I suppose this means Matt Gonzalez will now be called a traitor in Left Blogistan. If so, it will add more weight to the view that many so-called leftists are closet High RWAs.

Yesterday, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Ralph Nader announced that Matt Gonzalez, the former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, will be his VP running mate. Check out the video of the press conference.

[UPDATE: I don’t mean to blame everything on some abstract statisical group. My RWA score was higher than I expected, only slightly below the overall average, so I obviously am not exactly as I think of myself.]

On April 6, 1993, speaking at the University of Texas on the 75th day of the Clinton presidency, Hillary Clinton invoked Lee Atwater. He was the Republican dirty tricks expert who tutored Karl Rove in gutter politics. Atwater had died of cancer two years earlier, an ordeal which led him to repentance for his repulsive life. From Clinton’s speech:

He said the following: “Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the counry, Republicans and Decmocrats alike, that something was missing from their lives — something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican Party to take advantage of it. But I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society was what missing in me. A little heart, a lot of brotherhood.

“The eighties were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye-to-eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up with its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.

“I don’t know who will lead us through the nineties, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society — this tumor of the soul.”

Fifteeen years later Hillary hoped to speak to this vacuum, but Obama spoke better, and there you have it. As the Bible says, The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Not surprising it's in Texas.

Jesus, where do you even start with stuff like this? It’s beyond funny. It’s beyond tragic. All I can do is lay it out there on the sidewalk and let you guys pick at it.

NEW YORK — President Bush, saying he was unaware of predictions of $4-a-gallon gasoline in the coming months, told reporters Thursday that the best way to help Americans fend off high prices is for Congress to make his first-term tax cuts permanent.

From BBC News:

The United States has ordered a warship into position off the coast of Lebanon…

"The United States believes a show of support is important for regional stability. We are very concerned about the situation in Lebanon. It has dragged on very long," said the unnamed US official.

Speaking as a former unnamed US official myself, I hope the poor bastard at least permitted himself a wink as he dished up this beauty. Probably not, though. When first we practice to deceive, it’s usually on ourselves.

Imagine this. Democratic candidate John Doe is set to speak at a local campaign rally that his advance men have prepared.

Chosen to warm up the crowd is a well-known local Communist. He comes out and berates the Republican candidate, dissing his race, religion and capitalist beliefs.

It's on film. When Doe finds out about the speech, he apologizes and says it will never happen again.

A local political commentator explains the Communist has a large following and is good at getting out voters. That explains why Doe's staff chose him to deliver his harangue.

Instantly Doe is pilloried by both Republicans and Democrats and is driven into early retirement. Too bad for him he wasn’t a Republican.

Republican neocons and the GOP's mean trash-talkers are tolerated, even revered, by the Republican establishment.

And yet neocons, having captured the executive branch, have caused far more harm to the United States than any domestic Communist ever dreamed of doing. Still, they are tolerated or embraced by a major American party.

The far left of the Democratic party, on the other hand, has been branded as dangerous to the nation. The mainstream Democrats ousted them and would never choose one of them to warm up the crowd at a political rally.

So which party is radical ? Which one harbors anti-Americans in its ranks? Which tolerates members who are a proven threat to the United States ?

Americans enjoy thinking of themselves as the best and brightest. Unfortunately the data seem to contradict that belief.

Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic history and literature questions in a phone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750, not in 1492.

[…]

About a quarter of the teenagers were unable to correctly identify Hitler as Germany’s chancellor in World War II, instead identifying him as a munitions maker, an Austrian premier and the German kaiser.

On literature, the teenagers fared even worse. Four in 10 could pick the name of Ralph Ellison’s novel about a young man’s growing up in the South and moving to Harlem, “Invisible Man,” from a list of titles. About half knew that in the Bible Job is known for his patience in suffering. About as many said he was known for his skill as a builder, his prowess in battle or his prophetic abilities.

The proportion of writers who don’t know when it’s okay to split an infinitive was apparently not calculated by this survey, but we can certainly point to at least one New York Times writer who falls into that category. What Strunk calls incorrect comma placement is apparently part of the Times style manual, so the writer cannot be blamed for that.

It’s particularly impressive that in a country so taken with the literal truth of a book produced by politicians three centuries after the fact (if there was one), half of those in school, and therefore closest to the moment of learning, are seriously confused about what that book says.

But even if the best and brightest (i.e., Americans who slavishly follow whatever the right wing of the Democratic party says), sometimes make egregious errors, I thank whatever gods may be that we’re not like the benighted and godless commies (subscription required).

Our liberal enemies say that Nashi is a Kremlin project designed to protect against an Orange Revolution. Naturally, liberals like Garry Kasparov are not fascists or terrorists. But their criticism is precisely what allows teams of Chechen terrorists to roam free all over Europe. Vladimir Putin has subdued the spread of fascist ideology. Liberals now defend fascism. Their hatred for Putin has obscured everything else.

All hail the Great Leader Putin! Or, in our case, whoever the DLC nominates.

The prodigal fubar beat me to the punch this morning commenting on the NaderTraitor and his GOoPer sugar daddies.

Strange how NaderTraitor seems to pop up at the most inconvenient moments for the Dems. I really have a hard time understanding his motivation.

Perhaps somewhere in the Rove blackmail files, there is a picture of Ralph doing something really embarrassing, like giving fellatio to a billy goat. In fact, it is probably a three-way that includes Tony Blair — I never could understand how that smart intelligent liberal could become Bush’s Bitch overnight.

Shame Ralph couldn’t be a man about it and commit seppuku.

The same could be said for others, whose lives have contributed far less to the common good than Nader’s.

Oh how wonderful it is to laugh at the British sense of humor. But don’t let this video make you cry. Surely our brilliant American financiers will come in and save the day.

If you liked the Southeast Asia War Games (as we players sometimes called them), you’ll love Bush’s war of choice in the Middle East. Excerpted from the Times of London:

The cost of direct US military operations — not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans — already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.

And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion.

Let's go over a brief chronology on the real estate nightmare. At Thanksgiving in 2005, Neddie Jingo commented on the Viriginia Pilgrims Real Estate Pipe Dreams:

There are two exits from this Gilded Ghetto ; both empty directly out onto Route 7, which is one of the busiest highways in the United States. To go in the eastward direction (toward Washington and their jobs), people leaving this neighborhood have to cross the westbound lane and merge eastbound.

During rush hour this must be simply impossible. There are no breaks in the traffic. You drive past at 8 AM; queues of Hummers ten deep wait in vain for a break in traffic, gallons of gas burning away as they idle fruitlessly. One is tempted to salute them with a finger. Or worse.

Mother Jones gave us a brief synopsis of what many of these The Home Sweet Lemon buyers discovered once they moved into these Gilded Ghettos:

As a result, contractors throughout the country have been able to feed the U.S. housing boom with little fear of being held accountable for the quality of their work. The faster a house is constructed, the greater the profit, and thus many homes are now built as though on an assembly line, often in as little as 90 days.

Contractors “build them spacious and grandiose and give them the appearance of quality,” says Ahmad, whose group tracks both federal and state regulations. Behind the facade, though, are often shoddy workmanship and cheap materials, such as “wood” trim that is actually recycled paper.

In 2008, The Atlantic magazine chronicled the latest slums wreaking havoc on the American Public, who are going to be responsible for bailing out the banks who created this mess in the first place

And now, in 2008, the FDIC is preparing for a shock wave of failed banks.

“Regulators are bracing for well over 100 bank failures in the next 12 to 24 months, with concentrations in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Ohio, and the states that are suffering severe housing-market problems like California, Florida, and Georgia,” said Jaret Seiberg, Washington policy analyst for financial-services firm Stanford Group.

And so it goes.

Interesting stuff (via Xymphora). Hard to imagine either Clinton or McCain saying this.

Obama also said he encountered more nuanced views among Israelis than Americans.

