Defining Democracy

We all know that President Obama gives awesome speeches, but it’s sometimes not altogether clear what the hell he’s talking about, and he can be pretty tactless at times. Such as when he says that, “Democracies don’t work when everybody says it’s the other person’s fault and I want 100 percent of what I want.”

He was actually being rather superior and insulting about Egypt, but it would have been easy to think he was talking about this country, where Republicans say it’s the Democrats fault, Democrats say it’s the Republicans fault, and voters 100% want a free lunch.

He also said regarding Egypt in the same speech that "our commitment to Egypt has never been around any particular individual or party, our commitment has been to a process.” That process turns out to be that if roughly 4% of a nation’s population takes to the street the Army throws the present government out of power. Democracy takes different forms in different countries, you see.

When Hamas won the elections in Palestine we were much less “committed to a process” than we have been in Egypt, so apparently we will remain committed to a process only for so long as the process produces an outcome which we find acceptable.

And in this country, when large numbers of people took to the streets during Vietnam, the Army did not throw the government out of power, it threw the people out of the streets. As I said, democracy works different ways in different countries.

Obamacare?

I have been with United Healthcare ever since my wife and I married, fifteen years ago. We have never had the slightest problem with them paying claims, even after I developed some severe health problems in 2003. In the fourteen years leading up to this one, I have probably had to contest a total of two or three decisions with them.

This year I have been fighting them tooth and nail all year; have done battle on forty or more claims on which they have denied payment. I have prevailed in every case, but it has been like pulling teeth from an angry bear. Their reasons have been transparently ridiculous, ranging from claiming not to know my Medicare status up to something having to do with the current phase of the fucking Moon.

Does this have to do with implementation of Obamacare? You decide.

Mandate Delayed

I’m not into making predictions, mostly because it takes too long to verify their outcome, by which time the predictions have been forgotten. I much prefer to just lurk in the weeds and then say “I told you so” even if, in fact, I was merely thinking it. That makes me something of a prophet in my own mind, but... Whatever.

Anyway, I knew back when Obamacare first passed that it was going to remain popular only until it began to be implemented, at which point it was going to become very unpopular. I mean, suppose you passed a law requiring fire insurance companies to sell policies to people whose houses were actually on fire at the time. Everyone would love the idea on compassionate grounds, but once you implemented that policy it would not take long to figure out that everyone’s fire insurance had become meaningless and useless.

And so, of course, once we reach the point of implementation of this “health care reform” thing we find that, having delayed it for four years, we need to delay the employer mandate for yet another year because... Well, the reason given is that we need to simplify the rules, but that sounds a bit bogus to me. They’ve had four years to simplify the rules and they wait until the last minute to discover that the rules need simplifying?

I think somebody actually read more than the headline of the BLS report and realized that while we gained 150,000 new jobs, we also gained 400,000 part time jobs, meaning that we lost 250,000 full time jobs, and made the connection between that and Obamacare’s exemption of part time workers from the requirement for providing health insurance.

Whatever this delay means, it is hardly a testimony to the wonderfulness of Obamacare is it? You’d think that would it embarrass the administration to reveal its bias toward business interests by delaying the mandate for business but not for individuals, but this administration is not sufficiently self aware to be capable of embarrassment.

Not to mention that the revenue generated by the employer mandate was supposed to pay for the subsidies needed to support the individual mandate, so a source of funding for those health insurance subsidies is going to have to be found elsewhere. Krugman will not hesitate to advise borrowing it, of course, and the administration is not going to worry about its promise that Obamacare would be revenue neutral.

I’ve lost two of my five doctors this year. One of them, in his early fifties, quit practicing medicine altogether. The other one quit taking Medicare, so as soon as I lose my health insurance I will have to replace him.

The closer we get to this Obamacare mess, the more we find that it is just going to crash and burn. No matter how morally wonderful it may sound to do so, selling fire insurance to a person whose house is burning is simply not functionally sound. Companies being forced to sell insurance policies on which they know they are going to lose major sums of money is simply not a feasible health care solution. Neither is forcing providers to perform their services for less than it costs them to do so.

Medical Lottery

Doctors today practice medicine on something of a lottery system, apparently; providing services to patients without ever knowing what they will be paid for those services.

Payment is determined after the fact by the insurance company, according to the billing person at my pulmonologist’s office. Her response to my question about a bill was that I should take it up with the insurance company, and when I pointed out that I was questioning an invoice on the doctor’s letterhead her response was “I don’t know, I don’t care and I’m not going to discuss it with you” and a repeat of the instruction to take it up with the insurance company.

At issue was three office visits, all identified as “office visit, long,” and each billed at $222.00. Two of them showed a discount of $96.00, while the most recent one did not, and I was being directed to pay the full amount of $222.00. I was questioning why I did not receive the discount on the third office visit that I had received on the first two and her response was that the insurance company had instructed them to collect the full $222.00 from me. I asked if she was telling me that the discount was not actually offered by and under the control of the doctor, and she said that the insurance company dictated how much would be payable.

So I asked if she saw any reason why a customer might object to paying almost twice as much for the exact same service as previously received, and she got really pissed off at me, said that she didn’t really care what I thought, and told me again to take it up with the insurance company.

So even though it’s the doctor who owns the medical practice, and I’m the guy who chooses the doctor and can choose a different one if I want to, and I’m the one paying the doctor bill, none of us has any authority when it comes to pricing. The amount payable is strictly within the purview of the insurance company and we all submit to whatever they dictate.

