bolo boffin

Exegesis of a Facebook Status War

2009-07-23T02:27:00.005-05:00

Note: the following is a note from my Facebook page. I'm reproducing it here just in case Facebook decides to take it down or whatnot.

And now (8/10/09) I'm removing the name (even though the idiot was happy to use his own name when posting this trash) because it's showing up on the first page of a Google search of his name plus his town, and there's no point in hurting his business. And maybe the nimrod will move on. ***sigh***

Some of you may be wondering about the flamewar that just happened on my most recent Facebook status. I thought all of you deserved an explanation for it.

So here I was, minding my own business. Most of the time I'm on my Twitter account, @boloboffin, where it's been a great night watching C-Span, doing this and that. Michelle Bachmann was on the House floor after the Obama press conference, and she's always good for a laugh. So nice night, overall.

And @Atrios, the blogger behind Eschaton, tweets that he's never been arrested trying to enter his house. He's referring, of course, to the Harvard professor who forgot his key in Cambridge, managed to get into his house, and then got arrested by the cops.

I realize I can't quite tweet that, because I've never owned a house to call mine. I've always rented, but I am NOTORIOUS for leaving my keys behind. And in my many attempts to enter my residence or my car, I have never, ever suffered the same fate as Henry Louis Gates.

And I am apt to get mouthy.

So I tweet this message:

Joseph Nobles has never owned a house to be arrested trying to enter
23 minutes ago · Comment · LikeUnlike · via Selective Twitter · follow @boloboffin

And as you can see, I also used the Selective Twitter application here at Facebook to update my Facebook status as well. I don't usually do that, because I resist displaying my political side here. And for those of you saying, "He's resisting? Dude's always being political!", well, yes, I truly am holding back. I kid you not.

Well, five minutes later, the following pops up as a comment.

Alex Jones
I have found that giving cops lip transcends all racial and gender barriers.
18 minutes ago · Delete

Now I don't know Alex Jones (fake name) from Adam. He's a friend of a friend, and we were commenting together on that friend's page, and we Friended through Facebook for whatever reason and life progressed.

And I realize that my status has popped up on his feed. That's out of my control, I guess. I don't know that I've ever seen a status of his pop up on mine, though. I don't know how that algorithm works here at Facebook - it's a mystery to me how some will pop up and some won't. People I'm actually interested in here about skate on by at times. Ah, well.

And I suppose that what I've written might be confusing. Perhaps this person doesn't realize that my opinions are quite, quite liberal and that I support Mr. Gates completely in this matter.

And, like I say, I try to keep my politics out of people's faces here. If people want it, well, I'm happy to provide it - like I say, I Twitter and have even been known to blog at Bolo Boffin. And then if I do post at somebody's Facebook page, it's going to be family who have to put up with me even if I hack them off.

Because the way I figure it, Facebook is an unusual creature, but people should understand that your profile is your space. You don't go onto someone's space and hack them off intentionally. I am reminded of a friend of mine here in Dallas who I teased about a recent tattoo he'd added. Personally I like tattoos (thought I don't have one) and I like this guy a lot. But he took it wrong, deleted the comments, and let me know really quick that he didn't appreciate it, whereupon I hastened to apologize and let him know my true feelings on the subject. And he was right to do what he did. I was insulting him in his space as he saw it. We got that straightened out because I understood why he felt the way he did.

So I thought, "I'll make it clear which side of the issue I come down on. Alex will certainly see that he's being invasive. And we'll see what happens from there."

Joseph Nobles
I've found that showing cops my ID w/ correct address generally establishes my right to be in my domicile
13 minutes ago · Delete

Alex Jones
It's just when you show them your id while yelling...Is it because I'm a white man? Who are you? Get the hell out of my house...the white man has had it with the rousting...what is your name? I will own you...you whitey hater.
11 minutes ago · Delete

Mr. Jones' description of the events surrounding Prof. Gates' arrest are factually inaccurate. Gates did give the officer a little lip, but then did show his ID with correct address. At this point it is clear to the officer that Prof. Gates is in his house, that there was no breaking and entering.

And Gates began to ask for his name and badge number.

Which the officer refused to provide. And Gates followed the officer as he left the house. He found the officer outside with other police officers, and demanded the man's badge number and name again.

And THAT is when he was arrested for being disorderly.

If he had been white, people like Alex Jones would have been outraged. Gates was in HIS house. Gates was asking a police officer for his name and badge number, something to which he was entitled.

But fine outstanding white Southern gentlemen from Birmingham, Alabama like Alex Jones see things a little differently when African-American men get mouthy. That will never do.

And as you can see, Alex clearly doesn't care that he's soiling my wall with his filth.

Joseph Nobles
I fucking dare you to produce a link with that transcript. The man was in his house, you ignorant cracker.
9 minutes ago · Delete

Alex Jones
Well, I might have resorted to some hyperbole :-)
8 minutes ago · Delete

Alex Jones
And yes, I did see him on Black in America 2 and he did establish that there was some exchange.
7 minutes ago · Delete

To tell the truth, that surprised me at the time. I didn't think, "Alex's a happy troll: he's gotten his reaction and he's bathing in it." I thought, "Oh, wait, maybe my anger's misplaced. Maybe he'll turn out to be reasonable and we'll get this straightened out." Because, after all, there was an exchange. Perhaps Alex will check into this, see that his take was a little off, apologize to me, I'll apologize to him, and we'll both be the better for it.

So I tried to figure out the next thing to say, and as I did, I began to figure out how I knew Alex Jones (I didn't), who he was (some director in Birmingham), who was our connection (a dear sweet friend, oh, I apologize to you for this, please don't get caught in the middle), etc. And finding out he had no idea who I was cinched it for me. Alex Jones was an idiot troll. I was right the first time.

So getting back to my profile, I find this:

Alex Jones
http://www.theroot.com/blogs/police/losing-your-cool-america

That may be true, but Gates broke two cardinal rules for success while Black in America (something Soledad O’Brien may not have time to cover in this month’s CNN special). Rule Number One: Don’t get angry. Rule Number Two: Don’t get angry when police are present. Case in point: The BOSTON GLOBE reported that the “normally-mild-mannered professor” become irate when, according to the police report, an officer suggested he come outside of his home to discuss the dispute. “Ya, I'll speak with your mama outside,” Gates allegedly said. When police asked for identification, the report says the professor became visibly upset and asked, “Why, because I'm a black man in America?''
4 minutes ago · Delete

Alex Jones
Point, Set, Match
3 minutes ago · Delete

I had asked rather rudely for Mr. Jones to provide a transcript showing his version of events to be basically correct. This is what he linked to.

Feel free to read it. I recommend the link highly. But as you can see, it does not confirm his version of events at all. In fact, Mr. Jones' link to this is quite cynically done. You see, The Root is an African-American webpage explaining exactly why Gates was arrested: he lost his cool, something African-Americans are not allowed to do with police officers, not even if they are just home from a long trip, feeling sick, and having to deal with a lost key. Henry Louis Gates lost his cool, and, bam, the handcuffs went on. The article is bitterly deriding the reasons for the arrest.

But Mr. Jones linked to this article because he exults in this bitterness. He's happy to know that the unspoken rules are still in place for African-Americans in America. Even with Barack Obama in the White House - no, especially because of Barack Obama, it is good for fine upstanding white Southern gentlemen from Birmingham, Alabama to discover that an African-American Harvard professor can still be arrested for getting angry with a police officer who refused to give his name and badge number, that this "uppity" black man can be arrested on the porch of his own house for such an offense.

Joseph Nobles
Oh, so you're a fucking LYING ignorant cracker. Welcome to my Block list, asshole.
2 minutes ago · Delete

And he's the only person on my Block list. Perhaps this note will net me a few more. That's fine. People more in sympathy with Mr. Jones' demonic frolicking can block me as well. Good riddance to them.

And... soapbox dismount.

Wired: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

2009-03-21T17:29:00.002-05:00

Probably the best article that I've read so far explaining how Wall Street got into the mess that it did:

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

I finally got what tranching is from this article, and the explanation of how Li's formula was used by the financial world to blind themselves to risk is stellar.

And the article isn't hard on Li at all. It's not like he's John Yoo, out there perverting the Constitution so Bush could play Jack Bauer. Even he warned against the shortcomings of his formula.

Something keeps bothering me about all of this.

The CDS and CDO markets grew together, feeding on each other. At the end of 2001, there was $920 billion in credit default swaps outstanding. By the end of 2007, that number had skyrocketed to more than $62 trillion. The CDO market, which stood at $275 billion in 2000, grew to $4.7 trillion by 2006.

Should this fact in and of itself be a red flag to people? How can two associated markets grow 6740% and 1710% respectively in five or six years and somebody not say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa," especially when the one growing 6740% is basically unregulated? Are there no adults that could see that and think, "What are those crazy kids doing over there?"

I'm thinking that, although the article didn't say it, Li's formula amounted to a dangerous procyclical effect in the markets. Procyclicality is bad news. It turbocharges the effects of the market. An example in the physical world: let's say the market is a roller coaster. The market goes up and down in the normal course of events, just like the roller coaster. Some markets are kiddie rides, and some are whacked-out scream machines. But you know the risks when you get on them.

Well, supposing that instead of seats on the little trains, the owners of the roller coaster attached contraptions that dangled bungee cords on either side of the little trains? Now every time you go up, you really go up, and when you go down, you're plummeting. That's procyclicality in action.

And now suppose some stupid teenagers with their pot and acid decide to leap from bungee cord to bungee cord, from roller coaster to roller coaster, maintaining that high as long as possible? "Whee! Whee! I'm never coming down! Whee!"

That essentially was our marketplace over the past few years, thanks to the jumbo-sizing of the credit default swap market. And then the the markets went down, and some people hit the pavement in rather ugly messes, and everyone else got the notion that being on a roller coaster dangling from bungee cords isn't such a hot thing to do, they threw the brakes.

And now the roller coasters are stopped, little trains are stuck in every place imaginable, and Geithner and Bernanke are climbing up, disentangling all of these people, getting them back down to the ground...

...and then refunding them the price of admission.

After all, we don't want to stifle innovative recreation park ride creation, now, do we?

Barney Frank Defends Against Idiotic Attacks

2009-03-19T12:21:00.001-05:00

As only Barney Frank can.

According to the Republicans' misty memories of the period before 2007, I allegedly singlehandedly blocked their determined efforts to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and my supposed intransigence literally caused the worldwide financial crisis.

Fortunately, we have tools to aid memory -- pencil and paper, word processing, transcripts, newspapers, and the Congressional record. And as described in the most reputable published sources, in 2005 I in fact worked together with my Republican colleague Michael Oxley, then Chairman of the Financial Services Committee, to write a bill to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We passed the bill out of committee with an overwhelming majority -- every Democrat voted in favor of the legislation. However, on the House floor the Republican leadership added a poison pill amendment, which would have prevented non-profit institutions with religious affiliations from receiving funds. I voted against the legislation in protest, though I continued to work with Mr. Oxley to encourage the Senate to pass a good bill. But these efforts were defeated because President Bush blocked further consideration of the legislation. In the words of Mr. Oxley, no flaming liberal, the Bush administration gave his efforts 'the one-finger salute.'

Lots more there, all with Frank's trademark humor. Good on you, Congressman!

Japanese Internment Camp Apologist Degrades Holocaust Warning

2009-03-19T12:18:00.001-05:00

Michelle Malkin made her mark defending America's use of internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II. She's gone on to screech and villify the left at every opportunity, even appearing to be the heir apparent on "The O'Reilly Factor" until even Bill had to kick her hatred and drama to the curb.

She's still got one of the top-viewed blogs on the Internet, though, and she's leading the charge against the Democrats over the AIG news. She's been instrumental in blaming Chris Dodd entirely for something he did at the behest of the Treasury Department, and then portrayed Dodd as spineless for knuckling under when it was only his relenting that ensured the Obama Adminstration did have a process to try and get that money back.

However, today she's finally found her vicious stride. Today the House Democratic plan for taxing the bonus recipients to get the money back comes under her fire, and her headline is a shocker:

First They Came For The AIG Bonuses

This is of course the bastardization of a famous quote from Martin Niemöller about the hideous inaction of the German people in the face of the Nazi threat.

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

Malkin's appropriation of this poem cheapens it, and all in service of protecting people who got cash even while their company tanked the world economy.

Get your bloody hands off Niemöller's poem, Ms. Malkin. Someone who's spent her life drowning out the people who dare speak up has enough sins to atone for.

The Dodd Mess

2009-03-18T19:17:00.003-05:00

Comes Chris Dodd to Hardball to explain how the February 11 language was put into the bill:

So, number one, Chris Dodd knew the language was going in during the House-Senate conference. His staff wrote it in.

Number two, it was at the insistence of Treasury who would otherwise have had the entire section taken out.

Number three, it was a senior administration official telling The New York Times on deep background that Dodd put the language in, while leaving out the Treasury's part in the matter. For what it's worth, Greenwald thinks it was Rahm.

Very depressing stuff to look through here. One of the few bright spots in this:

Still looks more and sounds more like a president than Bush ever did.

Greenwald on Dodd Smear: Obama's Fingerprints

2009-03-17T20:20:00.006-05:00

Glen Greenwald has pulled together the best presentation of this yet, and it's clear that the language exempting bonuses before February 11, 2009 in the stimulus legislation was put in at the behest of the Obama administration.

And the smear against Dodd is also coming from the White House:

Yet now, the Obama administration is feeding reporters the accusation that it was Dodd who was responsible for the exemptions that protected already-vested bonuses. The Times article from Saturday that started the Dodd scandal thus contains this outrageously misleading claim:
The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.
And yet another New York Times article from today ("Fingers Are Pointed Across Washington Over Bonuses") -- this one by David Herszenhorn -- contains this White-House-mimicking, misleading passage:
But Mr. Reid mostly ducked a question about whether Democrats had missed an opportunity to prevent the bonuses because of a clause in the economic stimulus bill, part of an amendment by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, that imposed limits on executive compensation and bonuses but made an exception for pre-existing employment contracts.
That was the exact provision that Geithner and Summers demanded and that Dodd opposed. And even after Dodd finally gave in to Treasury's demands, he continued to support an amendment from Ron Wyden and Olympia Snowe to impose fines on bailout-receiving companies which paid executive bonuses (which was stripped from the bill at the last minute). But now that Treasury officials are desperate to heap the blame on others for what they did, they're running to gullible, mindless journalists and feeding them the storyline that it was Dodd who was responsible for these provisions. And today, during his White House Press Conference, Robert Gibbs advanced this dishonest attack by repeatedly describing the offending provisions as the "the Dodd compensation requirements."

How in Hades did these "administration officials" think they could get away with it? This is going to be the first real mess that the Obama White House has gotten themselves into, full fledged. Stupid politics, stupid internicene war, stupid all around.

Fox News Smears Chris Dodd -- Did NOT Grandfather AIG Bonuses

2009-03-17T14:54:00.003-05:00

There has been a lot of fury expended over the past few days about the bonuses AIG executives in the derelict Financial Products division received, and rightfully so. However, Fox Business has published what it considers a scandalous story. According to them, Chris Dodd inserted language into the stimulus package bill that protected these bonuses.

While the Senate was constructing the $787 billion stimulus last month, Dodd added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. That amendment provides an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009” -- which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are now seeking to tax.

Of course, this is going all over the conservative blogosphere.

Yet funnily enough, the actual text of Dodd's amendment concerning executive compensation doesn't have this February 11th exception in the text. In other words, the Fox Business smear merchants didn't bother to do any basic research. They knew Dodd had submitted this section through amendment, and there the language is now, so Dodd must have put it in there, right?

Well, no. Actually Dodd's amendment was to another amendment to the main bill, Amendment 98. Amendment 98 was a substitute amendment, so called because it wipes out the language of the bill or amendment it is "amending" and substitutes its own. Dodd's amendment to #98 did pass, but the original amendment was withdrawn later on.

The final bill passed by the Senate on February 10 was the text of another substitute amendment (#570) submitted by Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine. It did have the language of Dodd's Amendment 354, but the grandfather clause currently giving Dodd-haters the vapors is still not in there.

That language was not inserted until the House-Senate conference to reconcile differences between the bills. This was the next day, February 11, 2009, and funnily enough, that was the date used to grandfather these bonuses in. And since Dodd was not one of the conferees working out these details, it remains to be seen just how he was supposed to have inserted this language.

The actual conferees were, from the House: Obey, Rangel, Waxman, Lewis (CA), and Camp -- and from the Senate: Inouye, Baucus, Reid, Cochran, Grassley. Of these, four are Republicans -- Grassley, Cochran, Lewis, and Camp.

There is no indication whatsoever that Chris Dodd had anything to do with this clause. Consider this right wing lie debunked.

AIG Names Names

2009-03-15T17:34:00.002-05:00

The gig is up and Congress' questions are answered. AIG has released names and numbers for who got what from them directly and from Maiden Lane II and III.

Maiden Lane II was dealing with unwinding loans made on good assets to buy up toxic assets.

