No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

This is how we are losing in Iraq

The media are presenting some numbers that can explain how badly Iraq is being managed.
The Dark at the End of the Tunnel: Unsustainable Casualty Rate in Iraq.

While I don't guarantee the validity of the analysis, the historical references are accurate and I don't see anything wrong with it.

I would guess the real question is whether the numbers change after the elections scheduled for the end of January. The only reason that I can see for such a change is that the current attacks are a major push and the resources (human and military) that the insurgents have will run out.

I have no evidence that the resources available to the insurgents are even in doubt. My bet is that they are not.

posted by Richard at 2:27 PM

 

Nasty and Isolationist Right-Wing Publications.

Do you really want to know how bad the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal have become?? They have made up a story about a UN official complaining about how stingy the US was over aid to the Tsunami-stricken nations. The Gadflyer

This is the largest natural disaster to occur in decades, and what do the right-wing sleaze-rags do? They use it to lie about how badly Bush is being treated by the UN.

Do they even care that well over a hundred thousand people (especially children) were killed within about six hours? Apparently not. They have to make up lies about a UN official who never said that the US was being "stingy."

The funny thing is that their very lies make the story true. The thousands of deaths are irrelevant to them if they can use the disaster to make up political lies that appear to show that they are being "Dissed."

posted by Richard at 1:55 PM

 
Pro-Choice, not pro-abortion

I found this on Steve Gilliards' blog.

Democrats support women being able to choose when to have children, ensuring that all children are wanted and cared for. The ability to choose means that

1) women get to choose when and with whom they have sexual relations,

2) are able to choose from a full array of birth control options to avoid becoming pregnant if they do not want become pregnant, and

3) as a last resort access to a safe and legal abortion only up to viability or to protect the life of the woman.

Our position is properly called pro-choice, because it is about having the ability to make the choices necessary to control when and how to have children.

It is not pro-abortion, because if the first two parts of choice are guaranteed then the number of abortions will be reduced dramatically.

posted by Richard at 3:28 PM

 

The Economist Warns about the Dollar

The Economist Dec 02, 2004 has a rather frightening article on the fate of the American Dollar. Here are two key paragraphs, but the entire article is important.

The dollar is not what it used to be. Over the past three years it has fallen by 35% against the euro and by 24% against the yen. But its latest slide is merely a symptom of a worse malaise: the global financial system is under great strain. America has habits that are inappropriate, to say the least, for the guardian of the world's main reserve currency: rampant government borrowing, furious consumer spending and a current-account deficit big enough to have bankrupted any other country some time ago. This makes a dollar devaluation inevitable, not least because it becomes a seemingly attractive option for the leaders of a heavily indebted America. Policymakers now seem to be talking the dollar down. Yet this is a dangerous game. Why would anybody want to invest in a currency that will almost certainly depreciate?

The dollar's loss of reserve-currency status would lead America's creditors to start cashing those cheques—and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price.

At one point in the article it states that ”The OECD's latest Economic Outlook predicts that the deficit will rise to $825 billion by 2006 (6.4% of America's GDP) assuming unchanged exchange rates.” American readers need to remember that a British billion is 1,000,000,000,000 or one million million.. In the US we call that a trillion.

This provides some confirmation about my previous postings about the financial hole the Bush administration is placing the US into. And they are still digging it deeper.

posted by Richard at 1:49 PM

 

Someone with a reasonable view of Religion

Thank you, James Wolcott and H. L. Mencken.

I'm really getting fed up with all the pious hogwash we're supposed to accept now about faith and belief and the need for God in our lives. "There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get," wrote H.L. Mencken in 1929, and oh were he with us in this hour.

Most people use religion to justify what they were inclined to do anyway, picking and choosing the Biblical passages that best feather their proud modesty. We're cautioned now that snickering over Bush's choice of Jesus as his favorite philosopher only reveals how snobby and elitist we are. Well, too bad.

For all his compassion for the poor and lame, Jesus also possessed a punitive mean streak, and as a philosopher he was a primitive compared to Eastern thinkers such as Buddha, Shankara, and Longchenpa, a point Sam Harris drives home in The End of Faith: "Even the contemporary literature on consciousness, which spans philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience, cannot match the kind of precise, phenomenological studies that can be found throughout the Buddhist canon."

But now David Brooks is enjoining us to pay heed to evangelical theologian John Stott. I'll leave the last word to Mencken: "The average theologian...disseminates his blather, not innocently, like a philosopher, but maliciously, like a politician. In a well-organized world he would be on the stone-pile. but in the world as it exists we are asked to listen to him, not only politely, but even reverently, with our mouths open."

The three finest men I have met are two Roman Catholic Priests and an ex-Southern Baptist Preacher become Charismatic Preacher who I knew as a chaplain in my Reserve Unit. None of them required me to accept their blather without question.

If you understand Herbert A. Simon's concept of Bounded Rationality and the theories of General Semantics as described by Korzbski and S. I. Hayakawa will find Biblical Inerrancy irrational and phoney. Religion really has to be more than some preacher standing there and saying "Believe what I tell you or go to Hell."

The DFW Center for General Semantics offers an interesting list of people who have been exposed to General Semantics.

posted by Richard at 4:31 PM

 

Was Fallujah a Success or Failure?

Why did the US attack Fallujah? Sure the city was being used as a protected area for the insurgents to prepare car bombs and improvised explosive devices (IED’s) for attacking the Coalition Forces and the Iraqi police and military forces, but that wasn’t enough to cause the US to attack before the US Presidential election. The reason given was that an out-of-control Fallujah threatened the validity of the Iraqi elections planned for January.

So the US attacked Fallujah and now has it under military control Has it worked?

Juan Cole doesn’t think so:

Whatever the military rights or wrongs, the political judgment on the Fallujah campaign is easy. It was supposed to make holding elections possible in the Sunni Arab heartland. Instead, it has certainly further alienated the Sunni Arabs and made it more likely that they will boycott the elections en masse. If the Sunni Arabs remain angry and sullen in this way, Fallujah will have been a political failure.

We can only hope that the Bush administration is fighting the real war on terror more effectively than they are handling the insurgency in Iraq.

posted by Richard at 1:50 PM

 

US Supreme Court on Gay Marriage in Mass.

This is interesting. From Associated Press by way of Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped a dispute over gay marriages, rejecting a challenge to the nation's only law sanctioning such unions.

Justices had been asked by conservative groups to overturn the year-old decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage. They declined, without comment.

The lawsuit was filed by the Florida-based Liberty Counsel on behalf of Robert Largess, the vice president of the Catholic Action League, and 11 state lawmakers.

The Liberty Counsel had argued that the decision to legalize gay marriages was a usurpation of the Republican form of government guaranteed to Americans in the US Constitution.

Merita Hopkins, a city attorney in Boston, had told justices in court papers that the people who filed the suit have not shown they suffered an injury and could not bring a challenge to the Supreme Court. "Deeply felt interest in the outcome of a case does not constitute an actual injury," she said.

Since the Massachusetts Supreme Court made their decision based entirely on the Massachusetts State Constitution, the decision by the US Supreme Court is an acknowledgement that they have no jurisdiction in the issue. Clearly that implies that the Liberty Counsel argument was not persuasive.

The statement by Merita Hopkins is, to me, quite persuasive. Who suffers an injury if Gay Marriage is recognized by the state? For all the panicky noise from right-wing preachers, no one has ever attempted to answer that question.

The only answer that I can see is that the preachers themselves are hurt because the state is claiming that the doctrine they are spouting has no support. If anyone else is hurt (fear is not being hurt.) I can’t find them.

That makes the entire opposition to Gay Marriage nothing more than a cynical effort to use people’s fears to manipulate their vote.

The Court decision itself does not support a conclusion that the Supreme Court agrees with Merita Hopkins, except to the extent that they are saying they have decided that they do not have jurisdiction in the decision. Essentially they said that the Liberty Counsel’s argument was unpersuasive and there is no federal issue.

At least, that is my opinion of what it says.

posted by Richard at 11:31 AM

 

A Dog Story

I accidentally adopted a dog a couple of years ago. My first dog, if you can believe it. She is a sweet-tempered brown-and-blond furred part sheltie who apparently had been treated badly when younger, then was abandoned. Needless to say, she is uncertain that she belongs to “the pack”. We called her “Foxie.”