Is this a great country, or what?

Three Monkeys

"Europeans are furious" at the US governemnt for having been spying on Europeans, it says here, while Americans are furious at Edward Snowden for revealing that the US government is spying on Americans. Europeans don't want to be spied upon, while we don't mnd our government spying on us, we just don't want to know about it.

This Will Be Interesting

Kyle Petty, son of Richard “The King” Petty said the other day that, while Danica Patrick “can drive fast, she is not a racer.” Kyle drove for close to twenty years and won eight races in the major circuit, then known as Winston Cup. In his statement he added that he himself was never “a racer” and that if he knew what it took to be one he would have been one. I would not actually disagree with any part of his statement.

That has raised an absolute tempest between the Danica haters and her loyalists, and what makes it potentially interesting is that Kyle is one of the commentators for the Sprint Cup race that will be on TNT later this evening. I cannot wait to see how the television crew handles this little drama, given that NASCAR has been promoting Danica as being the best thing that has happened to the sport in decades, notwithstanding her average finishing position of 26th and her standing of 27th in the championship race.

I may actually watch the pre-race blather, which I do not usually do.

Her fellow Rookie-of-the-Year contender, and boyfriend who is six years younger than she is, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., has an average finish of 18.5 and stands 19th in the championship race. He finished ahead of her 14 out of 17 races, and in 10 of those races he was at least 10 positions ahead of her. That has to have led to some rather interesting pillow talk.

Danica has finished 25th or worse in 14 of the 17 races this year, which would tend to give some credibility to Kyle Petty's assertion.

Update, Sunday morning: During the rain delay they interviewed about thirty drivers. Danica Patrick was not among them, and neither was Ricky Stenhouse or Danica's team owner, Tony Stewart.

Trivial Question

Why are we celebrating a Senate that cannot find $20 billion to feed Americans who are going hungry, but can find $60 billion to keep people out of this country?

And The Losers Cry "Foul"

The losing side always seems to think that the winning side somehow “rigged the game” and cheated them out of what was rightfully theirs, no matter what the vote count may have been or what the nature of the process was. The undesirable outcome is never the “will of the people,” but is always a manipulated outcome achieved by scoundrels who suborned democracy.

(That does happen, of course. Think Florida and the year 2000.)

A piece the other day at Attywood complains that other states have gay marriage, so why can’t Pennsylvania have it as well? The answer is pretty simple, but seems to elude the writer of the piece; when the people of Pennsylvania quit electing representatives to government who oppose gay marriage, then they can have gay marriage. It’s not rocket science. You get the government you elect.

Do these politicians run on a platform of favoring gay marriage and then vote against it once they are in office? They do not. They are proud of opposing gay marriage, they campaign on the issue, they make speeches about opposition to gay marriage, and they win the election. Why are the voters upset and surprised that the state does not allow gay marriage?

Don’t raise the fig leaf of “Citizens United” at me on this. For one thing, voters who allow their vote to be purchased deserve precisely what they get; they are beneath contempt. But politicians purchase ads which feature the views they espouse. The advertisements to which these voters succumb scream the anti-gay marriage views espoused by the candidate.

When we stop electing representatives who oppose abortion, then a woman’s right to choose will be safe in this nation.

When we stop electing representatives who want to eliminate Social Security and Medicare then our social safety net will be secure.

In a discussion elsewhere conservative voters were accused of “voting for what politicians said and ignoring what they do,” but on these large issues that is nonsense. Politicians who oppose gay marriage, abortion and the social safety net do not hide their views. On the contrary, they make those issues central to their campaigns, and they win election. At reelection time they boast of having voted against those issues and they win reelection. There is no subterfuge here. You want gay marriage, a woman’s right to choose and a social safety net, quit electing these guys.

The voters who “vote for what politicians say and ignore what they do” are the liberals who reelected a Congress that had promised in 2008 to end the war in Iraq and gave us “the surge” instead; a Congress that decried the Patriot Act and then renewed it in 2009.

The voters who “vote for what politicians say and ignore what they do” are the liberals who reelected a president who said that he would close Guantanamo and then made no more than token effort to do so; who promised the most transparent government ever and then prosecuted more whistleblowers than all of the presidents preceding him combined; who promised to “change Washington” then named Wall Street to his cabinet.

Complain away, but we have the government we elected.

This 'n That

I watch the Food Channel a lot, probably more than I do any other one channel, and I not only have never seen Paula Deen, I had never even heard the name until this latest “news” broke. I can cite a couple dozen names of people who star on the Food Channel, but until now Paula Deen would not have been one of them. “Huge Food Channel star?”

Everyone is cheering about DOMA having been overturned, but actually only half of it has been. The remaining half is of lesser impact, but it would be well to get rid of the remaining part of the act that says that states do not need to recognize marriages performed in other states if that marriage would not be permitted in their own state.

We are about to lose one of the truly great men of the century in Nelson Mandela. He has made the world a better place in ways that very, very few men have done.

Since the first of the year we have been hearing about an “improving economy” and how consumer spending has been improving steadily. Now we find out that the economy grew at only a 1.8% annual rate in the first quarter, and that consumer spending was reduced by almost a full percentage point from its previous estimate. But not to worry, because the economy is picking up steam like crazy now. Yeah, right.

An economy that grows at 1.8% is actually shrinking, because the population is growing at 2%, not to mention the impact of inflation.

