What Ted Turner sold was the soul of his baby.

12/30 Mark Kleiman:

The idea that we need to protect our privacy even in the face of the terrorist threat is almost certainly restricted to a minority, though a minority that includes almost everyone you know. So if the question is framed in terms of security v. privacy or liberty, it’s a losing issue for the Democrats, just as Mickey Kaus and Glenn Reynolds hope it will be.

But the idea that the President should obey the law enjoys very widespread support. That’s the frame Democrats, and friends of civil liberty, should try to put around this issue. Just keep repeating “a government of laws, not of men.”

I prefer: “the same laws that have always protected Americans from illegal government actions.”

In Iraq, as in America, the wealthiest get wealthier, the oil barons rule, and backroom deals along with the freedom to lie are paramount for the oil aristocracy.

Finally, we’ve succeeded in bringing a complete dishonestocracy to Iraq.

Today should have been my brother, Matt’s, fiftieth birthday. But I lost him and my older brother, Tom, last summer. Which leaves my brother Mark. And the kid has his head on straight; consider his commentary in a WaPo blog:

What is a war? In the past, war was fought between geographic entities (countries) where, once one country’s leaders surrendered, the war was over, and occupation takes place, at which time rules of engagement between the occupier and occupied change and resistors to the occupation are treated as criminals and not enemies of the state.

How does this work in the case of a (now) stateless group?

The act that the President claims his authorization for the NSA warrantless wiretapping is the Joint Resolution Authorizing the Use of Force Against Terrorists, passed by the Senate and House of Representatives on Sept. 14, 2001. The act states:

(a) That the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

The first question is who are the “nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons”? Is there a list? Is that list static, or can he, unilaterally add to it whenever he chooses? Could he add any organization he chooses, without Congressional authorization (say the ACLU)?

And just when is the war over? When all the leaders are captured? (Maybe that’s why Bin Laden, miraculously, escaped capture at Tora Bora.) Until all members of the group are captured (impossible to do, how would one know)? Until the President determines it is over (why anyone would give up the unlimited powers that the President claims to have is unclear to me)? Until Congress declares the war over? Could Congress act unilaterally to end the war? Could the President put Congress on the list of the organizations who are aiding the terrorists?

It seems to me that September 14 resolution is too broad, too vague, and too dangerous in putting too much discretion in any one person. This is a “state of war” that is eternal in scope. There is no end possible.

If the President has the power he claims to bypass courts and Congress, the sound you hear is all of your civil rights being flushed down the drain. For all time.

Brother, testify.

In 2006, may we all find relief from the pains and insults of the past five years, the degradation of democracy from a cabal of industrialist monarchists who thrive on secrecy, intimidation and who consider the Constitution to be a dead document instead of the law.

It is the time Jefferson anticipated, when a second revolution must take place, to restore real democracy to the United States. Does it require violence? Not necessarily. That will have to depend on the enemy of the people of this republic. If the new Redcoats commit enough violence towards us, it’s simple logic to understand that force must meet force for our own survival.

As Lincoln said, ours is a government of, by, and for the people. Any officials who usurp the will of the people, and:

a) continue to pay lip service to folks like the victims of Katrina, providing window dressing relief while profiteering from their pain;

b) spy on the phone conversations and library records of peaceful groups and individuals with zero ties to terrorism and violence;

c) rob the public treasury to enrich their cronies and the ultra wealthy while putting the majority in financial bondage to the Chinese, Saudi Arabian and other major global money lenders;

d) damage our foreign intelligence apparatus by outing covert agents and attacking the families of whistleblowers and truth speakers;

e) impose theocratic designs upon the operations of a lawful secular government with selective morality mandated to suit their needs instead of the best interests of the nation as a whole;

f) demonstrate that foulmouthed cursers, bullies, chickenhawks, and profiteers will rule us at the expense of troop lives, civilian lives, and the diplomatic and civilized approaches to problem resolutions; and

g) otherwise continue to engage in barbaric practices formerly ascribed to vicious dictators, outside the bounds of international treaties and constitutional law,

then they need to be removed from office through all legal means.

And if the harm to our nation and the majority of its people increases in response, or the legal avenues are blocked to deny justice and inflict violence upon resisters of their illegal, immoral and unAmerican acts, then, as Americans, we will have no recourse left but to resort to civil disobedience, which may include massive national work stoppages, peaceful demonstrations and mobilizations designed to disrupt illegal government activities.

