YOU EEEEDIOT!!!!

WASHINGTON — President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.

"Shame On You, You Manipulative Hypocrites!..."

Watch all of this: new American citizen Craig Ferguson knows us better than we do..

"If You Don't Vote, You're A Moron.."



...

"Do Me The Honor Of Being Fellow Americans.."

Oh By The Way..

...we sorta invaded Pakistan today.

I hope they don't mind.

From Russia With Love - The Medvadev Doctrine

Russian President Dmitry Medvadev has laid out Russia's assertions on how they plan to handle and be handled by the west. Worth a read.

Actual Journamalism

Kudos to CNN's Campbell Brown for actually asking a solid question and sticking to the guy when he tries to escape it. Didn't know that was still possible.

(TPM)

Just Give Me The Damn Nameplate

I've said many times, in this space and others, that the fundamental problem with the standing republican ideology is that one cannot effectively govern when one does not actually believe in government in the first place.

So, almost needless to say, I very much agree with the Left Blogosphere's take this morning that John McCain really isn't interested in actually running things.

He's campaigned with an attitude of 'for chrissakes just make me President already - I was a POW!' for years, and his sense of entitlement is leaking into everything now. He wants the job, he just doesn't want to -do- the job once he gets it.

I don't think we really need to go through that again.

All You Really Need To Know

John McCain has hired Tucker Eskew, the very guy Bush hired to smear McCain during their 2000 campaign battle in South Carolina, as a consultant to help prepare running mate Sarah Palin for speech and debate season.


He was against it before he was for it.

Talking Point

We're almost through an eight year administration where just about every appointee or nominee ended up in some sort of scandal. McCain has made one choice as to who will lead in his administration, and she's already at a scandal-per-day pace in less than a week. Why would anyone think McCain has any idea how to do the job of selecting people to help him run the nation?

The President is elected not to rule, but to hire the people who make government happen. John McCain has demonstrated that he has no concept of how to do this job.

CRACK VAN (R - Stolen)

Governor enjoyed rock-star ride on visit
But deluxe van was 'stolen' in mix-up
By Jake Grovum and Rachel E. Stassen-Berger
Pioneer Press
Article Last Updated: 08/28/2008 12:27:47 AM CDT

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty spent Sunday riding around Pennsylvania in a stolen van.

The theft was inadvertent; his Keystone State driver was told to pick up the keys to the vehicle in which he was to shepherd the governor at the Holiday Inn in Allentown, Pa.

"He did exactly what he was told, except it was the wrong Holiday Inn and the wrong van," said Pawlenty, who campaigned through Pennsylvania for presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain on Saturday and Sunday.

The van the driver picked up was a tricked-out touring vehicle, complete with an LCD video screen, an Xbox and video games and an iPod-ready, six-speaker stereo system.

According to Bandago van rental company owner Sharky Laguana, the band Everclear, on its way to Denver for the Democratic National Convention, had dropped off the van at the Allentown Holiday Inn about 6 a.m. Sunday and left the keys at the front desk for a Bandago employee to pick up about 9 a.m.

But about 8 a.m., Pawlenty's driver arrived at the Holiday Inn to pick up the keys. Because there was only one set of keys at the hotel's front desk, the driver and the hotel clerk assumed they were to the vehicle intended for Pawlenty's travels.

So, when the Bandago employee went to retrieve the vehicle, "sheer panic and terror" ensued, Laguana said.

Laguana called police and reported the van stolen and talked to Everclear's business manager and tour manager about their responsibility. Technically, Laguana said, since the rental company never retrieved the van after the band used it, the band was liable.

Meanwhile, Laguana was trying to figure out what happened.

"That is the most amazing criminal heist that anyone has ever done," he said he was thinking. "The conclusion I came to was it's an inside job."

Pawlenty said that he was also thinking something was a bit off. After being picked up at the Holiday Inn where he was staying, the governor questioned the driver.

