Is It A Funny?

I really hope that this was meant to be a funny, and not, say, serious.

Under their belief-system, every single individual in the entire country can elect to be on drugs. What would our society look like if this happened? People's lives would be destroyed and their productivity in our society would be unarguably compromised. In essence, people will have the right to govern their bodies but our country will lose its ability to effectively govern as well. This will then jeopardize the freedoms of people everywhere.

Just because you can't handle your drugs, doesn't mean that other people can't. And being on drugs is possibly the only explanation for our embarrassment of a president, but last time I checked, he was a Republican, no matter now much the wingnuts claim he isn't.

Remember: Happiness and freedom are both protected under the constitution.

Where's my fucking pony?

Perhaps the most vexing element of Libertarian thought is their implicit (and often explicit) contempt for our government.

Because there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for anyone to have contempt for our government. No Siree, nope, no contempt here! I do agree that not everything should be a cutthroat capitalistic society because there are quite a few things that need government oversight, or should be provided by the government because I fucking pay taxes. Glam wars are not part of that equation.

That would be quite the concept: want to start your own war? Get a bunch of people together and go fight it in the name of [your entity here], personally funded by you and whatever delusional freaks you manage to swindle. Hell, it worked for Oliver North!

Awesomeness!

Fafblog is back! Yipee!

Bwah-ha-ha-hah!!!

This is just too good to pass up.

I'm a kind of sabot right now.

They singled me out and evicted me, but they didn't notice my guest. They let him go in escorted by my wife and daughter. I guess they didn't recognize him. My guest was …

Read it, and find out!

Sec. Alphonso Jackson, still at it in HUD

Remember that Secretary Alphonso Jackson of the HUD that I have that grudge against? And my later follow up? Well, it looks like he's still at it.

After Philadelphia's housing director refused a demand by President Bush's housing secretary to transfer a piece of city property to a business friend, two top political appointees at the department exchanged e-mails discussing the pain they could cause the Philadelphia director.

"Would you like me to make his life less happy? If so, how?" Orlando J. Cabrera, then-assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, wrote about Philadelphia housing director Carl R. Greene.

"Take away all of his Federal dollars?" responded Kim Kendrick, an assistant secretary who oversaw accessible housing. She typed symbols for a smiley-face, ":-D," at the end of her January 2007 note.

Cabrera wrote back a few minutes later: "Let me look into that possibility."

The e-mails, obtained by The Washington Post, came to light as a result of a lawsuit provoked by HUD's decision last September to strip the Philadelphia Housing Authority of as much as $50 million in federal funds. In December, it declared the agency in violation of rules that underpin its ability to decide precisely how it will spend federal housing funds. Kendrick was the official who formally notified the authority that she had found it in violation.

What a lovely group they do seem to have in that office. "Nice city ya gots there. It'd be a pity if something were to happen to it, know what I mean?"

Noted in passing

"Recent press reports suggesting a disconnect between my views and the president's policy objectives have become a distraction at a critical time and hamper efforts in the Centcom region," [suddenly retiring Centcom CINC Admiral William] Fallon said in a statement Tuesday in which he announced his resignation as head of U.S. Central Command, arguably the most important in the U.S. military....

"I don't believe there have ever been any differences about the objectives of our policy in the Central Command area of responsibility," Fallon said in his statement Tuesday, and he regretted "the simple perception that there is."

In keeping with one of my own pet peeves here, I would point out that their having the same objectives, doesn't mean they necessarily share views on how to achieve those objectives. The statement as is still leaves that possibility wide open, and military commanders don't really have any business choosing (big picture) objectives anyway; they're supposed to be figuring out how to achieve those objectives handed down to them. What we call the means to an end. So he's really not denying what he's trying to give the appearance of denying, here.

Furthermore, the second quoted paragraph there leaves open the possibility that there are differences in other areas. Not that I think there's likely much to that, but it does strike me as rather odd that he would specify and limit the policy in question that way. Why?

All told, he certainly seems to exude the air of somebody going out of his way to give the appearance of denying something, without actually denying it. Lying without lying, one might say.

Introducing Class Wargames

I've wrapped up a short piece introducing my alternative economics blog, Class Wargames. So now, I'm announcing it here. Go take a look.

Compare and contrast

Michelle Obama:

For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but I think people are hungry for change.

John McCain:

It's harder and harder trying to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan [Washington, D.C.].

Now, which one do you suppose gets called out by the media for not being patriotic enough? The one who just suggested our nation's capital is chock full of demonically possessed bureaucrats and legislators? Does he sound like he's proud of our country? Really proud?