And if the majority is thwarted and further damaged by the jackboots of tyrants? Well, then, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian evocations of the popular will shall have to prevail. Again, will violence be necessary? In the defense of life itself, of course. But my fervent belief is that peaceful means will suffice against moronic tyrants like these.

From the folks of the American Street, we wish you a healthy, prosperous and friend-filled 2006. And may the peaceful and historic revolution of real American patriots restore justice and freedom to our land once again.

There is a fascinating piece in the WaPo profiling the President’s favorite activity, brush clearing. Buried in there is a fascinating milestone that, as of this day, New Year’s Eve of 2005, less than five years into the presidency, the President has spent an inconceivable 365 days (not counting vacations in other locales such as Kennebunkport) on vacation at his Crawford ranch.

I learned something new: the extent to which the President’s activity requires the use of power tools, notably the chain saw, because a lot of the “brush” is nascent cedar and mesquite trees. The article notes that the President has dragooned staff members to help him clear brush (though not yet Condi Rice… would you want to be anywhere near that woman and a chain saw?) but not any foreign dignitaries (yet).

While a lot of this has to do with Karl Rove’s image making (”manly Texan works ranch with own two hands”, as opposed, of course, to, say, Connecticut born, prep-school and Ivy League attending spoiled rich boy dodges own job by pretending to be landscaper…
but hey, Democrats can’t seem to get any message out there, let alone an effective one), I get the feeling that Bush genuinely likes the activity. Which makes sense: what juvenile delinquent hasn’t craved the opportunity to grab power tools and chop down living things?

Well, no matter. We have three more years and three more New Year’s Eves to look forward to with Il Presidente in a position to assert his Divine Right as Monarch; perhaps the President can bring those vacation numbers up to maybe two full years by the time he leaves office… Given the alternative (Bush implementing any of his actual policies), I say to the brush: “bring it on!” The more time the President spends at his favorite activity over the next three years… the better.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Take your pick:

1) It’s not about the oil.

2) The US is a bastion of liberty with the highest respect for human rights.

3) God talks to me and directs my actions.

4) Any resemblance of Boss Hogg Cheney, Roscoe Bush, Daisy Duke Rice and Cooter Libby to a real sitcom called The Hazard of Dicks is purely coincidental.

Kevin Drum asks:

What is �€˜wartime�€™? Is George Bush really a �€˜wartime president,�€™ as he’s so fond of calling himself? Conservatives take it for granted that he is, while liberals tend to avoid the subject entirely for fear of being thought unserious about the War on Terror. But it’s something that ought be brought up and discussed openly.�€�

When we look back at the George W. Bush presidency, the word “wartime” will have had a suspicious tinge to it, just like the legitimacy of his election to the presidency in 2000 will always have an overshadowing of fraudulence. Learning about these domestic wiretaps has only increased the public’s already skeptical (and ever-declining) view of the level of ethics and honesty in the government under Bush.

NYT columnist Paul Krugman [nytimes.com] put it this way:

“One way or another, the Bush administration will stagger on for three more years. But its essential fraudulence stands exposed, and it’s hard to see how that exposure can be undone.

What do I mean by essential fraudulence? Basically, I mean the way an administration with an almost unbroken record of policy failure has nonetheless achieved political dominance through a carefully cultivated set of myths. The record of policy failure is truly remarkable. It sometimes seems as if President Bush and Mr. Cheney are Midases in reverse: everything they touch - from Iraq reconstruction to hurricane relief, from prescription drug coverage to the pursuit of Osama - turns to crud…

I hear right-leaning ideologues lately telling us to forget how the war was begun - and to look ahead. In other words, “don’t look back.” And yet, how can we forget that this war was, when all was said and done, completely unnecessary? How can we forget that fact when we hear Bush calling himself a “wartime president” every time he makes excuses for acting as if he’s entitled to unchecked power - like a monarch or a dictator?

David Brooks tells us that

“…the Democratic Party’s loudest voices are in the grip of passions that render them untrustworthy…”

The “passions” of which he speaks revolve around the proven failures of truth - the bona fide trust-damaging acts of this “war president,” in whom a nation NEEDS to trust, because it is paramount in a democracy to trust a commander in chief. It’s all about sending our own sons and daughters to war - or deciding to risk our own lives under a “war president” whose integrity is all-important. We trust with the blood of our own families - the flesh of our flesh. I can’t imagine anything greater about which to get passionate. How about you?

“Kirkuk is Kurdistan; it does not belong to the Arabs,” Hamid Afandi, the minister of Peshmerga for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two major Kurdish groups, said in an interview at his office in the Kurdish city of Irbil. “If we can resolve this by talking, fine, but if not, then we will resolve it by fighting.”