The top beneficiaries of payments tied to the unwinding of the securities lending portfolio were Barclays (BCS) of the U.K., with $7 billion, Deutsche Bank, with $6.4 billion, BNP Paribas of France, with $4.9 billion, Goldman with $4.8 billion and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) with $4.5 billion.

Maiden Lane III was buying bad toxic assets from institutions that had purchased credit default swaps from AIG on those toxic assets:

...the top recipients of payments under the CDO purchase program, with SocGen getting $6.9 billion, Goldman $5.6 billion, Merrill $3.1 billion and Deutsche Bank $2.8 billion.

And finally, those same institutions who sold their toxic CDOs to Maiden Lane III were made whole through payouts from AIG that also terminated the CDSs:

The top recipients of CDS-related collateral were France's Societe Generale, with $4.1 billion, Germany's Deutsche Bank (DB), with $2.6 billion, and Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch of the United States, with $2.5 billion and $1.8 billion.

I wonder what the Wall Street Journal was looking at, though. They said the biggest two recipients were Goldman and Deutsche Bank, but by far the biggest recipient of taxpayer cash from AIG was Societe Generale, with $11 billion coming through Maiden Lane III and AIG directly.

Stewart/Cramer

2009-03-13T11:17:00.002-05:00

The video of the uncut interview is available at the Daily Show site, because their code is screwing up my blog. Bleh.

My take on this is one I've seen elsewhere: why does it take a comedian to ask these kinds of questions? And how does Cramer defend himself? At the end he was a whining fifth grader, asking for another chance to let him at those lying CEOs. But he kept saying, "These guys were friends of mine and they lied to me." Well, the reason Cramer bought the lies instead of doing investigative reporting is because they were friends of his.

Again and again, it comes down to access. Who tends to get the access? The people who are going to tell the best story for the companies. Who tends to get those kinds of jobs? People who are friends of the CEOs.

In the uncut version, this exchange occurs:

JIM: There's a market for it and you give it to them.

JON: There's a market for cocaine and hookers.

JIM: Well --

[LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE]

JON: So what?

JIM: I think those should be legalized -- no.

JON: What is the responsibility of the people who cover Wall Street?

Making sure that the people who are pushing cocaine and hookers don't have the chance to swamp the global financial market sounds like a good start to me.

Roubini: The Ponzi Economy

2009-03-12T14:52:00.001-05:00

Combine this insight with Bernanke's stressing of savings relative to investment below:

According to Minsky and according to economic theory Ponzi agents (households, firms, banks) are those who need to borrow more to repay both principal and interest on their previous debt; i.e. Minsky’s "Ponzi borrowers" cannot service neither interest or principal payments on their debts. They are called "Ponzi borrowers" as they need persistently increasing prices of the assets they invested in to keep on refinancing their debt obligations.

By this standard media US households whose debt relative to income went from 65 percent 15 years ago to 100 percent in 2000 to 135 percent today were playing a Ponzi game.

And an economy where the total debt to GDP ratio (of households, financial firms and corporations) is now 350 percent was a Made-Off Ponzi economy. And now that home values have fallen 20% and they will fall another 20% before they bottom out and now that equity prices have fallen over 50% (and may fall further) using homes as an ATM machine and borrowing against it to finance Ponzi consumption is not feasible any more. The party is over for households, banks and non-bank highly leveraged corporations.

The bursting of the housing bubble and of the equity bubble and hedge funds bubble and private equity bubble showed that most of the "wealth" that supported the massive leverage and overspending of agents in the economy was a fake bubble-driven wealth; now that these bubble have burst it is clear that the emperor had no clothes and that we are the naked emperor. A rising bubble tide was hiding the fact that most Americans and their banks were swimming naked; and the bursting of the bubble is the low tide that shows who was naked.

I'm sitting here happy that my credit has been crap for years. I never took out any liar's loans. It scares me to even think I could have before the bubble burst. My major debts right now are student loans, which I'm repaying slowly.

It is hard to see how this economy gets better anytime soon, when the best solutions to the problem are so politically untenable or simply undoable (nationalize the banks which, among other obstacles, the FDIC could never back up right now).

Look What's Going Viral

2009-03-12T10:42:00.001-05:00

Somebody does Frank Miller doing Peanuts.

Cat On A Hot Tin GOP

2009-03-12T10:26:00.002-05:00

Michael Steele is now busy walking back his pro-choice comments made in an interview for GQ four days before he called Rush Limbaugh an entertainer with an ugly act. No, not his Viagra-fueled tour to a sex tourism paradise, his radio act:

I tried to present why I am pro life while recognizing that my mother had a "choice" before deciding to put me up for adoption. I thank her every day for supporting life. The strength of the pro life movement lies in choosing life and sharing the wisdom of that choice with those who face difficult circumstances. They did that for my mother and I am here today because they did. In my view Roe vs. Wade was wrongly decided and should be repealed. I realize that there are good people in our party who disagree with me on this issue.

But the Republican Party is and will continue to be the party of life. I support our platform and its call for a Human Life Amendment. It is important that we stand up for the defenseless and that we continue to work to change the hearts and minds of our fellow countrymen so that we can welcome all children and protect them under the law.

"The strength of the pro life movement lies in choosing life and sharing the wisdom of that choice with those who face difficult circumstances." So the strength of their position is that they acquiesce their politics and agree that the choice movement is correct. They then work to convince women to choose life. From your lips to God's ear, Michael, but he's the only one who's going to be listening to you in a couple of weeks.

Shoe Thrower Gets Three Years

2009-03-12T10:00:00.002-05:00

It should have been three months or time served.

The Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at then-President George W. Bush was convicted Thursday of assaulting a foreign leader and sentenced to three years in prison, lawyers said. He defiantly shouted "long live Iraq" when the sentence was read.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi's bold act in December electrified many across the Middle East who consider him a hero for expressing his anger at a president who is widely disliked for his decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The 30-year-old journalist pleaded not guilty to the assault charge Thursday, telling the three-judge panel that "what I did was a natural response to the occupation."

Reporters and family members were then ordered out of the courtroom for the verdict, which was relayed to them by defense attorneys and a court official.

People who engage in civil disobedience should expect to serve out their terms. That's part of the point. But this sentence was excessive and meant to squash dissent in Iraq. When you squash out dissent, it festers and boils out in worse ways.

This whole incident displayed one of the very few traits I like about Dubya. He dodged the shoes and shook it off. He kept explaining to the Iraqi government that he didn't care, that he wasn't offended, and all of that was obviously in an effort to mitigate the reaction of the Iraqi government. It didn't stop them from severely beating al-Zeidi or this harsh sentence, but it could have been worse, I suppose.

No one can deny the passion in the man or the passion he aroused. A gesture that viral can't be clamped down on. You've got to err on the side of allowing free expression like this.

The AIG Bailout

2009-03-07T11:55:00.003-06:00

More details from a whitepaper published on the fifth of March:

On February 28, 2008, American International Group, Inc. (AIG), the largest insurance company in the United States, announced 2007 earnings of $6.20 billion or $2.39 per share. Its stock closed that day at $50.15 per share. Less than seven months later, however, AIG was on the verge of bankruptcy and had to be rescued by the United States government through an $85 billion loan. Government aid has since grown to $200 billion. AIG's stock currently trades at less than $1.00 per share.

The Article explains why AIG, a company with $1 trillion in assets and $95.8 billion in shareholders' equity, suddenly collapsed. It then details the terms of the government bailout, explores why it was undertaken, and questions its necessity. Finally, considering a likely legacy of AIG is increased regulation of credit default swaps, the Article describes the current regulatory landscape for CDSs, advocates restoring Securities and Exchange Commission power to regulate them, but cautions against regulating before the CDS market has had a chance to self-correct.

I'm about halfway through, so I don't know about the conclusions. I do like the very cogent description of the mess AIG is in.

How Paulson Used AIG To Throw Goldman Sachs A Big Old Bone

2009-03-07T03:24:00.004-06:00

Among a lot of others, mind you.

It's in the WSJ today and branching out from there -- several of the counterparties receiving par payouts for their toxic CDOs now owned by the taxpayers have been identified. The first name on the list is Goldman Sachs:

Among those institutions are Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Germany's Deutsche Bank AG, each of which received roughly $6 billion in payments between mid-September and December 2008, according to a confidential document and people familiar with the matter.

Other banks that received large payouts from AIG late last year include Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America Corp., and French bank Société Générale SA.

More than a dozen firms with smaller exposures to AIG also received payouts, including Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and HSBC Holdings PLC, according to the confidential document.

This is big news because the vice chairman of the Fed, Donald Kohn, would not identify any of these companies when he appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday.

However, it was already known that Goldman Sachs, Societe, and Deutsche Bank had gotten a big payout from the AIG debacle, as this December 17 article from Business Week shows.

I've been trying to understand what happened here. Putting the Business Week article together with the Kohn testimony and this summary of part of the deal and other sources, you get a clearer idea of just how billions in TARP money has been funneled to these institutions. And it stinks.

To help explain what's happened, I've prepared a PDF presentation of this, relying mostly on Kohn's testimony. You can access it at my unrelated website here (pdf).

Let's go back a bit to when Bear Stearns went under. The Federal Reserve worked together with JPMorgan Chase to get JPMorgan a great deal. The Fed created a limited liability company in Delaware, named after the street the New York Fed bank is on, Maiden Lane. Maiden Lane, LLC, received $29 billion in loans from the Fed, and $1 billion in loans from JPMorgan. Maiden Lane used that money to buy up the toxic assets at the heart of Bear Stearns' woes. JPMorgan Chase then purchased Bear Stearns, free of the toxic assets with $30 billion sitting there all nice and tidy. And then JPMorgan bought Bear Stearns at $10 a share (although, remember, Hank Paulson wanted them to sell at $2).

Now this whole deal stunk mightily in the nostrils of Congress, and they saddled the Federal Reserve with some more strigent restrictions on how they deal out the money. And Maiden Lane, LLC, has actually lost $5 billion in value since that time. But that didn't stop them from pulling out the old playbook when AIG came staggering in through the door.

Well, what else was the Fed going to do?

AIG is actually a quite stolid and no-nonsense company for the most part. But one of its arms, AIG Financial Products (AIGFP), was described recently by Ben Bernanke:

"If there is a single episode in this entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can’t think of one other than AIG," Bernanke told lawmakers today. "AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system, there was no oversight of the financial-products division. This was a hedge fund basically that was attached to a large and stable insurance company.

What AIGFP was pretty wild. First they took out loans on stable assets owned by AIG and used that cash to invest in what would become toxic assets -- the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that have become so familiar to ordinary Americans nowadays. These are the complex financial instruments that all sorts of mortgages had been bundled into, sliced up, and rebundled to help minimize risk. AIGFP bought up a lot of them.

They also had friends out there doing the same thing. These companies wanted a kind of insurance on their CDO's, so AIGFP sold them credit default swaps (CDSs). This meant that AIG would be responsible for losses on the CDOs after a deductible of sorts was reached. But since they were all as safe as houses, the money being paid into AIGFP was a windfall. Money for everyone, and all granted under AIG's Triple A credit rating. Nice of them to lend that out to the underregulated, loophole-exploiting Financial Products arm, don't you think?

Of course, the housing market started to tank. And the truth is, AIG had been trying to extricate itself from this godawful mess for a while. They stopped issuing these types of deals back in 2005 when they started feeling squishy about them. They'd been working with regulators to unwind all of this mess.

But then a crisis point was reached. The counterparties who held the loans on their stable assets were starting to ask for their money back. The counterparties who'd bought credit default swaps on their toxic assets were losing cash and starting to call in their CDSs. And AIGFP had not set aside any capitalization against those CDSs -- they didn't have to! They weren't technically insurance. They were derivatives. And AIGFP was having difficulty selling their own toxic assets to meet their obligation to these two sets of counterparties.

This is the essence of a liquidity crunch. The cash has seized up. AIG needed help fast and a lot of it.

On September 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve provided AIG with a huge line of revolving credit. They created a facility with the quirky name Revolving Credit Facility. They put $85 billion inside this facility and opened up a window for AIG. This was the plan -- AIG draws on the credit as they have need to satisfy their obligations. Over time good assets get freed up and/or toxic assets become good boys and girls again. By selling these assets, AIG could then pay back the Revolving Credit Facility. And it had two years to do so, and then, poof! The Revolving Credit Facility is no more and AIG has learned a very important lesson.

And just to make extra sure that the government wouldn't lose any money in the deal, AIG had to place 79.9% of preferred convertible stock into a trust payable to the Treasury. The important thing here to know about preferred convertible stock is that if the Treasury decides to, it can convert this preferred stock into common stock, which means the Treasury really does own a massive controlling interest in AIG at that point.

So that worked, right? Not quite. By October 1, AIG had already drawn out $61 billion of the $85 billion available to it. Yes, you read that right. Two weeks later.

The toxic CDOs were getting worse and worse. They still couldn't sell their own, and the cash collateral calls from the counterparties from whom they'd borrowed were stacking up and the CDSs were mounting as well.

So the Fed took some further steps. They created a second facility for AIG, the Secured Borrowing Facility, that allowed several AIG subsidiaries to borrow up to $37.8 billion more to pay off the cash collateral calls. This was only a temporary fix, meant to buy AIG time to start selling assets and get their own cash flow running again.

Do you think it worked? Does a bear poop in the Vatican?

By November, the economic crisis was deepening and AIG was about to lose its Triple A credit rating. That would have mean immediate needs to pump up their available capital, with more collateral calls and more people bailing out of other financial arrangements. Plus, they did have this thing called actual insurance that they did occasionally like to sell to people, and that business was drying up fast as well. AIG was barely hanging on.

But by November, Hank Paulson had gotten his $700 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the wheeling and dealing had begun. Bernanke was spitting nails already about the whole situation, so the two of them got together and start thinking about restructuring the entire AIG bailout.

They came up with this. First, Bernanke capped the first facility from September, the Revolving Credit Facility, at $60 billion. He also lowered the interest rate AIG paid on this money and stretched out the loan term to five years. But AIG had to post all proceeds from asset sales into this facility and pay off the $60 billion.

Paulson agreed to give AIG $40 billion in TARP funds in exchange for $40 billion in Senior Preferred Stock in AIG. Fancy!

Then the Fed created two more Maiden Lane corporations, Maiden Lane II and Maiden Lane III. Paulson funded both of these institutions with TARP funds and then both started dealing with AIG's major problems, their own toxic assets and the CDSs on other counterparties' toxic assets.

Maiden Lane II got $20 billion in TARP funds from the Treasury. It went to the AIG subsidiaries that had been borrowing from the Secured Borrowing Facility created in October by the Fed. In exchange, the subsidiaries forked over the toxic assets they held. They were worth $40 billion at par (what AIG paid for them in the first place) but AIG only got $20 billion for them. They took the hit themselves, writing off the rest, and then paid back the Secured Borrowing Facility what they had borrowed.

And, poof! The Secured Borrowing Facility was terminated.

Maiden Lane II has 6 years to repay the TARP money to the Treasury. Its only holdings are these toxic assets bought at about 50 cents on the dollar, so the Fed is betting that the assets will at least be worth that $20 billion plus interest in six years. If there's any money left over after the Treasury is paid off, the Fed gets 67% of that and AIG gets 33%. Cross your fingers!

But it's Maiden Lane III that is the real piece of work. Keep your eye on the ball...

Maiden Lane III has been funded with $25 billion of the TARP funds (under the same terms as Maiden Lane II), and AIG was told to kick in $5 billion as well. Maiden Lane III has gone to to the counterparties that purchased the credit default swaps from AIG and given them an offer they couldn't refuse - all of their money back.

Here's how it worked. There was around $62 billion of toxic assets (at this point) being held by these counterparties. They gave them to Maiden Lane III for the grand total of $25 billion. Sounds bad, right? Sounds like they took a bad loss for buying such crazy assets in the first place, right?

AIG paid them everything else.

That's right. In exchange for terminating the CDSs they held on AIG, these counterparties received every single cent they ever paid for these crappy assets. They got par. Now it may very well be that these counterparties have more CDOs that weren't backed up by AIG's credit default swaps, and could still be in a world of hurt. But how nice was it that Maiden Lane comes along with TARP funds and brokers them a par payment on these crappy derivatives!

AIG, of course, took the hit here as well. $37 billion writeoff here, plus $20 billion writeoff because of Maiden Lane II, and $5 billion paid to Maiden Lane III... well, it's a good thing old Hank, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, plugged $40 billion extra of TARP funds into AIG, because that spectacular net loss of $62 billion in the fourth quarter could have been $100 billion.

And now we know that one of the two biggest beneficiaries of this incredible money shuffle was Goldman Sachs, which got (according to the Wall Street Journal) 10% of the money paid out through this deal.

Goldman Sachs received full par payment of their toxic assets backed up by AIG, $6 billion worth, thanks to the keeper of the TARP funds, Hank Paulson.

