Bruce also suffers from PTSD, and at times is suicidal. He has experienced uncontrolled fits of anger and loss of control, as well as flashbacks. Although Bruce worked intermittently after Edgewood Arsenal, his entire life has been ruined.

Bruce has been completely disabled for many years, and received social security disability payments from the age of 62 until he turned 66 in June, 2009, when he qualified for full social security benefits. Bruce has been rated by the VA as 100% service-connected for PTSD related to his service at Edgewood since 2005. He depends on his wife for much of his day-to-day care, and his social security and VA compensation are his only means of financial support.

I guess we should not be too terribly surprised by any of this, considering that:

The experiments involving human subjects were one of the key beneficiaries of the recruitment of over 1,500 scientists and technicians from Nazi Germany in “Project Paperclip,” some of whom played a pivotal role in, e.g., the testing of psychochemicals and development of a new truth serum. Over half of these recruits had been members of the SS or Nazi Party. The “Paperclip” name was chosen because so many of the employment applications were clipped to immigration papers.

The Church Committee hearings helped uncover a great number of these atrocities back in the 1970s, but some of its findings still remain classified after 35 years. It sure seems to me that we could still benefit from the appointment of a Select Truth & Reconciliation Commission, and one that's given the authority to cover a great deal more historical ground than merely what happened at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Since we'll never see a GOP-led Congress call for such hearings, now would be an ideal time for the Obama administration to make good on its promise of "transparency in government," don't you think?

---Vitelius

Cold-War Posturing We Can Believe In

Why are we still playing these dick-swinging games with the rest of the world?

---Vitelius

No One Could Have Possibly Predicted

That Decision Points would be chock-full of self-serving bullshit:

According to the notes---all in German---the meeting amounted to 90 minutes of verbal blows, which primarily stemmed from Rice's "relatively rigorous and uncompromising" defense of the US position. The same notes indicate that Scharioth didn't budge an inch toward Washington, either. In retrospect, though, they document a high point in German diplomatic history, because the objections and predictions put forward by Berlin on that Tuesday have turned out to be legitimate and correct.

The crux of the German argument was that the political costs of a war in Iraq would be "higher than (the) political returns." While Rice predicted that Iraq would take advantage of the "opportunities for reconstruction" like the ones Germany enjoyed after 1945, the delegation from Berlin countered that the rapid establishment of a democracy in Baghdad was "not (to be) expected."

The Germans also predicted that the real beneficiary of a war in Iraq would actually be Iran, and that a US-led attack would further complicate efforts to reach a solution in the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians

Likewise, they prophesized that going to war would precipitate a "terrorist backlash." Scharioth stressed that it was important "to win over the hearts and minds of the Muslim elite and youths," according to the notes, and that this was "not to be achieved" by going to war. He also added that doing so would greatly increase the danger of prompting an "influx to Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism."

Let that sink in for a moment: Condi Rice actually tried to contextualize the postwar reconstruction of Germany to a delegation of Germans. You can't teach diplomatic genius like that.

---Vitelius

Now They Tell Us

$680 billion in the operating budget, and they're short of cash to buy intel gear?

The Pentagon canceled a request for as much as $900 million in cameras, signaling gear and other equipment and software used to gather intelligence, citing a lack of funding.

The procurement office of Special Operations Command, which oversees units of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, canceled the solicitation yesterday, according to a notice posted on a federal procurement website.

Awesome. For just about the same amount of money we've spent bombing the shit out of Pakistani villagers for the last five years, we could have obtained a bunch of stuff that might actually help us learn who the hell we're supposed to be fighting over there. Nice set of priorities we've got going.

Hey, I understand that waging war is a financial drain, that's a given. But some wars are a lot more draining than others:

On Saturday Nov. 27, the United States and its allies will reach a grim milestone: they will have been in Afghanistan a day longer than the Soviet Union had been when it completed its 1989 withdrawal. What's more, the U.S. announced during last weekend's NATO summit that it intends to spend at least four more years, and possibly longer, in the Hindu Kush. Even then, many Afghans---perhaps even the president installed by the U.S. invasion---appear to doubt that the Americans will succeed where their erstwhile Cold War nemesis failed. (Emphasis added.)

Oh well. If our Wise Leaders in Washington grow weary of this war, they can always start planning ahead for the next one.

---Vitelius

Midterm Metaphor?

Speedy recovery, Mr. President:

President Barack Obama needed 12 stitches in his lip after taking an errant elbow during a pickup basketball game Friday with a group of family and friends visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday, the White House said.