"He said, 'I don't know, they just asked me to pick up this van.' And the strange thing is we were driving out of the parking lot of the correct Holiday Inn and the car we were supposed to be in and had used the previous day (with a different driver) was in the parking lot, and so I said, 'Why aren't we taking that car because it's sitting right there.' And he said, 'I don't know,' " Pawlenty said Wednesday.

The driver thought it odd that there were beer cans in the van when he picked it up.

http://www.twincities.com/rnc/ci_10320679

DNC

Tonight was the All Star Game to tomorrow night's Super Bowl. Hillary, Bill, Kerry, Richardson, and Biden all delivered huge speeches, the first time outside of Olbermann and Stewart that I've seen Big Timers take open shots at BushCo out loud. Good stuff.

I was downtown for a gig on Monday, and I must say that you there conventioners can give us our town back any damn day now. Bizarro Denver is full of out-of-towners wandering our streets and navigating around barrier checkpoints on $2-per-block pedicabs*.

* One pedaler I spoke to while waiting for the non-existent Mall Shuttle to arrive and subsequent Brute Squad to pass said he was averaging a thousand dollars a day and had already purchased a 10-day vacation to Japan after the convention leaves. Nice.

If you're reading this and you're at the DNC and have never been here before*, please come back again some other time and see how this place really is without the riot gear and the barricades and the rental humans.

* and please, if you see Cyndi Lauper and her publicist wandering aimlessly around 15th and Oblivion, kindly point them back toward civilization. Thanks.

Grandpa's Apparently Been Napping Since 1989...

"My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War. This is an act of aggression."

- - John McCain, speaking in Aspen last night about the Russia / Georgia situation on CNN

Luckily we've had nothing to discuss politically or internationally in the last 18 or 19 years - your local high school senior has known a lifetime of complete peace and innocence.

At least now we know - Gramps wants some old-school Reagan fun, where you shift troop icons around the board and talk smack and never actually do anything out loud but scare everyone shitless, all the while sending sneakies all over the map without telling that pesky congress about it. Those were the days.

Its a good time to be Vlad Putin, or Israel, or China, or North Korea, or any garden variety nutcase. Putin's trek into Georgia has demonstrated to the world what it already knew - that the US is too spread thin to be the world's cop. Its that part of the movie where Superman becomes mortal - its time to kick some ass and do whatever they want.

We won the cold war because the Soviet Union wasn't as militarily or economically strong as they said or thought. Now Russia has lots of toys, lots of your-enemy-is-my-enemy friends, and a lot of oil money to buy more toys and more friends. We have a strained military, massive debts (to many of those same countries who don't like us), a shattered economy (especially when compared to the buying power of Europe right now), and a complete lack of sound leadership.

Attention world: the Bat Signal will go unanswered from here out.

If It Weren't For Those Meddling Kids...

I think its safe to say that anyone who follows political discourse and life in general knows that, at some point, our collective media stopped being watchdog of the common man and slowly shifted toward being an Orwellian vehicle for propaganda. And anyone who has followed the truly galling and outrageous effort by BushCo to gut the inner workings of our federal government by firing career professionals and installing hacks in an effort to run a government without actually believing in such a thing.

I also think its fair to say that, while this was all being plotted out the big money in the political world decided - in a bipartisan effort - that corporations are more important than people, and legislated and ruled accordingly. And in this effort, the media - watchdog of the people, eyes and ears to the world, uncoverer of the seedy underbelly - fell under the auspices of the very people the media used to reveal to us.

Winston Smith knew that.

Anyway. I compare the top-to-bottom disembowling of the media as we know it to the ongoing effort to turn our federal government into a crony-laden country club with free contract money for every winking executive board member in sight, and it reminds me why the corporately-puppeted media is failing, and will ultimately fail altogether.

The internet.

Journalism, after all, isn't a business. Its an ideology. Its a mindset. Its a craft. And despite the inner and upper workings of those who attempt to present it on the large scale, those values and concepts cannot be and never have been contained within the walls of the machine. Every paper and broadcast outlet will have a traditionally minded journalist or two buried beneath those hired for Limbaugh factor - shock and ratings, be as outrageous and entertaining to whatever sense of entitlement fits the target demographic. But outside of that, there are people who believe and understand that, as a musician doesn't need a record label to make music, a journalist doesn't need a masthead or a call sign to be a journalist.