- Kurds in Iraqi Army Proclaim Loyalty to Militia
By Tom Lasseter, Knight Ridder Newspapers

Read the quote above.
Note once again - closely - that it is a statement from a top representative of the Peshmerga for the Kurdistan Democratic party of Iraq. Note that he is threatening violence if his party doesn’t get its way in negotiations concerning the city of Kirkuk.

“Barbour Griffith & Rogers, was retained by the Kurdistan Democratic Party in July 2004 “to ensure that Iraqi Kurdistan maintains its autonomy from Baghdad in the new Iraq Government, and for the return of oil-rich Kirkuk — which Saddam Hussein had ‘Arabized’ as the capital of the region — to Kurdistan.”

Now read this statement from Turkish columnist Tulin Daloglu that appeared in the Washington Times on December 27:

Robert Blackwill, who served as deputy national security adviser and presidential envoy to Iraq during first Bush administration, sounded surprised at a recent Council of Foreign Relations event when he acknowledged the fact that “[M]ost of the economic development that’s happening in Kurdish Iraq is coming across the Turkish border.” He may be surprised because the lobbying firm he heads, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, was retained by the Kurdistan Democratic Party in July 2004 “to ensure that Iraqi Kurdistan maintains its autonomy from Baghdad in the new Iraq Government, and for the return of oil-rich Kirkuk — which Saddam Hussein had ‘Arabized’ as the capital of the region — to Kurdistan.”

A Washington, D.C . lobbyist is representing the Kurdistan Democratic party of Iraq to ensure that Kirkuk is returned to Kurdistan?!
Is that true?
How far does that representation go?
Who is this lobbyist firm influencing in Congress?
What does it have to do with the decisions that our Representatives make about the war in Iraq?
Is this lobbyist involvement resulting (directly or indirectly) in any degree of violence, international strain, or decisions made about our American troops in the Kirkuk area?
When does any of this become a conflict of national interest?

I’d really like to know.

Read more from Tom Lasseter’s Knight Ridder piece to understand how the political influence in Northern Iraq is working against U.S. Military efforts:

American military officials have said they’re trying to get a broader mix of sects in the Iraqi units. However, Col. Talib Naji, a Kurd serving in the Iraqi army on the edge of Kirkuk, said he would resist any attempts to dilute the Kurdish presence in his brigade. “The Ministry of Defense recently sent me 150 Arab soldiers from the south,” Naji said. “After two weeks of service, we sent them away.

The Barbour Griffith & Rogers International website states:

BGR International (BGRI) specializes in lobbying and communications strategies for governments and businesses seeking assistance in dealing with the often complex U.S. political and business decision-making processes; in promoting international business development and market penetration; in planning political and media campaigns, including public relations, message development, research polling, and advertising; and in analyzing the effects of major foreign policy trends. Success in international politics and business requires knowing the governmental and business decision-makers in Washington and in world capitals, as well as an appreciation of the political, economic, security, cultural and historic forces that shape their decisions.

An article titled Kurds Try To Invest 14 Tons of Cash was posted in the Financial Times over a year ago, on December 10th, 2004 - and it only provides a vague answer as to what this lobbyist’s representation is all about:

A Washington-based lobbying firm with strong ties to the US Republican party has been in talks with international banks to facilitate the placing by the Iraqi Kurds of more than half a billion dollars in cash. The money is part of $1.4bn in Iraqi oil revenues paid in cash by the US-led occupation authority to the Kurds in June 2004, just days before it handed power to an interim Iraqi government.

Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, a firm founded by two senior aides of President George H.W. Bush and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, is representing the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Washington. Robert Blackwill, until last month White House chief adviser on Iraq, has also joined the firm.

Ed Rogers, a founding partner, confirmed the firm was working for the Kurds but said it was not managing any money for them. “Know that BGR has no role in managing investments for the Kurds and the only comment about our role that we can make is what is listed in our foreign agent registration filing,” he wrote in an e-mail.

People familiar with the matter say that the firm has made inquiries about investing the cash, which is currently held at a Kurdish bank, in Switzerland. However, the efforts have been delayed as banks make checks on the provenance of the cash….A spokesman for the Kurdish Regional Government said the payment was part of $4.5bn in funds it claims the UN owes the region as part of the now defunct oil-for-food programme.