How is this not the definition of moral hazard, the dreaded term so hated by Paulson that he actually let Lehman Brothers collapse to avoid it? Yes, Lehman Brothers was one of Goldman Sachs' competitors, now that you mention it. They get the shaft, Goldman gets a great big bone from Paulson, AIG writes off billions, and the taxpayers are left holding the bag.

But wait, it gets better. In the Business Week December article, not all of this money had been thrown around yet. The figures are incomplete. Here, only $15 billion had come from TARP into Maiden Lane III, and with the $5 billion from AIG, Maiden Lane III had purchased only $46 billion from this counterparties at that point in time. So AIG had paid out $26 billion due to its CDS obligations.

The final numbers are $24.3 billion from TARP. Now they leave AIG's $5 billion in Maiden Lane III to guard against loss of asset value. So that left $4.3 billion to buy up $16 billion more in toxic assets. That was about 25 cents on the dollar for those assets. Yay, us. But of course AIG made up the difference to terminate the CDSs, so these companies also got par for this junk.

How are all of these assets performing in the Maiden Lane LLCs? How does Paulson justify throwing that kind of money at his old company? How much did Paulson know about these CDSs? After all, Paulson wasn't Treasury Secretary until the middle of 2006 and AIG had stopped all sales of these CDSs in 2005. In other words, Goldman Sachs got all of their AIG credit default swaps while Paulson was CEO.

Oh, by the way, Goldman Sachs did post a fourth quarter 2008 loss, $2.8 billion. They still managed to end the year with a $2.32 billion profit, though. I guess that $6 billion from the AIG situation really helped out at the end of the day.

I hope we do as well.

TPM: Maiden Lane I, II, and III

2009-03-05T20:02:00.001-06:00

Hoo boy. After Bernanke's appearance today in front of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee to deal with the AIG mess, a rather astute observer wrote Josh Marshall with a succinct explanation of what the Fed's been up to. Brace yourself:

Josh, your reporting on the AIG credit default swap/counterparties issue has been spot-on. But to understand what happened there, you have to understand the Fed's "Maiden Lane" vehicles and how it's used them to avoid what Congress intended with TARP, which was the real story that came out of Dodd's hearing on the AIG mess today. And the roots of it go back to the Bear Stearns rescue last year.

By law, the Fed isn't allowed to buy assets -- it can only lend, as lender of last resort. That was a problem for the Bear Stearns bailout, because JP Morgan said it would only buy Bear if someone else assumed responsibility for the crap. Fed came up with this idea to start a shadow company, called a special purpose vehicle (SPVs were how Enron operated, creating "Chewco" and the like named after Chewbacca - the New York Fed called their SPV "Maiden Lane LLC" for name of the street the NY Fed is located on in southern Manhattan). The deal then was JP Morgan put $1 billion into Maiden Lane, the Fed put $29 billion in cash into it. Maiden Lane paid Bear Stearns $30 billion, which went straight back to JP Morgan as this deal happened simultaneously to JP's purchase of Bear. So Morgan got $30 billion in cash ($29 billion net) and the Fed got stuck owning the crap, but was legally only making a loan to Maiden Lane, who was the legal owner (Maiden Lane was incorporated not in NYC, but in Delaware to avoid paying taxes). By the Fed's own accounting - which is very different from a real company's accounting - Maiden Lane has lost $5 billion between its creation and today.

The same problem happened in AIG, but this time there was no buyer. In Sept, the Fed bought AIG (80%) in exchange for an $85 bill loan. By Oct, it was clear AIG was still dying, so the Fed lent it another $40 billion. This $40 billion was restructured in November when the Treasury put in $40 billion of TARP funds, which was needed to bail out the Fed's loan which had by this time gone bad. But essentially AIG had 2 problems: it had lent out safe securities with real values and used that money to buy shit mortgage backed securities -- this was called 'Secured Lending Facility' which was done right under the nose of the state insurance commissioners. It was in the hole $20 billion. The other problem was the crappy insurance that AIG's financial products company had written on other people's shit mortgage backed securities - the credit default swaps (CDS). When the bad mortgages that AIG insured went bad, the insurance had to pay-up -- but because it wasn't called insurance, but rather derivatives, AIG hadn't reserved any money against it. This had lost about $25 billion.

Using the loophole it had learned during Bear Stearns, the Fed set up two new companies: Maiden Lane II and Maiden Lane III. Two dealt with the secured lending and Three the shitty credit default swaps. The Fed lent each Maiden Lane $20 billion and $25 billion and then Maiden Lane paid off the investors that had either lent AIG the money to buy the shitty mortgage backed securities (ML II) and those who had the shitty mortgages and the corresponding insurance (ML III). To avoid booking a loss on the Fed's balance sheet, because the Fed had some legal problems if either of these Maiden Lanes lost money, and because of a reporting requirement that Dodd had put into TARP which actually required the Fed to report to the Congress and the public about the cost to taxpayers from ML I, the Fed did some creative accounting. They still paid all of the investors off at full value (par), so that they didn't lose anything. But they booked the loss on AIG's balance sheet and kept Maiden Lane clean. This is the hidden story behind how AIG went from losing $38 billion during the first 9 months of 2008 to losing $61 billion in the 4th quarter.

This was all exposed at today's hearing. And despite repeated requests from Senators on both sides - Dodd, Shelby, Corker, Warner - the Fed is still refusing to say who it bailed out through Maiden Lane II and III.

I didn't get to hear this today but I'm going to watch as much as I can at C-Span.org. I've embedded the hearing below so you can, too.

I'll be back with more on this once I've seen the video.

Update: It's Donald Kohn, the vice chairman of the Fed, giving testimony, not Bernanke. More up above.

Tumulty: The Health-Care Crisis Hits Home

2009-03-05T19:09:00.004-06:00

Karen Tumulty wrote this article for Time. Its thesis was suggested when her brother was diagnosed with kidney failure:

The diagnosis was only the first shock. The second came a few weeks later, in an Aug. 5 letter from Pat's health-insurance company. For six years — since losing the last job he had that provided medical coverage — Pat had been faithfully paying premiums to Assurant Health, buying a series of six-month medical policies, one after the other, always hoping he would soon find a job that would include health coverage. Until that happened, "unexpected illnesses and accidents happen every day, and the resulting medical bills can be disastrous," Assurant's website warned. "Safeguard your financial future with Short Term Medical temporary insurance. It provides the peace of mind and health care access you need at a price you can afford."

...Pat's decision to save some money by buying short-term insurance was a big mistake, says Karen Pollitz, project director of Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute and a leading expert on the individual-insurance market. "These short-term policies are a joke," she says. "Nobody should ever buy them. It is false security that is being sold. It's junk."

That's because diagnosing and treating an illness may not fall neatly into six-month increments. While Pat had been continuously covered since 2002 by the same company, Assurant Health, each successive policy treated him as a brand-new customer. In looking back over Pat's medical records, the company noticed test results from December, eight months earlier. Though Pat's doctors didn't determine the precise cause of the problem until the following July, his kidney disease was nonetheless judged a "pre-existing condition" — meaning his insurance wouldn't cover it, since he was now under a different six-month policy from the one he had when he got those first tests.

After 33 years of wrestling with insurance companies, Deborah Haile, payment coordinator at the San Antonio Kidney Disease Center, where Pat went for treatment, has pretty much figured out the system. So when I put in my first desperate call to her, on Aug. 20, 2008, she offered to make another run at Assurant. Within an hour, Haile called back, her voice bristling with anger. "Cancel that policy," she advised me. "Your brother is wasting his money on premiums, and he's going to need it."

The underinsured, which as Tumulty puts it, is "the shadow problem facing an additional 25 million people who spend more than 10% of their income on out-of-pocket medical costs." And they usually don't realize it until disaster hits. They think they're covered.

John Aravosis of Americablog.com recently discovered how antiquated his prescription drug coverage was when they began denying his asthma medication at the end of last year, and John has the best self-employed health insurance with the most prescription drug coverage available. When he first got the insurance, $1500 a year was adequate. But as the premium rose, the ceiling on coverage didn't and the drugs got more and more expensive. He even discovered that if he used a mail-order company to provide his needed medication cheaper, his co-pay would increase. Can there be a more Walgreen's-friendly rider?

Today President Obama brought together the major players in a White House Forum on Health Reform:

If we want to create jobs and rebuild our economy and get our federal budget under control, then we have to address the crushing cost of health care this year, in this administration. Making investments in reform now, investments that will dramatically lower costs, won't add to our budget deficits in the long term -- rather, it is one of the best ways -- in fact maybe the only way -- to reduce those long-term costs.

Now, I know people are skeptical about whether Washington can bring about this change. Our inability to reform health care in the past is just one example of how special interests have had their way, and the public interest has fallen by the wayside. And I know people are afraid we'll draw the same old lines in the sand and give in to the same entrenched interests and arrive back at the same stalemate that we've been stuck in for decades.

But I am here today and I believe you are here today because this time is different. This time, the call for reform is coming from the bottom up and from all across the spectrum -- from doctors, from nurses, from patients; from unions, from businesses; from hospitals, health care providers, community groups. It's coming from mayors and governors and legislatures, Democrats, Republicans -- all who are racing ahead of Washington to pass bold health care initiatives on their own. This time, there is no debate about whether all Americans should have quality, affordable health care -- the only question is, how?

There are going to be plenty who yell about socialism. These ninnyheads should be ignored. The general welfare of Americans is best served by all of its citizens gaining access to some basic levels and more of health care, and all of our society will be better served by eliminating the scourge of medical bankruptcies. America pays more per capita for health care than any other nation by far, and yet we still rank far below most other industrialized nations in all other leading indicators of a healthy populace. It is time for this state of affairs to end.

The Benefits Of Being Fat

2009-03-05T13:33:00.003-06:00

I've been losing weight now since the middle of November. I needed to do it, my cholesterol numbers were looking a little iffy, and I weighed more than I ever had in my life. I was around 225 and actually bought a chair that told me I weighed too much to sit in it safely. That was it. I called up Nutrisystem and started their plan.

Part of the plan is what they call the Mindset Makeover. It's not a plan that brainwashes you to do Nutrisystem. Stop saying that. It's a plan that brainwashes you into thinking in a healthy way about your appetite and your goals. The only thing "Nutrisystem" about it is that it's from them and it has Nutrisystem all over the paperwork. But it's just a way of learning to set goals and follow them through.

But in following it, you have to think through why you're overweight or obese and how to get yourself out of it. And a lot of people on the forums talk about how they slide back into old habits and nothing seems to work. Well, I realized that there's got to be something that's keeping us there, that's keeping us fat. There must be some kind of benefit to being fat that we keep exploiting. And so I thought about it and came up with three benefits of being fat that we have to sacrifice before we are what AA calls "entirely ready" to get on with a lifestyle change like losing weight.

I put this together into a blog post at Nutrisystem, and the response was so positive, I thought I'd put here on my main blog. Enjoy!

I had to say goodbye to smoking. It was like a bad relationship. It took some time, but eventually you can say goodbye to all of it. The good isn't all that great, and the bad is pretty bad, indeed. But I had to be ready to give up what I liked about smoking -- the nicotine, having something to do with your hands, etc. It was only then that quitting smoking finally took.

Well, it's the same thing with being fat. There are benefits to being fat. Let's list them together, shall we?

1. Being fat is a great way to constantly punish yourself.

That's a benefit? Oddly enough, it is. Not everybody is like this, but I fear a great many of us are. I won't go into reasons why we might feel like we need to punish ourselves because I'll bet as soon as you read that sentence, you recognized whether it was true about you or not.

Well, I'll mention one -- one of the worst ones. We deserve to be punished because we let ourselves get this fat! That causes a vicious feedback loop. We need to be punished because we let ourselves get this fat, so we keep shoveling the food in.

So our fat becomes both our sin and our absolution. We learn to put up with the stares, the inconvenience, and the health problems because after all, who put us into this mess? We did! And that becomes an odd comfort -- at least we're shouldering our own cross!

A more rational response to this is to get rid of the fat, get it down to a healthy level. Then you can take a sense of accomplishment from making yourself better and keeping yourself better. Continuing my religious analogy, Jesus was only on the cross three hours, right? At some point, he was finished with it. When are we going to be finished with our cross of lard?

2. Being fat is a great way to protect ourselves from other people hurting us again.

Again, I don't have to go into details here because you'll recognize the truth of this if it applies. It's so much easier to avoid pain if you can convince the pain to avoid you. A great way to make sure somebody who could hurt you stays away is to make sure these people are repulsed by you.

Fat becomes a powerful defensive weapon in this constant struggle. There are others -- avoiding society, anti-social behavior and demeanor in unavoidable society -- but fat ranks right on up there. It's the choice of people who don't really want to avoid society at all (the stereotype of the jovial fat person is based on a kernel of truth, a really large kernel).

However, this is one you probably need some outside help with. When the fat goes away, the shield goes with it, and if you don't fix the root problem, a relapse is one bad scene away.

Hey, tired of all the psychobabble? Here's one we can all agree on.

3. Being fat is just so dang easy to do.

Shoving a pizza down your gullet is the easiest thing in the world to do. Pizzas taste GOOD. They are designed to taste good. We used to have to chase our food around in Africa for days, and now we can put Papa John's on speed-dial. "Yes, I would like my usual with extra cheese sauce." Ding-dong! You're a fat ass.

When you get past the genetic inclination to obesity, you still end up with a lot of lazy fat asses. Fat, after all, is stored energy. To lose it, you've got to burn it. And there's only two ways to start burning all that stored energy -- eat less food and get your body into motion.

I'm finding that my body is losing some muscle along with the fat. The overall trend is a loss in body fat percentage, but it is slow. Part of that isn't so surprising -- I don't need as much muscle because I'm not lugging around all that much fat anymore! Fat people have to be strong because just walking to the mailbox is resistance training!

I love that picture of happyhoward holding onto the two 50 lb bags of dog food. He used to have 100 excess pounds of fat on his body 24/7/365! Folks, you are carrying your gym with you right now. I'm not going to discourage anybody from buying a gym membership or a Wii Fit or a BodyBugg, but you have everything you need to lose weight right now. Find time two or three times a day to walk your home gym around the block. Haul your home gym up the steps instead of parking it in the elevator.

Losing the weight means we lose these benefits of being fat and we have to be ready to give them up. If not, right back up the scale you will go, because it's an established comfort zone. We can help each other be entirely ready to give up these benefits, but in the end it's up to those three people in the mirror: me, myself, and I.

No more self-flagellation! No more hiding! No more stalling! Let's do this.

Just so you know, I started the program November 14, 2009 at 230 (after a nice Goodbye to Food tour). Now I'm down to 190.6 pounds as of this morning.

Cafe Wellstone In Second Life

2009-03-03T20:07:00.005-06:00

I'm at the Cafe tonight, after a rather lengthy post I put together at DU. Enjoying some early Randy Newman...

Cafe Wellstone is run by the General of Jesus' General. He got bit by a hobo spider last night, but seems to be much better today. Thank goodness...

I found a smashing Irish hat in my inventory.

It says it's for a lass, but I think it fits a hobbit just fine.

Secret Bush Memos Released

2009-03-02T18:22:00.002-06:00

On a Monday. Welcome to the new administration:

The Obama administration threw open the curtain on years of Bush-era secrets Monday, revealing anti-terror memos that claimed exceptional search-and-seizure powers and divulging that the CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations and other treatment of terror suspects.
The Justice Department released nine legal opinions showing that, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration determined that certain constitutional rights would not apply during the coming fight. Within two weeks, government lawyers were already discussing ways to wiretap U.S. conversations without warrants.
The Bush administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions, but the documents themselves had been closely held. By releasing them, President Barack Obama continued a house-cleaning of the previous administration's most contentious policies.

The shame in this is not that they are exposed but that they were written in the first place.

On The Subject of Kenneth Pollack

2007-08-01T14:15:00.001-05:00

Kenneth Pollack, our intrepid media's example of an Iraqi war opponent, wrote a book called "The Threatening Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq." I have it. I bought it because I saw Joe Lieberman hold that book up in the U.S. Senate as a book we should all read when we consider invading Iraq. He used the book twice in his floor speeches to bolster the case for invading Iraq

It was not just Joe Lieberman. Kay Bailey Hutchison quoted twice from Pollack's book and ensured that certain quotes made their way into the record. Jon Kyl used an article of Pollack's to give us a specific quote: "war now or war later." George Voinovich reminded us all of Pollack's book in his support for an emergency supplemental bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. Even Edward Kennedy cited Pollack when he made his own argument for war against Iraq.

Pollack and his partner in crime, Michael O'Hanlon, are providing political cover for wavering Republicans while trying to salvage their own reputations. In short, this is just more of the same from these two. Don't get fooled again.

New 9-11 Video: But Larry Silverstein Said "Pull It"!

2007-08-01T02:33:00.001-05:00

The latest debunking video I've made available at YouTube, I hope.

What's Behind The Data-Mining Curtain?