Update 2008-03-20: Now that I've given it some time for the McCain quote to get out there, if it would, here's the current tally via Google News: Michelle Obama: 304; John McCain: 24. Any questions?

Hope springs eternal

Another apparently underreported bit of math I noticed last night: According to the CNN results, at least, all the Republican candidates put together got fewer votes (1,319,960; 100% precincts reporting) than even the lesser of the two Democratic candidates (Obama: 1,356,330; Clinton: 1,455,959; and that's with 99% precincts reporting, so there will be a few more). Granted, Republican turnout was probably somewhat suppressed by the presumption that McCain had things all wrapped up (which he now does). Still, this was in Texas! This could augur very well for the general election in November.

Added: I suppose I should compare the numbers in Ohio as well, for completeness. Their greater preference for Clinton meant Obama did get fewer votes than all Republicans combined. Republicans: 1,010,864; Obama: 979,025; Clinton: 1,207,806 (all 100% precincts reporting). Even there, the mean of the Democratic candidates' votes (1,093,415.5) beats the Republicans' total.

Updated 2008-03-06: This other possibility had occurred to me, but I didn't want to bring it up without at least anecdotal evidence, even if it does tend to support my own preferred candidate. At The Rude Pundit (shockingly profanity-free for once), there's talk of Texas Republicans not just staying home because McCain's the obvious winner, but getting out and voting in the Democratic primary for the candidate they think will be easiest to defeat in November, perhaps most often Clinton. "Republicans knew that McCain would win Ohio and since in Texas we have open primaries, the RNC, Texas Repubs and Rush had been telling all their zombies to vote Clinton because they think they can beat her. My own mother, who hasn't voted for a Democrat for 40 years, told me that she voted for Hillary because 'you know, I support McCain, so I voted for her like everyone else up here.' My mother wasn't our only contact to verify our suspicions." All things considered, while I certainly consider these counts a good sign for November, I'm certainly not expecting a 2-to-1 blowout in Texas then, either.

Hagee vs. Farrakhan

Just a note of something I checked out in this Obama & Farrakhan vs. McCain & Hagee dustup we've been hearing about lately. (Short version, if you haven't heard: Obama had to denounce and reject Farrakhan's support, repeatedly, during a live televised debate recently; McCain, on the other hand, warmly embraces the support of similarly radical (in degree, but he's Christian!) pastor John Hagee, and the media barely bats an eyelash) I thought I'd just do a quick comparison of Google News hits, and lo and behold: The Final Score (for now): Obama and Farrakhan, a numerologically significant 1,984 hits; McCain and Hagee, merely 459. Double standards, much?

The Trouble With Capitalism: Market Saturation

pp. 35 & 36:

Market Saturation

The increasing maturity of most consumer markets in the industrialised countries was becoming a noticeable constraint to economic growth in the industrialised world by the end of the 1960s. This meant that in addition to static demand for non-durable goods (food, drink and clothing) the markets for most durable products (automobiles, television sets etc.) tended more and more to be governed mainly by replacement demand rather than by the continuous opening up of new groups of first-time buyers, which had been possible throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Hence demand for goods generally began to grow more in line with population — which was in any case increasing more slowly than in the immediate post-war period — rather than at the rapid rates recorded up to the mid-1960s.

The result was that companies serving these markets were obliged to diversify into new products or services in their unavoidable quest for further expansion, especially as they were barred by anti-monopoly restrictions from taking over their competitors, at least within their national frontiers. One consequence of this was the emergence, particularly in the USA, of 'conglomerate' groups or companies with diversified activities ranging from telephone equipment manufacture to hotel chains....

One thing that I'm particularly sensitive to in reading this book, and elsewhere, is the idea that at least a significant part of the trouble with the modern economy is exaggerated expectations of return on investment on the part of investors. This is essentially one reference to it here. Still, it doesn't seem to crop up as much as I'd guessed it would. I'm not sure whether this is because the author understates its role (or I'm just wrong in its significance), or he just assumes it as a near-axiom, not worth mentioning because it's a given.