“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel,” the Illinois senator and contender for the Democratic presidential nominee told a group of Jewish leaders in Cleveland on Sunday. “If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress…”

“There was a very honest, thoughtful debate taking place inside Israel,” he said. “All of you, I’m sure, have experienced this when you travel there. Understandably, because of the pressure that Israel is under, I think the U.S. pro-Israel community is sometimes a little more protective or concerned about opening up that conversation. But all I’m saying though is that actually ultimately should be our goal, to have that same clear eyed view about how we approach these issues.”

Hillary Clinton, yesterday:

“We’ve seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech on foreign policy at George Washington University. “We can’t let that happen again.”

We have also seen the tragic results of having senators who lacked the guts and/or the wisdom to vote against handing a loaded gun to that president. Since Mrs. Clinton clings stubbornly to her earlier belief that two and two do too make five, wouldn’t she just “let that happen again?”

I’m tempted to say the crybabies have escaped from the playpens, but such a severe cut might undermine my ability to convince them to grow up, so I’ll refrain.

Instead I’ll limit myself to this: silly season is back. It’s once again chic to portray yourself incorrectly as the aggrieved party in a situation of clear moral imperatives, to which the present is epilogue; and to reason from moronic and completely irrelevant bases.

I’ll offer an analogy to make this clear. Let’s suppose that a man, we’ll call him “George”, asks you for ammunition so that he can shoot people. If you give him one bullet, and he kills someone, you are an accomplis [sic], even if 100 other people also give him ammunition and weapons that he uses in his shooting spree. Moreover, to continue the analogy, you should ask yourself, what kind of man would express no remorse for lending that bullet and then would go so far as to give the guy another bullet four years later.

And after all, who can deny that opposing everything about a war involves more complicity than voting to start it and repeatedly funding every request? Simplicity itself: I think it, therefore it’s true, the facts be damned. But we’re different from Rush and Drudge and Hannity…

That’s good for a laugh but not for increasing understanding. As Bertrand Russell said, if you have a good logical argument, you make it. If not, you make emotional arguments. Or silly ones. You decide to vote for a war supporter even though you’re against the war, because the last time you prostituted your vote you didn’t get what you expected. Of course, you’ve never gotten what you expected. (This time, though, you just know it’ll be different.)

As with most areas of life, Americans are screwing up because they’re innocent of knowledge with respect to how their country works. And how other countries work. And what’s happened in the past. And, frankly, everything that isn’t on television. (Even then…)

Typical of the lot, Josh Marshall, from some blog called Talking Points Memo (probably a Frank Luntz associate), titles his post “Bush’s Chief Enabler Signs On”.

These folks are no doubt well intentioned; they might even hope to fulfill the role of citizens if provided with an education. But they start with the disadvantage of being Right-Wing Authoritarians.

I begin by noting the convergence of three qualities among Nader haters. First, they’re without exception conventional; they believe the Democratic Party is the fount of all goodness, and anyone who doesn’t succumb to the party’s blandishments is either a Republican or, worse, someone who sees how wonderful the party is and refuses to help it. “Who’s the candidate, what’s the platform, what policies can we expect?” Who are you to ask? We tell you who to vote for, and you do it, or you’re an enemy. Less human than the godly Democrats. The brave Democrats.

Bravely bold Sir Robin rode forth from Camelot
He was not afraid to die, O brave Sir Robin
He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin

Second, they have an uncanny knack for surrendering their personal judgements to those of the DJ, er, I mean, DNC. Or is it DLC? The Pope? Authoritarian submission in vitro. Whoever the party — sorry, The Party — nominates is fine with me. At least it won’t be whoever The Other Party nominates.

Third, they unleash their violent demons, previously inhibited by the necessities of the life of wimpy liberals, when they perceive that Authoritah would approve. With the addition of authoritarian violence, we complete the proof. Quod erat demonstrandum.

So what do we know of the genesis of RWA personalities — what issues lead people in that direction? Well, Altemeyer’s work has shown that two factors account for the vast majority of observed behavior: fear and self-righteousness. Those who fear opposition, who are scared that they won’t be able to hold onto their world views if things change, who wonder why everyone doesn’t agree with them, who can’t stand batting their ideas around in a free forum, are likely to feel threatened every time someone disagrees. Coupled with a belief that they’re right, completely, and anyone who disagrees is handing bullets to a shooter, you have the fanatic, also known these days as the Obama supporter. (One thing you gotta say about Clinton supporters, they’re not True Believers, they’re just hoping for high-status jobs.)

As a result they’re slinging mud that would make Drudge proud, pretending a deep knowledge of politics, while acknowledging the opposite in the same sentence.

Ross Perot’s campaign also seem [sic] to accomplish little for his objectives, which I barely remember, other than to help Clinton win the Presidency.

What proof is stronger than the lack of memory? If you can’t remember Perot’s objectives, they must not have been accomplished. He must have been wrong about the Giant Sucking Sound. But then, you wouldn’t know what that was anyway; you can’t get it on an iPod. (Actually I’m sure you could, but you wouldn’t be able to pay attention long enough to follow the argument.)

How would these people argue their case against Howard Zinn?

Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.

They offer no radical change from the status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.

They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.

None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

Americans do care about their country. They care about their environment, and what will be left for their kids. They demand to know which channel they should watch in order to wash their hands of the problem.

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

Unfortunately it appears that the sets of Democrats and concerned citizens have a decreasing intersection. Or perhaps it’s just the Will Rogers Democrat coming out: no matter who you’re for, unless they’re my choice too I’m against them. People who hate people, come together!

Or more accurately, people who believe they can only win by compelling others to act against their best judgement, against their will. Nader runs because the Democrats continue to offer Republican policies. He began exploring the minute Edwards dropped out. He offered to drop out in 2004 if the Democrats would adopt a few of his basic policies. But the Democrats were in hock to the same folks that own the Republicans.

Personally I feel a certain amount of negativity toward war enablers. That doesn’t mean people who act, speak, and vote against war. It means those who fund, vote, or speak for war. In other words, I’m no longer a Democrat, because I’m against war, while the Democrats continue to enable it. I favor peace, universal health care, controlling corporations, and trying to repair the environmental damage we’ve done; so I intend to vote for someone whose policies are in line with those goals. If you think the Democratic candidate will do that, I suggest you vote for that candidate. I don’t, so I expect I won’t.

This ran several days ago in Salon. com. To see it in its original home, go here. Not all of the commenters were won over by my arguments.

I know exactly how Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick felt on seeing his words from their author's womb unfairly ripped by Barack Obama.

I've been feeling the same way ever since the presidential campaign of 1984, when I wrote this for Walter Mondale:"In Reagan's America, a rising tide lifts all yachts." Mr. Mondale lost every state but Minnesota, but my line lived on. Through the years it has been stolen by the best — Molly Ivins, Ralph Nader, Joseph Stiglitz, Warren Buffett, Doonesbury — and always without credit.

Do I feel used? Cheated? No, I feel the same way I did in 1988 when the media went into snit mode on discovering that Joe Biden — the horror, the horror! — had failed to footnote a line or two he lifted from a British politician. I just feel indifferent.

The awful truth is that speechwriters have a secret, unwritten code. In obedience to it, the first thing we do on finding ourselves in the White House is to rummage through the papers of past presidents in search of things to pilfer.

Here's one such thing, from Warren G. Harding's keynote address at the 1916 Republican Convention: "We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it, and more anxious about what it can do for the nation."

With the subtraction of a few syllables and the addition of a soupçon of affectation ("Ask not?"), Harding's piffle could be and was recycled for John F. Kennedy's inaugural address — just as Harding himself had swiped it from a speech Oliver Wendell Holmes gave in 1884. Nor was Holmes likely to have been the first to come up with the general idea, which after all basically reduces to nothing more than, "Don't expect me to do everything around this house, young lady."