2007-07-28T23:54:00.001-05:00

Via Josh Marshall (short post, so that's the whole thing):

As you can see, we now have the first hint of what was at the center of the Ashcroft hospital room showdown. According to the New York Times, what the White House calls the 'terrorist surveillance [i.e., warrantless wiretap] program' originally included some sort of largescale data mining.

I don't doubt that this is true as far as it goes. But this must only scratch the surface because, frankly, at least as presented, this just doesn't account for the depth of the controversy or the fact that so many law-and-order DOJ types were willing to resign over what was happening. Something's missing.

Of course, 'data mining' can mean virtually anything. What kind of data and whose you're looking at makes all the difference in the world. Suggestively, the Times article includes this cryptic passage: "Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used."

To put this into perspective, remember that the White House has been willing to go to the public and make a positive argument for certain surveillance procedures (notably evasion of the FISA Court strictures) which appear to be illegal on their face. This must be much more serious and apparently something all but the most ravenous Bush authoritarians would never accept. It is supposedly no longer even happening and hasn't been for a few years. So disclosing it could not jeopardize a program. The only reason that suggests itself is that the political and legal consequences of disclosure are too grave to allow.

Late Update: The Post has a follow story on the data mining issue. It covers most of the same ground but hints a little more directly about possible interception of emails and phone calls. The article suggests that examination of "metadata" was the issue here. But, again, it doesn't fit. The intensity of the covering up doesn't match the alleged secret.

So what does match the intensity of the covering up?

First, a word about data mining. That Wiki article will give you all the info you need, I expect, but here's what I'd like to emphasize. You have a vast amount of data, too much for one person or even a dedicated group of people to pore over. Therefore, you use a computer to search out key phrases or data sets to help focus your search. The computer can cut through the chatter and find the key phrases, giving the investigators a greatly reduced amount of data in which to perform more focused searches, or even to simply start laying human eyes upon.

Say you're in the FBI, and you want to hunt terrorists. You know that the terrorists are using the Internet, for example. So you find a way to allow your data mining program to intercept email messages and scan them as they travel down the tubes. The ones with the key phrases get flagged, and the ones that don't are flushed.

This is my question: where do the key phrases come from?

I rather doubt that the terrorists are talking freely about wanton destruction in any way. There's got to be some kind of coded message, and it needs to be rather innocuous sounding small talk to escape detection. "I got oranges at the market today, but I couldn't lay my hands on any rhubarb." And so bin Laden knows that the cell leader talked to one crucial member of the cell but couldn't find another.

How do you data mine a conversation like that? How do you even know what they are talking about?

This is off the top of my head, but tell me why it wouldn't work. You do some initial surveillance. You do the monitoring of telephone calls to known al-Qaeda members outside the country. You come up with a pared-down list of people in the United States that may or may not be talking to the terrorists about terrorism.

Then you track down their email accounts. You feed the telephone conversations into a text analyzer.

And then you crack those emails and telephone conversations open. You use text analysis to identify common phrases and words, you put human eyes on this mass of data to see if humans think these conversations sound fishy, and then you boil it all down to key phrases to focus the larger task of data mining.

And then you do it all over again. You identify people who are using the same key phrases in their emails and telephone conversations. You boil them down, crack open their conversations, and work the process again. Hits begin to accumulate, maybe. Misses gets refined out of the process, maybe. But since the key phrases are likely innocuous sounding, you get hundreds of thousands of misses.

It's the chicken or the egg problem: which comes first, the data mining or the key phrases?

What if, to get a huge jump start on the process, the Bush Administration violated the privacy rights of thousands of Americans, again and again and again? What if career prosecutors were unwilling to accept any of the tainted results because they would never be admissible in a court of law if the original and continued process of validating key phrases became known? What if millions of dollars were thrown into this kind of a program, all to get the vast amount of evidence thrown out and the guilty set free?

Okay, don't listen to that - it's all about this:

Well, well. As we wrote over a year ago, after combining careful examination of how Republicans parse their statements with network engineering knowledge available through open sources:

Long story short: (1) Internet surveillance is Bush’s goal, not voice calls; (2) the Republican “wiretap” talking point is a diversion, to voice, away from from Internet surveillance; (3) Bush’s domestic surveillance system would pose no engineering challenges whatever to NSA. No rocket science—or tinfoil hats—required.

Can we please stop talking about “wiretaps” now? It’s not your voice communications Bush wants. It’s your mail.

Because email and all Internet communication is sent by packets all around the Internet, some of the packets could go outside the United States. That means the entire message could be forfeit. For all we know, they intentionally direct email out of the country so that they can then grab it.

Gonzales Committed Perjury On Tuesday

2007-07-25T19:30:00.001-05:00

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - Documents show that eight congressional leaders were briefed about the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program on the eve of its expiration in 2004, contradicting sworn Senate testimony this week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The documents, obtained by The Associated Press, come as senators consider whether a perjury investigation should be opened into conflicting accounts about the program and a dramatic March 2004 confrontation leading up to its potentially illegal reauthorization.

..."The dissent related to other intelligence activities," Gonzales testified at Tuesday's hearing. "The dissent was not about the terrorist surveillance program."

"Not the TSP?" responded Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y. "Come on. If you say it's about other, that implies not. Now say it or not."

"It was not," Gonzales answered. "It was about other intelligence activities."

A four-page memo from the national intelligence director's office shows that the White House briefing with the eight lawmakers on March 10, 2004, was about the terror surveillance program, or TSP.

The memo, dated May 17, 2006, and addressed to then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert, details "the classification of the dates, locations, and names of members of Congress who attended briefings on the Terrorist Surveillance Program," wrote then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

Sigh.

Cheney Contemplating a Run?

2007-07-24T22:24:00.001-05:00

From Think Progress:

This New York Sun editorial explores the idea of Richard Cheney running for president.

Mr. Cheney has virtues as a candidate in his own right. He has foreign policy experience by virtue of having served as defense secretary, and he has economic policy experience, having served as a leading tax-cutter while a member of the House of Representatives. His wife, Lynne, would be an asset to the ticket in her own right, a point made by Kathryn Jean Lopez in a post on the topic at National Review Online back in February. By our rights, Lynne Cheney would make one of the greatest First Ladies in history. Mr. Cheney, in any event, is more than four years younger than Mr. McCain, and, if elected, would be 67 years old at his inauguration, younger than Reagan was when he took office. His health, while a topic of frequent speculation, hasn't interfered with his service as vice president.

Lawrence Kudlow wrote a column a while back saying he hoped President Bush asked Vice President Cheney to run for president in 2008. It was a fine idea then and it still is — not because the current field is particularly weak, but because Mr. Cheney is so much more experienced and shrewd a figure, one who could help settle some of the arguments about the Bush years in favor of Mr. Bush. A White House aiming to get Mr. Cheney elected could also avoid some of the hazards that befall lame-ducks — drift, brain drain, irrelevance. Such a campaign might lift Mr. Cheney 's own standing in the polls.

The vice president's stature would put him instantly into the first rank of contenders on the Republican side. On Monday, speaking in Alabama, the vice president received such a warm greeting that he began his remarks by saying, "A reception like that is almost enough to make you want to run for office again." It is hard to imagine the vice president did not comprehend how tantalizing such a remark would be. He used the same opening line on March 24 when he spoke to the leadership of the Republican Jewish Coalition. This is not an endorsement, and there are things we find attractive about many of the other candidates. But for those of us who are concerned with extending Mr. Bush's campaign for freedom around the world and cutting taxes at home, a Cheney campaign is attractive.

Oh please please please please please please PLEASE don't throw us into that briar patch, Brer Cheney.

Talking To Your Kids About Internet Porn

2007-07-20T03:45:00.001-05:00

This is from Savage Love, a great sex advice column which is no-holds-barred and no-nonsense. I think that should be the gold standard for advice columns, but anyway, on to the quote, which is not actually from Dan Savage, but one of his readers:

This is in response to IPRUDE, the mother who's worried about her son's online porn consumption. I'll never forget the day my mom found my porn magazines. She never confronted me; I simply lifted the mattress one afternoon to find my precious Penthouses gone. In their place: Sunset magazine and Good Housekeeping. It was a reminder that (1) I needed to do a better job of hiding my porn, and (2) that she wouldn't have found it in the first place if she didn't have to clean my damn room for me. It was the most effective nonconversation we ever had.

Here's an update for the internet age: IPRUDE should clear the cache of her internet browser, so the zillions of porn website addresses don't show up as soon as she begins typing a URL. Cache cleared, Mom should type in some made-up URLs: www.stoplookingatporn.com, www.asianslutsarepeopletooyouknow.com, and www.fortheloveofgodjasonquitwatchingexploitativeasianporn.net, etc. It won't matter that these websites don't exist; the browser's autocomplete function will list them as soon as her son types the first letter of his favorite porn URL.

It's funny because it's true.

Generation Chickenhawk: Max Blumenthal Interviews College Republicans

2007-07-20T02:24:00.001-05:00

The highlight? Tom Delay, who had a brilliant idea on what those 40 million aborted babies coulda growed up ta do.

The Final Gasp: Bush Asserting That Executive Privilege Trumps Oversight

2007-07-20T02:08:00.001-05:00

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action."

But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts.

This is it. This is the endgame. Bush just drew a line in the sand and said, "Bring it on."

The Congress has an obligation to challenge this. They must. This is the final battle - who has the ultimate authority in the American government, the President or Congress?

We have heard a lot about the American experiment. This may actually be the end of it. If Congress knuckles under or loses this battle, the President may as well start wearing a laurel wreath because he will be Emperor. If Bush can block any inquiry into his actions, if he can commute and pardon those who keep the truth from being known, then the gig is up. America will be so far gone from what the Founding Fathers intended that we might as well tear down their monuments now. It would be a more fitting and honorable memory of them.

Dodd's Republican Debate Talk Clock

2007-06-06T06:12:00.000-05:00

Wolf Blitzer, what a guy.

Give Them An Inch

2007-06-04T23:00:00.000-05:00

Owen, Rogers Brown Back on Short List

Leading Senate Democrats are already warning against solidly conservative nominees, and that could make confirmation difficult in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Still, some of Bush's political advisers believe he would be better off tapping a strong conservative who would rally the base -- especially a nominee with a compelling life story who would be difficult for moderate Senate Democrats to oppose.

In that camp are federal appeals court Judges Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. Both were filibustered by Senate Democrats after Bush nominated them as appellate judges and were eventually confirmed after Senate leaders struck a compromise on judicial nominations.

Either could have been a likely replacement for O'Connor in 2005, but leading Senate Republicans told the White House not to nominate them because they were seen as too controversial at the time. Now that both are on the federal bench, the White House has put them back on a working short list.

Of the two, Owen is the best known in the White House and is generally considered less controversial than the more outspoken Brown.

Owen, like Brown, also has gotten high marks from her colleagues on the federal appeals court. But Owen's friendship with Karl Rove could hurt her, especially in a White House vulnerable to charges of cronyism.

Whatta surprise.

Chris Dodd's Talk Clock for the Debate

2007-06-04T03:29:00.000-05:00

Very smart idea, not only to see the candidates' allocation of time, but also to see the moderator's talk time in comparison.

The only person who spoke more than Wolf was Clinton and Obama. Wolf just edged Edwards by a whisker. It's clear who the media sees as the people to take seriously.

Everyone says Biden did well, but he has less time to make a mistake than most. Maybe that's a secret Biden should employ more often.

Help Me Choose My Daemon!

2007-04-29T23:00:00.000-05:00

It's not as bad as it sounds. This is a neat promo doohickey from the upcoming Golden Compass movie. It's fun!

Go find your own! Check out the movie site. It's going to be coo-ul!

The Soundbites: But WTC7 Wasn't Hit By A Plane!

2007-04-26T21:52:00.000-05:00

Here's the final version of the last video I released. All better!

The Rove-Crow Exchange

2007-04-22T23:31:00.000-05:00

At the Huffington Post:

In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, "Don't touch me." How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unphased, Sheryl abruptly responded, "You can't speak to us like that, you work for us." Karl then quipped, "I don't work for you, I work for the American people." To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, "We are the American people."

At Fox News:

Crow and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer David walked over to the presidential adviser's table, where David suggested that Rove "take a new look at global warming." David said Rove was rude with her, but witnesses say David was very aggressive.

Rove said David came over to insult him and succeeded.

Crow tried to calm things down but was instead drawn into the debate with Rove, telling him, "You work for me."

Rove responded, "No. I work for the American people."

Writing about the encounter on The Huffington Post Web log, the Hollywood mavens gave a colorful recount of the discussion.

Click here to read The Huffington Post blog entry.

"In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, 'Don't touch me.' How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow?" they wrote.

The two also weren't impressed by Rove's apparent argument that the United States would lose it's competitive edge by acting unilaterally.

At CNN:

"I am floored by what I just experienced with Karl Rove," David said later. "I went over to him and said, I urge you to take a new look at global warming. He went zero to 100 with me. ... I've never had anyone be so rude."

Rove said: "She came over to insult me and she succeeded."

As the debate intensified, Crow tried to calm things down but was drawn into the debate with Rove instead.

"You work for me," she told Rove, according to the Post column "The Reliable Source."

"No," was his response. "I work for the American people."

Heather Lylis, a spokeswoman for Crow and David's global warming tour, said Sunday that Crow's response for Rove was: "Yes, and I'm an American citizen."

Reliable Source:

"I am floored by what I just experienced with Karl Rove," David reports. "I went over to him and said, 'I urge you to take a new look at global warming.' He went zero to 100 with me. . . . I've never had anyone be so rude."

Rove's version: "She came over to insult me and she succeeded."

Things got so hot that Crow stepped in to defuse the situation and then got into it with Rove herself. "You work for me," she told the presidential adviser, according to singed bystanders. "No," was his response. "I work for the American people."

News of the dust-up filtered quickly through the room. Some witnesses said David was very aggressive with Rove; a shaken Crow later said that Rove was "combative and unresponsive."

I just found it interesting who would tell the whole story, and who wouldn't.

Bolo YouTube: But WTC 7 Wasn't Hit By A Plane!

2007-04-20T01:54:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: I've pulled this for a couple of reasons. I will repost it next Thursday.

George Bush Fired David Ignatius

2007-04-15T17:59:00.000-05:00

Because Pete Domenici wanted Ignatius fired.

Kaboom.

Bolo YouTube: How Fast Did Building 7 Fall?

2007-04-11T22:50:00.000-05:00

Yep, done by little old Bolo. I don't get into it much here, but I'm a rabid debunker of 9/11 conspiracy myths online, and I've finally gotten a setup to make YouTube videos with. So here's the first short I did. I expect to do one of these a week, and eventually the expected Video Response, when and if I ever get a camera.

So anyway, click and enjoy.

UPDATE: ~~Hmm. The YouTube isn't working. Well, anyway,~~ here's the Google Video link:

2nd UPDATE: YouTube is done hiccuping.

I Discovered Second Life Last Night!

2007-04-09T16:04:00.000-05:00

Wow!

I made my avatar and learned to walk and fly, Wow!

I went to Help Island, played games, got some free stuff, learned to dance, got a bike, Wow!

I transported to the Main area, Wow!

I walked around, and walked around, and flew, and ran into red barriers, and looked at stores and casinos, and couldn't find anyone in place after place.

Bleh.

Maybe if I find some people, it will be more fun.

I'll post snapshots later.

A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To Syria

2007-04-08T05:39:00.001-05:00

I'm in a work cycle here, so it's been hard to understand exactly what happened when Nancy Pelosi went to Syria. I know what a lot of partisan people are saying about it, on both sides of the aisle, and seeing where my seat is situated, I know who I think has the more solid take on the matter.

Still I don't want to pass judgment just yet. I'm quite willing to believe that the Speaker is capable of making a mistake. She definitely did when she supported John Murtha over Steny Hoyer for House Majority Leader. But that was a good mistake; it showed how loyal she could be to a friend. In the end, Hoyer won the vote handily, and though it was hard to see Murtha up there behind the podium, still he was there, and it was because of Pelosi. Mistakes like that we need more of.

Let us gather the facts, if we can find them. And let's be as basic as we can about the facts, starting with this one: Nancy Pelosi has just recently been on a trip to Israel and Syria.

During the trip, on March 30th, Speaker Pelosi's office released this statement:

As recommended by the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan delegation led by Speaker Pelosi intends to discuss a wide range of security issues affecting the United States and the Middle East with representatives of governments in the region, including Syria.

Pelosi's press release reads like it is a response to the comments made by the White House:

Q Dana, the Speaker of the House is traveling to Syria next week. Wondering what the White House's view on that is.

MS. PERINO: Well, as you know, we do not encourage -- in fact, we discourage members of Congress to make such visits to Syria. This is a country that is a state sponsor of terror, one that is trying to disrupt the Siniora government in Lebanon, and one that is allowing foreign fighters to flow into Iraq from its borders. And so we don't think it's productive to go to Syria and try to -- well, I don't know what she's trying to accomplish. I don't believe that anyone in the administration has spoken to her about it. But in general we do discourage such trips.