Obama says that he wants Putin to give Snowden back to us but is not going to do any “wheeling and dealing.” This is descending from comedy into farce. After we have been so nice to Russia, doing things like goading Georgia into picking a war with them over South Ossetia, admitting former Soviet nations into NATO and bringing NATO right up to Russian borders, this whole Syria deal… And we think Putin wants to curry favor with us.

In typical Congressional weirdness, the immigration bill wending its way through Congress actually encourages hiring noncitizens. People who are amnestied under the bill will be ineligible for health care provisions under Obamacare, so employers will incur lower employment costs for them than for citizens, for whom they will either have to provide health care or pay a penalty. Do these clowns ever actually think about what they are doing?

The vet started our cat on a new medicine and said to let her know if Molly "started acting wierd." Um, she's a cat. How do I know if she's acting wierd? "Well," the vet says, "if she's licking herself or running around a lot." Are you serious? Have you ever had a cat? Or even seen one?

The problem with spellcheckers is that they will accept "manes" when you meant to type "names." Shit.

Zombie Math

Paul Krugman claims today that “tougher climate policy will, almost surely, be job-creating, not job-destroying, under current conditions.” His reasoning seems to involve unicorns and magic ponies because of a “termite theory” which was debunked under it’s former name of the “broken window theory,” but which he says is “right under these conditions.”

Paul Krugman again confuses his mathematical models with real world conditions when he says that a policy that raises energy prices will do no harm because “our economy isn’t supply-constrained right now, it’s demand-constrained.” Meaning, of course that people are not buying enough. So, he says, “Even if prices go up a bit, how will this reduce real demand?”

The stupidity of that statement is really hard to fathom. Will people spend less money if prices go up? No, they are already spending all of the money they have, and borrowing to spend more. That is not the point. The point is where that money is being spent and how that spending pattern affects the economy. The point is that when their electric bill doubles and the heating bill goes up they will spend less on other things.

They will spend less, for instance, on clothing, and when clothing makers are selling less clothing they lay off workers. So there are fewer clothing workers, but there are no additional electric workers because only the price of electricity went up, not the amount being used. That, my good Doctor Krugman, is a net loss of jobs, caused by the price increase of electricity.

The problem for Dr. Krugman is that he deals in mathematical models. For him “real demand” has nothing to do with what real people are doing in a real world, it is simply the amount of consumer dollars that are flowing in an outward direction. So he’s right in that prices will not change the amount that consumers spend. But the real world does not allow that to be extended to mean that jobs will not be affected merely because the amount of spending is unchanged. One cannot merely plug in mathematics; one has to actually think logically in the framework that exists outside of the ivory tower at Princeton University.

Media Hysteria

If the media circus regarding Snowdon was not so pernicious it would be utterly hilarious on more than one level; first being that the real story is about what the government is doing, not about Snowdon’s flight from government prosecution for blowing the whistle on government malfeasance. It’s positively awe inspiring to watch the degree to which the media has “missed the point,” except that they have not done so by error, they have done so deliberately, as water carriers for the government.

Then there is the reasoning given for Snowdon’s “flight from justice,” which in reality can be summed up in two words which no one is mentioning; “Bradley Manning.” I suspect that if Snowdon thought that he would receive justice in this country he might well have stayed and faced it, but given the years of torture to which Bradley Manning has been subjected by the Obama administration and the kangaroo court that is trying him now, Snowdon reasonably chooses to take his chances in international flight.

Finally is the utter hysteria with which the media has reached over the “criminal of the century” and the need to capture him at all costs. To hear the media tell it this guy ranks up there with Ames, the Rosenbergs and Hanssen, and maybe worse, for telling the world what most of it already knew, namely that the American government has been watching who is making phone calls and what is being transmitted on the internet. There may be someone in the outer reaches of Mongolia who didn’t know that.

Not to mention the absurdity of the claim that letting terrorists know we are monitoring their phone calls "endangers national security.” Terrorist cells can no more destroy this nation than can a herd of house cats, and the term “national security” has been so overused as to have become as meaningless as the concurrent word “terrorist.”

As horrible the event was, “national security” does not mean preventing two guys from deploying pressure cooker bombs at a sporting event to kill three people. We need to prevent it, but it is not a matter of “national security.”

Edward Snowdon threatened the unfettered power of the federal government over the people of this nation, and that government wants to make an example out of him to prevent others from following his example.

Interesting Circle

I haven't commented on this aspect of the "employer mandate" for health insurance because I haven't figured out what it means. Having finally decided that it doesn't mean anything, I'm going to go ahead and comment on it anyway, because I find it interesting.

Why did employers begin offering health insurance in the first place? As a way to raise wages despite government wage controls. Government was fighting inflation and placed limits on prices and wages, and so to attract employees in a tight labor market, employers offered health care and/or health insurance as incentive. Kaiser Industries actually had its own doctors and clinics. It's not quite that simple, but...

So now business is trying to reduce wages. And instead of capping wages as they did in the past, the government is effectively mandating increased wages in the form of health insurance.

And we rant about the ill effects of "unfettered capitalism."

Oh Really? Where?

Andrew O'Hehir gives a little talk at Campaign for the American Conversation regarding the “American Dystopia.” He speaks of the American condition today which is not “1984” of oppressive government spying, nor “Brave New World” of suppression of dissent by means of unfettered consumerism, nor “The Matrix” where all is illusion and reality is concealed, but which has elements of all three. He makes an interesting and, I think valid, point, but it goes downhill from there.