And nor was I the first to come up with that business about rising yachts. I can't find any earlier evidence of it on the Internet, but that means nothing. All us monkeys pounding on all those typewriters for all those years? Somebody wrote it before.

Virtually all writing is plagiarism anyway, whether the writer knows it or not. Very few ideas, except out at the cutting edge of science, have not occurred to somebody before and been written down in one form or other. The only function remaining for the writer is to repeat in today's idiom what has already been written, somewhat differently, for readers in the past. This is particularly true in political prose, which tends to be light on facts and innocent of all but a few childish ideas.

To criticize a politician for plagiarizing, then, is no more sensible than to criticize a fish for swimming. It is what both animals are designed to do. The only sensible criticism would focus on how effectively political speech does the job for which it is intended. How skillfully does the politician mix and administer the small dose of simplistic placebos which the patient is considered able to handle?

For instance, this draft language for a speech was written in 1860 by the incoming secretary of state, William Henry Seward. Note that it is entirely free of meaning:

"The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriotic graves, pass through all the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation."

Seward's boss repurposed this into:

"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

This is equally free of meaning, but goes a considerable way toward explaining why Seward was the incoming secretary of state and Lincoln was the incoming president. It ain't what you say but how you say it.

And that is why the Clinton camp has found itself reduced to rolling out the pop gun of plagiarism at this difficult point in the campaign. They have no other artillery. But as somebody or other may have more or less said somewhere else, Obama probably has nothing to fear from smear itself.

Some things never change, despite what Maureen Dowd said.

In college I took a class on the New Novelists. We read folks like Samuel Beckett, Michel Butor, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The latter died Monday at the age of 85.

He was the most prominent of France’s so-called New Novelists, a group that emerged in the mid-1950s whose other members included Claude Simon, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute. Their experimental work tossed aside literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation.

“Tossed aside” might be an understatement. “Assiduously avoided” would work at least as well.

True to his artistic principles, Robbe-Grillet’s novels are composed largely of recurring images, impersonally depicted physical objects and random events of everyday life. However, beginning with his first novel published in France, Les Gommes (1953, The Erasers), Robbe-Grillet used and manipulated traditional and popular literary genres — working several times with the mystery novel from. (Robbe-Grillet’s first novel, A Regicide, was not published until 1978.) The Erasers mixes a detective story with Robbe-Grillet’s signature changing perspectives and detailed descriptions of natural objects such as a tomato wedge. The book received the Fénélon Prize in France in 1954. Robbe-Grillet was elected member of the prestigious Academie Francaise in 2004, the highest honor in France for a French artist, writer or intellectual. However, he never sat in any meeting of the Academie.

In addition to his novels, he did some movie work, most famously Last Year at Marienbad. He also wrote a book of essays called “Toward a New Novel” that was mind-expanding.

“The Academie Francaise today loses one of its most illustrious members, and without a doubt its most rebellious,” mourned President of France Nicolas Sarkozy.

Despite the New Novel’s focus on objective reality swept clean of human feeling or bias, French author Robbe-Grillet always insisted that the nouveau roman is entirely subjective — its world is always perceived through the eyes of a character, not an omniscient narrator. “The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it,” he once stated.

In November I hope to vote for a candidate promoting the following policies.

• Adopt a single payer, Canadian-style, health care system
• Cut the bloated, wasteful military budget
• Adopt a Wall Street securities speculation tax
• Support solar energy not nuclear power
• Reverse U.S. policy in the Middle East
• Impeach Bush/Cheney
• Adopt a polluter carbon tax
• Crack down on corporate crime and corporate welfare
• Open up the Presidential debates
• Repeal the anti-union Taft-Hartley law

Damn, I let Valentine’s Day slip by again without sending you all cards. Oh, well…

Today’s text is taken from the spoken word of Clarence Jordan, one of the finest and bravest Christian gentlemen the South ever produced.

Jordan, a wealthy lawyer who gave up the law to found Koinonia Farm, would walk into a rich man’s house and say, “Nice piece of plunder you’ve got here.”

The entry on day 337 of my George W. Bush Countdown Calendar:

On the one-year anniversary of Katrina in 2006, Bush was asked by NBC’s Brian Williams if he shouldn’t “have asked for some sort of sacrifice after 9/11.”

He replied: “Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think American have sacrificed.”

We note with pleasure the return of our royal friend and colleague Simbaud to the active throne. He points us to Scott Horton’s post at Harper’s, “Congress Cites Bolten and Miers for Contempt — But Is the Issue Really Impeachment?”. We certainly hope it is.

Horton’s point is that the House vote this week to hold in contempt the contemptible Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten seems gratuitous, in that there’s next to no chance of it being enforced. No Attorney General working for Dick Cheney will ever prosecute Republican lawbreakers, no matter what law they break; and a court case, which the House can mount even if main Justice opposes it, will show no results before the eagerly awaited January 20, 2009.

But past experience indicates that John Conyers does not act gratuitously, and Horton’s sources tell him that the DoJ investigation into the firings of US attorneys like New Mexico’s David Iglesias are likely to conclude that the firings were politically motivated.

Now the Justice Department’s investigation focuses only on Alberto Gonzales, Paul McNulty and a handful of other senior political appointees, almost all of whom have left. It does not have the jurisdiction to address staffers in the White House like Rove, Miers and Bolten, nor indeed, President Bush.

But they are clearly within the jurisdictional remit of the Judiciary Committee. Moreover, if the Justice Department’s report implicates not just Rove, Miers and Bolten, but also Bush in the decision to fire for improper reasons — a conclusion which is now looking extremely likely — then it will be up to Conyers’s committee to press the investigation forward. In so doing, he is entitled to conduct hearings on the footing of impeachment. If he does, the executive privilege objection interposed by the White House and backed in another Constitution-defying opinion of the Attorney General, would not apply.

It’s even possible that the obviousness of White House influence in the firings would overcome the well-known resistance of the Speaker to anything that might hurt the Republican administration. We can hope, at least.

I’m not one who spends a lot of time at the Lyndon Larouche site — they do have their wacky theories — but here’s a selection from an article from one of his sites that I agree with wholeheartedly. Enjoy that tap water while you can. The powers that be are already conditioning us to think of water as something we have to pay for. Look for the price to spike — just like the price of oil has done. The selling off of our infrastructure — and it is we the people who are the real owners of public infrastructure — has begun in earnest. Watch for the sovereign wealth funds — meaning the princes of other nations — to start buying their shares in earnest. We’re being sold down the river and the pace is picking up faster than ever.

There are also many projects underway to create special fee-based lanes (“Lexus lanes”) on public highways under the guise of dealing with congestion, and even discussions of tracking all cars, and charging drivers by the mile driven on all “public” roads. Add to this, the growing number of schemes to privatize water and sewer systems, bridges, tunnels, airports, and other infrastructure projects, turning them into profit centers.

The pressure for governments to agree to such deals is rising, as the effects of the economic collapse are felt. Falling real estate values, for example, are beginning to devastate county tax receipts, and the breakdown of the securities markets is making it increasingly difficult for state and local governments to raise money for infrastructure projects through the sales of bonds. Under such circumstances, the lure of money from private equity funds to buy or lease government assets is increasingly powerful. But governments which accept such bids are basically selling their populations down the river.

The treating of infrastructure as a profit center to be judged in its effectiveness by the amount of revenue it produces, is a sign of a society gone insane. The purpose of infrastructure is to raise the productive power of the people in the area it serves, as a way of making the economy more productive. Selling it off to the highest bidder, who will charge as much as possible to maximize income, is actually counterproductive to economic growth.

Rather than attempt to bail out our banks by shifting their losses to the population, and allow corporatist privatization of what should be free public services, we should return to the policies associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR put those he termed "the economic royalists" in their place, and defended the general welfare of the population, and in doing so, defended the nation. That is a policy which worked, and a policy to which we must return if we are to survive as a nation.