The internet is what corporations fear - something that allows the masses to create and distribute ideological property that they once 'owned', and thus profited from. Everyone from musicians to investigative reporters to sports to science to information services to, of course classified ads have been liberated from their traditional bastions and allowed to be defined and created freely, often at the expense of the monoliths.

My question is this: If the internet, and other means of connecting people and sharing information and skill and talent and creativity at the individual level, can make certain specifically inherent corporations and institutions practically obsolete, then what possibilities are there that those who find our political machine to be equally deficient to lead and gather and call together from the bottom up?

The individuals with the skills to bypass the machine have done so. Is there a way to bypass this machine?

"McCain Rebukes Statements By Phil Gramm"

Um. Fuck you.

When we vote in November, we don't just elect some guy to run the country - we elect the Nation's Boss - the guy who hires and nominates and recommends the people who will run the agencies that affect our everyday lives.

McCain hired Phil Gramm, a guy who believes that our everyday economic hardships in life our figments of our imaginations, to be his campaign economic advisor. He has a roster packed with Rovian strategists politicizing and mudding up every element of his presentation, the same trick that got us where we are now.

Don't vote for what's said - vote for what's done and who's appointed to do it.

You May Ask Yourself.. My God.. What Have We Done?..

Jesus Fuck.

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

...

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

...

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

NY Times Article

The 1957 Report Cited (.pdf)

Documents from the ASC Hearing (.pdf)

First it was "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US", now “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War”.

God, "we" suck.

hat tip to Atrios

I Wrote An Email, Yes I Did...

Driving home this afternoon from work and shopping, well...

Attn: 850 KOA Program Director

Hello. I was driving home this afternoon (Sunday) and tuned to 850 in hopes of catching the last few minutes of the Rockies game, forgetting that it was an central time road game and already over.

I tuned in at 3:40pm, and the very first words from my speakers were literally, verbatim, "Barack Obama is John Kerry in blackface."

Now, I'm fairly politically central, and the political ramifications of that statement simply don't interest me, but the gentleman very confidently repeated the exact same sentence seven times in the next five minutes, with pride and vigor.

A few things. One; is describing any black man as any other man 'in blackface' appropriate? Ever? Really? Second; Wouldn't John Kerry in blackface, at any time, anywhere, be offensive to everyone in and of itself?

I listened long enough to get the host's local KOA aircheck mention in, but did not catch his name and wasn't really in the mood to wait for it. I'm of african american, native american, scottish, and irish descent, and I found his words not only inflammatory but rather unnecessary and, above all, quite stupid.

His point - that Obama has similar political policies to the Kerry presidential campaign - aren't relevant to the statement made in any way. A hypothetical John Kerry-in-blackface wouldn't resemble Obama politically nor physically, and would be ostracized within milliseconds.

His literal words infer that Barack Obama is an older white male war veteran and former presidential candidate posing as a black man in the worst possible manner, and if this is the case not only would said person be ostracized but he should be investigated for campaign and identity fraud. You get my point.

KOA is a supposedly reputable and historic radio institution, and to allow someone on the air who would say something that inflammatory is rather disgusting. The fact that you'd allow a host to use such an improper and categorically stupid analogy demonstrates a disregard for professionalism and the english language, something distinguished broadcasting icons are supposed to respect and uphold.

Regards,
T.

A Haunting Feeling

Before mid-1998 I had never really been politically active. Being a pacifist of sorts I've had flare-ups of opposition when Bush I took us into Desert Storm, when Clinton decided the best action in Kosovo was to start blowing shit up, and of course when Stimpson W Bush decided to a) run for president in the first place, and b) use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to do whatever the fuck he could think of.

My first real twinge of active (as opposed to reactive) politics came in 1998 when Jesse Ventura decided to run for Governor of Minnesota. I was living in St. Paul at the time, and had a courier job where I listened to his midday radio show every day, and I came to realize, much to my shock, that he was the best candidate of the three available. I voted for him, and he amazingly won. And he did a pretty damn good job for an independent executive in an absurdly partisan state.

