Category Archives: analysis

Real Time With Bill Maher: Cornel West, Mos Def & Ralph Nader

To generic kenalog learn more about the price you may pay for Viagra, viagra information talk with your pharmacist, insurance provider, or doctor. In more allopurinol sale severe cases, the symptoms were irreversible, but lower levels of cheap viagra no prescription methylmercury resulted in milder symptoms. "We don't really understand clearly approved tizanidine pharmacy what are the causes of epilepsy and how it comes cheapest generic dexamethasone online about," Dr. Jean-Philippe Langevin, a neurosurgeon and director of Restorative order viagra in canada Neurosurgery and Deep Brain Stimulation Program for Pacific Neuroscience Institute buy cialis at Providence Saint John's Health Center in California, told MNT. buy cheap accutane The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved all statins, purchase cialis without prescription and they are safe for most people, according to Chen. cheap generic cephalexin After the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves* a drug, it.

Topics including Iraq, terrorism (Islamic, American and otherwise), Obama/Clinton, the Jena Six, OJ Simpson, the Boogie Man…
[youtube]http://youtåube.com/watch?v=rO1w1H3iZUU[/youtube]

Bill: [On Islamic terrorists] You have to admit there are certain people who do want to kill Americans.
Mos: Yeah, uh, some of them are called The Police…

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=3zyEIGchffs[/youtube]

Mos: This is not about the Muslim or the Christian…the division of the Democrat/Republican, Muslim/Christian, uhhh, Autobot/Decepticon, Crypt/Blood, black/white: it’s all bullshit, because the bottom line is that Islam is not the threat; it’s not a problem.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=zvT4adazeOE[/youtube]

Bill: [to Nader, on being a consumer advocate] Ralph, you’re bringing sexy back.
Ralph: [On his new book] There are at least three reasons why if my mother raised George W. Bush, we wouldn’t be in Iraq. One: she would have taught him history. Two: critical thinking. And three: how to listen.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=aMwIOq06iAk[/youtube]

Cornel: Truth lies prostrate on rugged heels with nameless cavalries. And what I mean is, it’s hard to find a space for truth, and it’s hard for truth to be a species of the good to have impact, in the face of corruption, mendacity, mediocrity and shortsightedness. So truth has to lie prostrate, which means we have to reveal it in its nekidness, even if that nekidness seems to be connected to a lack of power…
Bill: Let’s get the truth nekid right here on this table.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=4vDmURpie_E[/youtube]

Bill: [New Rule] Sorry Mr. President, but slinking into somewhere unannounced and under cover of night isn’t an ass whooping; it’s a booty call.

Thanks to Kelena for the tip on this one!

Bill Moyers & Impeachment

Since Clinton got impeached for doing what any respectable president would do, some people are now arguing that Bush and Cheney should be impeached for numerous reasons (the Iraq war, the Plame incident and subsequent pardon, secret CIA prisons, bad airline food). One of the people exploring this idea is that ninja Bill Moyers. We currently classify Bill as ‘still supporting the forces of good.’

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPfM4I20X7Q[/youtube]

Still, some people argue that impeaching the president undermines the process and validates the Republican impeachment of Clinton. But, as a former administrator of this site pointed out, Bush may be the best example of exactly how and when a president should be impeached. Furthermore, Bill Moyers argues that this is specifically the situation for which the founding ninjas (using term loosely) intended impeachment to be used.

You can check out his video journal here; it’s got the full video. He also has a cool little history of impeachment here.
[Ed: You really have to check out the site about the Scooter Libby pardon]

More World Bank & Roving Bugs

85864221_3f05fb00f4.jpg

So it has come to my attention that since the discussion of roving bugs first surfaced on the internet, many people have blogged about it.

So many people have mentioned this issue in fact that it has generated a sort of hysteria about the issue.  The generation of such hysteria has obviously spurred a coalition of naysayers.  I just wanted to reaffirm to people that the technology is obviously possible.  Some articles go as far as to claim that the roving bug could be activated even when the phone was switched off.  That might be a little hyperbolic.

Anyway, this guy disagrees.  Here is a little more about that roving bug bust.

wiretap_trent.gif
The article from which this graph originates is very interesting. So is this.
coverargentina2-copy.JPG

The other thing is that I was having a conversation with my dad the other day and he made a good anecdotal point about why free market capitalism pisses people off who live within poor market economies, I mean, besides the obvious reasons.  He pointed out what happened when a company from the UAE tried to buy American ports. It wasn’t very pretty.

I was saying in the last post that many countries blame their financial problems on the sharky nature of the world bank which can have the (purposeful or accidental) effect of destabilizing an economy, and/or supporting people financially who really don’t need to be in charge.  Argentina is one of the countries that really hates the organization.  Read and educate yourself.

bush-phone-cutout-copy-3.jpg

The image of the Argentinian World Bank protest originates from this article.