In retrospect, I’m absolutely convinced that we lost the war wrong. We should have fought that war in an advisory mode and remained in that mode. When the South Vietnamese failed to come up and meet the mark at the advisory level, then we never should have committed US forces. We should have failed at the advisory effort and withdrawn. — Gen. Volney F. Warner, 1983

I’ve reached the epilogue of H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty, and it’s been quite a journey. The book covers the period from the inauguration of John Kennedy in 1961 to the point in July 1965 when Lyndon Johnson’s non-decision decisions fatally committed the United States to a land war in Asia, which nearly all of his advisors believed the US could not win. To get an idea of the granularity level McMaster is working at, check the first four (of fifteen) entries in the Table of Contents:

1. The New Frontiersmen and the Old Guard
   1961–October 1962
2. Havana and Hanoi
   October 1962–November 1963
3. New War, New Leader
   November 1963–January 1964
4. Graduated Pressure
   January–March 1964

At several critical points the narrative goes day by day, occasionally even hour by hour. The endnotes require eighty-two pages. It appears McMaster has gained access to nearly every relevant document, many of them unpublished memoirs or government memos that describe in detail what the participants were thinking about.

Anyone familiar with the history of the period will not be surprised by the duplicity and heartlessness of the main manager of the war, Robert Strange McNamara. If you saw The Fog of War, you know what I mean. McNamara is the kind of liar who lies to himself first and foremost, with the result that he can be convincing because he believes the lies he tells.

Certainly the war in Vietnam is the fault of LBJ above all; he handed McNamara the reins so he could concentrate on passing his Great Society legislation. That wasn’t a surprise to me, but I was taken aback by McMaster’s conclusion that Johnson’s personal insecurity was a large part of the problem. Unlike the current occupant, the President was actually the decider; but, like Bush, he was uncomfortable with dissent, so he continually reduced the size of the group with whom he was candid. When an advisor began to express doubts about the war, he was ignored, even if he happened to be the Vice President.

As a result the Joint Chiefs of Staff were cut out of the process of generating a strategy for fighting the war. When Johnson took office on November 22, 1963, American military folks were fighting in Vietnam, but neither the Vietnamese nor the American governments admitted that. Both claimed that US personnel performed in advisory roles only, which was true in the sense that American forces were not acting alone. Ground forces were always composed of Vietnamese soldiers accompanied by a few Americans, though the opposite ratios generally held when it came to the air war.

The Secretary of Defense, so called, held the top military brass in low esteem, in part because of his lack of knowledge of the military, in part because of his experience with the Bay of Pigs invasion, and in part because he believed he was smarter than they were and his systems analysis methods would solve every problem. This led McNamara to believe that he could control the American side of the war very precisely from Washington; so when he ordered bombing raids and the combination of bad weather and restrictions on military methods produced disappointing results, he blamed the military, despite their opposition to his methods. They might have been opposed to his goals as well, had they been given a clear picture of those goals; but you can’t provide a clear picture if you don’t have one yourself. At one point the National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy,

…told [Under Secretary of State George] Ball that there was no need for the United States to “follow a particular course down the road to a particular result.”

Right, we were only there killing people, and losing American lives, to see what would come of it. And to keep the profits rolling in for companies like Bell Helicopter. LBJ’s war cabinet believed, and said, that the US would be better off to fight and lose in Vietnam than to withdraw from the fight altogether.

Of course there’s plenty of blame to go around. An insecure President and a megalomaniac Defense Secretary were the main culprits, but the Joint Chiefs get some grief from McMaster too, which is probably why he’s still a Lieutenant Colonel.

The body charged with providing the president with military advice and responsible for strategic planning permitted the president to commit the United States to war without consideration of the likely costs and consequences. Comprehensive estimates of the number of troops necessary to win existed, but to conceal interservice divisions and to increase the likelihood that the president would approve the actions that they recommended, the Joint Chiefs suppressed them.

One study estimated that seven hundred thousand troops would be needed to win in Vietnam. The Army Chief of Staff thought five hundred thousand troops and five years would be required. But no one said anything, because McNamara and his allies in the administration had chosen a strategy they called graduated pressure, which severely limited the military’s ability to fight the war. The CIA was consistently reporting the difficulties faced by American strategists, but the American ambassador, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, removed the offending paragraphs before forwarding his reports to Washington. This inability to present the President with unvarnished analyses eventually led the director of the CIA to resign in frustration. But the Joint Chiefs simply buckled.

There are some striking similarities to the current war in Iraq. The ideological certainty of both administrations, though of different types, produced similar situations of willful blindness. This caused both administrations to ignore intelligence estimates that didn’t fit with what they wanted to hear. In both cases, many of the Americans making war strategy were innocent of military experience themselves. They believed passionately in the inherent superiority of American firepower, and equally strongly but less overtly in the superiority of Americans and the American way of life. These beliefs allowed both groups to retain their intentional ignorance of the objectives of those on the other side. McNamara et.al. persisted in thinking that Hanoi was playing a prestige game, and that rational calculations of cost would drive Ho Chi Minh to give up his ambitions to unify Vietnam.

William Bundy’s, [Michael] Forrestal’s, and [John] McNaughton’s education and experience in the law reinforced the analysts’ assumptions. In English common law, lawyers and judges must view human behavior through the lens of the “average reasonable man.” That theory underlay predictions of how Hanoi would respond to limited air strikes.

The problem was that all the evidence showed that Hanoi was not directed by average reasonable men. Ho told a French visitor that if they killed ten of his men for every man the Vietnamese killed, Ho would win the war. In the end, the Vietnamese were not going anywhere; the only way to beat them was to wipe them out. Graduated pressure was a strategy that clearly would not dissuade such opposition.

One is left with the impression that a good deal of the bungling of the invasion of Iraq is a replay of the disaster the US created in Vietnam. The main difference is that in the case of Iraq the Cheney administration knew exactly what it was going for. The PR was equally dishonest, but the goal was clear to the strategists: steal all the oil, even if we have to be there a hundred years to do so. American lives no longer mean more to the White House than foreign lives; dollars, and power, count.

Here's a little Leonard Cohen to cheer us up. Next week I want to delve into sovereign funds, the selling out of America by our legislators, and how — right now — we are being pawned as paupers to the princes of other nations into servitude and slavery. Our financial system is teetering on bankruptcy as we speak. Thanks to the GOP and George Bush. America as we have known it is now a passing memory. Details next week.

Also sprach Vicente Navarro:

The class divide is larger than ever. Obama and (later) Clinton have called for ending this divide and healing this schism. One can understand the calls to end the race and gender divide. But, what is meant by ending class division? The call by Obama to “unite the rich and the poor” is intriguing to say the least. It seems to assume that rich and poor have a commonality of interests that simply needs to be mobilized for a better America. This certainly makes Obama nonthreatening to the media and to the political establishments (the rich), which may explain the very favorable coverage he is receiving from the establishments’ media.

Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Age of American Unreason, is based on the solid premise that most of us are dumb as stumps and can’t stand anybody who isn’t. According to the New York Times review, here’s what inspired her to write it:

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment [on 9/11] , she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

If you doubt that Ms. Jacoby is onto something, ask yourself why the Times felt compelled to explain Pearl Harbor to its readers.

Ted Rall is at it again.

“I want the Republicans to feel the way I did in 2004,” an Iowa Democrat told The New York Times. So do I. I want them to watch everything they care about disassembled. Take Reagan and Bush’s names off the airports, nationalize major corporations, demolish Gitmo, gay marriage — anything that pisses them off.

I want revenge. Obama preaches reconciliation. “I will create a working majority because I won’t demonize my opponents,” says Obama. The Illinois senator is an interesting politician and might make a good leader. But not yet. Give me eight years of Democratic rule as ruthless and extreme and uncompromising as the last eight years of Bush. Then we can have some bipartisanship.