Q So specifically on this one -- this will be the highest-ranking U.S. official to go to Syria since the Hariri assassination, even before that, and apparently she's going to meet with President Assad. Would you have a specific message to the Speaker of the House about meeting with President Assad at a time when the administration has even withdrawn our ambassador from Damascus?

MS. PERINO: Well, again, I don't know if anyone has spoken to the Speaker. I do think that, as a general rule -- and this would go for Speaker of the House Pelosi and this apparent trip that she is going to be taking -- that we don't think it's a good idea. We think that someone should take a step back and think about the message that it sends, and the message that it sends to our allies. I'm not sure what the hopes are to -- what she's hoping to accomplish there. I know that Assad probably really wants people to come and have a photo opportunity and have tea with him, and have discussions about where they're coming from, but we do think that's a really bad idea.

...Q Dana, normally when a congressional leader goes on a trip, no matter what party they're in, they consult with the State Department. Were there any consultations between her and --

MS. PERINO: I don't know. I just learned about this trip right before I came out here. We'll check. Our initial check was that nobody was aware of any discussions, but we'll confirm and let you know.

Q Do you know, did anyone from the White House try to dissuade her from going on this trip?

MS. PERINO: As far as I know, we just found about it. I just found about it.

So at this point, the White House doesn't know if the State Department talked to the Pelosi group, but in general, they say, they discourage people from going. It sends a bad message. It only gives President Assad a photo opportunity.

The State Department, same day, about an hour and a half later:

QUESTION: On Syria.

MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah.

QUESTION: Nancy Pelosi is visiting Syria. The White House criticized her decision to go. I was wondering what you think of this. And it's my understanding that the Bush Administration tried to dissuade her from visiting Syria at this time, didn't think it would be appropriate.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right.

QUESTION: Can you speak to that?

MR. MCCORMACK: Well, we've -- you know, our message both to Republicans and Democrats alike who either have visited Syria in this recent period or intend to, as Speaker Pelosi does, has been consistent, it's been the same. In our view, it's not the right time to have those sort of high-profile visitors to Syria mostly for the simple fact that the Syrians, despite a number of different pleas and approaches from the United States as well as other countries, have refused to change their behavior vis-à-vis support for Palestinian rejectionist groups, for their support for -- their unhelpful stance with respect to Lebanon. And we don't think it would be appropriate for high-level visitors, even those from the Congress, to pay a visit to Syria right now.

A typical Syrian MO on this is to use these visits to tell the rest of the world and say, "Look, there's nothing wrong. We're having all these visitors come to Syria, coming to Damascus, there's no problem with our behavior," and they point to the visits as proof that there is no problem with their behavior and that they are not, in fact, isolated. So that's the simple reason why we have encouraged others as well as Speaker Pelosi not to travel.

That said, congressmen and representatives are going to make their own decisions about where they travel. And in this case, they made the decision to go forward. We are going to provide all the support that might normally be expected to be provided to a member of Congress traveling to a foreign country. We provided a briefing for Speaker Pelosi's staff and those traveling with her. So that's about -- that's really where we stand right now.

QUESTION: Will anyone from State be accompanying Speaker Pelosi?

MR. MCCORMACK: No.

QUESTION: Sometimes, you send along a little help (inaudible).

MR. MCCORMACK: A little help --

(Laughter.)

MR. MCCORMACK: Not to my knowledge, not to my knowledge. Of course, other people on the ground are ready to assist the congressional delegation in setting up meetings and even attending those meetings if that's what the congressional delegation wants.

QUESTION: But Ellen Sauerbrey was there and --

MR. MCCORMACK: A very specific mission dealing with the humanitarian issue of Iraqi refugees and she went in -- talked to somebody at her level, her counterpart on a very limited scope mission.

Yeah.

QUESTION: Just to sort of -- has there been a presidential or vice presidential visit to Syria?

MR. MCCORMACK: To Syria? When?

QUESTION: Has there been?

MR. MCCORMACK: Ever?

QUESTION: Ever.

MR. MCCORMACK: I'm going to look over here. George. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Jimmy Carter met with President Asad, I think in Geneva. So did --

QUESTION: So did Clinton.

MR. MCCORMACK: In Geneva. And Secretary [Madeline] Albright, I know, visited there for the funeral and then --

QUESTION: [Warren] Christopher --

QUESTION: Christopher went a couple of times.

MR. MCCORMACK: [James] Baker's been there numerous times.

QUESTION: Even Sean McCormack, I think might have been to Damascus once or twice. Is that true?

MR. MCCORMACK: I made one trip there, yeah. Not that that's important. (Laughter.)

I include the last part to show just exactly what a big deal the Speaker in Damascus is. The last high ranking official to go to Damascus was actually Secretary Powell , who was there in 2003. But since then, the Bush Administration has not been too happy about anybody meeting with Syria.

The meetings have happened, though. It seems recently the floodgates have opened. On March 30th, three Republican representatives were already in Israel getting ready to go to Damascus.

The Assistant Secretary of State had gone to Damascus earlier in March, as the briefing above points out, on a limited-scope mission.

The US had even sat down with Syria in multilateral talks about Iraq that month - in Baghdad.

A few months earlier, in December 2006, Arlen Specter had gone to Damascus. Arlen's been there a few times, and most notably was in Damascus the day that the former President Bush had begun dropping bombs on Baghdad:

Mr. Specter, who visited Syria despite loud objections from the Bush administration, did not say what conditions Mr. Assad gave for restarting talks with the Israelis. Syrian officials were not available for comment.

Mr. Specter's visit came on the heels of trips to Damascus by Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut.

A bipartisan panel on Iraq recommended earlier this month that the United States engage Syria, Iraq's neighbor, toward returning stability to Iraq.

The United States has limited diplomatic ties with Syria because of its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, which the United States deems terrorist organizations. President Bush has expressed reluctance to seek help from Damascus on Iraq until the Syrians curb that support and reduce their influence in Lebanon.

...Mr. Specter said before he left that he and other Republicans are concerned that the administration's policies in the Middle East are not working and that other GOP members may follow in his footsteps.

And the day after Pelosi's visit, Darrell Issa would meet with Assad as well.

A name or two keeps popping up here: James Baker and the Iraqi Study Group. Hold onto that.

On the 31st, Pelosi and the bipartisan delegation met with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. While meeting with him, Olmert spoke to Pelosi about Syria and the peace process.

Pelosi left that meeting, intending to communicate a clear message to Syria:

Pelosi has said she will tell Syrian leaders that Israel will talk peace with them only if Syria stops supporting Palestinian militants. She has said she will also talk to the Syrians about Iraq, their role in neighboring Lebanon and their support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants.

On April 1st, she met with Israel's acting president Dalia Itzik, who defended the idea of Pelosi going to Syria:

"Your expected visit to Damascus has naturally touched off a political debate in your country, and of course, here," Itzik said in televised remarks.

"I believe in your worthy intentions. Perhaps a step, seen as unpopular at this stage ... will clarify to the Syrian people and leadership they must abandon the axis of evil (and) stop supporting terrorism and giving shelter to (terrorist) headquarters," said Itzik, a member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's centrist Kadima party.

...Pelosi, who met Olmert earlier in the day, held aloft during her dinner speech in parliament replicas of the dog-tags of the three captive [Israeli] soldiers.

"They (the dog-tags) are in my office, I carry them with me today, with the promise that we must never rest until they are all safely at home. And yes, I will mention this to the president of Syria," said Pelosi, the top House Democrat.

On April 4, Pelosi flew into Damascus. An Australian network filed this report, before the Speaker had met with Assad:

KIM LANDERS: But should the Democrats be dabbling in US foreign policy?

Charles Kupchan is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

CHARLES KUPCHAN: The Democrats are making an assault on President Bush's monopoly over foreign policy in the United States, both through legislation, on getting troops out of Iraq, and now also conducting their own independent diplomacy by heading to the Middle East and meeting not just with the Syrians, but a host of other countries.

KIM LANDERS: He says Nancy Pelosi is picking up on the recommendations of the independent Iraq Study Group, which recommended engaging with Iraq's neighbours, including Syria.

CHARLES KUPCHAN: If we could find some way of having a working relationship with the Syrians, that would help us in Iraq, particularly on Anbar province, which is where the al-Qaeda network is still alive and well, and that's an area that's very close to the Syrian border.

KIM LANDERS: But Robert Lieber, who's a Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University, has doubts about the merits of the senior Democrat's trip.

ROBERT LIEBER: There are real grounds for concern about the appropriateness of this, given the role that Syria has played and the fact that any number of political actors and sometimes government officials have had their pocket picked, in policy terms, in travelling to Syria to meet with the elder or now younger Assad.

It's a dicey game.

KIM LANDERS: By asserting themselves on the foreign policy stage, are the Democrats showing too much ambition?

ROBERT LIEBER: Possibly, yes.

I think there is a very important piece of information we don't know. We don't know what Nancy Pelosi is going to say to the Syrians.

If she delivers a smart, tough message, which I would think some of the key figures in Democratic foreign policy making would want her to do, that's one thing. If on the other hand she delivers something that is fatuous or which seems overly indulgent to the Syrians, or inclined to take Bashar Assad at his word, then I think the impact of the visit will be counterproductive and even destructive in policy terms.

ELEANOR HALL: Professor Robert Lieber speaking to Kim Landers in Washington.

Professor Lieber appears to have not been paying attention to Nancy Pelosi. Every indication from her was a smart, tough message. I mean, she had replicas of the Israeli soldiers' dogtags around her neck.

But the ink seems to be already dry on the script of how Pelosi's visit would be played.

There's more to this story, much more. But I fear it must wait till tomorrow.

So, The Update

2007-04-05T06:12:00.001-05:00

Well, it was something to do. It took a couple of hours to tweak and what not, but finally here it all is. I hope nobody was married to the old format.

I was for a while. I'd puttered around with an old Blogger template, which is the greatest way to learn anything. The result pleased me well, but then I saw a recent YouTube that emphasized one great revolution of the Internet - the ability to manipulate form independent of content.

That's what convinced me to change: I saw what an old grump I was becoming about the very idea of change.

But to resist change is to eliminate yourself from the vital conversation. And I'm not ready to pull back from that just yet.

I've just gotten a copy of Edward Bernays' Propaganda, another one of those books that every high school student should read. You may have heard of that "invisible government" line - you know the one:

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

But even in the quotation of this vital first chapter at Wikipedia, a key paragraph is snipped loose. It's a single sentence, but it changes the entire character of the message. Here it is:

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

At once, the thrust of the book pulls back from the Orwellian mold into which it is usually cast, even in the blurb on the back cover. "A fascinating and controversial look at how governments and corporations control how we think and act"? Two added words would make the description more accurate: "seek to." Governments and corporations seek to control how we think and act, and they can be largely successful.

But they can also not be, because the invisible government remains invisible even to itself. This might be an irreducible fact of human society.

The Internet is one more place that we seek that old Egyptian principle of Ma'at. We must make sense of the world, and once found, we relinquish that hard-won understanding only with suffering.

But we must do so when necessary, and should do so when fitting.

Well, anyway, that's enough of that.

New Theory of Great Pyramid Construction

2007-03-31T18:16:00.000-05:00

And is the presentation ever splashy:

The secret of the construction of the pyramid of Khufu in Egypt has always held people in fascination. Numerous theories have been put forward but none has yetstood up to analysis.

Eight years ago, the architect Jean-Pierre Houdin had a flash of intuition and developed a revolutionary theory. Considering Khufu' monumental undertaking as the first industrial construction project in history, he turned to Dassault Systèmes technology to test his hypotheses and feed his thought processes. So it was that he joined the 'Passion for Innovation' programme.

Having demonstrated the validity of the theory with the aid of their scientific 3D solutions, Dassault Systèmes invite you to enjoy an extraordinary journey through time and space. Relive the Great Pyramid construction project in real-time 3D!

This guy has explained it down to cracks in the King's Chamber. I've yet to see the 3D presentation, but I can't wait - apparently it cycles through the entire 23 year process of building. And by Houdin's estimates, it may have taken only 4,000 people to build instead of the 100,000+ usually quoted.

If Imhotep did not do it this way, he missed a hell of a chance.

YouTube: Bernard Herrman Documentary

2007-03-30T21:27:00.000-05:00

Bernard Herrman is the legendary film composer of such films as North by Northwest and Taxi Driver.

Here's the first section:

Click through to find the other sections. It's very well made, and probably hasn't been seen in the States.

It's On

2007-03-30T01:29:00.001-05:00

The Senate voted to end the war.

The Senate approved a spending measure with a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, setting up a showdown with President George W. Bush, who has vowed to veto any congressional demands to end the war.

The $122 billion emergency spending legislation funds military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and provides money for domestic needs such as relief to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The proposal calls for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq to begin 120 days after final passage of the measure, with a goal of having most forces withdrawn by March 31, 2008. The Senate, during debate on the war-funding measure March 27, voted 50-48 to retain the withdrawal timeline. The entire measure was passed today 51-47.

Democrats have been ratcheting up pressure on Bush to change strategy in Iraq since winning control of both chambers of Congress in the November election.

``We have given the American people what they want, and now it's up to the president,'' Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. ``He has a responsibility to sign this bill.''

Of course he won't. Bush's war on rationality will continue with his second veto ever. The first, you'll recall, continued the federal government's "funding restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research." And now Bush has this. Fox News will be happy to report the talking point that it's all just posturing to make Bush deny funding for the troops. Well, the bottom line is, he will. Supporting the troops is less important to this president than ending a failed policy. He screwed up and he can't admit it.

It's the same mistake, really. Bush made his Solomon choice of cutting the stem cell issue in half, which pleased nobody, and yet he persisted. Iraq is the same thing. Nobody in Iraq appears to be happy with the American presence. The Sunnis are in the fight of their lives, the Shiites are biding their time, and the Kurds are ready to break loose and start inciting separatist violence in Turkey. And Bush definitely doesn't want all that feces-meet-rotary-device endgame on his watch.

But why shouldn't it be? If anybody should have the "You break it, you buy it" sign pointed out to them, it's this president. And that's the political motivation behind the President's stance. It's as nakedly political as anything else in Washington. But we're used to to Bush condemning others for his own vices. It's one of the things that remind me how human the man is. Nevertheless, the failure of the Iraqi occupation is the direct result of Bush's policies and decisions. If there's to be an violent civil war, it belongs to Bush.

There will be a violent civil war if we leave, won't there?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Cover

2007-03-29T05:12:00.001-05:00

James Dobson Doesn't Think Fred Thompson Is A Christian

2007-03-28T16:58:00.001-05:00

From US News & World Report, the latest proclamation from Pope Dobson - Fred Thompson, the former Senator from Tennessee and a possible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination isn't a Christian.

In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a possibility."

Didn't Jesus have something to say about people who talk openly about their faith?

"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

"So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Prayer
"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

It doesn't get much more red-letter Jesus than the Sermon on the Mount.

Clearly Romans 14:4 needs to be front and center in this presidential campaign. Who are you, James Dobson, to make yourself a judge of another man's servant?

Or perhaps that's the problem. Pope Dobson is making it clear that Fred Thompson would not be his servant. "Christian" for Dobson and company doesn't mean "someone who follows the teachings of Christ," but "someone who does the will of James Dobson." This is one more thing that shows James Dobson for the power-hungry hypocrite that he is.

Behold, He Blogs Again

2007-03-28T03:23:00.001-05:00

No, really this time.

I've got this new gadget on my Firefox called ScribeFire. Blogging is just as easy as pie. So, I've got no excuse. Blogging must be done. The hobbit is back in business.

No, really.

George W. Bush Is Going To Bomb Iran

2006-12-29T00:15:00.000-06:00

George W. Bush is going to bomb Iran. This is the purpose of the "surge". No amount of troops is going to fix Iraq; they couldn't if they tried. If Bush wanted to fix Iraq, he'd give them jobs. People who are employed in decent jobs can figure out how to live with their neighbors. More American troops in the Persian Gulf are not going to quell violence in Iraq any more than the ones already there are.

George W. Bush is going to bomb Iran. And there may be almost nothing we can do to stop it.

Iran has a single trump card - their nuclear program. I share the doubts that Bush can destroy the whole thing. There will be no repeat of Israel's surgical removal of the nuclear ambitions of Saddam Hussein. But Bush can take out enough of Iran's nuclear facilities to knock them back a few more years in the development of a feasible weapon. That is all he needs to bomb - that is, until Iran makes its move.

And that's what the surge is for. Ostensibly, it's about Iraq. Nobody thinks that Iraq needs more American soldiers. And it doesn't today. But Bush is sending them anyway, because he knows what he's about to do, and Iraq is going to need more soldiers when the Shiite forces sympathetic to Iran erupt in violence.