The World Bank & Wolfowitz

Before you start reading, let me reiterate that none of the links in our articles are ads. All of the links bring you somewhere relevant. Click freely and frequently.

Steve Bell's cartoon

With all the recent scandal surrounding Wolfowitz and the World Bank, the mainstream media is still so far away from having an actual discussion about the organization and its counterpart, the IMF.

In a nutshell, what happened is Wolfowitz gave his girlfriend a few financial perks, in the form of pay raise. This was unethical given that he is the president of the organization. The World Bank deals exclusively with funds, and there has been major criticism since its inception that its accounting practices are not clear. For the president of the organization to do this reflects, in my opinion, horribly on the institution in general.

One Fox News blogger makes the point that there is a certain level of hypocrisy in the members of the World Bank (which includes 184 countries/members) all of a sudden turning around and pointing the finger at Paul Wolfowitz:

I don’t know whether his efforts to secure a job for a girlfriend meet the resignation test. I do know that it’s more than a little amusing who’s judging him: an organization that’s been playing financial shell games for years and whose members have some curious conflicts of their own.

Cavuto

Point taken; there is an amount of hypocrisy. However, Wolfowitz was a controversial pick in the first place given his total financial inexperience and moreover the controversial Wolfowitz doctrine. Take into account the fact that he was vowing to fix these problems in the first place (here’s a link for you conspiracy theorists) and that makes for a big mess.

chapatte

So now that Wolfowitz is resigning, the White House is going to appoint a new head of the organization again, instead of installing a transparent and democratic process. Not that the members of the World Bank board are to be trusted anyway, but we’ve been appointing the president of the organization for half a century since its inception and it hasn’t really worked out yet.

My whole thing is that while this scandal “spotlights” the problems behind U.S. control of the bank, we can’t just let Wolfowitz resign and let the issue die. The problem, obviously goes deeper than Wolfowitz.

The World Bank was started in the aftermath of World War II with the goal of helping these war-ravaged nations (namely France) rebuild. Like I said before, the U.S. has always appointed the president informally. The conference where the World Bank was established was called Bretton Woods, which went down in NH.

World Bank Group

So countries like France were devastated and the basic idea became “let’s lend them some dough so they can get together.” Inclusive in this was the idea of ridding the world of all the problems that hindered markets previously. To accomplish this they had to outlaw many of the economic practices of Europe which included unfair devaluation of currency and excessive fining. What would happen was say France was stealing your business with a cheap import, they would devalue French currency so as to give them less buying power, etc.

The idea also carried an idea of free market capitalism, in essence the idea that businesses would be able to flow freely over borders and that there would be so-called “equal access to natural resources.” That really means that anybody with the capitalistic power can enter your country and suck you dry. This kind of happy-go-lucky capitalism would be all well and dandy if some of the poorer nations were able to stack as much green as the richer nations and therefore actually have free access to these resources. Unfortunately, they are not able to do so, and furthermore have no access to the higher up positions in the bank. In this article, Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank Aide speaks out.

Another criticism is that many nations were forced into compliance with the World Bank because of their ties to colonial powers or their capitalist domination by these selfsame powers, against their wills.

For critical views on the World bank, check out the Bretton Woods Project.
These are the Wikipedia lists of criticisms for the World Bank & IMF

Images from: Steve Bell, Chapatte, Soapbox,

Can Gore Let It Rip?

Next time he runs for president, things will be different. That was Al Gore’s pledge to Democrats after the 2000 election: “If I had to do it all over again, I’d just let it rip. To hell with the polls, the tactics and all the rest. I would have poured out my heart and my vision for America’s future.”

Will Gore run in 2008? The question will echo throughout his appearances Wednesday before the House and Senate committees dealing with climate change. It likely will echo through all of American politics for months to come. There are two ways to ponder the question.

The logic of politics suggests Gore has already given his answer. He is not raising money. He is not urging friends and associates to stay on the sidelines until he makes a decision. He has said repeatedly that he has no plans to run. Shouldn’t we take him at his word?  Not yet, we shouldn’t. The logic of psychology and even history suggests that Gore should run. And if he should run, it is hard to believe that a man who has organized most of his adult life around public service and the pursuit of the presidency won’t in the end actually do it.

For the moment, Gore’s legacy in American politics rests on two opposing facts:

– From the perspective of Democrats, no politician has been more right, more often, on more important questions. On global warming, words that had a radical edge in 1992 — and still do, to many conservative ears — Gore wrote “Earth in the Balance,” anticipating mainstream liberal rhetoric by a decade. Many Washington Democrats cringed at what they regarded as his shrill people-vs.-powerful 2000 convention speech, when he warned that a Bush presidency would favor special interests and the wealthy. They cringed even more in 2002 at what they regarded as Gore’s naive warnings that the coming Iraq war was a disaster in waiting and a distraction from other fronts in the campaign against terrorism. But within a year or so of both speeches, most Democrats inside Washington and beyond essentially embraced Gore’s argument and tone.