He points out that he was born in the sixties and that times were violent and chaotic, citing Vietnam and “race relations.” To begin with it wasn’t about “race relations,” it was about civil rights, which is one whole hell of a lot more important than a matter of how we “get along with each other,” and if he was born in the sixties he doesn’t know jack shit about it because the major changes were all over by the time he was old enough to remember.

If he did recall the sixties he wouldn't be babbling about “race relations.”

He then mumbles some magic words about change, mentions Obama’s 2008 campaign and that Obama was unable to deliver on his campaign promise, and then segues into a bland non sequitur about how he sees hope for the future. “We do not have to be spied upon,” he says, because of the massive changes that have occurred over the past fifty years. Sort of a Shakespearean “past is prologue” kind of thing, I suppose.

The point he seems to miss is that all of the major social change that has occurred during those fifty years did so in the first twenty of them, and the only change that has occurred during the past thirty years has been a slow and steady decline toward dystopia. That’s hardly a rosy picture of hope, so it’s hard to imagine where he’s seeing that hope that he’s babbling about.

What he does manage to point out, probably without meaning to, is that change is not accomplished by politicians, it is accomplished by people who are pissed off sufficiently that they are willing to suffer serious discomfort and risk injury and death to force change on politicians who are benefiting from the status quo. By his own statement, we live in peaceful and comfortable times, and that is precisely why change will not happen.

In Brazil and in Turkey today people are willing to be uncomfortable as hell; to face water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets; to risk imprisonment, injury and death; to remain on the streets in the tens and hundreds of thousands indefinitely to make their point. In this country, a few hundred people hold a campout in a public park and sing songs, and then disperse as soon as the police show up.

Whatever form it takes, we have the government we deserve.

Banned Again

Whatever liberals may claim to be, open minded they are not. I participate in discussions in both liberal and conservative discussion groups, and have been both applauded and flamed on both since I tend to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I have never had a post deleted or been banned by a conservative group, but have had both happen on liberal groups.

The latest was when a poster bragged about having a friend who was a former illegal alien who had become a citizen, who wrote that the friend said that he would never vote for Republicans “if they tried to take his citizenship away.” The writer went on to say that Republicans opposed immigration because it would increase the number of Democratic voters.

I asked why immigrants would automatically be Democrats. Would it be, I asked, because Democrats “gave them citizenship?” If so, that would be voting based on bribery. I pointed out that the poster’s friend by his own statement was refusing to vote for Republicans because they would not give him what he wanted, that is to say would not bribe him. I added that there is no mechanism in this country for stripping a person of citizenship, so the friend’s statement made no sense, and went on to say that no one should feel bad, because pretty much all voters today vote based on bribes. “I voted for Blah because he cut my taxes.”

My comment was replaced by a notice that an “offensive comment” had been deleted as well as the commenter’s name, and that my “posting privileges” had been cancelled. In all fairness, conservatives do not like to be disagreed with either, but they do not try to erase the existence of opposing views altogether. Conservatives will call me some fairly nasty names, but they don’t try to pretend that I don’t exist.

I would actually agree that the deleted comment has something of an offensive nature, but there is a larger point that the ban missed, which is the frequency with which people unashamedly admit to utterly selfish reasons for their votes. A vote was based on “lowering my taxes,” or on the basis that the representative “brings more federal money into my district,” or “protects my Social Security,” or other ways in which the vote represents the personal benefit to the voter. That was the point which I made in the post, but apparently the “jury” only read part of my post and hit “ban.”

A couple of liberal blogs have banned me permanently, so...

Fine Lines

From Col. Pat Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis,

The generally mindless crew now described as "journalists" say whatever comes into their heads and then compliment each other on their "wisdom." They get paid for this?

Unfortunately for my keyboard and nasal passages, I was drinking coffee when I read this.

I don't smoke or drink, but...

Effective? Who Cares

I watched Chris Matthews on Hardball yesterday and, as usual, most of his blather was nonsensical speculation about tactics which he and his cronies expect to be used in the election of 2016. He has no concern regarding the implications of that election on the well being of the nation, you understand, but is excited nearly to the point of orgasm over who will be running and what "issues" they will be running on. The man is an idiot.

They did do a segment on the NSA eavesdropping, and the entirety of the concern had to do with the degree to which the programs are effective in keeping us safe from being blown up by Chechen terrorists who deploy pressure cooker bombs at marathons. Oh, wait, they actually didn't mention that episode. Fucking morons.

President Obama also defended the programs, again by telling us how effective they are at protecting us from Chechen terrorists who deploy pressure cooker bombs at marathons. What he actually said was "terror plots," of course, because when talking about the NSA he's pretending that Boston didn't happen. He also said that the programs are "transparent" because a secret court in an undisclosed location with an unelected judge whose name is super secret approves 100% of the warrants secretly submitted to him without the knowledge of the persons who are the subject of the warrants. He has a vastly different definition of "transparent" than I do.

The issue, of course, is not whether or not the NSA programs are effective. The issue is whether or not they are legal, and that is a question that no one is asking. If they did ask the question it would not, of course, be answered because the answer is pretty clearly "no." Or, "Oh hell no."

This Is Interesting

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that Arizona cannot require that a person show proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or a Social Security card, when registering to vote. It seems that such a requirement prevents the elderly and poor people from voting, which it may or may not actually do. I’m 70 and I got a new Social Security card not long ago which cost me nothing. Anyway, you know who such a law certainly does prevent from voting? Yeah, people who are not citizens.