Yet gradually, as may now be recognised with the benefit of hindsight, the development of such new consumer markets proved insufficient to offset the impact of the saturation of existing ones.... Thus for many it was an article of faith that every economy was subject to a normal or 'underlying' growth rate or trend, from which it might be expected to deviate only under abnormal circumstances and, implicitly, for relatively short periods. Likewise, as already noted, many of the cruder apostles of Keynes had convinced themselves that 'demand management' could actually permit the stimulation of increased consumption simply by injecting more money into the economy, and that consequently excess productive capacity need never be a problem again. Thus they, along with most OECD governments, failed to appreciate that, once the short-term limits of purchasing power have been reached, the only consequence of artificially trying to extend them further is bound to be inflation.³

3. Even now it is quite common to find economists who reject any notion of limits to demand growth, usually on the grounds that it is based on the 'lump of labour fallacy' — that is, the suggestion that there is a fixed amount of output (and hence labour) required to meet demand (cf. S. Brittan, Capitalism with a Human Face, Fontana, London 1996). The obvious perversity of this argument is based on a refusal to bring the time factor into the equation, since it is not a question of suggesting that demand is finite in any absolute sense but only over a given time period. Yet since rates of return on capital are reckoned in relation to periods of time it should not be necessary to point out that it is the short- or medium-term limitation which is crucial in defining whether there is a ceiling on demand growth.

I think we're getting pretty close now to the "limits of purchasing power," "bound to be inflation" point he's talking about. By the way, have you checked the price of wheat lately?

The Trouble With Capitalism: Investment promotion

Investment promotion (pp. 23 & 24)

Besides undertaking to apply the weapons of macroeconomic management to influence the level of output and employment, governments resorted to other forms of intervention to help sustain activity. Most conspicuously, they became significant promoters of investment, whether through state subsidies or incentives to private investment, or else through direct state equity participation in enterprise. The proliferation of such mechanisms — including grants, tax concessions, loan guarantees and subsidies to research and development — was for many countries (notably those of continental Europe as well as Japan) simply an extension of their traditional approach to economic development. Yet its rapid growth throughout the Western market economies (including the United States) in the post-war period meant that 'corporatism' had become a universally accepted element in the post-war capitalist system. What was scarcely perceived at the time — and is still not widely accepted even in the supposedly more laissez-fair 1990s — is that such uncontrolled use of state support for enterprise (whether in the private or public sectors) was bound to result in serious distortion of competition and international trade patterns.⁵

5. See H. Shutt, The Myth of Free Trade, Basil Blackwell/The Economist, Oxford 1985

Note that I would certainly agree that, here in the US, the "grants, tax concessions, [and] loan guarantees" have certainly gotten rather out of hand. More on that when I cover the later chapters.

Transnational corporations (p. 32):

Such was the basis of what was later to become known as the 'global economy'. Perhaps surprisingly, it has been widely acclaimed in the 1990s as the very model of a dynamic, free-market economic system in which the inability of either governments or private corporations to control the pattern of development is treated as a positive virtue. However, as suggested in this chapter, it is really the legacy of a post-war attempt to organise the world economy along the lines of international cooperation rather than uncontrolled competition & in a climate of opinion which had, indeed, come to reject laissez faire as an intolerably unstable basis for economic management. The fact that it proved a recipe for anarchy based on rampant market distortion was the result of misplaced commitment to the idea of the sovereign nation-state, combined with a lack of political will to curb the power of transnational corporations.

The Trouble With Capitalism: The New Deal

I'll be mostly glossing over the next couple of chapters in The Trouble With Capitalism, as the mostly deal with historical background. But I'll doubtless find a few bits worth mentioning. Like the following. (pp. 15 & 16)

[W]hen US President Roosevelt assumed office for the first time in 1933 he was committed to a programme of vigorous intervention by the federal government to stimulate and underpin a recovery in the US economy — the New Deal — based on broadly similar principles to those applied by the Fascist regimes in Italy and Germany....

It is significant that one area where the Roosevelt administration's proposals for state intervention in the economy met with little opposition was support for the financial sector. Nothing had been more fatal to attempts to restore confidence in the United States following the Wall Street crash than the catastrophic collapse in the banking sector, with no fewer than two thousand banks failing in 1930 alone. This prompted the new administration to introduce, as one of its earliest measures, legislation requiring all banks to insure their deposits (up to a maximum level for each one) through a government agency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, thus guaranteeing small savers against total ruin.¹³ This measure... foreshadowed what was to become, after World War II, an implicit commitment by the state to act as 'lender of last resort' to the banking community — in other words, to come to the rescue of any institution whose failure could be considered a threat to the stability of the financial system as a whole, regardless of how reckless its lending policy may have been. Yet as with so many other moves tending to advance the role of the state in sustaining the capitalist system, this far-reaching commitment was made as a purely pragmatic response to otherwise ruinous market trends. It is scarcely a matter of wonder that those responsible, who were also closely linked to the main beneficiaries, were not inclined to emphasise its ideological implications.

13. In reality the use of an insurance scheme was cosmetic, since the level of premiums paid by the banks never corresponded to the actuarial cost of providing the necessary cover and it has been understood ever since that the federal government will provide whatever support is necessary to avert the collapse of any bank which might entail 'systemic risk'.