– From the perspective of people who believe, as nearly all Democrats do, that the Bush presidency has been a historic debacle, no Democratic politician is more culpable for these consequences than Gore himself. A more poised, focused and self-confident campaign surely would have won the election and not just the popular vote in 2000. As the chosen leader of his party, Gore had a responsibility to wage that campaign.

[Politico]

The Lessons of Iraq

Former Senator and Presidential Candidate Gary Hart has published a great piece on the Huffington Post:

Very soon a new industry called “The Lessons of Iraq” will be born, even as the search for the end-game continues against the back-drop of the theme “who lost Iraq.” Partisan strategists will be allocating blame while more thoughtful citizens will try to draw lessons for future generations.

Some lessons are apparent. Do not manufacture justification for invasions. Plan for all eventualities, including the most unpleasant. Do not pay exiles to tell you what you want to hear. Deal honestly with Congress and the American people. Be candid about possible costs in lives and money. And an endless list of common sense, and Constitutional, dos and don’ts.

The second kind of lessons are less obvious and have to do with the new realities of the 21st century:

First, treat jihadist terrorism more like organized crime than traditional warfare. By declaring “war on terrorism” we made the fatal mistake that it could be crushed using conventional warfare and massed armies…

Second, liberate the U.S. from dependence on Persian Gulf oil. We can then sharply reduce the U.S. military presence in the region and remove the single most important incentive for jihadism…

Third, restore principle to American foreign policy. Neoconservatives who dominate the Bush administration have used the Wilsonian rhetoric of “democratic idealism” even as they pursue the most cynical and dishonest policies…

Fourth, engage the nations of the world in achieving security for the global commons. Security in the 21st century now means much more than it did in the Cold War 20th century.

Read the full article at the link below:

[HuffingtonPost]

Before Jon Stewart

The truth about fake news. Believe it.

Fake news arrives on doorsteps around the world every day, paid for by You, Time magazine Person of the Year, a.k.a. Joe and Jane Citizen, in one way or another. Take for instance, the U.S. government’s 2005 initiative to plant “positive news” in Iraqi newspapers, part of a $300 million U.S. effort to sway public opinion about the war. And remember Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist who was hired on the down low to act as a $240,000 sock puppet for the president’s No Child Left Behind program? Williams’s readers had no idea he was a paid propagandist until the Justice Department started looking into allegations of fraud in his billing practices.

Fake news has had its lush innings. The Bush administration has worked hand-in-glove with big business to make sure of it. Together, they’ve credentialed fringe scientists and fake experts and sent them in to muddy scientific debates on global warming, stem cell research, evolution, and other matters. And as if that weren’t enough, the Department of Health and Human Services got caught producing a series of deceptive video news releases— VNRs in p.r.-industry parlance—touting the administration’s Medicare plan. The segments, paid political announcements really, ended with a fake journalist signing off like a real one—“In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting,” and they ran on local news shows all over the country without disclosure. All of this fakery taken together, it may be fair to say that the nation’s capital has been giving Comedy Central a run for its money as the real home of fake news.

[CJR::via::RawStory]

“Obama more liberal than Kucinich, analysis reveals”

WASHINGTON _ The most liberal member of Congress running for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination isn’t Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

It’s Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

And the Republican candidate who’s grown less conservative over his years in Congress? Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Those are among the interesting findings in a recent analysis of votes by all the members of Congress who are running for president.

They cut to the heart of debates going on among activists in both major parties: Can a liberal Democrat win a general election? Which Republican is ideologically pure enough to win support from conservatives?

The study, released this month by the National Journal, a respected inside-the-Beltway research report, will help voters cut through the spin and hype of TV sound bites in coming months and judge these candidates for themselves.

Read more of the findings at the link below:

[RawStory/McClatchy]

Talking About Israel

Another great piece from Nicholas Kristof:

There is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians. And that silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.

Within Israel, you hear vitriolic debates in politics and the news media about the use of force and the occupation of Palestinian territories. Yet no major American candidate is willing today to be half as critical of hard-line Israeli government policies as, say, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper.

Three years ago, Israel’s minister of justice spoke publicly of photos of an elderly Palestinian woman beside the ruins of her home, after it had been destroyed by the Israeli army. He said that they reminded him of his own grandmother, who had been dispossessed by the Nazis. Can you imagine an American cabinet secretary ever saying such a thing?