I also lived in the DC area during Marion Barry's rise and fall. I mention that because of this: I am fiercely and devotedly anti-Bush, and John McCain fits a description I read several months ago of Mitt Romney, "if he could get elected as a Pirate, he's run as a Pirate." Frankly, a republican being elected at this point on the coattails of Stimpy's 19% approval rate would be an indictment of the Democratic leadership more than anything.

I'm left to fence between Hilary, who I find highly capable if not amazingly annoying (oh, and Bill? PLEASE shut it. Thanks.) and Barack Obama. Obama is a powerful presence, and he has the charisma and the it-factor to bring people up and out, and that's very exciting.

The problem is this: When I step back and look at Obama on paper and in practice, with the oratories and the general big ideas and big hopes and big dreams and big changes and yes we cans and all that, it strangely reminds me of someone no one really wants to be reminded of:

Sharon Pratt Kelly.

Remember her? You may not. Sharon Pratt Dixon (later Kelly) was a longtime local DC political player, a representative for the local power company who managed campaigns and married a DC Councilmember. She ran for Mayor of DC in 1990 when incumbent Marion Barry was caught smoking crack in a sting operation and announced he would not seek reelection. Her campaign was a broad reform message based on 'cleaning house with a shovel not a broom', and her grassroots campaign came from well behind to win the election comfortably.

Just one problem: she got into office and it became apparent relatively quickly that she, in fact, hadn't the slightest idea what she was doing. She got into the chair, attempted to implement a bunch of shortsighted ideas, met council resistance to the point of spending the back half of her term essentially neutralized as a leader, to a point so bad that none other than Barry himself was able to come back around and defeat her in 1994.

The Obama/Clinton slapfight has given us zero insight into how either one would perform as president. I think its fair to say that one of the two will likely be elected based on the fact that we pretty much know what the McCain camp has in mind, and it isn't much different than what Stimpy has us stuck in. Nonetheless, I can't help but hope that we have someone who can do the work to get this nation back into a decent place and a good standing in the world, because a loud failure may bring us right back into the fire in four years.

There Was Supposed To Be An Earth-Shattering Kaboom!

I spent a good amount of time on Monday night watching Day 2 of the Tokyo Nikkei stock exchange freefall. Watching it open for Tuesday morning and lose 300 points in 45 minutes was amazing, the road to it's ultimate 752.89 point loss was frightening knowing the US markets would open Tuesday morning after MLK day in response to nearly 1200 points of loss overseas in two days.

The Fed, whose Chairman has apparently been expressing private fears of near-recession to his inner circle, bailed out the impending US reaction on Tuesday morning with a freakout .75% cut in the federal funds rate, the largest single whack in 20+ years.

I have basically nothing in the market so for me watching the Nikkei tank and the Fed panic is like knowing Brett Favre is due to underthrow the corner-route in overtime. Bits of entropy and schadenfreude floating in a lovely soup of entertainment.

It's one thing to trumpet the merits of free market economics, but it really is a fantasy to think that the global economy is like the tides and happily ebbs and flows along in some sort of circadian rhythm when the recent reality has been a corporate economy resembling Tom Hulse's character in Parenthood, sponging off the parents, scoring the occasional massive victory that makes it all better, then the string of successful hits on 19 results in a change of dealer, and we end up with Tuesday morning, where the economy was thrown out of a moving car onto the front lawn at sunrise.

I've had numerous arguments in the last few days, people defending the situation as a correction. It sure is, but what it is correcting isn't a natural free market high. This is the corporations and financial institutions, knowing that the Government That Doesn't Believe In Government doesn't like to bother with all that troublesome oversight stuff, stretching their profit aspirations to the limit. There are laws and enforcement to prevent me from conning you out of $20 on the street, but there's nothing preventing large companies selling you a subprime mortgage loan worth more than you have, then collateralizing their more conventional investment vehicles inside those crap loans for higher yields.