In short, the kind of trouble that these policies were meant to avert does sound a lot like the current problems of the sub-prime collapse. Especially that bit about "com[ing] to the rescue of any institution whose failure could be considered a threat to the stability of the financial system as a whole, regardless of how reckless its lending policy may have been."

Counting the costs

This story in The Australian ties in rather well with my current reading, and helps bridge the gap of the decade since it was written.

THE Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US3trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US50-$US60-billion predicted in 2003....

Professor Stiglitz told the Chatham House think tank in London that the Bush White House was currently estimating the cost of the war at about $US500 billion, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen.

The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said.

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said.

That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.

Professor Stiglitz, an academic at the Columbia Business School and a former economic adviser to president Bill Clinton, said a further $US500 billion was going to be spent on the fighting in the next two years and that could have been used more effectively to improve the security and quality of life of Americans and the rest of the world.

The money being spent on the war each week would be enough to wipe out illiteracy around the world, he said.

Just a few days' funding would be enough to provide health insurance for US children who were not covered, he said.

The public had been encouraged by the White House to ignore the costs of the war because of the belief that the war would somehow pay for itself or be paid for by Iraqi oil or US allies.

"When the Bush administration went to war in Iraq it obviously didn't focus very much on the cost. Larry Lindsey, the chief economic adviser, said the cost was going to be between $US100billion and $US200 billion - and for that slight moment of quasi-honesty he was fired.

"(Then defence secretary Donald) Rumsfeld responded and said 'baloney', and the number the administration came up with was $US50 to $US60 billion. We have calculated that the cost was more like $US3 trillion.

"Three trillion is a very conservative number, the true costs are likely to be much larger than that."

This is just the kind of thing Shutt is going on about in this book. (My reading in it is currently far ahead of my posting about it.)

Afterthought (added 03-01): I might also point out that that sum comes to around $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Enjoy your tax cuts!

The Trouble With Capitalism blogging

So, since I've gotten myself an old new book from the library, The Trouble With Capitalism: An Enquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure by Harry Shutt, and I'm reading it now, I thought I'd share some of the choicer excerpts as I go along. Some, I'll just post without comment; others, I might point out things that have come to pass since then, or how it relates to my own beliefs in the area, or even where I feel it might be in the wrong. Keep in mind, it is a 1998 book, so some of it is a bit dated. I might even pick on it a bit in places, for instance where it says the Interwebs don't seem to be really taking off. But it'll be good-natured; in that example, his thoughts seem to have been born out eventually by the bursting of the New Economy dot-com bubble.

A choice bit from the very first page of the introduction, to start off with:

The rapid advances of this new consensus [the superiority of laissez-faire capitalism] to near universal acceptance owes much to the recent conspicuous failure of economic models based on extensive state intervention to deliver adequate levels of prosperity or security — most spectacularly in the fallen Soviet empire. Yet despite this apparently compelling logic, anyone endowed with a reasonable capacity for impartial observation of everyday realities — and for treating official propaganda with due scepticism — might recognise that such claims of a triumph for the free market and of its supposedly magical powers are profoundly perverse, for at least three reasons.

Further on in the introduction (added 2-28):

This book is an attempt to expose the realities of the contemporary evolution of the global capitalist economy, and thereby to dispel the illusions which lie behind the neo-laissez-faire prospectus. By viewing it in the context of the longer-term development of the world economy it also seeks to demonstrate that the reason for the aggressive and irrational dogmatism of the Western political establishment in trying to forge this new consensus is a growing sense of the increasing fragility of capitalism rather than of its enduring strength. Indeed the reader may well conclude that only acute awareness of a genuine threat to the survival of the dominant vested interests could explain such systematic distortion of reality.

In some respects, it may be noted, the analysis presented here of the chronic weakness of profit-maximising capitalism is traditional, in that it emphasises the distorting and destabilising effects of the recurrent excess supply of capital in relation to the demand for it. What is perhaps less familiar is the revelation that technological change is leading to a long-term relative decline in the demand for fixed capital, thereby rendering traditional capitalist structures obsolete — much as the new technology of steam power made inevitable the replacement of feudal structures and cottage industries by capitalist enterprise some two hundred years ago.