The first attack in this final war against Iran has already occured. You read about it, I'm sure. The White House excised a number of passages from an op-ed in the New York Times that talked about the history of this administration's secret negotiations with Iran. Any mention of Iran's critical help in forming the Afghan government now in place? Gone. Any word of Bush's constant double-dealing with the Iranians over people you may not have heard of, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Mujaheddin-e Khalq? Blacked out. And any mention of Iran's 2003 offer to put everything on the table, including recognition of Israel? The Times and the two authors of the piece, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann, were threatened with criminal prosecution if they were to put words like that into print.

I know about all of this "secret" material, because none of it was secret. Leverett and Mann published their sources, all mainstream media with the exception of a report or two from Leverett's think tank, the Century Foundation. All of the things marked out of this op-ed by the White House are in the public domain. And yet the Bush Administration felt so threatened by this op-ed that they pulled out their little black markers and crossed out any hint of a peace-seeking Iran being played by a cynical America for all it could get.

Why? Because Bush is about to bomb Iran. Any talk of how Iran was making some genuine offers for peace (back before they were spinning any centrifuges) and how Iran was working with the United States to bring stability to the region, all of that is counterproductive. The Bush Administration isn't a slave to reality - it makes reality.

A reality to be ignored: Before 9/11, Iran had built up a large number of contacts among the various Afghan warlords. After 9/11, the Iranians worked those connections above and beyond in cooperation with the United States to stabilize Afghanistan under the interim government. James Dobbins, a participant in that accomplishment, explains:

Two weeks after the fall of Kabul, all the major elements of the Afghan opposition came together at a U.N.-sponsored conference in Bonn. The objective was to create a broadly based successor government to the Taliban. As the U.S. representative at that gathering, I worked both with the Afghan delegations and with the other national representatives who had the greatest influence among them, which is to say the Iranian, Russian and Indian envoys. All these delegations proved helpful. None was more so than the Iranians. On two occasions Iranian representatives made particularly memorable contributions. The original version of the Bonn agreement, drafted by the United Nations and amended by the Afghans who were present, neglected to mention either democracy or the war on terrorism. It was the Iranian representative who spotted these omissions and successfully urged that the newly emerging Afghan government be required to commit to both.

The second was even more decisive. The conference was in its final hours. The German chancellor was due to arrive momentarily for the closing ceremony. Yet we still lacked agreement on the central issue: composition of an interim Afghan government. The Northern Alliance was insisting on 18 of 25 ministerial portfolios, which would have marginalized other opposition groups. From 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. the four key envoys -- those from Washington, Tehran, Moscow and New Delhi -- worked along with the U.N. representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, and our German host to persuade the recalcitrant Northern Alliance delegate to make the necessary compromises.

Two weeks later President Hamid Karzai and his new cabinet were inaugurated in Kabul. The most senior foreign delegation was headed by Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, who had stopped in Herat on his way in to pick up the one warlord, Ismail Khan, whose attendance and support for the new government was most in doubt. At the Tokyo donors' conference the following month, Iran pledged $500 million in aid to Afghan reconstruction, by far the largest sum from any neighboring state or developing nation.

(That's from Dobbin's May 2004 op-ed in the Washington Post, by the way. I had to buy a monthly pass to get it, but it's all open source, it's public domain. No classified information was released in the publishing of that article.)

Later on, Iran was asked by Karzai and Washington to keep a particularly nasty anti-American cleric Gulbiddin Hekmatyar in their country. Washington wanted Iran to keep him close, keep him safe. Tehran agreed, but they asked that Washington not accuse them of harboring terrorists. That would be a pretty nasty trick, don't you think? Ask a country to keep a terrorist under the equivalent of house arrest, and then accuse them openly of supporting terrorists?

Bush did so. Not six weeks after the Bonn negotiations, not a month after the Hekmatyar request, Bush declared Iran a member in good standing of the "axis of evil".

Hekmatyar left Iran soon after. As the redacted op-ed says, "the Islamic Republic could not be seen to be harboring terrorists." A year later, Bush got to designate him a terrorist. He's still in Afghanistan, and while he thinks the recent defeat of Republicans is proof that America will be pushed out of Afghanistan like the Soviets, he's endorsing George W. Bush for a third term. Bush is our Brezhnev, he says. He's great for business.

After all, look how Bush handled the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK). MEK is "an Iranian opposition group based in Iraq... that is on a U.S. State Department list of terrorist groups." Saddam used these guys to pull off attacks in Iran. The United States had been meeting regularly with Iran after 9/11, working out day-to-day matters in the region. The Washington Post reports:

At one of the meetings, in early January, the United States signaled that it would target the Iraq-based camps of the Mujaheddin- e Khalq ...After the camps were bombed, the U.S. military arranged a cease-fire with the group, infuriating the Iranians. Some Pentagon officials, impressed by the military discipline and equipment of the thousands of MEK troops, began to envision them as a potential military force for use against Tehran, much like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

We told Tehran we would target a terrorist organization, and then we decided that the terrorists might be able to help us take out Tehran. Let that sink in a minute.

[Richard] Armitage said it was a mistake for the U.S. military to have arranged a cease-fire agreement with the MEK during the war, a decision that alarmed Iran. "We shouldn't have been signing a cease-fire with a foreign terrorist organization," he said.

Wow, Richard. You think?

The United States then told Iran on May 3 that they were going to disarm MEK. We also discussed exchanging prisoners, al-Qaeda members in custody in Iran for MEK prisoners in Iraq. But Armitage "ruled out such a deal":

..."because we can't be sure of the way they'd be treated," referring to the MEK members. He said officials were questioning MEK members to determine who had terrorist connections. "In my understanding, a certain number of those do," he said, adding that they will face charges.

Hold that thought. Hold the thought that Iran had been given our word that we would target the MEK. Hold onto the thought that we'd instead started touting them as a force to help topple Iran. Hold onto the thought that we'd then given our word about disarming these terrorists, although we wouldn't do any prisoner exchanges, not even for al-Qaeda prisoners.

You still don't have the full context, yet:

Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces..., an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.

Everything was on the table. Everything. Peace in the Middle East. George W. Bush had it in his hand.

What did we do? We scolded the Swiss diplomats who had passed it on to us, and then we started making nice with terrorists who hated Iran.

Nine days after the May 3rd meeting in which we promised to disarm MEK, terrorist bombings erupted in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The US blamed Iran, and cut off talks. Some other countries tried to get the United States and Iran back to the table but failed.

Did you go to the link? Because today, it's clear who did those attacks: al-Qaeda. Hekmatyar's compatriots. Osama's army. The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

Not Iran.

Bush has never wanted peace with Iran. There will be no win-win situation with this president and Iran, because Bush is playing to win on his terms alone, the way that he was able to play Libya's recent capitulation to the West.

But Iran's not doing the Gaddafi shuffle. It's always had more support in the region than Gaddafi ever did. Iran's been a fly in the American ointment since 1979. And now, after being rebuffed repeated in a quest for peace, Iran is back on the nuclear path.

So people, get ready. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid can talk all day long about the first hundred hours. We can start considering our options for the 2008 presidential primary. Hey, what are your plans for the New Year?

George W. Bush is going to bomb Iran.

Any references not linked in this piece are to Washington Post articles available only for a price on the web. They are from Leverett and Mann's citations, and are:

“Iran’s Leader Condemns Saudi Attacks,” The Washington Post, May 15, 2003

“Time to Deal With Iran,” The Washington Post, May 6, 2004

“In 2003, U.S. Spurned Iran’s Offer of Dialogue: Some Officials Lament Lost Opportunity,” The Washington Post, June 18, 2006

“U.S. Ready to Resume Talks With Iran, Armitage Says,” The Washington Post, Oct. 29, 2003

“U.S. Eyes Pressing Uprising in Iran: Officials Cite Al Qaeda’s Link, Nuclear Program,” The Washington Post, May 25, 2003

Bureaucracy impedes bomb-detection work

2006-08-12T15:53:00.000-05:00

Bureaucracy impedes bomb-detection work

The Bush Administration was getting ready to enable another 9/11, plain and simple. They were getting ready to cripple the kind of preventative work that would have caught a similar plot to that uncovered in Britain recently. How the hell did these guys get the reputation that they are tough on national security??

Actual Comments from the Rapture Ready Board

2006-07-14T14:19:00.000-05:00

The Love Song of J. Edgar Goldstein

2006-07-01T17:14:00.000-05:00

Creek Running North

Let us go then, you and I,
Where my leer is sprawled out upon the thigh
Of the lefty chick that waits upon my table;
Let me binge, in certain half-deserted streets,
With friends with pointed sheets
Through restless nights in Internet tirades
And sawed-off guys in chicken-hawk brigades:
Guys that swallow all my tedious arguments
Pusillanimous stray vents
That prompt in sane folk moral indigestion …
Oh, do not ask my meaning!
Let me get on with my preening.

More, much more, at the link.

Republican Congress Passed Over 750 Unconstitutional Laws

2006-06-28T10:43:00.000-05:00

From the wandering hillbilly, I found this article from the Boston Globe. It's a recent report on Specter considering ways to sue the Bush Administration over his signing statements.

Buddy Don quotes this portion:

``Respect for the legislative branch is not shown through [making a] veto," Boardman argued. ``Respect for the legislative branch, when we have a well-crafted bill, the majority of which is constitutional, is shown when the president chooses to construe a particular statement in keeping with the Constitution, as opposed to defeating an entire bill that would serve the nation."

Boardman said the president has the power and responsibility to bypass any statute that conflicts with the Constitution, even in cases ``where the Supreme Court has yet to rule on an issue, but the president has determined that a statutory law violates the Constitution."

I guess I've never heard it put that way before, but it struck me: Bush believes that the Republican-controlled Congress has passed over 750 unconstitutional laws. That is quite a feat for any legislative body, and especially one controlled by the President's own party.

Oh, No! Rush Arrested For Illegals Again

2006-06-26T20:45:00.000-05:00

AMERICAblog

Rush was caught smuggling illegal Viagra into the country! I'm so...sad.

With the bad back, why does he need Viagra?

2006-06-23T05:05:00.000-05:00

To whom it may concern: I am who I say I am.

If you find yourself puzzled by this remark, pay it no mind.

No, He Didn't

2006-06-21T02:32:00.000-05:00

War Room - Salon.com

Ron Suskind, George W. Bush and the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB

Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine" is out this week, and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman says it's full of "jaw-dropping stories" about the Bush administration's war on terror.

Or lack thereof.

We've known for years now that George W. Bush received a presidential daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, in which he was warned: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." We've known for almost as long that Bush went fishing afterward.

What we didn't know is what happened in between the briefing and the fishing, and now Suskind is here to tell us. Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

-- Tim Grieve

I thought I couldn't be shocked by the mendacity of these people anymore. Bush's place in history is now clanging shut around him.

Dear God, $1.4 Billion That Halliburton Could Have Had!

2006-06-15T14:29:00.000-05:00

BBC NEWS: US storm fraudsters paid $1.4bn

Waste and Abuse in Pentagon Budget

Remember the good old days, when Rumsfeld admitted that he couldn't account for 25% of the Pentagon budget? Getting excited over the chump change spent in New Orleans is really the height of hypocrisy for these wastrels.

al-Zarqawi's Dead!!!

2006-06-08T04:14:00.000-05:00

Bob Riley Defeats Roy Moore

2006-06-06T23:25:00.000-05:00

al.com: Elections

However, the real story is: Roy Moore got 35% of the vote. I don't know how much that has to do with Democrats crossing over (Alabama lets you vote in either primary), but there couldn't be that many crossover votes.

Meanwhile, Riley will face off against Lucy Baxley. Lots more Democratic voters than Republican voters. Makes you wonder...

Kristol: Bush Will Invade Iran Before His Term Expires

2006-06-04T22:09:00.000-05:00

Think Progress

This is why we must impeach him. Until this man is removed from office, he will continue to implement his will like a dictator. He will use this invasion to neuter his lame-duckness. He is a menace to all things American.

Is Barbara Bush The Illegitimate Daughter of Alestair Crowley???

2006-06-03T13:37:00.000-05:00

Hell, no.

Okay, now that I've completely declared my bias on the subject, I'll point you to an article recently posted at the Smirking Chimp that goes all conspiratorial about Barbara's mother supposedly hanging out with Crowley nine months before Barbara was born. It is a convoluted route to get her there, and all based on an anonymous source, a sixth-level initiate in something called the Ordo Templi Orientis.

Anyway here are pictures of Barbara, her father, and Alestair:

To my eye, Barbara looks too much like Marvin in a white wig to be anyone but his daughter. I would do anything for Bush hatred, but I won't do that.

Update: Fixed the title, since this post has been linked to by Jeff Rense. Welcome, welcome, one and all. Boy, of all the people who would link to me, I never thought it would be Rense.com. It's a wild wild world.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

2006-06-02T01:06:00.000-05:00

Rolling Stone

Go read this article. And then find me a reporter who will ask George Bush this question: "Wouldn't it feel nice to win an election on your own merits just once?"

That Explains Why Sinclair's Not There, Either

2006-05-29T19:35:00.000-05:00

Power Line

Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I'd never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?
Tom Joad: Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then...
Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?
Tom Joad: Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.
Ma Joad: I don't understand it, Tom.
Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but - just somethin' I been thinkin' about.

Tom Joad may be there, but he won't be in Powerline's list of the greatest American novels. They said, "Politics and sociology were ignored" when making out the list. Someone wrote in and advocated for Grapes of Wrath. Hindrocket said: "No socialist realism for us, thank you!"

Powerline: we can't help but lie, even about a silly literature poll.

Rove 2.0

2006-05-29T00:06:00.000-05:00

US News

The man behind Dick Cheney's unusual influence in the Bush Administration got a big US News & World Reports article about him: David Addington. He's the driving force behind the "unitary executive" policy that runs like cancer through this organization, and it's his hand that has been guiding the signing statements Bush uses to remold or set aside over 750 laws passed by Congress. And US News hints at more:

The effort to discredit a former ambassador who publicly dismissed the Niger claim as baseless, by disclosing the name of his wife, a covert CIA officer? Addington was right in the middle of that, too, though he has not been accused of wrongdoing.

Not yet, anyway. Fitzmas may yet hinge on driving a wedge between this man and Dick Cheney, and that looks very unlikely...

In January 2001, he became Cheney's legal counsel and, according to former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the vice president's "eyes, ears, and voice." Cheney implicitly trusts Addington on judgment calls because they are, in the words of adviser Matalin, "the same kind of person--Addington was always the first among equals when the vice president sought advice. And he has always been the final voice and analysis on what we were discussing." Cheney and his aide are so close, says Nancy Dorn, an Addington colleague from the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush years, that they "hardly even have to communicate with words."

Addington, his colleagues say, is modest, courtly, and family oriented. He commutes to the White House by Metro when he could easily command a government car, usually eats at the staff table at the White House mess, and spends weekends cheering at his daughters' soccer games. "There are a lot of transactional people in Washington," says Matalin. "He's not one of them. He's a good soul."

According to critics, the reason Addington is such an effective bureaucratic infighter is that he's an intellectual bully. "David can be less than civilized," one official says. "He can be extremely unpleasant." Others say it's because Addington is a superb lawyer and a skilled debater who arms himself with a mind-numbing command of the facts and the law. Still others attribute Addington's power to the outsize influence of Cheney. "Addington does a very good job," says a former justice official who has observed him, "of harnessing the power of the vice president."

But it's a subtle kind of harnessing. Addington, according to current and former colleagues, rarely if ever invokes Cheney's name. An administration official says that it's sometimes unclear whether Addington is even consulting the vice president. But Cheney is always the elephant in the room. "People perceive that this is the real power center," says attorney Scott Horton, who has written two major studies on interrogation of terrorism suspects for the New York City Bar Association, "and if you cross them, they will destroy you."

Addington is up to his eyeballs in the Valerie Plame affair.

2006-05-27T15:10:00.000-05:00

Frist Puff Piece: "Reeking of Silverback Testosterone"

2006-05-24T16:43:00.000-05:00

Washington Post

That Laura Blumenfeld gives good copy.

[Frist] pressed his stethoscope to the gorilla's chest and narrowed his eyes. Kuja, a silverback patriarch, was breathing isofluorine. He was the Senate majority leader of the gorillas, who negotiated disputes, back-slapped the ape boys and owned exclusive mating rights with the females. When Kuja started to stir, a veterinarian injected more anesthesia. One backhanded swipe could break Frist's neck.

Frist listened to the heart; the gorilla's lub-dub sounded human. "When you're this close, you feel this kind of oneness with them," Frist said. The stink of ape sweat and gorilla testosterone soaked his hair and clothes. "Gorillas, people, men. You look at the people here, a symphonic flow of people pitching in. It's the oneness of humanity."

This kind of oneness does not come easily to Frist. Though devoted to matters of the heart, Frist acknowledges that he is aloof, something he traces back to the day he refused to attend kindergarten. He calls it "the Great Wall," an emotional barrier that has kept him from having close friends. It is a wall that could block his connection with voters, some say, and his way to the White House.