When Foxie first moved here, my son and his wife had another dog, and two cats. My daughter-in-law brought Foxie home since she was found alone, abandoned and starving near her work. We couldn't find Foxie's owner, so she stayed. We were her new dog/people pack. As near as I can tell, Foxie sees people and other dogs as pack members, but cats aren't. They are just entertainment. She tries to herd the cats.

Since then my son, his wife and their dog have moved out, and we sent one cat to Tennessee. Now it is just me, Foxie and the small cat.

Foxie has recently been taking one pellet from her food bowl and dropping it in the middle of the living room, near where I am frequently on the computer. That behavior puzzled me. But I think I have it figured out.

Pack behavior.

Foxie is a subordinate dog, and considers me the alpha dog. She is bringing a little of her food to me. An offering to the alpha dog.

Hey, I’ll take it. I don’t get much respect anywhere else.

posted by Richard at 7:01 PM

 

Democrats and a National Competitiveness Strategy

From The Emerging Democratic Majority weblog, Ruy Teixiera wrote:

Historically the Democrats have been the party of security, but that's an identity they need to reclaim. ….The challenge of a global labor market demands more of them than a commitment to mid-career retraining; defending the American middle class means creating the kind of global standards that the Democrats created on the national level during the 1930s and '40s, the time of their greatest popularity. That's a daunting challenge, one that requires the Democrats to think and develop a story about the new threats to the American dream.

Put this together with last night’s Charlie Rose panel discussion with the COO of Intel and the CEO’s of Cisco, Google and Yahoo who all agreed that the US is currently in competition with China and Europe, both of which have effective national competition strategies while the US has no strategy at all.

The four agreed that the US led the world in technology throughout the twentieth century, but now is an also-ran in the fielding of the single most significant technology infrastructure of the 21st Century, broadband connection. This is because there is no statement of national priorities. Broadband infrastructure can’t be left to the unguided private enterprise because without guidance, the companies can’t tell if a profit if possible, so they don’t do it.

The problem with this is that fielding broadband is expensive and slow, and until it is up and running, the follow-on economic development is stifled. That is why South Korea is so far ahead of the US in internet usage. They made going broadband a national priority, and did it. China and Europe are ahead of the US in this.

So a position for the Democrats would seem to be to push a national competitiveness plan or set of priorities.

Just a thought.

posted by Richard at 3:04 PM

 

Why the Battle for Fallujah?

George Will today offers an interesting take on what the attack on Fallujah means.

operations in Fallujah, and perhaps in three or more other Iraqi cities, may determine whether elections scheduled for late January will midwife the birth of a viable state.

As events unfold in Fallujah, the two great questions are: In a region where there is little tradition of armies loyal to the state, can Iraq's military be reconstituted while a new Iraqi state is being constituted? And can this be done before Americans' patience is exhausted by the suspicion that the current Iraqi government is prepared to "fight to the last American"?

Success in Iraq, people here believe, is contingent on three ifs:

• If Iraqi military and security forces can stay intact during contacts with the insurgents.

• If insurgents are killed in sufficient numbers to convince the Sunni political class that it must invest its hope in politics.

• If neighboring states, especially Syria, will cooperate in slowing the flow of money and other aid to the insurgency.

If so, then America can -- this is the preferred verb -- "stand up" an Iraqi state and recede from a dominant role.

George Will is right wing but is more of a reporter than he is a ‘water-bearer’ for the Bush administration. In this instance he presents a reasonable explanation for why we are attacking Fallujah and what our military thinks they might get as a result.

Time will tell.

posted by Richard at 3:51 PM

 

Ariana Huffington on Why Kerry Lost

I want to know why Kerry lost the race for the Presidency. Ariana Huffington today has one answer. She says this is published today in the LA Times, but I can't find it, so I am printing it all here for purposes of discussion.

-------------------------------------------------------
THE ARCHITECTS OF DEFEAT

By Arianna Huffington

Twelve days before the election, James Carville stood in a Beverly Hills living room surrounded by two generations of Hollywood stars. After being introduced by Sen. John Kerry's daughter, Alexandra, he told the room — confidently, almost cockily — that the election was in the bag.

"If we can't win this damn election," the advisor to the Kerry campaign said, "with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55% of the country believing we're heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs — if we can't win this one, then we can't win shit! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party."

Well, as it turns out, that's exactly what should be done. But instead, Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday morning with a breakfast for an elite core of Washington reporters.

At the breakfast, Carville, together with chief campaign strategist Bob Shrum and pollster Stan Greenberg, seemed intent on one thing — salvaging their reputations.

They blamed the public for not responding to John Kerry's message on the economy, and they blamed the news media for distracting voters from this critical message with headlines from that pesky war in Iraq. "News events were driving this," said Shrum. "The economy was not driving the news coverage."

But shouldn't it have been obvious that Iraq and the war on terror were the real story of this campaign? Only these Washington insiders, stuck in an anachronistic 1990s mind-set and re-fighting the '92 election, could think that the economy would be the driving factor in a post-9/11 world with Iraq in flames. That the campaign's leadership failed to recognize that it was no longer "the economy, stupid," was the tragic flaw of the race.

In conversations with Kerry insiders over the last nine months, I've heard a recurring theme: that it was Shrum and the Clintonistas (including Greenberg, Carville and senior advisor Joe Lockhart) who dominated the campaign in the last two months and who were convinced that this election was going to be won on domestic issues, like jobs and healthcare, and not on national security.

As Tom Vallely, the Vietnam War veteran whom Kerry tapped to lead the response to the Swift boat attacks, told me: "I kept telling Shrum that before you walk through the economy door, you're going to have to walk through the terrorism/Iraq door. But, unfortunately, the Clinton team, though technically skillful, could not see reality — they could only see their version of reality. And that was always about pivoting to domestic issues. As for Shrum, he would grab on to anyone's strategy; he had none of his own."

Vallely, together with Kerry's brother, Cam, and David Thorne, the senator's closest friend and former brother-in-law, created the "Truth and Trust Team." This informal group within the campaign pushed at every turn to aggressively take on President Bush's greatest claim: his leadership on the war on terror.

"When Carville and Greenberg tell reporters that the campaign was missing a defining narrative," Thorne told me this week, "they forget that they were the ones insisting we had to keep beating the domestic-issues drum. So we never defended John's character and focused on his leadership with the same singularity of purpose that the Republicans put on George Bush's leadership. A fallout of this was that the campaign had no memorable ads. In a post-election survey, the only three ads remembered by voters were all Republican ads — and that was after we spent over $100 million on advertising."

Cam Kerry agrees. "There is a very strong John Kerry narrative that is about leadership, character and trust. But it was never made central to the campaign," he said. "Yet, at the end of the day, a presidential campaign — and this post-9/11 campaign in particular — is about these underlying attributes rather than about a laundry list of issues."

It was the "Truth and Trust Team" that fought to have Kerry give a major speech clarifying his position on Iraq, which he finally did, to great effect, at New York University on Sept. 20. "That was the turning point," Thorne, who was responsible for the campaign's wildly successful online operation, told me. "John broke through and found his voice again. But even after the speech the campaign kept returning to domestic issues, and in the end I was only able to get just over a million dollars for ads making our case."

Despite a lot of talk about "moral values," exit polls proved that Iraq and the war on terror together were the issues uppermost in people's minds. And therefore as Thorne and Vallely, among others, kept arguing, if the president continued to hold a double-digit advantage on his leadership on the war on terror, he would win. But those in charge of the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red elephant standing in the middle of the room and allowed themselves to be mesmerized by polling and focus group data that convinced them the economy was the way to go.

"We kept coming back from the road," said James Boyce, a Kerry family friend who traveled across the country with Cam Kerry, "and telling the Washington team that the questions we kept getting were more about safety and Iraq than healthcare. But they just didn't want to hear it. Their minds were made up."

Boyce, along with Cam Kerry, were instrumental in bringing to the campaign four of the more outspoken 9/11 widows, including Kristin Breitweiser, who had provided critical leadership in stopping the Bush administration from undermining the 9/11 Commission. "We told the campaign," Breitweiser told me, "that we would not come out and endorse Kerry unless he spoke out against the war in Iraq. It was quite a battle. In fact, I got into a fight with Mary Beth Cahill on the phone. I actually said to her: 'You're not getting it. This election is about national security.' I told her this in August. She didn't want to hear it."