A Troubling Thing

When I read people debating about Clinton on various blogs, I've noticed that something always pops up that bothers me: the implication that Senator Clinton will run the presidency just like her husband did. I saw one comment, when one commenter provided the reasons for not voting for Senator Clinton, that basically outlined policies from Mr. Clinton's years in the White House. I mean, there were a few instances of Senator Clinton's voting record, but many were not. I'm not sure that it really is a valid point to bring up Mr. Clinton's policies and assume that's how his wife will run the presidency. It almost has the underlying current that Mr. Clinton will be running the country by proxy...as if Senator Clinton has no mind or will of her own. That kind of bothers me. I have no problems with people discussing Hillary's record and past history as a Senator, or the fact that she's a DLC-type. But really, do we know for a fact that she will most definitely run the presidency just like her husband did? Is pointing out his record even relevant to discussing how she would run the country? I would like to think that she has a mind of her own and can stand or fail on her own merits. For the record, I'm not decided on who I will vote for in the primary. I could live with either as the candidate.

If God Dies In Space, Will Anyone Hear God Scream?

I woke up this morning, devoid of caffeine as I had not yet cracked open my Dew, and lo and behold over on Sadly, No!, this awful Youtube clip greeted me. For anyone who doesn't want to mop up their brain because it leaked out of your ear, the video is a very unconvincing attempt at supposedly refuting astronomy. 'Cause, you know, God created the universe, and the eeeevil Scientists didn't calculate for that. Or something.

I'm sorry. (Dabs at ear with napkin.) Where was I? Oh, I don't remember the full stupid of this video, because thankfully, once the grogginess wore off, so too did the haze of idiocy.

But reading through the comments and such, I started thinking. (Dangerous, I know!) The whole creation story (and that is what it is, a story) in and of itself does not refute evolution at all. Really, the story of creation in Genesis doesn't exclude evolution, though in the Bible, it's all created by God and evolution is adaptations. There was light, there was planets,there was things in the sea, there was creatures on land, there was man. Of course, given the time frame of when the story was told and eventually written down, I wouldn't expect people at that time to know as much as we do now. A friend and I were discussing this over the weekend, and really, there's nothing in it that wouldn't loosely match up with the general framework of evolution (just my opinion, and in a very general sense). Of course, I was laughing at the Creationist she stumbled on, and she was of the opinion that there's two sides to this "debate". No, no there isn't really, I tried to tell her, but she didn't believe me.

But that got me to thinking about a passage in one of my favorite books, 1984. Here is the passage that I am reminded of reading through the comments at Sadly, No!:

"But the world istelf is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny - helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited."

"Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness."

"But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals - mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of."

"Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing."

"But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach forever."

"What are the stars?" said O'Brien indifferently. "They are bits of fire a few kilometers away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it."

To me, their arguements are similar, only separated by the use of God. Of course, at this point in the book, Winston is being tortured.

Your Religious GOP: They didn't just read 1984, they studied it!

Recommendation from a fine businessman

President Bush, State of the Union, 2007:

When America serves others in this way, we show the strength and generosity of our country. These deeds reflect the character of our people. The greatest strength we have is the heroic kindness, courage, and self-sacrifice of the American people. You see this spirit often if you know where to look -- and tonight we need only look above to the gallery....

After her daughter was born, Julie Aigner-Clark searched for ways to share her love of music and art with her child. So she borrowed some equipment, and began filming children's videos in her basement. The Baby Einstein Company was born, and in just five years her business grew to more than $20 million in sales. In November 2001, Julie sold Baby Einstein to the Walt Disney Company, and with her help Baby Einstein has grown into a $200 million business. Julie represents the great enterprising spirit of America. And she is using her success to help others -- producing child safety videos with John Walsh of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Julie says of her new project: "I believe it's the most important thing that I have ever done. I believe that children have the right to live in a world that is safe." And so tonight, we are pleased to welcome this talented business entrepreneur and generous social entrepreneur -- Julie Aigner-Clark. (Applause.)

Now:

More than a half-million Chinese-made products were recalled Thursday, including "Pirates of the Caribbean" and Baby Einstein toys, because they contain dangerous levels of lead.

Coin-shaped "Pirates of the Caribbean" flashlights and soft, textured Baby Einstein blocks were among the 555,200 products recalled, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced.

You're doing a heckuva job, Julie. (And Disney, to be fair.)

While we're at it, why didn't Bush ever tout his own entrepreneurial success in that speech? Surely, it would've fit right in with those others.

Facinating.

This is a very interesting presentation regarding changes in the world since 1960. Enjoy!

There is also an update to the original presentation.

You keep using that word....

If I might borrow TPM's video...

I especially like how, at around 4:45 left to play, it seems he gets confused whether to say "Petraeus" or "Betray-us".

But, on a slightly more serious note:

And tonight, our moral and strategic imperatives are one: We must help Iraq defeat those who threaten its future and also threaten ours....

Eight months ago, we adopted a new strategy to meet that objective, including a surge in U.S. forces that reached full strength in June. This week, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before Congress about how that strategy is progressing....