Obama’s let’s-tiptoe-through-the-tulips-with-the-GOP shtick amounts to bargaining with yourself. If a vendor at a flea market offers to sell you a lamp for $10 and you’re willing to pay $8, you don’t offer $8. Demonize, Barack, demonize!

Oh, and Obama says he wouldn’t have voted for the Iraq War. I say he’ s lying. So do his votes for funding the war since he joined the Senate. His voting record on Iraq is the same as Hillary’s.

Hillary, no. Obama? Nobama. What to do?

This just in from medieval Rome:

…The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary’s Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game.

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs…

I subscribe to the Evans-Novak Political Report and you don’t so here’s what the Prince of Darkness has to say this week:

Amid the exciting windup of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and the mop-up of the Republican contest, the reality is that 2008 shapes up as a very bad year for the GOP. The fact that the Democratic turnout in yesterday’s Virginia primary was double the Republican reflects the larger, more boisterous Democratic rallies from Iowa to the Potomac primaries. The pessimism and gloom in the business community is particularly pronounced.

Adding to the dark mood among Republicans is the increasing prospect that they will not be able to bolster their morale by running against the detested Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.). Her unification of Republicans has been one of the few GOP assets going into the campaign. It will take time and effort to work up a passion against the likable Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) no matter how leftist he really is.

While the Democratic delegate race looks like a dead heat, all the momentum is with Obama. He showed increasing ability to win white votes yesterday. The Clinton campaign is in disarray with the sacking of the campaign manager and the resignation of the deputy campaign manager, plus the migration of campaign contributors to Obama. Clinton’s reliance on the March 4 Ohio and Texas primaries, where her nominal lead is based on out-of-date polls, is risky in the extreme.

It’s time for all you whiny human rights bitches out there to shut your rosy little yapholes and act like men for a change. If some pudgy, soft turd hiding behind a black robe can do it, so can you:

“You can’t come in smugly and with great self satisfaction and say ‘Oh it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good’,” [Scalia] said in a rare interview…

In the interview with the Law in Action programme on BBC Radio 4, he said it was “extraordinary” to assume that the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” — the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment — also applied to “so-called” torture.

“To begin with the constitution... is referring to punishment for crime. And, for example, incarcerating someone indefinitely would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment for a crime…”

“I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?” he asked.

“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?”

Time for everybody to wake up. Let's watch a McCain video!

Waiting for Dorothy offers us a glimpse into the mind of the Invisible Hand. (Sorry no pictures this time, you’ll have to go take a look for yourself.)

James Fallows passes along a participant’s perspective on the so-called crucial role of so-called organization in Obama’s recent string of stunning victories. Read the whole thing here.

My note re organization: At 11 AM I got a call asking if I could be the Obama “lead” at our [Washington state] caucus location, which had 12 precincts caucusing. Someone delivered to me a few hundred campaign pins, a few posters, and lots of stickers. When I showed up, a few minutes after noon, the place was plastered with Hillary posters. Obama early-arrivers volunteered to take all the materials off my hands. The materials were all snapped up before 20% of the ultimate attendees arrived. There were 2,000 people there. They voted at least 5 or 6 to 1 for Obama over Clinton overall, if not higher. I was the only “organizer” for Obama, and I did almost nothing nor could I. We were simply swamped with people.

Today, when I didn’t have any info on the Maine caucuses, except that she was expected to win, I read that Obama had addressed an overflow crowd yesterday, with 3,000 people not being able to get in and being forced to stand out in the snow. Note that this is just what happened in Seattle at Key Arena on Friday. The giant overflow crowd left outside in foul weather is a sign of an organization that has been overwhelmed, not an organization that has been successful. As soon as I read that, knowing what had just happened in WA, and having seen the amazing demographic diversity of the Obama supporters in our caucuses (which made me think, “This is not a regional phenomenon”), I told [xx], “He’s going to carry Maine.” It didn’t take a genius!

Our new friend Gary Eschman dug this up, emailed it, and kindly agreed to my request to publish it.

George Walker Bush Presidential Library

The Library will include:

• The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction.
• The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you can’t remember anything.
• The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don’t have to even show up.
• The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don’t let you in.
• The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don’t let you out.
• The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room (which no one has been able to find).
• The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you to go back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tours.
• The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous secure, undisclosed location, complete with shooting gallery.
• Plans also include: The K-Street Project Gift Shop, where you can buy (or just steal) an election.
• The Airport Men’s Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
• Last, but not least, there will be an entire floor devoted to a 7/8 scale model of the President’s ego.

To highlight the President’s accomplishments, the museum will have an electron microscope to help you locate them.

When asked, President Bush said that he didn’t care so much about the individual exhibits as long as his museum was better than his father’s.

There is a great deal about the United States that would puzzle not only a visitor from Mars, but any person with a room temperature IQ and the ability to stand back for a minute and take a good look at things as they actually are.

For instance a judge in Nebraska just ruled that the electric chair is unconstitutional there, on grounds that it causes “intense pain and agonizing suffering.” Efforts to replace the chair with lethal injection have so far failed, however, leaving the Nebraska governor wringing his unbloodied hands in frustration.

Other governors in other states are facing similar but different dilemmas, posed by death penalty opponents who argue that lethal injection is equally cruel and unusual, as it too can cause intense pain and agonizing suffering. So what is a poor governor to do? What’s the use of being a governor anyway if you can’t even kill people?

As it happens a great deal of field work has been carried out on this very problem, particularly during World War II and today in peacetime China. Over and over, the cheapest, quickest, most efficient, and most humane way to execute human beings has proven to be a bullet in the back of the head. (The guillotine is second best, but leaves a mess.)

So wake up, America. Your problem has already been solved. And if you want to tie a ribbon around the package, take the Mafia’s advice: two in the head and you know they’re dead.

This piece by Spencer Ackerman in The Washington Independent is the best analysis I’ve seen anywhere of the tangled web Hillary wove for herself by supporting Bush’s war. Its conclusion:

And there’s a final significance to Clinton’s turn against the war. In November, the Democratic nominee will probably face a Republican who believed deeply in the war, but who also repeatedly criticized the war’s execution—Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz). McCain, a war hero, has national-security bona fides that few candidates possess. He will be able to inhabit the space Clinton has carved out for herself over the past two years: sober critic and skeptic of Bush. However, he’ll also be able to pounce on her inconsistency and vacillation, if Thursday’s debate is any indication, in a replay of the “flip-flopper” charge that doomed Kerry four years ago. Unlike Obama, Clinton will have no way of pivoting to a broader indictment of the militarism that McCain cheerfully espouses. It may be that, nearly six years after Clinton thought she had positioned herself to avoid all the pitfalls of the war, her calculation itself was what ultimately sealed the fate of her candidacy.

A lot of you have been asking why we don’t run more about turtles. Actually we had turtle items as long ago as August of 2003 and as recently as January of 2007, but here’s another:

BANGKOK, Thailand — A leatherback turtle has been tracked swimming from the coast of the Papua province in Indonesia to Oregon, researchers said, in what may be the longest trip for marine vertebrae between breeding and feeding sites.

“This is an animal perfectly suited for doing this kind of journey,” said Scott Benson, research fishery biologist for the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, who helped track the turtle and presented details of the journey at a sea turtle symposium last month.

The longest distance of nine turtles tagged in 2003, Benson said, was the leatherback that reached Oregon and then headed to Hawaii before the battery on the satellite transmitter gave out. The 12,774-mile journey took 647 days, he said.

There has been a remarkable consistency among George W. Bush’s attorneys general in one respect. All three of them have openly argued for breaking the law and have proceeded to do so on a daily basis.

Here is Michael Mukasey, currently taking his turn as our nation’s chief law-breaking officer:

Also Thursday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey told lawmakers he will not open a criminal investigation into the CIA’s use of waterboarding on terror suspects.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers asked Mukasey bluntly whether he was starting a criminal investigation since Hayden confirmed the use of waterboarding.