First word of the injury came in a statement from press secretary Robert Gibbs nearly three hours after the incident saying that Obama was inadvertently struck by someone's elbow.

And once you've healed up, it's time to start throwing some elbows of your own---only not at your hoop buddies but at some other game-players in Washington.

---Vitelius

A Good Argument for Physician-Assisted Suicide

Just fucking shoot me.

This also too:

While President Obama has fared well at the state level in early 2012 presidential election polls, a newly released national poll paints a more troublesome picture for the president's re-election bid.

The McClatchy-Marist survey finds 41% of Democrats are in favor of a challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination. When Democratic-leaning independents are included, 45% support a primary challenge, 46% don't, and 9% aren't sure.

Considering how well this worked for a Democratic incumbent the last couple of times it happened, can there be any doubt we'll see it again in our lifetimes?

So my question for the day is: Which craven opportunist and/or progressive idealist within the party elite will be sufficiently foolish/altruistic to risk running a replay of 1980? Evan Bayh? Russ Feingold? At least Jerry Brown is 107 years old, or we'd probably have to worry about him too. Or will this nightmare scenario even happen at all?

---Vitelius

Anita Hill Could've Warned Him About This Guy

There's certainly been plenty of speculation of late over whether or not our awesome new GOP Congress will attempt to impeach Obama in the next session. Personally, I think it's a foregone conclusion---and frankly, if the list of charges against the President includes inviting this bad-faith asshole to chair his Deficit Reduction Commission, I might be tempted to cast an "aye" vote too. I mean seriously, WTF?!?

---Vitelius

Breaking News: Americans Do Weird Things

Granted, whenever consumer spending increases, that's generally quite beneficial to our economy---assuming it's not all being put on the credit card, of course---but I'll still never understand why anyone in his or her right mind would ever want to go shopping for TVs and laptops at 3:00 in the morning, especially when you know ahead of time that 10,000 other people will be at the same spot at the same time, all jostling for the same limited supply of manufactured goods. What's the thrill here? When did Christmas shopping become a contact sport? Are most Americans still in thrall of mindless consumerism, or have any of us learned the lesson of the last decade's shopping spree? I know we're all social animals by nature, but some types of group behavior have always been beyond my ability to explain.

---Vitelius

Betting Line of The Day

Corporate America-American Workers: 5/4. Any takers?

---Vitelius

We're All Belgians Now

Because bond traders and deficit hawks must always be appeased:

Like Ireland, struggling to fend off criticism of its austerity package, there are signs that international bond investors are starting to view Belgium as living on borrowed money and borrowed time.

To make matters worse, it has a broken political system and is without a government since April. International money market traders today pushed the cost of insuring Belgium's debts to record levels. The interest payments still fall short of those charged for Spain's government [or] the Portuguese, but analysts said the gap was narrowing quickly.

"Belgium is having to pay a political risk premium, because it still doesn't have a government in place to make decisions over how to curb its spending and its debts, which is what the market wants to see," said one analyst.

Forget all this talk about liberal democracies and popular will. Debt restructuring? Nationalization? That's sooo 20th Century. In our awesome new Randian millennium, there are only predators and prey. Hopefully the locals will soon get accustomed to generous helpings of catfood flammande.

---Vitelius

Recipe: Chipotle-Maple Sweet Potato Casserole

In honor of the day, and quite easy:

8 medium sweet potatoes, approximately 4 lb.
1 stick unsweetened butter, melted to room temperature
1 chipotle chile in adobo, finely chopped, or 1 tbsp chipotle chile powder
2 tbsp ground cumin
1 cup maple syrup
1 cup brown sugar
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the sweet potatoes on a baking sheet and cook 1 hour, or until thoroughly soft to the touch. Remove from the oven to cool. Reduce the oven temperature to 325 degrees.

Once the potatoes are cool enough to handle, peel away the skins and place the flesh in a large mixing bowl. Add all of the ingredients except the brown sugar and mix thoroughly to combine with a potato masher or fork. When fully beaten, the sweet potatoes should have the texture of a slightly loose puree.

Spoon out the mixture into an ovenproof casserole dish. Sprinkle the brown sugar on top of the potatoes and return to the oven. Cook, uncovered, 15 to 20 minutes or until the sugar starts to bubble on top and the mixture has firmed up. Remove from the oven, cover with foil, and keep warm until ready to serve. Serves 6 to 8 as a side dish.

---Vitelius