The premise of our strategy is that securing the Iraqi population is the foundation for all other progress....

Anbar province is a good example of how our strategy is working....

General Petraeus also recommends that in December we begin transitioning to the next phase of our strategy in Iraq.

I don't care how many times you keep using that word, it still does not mean what you think it means.

Nothing he talked about amounts to a "strategy" yet. Piling on more troops is not a "strategy", not even a "tactic". It's a relic of good old attrition warfare.

Some say the gains we are making in Iraq come too late. They are mistaken. It is never too late to deal a blow to al Qaeda. It is never too late to advance freedom. And it is never too late to support our troops in a fight they can win.

Sounds like he's making his excuses in advance on the off chance we ever catch bin Laden, or even if he just eventually dies of natural causes: "See? We finally got him, seventeen years later! That's not too late. Right? Let that be a lesson to the evildoers in the world! Freeance! Peance!"

On This Hallowed Fourth

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

- Declaration of Independence

What has become of this great Republic on which we stand? The skies alight with fire for our Founding Fathers, that the memory of Independence shall live on. But those lights fall on unseeing and blind eyes; for the Injustice of our leaders and their moral poverty diminishes every citizen, even those who have endeavored to secure their grand position with the blood and toil of their fellow Americans. No one is exempt from the vigilance of Liberty, not even those who would wish to purchase their freedoms at the cost of others. Some would say that they are tired of struggle, some that they will one day hope to purchase their own freedoms, others that they have the exact amount of freedoms that they wish for themselves. Is Liberty such a cherished gift that one must only reserve it for special occasion? Is it just another trinket, to be displayed in glass casing upon the mantelpiece, taken down only to awe acquaintances but otherwise left steadfastly in place to nobly collect dust? I would like to think that our precious national beacon is more than merely a dream in a fevered mind. Should not all people declare their Independence from government oppression, secrecy, tyranny?

And what of it that a person so endowed with such Liberty fears that they will commit the most heinous acts which will weigh heavy on their conscience? Our laws are written so that there are penalties for such crimes, and a normal person will abstain from the temptation of said depravity. For those who fear their own Liberty, there are many establishments other than our own government that can provide a needed shelter for a struggling conscience. What confusion arises that Liberty means both independence from the laws that govern the populace and the basic laws of common humanity? Does such a person feel that, if endowed with Liberty, he would act as a child deprived of sweets would, engorging himself beyond capacity? Why would one feel that Liberty is merely a treat to the deserving, and only in moderation, or that it would be a cover for all of the base impulses that a person might have? Liberty is a common meal, not an after-dinner compliment, and is the basis of a healthy and sensible political diet.

But what of the men and women in our employ, who grace the halls of our government? For they, too, should embrace Liberty, even at the cost of the hands of the moneyed few who would like the value of their impressive trinket to increase by ensuring that the demand of Liberty far exceeds the supply of it. These are the same few who would export a crate labeled "Liberty", sold on merit alone and without inspection, to a mostly unsuspecting populace who, once they opened the crate, would find the completely different product of "Injustice". For how else do the merchants of suffering package an inferior product? And if we allow grave injustices to permeate the layers of the hallowed halls of government -- as seems to be the case, as more comes to light -- we do a disservice not only to ourselves, but to our fellow World, with which we might have little in common, save for our common humanity. We should not be so blind as to not see that our hand extends out beyond our body; what we are so willing to do to ourselves, we impart to other places without knowing the exact consequences.

So as we eat, drink, and be merry on this fine Independence Day, let us remember that there are still the forces of Tyranny working fast to chip away at our freedoms, and that we all owe it to our ancestors to renew our interest in our own Liberty.

Promiscuous cheetahs!

Somewhat off the beaten path for this blog, but a few months ago, while reading a book, probably one of Dawkins' more biology/genetics books, it popped into my head that, given that cheetahs had passed through a severe population bottleneck a long time ago, I would guess that they would probably be less choosy about their mates than they had been before the bottleneck. My thinking was, with so few potential partners around, those who were still picky would be less likely to meet up with another cheetah up to their standards, and therefore less likely to bear a litter that season. So you might end up with, well, promiscuous cheetahs:

For female cheetahs in the Serengeti, the call of the wild is just too hard to resist as new research shows nearly half of their litters are made up of cubs with different fathers.

And while the serial infidelities of the females does ensure a broader genetic mix to help the survival of the endangered species, it comes at a cost, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said on Wednesday.

Chalk up another one for evolution!

Well, technically, it isn't exactly the effect I was predicting. There's a distinction between pickiness and faithfulness, after all. But I do think it connects rather well, and could be explained in much the same manner.