“No, I am not, for this reason: Whatever was done as part of a CIA program at the time that it was done was the subject of a Department of Justice opinion through the Office of Legal Counsel and was found to be permissible under the law as it existed then,” he said.

Mukasey said opening an investigation would send a message that Justice Department opinions are subject to change.

“Essentially it would tell people, ‘You rely on a Justice Department opinion as part of a program, then you will be subject to criminal investigations ... if the tenure of the person who wrote the opinion changes or indeed the political winds change,’” he said. “And that’s not something that I think would be appropriate and it’s not something I will do.”

This last paragraph might sound reasonable to someone unfamiliar with the law: Gee, officer, the Justice Department said it was okay. Go give them the ticket.

But under the law it is not okay at all. Mukasey’s own Justice Department will ship you off to jail if that’s the best excuse you can offer for committing a felony. And they do it every day.

Wayne Uff explained the process for us several months ago, as former attorney general John Ashcroft’s was doing his best to let our largest telecomunications companies off the hook for the illegal wiretapping they did at George W. Bush’s request.

Uff, a retired federal prosecutor himself, makes an argument that may seem counterintuitive to the layman. It is, however, the law, and the law is what Torture Boys Ashcroft, Gonzales and Mukasey swore an oath to uphold.

In this article former Attorney General John Ashcroft defends immunity for the telephone companies who turned over wiretap information without warrants in reliance on the government’s say-so that it was legal. Ashcroft argues that:

Longstanding principles of law hold that an American corporation is entitled to rely on assurances of legality from officials responsible for government activities. The public officials in question might be right or wrong about the advisability or legality of what they are doing, but it is their responsibility, not the company’s, to deal with the consequences if they are wrong.

Small problem: he’s wrong on the law. Companies that deal with the government in fact are not entitled to rely on promises made by government officials, and it is common for companies to lose major legal cases despite the fact that they relied on what they believed to be valid advice from government officials.

There are hundreds if not thousands of these cases out there. And, it is very common for the citizen who relies on an erroneous representation by a government official to get to get the shaft, high and hard. Here’s just one that I found in a minute on Google:

As to “actual authority,” the Supreme Court has recognized that any private party entering into a contract with the government assumes the risk of having accurately ascertained that he who purports to act for the government does in fact act within the bounds of his authority. Fed. Crop Ins. Corp. v. Merrill, 332 U.S. 380, 384 (1947); accord CACI, Inc. v. Sec’y of the Army, 990 F.2d 1233, 1236 (Fed. Cir. 1993) (“A contractor who enters into an arrangement with an agent of the government bears the risk that the agent is acting outside the bounds of his authority, even when the agent himself was unaware of the limitations on his authority.”). ....

But even if the Secretary of the Air Force himself had said to the recruiters that they could and should promise free lifetime medical care to aid in recruitment, those promises would be a nullity because, as shown below, the pertinent regulation provided to the contrary.

And, even on fairness, the rule that the letter of the law governs – and not the flawed interpretation of a government official – has much to recommend it. One of the rationales for this rule is that “The People” passed the laws, and it is the people’s law that governs, not the imperfect officials who may mistakenly interpret the law. It is not fair to force the people to abide by the perhaps twisted and erroneous interpretation of their laws by the imperfect individuals who hold office temporarily. It is not the people’s fault that their laws were misinterpreted by an official, and it is not fair to penalize the people for the mistakes of public servants. Remember the old saw about ours being a government of laws, not men? This is exactly what is meant: actions aren’t made lawful by the president’s saying they are lawful; actions are lawful if they are within the law.

Just sayin’.

Froomkin allows as how Attorney General Michael Mukasey and National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell are pissed, and they have reason to be. They’ve written a letter to Congress, letting those uppity SOBs know that the Maximum Leader will destroy them in a cable TV smack-down if they threaten to act like a co-equal branch of government, or presume to defend the civil liberties of Americans, widely known as a scummy and untrustworthy lot. They write:

Hugely profitable multinational corporations who respond in good faith to an obviously illegal request for assistance by public officials bent on destroying the Constitution should not be held liable for their actions…

Duh! How would they maintain their profit margins, and keep their executives out of jail, if they were forced to follow the law? After all,

…S. 2248 would afford retroactive liability protection to communication service providers that are believed to have assisted the Government with intelligence activities in the aftermath of September 11th.

They didn’t actually assist the Government, and the obviously illegal requests began before 9/11; but you fell for the Cheney administration’s PR. Since you believe it, you’ve gotta let the telecoms off the hook for their illegal activities. If you don’t, it would cut into what everyone in the world knows are the main motivators for American military activity around the globe: corporate profits.

Rick Hertzberg clears the whole thing up:

We’re awash in numbers from yesterday’s primaries, but there’s one number that nobody ever seems to crunch: how many votes did the candidates get?

I don’t mean how many delegates, or how many states, or the margin in this or that state. I mean: across the nation, which is to say in all 23 states that held Democratic primaries or caucuses yesterday (I’m focussing on the Dems for the moment), how many human beings voted for Clinton and how many for Obama?

I just spent some time with a calculator and the latest CNN state-by-state totals, and here’s what I came up with:

* Hillary Clinton: 7,347,477 (48.8%)
* Barack Obama: 7,293,887 (48.5%)
* John Edwards: 408,622 (2.7%)

One way to look at this: Clinton crushes Obama by more than fifty thousand votes!

A second way: Despite trailing Clinton by five to seven points in national polls on the morning of the primaries, Obama finishes within half a percentage point!

A third way: A majority of Democrats voted against Clinton.

A fourth way: A majority of Democrats voted against Obama.

A fifth way: If Edwards’s votes split 57-43 for Obama, Obama wins.

Then there’s my way, which is also the high way:

It was a tie.

Just when you were thinking Bush’s Justice Department couldn’t get any more despicable, it gets more despicable. Here’s the latest maggot to issue from the rotting corpse of Justice.

Sioux Manufacturing, a North Dakota company, has produced millions of helmets over the years for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. These were supposed to have been built, as is normal in such matters, to certain specifications set by the customer in what the law calls a “contract.” Unhappily, however, Sioux Manufacturing had a competing and overriding moral obligation — its duty to maximize profits. The Pentagon’s specifications would just have to go.

So the looms were set to short-weight the helmets on Kevlar, the polymer thread which makes them resistant to bullets and shrapnel. Less Kevlar made for lighter helmets. The company therefore added resin to bring them up to the specified weight. This further reduced protection for the troops, since resin made the helmets less elastic and more brittle.

The evidence for all this comes from tape recordings, extensive company records, and the testimony of two plant managers who filed suit under the federal whistle-blower law for $159 million in damages. They were of course fired.

Bush’s U.S. Attorney for North Dakota, Drew H. Wrigley, has just cleaned up this whole sorry mess, thank God, and brought the suit to “an appropriate resolution.” Wrigley stamped his tiny foot and forced those naughty Sioux to settle for $2 million with no admission of wrongdoing.

And as if that weren’t enough, 12 days before the settlement an outraged Pentagon had smacked the reeling company with a $74 million contract to replace all the substandard helmets it had already bought from them.

Cost-plus, no doubt.

Just in from Reuters:

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama surged to a big lead over Hillary Clinton in California hours before “Super Tuesday” voting began in 24 states, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Tuesday.

In the Republican race, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney held a 7-point advantage on Arizona Sen. John McCain in California, while McCain added to commanding double-digit leads in New York and New Jersey.

On a sprawling day of coast-to-coast voting, the biggest ever in a U.S. primary race, the U.S. presidential contenders in both parties were fighting to win a huge cache of delegates to this summer’s nominating conventions.

In California, which alone provides more than one-fifth of the Democratic delegates needed for the nomination, Obama led Clinton by 49 percent to 36 percent, the poll found. The margin of error was 3.3 percentage points.

Gary Hart is one of the many first-rate public men who have been denied a fair shot at the presidency by our trivial, ignorant and astonishingly gullible press.