Interesting that states can, and California does, require proof of citizenship before issuing a driver’s license. That is, in fact, a federal mandate which some states are resisting. I see nothing which intrinsically makes citizenship a requirement of driving a car.

Employers not only can, but are required to obtain proof of citizenship before hiring, and the feds periodically raid employers to assure that they are complying with this requirement. What is it about feeding one’s family which intrinsically requires that one be a citizen?

It would seem to me that participating in government does naturally require citizenship, but we now say that states cannot require proof of citizenship before registering people to vote.

So, to recap, we are a country which will not allow non-citizens to drive a car or work for a living, but we will allow non-citizens to vote in our elections. Is this a great nation, or what?

The Syria Decision

The decision to send weapons to Syria was based on the evidence that Assad’s forces had used Sarin gas on the rebel forces, crossing a “red line” set several months ago. As Daniel Larison points out yesterday, this is where we get to as a result of a serious of “unforced errors” by the dimwit in the White House. He’s being kind; I call them stupid mistakes. First Obama says “Assad must go,” for no reason that is apparent in terms of American national interest, then he made the silly “red line” statement, which was an open invitation for claims of chemical weapon use.

Then there is the report from US “intelligence” to which Obama is responding. It claims that 100-150 rebels were killed by Sarin gas used by Assad’s forces; a claim that defies credulity all by itself. Assad’s forces are not some disorganized bunch of warlords. This is a disciplined, well trained and organized military. They have an air force, tanks, artillery, rockets, cluster munitions, and heavy weapons. And with all that, while winning battles and retaking ground, they are going to use Sarin gas to kill a mere 100 rebels? That accusation is utterly absurd.

Larison also points out that providing light weapons is completely illogical, since it does nothing to address the use of chemical weapons; it does not prevent the further use of chemical weapons, it does not protect from chemical weapon use. It does not, in fact, have anything to do with chemical weapons at all.

Then we have an article in The Times claiming that Obama didn’t want to do anything at all but was bullied by people inside and outside the White House to “do something” and yielded to the pressure. That sounds about right, given the degree of moral cowardice he has displayed since he has been in office. No one can ever claim that he is a steely “man of conviction.” My cat has more courage, and she runs away from birds.

And then we have another “insider report” that the real reason for the decision is not chemical weapon use, as we are being told, but rather the signs that Assad is winning the civil war; an outcome which the White House deems unacceptable. That at least is more or less logical even if it is, in several ways, utterly stupid. Not to mention dishonest, much like Bush and his WMD’s in Iraq.

In general terms, it is seldom a good idea to back the losing side, but more specifically is seems idiotic to back the side that has said it will commit genocide on the Syrian Christian population if it wins. Especially when you are doing so under a policy called “responsibility to protect.”

Finally, the fuckwit wants to ban firearms here at home, but he hands them out overseas like beads at Mardi Gras, because guns in the hands of nutcases in America are dangerous but guns in the hands of jihadist nutcases in other parts of the world is promoting democracy. That has worked so well in Libya, Mali, Afghanistan and Iraq, hasn’t it?

Obama's Mushroom Cloud

Colonel Pat Lang writes yesterday, under the absolutely brilliant headline, “The Mushroom Cloud is Called Sarin This Time,”

I thought it would take longer for the influence of Susan Rice and Samantha Power to take effect, and then, there is the pitiful spectacle of John McCain.

Colonel Lang, you have a truly magical way with words.

I thought there was no action so middle-of the-road, so feckless and idiotic that the idiot in the White House would not do it, and this proves me right. I was concerned when he brought these two “R2P” advocates into his house, and here we are. With Susan Rice screaming in one ear and Samantha Power in the other that “people are dying” and “we have to do something,” he decides to throw a bunch more weapons into the caldron so that the war will be prolonged, people will die in increasing numbers, and the Middle East will become more destabilized than ever. Fucking brilliant.

Do you doubt that this will escalate into a no fly zone and regime change?

I think this man is as fucking nuts as any neocon about this “American exceptionalism” crap, is as thoroughly blinded by the myth of the omnipotence of American military power, and that he has become utterly corrupted by five years of having been the “most powerful man in the world.” I think he has, like any president who stays in office for more than four years, gone completely insane.

Of Course "It Works"

“This program provided information which prevented dozens of terrorist attacks on our homeland.” Does that line, spoken by the Obama administration in defense of the NSA surveillance programs, sound familiar? It should; it is precisely the same line that the Bush administration used in defense of torture.

Did it justify torture? Yes, unfortunately, in the eyes of some, it did.

Those were the people who a) would justify anything that George Bush did because they were blinded by loyalty to George Bush and/or the Republican Party and/or b) were so terrified of being hit by an asteroid from outer space killed by a terrorist, that they would permit any action taken by their government.

Today we have people who are so blinded by loyalty to Barack Obama and/or the Democratic Party that they will accept and justify anything done by the current administration, and we still have people who are terrified beyond reason of being killed by a terrorist, even though being hit by an asteroid from outer space is more likely.

Those in the latter group, terrified of being killed by a terrorist, point to the Boston bombing as justification for their fears and as justification for the NSA surveillance, even though the NSA surveillance was in place at the time and did not prevent the bombing.