Reasons for voting against

My take on why Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama decided to vote against the war funding bill, despite some prior ambiguity:

It certainly seems apparent that President Bush is hoping to just wear out the clock on Iraq, and be able to pass the problem on to the next President. I suspect people at the GOP might even be expecting the next President to be a Democrat, and plan accordingly, presenting whoever wins with a "poison pill" writ large, or a flaming bag of dog turd on their doorstep, if you prefer that metaphor. Whichever reasoning they might follow, they don't want to pull out a significant number of troops before the next election at the very least, almost as certainly before the next inauguration.

Because whenever we do start pulling out, yes, there will almost certainly be a bloodbath. And it won't look good for whoever's running things at the time. But it's going to happen sooner or later. Why not just put it off for a year or two, and who cares about the extra casualties in the interim? And maybe by then a Democrat can take the blame; they're probably hoping that that might help them recapture the Presidency in 2012 (assuming a Democrat wins in 2008), and Congress in 2010.

So the Senators might be looking at this, and thinking, if they are successful in their respective bids, that they're the ones who will be stuck holding the bag. And even if they don't win, either in the primaries or in the general election, Obama will be up for re-election in 2010, and Clinton in 2012. So they would have good reason for wanting to get it over with sometime before 2009.

Submitted (almost) without comment

Carter: Anti-Bush remarks 'careless or misinterpreted'

Deputy White House press secretary Tony Fratto, with Bush at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, said Monday: "I think it just highlights the importance of being careful in choosing your words. I'll just leave it at that."

Perhaps Fratto should have chosen his words more carefully.

Parsing, parsing, parsing

It's not so much that I like parsing and splitting hairs so finely (though I confess I do), as that with this crew in the Administration, they force you to, in order to figure out what they're really saying and meaning. From yesterday's White House press briefing (via Glenn Greenwald):

Q But you had the Acting Attorney General at the time saying, in regards to what Inspectors General -- the acting -- chief law enforcement officer in the country is saying in 2004, I've got problems with this, and then you've got the Chief of Staff and the Counsel, Alberto Gonzales at the time, going -- and according to James Comey, they were trying to take advantage of a sick man who was in intensive care.

MR. SNOW: Trying to take advantage of a sick man -- because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn't work?

Note that this response is coming from Press Secretary Tony Snow, of whom Wikipedia summarizes:

On 2007 March 27, the White House announced that the [abdominal] growth was cancerous and had metastasized. ^[6][7][8] In Snow's absence, the press briefings began to be covered by Deputy Dana Perino. On April 21, 2007, Snow made an appearance at the annual White House Correspondent's Association Dinner, where he introduced a joking tape by David Letterman. Snow returned to work on April 30, 2007.

Funny how a little thing like surgery can knock you out for a day or two, isn't it, Tony? Ha, ha. What's that? A whole month and then some? Gee, why were you slacking off for so long?

Added: Also, for the record, it was Ashcroft's gall bladder, not his appendix, that he was in for.

Q Yes, "I was very upset, I was angry." He was in intensive care at GW. "I thought I had just witnessed an effort" --

MR. SNOW: I --

Q -- let me just tell you -- "I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man." Okay? Did any White House officials come and try to take advantage of you -- I mean, that's really not applicable in terms of this.

MR. SNOW: You know what, Ed --

Q They were trying to take advantage of him, according to James Comey.

MR. SNOW: Ed, I'm just telling you, I don't know anything about the conversations. I've also told you the relevant thing, which is, you wanted to ask from a substantive point of view, were there protections in terms of the terrorist surveillance program -- the answer is yes. It had multiple layers of review, both within the Department of Justice and the National Security Agency. Jim Comey can talk about whatever reservations he may have had, but the fact is that there were strong protections in there....

And what of the fact that Attorney General Gonzales almost flatly denied (with weasel words) that anyone within the Department of Justice had any such reservations, back in February of 2006? (via Think Progress' Peter Swire)

SCHUMER: I concede all those points. Let me ask you about some specific reports.

It's been reported by multiple news outlets that the former number two man in the Justice Department, the premier terrorism prosecutor, Jim Comey, expressed grave reservations about the NSA program and at least once refused to give it his blessing. Is that true?

GONZALES: Senator, here's the response that I feel that I can give with respect to recent speculation or stories about disagreements.

There has not been any serious disagreement -- and I think this is accurate -- there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations which I cannot get into.

[LH: You can't get into the disagreements, the other matters, or the operations? I wish that sentence made clear to which object the clause applied. See amphiboly at the Fallacy Files.]

I will also say...

SCHUMER: But there was some -- I'm sorry to cut you off -- but there was some dissent within the administration. And Jim Comey did express, at some point -- that's all I asked you -- some reservations.