...At 9:30 a.m., Frist opened the Senate, gripping the corners of the lectern, as he had the operating table. Across the city, rolling in a bed of hay, Kuja opened his eyes and grunted. The gorilla kept touching his tongue to his tooth. Something had changed inside of the beast while he slept. Frist smiled and spoke unremarkably from the lectern, reeking of silverback testosterone.

Ew.

This is supposed to be a puff piece - something that makes Frist look better, you know? All these "drenched in gorilla testosterone" lines are just grossing me out. He still stank of the surgery as he went to the Senate? Isn't that unsanitary?

Maybe Blumenfeld is reaching here, so please you God. The man took home cats to play with a couple of days and then dissect, he worked so much that he felt like an intruder in his own house, and now we get stories of him "reeking of silverback testosterone" on the Senate floor. This is taking anti-socialism to an unhealthy extreme!

And by the way, let's get this straight: when you have drugged an animal past its ability to tear you inside out, it's impossible to establish a feeling of oneness with them. If "oneness" means anything, it is a mutual act. What Frist was doing is getting in touch with the tempting sensation of possession. He covets, Clarice, and we covet the things we see every day. Frist covets advancement and power. He seeks an exalted place in this world. And that's something that shines through this creepy little article.

Bolo Does Really Lame Comics

2006-05-24T15:19:00.000-05:00

stripcreator

Very cool little site here. It lets you make and save your own comic strips. Mine are rather lame to start out with, but who knows? With practice, I might attain the dizzying heights of mildly crappy.

The Benefit of the Doubt

2006-05-24T02:48:00.000-05:00

Townhall.com: Chuck Colson

In his latest pious article published at Townhall, Colson decries all things Michael Schiavo. In Michael's world:

...the "survival of the fittest" is taken to a whole new level - [it is] a place where a badly brain-damaged woman should have her food and water taken away simply because she is badly brain-damaged and her husband says she would not want to live that way.

...he, and so many of his partisans in the media and the public, do not want to give the benefit of the doubt to a comatose person. Now, I admit that many people today think well of Michael and less of those of us who defended Terri Schiavo since the autopsy showed that she had been brain-dead when she was in a comatose state. But thatÂs beside the point. Our concern was with safeguarding the process and giving her the benefit of the doubt. After all, you canÂt do an autopsy until the person is dead, and then it is too late to correct mistakes.

Mr. Colson, Terri Schiavo was not a brain-damaged person. Doctor after doctor diagnosed her as suffering from a permanent vegetative state. The autopsy confirmed this diagnosis - her brain was not damaged, it was atrophied. Terri Schiavo was gone. She had checked out of her mortal body years before.

There was no benefit of the doubt to give Mrs. Schiavo, because there was no doubt.

Michael has now written a book, and this is what has gotten Colson's dander up. Michael is making the book rounds, and any reservation he had for calling his critics out is now over. Colson sniffs at Michael's "lucrative business", even though Colson himself used his own book tour to lob a few choice comments Mark Felt's way. Judge not, Mr. Colson?

This is just more flag-waving to keep the faithful aroused and voting. Terri became a great fetus substitute for their cause, one that didn't involve shoving bloody pictures and jars into the faces of frightened women. Why, Terri could moan and move her head from side to side. And the wicked Michael just wanted the insurance money and to make an honest woman out of the skank ho he was living with, while he was still married to Terri. This, for Chuck, is social Darwinism writ large (yes, Colson's big on intelligent design). In Michael's world, you best not slow down to catch your breath, because some enterprising member of your family might knock you in the head, leave you to die, and spend all your money.

Wouldn't it be better in Chuck Colson's world?

Colson is a backbone in the Religious Right's grip on secular power in America, and the Schiavo case was one of many examples of how effective this religio-political movement is. Colson's present power has been the result of a long way back for him. He started in prison, and organized a prison ministry after he got out. This ministry grew, and it helped bind together church and state so naturally. After all, they had to hit the churches for funds on one hand, while working with and helping out the state officials running the prisons on the other.

Whenever you see a group of the big Christian political theocrats, Colson's name is on the list. He was a founding board member of the extremely conservative American Alliance of Jews and Christians. He was a co-signer of the Land Letter, the multimedia evangelical's dispensation for Bush to invade Iraq. His prison ministry is the model for Bush's "faith-based" initiatives. And when the Arlington Group was hogtied on how best to get gay marriage banned in the Constitution, "Colson played a key role in hammering out a compromise."
It's no wonder that he was the one of the few felons whom Jeb Bush made sure was able to vote in the Florida 2000 presidential elections.

You really should spend some time over at his organizations' websites. The Wilberforce Forum is the place to start. It calls itself a division of Prison Fellowship (Colson's original group), but links through the pages to "Prison Fellowship" go straight to wilberforce.org, so which is the umbrella organization now is easy to see. Under Wilberforce are two other interesting organizations. Breakpoint helps get the word out about Jesus, sorta - it's the media arm. Justice Fellowship is the lobbying arm - their mission is "to reform the criminal justice system to reflect biblically based principles of restorative justice for America's criminal justice system." That means, turn the prisons into Christian factories. Republican Christian factories, that is.

Chuck sure has done well for himself since he got out of prison for his illegal actions to put and keep Republicans in power. Jesus is the Way - he's the one that said to visit people in prison. Is he a wolf in sheep's clothing?

Is there any doubt?

Bush Will Just Have The Supreme Court Overrule Global Warming

2006-05-22T13:33:00.000-05:00

Los Angeles Times

President Bush nixed the idea of his seeing Al Gore's new movie.

In my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the enviroment.

Because talking about causation opens up questions of liability, and there's never been an American administration more willing to dodge liability than George W. Bush's.

In The End, It Wasn't Their Responsibility

2006-05-18T17:25:00.000-05:00

AlterNet: The 9/11 Story That Got Away

Judy Miller was told about an al-Qaeda intercept in July 2001 that talked about an operation so big that America couldn't avoid response. She went to her editor. Between them, they decided that there wasn't enough information for a story. Judy tried to shake loose more information, but it wasn't forthcoming, and it turned into August, and August turned into September.

But it wasn't their responsibility to say something. The counter terrorism people were regarded as extremists the way Judy saw it. And after nothing happened on July 4, everybody wrote al-Qaeda off. Even the Cole bombing the October before had been a very loosely organized affair. Al-Qaeda was regarded as a bunch of chumps.

It was the responsibility of the higher-ups to listen. And this intercept, just aired today, was by no means the worst of it. There was the Phoenix memo. There was the August 6 PDB. There was plenty of information and warnings out there. And they were ignored by this incompetent bunch of numbskulls, who were more concerned with their own political agenda than our national security.

You've Quit Working For Fox - Right, Tony?

2006-05-17T22:21:00.000-05:00

Crooks and Liars

MR. SNOW: Well, as I pointed out -- I mentioned this yesterday, and for -- let me see if I can find my quote, because I pulled it out. Chuck Hagel, as you may recall, made a fair amount of news over the weekend when he first said that -- let's see -- "Well, I want to listen to the details and I want to listen to the President," said Senator Hagel -- he said this on "This Week" on a competing network.

O'Reilly and The Race Card

2006-05-17T16:32:00.000-05:00

Bill O'Reilly has taken the phrase "xenophobic demagogue" to new heights:

Now in 1986, President Reagan thought he could solve the [immigration] problem by granting about 3 million illegal aliens amnesty. The New York Times was in heaven, editorializing back then, quote, "The new law won't work miracles but it will induce most employers to pay attention, to turn off the magnets, to slow the tide." Of course, just the opposite happened. But the Times hasn't learned a thing. That's because the newspaper and many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed.

According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will. This can only happen if demographics change in America.

An open-border policy and the legalization of millions of Hispanic illegal aliens would deeply affect the political landscape in America. That's what The New York Times and many others on the left want. They might get it. And that's the "Memo."

I guess this is what to expect from here on out. November sweeps is all about the war on Christmas, and May is all about the war on brown people. Jeez Louise...

Give Them An Inch...

2006-05-14T23:50:00.000-05:00

New York Times

James Dobson is hop, hop, hopping mad. Bush hasn't put that ban against gays marrying in the Constitution yet. The Republicans haven't outlawed minors crossing state lines to get abortions. And obsenity fines haven't been raised on broadcasters yet.

Plus, gays got covered in a hate-crimes bill, and embryonic stem cell research was extended as well. He is fit to be tied.

"There's just very, very little to show for what has happened," Dr. Dobson said, "and I think there's going to be some trouble down the road if they don't get on the ball."

He's threatening to keep his people at home if the Republicans don't start kowtowing to his political ends. The flecks of spittle are just flying from his sputtering lips.

Well, good. The Bush Administration has lived by the Christianist vote and it shall die by it as well. Dobsonstilskin can just stomp on the floor all the way to Hell as far as I'm concerned. Good riddance to them both.

Cheney's Notes on Wilson Editorial

2006-05-14T20:38:00.000-05:00

TPM DOCUMENT COLLECTION

So nice to see this. The original belongs in a museum somewhere, just as soon as Patrick Fitzgerald gets done with it.

It's quite clear that Cheney was itching to discredit Wilson while he read this article, especially from the handwritten notes atop the page:

Have they done this sort of thing before?
Sent an Amb. to answer a question?
Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us?
Or did his wife send him on a junket?

The "they" is the CIA, so it's abundantly clear that on July 6, 2003, Cheney knew that:

Wilson's wife worked for the CIA
She worked in a high enough position in which her ability to "send him on a junket" would be accepted
Cheney saw the potential of using this information as a way to discredit Wilson's story

The pro bono question is another interesting point - how could this have discredited Wilson? If the CIA normally paid their fact-finders, Wilson's pro bono status could be seen as a ploy to sanitize his motives. Some people find it a matter of character to avoid even the appearance of evil; Cheney finds it suspicious. That says more about the character of the Vice President than Wilson.

Here's what Cheney underlined in Wilson's editorial:

...I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

...I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake...by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's.

While the CIA paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono)...

...ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq - and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington.

It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.

...it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq.

...there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.
(As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out...

Though I did not file a written report...

...and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports,...

The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.

A junket is a "a trip or errand made by an public official at public expense with dubious public benefit". To support the idea that Wilson's trip was a junket, Cheney had to find reasons that the trip was of "dubious public benefit" (Wilson's profit was negligable, since he wasn't paid). And two of the underlined quotes seem to be building that case - the local ambassador had already debunked the Niger papers, it did not take long to ascertain the doubtfulness of the transaction.

Other things are underlined to be verified apparently, for they are all documentation - the memorandum of agreement, the ambassador's debunking report, the "specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president", and most pointedly, Wilson's expenses. The notation of Wilson's non-paper report is highlighted as well, which could be used in a "dubious nature" argument.

An interesting passage is Wilson's confession as to never seeing the memorandum of agreement. I can imagine Cheney's glee as he began to underline, only to stop half-heartedly in the middle of the second sentence. The news accounts point out that the memo had glaring errors, and how Cheney must have choked, knowing that Wilson had another source for that information, his wife. Who told Wilson about the memorandum first? Could it have been his wife, the CIA agent Cheney so obviously knows about? And then to read that Wilson has "every confidence" that his mission was told to the "appropriate officials"? Wilson was walking the line, saying just exactly what he could and finding ways to say what might otherwise have exposed his wife, his wife...Wilson's wife.

As Richard Cheney read this opinion piece, he could not help but be struck by Wilson's tender steps around his wife's identity as a CIA agent, and his crafty statements about his certain knowledge of things unknowable. As he put this paper aside, he'd developed the plan that could be used to discredit Joseph Wilson's exposure of their incompetence - find a way, any way, to make this about Wilson's wife sending him on an useless mission at taxpayer expense.

What really remains to be known is if Cheney was aware of Valerie Plame's actual status, and whether the people who did divulge her identity to reporters, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, knew this as well. Because now we know who put this plan into play. It was Dick Cheney in the office of the Vice President with a felt pen.

And At 5, He Gets the Fax from Tony

2006-05-14T19:41:00.000-05:00

E & P

[Tim Russert] also disclosed that he goes to church every week at 4 p.m. on Saturday and prays "that I will ask the right questions" on NBC the following morning.

Interview: Jeff Dowd and "The Big Lebowski"

2006-05-14T14:59:00.000-05:00

About.com

A very nice interview with the dude who inspired the Dude, about the movie The Big Lebowski. The interview is really great, and I love the part where Dowd is watching Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn do a one-hour version of the first Austin Powers movie, which they had just seen. Can you imagine Sean Penn doing, "Yeah, Baby! Behave..." That cracks me up.

McCarthy Believed CIA Lied to Congress

2006-05-13T22:33:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post tells us that Mary McCarthy had been investigating "allegations of criminal mistreatment by the CIA and its contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan". Last June a "senior CIA official" told Congress in a secure room that no actions of the CIA had violated international treaties for the treatment of prisoners.

When Mary heard this, she was startled, because she considered it a lie.

And it wasn't the only time Mary came across evidence that senior CIA official were lying to Congress about these matters. She had led the investigation into detainee treatment in both Iraq and Afghanistan:

McCarthy's findings are secret. According to a brief CIA statement about the probe in a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, investigators set out to examine "the conduct of CIA components and personnel, including DO personnel" during interrogations. Tens of thousands of pages of material were collected, including White House and Justice Department documents, and multiple reports were issued. Some described cases of abuse, involving fewer than a dozen individuals, and were forwarded to the Justice Department, according to government officials.

Another report, completed in 2004, examined the CIA's interrogation policies and techniques, concluded that they might violate international law and made 10 recommendations, which the agency has at least partially adopted. That report jarred some officials, because the Justice Department has contended that the international convention against torture -- barring "cruel, inhumane, and degrading" treatment -- does not apply to U.S. interrogations of foreigners outside the United States.

Little else is known publicly. The CIA inspector general's reports have narrow circulation. When IG inquiries involve covert actions such as foreign interrogations, for example, the agency briefs only the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, instead of the full panels. So only a handful of people in Washington knew what McCarthy knew.

This misconduct may have been her motivation, if so she did, to leak information about the CIA's secret prisons. She was fired last April as if she had done it, and she may yet face proscecution over it.

Let's see: leaking sensitive information as a whistleblower or lying to Congress to hide criminal acts, which would you rather be convicted of?

2006-05-13T15:38:00.000-05:00

Was Moussaoui being transported in a white Ford Bronco?

A Weak Defense of the NSA Program

2006-05-13T10:54:00.001-05:00

The Right Call on Phone Records

Richard Falkenrath does the politically expedient thing and hangs the NSA program squarely around the neck of General Michael Hayden. With any luck, the two will sink together.

Falkenrath lies right out of the gate. He says that "anonymized domestic telephone records" are "records stripped of individually identifible data." To a point, that's true, but the telephone number remains, and can be linked right back to that individually identifible data by consulting another database. Yet Falkenrath calls attention to his phrase "anonymized data" like it was an amulet against the truth, which it is.

The three companies reported to have supplied telephone records to the NSA also appear to be acting lawfully. The Telecommunications Act of 1934, as amended, generally prohibits the release of "individually identifiable customer proprietary network information" except under force of law or with the approval of the customer. But, according to USA Today, the telephone records voluntarily provided to the NSA had been anonymized.

Liar. Telephone numbers, all by themselves, are not anonymized records. It's the "Joe Wilson's wife" argument all over again.

Falkenrath has a nice little example of how Mohammed Atta calls person A (the pizza guy), who calls person B (the pizza guy's girlfriend), who calls person C (her daddy), who calls Khalid Sheik Mohammed (wrong number). Surely it behooves the government to run all three of these people through Fort Gitmo. It'd be the most effective waste of money imaginable.

As Taking on Goliath points out:

His little ring of contacts scenario could also be achieved by nSA officials going to the FISA court, and limiting their warrant to all people who have contact with a known terrorist, and let's says any person within six degress of those contacts. The FISA court has proved it is willing to assist them in anyway possible, so if it turns out that kind of net would be insufficient, they could go back and ask for 10 degrees out or 15 or 20.

My point here is this: There is no way that mining through millions (if not billions) of anonymous phone records can in any way, shape, or form be more effective and valuable than targeting a select few of non-anonymous contacts that you have a probable cause to believe might be assisting a terrorist.

And watch this argument:

Clearly, there is a compelling national interest in understanding and penetrating such terrorist networks. If the people associated with domestic telephone numbers A, B and C are inside the United States and had facilitated the Sept. 11 attacks, perhaps they are facilitating a terrorist plot now. The American people rightly expect their government to detect and prevent such plots.

Falkenrath makes it sound like only this program is standing between us and another 9/11. That damn well better not be the case, because this program is illegal on grounds stretching back to the founding of this country.

Luckily, Americans are waking up. They are voting with their business and their disapproval (come on, Washington Post, give us a fair and honest chance to understand what's happening before you push-poll us). There will be a day of reckoning, and thank goodness it's coming soon.

Rove Informs White House He Will Be Indicted

2006-05-12T19:39:00.000-05:00

Truthout

UPDATE: The only place I can find this story is Truthout, or people linking to Truthout. I really want this story to be true. That's two major reasons for me to doubt this story right now.