The campaign's regular foreign policy conference calls were another arena where this battle was fought, with Kerry foreign policy advisor Richard Holbrooke taking the lead against the candidate coming out with a decisive position on Iraq that diverged too far from the president's. Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart consistently argued against Holbrooke, and Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden expressed his disagreement with this ruffle-no-feathers approach directly to Kerry. But until the Sept. 20 speech in New York, it was Holbrooke who prevailed — in no small part because his position dovetailed with the strategic direction embraced by Shrum and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill.

Jamie Rubin, the Clinton State Department spokesman, had also argued that Kerry should stick close to the Bush position, and even told the Washington Post that Kerry, too, would probably have invaded Iraq. Kerry was reportedly apoplectic but did not ask for Rubin's resignation, thereby letting the damage linger for two weeks before Rubin told Ron Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times that he was not speaking for the candidate.

Just how misguided the campaign's leadership was can be seen in the battle that took place between Vernon Jordan, the campaign's debate negotiator, and Cahill and Shrum. "They were so opposed," someone close to the negotiations told me, "to Jordan's accepting the first debate being all about foreign policy, in exchange for a third debate, that Jordan and Cahill had a knock down, drag out argument. It was so bad that Jordan had to send her flowers before they could make up." It was a familiar strategic battle with Jordan siding with those who believed that unless Kerry could win on national security, he would not win period.

Behind the scenes, former President Clinton also kept up the drumbeat, telling Kerry in private conversations right to the end that he should focus on the economy rather than Iraq or the war on terror, and that he should come out in favor of all 11 state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage — a move that would have been a political disaster for a candidate who had already been painted as an unprincipled flip-flopper. Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq here and there until the end of the race (how could he not?), but the vast majority of what came out of the campaign, including Kerry's radio address 10 days before the election, was on domestic issues.

Another good illustration of how the clash played out was the flu vaccine shortage, which ended up being framed not as a national security issue (how can you trust this man to keep you safe against biological warfare when he can't even handle getting you the flu vaccine?), but as a healthcare issue with the Bush campaign turning it into an attack on trial lawyers.

"This election was about security," Gary Hart told me. But when he suggested that Kerry should talk about jobs and energy and other issues in the context of security, Hart said, he was "constantly confronted with focus group data, according to which the people wanted to hear a different message focused on the economy."

The last few days of the campaign, in which national security dominated the headlines — with the 380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq, multiple deaths of U.S. soldiers, insurgents gaining ground and the reappearance of Osama bin Laden — show how Kerry could have pulled away from Bush if, early on, his campaign had built the frame into which all these events would have fit.

How the campaign handled the reappearance of Bin Laden the Friday before the election says it all. "Stan Greenberg was adamant," a senior campaign strategist told me, "that Kerry should not even mention Osama. He insisted that because his polling showed Kerry had already won the election, he should not do anything that would endanger his position. We argued that since Osama dominated the news, it would be hard for us to get any other message through. So a compromise was reached, according to which Kerry issued a bland statesman-like statement about Osama (followed by stumping on the economy), and we dispatched Holbrooke to argue on TV that the reappearance of Bin Laden proved that the president had not made us safer."

As at almost every other turn, the campaign had chosen caution over boldness. Why did these highly paid professionals make such amateurish mistakes? In the end, it was the old obsession with pleasing undecided voters (who, Greenberg argued right up until the election, would break for the challenger) and an addiction to polls and focus groups, which they invariably interpreted through their Clinton-era filters. It appears that you couldn't teach these old Beltway dogs new tricks. It's time for some fresh political puppies.

-------------------------------------------------

Since I live in Texas, I did not get the direct impact of the campaigns. Neither side bothered to waste the advertising budget or campaign efforts on Texas. In essence I am an amateur historian trying to dig through the reports and editorials that purport to explain the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election.

Whatever the reason for the election results, I really doubt that historians will be kind to the leaders we have chosen for this period of American history.

posted by Richard at 2:27 PM

 

The Character of Bush's Reelection

The election is over, Bush will be sworn in again in January, and I am, of course, very disappointed. I am also quite disgusted with the election that Bush/Rove ran.

Ruy Teixeira at the Emerging Democrat has a good description of the nature of the Republican election effort.

What the vast majority of Democrats find most disturbing about 2004 is that Bush's victory was based on a pervasive strategy of dishonesty--a dishonesty that included major distortions of Kerry's record by the Bush campaign's own television commercials, outright lies told by the Swift Boat Veterans, grotesque distortions circulated among rural or minority voters (such as the claim that Democrats would take away religious people's bibles or that Martin Luther King was a Republican), flyers listing false reasons why voters should believe themselves disqualified, leaflets and phone calls falsely announcing changes in polling places and phony voter registration groups that collected and then destroyed voter registration forms.

Layered on top of this were techniques for suppressing the vote in Democratic areas that included last minute changes in polling places, use of felon lists known to be inaccurate and the provision of inadequate numbers of voting machines and ballots.

The dishonesty and disrespect for the voters that this demonstrates is indicative of the nature of the Bush administration and of the current Republican Party in general. This is a sad time for America.


posted by Richard at 10:22 AM

 

At times Bush's responses to questions he is asked seem totally unrelated to either reality or to the question. Many of us wonder why that seems true.

Bush’s top deputies, when asked why President Bush’s decisions so often fly in the face of the facts, say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' This is a strong attraction to the Evangelicals, who believe that Bush is a messenger appointed by God to lead this nation. Bush believes this also. It is the source of his certainty that he is absolutely right in his decisions.

It is also the reason why he can’t explain what his three worst decisions were. He doesn’t believe there were any. God told him what was right, and he did it. There is no room for bad decisions if God told him what to do.

The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.

The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions.

Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House.

There is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker.

For a truly excellent psychological analysis of Bush as President, see New York Times article by RON SUSKIND

posted by Richard at 7:48 PM

 

Bush failed to prevent flu, tried to lie his way out.

A great many things are produced better under unregulated free enterprise. It looks like Flu Vaccine simply isn’t one of them. Why is that?

Contagious diseases and illnesses can often be contained if the entire population is controlled so that the spread of the disease does from the ill to the healthy is limited or prevented. This makes Public Health a government responsibility. It applies to people without money as well as those with money. Influenza is one of the diseases this clearly applies to.

The problem is that the market for the flu vaccine is uncertain. It sells best when the flu is widespread and people are afraid to get it. If the vaccination program is successful, then the fear is reduced and people have better uses for their money than for a vaccine to an illness they suspect they won’t get.

A company’s profitability will suffer if it successfully produces a vaccine that prevents a flu epidemic. But if it produces too little vaccine to prevent an epidemic it can’t raise prices to increase profitability as the theory of free market economics would expect. If it does, it will be accused of “Price-Gouging.” The greater problem is that producing a vaccine in the most profitable amounts will guarantee that the disease remains to be dealt with again later. This is economically a good idea, but is socially very bad. Our laws very properly do not permit this.

Since producing a flu vaccine is a time-consuming, very expensive and uncertain process, Production of a flu vaccine is an unattractive market for a company to enter. See the Dallas Morning News Editorial below.

The Bush administration guaranteed a market to two companies and relieved them from legal liability for side effects caused by the vaccine. The guaranteed market is probably a good idea, but then the Bush administration dropped the ball by not regulating the production process. When you relieve a company from legal liability for the side effects of their product, then the government has taken responsibility for problems in the process. But George Bush takes responsibility for nothing.

None of Chiron's flu vaccine is safe

From Knight-Ridder News Service in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 16, 2004 by Seth Borenstein

A U.S. inspection, completed Friday, found that the manufacturing process was allowing disease-causing bacteria into the vaccine. The contaminant is serratia, a bacterium that can cause pneumonia and infections of the urinary tract and in cuts and wounds.

The contamination may have occurred during the filling of vials, which doesn't seem to have been done in a sterile manner, said acting FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford.

No flu vaccine aid from Canada is likely

From Knight-Ridder News Service in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 14, 2004 by Seth Borenstein and WILLIAM DOUGLAS

America's top health official and other experts said Thursday that getting more supplies of vaccine from Canada is unlikely.

There isn't enough time for U.S. regulators to approve a Canadian vaccine, and Canada doesn't have enough to spare, they said.

Vaccine Shortage: Risk, expense of production are too high From the Dallas Morning News, Oct 15, 2004.

Drug manufacturers no longer produce vaccines because it is risky and expensive to do so, and the potential rewards for such work are relatively small. A generation ago, at least a dozen manufacturers provided the annual U.S. supply of flu vaccine; today, that number is down to a mere two.