This free market high economy was apparently hiding a rather large smack habit, and at some point this weekend it woke up in the tub again. It corrected itself, alright.

The Perpetual Lie

_{"Surge To Nowhere", guest editorial by Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Washington Post, 1/20/08...}

_{"In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won't be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, "part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative," thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and leaving it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news."}

_...

_{"McClellan Points Finger At Bush, Rove", Politico.com 11/21/07...}

<sub>Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being "involved" in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.

McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”

The excerpts give no details about the alleged involvement of the president or vice president.

But McClellan lists five top officials as having allowed him inadvertently to mislead the public.

“I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.”

McClellan then absolves himself and makes an inflammatory — and potentially lucrative for his publisher — charge.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote.</sub>

_{“And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."}

O RLY?

Irony is officially dead.

The U.S. is concerned about the centralization of power and democratic
backsliding ahead of Russia's legislative and presidential elections in
December and March. Putin will step down next year as president. He has
said he would lead the ticket of the main pro-Kremlin party in the
parliamentary elections and could take the prime minister's job later.

Rice sought opinions and assessments of the situation from eight prominent
rights leaders.
...

Lyudmila Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group told the Interfax news
agency her organization sees "the purposeful construction of an
authoritarian society and an onslaught on the people's rights, elections
are being turned into farce, and human rights and opposition organizations
are experiencing pressure."

Alexander Brod, head of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, said the
discussions touched on "authoritarianism and the crisis of human rights."
He said he disagreed with "the opinion that we had a flourishing democracy
in the 1990s and that we have a setback now."

"Not all is ideal in America, either. We see protests against the war in
Iraq and violations of human rights on the part of security services and
violations of human rights in countering terrorism," Brod said.

Vladimir Lukin, the government-appointed human rights ombudsman, was
quoted by Interfax as saying he told Rice that human rights should be
discussed in a dialogue rather lecturing in a "doomsday" style.

Doomed To Repeat

from Stars & Stripes

Under cover of night, Baghdad wall is built


By Monte Morin, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Mike Pryor / Courtesy of U.S. Army From left, Iraqi police commander Lt. Col. Ahmed Abdullah, an interpreter, and 1st Sgt. Phong Tran, of the 2nd Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, survey a section of the wall in Baghdad's Adhamiyah district. Sean Ransford / Courtesy of U.S. Army A contractor helps emplace 12-foot-high concrete barriers along a road in Adhamiyah, Baghdad.

Construction of a controversial, three-mile blast wall in one of Baghdad’s most troubled neighborhoods was completed recently, following three months of grueling labor and heated protests from Iraqi residents and government officials.

The barrier, which consists of thousands of 12-foot-high concrete slabs, or T-walls, rings much of Adhamiyah — an island of Sunni families in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite east side.

Engineers with the 82nd Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team lowered the final 7-ton slab into place in the early morning darkness of May 28, according to a U.S. military statement issued Tuesday.

U.S. commanders say the barrier will make Adhamiyah a safer neighborhood by restricting incoming and outgoing vehicle traffic to several guarded checkpoints. The project is part of an overall attempt by U.S. forces to quell sectarian violence in the embattled capital.

The plan triggered harsh criticism from both Sunnis and Shiites, who saw darker motives in the wall’s construction. While some compared it to Israel’s West Bank security wall, others insisted the project was part of a larger plan to divide the city into a maze of “gated communities.”

U.S. commanders insisted that this was not the case and that the wall was a temporary security measure.

Troops worked at night to build the wall, enduring attacks from insurgents and hauling concrete barriers and work equipment down roads heavily mined by roadside bombs. In one incident, the brigade’s comamnder, Col. Billy Don Farris, was shot and wounded by a sniper while inspecting the wall.

“We’re exhausted,” Lt. Eric Brumfield, a platoon leader with the 2nd BCT’s 407th Support Battalion, was quoted as saying in the release. “We’re tired of seeing that wall every night. But in the end, we did it. We were able to fight through the [roadside bombs] and the publicity and everything else and got it done.”

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