The United States is at war in Iraq today, and it seems that a Washington DC lobbyist firm is reaching into extremely dangerous territory in professionally assisting a foreign power with a political aim such as fighting for the powderkeg known as Kirkuk. The relationship between the high-powered lobbyists of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers and the Bush administration is politically incestuous. The timing of taking on the Kurdistan Democratic party of Iraq as a new client in July 2004 - when just the month before, June 2004, $1.4bn in Iraqi oil revenues was paid to the Kurds in cold hard cash by the US-led occupation authority raises a lot of questions. If these lobbyists aren’t involved in managing Kurdistan investments, what are they doing - and is what they are doing ethical and/or patriotic? Should this lobbyist firm be assisting a foreign political faction that is directly involved in war-time negotiations when our own troops are dying - and while a democratic settlement for a central government in Iraq is being sought by our own government?

There is no need to yell and scream. No need to be strident and shrill. What is needed is that conservatives learn their proper role.

Now by conservative, I mean people who are not creative, but who are, in the main, reactionary.
In America, it has long been the case that the creative class tended toward liberality, since that is, in large part, what enables them to be creative. Creativity is a generative and generous act.

But many of those who are not creative make the mistake of becoming, or being, reactive, as if reactivity balanced creativity. But this is not the proper order. The proper thing for the non-creatives to do is to be receptive, not reactive. Creativity is the yang, receptivity is the yin.

All of life is infused with both characteristics. No one is completely one way or the other. There are simply aptitudes and orientations.

America is prevented from evolving naturally by this miscalculation. Instead of great ideas being nurtured and developed by those who would be receptive, instead they are reacted against, shot down, and the balloon bursts…if it is ever given wind in the first place.

The second mistake of the reactives is that reaction is, to the extent that it is mechanical, the antonym of consciousness. As DH Lawrence once wrote: “Death is not evil. Evil is mechanical.”
And so it is with mechanical humanity — if the oxymoron hasn’t already smacked you on the face or fundament. And mechanicality is a state against which one must ever struggle, as modernity itself seems to lull one into its hypnotic laze. (Here laze is meant to indicate the gestalt of laziness…and to not neologize might be a glaring example of said laze.)

Allied with this unconscious, mechanical reactionariness are the onion layers of delusion (Maya) caused by the buffers from reality caked on with each ego-centered supposition, as if every knucklehead were indeed the actual center of the universe.

Creatives, for their part, need to understand that a gift is a gift, and that gifts can be taken away if not stewarded with proper care. Midwiving reactives into receptives may be a role you have to take up. Alas, friends are better than foe. Make it all worthwhile.

Americans are growing weary of the ululation, the pounding fists, the adolescent bravado. Fix the most basic structures, and the rest will become much easier to attend.

These things and more have been uttered under the influence of Anonymoses, uncle of all blogs, and may not be taken as medicine. If conditions persist, consult your physicist.

It looks like school was in on Meet the Press as Ted Koppel held forth about war in the Persian Gulf. Ted’s a close friend of Kissinger, you see, and he obviously feels like he’s learned a lot from the old murderous master of geopolitik. Allow Ted to explain the region to you - and, for the purposes of this explanation, you’ll have to think of the people who live there as mannequins or fleas or something that you wouldn’t mind burning and/or crushing to death:

As long as we had the shah of Iran there, he was our surrogate. In fact, you may remember the Nixon policy was that the shah would be our surrogate in the Persian Gulf. When the shah was overthrown, we shifted our chips onto the Saudi board, and then it became the House of Saud that became our representative. The Saudis are, indeed, troubled. The royal family of Saudi Arabia is in deep trouble. Therefore, we need to have a stable Iraq in order to guarantee a stable Persian Gulf, and the name of that game is oil. Nobody talks about that….

Thank you Professor Ted. Why didn’t we get it before now? That That shah thing was brilliant - worked out great for us. And it’s a good think he doesn’t oversimplify the whole U.S.-Saudi relationship, which apparently sprung fully formed from the desert sand in 1953.

Then Koppel, still in half-assed analysis mode, rushes on to make his big point, which the righties must have missed when the memo to decry him went out: He must call a plan to withdraw precipitously for political purposes, a plan the Dems don’t have and never proposed, “cheap.” It’s his Point: (emph mine)

But the point–the one issue I would add, Tim, is the mousetrap that is waiting for the Democrats is if they do not publicly acknowledge that U.S. national interest is just fundamentally involved in a stable Iraq and a stable Persian Gulf, if they simply come after the Republicans, and take the cheap shots on the war, and say, “You gotta bring the troops home at all costs,” they might even win the election, but if they win the election, they’re going to find themselves confronting the same issues of national interest that the Republicans are facing right now. The simple fact of the matter is it is in America’s national interest that there be stability in the Persian Gulf, and if we precipitously pull the troops out of that area now, there’ll be hell to pay.