OMG: Possible Testimony About Satellites Spying On Citizens

2006-05-12T17:47:00.000-05:00

Think Progress

This one is a stemwinder. If this is true, it's a big piece of the puzzle.

The phone call database might have been involved in a program that illegally used satellites to spy on US citizens.

How you ask? Well, you know that cellphones can be tracked by their signal. And now Bush has a great big database of every phone call being made. You take your database, you analyze to find suspicious cellphone numbers, you plug the suspicious numbers into a tracking program. When the cellphone is activated again, a satellite hones in on the call and observes the person making the call.

But something like that doesn't start off being foolproof. Something like that has to be tested. And it could go wrong in so many different ways, so you have different groups of people working on different parts of the project. Say, one group who's working on the analytical algorithms, who coughs up numbers to try out every once in a while.

But the group that's perfecting the "wait for the cellphone and tune the satellite technology" needs more data and work time than that. So they use random numbers. Or they keep the "bad" numbers and work out the kinks that way, while spying on the innocent person.

Or they use numbers of people who are on the opposite political spectrum as the current Administration. And they track them. And they note where they are, and what they're doing and who they are talking to.

But they never ever listen, oh, no. They just practice their lipreading.

Can You Blame Him?

2006-05-12T13:51:00.000-05:00

The Republic of T.

Terrance at the Republic of T is no longer a Democrat. He sees a pattern of "degaying "in the recent actions of Howard Dean's Democratic Party, and he's convinced me it's going on.

But I have to be honest and say that this isn't much of a surprise. It's been telegraphed in one way or another for a long time. It started even months before the 2004 election. Voters hadn't yet gone to the poll when EMILY's List supported an anti-gay Democrat for congressional office. Barack Obama, the party's "Great Black Hope" of the moment, also came down against marriage equality.

It got worse after the 2004 election, when Democrats apparently started buying into the "values voter" hype and Hillary Clinton (among others) started leaning further right, with her eyes on a 2008 presidential run. Now she's cozying up to Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Fox network.

Since then we've had the closely-watched candidacy of Tim Kaine in Virginia, who continues to deliver on his earlier promise.

We've seen the DNC's gay & lesbian liaison office sit empty for more than a year, only to then be eliminated, while the party's LGBT fundraising arm remains intact.

We've seen the DCCC forget its own nondiscrimination policy regarding sexual orientation.

We've seen Dean suddenly fire the DNC's gay outreach chair, after the guy's partner had the temerity to suggest that Dems live up to their long declared values when it comes to equality for gay & lesbian Americans.

In my own state, which is relatively progressive on gay issues, the Democrat's front runner for the governor's race can't manage a straight answer on whether he supports a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in the state, even though he has a record as mayor of Baltimore of supporting equal protections and benefits for same-sex couples.

Now Dean goes crawling to Pat Robertson, to pander to a demographic that will never give him or the party the time of day, let alone their dollars or their votes.

Let me put it this way. If the Democratic party was a guy that I'd been dating all this time, after everything that I've cataloged above, Dean's quickie with Pat would basically add up to that boyfriend cozying up with my worst enemy and whispering sweet nothings such as "I never really liked him anyway."

At that point, I'd break up with him, lose his phone number, ask for my keys back, and return his gifts too. And if he wanted my trust or support any time in the future, he'd have to earn it.

Personally, I feel more married to the Democratic party than just heavy dating, but Terence is making me reevaluate the marriage. For God's sake, Bush's numbers are in the toilet, scandal after scandal is crashing down around the Republicans in Charge's heads, and Dean still feels the need to kneecap gays and lesbians in order to counteract the gay marriage initiatives coming up on several state ballots this November?

I think that all Americans are diminished when we allow stereotyping to dismiss the worth of fellow Americans. I think that all Americans are stronger, and the nation is stronger, when we judge people by who they are, not what they are.

Howard Dean used to think that too.

Tony Snow's First Gaggle

2006-05-12T13:28:00.000-05:00

TPMmuckraker

Have to say, the Snowster was on top of his game. It seems the gaggles aren't the same thing as a full press briefing, so not a lot of holding his feet to the fire. But what I read seemed crisp and cogent. He's not about the full truth, but the truth as the Administration wants it to be seen. So far, so good. We'll see what happens in the weeks ahead.

2006-05-11T18:40:00.000-05:00

Just saw I'm on the blogroll at ProPolitics - sweet!

2006-05-11T18:18:00.000-05:00

You know what I hate about newspaper websites? They never have links in their stories. Not even to stories in their own archives that might be relevant. Yeah, sometimes there's a little sidebar. But I mean in the story, the way God intended HTML to be used. Just saying...

Hammer Down

2006-05-11T17:18:00.000-05:00

Firedoglake

Tom Delay has given his resignation from the House, effective June 9, 2006. That's a 30 day notice.

So how should we celebrate the last thirty days of Delay? How about a retrospective, covering the life of this scoundrel, catching us up to date on everything?

Sounds like fun.

Bush: I am not a troll

2006-05-11T16:58:00.000-05:00

Had to get this headline from ZD Net - it's a winner.

Cafferty: NSA Database Amounts To Dictatorship

2006-05-11T16:53:00.000-05:00

Crooks and Liars

Not just the recent revelation about the NSA's database containing every phone call being made, but Cafferty was also hacked off about the Justice Department's inability to investigate the NSA.

This some bullshit, my friends. And Bush sailing out to sputter "9/11, 9/11, ollie ollie oxen free" is really getting my goat. I've listened to radio reports all day that has Bush talking about wanting to know what Al-Qaeda is saying. Well, fine, Mr. Bush. Go listen to Al-Qaeda. What do fully domestic phone records have to do with somebody in Afghanistan or Pakistan? Get the hell out of our personal records without a warrant.

If You Didn't Fix It, It Ain't Fixed

2006-05-11T11:30:00.000-05:00

Cool Tool: Debugging

I'm getting this link into the blogroll as soon as possible. It highlights cool tools. Simple. Beautiful.

Today's post is about a book you need to buy. It's called Debugging. It's about fixing software or hardware, but the blogger points out that the rules apply to a lot of different situations.

The rules are:

Understand the system
Make it fail
Quit thinking and look
Divide and conquer
Change one thing at a time
Keep an audit trail
Check the plug
Get a fresh view
If you didn't fix it, it ain't fixed

I pass them along to you.

Missing File on Chief Justice Still Missing

2006-05-11T11:16:00.000-05:00

Washington Post

Well. Apparently a file of John Robert's work papers went missing recently:

The file, compiled during Roberts's tenure as an associate counsel in the Reagan White House, vanished in July when lawyers from the Bush administration were reviewing the materials at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., as part of a vetting process before Roberts's formal nomination to the Supreme Court.

"This investigation is unresolved and the file is still missing," says the 64-page IG report, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from a Washington area researcher and posted Tuesday on the Web site Memory Hole. ". . . The OIG was unable to determine whether the missing file was taken intentionally, unintentionally, or lost."

Turns out that Archives policies were not followed as the Bush Administration researchers (names, anyone? The White House refuses to release them) looked at all the paperwork. They were given a private room. They were left unsupervised. They were allowed to bring in personal belongings (read: briefcases). So nice of the Ronald Reagan librarians to accommodate the Bushistas so lovingly, don't you think?

The White House, true to form, is pointing to this review and saying that it points to no evidence of wrongdoing. I just wish this administration didn't relish the appearance of evil so much.

I'm Blogging Here Again

2006-05-10T19:45:00.000-05:00

eXTReMe Tracking - Science - Politics

If you click on the link you'll see stats for this page. I find it incredible that this page - to which I have not blogged for quite sometime - is still getting over 20 hits a day.

Most of them these days are from one single thing - the freaky little Jesus with a Gun clock jpg down below. People are googling like mad for a image of Jesus with a gun, and my little jpeg is coming up second on that search. Crazy, no?

So people who want that graphic sound like my target audience. So Bolo lives again. I don't think I'll play nice this time. If you want nice me, check out Inner Cog over on Wordpress.com. Otherwise, stick around. I'll blog until I can't. That's all I can promise.

The Thing About Richard Cohen

2006-05-09T23:01:00.000-05:00

Maybe you don't think Stephen Colbert wasn't funny. Fine. But there's something else he wasn't.

Afraid.

Iranian Letter: Using Religion to Lecture Bush

2006-05-09T22:09:00.000-05:00

New York Times

This wrapup is right on target concerning the Amhadinejad letter. I just finished typing it up from the hard-to-read PDF file.

I've got a few more things to say about it, but I tired. Maybe tomorrow...

Possible Out for Hayden 4th Flap?

2006-05-09T15:28:00.001-05:00

White House Briefing

I wrote in yesterday's column that Hayden had misinterpreted the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution during a January speech , when he asserted that the standard for searches was "reasonableness," not "probable cause."

Several readers wrote in to say that Hayden was technically correct -- and that reasonableness is the standard for searches, while probable cause is the standard for warrants for such searches.

But my understanding is that the traditional reading of the amendment is that it is the obtaining of a warrant (which requires probable cause) that determines whether a search is reasonable or not.

There are some specified exceptions to the warrant requirement -- but historically they've been identified by the courts.

Having unilaterally decided they didn't need warrants, I'm assuming Hayden and his lawyers felt they could then take it upon themselves to decide what was reasonable or not. But that's not how it's supposed to work.

So I guess it's conceivable that Hayden's view is not an out-and-out misinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment. But at the very least, it's certainly an activist way of looking at things.

"Having unilaterally decided they didn't need warrants" is the operative phrase.

Here's Findlaw's discussion on electronic surveillance and the Fourth Amendment. You can't skim it, but you should read it. It's a tight description of the relevent opinions from the Olmstead case onward.

Katz v. United States seems to wrap it up.

Unanimously, the Court held that at least in cases of domestic subversive investigations, compliance with the warrant provisions of the Fourth Amendment was required. Whether or not a search was reasonable, wrote Justice Powell for the Court, was a question which derived much of its answer from the warrant clause; except in a few narrowly circumscribed classes of situations, only those searches conducted pursuant to warrants were reasonable. The Government's duty to preserve the national security did not override the gurarantee that before government could invade the privacy of its citizens it must present to a neutral magistrate evidence sufficient to support issuance of a warrant authorizing that invasion of privacy. This protection was even more needed in ''national security cases'' than in cases of ''ordinary'' crime, the Justice continued, inasmuch as the tendency of government so often is to regard opponents of its policies as a threat and hence to tread in areas protected by the First Amendment as well as by the Fourth. Rejected also was the argument that courts could not appreciate the intricacies of investigations in the area of national security nor preserve the secrecy which is required.

So as the courts have determined, only a small subset of searches made unpursuant to warrants are reasonable. Hayden's sidestep of warrants was unwarranted, particularly since the immediate need of wiretapping in the terrorism age is taken care of by the retroactive review allowed under the FISA court.

Short story? He's still a fascist.

Update:

The weaselly way this guy said what he said must be noted:

I didn't craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order. Just to be very clear -- and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me -- and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one -- what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe -- I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable.

What we are doing is reasonable. Weasel words. The General is counting on a common understanding of the word reasonable to fudge the issue (much the way a certain President used the term "sexual relations" to fudge another point). He takes the term "reasonable" outside its very legal definition, as already determined by Katz, by his words "and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one". However, since the General is dealing with very murky legal issues, he might want to consult a lawyer pretty damn quickly.

Signs of Humanity

2006-05-08T07:46:00.000-05:00

TBogg

I love things like this. The Bush Administration sent out a talking points memo to a lot of people that shouldn't have gotten it. Tbogg's singing West Side Story over it.

Career appointees at the Department of Agriculture were stunned last week to receive e-mailed instructions that include Bush administration "talking points" -- saying things such as "President Bush has a clear strategy for victory in Iraq" -- in every speech they give for the department.

"The President has requested that all members of his cabinet and sub-cabinet incorporate message points on the Global War on Terror into speeches, including specific examples of what each agency is doing to aid the reconstruction of Iraq," the May 2 e-mail from USDA speechwriter Heather Vaughn began.

The e-mail, sent to about 60 undersecretaries, assistant secretaries and other political appointees, was also sent to "a few people to whom it should not have gone," said the department's communications director, Terri Teuber . The career people, we are assured, are not being asked to spread the great news on Iraq in their talks to food stamp recipients, disadvantaged farmers, enviros or other folks.

The e-mail provided language "being used by Secretary [Michael O.] Johanns and deputy secretary [Charles F.] Conner in all of their remarks and is being sent to you for inclusion in your speeches."

Another attachment "contains specific examples of GWOT messages within agriculture speeches. Please use these message points as often as possible and send Harry Phillips , USDA's director of speechwriting, a weekly email summarizing the event, date and location of each speech incorporating the attached language. Your responses will be included in a weekly account sent to the White House."

A weekly account sent to the White House? Chortle!

We're the Bush Administration, and we're marching in lockstep. Viva George Bu...no, wait, that's Spanish. Long live our glorious Emporer!

Bolo Boffin Expires - Long Live The Inner Cog

2005-11-14T12:02:00.000-06:00

Well, I don't post here anymore. That's obvious. Thanks for all the faithful readers. I've decided to revamp the whole operation, so I'm taking up residence at theInner Cog. It's just me right now, but we'll see about some other folks. Anyhow, Bolo was fun, but I'm moving on. Come see me in the new digs.

Frist Sells HCA Stock Two Weeks Before Price Plummet

2005-09-22T11:47:00.000-05:00

Yahoo.com > DemoUnder

The news that brought me back. I'm on super secret undercover assignment right now, but Frist's unbelievable sense of personal entitlement drew me back into blogging. If I blog in the future, it will be quite sporadic; I don't get into port much (oops! I'm spilling the beans). But I've been watching Katrina coverage with pretty much blind outrage at the Bush Administration once again finding itself "learning the lessons" of being prepared. George, these are the Majors. If you don't already have the basics down, you screw up the pennant race bigtime.

But of course, they have the basics down. They demonstrated that during the election year in Florida. New Orleans in an off year? Fuck 'em.

I mean, seriously. Don't you know they just looked at Katrina heading for New Orleans with all its oil business and said, "Hey - great way to get gas prices up - hold off. And Rush and O'Reilly stocking up on poor (read black) degradation material is just icing on the cake."

Oo, don't get me started.

Anyway, I saw that Frist got his doctor props together and went down to do triage in New Orleans. I was giving him credit for that, but now the truth comes out: he needed a moral high ground approach to head off criticism about this blatently illegal stock trade. And the crap about his "conflict of interest" should be branded onto his corrupt backside. That rat bastard. Horsewhipping's too good for him.

I really should blog more often. Holding it in like that gets toxic.

Since When Do Blog Articles Get Listed on Google News?

2005-05-29T12:29:00.000-05:00

Here's a sceen shot of a blog article listed on Google News. It's the one titled [url=http://www.americandaily.com/article/7895]NBC, Wolf Should Apologize Without Delay[/url].

Sure, it's in Entertainment, but that's still right there on the front page, the top headline in that grouping of stories. So our news is going to be subject to Googlebombing as well? Is there anyone else that thinks that's a bad idea?

New Jesus Clock

2005-05-21T19:31:00.000-05:00

Wesley Clark Is Running in 2008

2005-04-17T12:32:00.000-05:00

Clark Community Network || CCN Home

General Wesley Clark announced at the Figueroa Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles that he will run once agian for President of the United States. It was, for the most part, a small gathering. The only notable that I saw there was Lt. Governor of CA, Cruz Bustamante. As the General was addressing the growd he said, 'some of you have been asking whether I am going to run in 2008' (not an exact quote) and the crowd went wild and started chanting 'Go Wes Go'. Clark said 'I am'. Somewhere in between he cracked a joke about how he was drafted late '03 and blamed us. Then Clark said that he thought if he ever got drafted again he would make sure to get an early start and then followed with THIS TIME he wants to make sure that he gets enough funds, so he won't be in '04 situation. Clark 08!

Very good news. I'll be backing the General again.

Securing America: Wesley Clark's New Website

2005-03-17T20:02:00.000-06:00

WesPAC

Wesley Clark has just opened up his new website. Give it a looksee, will ya?

Ignorance on Parade

2005-03-17T16:46:00.000-06:00

MSNBC - Teen protests Pledge said in foreign languages

A ninth-grader is protesting his school’s decision to broadcast the Pledge of Allegiance in foreign languages as part of National Foreign Language Week.

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Patrick Linton said he and other students at Old Mill High School sat down rather than stand Wednesday when the pledge was read over the school’s public address system in Russian. Linton’s teacher told him if he had a problem he should leave the room.

He did, and did not plan to return this week.

“This is America, and we got soldiers at war,” the 15-year-old said. “When you’re saying the Pledge in a different language which nobody understands, that’s not OK.”

Charles Linton, Patrick’s father, said the use of other languages is disrespectful to the country. “It’s like wearing a cross upside down in a church,” he said.

Sources tell me that Townhall.com has offered this bright shining American boy his own triweekly column.