Clapper, Alexander, Joe Biden and others are claiming that these surveillance programs prevented “dozens of terrorist attacks,” but they are not going to give us the details of those attacks because those details are “secrets” which are vital to “national defense.” That’s one explanation. Other explanations for not disclosing details might be that there were fewer than “dozens” of attacks, that attacks were prevented but not by these surveillance programs, or it might be that no such attacks ever existed.

The only attack which has been mentioned is the guy planning to bomb the New York subway with bombs made from hair care products. Turns out the original tip did not come from these surveillance programs at all, and that the use of this surveillance not only caught him in the net but also swept up three other people who were buying large quantities of hair care products. Those people turned out to be hairdressers rather than bombers, so the efficacy of these programs might be a bit questionable.

Who could have imagined that hairdressers might buy large quantities of hair care products? They don’t call them intelligence agents for nothing.

Not to mention that, having received the tip, they could easily have gotten a FISA warrant to record this one person’s phone calls. Wherein was this “total awareness” surveillance program required?

But whether or not they work is moot. The first question about a government program is not whether or not it works, but whether or not it lies within the boundaries set by our constitution. That question is not even being addressed by the administration in defense of these programs and, since its legality has been challenged, it is the first one which should be.

Observation

I realize that Snowden is a whistleblower who revealed illegal activity by our government, and that he is to be applauded for doing so, but I cannot help but observe that he comes across as something of a narcsssictic self-aggrandizing twerp. Too many carefully rehearsed grandiose statements. There is just too much self-protrayed "nobility" there.

Otherwise Known As

Conservatism: a political or theological orientation advocating the preservation of the best in society and opposing radical changes.
Liberalism: a political orientation that favors social progress by reform and by changing laws rather than by revolution.

Ian Welsh observes in a comment that “those definitions are not how those who claim to be either liberals or conservatives operate or have operated in living memory in the United States,” and he makes a good point. Being in a comment rather than in an original post, he does not go onto as much depth or explain his point as cogently as his writing usually does.

Those who call themselves conservatives today are actually reactionaries. They do not seek to maintain “the best in current society,” but rather to unwind existing programs in order to return to a “better” past. The Luddites were also reactionaries, who wanted to dismantle the Industrial Revolution in order to return to the simpler pastoral life that had preceded it.

And, by the way, the “better past” touted by today’s “conservatives” was by no means the rosy state of affairs that they portray. Life was “ugly, brutish and short” and the oligarchs controlled things even more then than they do now. Which may be their point and their objective, but…

Those who call themselves progressives do nothing more than argue for the preservation of programs which were in place before their parents were born in many cases, Social Security and Medicare, and lobby for the continuance of “New Deal” type of spending that has been the practice for even longer. This is the very definition of conservatism.

Even Paul Krugman, the doyen of “liberalism,” illustrates today his true conservatism as he writes that, “Many of us wish that Obamacare were a simpler system, one that directly provided health insurance.” Emphasis added by me. The true liberal would have written that as, “…one that directly provided health care.”

And, yes, please don’t cite “health care reform” as an example of today's Democratic Party progressivism. Making health insurance mandatory instead of optional is not progressive.

So for all practical purposes we have no liberals today; instead we have conservatives and we have reactionaries, both using aliases.

Chargers PR

The San Diego Chargers "fanned out" (pun apparently intended) throughout the city yesterday on a "Thank you tour" to express their appreciation for the support that fans have given them in past years. They dispersed, in uniform, to various parts of the city and spent time talking with people and signing autographs. Based on the photos, they didn't appear to be suffering in the process. If this is evidence of the management style of our new coach and general manager, I think Dean Spanos may have chosen well. Winning games will be the bottom line, of course, but still...

Killing The Messenger

CBS Evening News has done segments on the NSA surveillance issue for the last three evenings. All three times, the topic had nothing whatever to do with the content of the programs; nothing whatever to do with what the government is doing in the way of spying on its citizens. The topic was entirely about catching and convicting the person who informed the American people of what their government is doing.

The thing that surprises me in all this is the absolute openness with which our government and the people in it break the law. There used to be a concept of “plausible deniability,” whereby the top men were isolated from our government’s more heinous actions so that they could argue that they did not know it was being done, but today the top people stand up and proudly brag about being the authors of governmental malfeasance. “Hell yes,” the president says, “I ordered than man assassinated. It was the easiest decision I’ve made as president and I’m proud of it.”

Of course we used torture after 9/11. We’ve always used torture. The CIA was throwing Viet Cong out of helicopters during that war. But it was always a rogue action and the top brass was always saying, “Tell me what you found out but don’t tell me how you got the information.” Anyone who was caught inflicting torture was punished for doing it, even though efforts at catching them may have been less than rigorous.

George Bush and Dick Cheney came right out and bragged about having ordered that torture be used to obtain information, and suffered no consequences for it. None. Both retired to wealthy and sumptuous lives.

There is a certain amount of fulmination regarding Obama’s use of assassination, although few dare call it that, as an instrument of foreign policy. In one respect that is no big deal; the CIA has been assassinating people for decades. It was kept a deep dark secret, though; was something that our government would never admit that it did, and the President’s fingerprints were never on the orders so that he could never be accused of being complicit.

Today, Barack Obama brags about how he personally chooses the targets for assassination, a flagrantly illegal act by national and international law, and no one even suggests that he should receive any repercussion for that.

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence lied to Congress, and admitted to Andrea Mitchell on national television to having done so. When asked if the NSA was spying on Americans he told Mitchell that he “gave the least untruthful answer” that he could. He lied. To Congress. And nobody in officialdom cares.