Thanks to Don Heiny for calling my attention to the unanswerable arguments that Hart lays out in the essay from which this is taken:

Sorting through a great deal of obfuscation, Senator Clinton still seems to cling to the argument that Bush mismanaged the whole project, that it was worth doing but it was done badly. Thus, she seems to accept unilateral invasion as a first resort, even when intelligence, as it was in this case, is less than clear. She seems to be willing to follow policy makers, in this case neocons, who had a publicly announced imperial agenda in the Middle East. And she permits the impression to grow that "triangulation," in matters of war, requires placing protection of political career over protection of the national interest.

Help me out here. I seem to have registered subliminally that the candidates of both parties, throughout the long parade of debates, have one by one abandoned their American flag lapel pins. But each time I made a note to check during the next debate, I wound up forgetting.

Was I right? If so, I find this development enormously significant and enormously encouraging. For years after 9/11 Bush and all his flunkies wouldn’t be seen in public without their gay little fashion statements, afraid that we might otherwise mistake them for Lithuanians or Ukrainians or some damned thing.

If the presidential candidates have, after due diligence, concluded that it was safe to drop these puerile displays of patriotism, there is at least a chance that we the people are growing up.

…at 8:32 a.m., EST, from CNN:

WASHINGTON — Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton is losing ground to Sen. Barack Obama in a national CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released on the eve of critical Super Tuesday presidential primaries and caucuses.

The two are virtually tied in Monday’s survey, which shows the New York senator has lost a comfortable national lead she’s held for months over Obama and other rivals.

The survey also shows Arizona Sen. John McCain as the clear Republican front-runner.

Obama, who trounced Clinton in January’s South Carolina primary, garnered 49 percent of registered Democrats in Monday’s poll, while Clinton trailed by just three points, a gap well within the survey’s 4.5 percentage point margin of error.

Raw Story reports that a UKTV Gold television survey showed 58% of Britons think Sherlock Holmes really existed, while 23% believe Winston Churchill is a myth.

I don’t deny the mythical character of much of Churchill’s life. Anyone who’s read Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review of three biographies of the irascible drunk, in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s (subscription only), knows that a huge portion of his life was made up out of whole cloth, or constructed by others under his loose supervision. (Unfortunately his racism was genuine.)

…Churchill the great writer [was] awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on the strength of a book that was largely written by others.

But he did actually live, whatever you think of him. So did Gandhi, Florence Nightingale, the Duke of Wellington (boo!), and Richard the Lionheart.

The post-literate generation may believe that watching pictures move gives them information, but the results prove otherwise.

See? What did I tell you about snorting pig brains?

The packing house, in Austin, Minn. (pop. 23,000), slaughters 1,900 pigs a day, working two meat-cutting shifts and one clean-up shift. Virtually everything is used, including ears, entrails and bone. The 12 sufferers of the neurological illness — most are Hispanic immigrants — all work at or near the “head table” where the animals’ severed heads are processed.

One of the steps in that part of the operation involves removing the pigs’ brains with compressed air forced into the skull through the hole where the spinal cord enters. The brains are then packed and sent to markets in Korea and China as food.

Investigators say there is no reason to suspect that either the brains or the pork cuts were contaminated. Their working hypothesis is that the harvesting technique — known as “blowing brains” on the floor — produces aerosols of brain matter. Once inhaled, the material prompts the immune system to produce antibodies that attack the pig brain compounds, but apparently also attack the body’s own nerve tissue because it is so similar.

Tomorrow, Feb. 3, has been declared Global Blogroll Amnesty Day (GBAD) by two of our bestest blogging friends, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo and Jon Swift. We hereby add our humble voice to the multitude.

The theory behind the event goes like this. Some time ago, Atrios over at Eschaton, for which I think I still have a link sitting around somewhere, decided his blogroll was overblown. Perhaps it was costing him extra money to store so many links, or maybe he ran out of open threads before the blogroll ended. In any case, he decided to prune, and a bunch of people who previously had a little traffic directed to their blogs by being on his roll found themselves off the list. I don’t think anyone’s claiming intent to harm, but harm was felt. Soon after, Kos at Daily followed suit (as is his wont).

This left a decent number of decent folks feeling slighted, and God knows we feel their pain. For instance, Bad Attitudes used to be on the Eschaton blogroll, but last time I checked — I go there at least a couple times a year — we no longer made the cut. Dunno what’s happening at Kos, haven’t been there for as long as I can remember. (I note, however, that our good friends at Cursor have helped us keep up appearances.) I can see why we’re not considered A-list; after all, our colors are not butt-ugly, we use em-dashes and horizontal ellipses, and we don’t follow the DNC marching orders. We’ve discussed the possibility of a worldwide Bad Attitudes conference, but we ran up against what philosophers call The Bill Hicks Conundrum: people who hate people, come together!

The result of all this is that we B-listers gotta hang together, or we shall assuredly hang separately. Our massively esteemed but, sadly, intermittently active colleague Simbaud at King of Zembla used to engage in promotion of newly encountered blogs on a regular basis, and that’s basically the intent of GBAD.

So without further ado, here’s a few blogs I’ve recently come across for the first time. I do not imply by listing them here that they shine less brilliantly, or attract less traffic, than we do. And of course the biggest problem with any such endeavor is that one omits more than one includes, thus leaving more people pissed off than pleased. My only defense is the limitations imposed by the one commodity of which you’ve already got all you’re gonna get, time. If you know of other blogs that should be plumped, list them in comments, or better still at your own blog. The more the merrier!

Democracy Lover combines fine writing with left-wing ’tude and good pointers.

We have two parties who, despite some superficial differences (primarily in rhetoric and tactics), support the same corporatist agenda: empire, huge military budgets beyond any possible rational necessity, and placing profits above people. Sure, the Republicans are crass and vile and obvious about their goals and the Democrats are more subtle and covert and try to give the impression they care, but in the end the underlying fundamental values are identical. I will concede that there is a difference on “social issues” — but to the extent it exists, it is driven more by placating the party base than anything else.

The current Congress has made it abundantly clear that the Democratic Party has no intention whatever of opposing even the most outrageous and un-Constitutional excesses of the Bush administration. They call press conferences and make speeches about their commitment to the rule of law and the will of the people, but in the end they always give the Cheney administration what it wants.

Rez Dog at Unsolicited Opinion takes a minimalist approach to blog design, preferring to concentrate on clear prose, deep feeling, and true patriotism.

The moral of this tale: Elections are only one part of the public discourse: community forums, public hearings, referenda, letters to the editor are the ongoing discourse between elections. What’s important to me is holding that discourse and creating a society were all prosper. I learned long ago that victory or defeat in an election is merely an event. What counts is how those events shape our lives and society. I look back at Henry Howell and George McGovern and I see positive results. I look at the current candidates for national office and see a few sparks and wonder if any will actually ignite.

I hope so. My country needs a conflagration of ideas and energy.

Alicia Morgan at Last Left Turn Before Hooterville combines Right Intention with skilled writing and forward thinking. Plus, she wields a mean Photoshop (or perhaps GIMP) at Capitol Punishment.

…the party’s over for me. Now it’s just a matter of doing what it takes to get a Democrat into the White House — more to keep the Repubs from adding any more right-wing fanatics to the Supreme Court than anything else. Emotion about politics is a luxury. When you can be enthusiastic about a candidate, it feels good and energizes you to work for them. Nothing wrong with being jazzed about your guy or gal, if I may be so bold. But it’s not a necessity. And if it weren’t for the justices and other appointments that are made by a President, I might not even care. Let the Repubs lie in the bed they made. Let them take on the disaster that the Boy King has saddled us with.

However, I can’t go there. I have to work for a Democratic candidate. I can’t sit back and leave my daughter with a Supreme Court that will take away her privacy and control of her own body. I can’t sit back and leave my sons with the possibility of being drafted when we run out of volunteer cannon fodder (or my daughter, for that matter.) I have to stand up for Democratic values and hope that our nominee will stand up for them, too. All I can do is pressure them within the party structure to move towards our real American values — liberal values.