What's wrong with nationalizing flu vaccine production, putting the federal government in charge of this vital public health service? Many experts fear that concentrating this responsibility in government hands would lead to a loss of innovation and flexibility typical of monopolies.

One vaccine maker told Congress that it takes from five to seven years to build a vaccine production facility and bring it online.

In short, the Bush administration screwed up the process for getting a reliable, safe supply of flu vaccination, and Bush tried to lie his way out of it during the Debate last Wednesday night. We are probably very lucky that Chiron was producing the vaccine in England. The British caught the problem and stopped Chiron from distributing the product.

The Bush administration would never have known that the process was putting in dangerous contaminates because they refuse to regulate business, even those invloved in health protection. Or if they had accidentally learned of the problem, they would have ignored it and let the vaccine be administered as it was in spite of deadly side effects. Hey, what do the deaths of a few customers matter if telling others about them would reduce the profitability of one of the drug companies?

The flu vaccine crisis is just another failure by the Bush administration.

Do they have any successes?

posted by Richard at 6:06 PM

 

RNC does not think Bush can win a fair election

Of course, they had to call the Supreme Court into Florida to act without any basis to appoint Bush in 2000, so why should the Republican National Committee (RNC) think it will be better for them this year?

Here we have Paul Krugman's thoughts on the subject:

Block the Vote

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.
The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.
Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.
Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.
But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.
That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.
And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular.
Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form. Many counties are, sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent that some officials have both used this rule and other technicalities to reject applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying would-be voters of problems with their applications until it was too late.
Whose applications get rejected? A Washington Post examination of rejected applications in Duval County found three times as many were from Democrats, compared with Republicans. It also found a strong tilt toward rejection of blacks' registrations.
The case of Florida's felon list - used by state officials, as in 2000, to try to wrongly disenfranchise thousands of blacks - has been widely reported. Less widely reported has been overwhelming evidence that the errors were deliberate.
In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names.
And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.
Next week, I'll address the question of whether the votes of Floridians with the wrong color skin will be fully counted if they are cast. Mr. Palast notes that in the 2000 election, almost 180,000 Florida votes were rejected because they were either blank or contained overvotes. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission estimate that 54 percent of the spoiled ballots were cast by blacks. And there's strong evidence that this spoilage didn't reflect voters' incompetence: it was caused mainly by defective voting machines and may also reflect deliberate vote-tampering.
The important point to realize is that these abuses aren't aberrations. They're the inevitable result of a Republican Party culture in which dirty tricks that distort the vote are rewarded, not punished. It's a culture that will persist until voters - whose will still does count, if expressed strongly enough - hold that party accountable.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

posted by Richard at 8:34 PM

 

Vote for Kerry and Save America

The best of the state-by-state election prediction sites I have found is “Electoral Vote Predictor 2004”. As nearly as I can tell it is an unbiased report of the results of the very latest state polls, and the “Votemaster” provides intelligent explanations and commentary. That includes good discussions of the limitations of his report, something you will certainly never hear from George Bush or Dick Cheney. I strongly recommend it if you want to keep track of the poll-driven predictions.

In fact, it clearly is providing information someone doesn’t want you to have. The Votemaster reported this today.

The site has had technical problems repeatedly in the past several days and has been down several times. I didn't want to discuss this, but I don't want anyone to think the problem was an incompetent hosting service. Just the opposite. The site has been subjected to a full-scale, well-organized, massive attack with the clear intention to bring it down. The attackers have tried repeatedly to break in, but the server is a rock-solid Linux system which has stood up to everything they threw at it and hasn't crashed since I got it in May. While our troops are fighting and dying to bring freedom of speech to the Iraqi people, there are forces in America who find this concept no longer applicable to America. I don't know who is behind this attack yet (although we are working it), but it is too professional to be some teenager working from a home PC. Given that all the hate mail and threats I get come entirely from Republicans, I can make an educated guess which side is trying to silence me, but I won't say. And I won't surrender to cyberterrorists.

Between the Sinclair group of TV stations, FOX lies, Washington Times and New York Post lies, the Swift Boat Liars for Bush lies, and the lies that Bush, Cheney and Rice told America to send us into an unnecessary war in Iraq, anyone who thinks that democracy in America is not under threat needs to wake up. There is no essential difference between the way Putin is centralizing government control in Russia and Bush is centralizing control of America in Washington.

We may still have the right to elect an honest American President instead of a power-mad intellectually challenged fool who wants to hand control of this nation to the corporations and his superrich friends. So go vote against Bush on November 2, even if you are in a state like Texas that he has locked up.

If Bush is reelected, then it is extremely likely that all of America will be “locked up” by the Bush forces from now on the way Texas is today.

Of course, if Bush is reelected we may not know for sure because honest reports of information like that given us by Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 will no longer be available, and the Supreme Court will reinterpret the Constitution so that such a dictatorship is perfectly legal.

Get out and vote against lies, tyranny and misgovernment. Vote for Kerry on November 2.

posted by Richard at 5:16 PM

 

A Description of Bush

This is from Andrew Tobias regarding the Second Presidential Debate:

THE COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE
“My opponent is a Massachusetts liberal,” President Bush has taken to saying at rallies. “I am a compassionate conservative.”

I don’t think it’s conservative to go to war when you don’t have to or to borrow half a trillion dollars a year from your children.

I don't think it’s compassionate to cut children’s health care – and I don't think it was compassionate of President Bush to execute Karla Faye Tucker.

Do you remember that case? Karla Faye Tucker committed a terrible crime when she was young; but in prison she became a loving, caring woman, a born again Christian. A number of groups and individuals – including the Pope – pleaded with then Governor Bush to spare her life – to keep her locked up forever, but not kill her, the first woman to be executed in Texas in more than a century.

People can legitimately disagree on this and do. But was Bush’s choice compassionate? Was it the choice his favorite philosopher would have made?

Tucker Carlson, the “right” wing of CNN’s Crossfire, profiled then-governor Bush for the premier issue of the now-defunct Talk magazine. He reported:

In the week before [Karla Faye Tucker's] execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' "

"What was her answer?" I wonder.

"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."

“When I read that,” writes one well-known conservative, “I thought, ‘Please don’t let this man get close to any position of power – ever.’”

“I think it is nothing short of unbelievable,” Gary Bauer, was quoted at the time, “that the governor of a major state running for president thought it was acceptable to mock a woman he decided to put to death.”

It’s not inconsistent with the memories of that Harvard Business School Professor people have been quoting. From Salon:

"He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, "Oh, I never said that.”

. . . Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. "In class, he couldn't challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that's how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy."

. . . I used to chat up a number of students when we were walking back to class," Tsurumi said. "Here was Bush, wearing a Texas Guard bomber jacket, and the draft was the No. 1 topic in those days. And I said, 'George, what did you do with the draft?' He said, 'Well, I got into the Texas Air National Guard.' And I said, 'Lucky you. I understand there is a long waiting list for it. How'd you get in?' When he told me, he didn't seem ashamed or embarrassed. He thought he was entitled to all kinds of privileges and special deals. He was not the only one trying to twist all their connections to avoid Vietnam. But then, he was fanatically for the war."

Tsurumi told Bush that someone who avoided a draft while supporting a war in which others were dying was a hypocrite. "He realized he was caught, showed his famous smirk and huffed off."

Tsurumi's conclusion: Bush is not as dumb as his detractors allege. "He was just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion," he said.



posted by Richard at 6:33 PM

 

Who decided to disband the Iraqi Army?

The largest single blunder made by the Bush administration in Iraq was disbanding the Iraqi Army instead of using it to maintain the borders and internal security in Iraq. Newsweek addresses this today.

At the heart of the controversy is a still-unresolved dispute over who was mainly responsible for one of the biggest mistakes of Bremer's 15-month tenure in Iraq, one that is commonly ascribed to him. This was the decision in May 2003 to reverse the efforts of Bremer's predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, to put the ragged elements of the Iraqi Army to work. After Bremer formally disbanded the army, some disaffected soldiers were believed to have joined the insurgency, which still rages.

Administration officials said today that this decision was made on the ground in Iraq, rather than in Washington. Before the war, the plan was to get rid of Iraqi Army officers but use regular troops for security and reconstruction after Saddam's ouster. But Bremer “flipped that around,” said a White House official. He added that Bremer and his deputy, Walt Slocombe, made the decision by themselves.