But when Obama is asked if the NSA is spying on Americans, he not only says that it is, he becomes angry that anyone has dared to reveal that fact and vows to track down and punish the person who did so. "Hell yes, I am spying on you," he says, with fire in his eyes, "I am keeping you safe from terrorists." He goes on the attack against anyone who would challenge his right to spy on the American people.

Because, you see, these people are not subject to the laws.

Orwell Had The Year Wrong

The poll which reveals that the number of Americans who believe that the government tracking of phone activity is an acceptable method of “keeping us safe from terrorists” has actually risen from 51% in 2007 to 56% today is seriously disheartening to me. Bernie Sanders talks about an “Orwellian future,” but this poll makes me think we are living in an Orwellian present.

One has to suppose that the Boston bombing is contributing to this, but the problem I have with that idea is that this surveillance didn’t prevent the Boston bombing, and so this theory suggests we are surrendering our civil liberties based on a visibly false premise.

Other than that, we are farther than ever removed from 9/11, the “terror wars” are supposedly winding down, Osama bin Laden is dead, we are being told repeatedly that Al Queda is all but wiped out, and yet more people than ever are willing to have an authoritarian government in the name of “being kept safe from terrorism.”

One of the numbers in the poll is quite revealing of the “cult of personality” which has developed around Barack Obama. In 2007, when George Bush was in office, only 37% of Democrats thought that the NSA surveillance programs were acceptable; this year, with Barack Obama at the helm, 64% of Democrats find them acceptable.

This is the population of which dictators are made.

One Defense I Missed

There's one defense of Superman Obama which I had missed in my perusal of reactions to the revelations regarding our surviellance state, and was provided by John Cole in a post yesterday. It says that, "President Obama is not the villain here, he is merely following laws which were passed by Congress." He goes on to say that "they" followed every letter and comma of what are admittedly horrible laws.

Well, the latter point is highly questionable, but that point is moot. The real point is that the Patriot Act gives intelligence agencies some permissions to spy on Americans; it doesn't say that they are required to actually do it. The actual spying was a choice made by the current administration.

Not Just A River In Egypt

The reaction by the left blogosphere to the revelation of our Democratic surveillance state is nothing short of astonishing, coming in several forms. 1) It’s a made-up Republican scandal for the purpose of discrediting Superman, is therefor fake, and we can respond to it only by calling Republicans bad names. 2a) It’s true, but it’s okay because it’s Superman who is doing it. He is noble and pure of heart and is doing it only to keep us safe. Trust him and shut up. 2b) I’d rather be spied on than be blown up by a terrorist nuclear weapon. 3) It’s horrible but we have to accept it peacefully because both sides are doing it, so shut up and vote for Superman’s party because the other one would be infinitely worse.

One writer even used numbers 1 and 3 in the same post: it’s a fake scandal and we have to accept it because both sides do it. The mind boggles.

My responses are 1) If it’s fake why is Superman instigating such a furious hunt for the treasonous bastard who leaked the programs? 2a) Yeah, right. I’ve already talked about how much I trust someone who claims the right to kill me without due process of law. 2b) I’m also terrified of getting killed by an asteroid, which is more likely that your terrorist. 3) The lesser of two evils is still evil. In a democracy we don’t have to accept anything.

The “terrorist plot” that I've heard cited as having been deflected by this program, or by one of the several programs which have been revealed, regards a guy who was planning to put backpacks on the New York subways. They offer no more detail than that, but you may recall that the guilty behavior that the guy exhibited was that he was visiting too many hair salons. Turns out he was buying his bomb-making materials at these hair salons. I don’t make these things up, the FBI does.

Like the guy who was going to blow up the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan. The evidence was that he had several dozen cell phones which he had recently bought in Detroit. They did not explain how he was going to blow up a major bridge using cell phones, and it turned out he was merely bootlegging cell phones. Good thing we were spying on him.

So, Republicans are outraged over this revelation, but they get outraged over pretty much anything. Democrats are either in denial or are making excuses, but Obama could rob a bank in broad daylight on Pennsylvania Avenue and Democrats would claim he was getting money to feed hungry families. Not his, of course; his family is a long, long way from hungry.

Meanwhile, you might be careful how often you call your hairdresser.

On Safety and Liberty

I watched clips of Obama’s response to the revelations regarding the NSA surveillance issues yesterday, and to say that I heard echoes of George W. Bush would be an understatement. He spoke of “striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy, because, there are some trade-offs involved,” and assured us that the programs in question “help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

“But I think its important to recognize that you can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We're gonna have to make some choices as a society. And I can say in evaluating these programs, they make a difference in our ability to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity.”

The juxtaposition between his assertions of “100% security” and “possible terrorist activity” is rank Bushism, with the former being impossible and the latter blatant fear mongering.

He assured us that no one was listening to our phone calls which was distraction, since nobody ever claimed that any such thing was happening and that was not anyone’s concern regarding the illegal program. The fact is that obtaining a record of a person’s telephone activity requires a court order, and this program is making a database of everyone’s telephone activity which can be accessed at will. It is a massive violation of law, and Obama tries to palm it off as “keeping us safe” just as Bush did.

Obama goes on to say that whatever potential this program has for government abuse, such as repressing protest, that we should trust him not to engage in such abuse, and assures us that he will use to program only to “keep us safe from terrorists.” I don’t know if I trust him or not, I’m pretty sure I don’t. This is a man who says he finds it easy to give an order to assassinate an American citizen without due process of law, and I’m supposed to trust him?