GONZALES: The point I want to make is that, to my knowledge, none of the reservations dealt with the program that we're talking about today. They dealt with operational capabilities that we're not talking about today.

[LH: It seems to make some sense, if Comey rushed to the hospital over some other "program" than the Terrorist Surveillance Program per se.

SCHUMER: I want to ask you, again, about -- we have limited time.

GONZALES: Yes, sir.

SCHUMER: It's also been reported that the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, respected lawyer and professor at Harvard Law School, expressed reservations about the program. Is that true?

GONZALES: Senator, rather than going individual by individual, let me just say that I think the differing views that have been the subject of some of these stories did not deal with the program that I'm here testifying about today.

SCHUMER: But you were telling us that none of these people expressed any reservations about the ultimate program, is that right?

GONZALES: Senator, I want to be very careful here, because, of course, I'm here only testifying about what the president has confirmed.

And with respect to what the president has confirmed, I do not believe that these DOJ officials that you're identifying had concerns about this program.

SCHUMER: There are other reports, I'm sorry to -- you're not giving me a yes-or-no answer here. I understand that.

Newsweek reported that several Department of Justice lawyers were so concerned about the legal basis for the NSA program that they went so far as to line up private lawyers. Do you know if that's true?

GONZALES: I do not know if that's true.

SCHUMER: Now, let me just ask you a question here.

You mentioned earlier that you had no problem with Attorney General Ashcroft, someone else -- I didn't want to ask you about him; he's your predecessor -- people have said have doubts. But you said that you had no problem with him coming before this committee and testifying when Senator Specter asked, is that right?

Technology Keeps Getting Better

You know, I had to read The Rude Pundit's post twice because I didn't understand what he was saying and so mad about...until I realized that car contained a living GW Bush and NOT a cardboard cutout. Although both pictures look like it, the one where the worker isn't smiling certainly looks more cartoonish and one dimensional than the other. So when did they start developing cameras that could capture the essence of your soul?

im in ur briges....

Remember, people of America, the only thing we have to fear i—Oh my God! Is that a stoplight? It could be hiding a bomb!!

Seriously, though, are we becoming such a nation of imbeciles that not only do we confuse a little circuitry with a bomb, but then we have to blame all the fuss on the people who left the circuitry around? Even aside from the fact that it should have been obvious to anybody getting close enough to suspect that these were bombs, that they weren't, what about all the bomb-sniffing dogs and equipment we keep hearing about? If they couldn't establish that these weren't bombs within, I think, about two hours, are they really that useful?

Self-quote of the day

The opposite of "natural" is "civilized".

(With respect to rhetoric sometimes pushed by people claiming that some behaviour, usually something "un-Christian", is also "unnatural".)

Welcome, Komrads!

Per the New York Times:

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts. It suggests that the administration still has ways to exert its power after the takeover of Congress by the Democrats.

The White House said the executive order was not meant to rein in any one agency. But business executives and consumer advocates said the administration was particularly concerned about rules and guidance issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Political officers, anyone? Could they be much more obvious about it?

Don't turn around, oh oh
Der Kommissar's in town, oh oh
And if he talks to you
And you don't know why
You say your life
Is gonna make you die...

Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?

He's at it again

VP Cheney was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer Wednesday. It's a pretty interesting interview overall, and the Vice President goes rather unhinged for a while. But I couldn't help noticing that one particular phrase popped up yet again (emphasis added):

BLITZER: The criticism is that you took your eye off the ball by going into Iraq and in effect reducing the focus of attention on al Qaeda and bin Laden.

CHENEY: It's just not true. I've heard that charge -- it's simply not true, Wolf. The fact of the matter is we can do more than one thing at a time and we have. And we've been very successful with going after al Qaeda. They're still out there, they're still a formidable force. But they're not nearly as formidable as they once were, in terms of numbers and so forth.

That reminded me of these hoary chestnuts I dug up from an old post. I guess since it had been almost a year, it was time to revisit and revise.

"It's important, always, to work to make sure you get information out like this as quickly as possible," McClellan said. "But it's also important to make sure that the first priority is focused where it should be...."

"I can't let this comment stand," Mr. Bush shot back, telling Ms. Albright and the rare assembly of her colleagues, who reached back to the Kennedy White House, that his administration "can do more than one thing at a time...."

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I really don't because-- and I know we can do more than one thing at a time. We have got special operators and capable intelligence folks on the hunt all the time....

Gee, you'd almost think they were a bit touchy and nervous about their ability to do more than one thing at a time, wouldn't you? Nah, that's just crazy unhinged Bush Derangement Syndrome talking.