When will bobbleheads learn to keep to themselves their opinions on matters they don’t understand, or at least have no interest in explaining completely? We’ve got to stop pointing cameras and bright lights in their direction.

In a very good post about the evident need for the aristocracy to keep tabs on the middle class, Alt Hippo asks the $64,000 question of bloggers:

I’ll leave you with this question: have you ever written a post, but then edited it down or deleted it, because you were afraid of who might be listening in?

The same question goes for anyone who comments on blogs or writes emails. I can safely say that I’ve modified something I’ve written in all three cases for fear of making it on some watchlist. Starting with Ari Fleischer’s infamous comment about all Americans needing to “watch what they say” and “what they do” it was pretty hard not to take him at his word and do just that. Now there’s the NSA scandal breaking with an undisclosed list of domestic targets at the center of an illegal and unconstitutional spy operation that’s been operating for almost five years.

I’ve edited and deleted posts at my blog and have done the same with comments at other blogs. About three years ago I told an email correspondant in France that given the current repressive climate in the United States, I considered communicating with him to be dangerous and would have to stop. At the time I felt a little bit silly for doing that; this was, after all, America. Now, not so much.

So what about you? Do you write with the idea that Big Brother is looking over your shoulder?

In the aftermath of September 11 –

Surveillance applications poured in. A flood of new FBI agents, not trained in FISA law, added another complication. It was critical that the government satisfy the FISA law’s “probable cause” requirement that the target was a foreign agent.

“You’d have an FBI agent screaming, ‘I need this warrant and I need it now,’” Lesemann recalled recently. “He’s screaming, ‘People will die unless you go to court.’ Or an agent would say, ‘This is a bad person, we need to move on this,’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, this is a bad person, but there’s no ‘foreign power’ here.’”

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Atrios:

The television commercials are attention-grabbing: Newly found Iraqi documents show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including anthrax and mustard gas, and had “extensive ties” to al Qaeda. The discoveries are being covered up by those “willing to undermine support for the war on terrorism to selfishly advance their shameless political ambitions.”

The hard-hitting spots are part of a recent public-relations barrage…

…begun by a trio of supposedly media-savvy Republicans. They include Kaloogian, whose brief tenure as a California assemblyman has been followed with few successes of note. He tried to block the showing of Fahrenheit 9/11 and failed, but succeeded in blocking the showing of a Reagan miniseries that all accounts indicate was not flattering but also was plain old badly done tv. So he protected Reagan’s reputation but saved us all from some lousy soap opera.

He also backed John Bolton, who Bush had to use the backdoor entrance to get him in place, and supported Gitmo’s continued operation, but in all these efforts of his or the organization, all they’ve succeeded is drawing media attention, not swaying large numbers of Americans to support these positions.

The group’s name, Move America Forward, seems to mimic the more successful Progress For America in both its name and tactics. But by claiming distance from the White House and Republican Party, they can push their pro-Bush agenda while coyly claiming independence.

Radio commentator Melanie Morgan has been equally ineffective, despite recovering from a gambling addiction and her child-neglecting days.

Their principal claim to fame rests on the successful effort to recall Gray Davis, but Davis was as popular as a fart in an iron lung before their campaign started.

The third member of this underillustrious trio is one Sal Russo, a California political operative since before Reagan was governor. He doesn’t even rate high marks from within his GOP ranks, where he’s viewed as being ineffective at anything except enriching himself, sometimes via fraud.

Nobody’s measured the impact of their hard-hitting commercials, but it’s fairly predictable that they’ll only preach to the choir. After all, Bush - who I predicted a year ago would announce sizable troop reductions by Christmas - couldn’t call for more than the removal of the extra troops brought in specifically for this month’s elections. The insurgency has succeeded in changing his plans to a less politically palatable minimalist withdrawal plan, so they’ll ultimately control the Iraq agenda more than Bush will and more than this fund-sapping trio will.

Ultimately, they can say Saddam had WMDs all they want but since Bush, the UN and the GOP have all conceded the WMDs did not exist, they won’t succeed. Unless their hidden motive is to launch a war with Syria for reasons equally spurious as the ones used against Iraq. Yet even there, with Americans tired of the lying, their chances are slim.

I’d keep my eye on other organizations that will likely emerge this year because these nimrods are poor imitators of real operators like Karl Rove, C. Boyden Gray and Brent Bozell.