But Bremer and Garner have previously indicated the decision was made in Washington. According to one official who attended a meeting that Bremer had with his staff upon his arrival in Baghdad in mid-May of 2003, Bremer was warned he would cause chaos by demobilizing the army. The CIA station chief told him, "That's another 350,000 Iraqis you're pissing off, and they've got guns." According to one source who was at the meeting, Garner then asked if they could discuss the matter further in a smaller meeting. Garner then said: “Before you announce this thing let’s do all the pros and cons of this, because we are going to have a hell of a lot of problems with it. There are a hell of a lot more cons than there are pros. Let’s line them all up then get on the phone to [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld.” Bremer replied: “I don’t have any choice. I have to do this.” Garner then protested further, but Bremer cut him off. “The president told me that de-Baathification comes before the immediate needs of the Iraqi people.”

This action was taken by Bremer with full knowledge of the White House and Don Rumsfeld, and is the direct cause of most of the casualties that have occurred to both Americans and Iraqis since then. They were warned in advance and did it anyway.

posted by Richard at 4:15 PM

 

Why did the Iraq occupation go so bad?

The war in Iraq simply isn’t worth the cost. The problems are obvious and were mostly predictable. The first is the fact that it is a diversion from the terrorist threat against America, bringing into question why we started it at all when we did. But this has been discussed at length. Now Fred Kaplan of Slate uses Paul Bremer’s recent revelations that he told the administration that we did not have enough troops to do the job to discuss the way it was handled and speculate a little on why it was handled that way.

From Slate:

The week's most stunning development may have been the revelation in L. Paul Bremer's remarks, before a group of insurance agents at DePauw University, that we never had enough troops in Iraq, either to secure the country's borders or to provide the stability needed for reconstruction. "The single most important change, the one thing that would have improved the situation," Bremer said, "would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout."

But Bremer's disclosure slams himself no less than Team Bush. Bremer, after all, was the man who ordered the disbanding of the old Iraqi army. This decision is commonly seen in retrospect as the administration's first—and perhaps most—disastrous move after the fall of Baghdad. If Bremer thought there weren't enough U.S. troops on the ground, why did he call for the demobilization of Iraqi troops (many of whom had not been loyal to Saddam—they didn't, after all, fight for him)? This is one of the war's great remaining mysteries. (Another is why we went to war in the first place, but that's another story.) Bremer almost certainly didn't make this decision himself; it had to come from higher up. But from where? My guess is that, ultimately, Ahmad Chalabi was a big influence. He was still counting on taking the reins of power in the new Iraq (he had the support of the White House and the Pentagon at the time), and he hoped to install his own militia, the Free Iraqi Forces, as the new Iraqi army. The old, Baathist-dominated army would have been in the way; it had to go.

Saddam Hussein was a major problem in the Middle East and the sanctions on Iraq were losing their effectiveness at keeping him from acquiring chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The invasion of Iraq was one option for resolving the problems he caused. The majority of the problems in Iraq today stem not from the invasion itself as from the utter incompetence with which the aftermath of the invasion was handled. The small number of America troops used, the lack of any plan for security after the invasion, and the disbanding of the Army and police forces eliminated security and allowed the insurrectionists the time and space to become organized and learn their trade.

Now the middle classes who were happy to see Saddam go and should have supported the occupation are leaving the country because it is not safe to live and work there. Robberies, kidnappings, murders, all of these things are occurring alongside the more telegenic car bombs, so the nation is being left to the radicals and the criminals. It is the failure to anticipate and deal with these problems that make Iraq the greatest indictment against the Bush administration.

When the history of this sad period is written, Ahmad Chalabi will be seen as a key influence in the most idiotic actions taken by the Bush administration, perhaps as much a disastrous influence as Vice President Dick Cheney.

posted by Richard at 8:55 AM

 

Proposals that Social Security be replaced by private (non-government) pensions are all sold by promising higher pension payments. They ignore the much greater risk that such private pensions carry. The New York Times has an article that demonstrates the problem.

From the article:

“Mr. Paulsen, 61, is just one of more than 500,000 Americans whose pension plans have failed in the last three years and been taken over by the federal government, leaving many without health insurance and some, like Mr. Paulsen - high earners who retire early - with pensions much lower than those they had counted on. “

Half-a-million retirees depending on private pensions in the last three years have found that non-government pensions have failed them. They now have only what the government will pay. This is a significant percentage of all retirees. Is this a satisfactory replacement for Social Security?

posted by Richard at 9:58 AM

 

The Bush Administration is Secret Government

Rep. Henry A. Waxman has released a comprehensive examination of secrecy in the Bush Administration. The report analyzes how the Administration has implemented each of our nation’s major open government laws. It finds that there has been a consistent pattern in the Administration’s actions: laws that are designed to promote public access to information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded. The cumulative result is an unprecedented assault on the principle of open government

Report by the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee.

Essentially the Bush administration has been acting as though there should be no "transparent government" and also that even the Congress has no right to learn what the Executive Branch is doing. This is clearly a major step twoards authoritarian government, since it requires that Americans simply accept any decision made by the President or his administration with no possibility of question.

posted by Richard at 1:40 PM

 

Is Scott McClelland reading Baghdad Bob's notes?

This is what Joe Klein has to say about the situation in Iraq based on the recent National Intelligence Estimate the CIA presented George Bush in July.

If the National Intelligence Estimate is accurate, we are facing a far more dangerous world than existed before the war. Many intelligence and military experts now believe that al-Qaeda has rebuilt its leadership structure and metastasized; that the U.S. military is overburdened and its leaders are likely to tell the next President that they lack the resources necessary to regain control in Iraq; that the U.S. government has lost the credibility to lead the world into action against future threats from, say, Iran or North Korea; that Iraq itself seems in danger of splitting into three chaotic regions, which—in the NIE's worst-case scenario—may lead to civil war.

Time Magazine

You won’t hear that from either Bush or Cheney prior to the election. What you hear from this is a set of statements which are “true, truish or unprovable” but which are either unimportant or divorced from reality.

Whatever we hear in the debates will be more such hot air with no relevance to what is happening in Iraq or will be lies of the kind that take time to prove false. What we will not hear is what has to be done in Iraq because no one at this time knows.

posted by Richard at 11:13 AM

 

Intelligence understands the morass

U.S. intelligence pessimistic on Iraq future Estimate contrasts Bush statements, says civil war possible

The Associated Press
Updated: 10:46 a.m. ET Sept. 16, 2004

WASHINGTON - A highly classified National Intelligence Estimate assembled by some of the government’s most senior analysts this summer provided a pessimistic assessment about the future security and stability of Iraq.

The National Intelligence Council looked at the political, economic and security situation in the war-torn country and determined — at best — the situation would be tenuous in terms of stability, a U.S. official said late Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

At worst, the official said, were “trend lines that would point to a civil war.” The official said it “would be fair” to call the document “pessimistic.”

The intelligence estimate, which was prepared for President Bush, considered the window of time between July and the end of 2005. But the official noted that the document, which spans roughly 50 pages, draws on intelligence community assessments from January 2003, before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deteriorating security situation there.

The latest assessment was undertaken by the National Intelligence Council, a group of senior intelligence officials who provide long-term strategic thinking for the entire U.S. intelligence community but report to the director of central intelligence, now acting CIA Director John McLaughlin. He and the leaders of the other intelligence agencies approved it.

Estimate contrasts Bush statementsThe estimate contrasts with public comments of Bush and his senior aides who speak more optimistically about the prospects for a peaceful and free Iraq. “We’re making progress on the ground,” Bush said at his Texas ranch late last month.
“It states the obvious,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said on Air Force One as Bush flew to a day of campaigning in Minnesota. “It talks about the scenarios and the different challenges we face.” He said it did not reach any conclusions and left it up to policy-makers to act on the information.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment Wednesday night.
The document was first reported by the New York Times on its Web site Wednesday night.

It is the first formal assessment of Iraq since the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on the threat posed by fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

A review of that estimate released this summer by the Senate Intelligence Committee found widespread intelligence failures that led to faulty assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Senators say risks of failure greatSenate Republicans and Democrats on Wednesday denounced the Bush administration’s slow progress in rebuilding Iraq, saying the risks of failure are great if it doesn’t act with greater urgency.