Hillary? Barack? Who knows? Who cares? It’s back to business as usual.

Charles H. Butcher III, Chuck for …, is an Oregonian Democrat who’s big on guns and is angry about the right sorts of things.

I have never understood the personal enmity so common now in Congress, politics need not trump character or friendship. Certainly some uncomfortable character traits may accompany certain politics, making comradeship unlikely, but demonization is silly. Neither is it reasonable to take such a partisan stand that the other Party is cut out of debate or totally ignored, there are generally some give points, the Republicans have proven they don’t see that. Some Republicans have demonstrated that their Party trumps the nation and those need to be bulldozed, but it is, at any time, ridiculous to make enemies, you will have some anyhow. Things in Congress won’t have changed 1/20/09, this will have to be dealt with, so I don’t take “Unity” too seriously.

Grandpa Moses at The Freedom From Patriot News Censorship Blog is the newest kid on the block, or at least his blog is. He shares with us a love of great writing, a disgust for censorship, and an understanding of the truth of communication: the medium matters, but the message is the message.

…I am reminded of the words of the immortal Hunter S. Thompson:

“Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”

Indeed. The fear of ideas, particularly those that offer us searing truth, seems to pervade our world. Many of the old fogies who I grew up with can’t seem to understand that digitized print is becoming and will be our books and articles of the future. In fact they have already become so. Try some of the links to various blogs on the sidebar here. You will discover horrendous things about the press and the government that you cannot get from the “established press”. The newspapers may consider themselves sacred because the product they produce can now be held in one’s hand, but the written word is timeless and it will survive, in whatever format the future may present us with. Unfortunately, the censors will always be with us. Those who own certain formats who are trying to hold onto their monopoly over words by censoring ideas will one day find that their product is as useless as a buggy whip.

If I weren’t already committed to voting for Edwards, I’d seriously consider writing in Mr. Twain.

The rumor that I buried a dead aunt under my grapevine was correct. The vine needed fertilizing, my aunt had to be buried, and I dedicated her to this high purpose. Does that unfit me for the Presidency?

The Constitution of our country does not say so. No other citizen was ever considered unworthy of this office because he enriched his grapevines with his dead relatives. Why should I be selected as the first victim of an absurd prejudice?

Why indeed?

And for those of us still harboring pretensions to writing, his advice remains as valuable as Strunk’s.

Substitute damn every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

What the hell is Obama doing imitating the widely and appropriately despised Harry and Louise ads, originally run by the insurance industry back in the days of the Clinton health-care fiasco in an attempt to head off any rational solution? Which, by definition, would omit them.

Dude, when you’re running to the right of Billary, are you expecting Democrats to fall for it? ’Course, they probably will…

One of the enjoyable aspects of the current election campaign is watching the antics of the wingnuts as they’re forced to choose between John McCain and a firing squad.

Over the past month a new Axis of Evil has emerged — not one based in Damascus, Tehran or Pyongyang — but instead in Cedar Rapids, Charleston, South Carolina, Derry, New Hampshire and Boca Raton, Florida. It is the liberal and “independent” voters in these 4 states that have nearly completed a deed that makes Kim Jong Il envious — the near crippling of the American Electoral System.

These four states have combined their native liberal populism with an imported liberal electorate and have forced the GOP to accept a nominee so distasteful that in more than one poll — the numbers of voters choosing not to vote and those choosing to vote third party actually exceed those who will hold their nose and vote for Maverick, War Hero, Amnesty Supporter, John McCain.

I admit, I’ve always known that South Carolina and Florida were secret hotbeds of liberalism. But I was hoping no one would notice.

I’m not interested in sending any more traffic to the wackos at Human Events Online, but if you really must read the article Steve Thomma, who’s been filing some excellent stuff for McClatchy, links to it.

Late to the party, as usual, I’ve become a major Sam Smith fan in a single visit.

If you’re one of those folks who think Edwards’s $400 haircut matters, but Clinton’s $1200 makeover doesn’t, you shouldn’t read this post.

One of the delusions of elite liberals is that that they lack prejudice. To be sure, they treat black[s], women and gays far better than once was the case. But if you are poor, uneducated, own a gun, weigh a lot, come from the South or mainly read the Bible it is another matter. Class and culture have replaced the genetic as acceptable targets.

[…]

For many years, as the Democratic establishment has become wealthier, the traditional Democratic base has been steadily pushed away as too dumb, too prejudiced, or otherwise too unworthy of the party. It wasn’t that abortion, gays and family values were intrinsically so important. But if your campaign contributors won’t let you talk or do anything about pensions, healthcare, outsourcing or usurious interest rates, the door opened wide for the rightwing hypocrites.

Which is how the Democrats lost the middle class, as Tom Edsall explains in Building Red America. Following the DLC model, the party has concentrated on issues that are mainly important to the party elite, who are generally well fed and educated, leaving behind the issues of concern to the vast majority of those on whom they depend for votes. Like the country-club Republicans who cozied up to the right-wing Christians every fourth November and ignored them the rest of the time, the Democratic power brokers talked a good game but did nothing to help the people who need jobs, health care, child care, and transportation in order to have a shot at the American dream. All of which we as the richest country in the history of the world could easily provide, except that doing so would produce more competitors for the top rungs of the ladder, which is exactly the opposite of the goal of both parties. Used to be different for the Democrats, back in the FDR days, which is why Democrats controlled Congress for decades. What the country wants hasn’t changed; but the Democratic party is now controlled by people who don’t give a damn what the country wants, as evidenced by the current wimp-ass Democratic Congress on too many issues to list here and now.

So along comes a wealthy southern white male lawyer and tries to change things back to the way Democrats used to do it. And what happens? Yes, those with power move to keep him in the background. Yes, from the start the establishment media gave him as little coverage as possible.

But more significant was the reaction of average members of the liberal — really post-liberal — establishment. Ridicule and disgust combined with a stunning disinterest in Edwards’ issues that told much about the Democratic Party today.

Not only was this elite bored with Edwards’ program, it made clear that the candidate didn’t look or talk right, was too wealthy to say such things, and, when you come right down to it, wasn’t one of us.

[…]

Edwards’ problem was that he made the smug set of American liberalism extremely uncomfortable. He showed them what they should really be thinking about and what they might do about it. And they didn’t like it. Far better to relax in the self-righteousness of choosing between a Harvard Law School black and a Yale Law School woman.

And so, once again, the Democratic Party drifts further away from what once made it worth bragging about.

And if you cherish the notion that the sainted Al Gore (who did nothing while in office to advance the cause he now champions so well) would have saved us all had Ralph Nader not been so egotistical, you also shouldn’t (and I dare say won’t) read this one.

We are left with corporatized, conservative compromisers who add mightily to the argument that the Democratic Party should be forced to change its name to end the consumer fraud it purveys.

So what do we do about it? Some will stay home on election day, others will support a Nader or a Green, likely Cynthia McKinney. The Democrats will be, as usual, furious that a certain number of voters still believe we live in a democracy and choose someone other than those assigned to them by the DNC. While Ralph Nader may make what seems to some the wrong political decision, it is a sign of the corrupt, cynical nature of our times to look into the face of moral integrity and dismiss it as an act of ego.

Even from a tactical standpoint, it is no worse than a Democratic Party that has known for eight years that it was unraveling and failed to do anything for progressives and Greens except to insult them. These folks deserve to be treated at least as well [as] soccer moms or hedge fund traders, but instead they are ridiculed and scolded and then the party wonders why they don’t get their vote.

Actually I think the party understands why it loses so many voters, but it has replaced caring about them with the brilliant strategy of doing and saying nothing, thus managing to appear slightly less repulsive than the opposition.

(Hat tip to Democracy Lover for the pointer to Sam.)