…You can argue that Arabs pursue a double standard, focusing on repression by Israelis while ignoring greater human rights violations by fellow Arabs. But the suffering in Palestinian territories, while not remotely at the scale of brutality in Sudan or Iraq, is still tragically real…

…Hard-line Israeli policies have profoundly harmed that country’s long-term security by adding vulnerable settlements, radicalizing young Palestinians, empowering Hamas and Hezbollah, isolating Israel in the world and nurturing another generation of terrorists in Lebanon. The Israeli right’s aggressive approach has only hurt Israeli security, just as President Bush’s invasion of Iraq ended up harming U.S. interests…

[NYTimes]
(Times Select subscription required)

Bush’s Shadow Army

The Bush Administration is increasingly dependent on private security forces to do its dirty work, Jeremy Scahill reveals in his new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. 

The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld’s tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq — an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.

To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a “road map for change” at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the “Department’s Total Force” as “its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors — constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions.” This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors — conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.

Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. “We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren’t being counted, and the danger is that there’s zero accountability,” says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.

[AlterNet]

Rocker David Byrne Making Sense at SXSW Fest

Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne wants record labels to focus more on marketing than on manufacturing and distribution in the face of increasing digital album sales.

Byrne gave a presentation entitled “Record Companies: Who Needs Them?” at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, Thursday. He offered a slide show that predicated digital sales would outstrip CD sales by 2012.

That year will be the “tipping point,” much like the mid-to-late ’80s when CDs overtook cassette sales. Once download sales became the norm, Byrne said, it will allow manufacturing and distribution costs to approach zero. “That is a fact,” he said.

He said at that point, record labels will be faced with a sort of choice — to ramp up marketing services to use music as a loss leader for tours and merchandise revenue, or aim only for international stars of the ilk of Britney Spears.

[NYTimes]

The Ides of March 2003

Our ninja Frank Rich does it again:

TOMORROW night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now …” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

[NYTimes]
(Times Select subscription required)

How the Right Went Wrong

But everything that Reagan said in 1985 about “the other side” could easily apply to the conservatives of 2007. They are handcuffed to a political party that looks unsettlingly like the Democrats did in the 1980s, one that is more a collection of interest groups than ideas, recognizable more by its campaign tactics than its philosophy. The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan’s legatees. Government is not only bigger and more expensive than it was when George W. Bush took office, but its reach is also longer, thanks to the broad new powers it has claimed as necessary to protect the homeland. It’s true that Reagan didn’t live up to everything he promised: he campaigned on smaller government, fiscal discipline and religious values, while his presidency brought us a larger government and a soaring deficit. But Bush’s apostasies are more extravagant by just about any measure you pick.

[TIME]

See also: The Coulterization of the American Right 

Two Perspectives on the Iraqi Draft Oil Law

“Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?” [NYTimes]:

A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would, if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq’s oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.

In March 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group (better known as Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force), which included executives of America’s largest energy companies, recommended that the United States government support initiatives by Middle Eastern countries “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq oil law would achieve. It does so to the benefit of the companies, but to the great detriment of Iraq’s economy, democracy and sovereignty.

“Three cheers for Iraq’s new hydrocarbon law” [Slate.com]:

The recent hydrocarbon law, approved after much wrangling by Iraq’s council of ministers, deserves a great deal more praise than it has been receiving. For one thing, it abolishes the economic rationale for dictatorship in Iraq. For another, it was arrived at by a process of parley and bargain that, while still in its infancy, demonstrates the possibility of a cooperative future. For still another, it shames the oil policy of Iraq’s neighbors and reinforces the idea that a democracy in Baghdad could still teach a few regional lessons.

To illustrate my point by contrast: Can you easily imagine the Saudi government allocating oil revenues so as to give a fair share to the ground-down and despised Shiite workers who toil, for the most part, in the oil fields of the eastern region of the country?

The Coulterization of the American right

Gary Kamiya puts it perfectly:

American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt, free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for the GOP, is that this isn’t a winning political strategy anymore — but they’re stuck with it. They’re trapped. They need the bigoted and reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans from achieving Karl Rove’s dream of long-term GOP domination.

It is a truism that American politics is won in the middle. For a magic moment, helped immeasurably by 9/11, the GOP was able to convince just enough centrist Americans that extremists like Coulter and Limbaugh did in fact share their values. But the spell has worn off, and they have been exposed as the vacuous bottom-feeders that they are.

It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked: Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than Coulter. Imagine the reaction if Al Gore, when he was vice president, had routinely appeared on a radio show hosted by, say, Ward Churchill. (The comparison is feeble: There really is no left-wing equivalent of Limbaugh, just as there is no left-wing equivalent of Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy.)…Yet the grotesque Cheney-Limbaugh love-in doesn’t raise an eyebrow. We’re so inured to the complete convergence of “respectable” conservatism and reactionary talk-radio ravings that we don’t even deem it worthy of comment.

[Salon.com]
(free, after advertisement – just wait the few seconds, it’s worth it)