“It’s beyond pitiful, it’s beyond embarrassing, it’s now in the zone of dangerous,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., referring to figures showing only about 6 percent of the reconstruction money approved by Congress last year has been spent.

Foreign Relations Committee members vented their frustrations at a hearing where the State Department explained its request to divert $3.46 billion in reconstruction funds to security and economic development. The money was part of the $18.4 billion approved by Congress last year mostly for public works projects.

The request comes as heavy fighting continues between U.S.-led forces and a variety of Iraqi insurgents, endangering prospects for elections slated for January.

“We know that the provision of adequate security up front is requisite to rapid progress on all other fronts,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Ron Schlicher.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said circumstances in Iraq have changed since last year. “It’s important that you have some flexibility.”
But Hagel said the shift in funds “does not add up in my opinion to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we’re winning. But it does add up to this: an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble.”

'Lack of planning apparent' Hagel, Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and other committee members have long argued — even before the war — that administration plans for rebuilding Iraq were inadequate and based on overly optimistic assumptions that Americans would be greeted as liberators.

But the criticism from the panel’s top Republicans had an extra sting coming less than seven weeks before the presidential election in which President Bush’s handling of the war is a top issue.

“Our committee heard blindly optimistic people from the administration prior to the war and people outside the administration — what I call the ’dancing in the street crowd,’ that we just simply will be greeted with open arms,” Lugar said. “The nonsense of all of that is apparent. The lack of planning is apparent.”

He said the need to shift the reconstruction funds was clear in July, but the administration was slow to make the request.

“This is an extraordinary, ineffective administrative procedure. It is exasperating from anybody looking at this from any vantage point,” he said.

State Department stresses progress State Department officials stressed areas of progress in Iraq since the United States turned over political control of Iraq to an interim government on June 28. They cited advances in generating electricity, producing oil and creating jobs.
Schlicher said the department hopes to create more than 800,000 short- and long-term jobs over two years, saying, “When Iraqis have hope for the future and real opportunity, they will reject those who advocate violence.”

Congress approved the $18.4 billion in November as part of an $87 billion package mostly for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, administration officials said the reconstruction money was just as important as the military funds. But only $1.14 billion had been spent as of Sept. 8.

“It’s incompetence, from my perspective, looking at this,” said the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. of Delaware.

In separate action Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to shift $150 million from the $18.4 billion to buttress U.S. efforts to help victims of violence and famine in the Darfur region of Sudan and nearby areas. The transfer was approved by voice vote with bipartisan support.

© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6016743/

posted by Richard at 11:33 AM

 

Powell to Straw on the NeoCons

The Observer is reporting that Powell may really understand how to characterize the NeoCons.

The Guardian (12 September 2004) reports what he said about them.

A furious row has broken out over claims in a new book by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie that US Secretary of State Colin Powell described neo-conservatives in the Bush administration as 'fucking crazies' during the build-up to war in Iraq.
Powell's extraordinary outburst is alleged to have taken place during a telephone conversation with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

The 'crazies' are said to be Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

It's nice to know that even though Powell has sold his soul to the crazies, he is still smart enough to know how bad they really are.

The book is The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency and is due to be released September 21, 2004.

posted by Richard at 8:50 PM

 

How to win the battles and lose the war

The Russian reaction to the terrorist attack on School No 1 in Beslan is taking shape. This is continued action in two wars that have together lasted over ten years, and which Putin used to show that he was “tough on the Chechnyans” when he first took office. In moves the Christian Science Monitor article characterizes as “bankrupt”, Putin is following the Bush counter-terrorism actions as demonstrated after 9/11. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor today :

President Vladimir Putin refuses to meet with top Chechen separatist leaders, whom he holds responsible for a wave of terror that includes two downed passenger jets, a suicide bomb in Moscow, and the hostage crisis. But analysts say that Mr. Putin may offer far broader autonomy to Chechnya, which adds up to "de facto independence."

Military officials amplified past threats on Wednesday in moves that in some ways mirror US steps after 9/11. Chief of Staff Col. Gen. Yury Baluyevsky warned of "preemptive strikes ... to liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world." A $10 million reward is being offered for information leading to the "neutralization" of Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev and the more moderate former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov.

The steps are meant to equate Kremlin steps with preemptive US moves. These include threats against Georgia in 2002 over Chechen rebel bases, and the killing of a former Chechen leader in a car bomb in Qatar in February. Russia denies any involvement, but two Russian security agents have been convicted in the case.

"They are saying that what's good for the goose is good for the gander: If you [in the US] can do it, we after such an attack can do it as well," says Mr. Lieven. "The military has obviously failed. [The Kremlin] is bankrupt, totally bankrupt of ideas.

"The Russians have not yet done everything that they could in terms of savagery," says Lieven. "All this talk of Russian abuses - most of [it is] true. But if you remember American strategy in Vietnam, or the French in Algeria, they cleared extensive areas of the countryside, put people behind barbed wire ... Anyone in those areas was by definition an enemy and shot on the spot."

"The Russians haven't done that yet," adds Lieven. "Another few attacks like this [and] the Russians could adopt much more ferocious measures."

Like Bush, Putin is trying to use the military to solve political and sociological problems. Chechnya is another example of the inability of pure military force to resolve such difficulties, but like Bush, Putin does not seem willing to try negotiation or other approaches for fear of appearing weak to his supporting constituency. Part of the probelm is that he terrorist have succeeded in making him appear weak, and part is the problem is that neither Bush nor Putin appear to be able to see past military force to the methods of detaching the supporters of the terrorists from the populations they claim to be fighting for.

No one will win until our leaders can learn to think in terms of humans they don’t otherwise understand or like. Until then we can plan on more terrorism.

posted by Richard at 5:07 PM

 

Is Osama bin Laden winning?

Kevin Drum has the following to say about Iraq:

If we stay in Iraq and fight a long, grinding, unwinnable guerrilla war against Islamic militants, bin Laden is delighted. If we give up and leave Iraq, bin Laden is delighted.

It didn't have to be this way, of course. We could have spent our military energies on smashing al-Qaeda and our diplomatic energies on gaining allies in the Middle East — demonstrating that Osama bin Laden's murderous vision was neither the best nor the only path for the Muslim world. Instead, thanks to George Bush's obsession with Iraq, America is the Great Satan, bin Laden is the most popular public figure in every Arab country in the world, al-Qaeda is bigger and more broad-based than ever, a thousand American soldiers are dead, and Iran and North Korea pursue their nuclear plans with impunity.

This is based on the excellent analysis posted today by Juan Cole. His final conclusion is:

The US is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the US has of its.

Kevins' conclusion is one I share: We are where we are because of George Bush. Never forget that.

posted by Richard at 1:28 PM

 

What happened at School No 1 in Southern Russia?

The Washington Post has an informative article on the terrorist attack at School No. 1 in the town of Beslan in Southern Russia. There are several very interesting elements in it.

The purpose of the raid seems reasonably clear.

"The puppet leaders who organized these fierce incursions, they are attempting to destabilize the situation in the North Caucasus and make one people go against another," said Aslakhanov, President Vladimir Putin's top Chechnya adviser. "They are inciting old grudges and unsolved problems."

"It appears to be a deliberate provocation to reignite the conflict between Ingushetia and North Ossetia, to extend the range of the chaos," said Fiona Hill, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It's very easy to stir up the region if you want to, and somebody wants to. This is a wake-up call. The whole of the Caucasus is going to go up at this rate."

The leader has been identified as a long time Chechnyan guerrilla leader.

Calling the shots, according to Russian investigators, was Basayev, the brutal guerrilla leader who has fought the Russians in two wars over the past 10 years and been designated a terrorist by the United States and United Nations.

Basayev stormed a Russian hospital in 1995 and took more than 1,000 patients and doctors hostage and sponsored the capture of a Moscow theater in 2002 that led to the deaths of 129 civilians.

[See the article from Slate giving the background of the Chechnyan war.]

There may have been some Arabs involved, but this was pretty clearly locally planned, initiated, and carried out.

Russian investigators are checking out reports from an unidentified Western intelligence service suggesting that some of the attackers came from Jordan and Syria, according to a source briefed on the government's investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. An Islamic group tied to al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman Zawahiri, has claimed responsibility for the attack.

But some analysts remained skeptical, arguing that the Russians were exaggerating the Arab connection so Putin could claim to be fighting international terrorists rather than domestic nationalists.

"It could be there were advisers from the Middle East, but initiating the plan, executing it, belonged to locals," said Alexei Malashenko, a regional specialist at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research organization.

The Russian government has been trying to bomb the Chechyans into submission, and the main result has been to expand the war they are fighting to cover all of Russia. The use of military force by itself simply isn't going to solve their terrorist problem.

posted by Richard at 2:26 PM

 

Why are the Chechens conducting terrorism?

This is the background to the recent terrorist actions by Chechens.
http://www.slate.com/id/2106287/


ChechnyaWhat drives the separatists to commit such terrible outrages?By Masha GessenPosted Saturday, Sept. 4, 2004, at 3:06 PM PT

As many as 600 people, many of them children, are dead, and hundreds more are injured. The two-day hostage crisis that ended in an 11-hour gunfight is the most horrific in a harrowing chain of terrorist attacks in Russia. Russian officials are saying al-Qaida did it. But the truth is far more complicated.

The current conflict in Chechnya goes back to the fall of 1991, when the tiny republic in the Russian Caucasus declared independence. It wasn't a crazy thing to do. The Soviet Union, which once seemed indestructible, was falling apart (and collapsed completely by the end of the year). Russia itself had a convoluted structure, with 89 federation members, each belonging to one of five categories (region, autonomous region, ethnic republic, province, and two special-status cities) with different structures and rights within the federation. The Russian Constitution recognizes the right of federation members to secede—and Chechnya tried to claim this right.

The Chechens' desire was perfectly understandable. As an ethnic group, Chechens had been mistreated by the Soviet regime, and the Russian empire before it, perhaps worse than anyone else. In 1944, the Chechens, along with several other ethnic groups, were accused of having collaborated with the Nazis and deported to Siberia. Their collective guilt established by the order of Stalin, on Feb. 23, 1944, more than half a million Chechens were forcibly herded onto cattle cars and sent to Western Siberia. As many as half died en route, and uncounted others perished in the harsh Siberian winter; the exiles were literally dumped in the open snowy fields and left to fend for themselves.

The Chechens were not allowed to return home until 1976. So by the time of perestroika, virtually all Chechen adults were people born in Siberian exile. No wonder they didn't want to live side by side with the Russians, who had mangled their lives. The last straw came in August 1991, when, during the failed hard-line communist coup, rumors spread that another deportation was in the works. Chechens overthrew their local, Soviet-appointed leader, and elected a new president on a nationalist platform.
Russia had no intention of recognizing Chechen independence.

The Kremlin's fears were understandable: With the Soviet Union crumbling, there was no reason the shaky Russian federation couldn't follow. Granting independence to one region could set off a chain reaction. What's more, an oil pipeline went through Chechnya, and a small amount of oil was produced in the republic itself, so losing Chechnya could have meant significant financial loss for Russia. President Boris Yeltsin declined even to negotiate with the Chechen separatists—a traditional Russian disdain for this Muslim people no doubt played a role in his decision—and simply let the problem fester for three years.

By the fall of 1994, Chechnya, which had been left to its own devices, had all the trappings of de facto sovereignty. It had its own armed forces, small but well-trained, called the Presidential Guard. It operated its own international airport, which Russia seemed not to notice, and it had effectively taken control of its oil production and exports.

In October 1994, Moscow decided finally to put things right by staging an armed uprising in Chechnya. It was meant to look like a spontaneous rebellion of pro-Moscow Chechens, but it was so poorly planned that it failed, and several dozen participants were detained by the Chechens. All the supposed rebels turned out to be ethnic Russians employed by the secret services.

When the covert operation failed, Moscow decided to use overt tactics. The Russian defense minister at the time boasted he could take Grozny, the Chechen capital, in two hours. The war, which began on Dec. 11, 1994, lasted nearly two years, cost at least 80,000 Chechens and about 4,000 Russian soldiers their lives, and ended in military defeat for Russia. In 1996, Russia pulled its troops out of a virtually demolished Chechnya, leaving it to fester—again. For the next three years, Chechnya, whose infrastructure had been bombed out of existence, turned into a state run by and for criminals. In the absence of any clear legal status for the place or its residents, everything that happened there—from oil exports to kidnappings—was by definition illegal.

A shocking and important event preceded the Russian pullout from Chechnya. In June 1995, a group of rebels emerged from what seemed at the time to be a nearly defeated Chechnya and tried to take over the small Russian town of Budyonnovsk. Dozens of armed men ended up barricading themselves in the local hospital, where the patients, including women with their newborns, became their hostages. Russian troops tried to storm the building but aborted the attack quickly. In the end, Moscow negotiated a cease-fire in Chechnya and let the terrorists get away in exchange for the hostages' release. Immediately after Budyonnovsk, Russia started peace negotiations with the Chechen rebels, making the hospital siege probably the most successful act of terrorism in history. It is also the only large-scale hostage-taking that didn't end in a storm.

The second war in Chechnya began in September 1999, following a bizarre and brutal series of terrorist acts. Two apartment buildings in Moscow and one in the south of Russia exploded, killing more than 300 people. Another building, in the town of Ryazan, was de-mined in time. At the same time, a group of Chechen rebels staged an incursion into the neighboring republic of Dagestan, taking over several villages there for a few weeks.

In the last five years, several critics of the Putin regime, including a former senior secret services officer, have produced a fair amount of evidence indicating that the Russian secret services may have instigated or even carried out some or all of these attacks. If this were the case, it wouldn't be the first time a country fighting a separatist movement tried to defeat it by funding a more radical terrorist wing in the hopes of undermining the more moderate separatists locally and discrediting them internationally. It also wouldn't be the first time such tactics had failed. Usually, the terrorist movements quickly take on a life of their own, and their federal masters and funders lose control.

The current Russian regime based its popularity on its harsh response to the terrorist attacks of 1999. Vladimir Putin, a virtual unknown who was appointed prime minister just before the first explosions, rose to political fame and power by taking a harsh stand and promising to bomb Chechnya into submission.

The bombing has been going on for five years, but submission still seems unattainable. Chechen fighters have not only continued to battle the federal powers at home but have staged a series of increasingly shocking terrorist attacks in other parts of Russia (although the Chechen connection is, in most cases, presumed rather than proved). There have been explosions in Moscow and elsewhere, including a bomb in the Moscow subway; there have been two shocking hostage crises—over 800 people held for three days in a Moscow theater two years ago and 1,000 or more held in the school building this week. Russians, for their part, always seem to botch the rescue operations. In the Moscow theater, the military part worked fine, but 129 people died needlessly because no one had bothered to organize the medical end of the rescue. The details of this week's bloodbath are not yet clear, but it is obvious that it involved a military and humanistic failure on the part of the Russians.

So, what does al-Qaida and international Islamic terrorism have to do with any of this? Probably very little. Chechens have plenty of reason to do what they do without outside inspiration.

In addition, their tactics are very different from al-Qaida's. Osama Bin Laden's group generally aims for maximum casualties; the Chechens, at least when they have staged hostage-takings, have not seemed to have that goal. Al-Qaida explicitly targets Westerners; the Chechens, on the other hand, explicitly exclude Westerners from their list of targets; they target Russians and Russia-sympathizers.

Finally, the Chechens' demands, when they have made them, have always focused on the war in Chechnya to the exclusion of any religious or international agenda. They have consistently demanded a the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya—an unattainable goal in the current Russian political climate, but one that may look plausible to the Chechens because it worked after Budyonnovsk.

Russian intelligence has produced little or no evidence that al-Qaida is present in Chechnya. Russian officials claimed that there were Arabs among the hostage-takers, but this information has yet to be confirmed, and even if it is, it may mean only that foreign men have come to fight on the side of Chechens—something that has happened before and something that happens in every conflict, whether or not a major international organization is involved.

On the other hand, it would be surprising if al Qaida had no presence in Chechnya at all. Chechens are Muslims, and they are at war; representatives of virtually every Islamic organization have at one point or another sent missionaries and recruiters to the region. They have also sent money. Researchers of al-Qaida say that, in addition to its own organization, the terrorist network has a number of loose affiliates, essentially freelancers, who get occasional financial support. Most likely, some Chechen groups or individuals fall into that category.

But Russia's terrorism problem is not international Islam. It's a war that Russia started and has continued. Because of terrorism, this war has spread to engulf the entire enormous country.

Masha Gessen is deputy editor in chief of Bolshoy Gorod, a Moscow weekly.

posted by Richard at 11:09 PM

 

What creates good students and good schools?

This was published today (September 6, 2004) in the Washington Post by William Raspberry

Show me a home where education and learning are central values, and where the parents are reasonably competent at the business of child-rearing, and I'll show you the home of a good student.

Further, the clearest identifying characteristic of what we call a good school is a critical mass of children from good homes.

If this is so, why do our public policies pay so little attention? Listen to our school leaders and you'd think the difference between school success and school failure lies in the quality of the superintendent, the size of the school budgets, or the academic backgrounds and skill levels of the teachers.

My point is not to let the schools off the hook but to offer an explanation of why a torrent of school reforms over the past few decades has brought the merest trickle of improvement. We haven't paid enough attention to improving the homes our children come from.

Maybe one reason is that we have confused good homes with affluent homes. It's true that the educational values I'm talking about are more likely to reside in the homes of economically successful adults.

But the values that place a premium on education don't exist only in rich homes. Good homes in the sense I'm talking about are homes where parents understand and stress the importance of knowledge, quite apart from its economic utility.

Raspberry continues to describe the program he calls “Baby Steps” that he has initiated in his Mississippi hometown to encourage and train parents to create an educationally good home for their children.

This is the first sensible thing I have seen published about childhood education in years.

This also seems to me to imply certain public policy efforts to support families raising children. Such policies include a fair and livable minimum wage, decent affordable housing, and universal access to health care. While affluence may not be necessary to create good homes, a minimum of financial and medical security certainly is.

But Raspberry’s “Baby Steps” program or something similar is critical. With or without those public policy items, parents need groups who encourage them towards proper parenting and teach what is necessary for parenting.

As social beings we do those things the groups of people we belong to encourage, and we generally don't do those things that people don't encourage.

posted by Richard at 9:01 AM

 

Report - Diebold voting machines designed to manupulate the vote.

This report is scary, especially after the President of Diebold has promised to work to elect Bush. It needs to be publicly investigated by an independent body. From: www.blackboxvoting.org. Read the entire article.

Consumer Report Part 1: Look at this -- the Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole

Submitted by Bev Harris on Thu, 08/26/2004 - 11:43. Investigations
Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.

posted by Richard at 2:14 PM

 

US losing allies in Iraq

Bush may believe that the US is winning in Iraq, but the member states of the coalition of the willing do not seem to be getting the message.

Here is Juan Cole reporting on the loss of troops from our allies. The Polish and Ukrainian troops have been the largest contingests after the US and the UK, and the Polish troops commanded the foreign division.

The Government of India has asked the 5000 Indian workers in Iraq to come back to India, offering them help in doing so, because of the poor security conditions.

Not only have the Poles started making plans to end their major military presence in Iraq by January, but the Ukraine contingent is also signficantly sizing down this fall or winter.

That is, Poland and Ukraine, and many other countries will probably be added to the below list provided by AP a couple of months ago:

Thailand: 423 troops leaving early on Aug. 31 instead of Sept. 20; 20 withdrawn on Aug. 10.

Norway: 10 currently in Iraq; 140 withdrawn on June 30. Cited reason: growing domestic opposition and peacekeepers needed elsewhere, such as Afghanistan.

Dominican Republic: 302 withdrawn on May 4. Cited reason: growing domestic opposition.

Honduras: 370 withdrawn on May 12. Cited reason: Troops were sent for reconstruction, not combat.

Nicaragua: 115 withdrawn on Feb. 4. Cited reason: lack of funds.

Philippines: 51 withdrawn on July 19. Cited reason: to save lives of hostages.

Singapore: 160 withdrawn on April 4. Cited reason: completed humanitarian mission.

Spain: 1,300 withdrawn on May 4. Cited reason: new government fulfilled campaign pledge.

Note that only 13 countries other than the US have 300 or more troops in Iraq, and several of them will probably insist on withdrawing by February 2005.

The US will increasingly have to go it alone in Iraq next year, though the UK and Italy will probably continue to provide about half a division between them. (the US has the equivalent of about 7 divisions in Iraq).

posted by Richard at 1:10 PM

 

What is this Republican Convention about??

Are you like me? Confused about what this Republican Party is trying to present at its convention?

Ezra Klein has the closest thing to an answer I have seen yet. He is posting at Kevin Drums' blog Washington Monthly.

Ezra Klein
SEPTEMBER SURPRISE...This has been a -- what's the adjective I'm looking for? -- surprising convention. We high-falutin media personnel (particularly us intern/blockers) love our pre-event storylines, it makes covering the convention so much easier. And this time, the storyline was not only obvious, but seemingly based in fact. With McCain and Giuliani headlining the first night, Arnold taking the second, and fair-weather Democrat Zell Miller attaching himself to the third, it seemed clear that the Republicans were going to paint a hopeful, inclusive portrait of their party. But then, between McCain's call-out of Moore and Miller's Emperor Palpatinesque performance, a funny thing happened. It became clear that moderation was not the theme of the week and a new narrative was needed. In the resulting scramble for storylines, two distinct narratives have emerged:

? Illusion, the first, has been best expressed by the LA Weekly's Josh Bearman. This launches from the observation that the delegates seem, well, unexcited. Where the Democratic convention offered crushing crowds and enough body heat to render the Fleet Center suitable for baking, the Republican convention seems sparsely attended and unenthusiastic, to the point that Maryland Lt. Governor (and token black guy) William Steele had to go camp-counselor on the delegates, repeatedly exhorting the crowd to turn up the volume for the renomination of the ticket. There's been no attempt to set forth an agenda, little effort to build up Bush and no feeling of security or strength emanating from the stage. Instead, we've seen fear-mongering, a focus on this dangerous world, and an assurance that John Kerry will bring the country to its knees, right before handing Osama (c'mon, you remember him) a key to the gates.

? Extremism, the second, has been best explained by TNR's Noam Scheiber. All the Republican moderates featured on the stage are looking for further advancement within the party. More often than not, that means the 2008 nomination for president. And prevailing in that contest requires, as John McCain will tell you, some love from the conservatives who power the primary. So instead of using the convention to showcase their broad appeal, they've used it to showcase their right-wing appeal. Since these guys suffer from a, uh, lack of belief in current conservative extremism, they've resorted to base us-against-themism, requiring full-throated attacks on Kerry. Instead of painting a moderate, kind face on the party, the convention's been hijacked by outcasts trying too hard to show they can be part of the gang, too. One by one, they've lined up to slash, rip, and detonate homemade effigies of the Democrat, appearing for all the world like a surprisingly blood-thirsty mob. Now, that might be effective, but no one on earth is going to mistake it for moderation.
This speaks to a political calculation by the Republicans, a gamble that this election no longer turns on appeals to the center but excitement among the base. The base will vote against, the center will usually vote for. So if you want the middle, you give them a party they'll love; if you want the base, you give them the other party to hate.

Tonight, I fully expect Bush to try and make himself loveable. But the Republicans have spent the rest of the convention demonizing the Democrats, and along with Bush's appearances on fishing shows, speeches at Nascar rallies and advertisements in red states, that speaks to a significant uncertainty that moderates are reachable or important in this election.

If you are a moderate, or a half way educated individual, why would you buy the garbage the Republican Party is trying to pass off on us?

Fear.

There is no other answer to that question. They are offering us the option of supporting them because they promise success in the war on terror and they tell you that Kerry does not make such an absolute promise.

But they don't tell you how they will make it work. It is just a "Trust us!" statement, and they ask you to ignore the idiotic decisions made after we invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq. They ask you to ignore the fact that Iran and North Korea are greater threats than Iraq ever was, but that they have no way of dealing with either. Essentially, they are ignoring the real problems, and threatening you with the lesser set of problems that they have opted to deal with.

They offer us a picture of fear, but as an alternative they offer us George Bush, a man who has never failed to fail to deal with a problem he was faced with.

Bush has made many promises, and never lived up to any of them. But he made some beautiful promises. Of course, they were never funded, or didn't work, but he made great promises. Just as he is doing now.

What else does he have to offer?? Just promises. No results, just promises.

Look for the nastiest campaign of the last hundred years in the next two months. Bush has nothing else to offer except anger, lies, promises and misrepresentations.

He will then ask his supporters to carry out the promises he has made. Then ask if that is the kind of people who should be in charge of the very serious problems of terrorism and the economy.

posted by Richard at 5:31 PM