Trusting him or not is not the point. Our constitution spells out a form of government which makes it unnecessary to trust any individual. Obama is violating that constitution, and then asking us to trust him not to abuse the product of that violation. That’s like a bank robber asking us to trust him to spend the stolen money wisely.

Organ of the State

CBS Evening News covered the various spying leaks last night in a manner that I have come to know as typical of them. They discussed the leaks in terms of how the leaks happened and who published them, and then went into a discussion of how the “whistleblowers” would be hunted down and punished by the government.

The content of the leaks, the fact that our government is illegally collecting data about its citizens, that it continues to do under Obama what was decried as illegal under Bush, was essentially ignored. It was about “enemies of the state” who dare to reveal to the public what its government is doing.

Arguing In Good Faith

Krugman today accuses one Arvik Roy of arguing “health care reform” in bad faith because he claims facts which are not true in making his points. Krugman does not say which untrue facts Mr. Roy claims, but that’s okay, because Krugman is undoubtedly correct in his accusation. My problem with Dr. Krugman is that I’m wondering where he gets off making such accusations, given his proclivity for spouting nonsense himself.

Let’s take, for instance, Krugman’s assertion that the government should borrow money without restraint at this time because interest rates are really low. Add that to the statement that he has made many times that governments never repay debts and you have an assertion by Krugman which is completely inconsistent with reality. Krugman knows that government debt is, essentially, adjustable rate debt and that interest rates are certainly not going to stay low forever, so he cannot possibly believe that his claim regarding the cost of government borrowing is true as he posits it.

It might be true if the government were to retire the debt when its term expired, but Krugman specifically asserts that government does not do that. It might be true if the debt were not time limited, but Krugman knows very well that such is not the case. So is Krugman “arguing in good faith” when he claims that the government should borrow without restraint because interest rates are low at this moment? I think not.

Let’s also examine Krugman using the writings of John Maynard Keynes as authority for why government should spend money in economic hard times. All well and good, but then he abandons Keynes altogether in arguing that we should strive for inflation because it “makes debt easier to repay.” Keynes abhorred inflation, and with good reason, in that it rewards debt, punishes savings and diminishes capital formation. Keynes also advised that, while government should spend in times of economic stress, he advocated that it should repay the incurred debt in economic good times, something which Krugman specifically decries.

Can anyone claim that selectively citing a source and quoting only those portions that fit your agenda is “arguing in good faith” on any topic?

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Is This Going To Be A Turkey Shoot?

It will be interesting to see how this mess develops, because it reminds me of two things which led to entirely opposite outcomes.

The first is the treatment which Occupy Wall Street received at the hands of various police forces in the United States. That, of course, led nowhere but to the irrelevancy of the movement formerly known as Occupy Wall Street, which is still around but is almost totally ignored. There were a few words of outrage, outrage I tell you, regarding the harsh treatment by “police thugs,” but no one in this country takes that kind of outrage seriously, so…

The other thing it reminds me of is, of course, Tahrir Square in Egypt, and we all know how that turned out. We don’t have Hillary Clinton around to tell us how Erdogan is a “dear friend of the family,” but John Kerry has probably been to yacht races with him on the Bosporus Gold Coast, so that might serve the same purpose. Obama is already hyperventilating about the noble qualities of Erdogan while urging both sides to remain calm and use “peaceful measures,” so we’re all set for that phase of things.

People in the Middle East are serious about their protests, though, and unlike this country they meet police thuggery with an escalation of violence instead of stealing off into the woodwork. So we will see before long if this is going to proceed to the phase where Obama is telling the world that Erdogan has “lost his authority to govern,” and that he must “step down immediately” or face some "serious consequences" which Obama will refuse to describe.

Events in the Middle East are not always easy to forecast, but Barack Obama is completely and entirely predictable.

The Absurdity That Is Salon

This is the headline at salon.com for an essay by Lewis Lapham, describing his upbringing in a shipping family and his first time at sea. The episode of his shipmates taking him to a whorehouse is a very minor episode, taking less than one paragraph in a fairly lengthy tale, and is in no way actually relevant to his seagoing experience. The headline, however, illustrates the kind of thinking that prevails at what used to be... Oh, to hell with it.

On Morals And Ethics

Ian Welsh had a piece on ethics this week in which he defined the difference between morals and ethics as, “…morals are how you treat people you know. Ethics are how you treat people you don’t know.” I rather liked that definition at first reading, even though it sounded a little bit “too good to be true.” The more I pondered it, though, the more it held up, and I came to like it very much indeed.

His discussion regarding the definition is well said and and makes some good points. Like most of what he writes, I recommend it as good reading.

He also, in this piece, resonates with my thinking regarding a major breakdown in our governance that has been a burr under my saddle for a long time and which no one ever talks about. That is that our legislators keep thrashing around in a misguided efforts to arrive at moral legislation, such as abortion and gay marriage, and have abandoned completely any effort at ethical governance, as is revealed by their oft-repeated statement that, “My responsibility is to serve the best interest of my state/district.”

Actually, we should have no laws regarding the moral issue of abortion, either permitting or banning it, and the ethical responsibility of a federal legislator is to represent the principles of his state/district in serving the best interest of the nation as a whole.

The voters, of course, contribute to the ethical failure by reelecting incumbents because they want to “maintain seniority in Congress.” What that actually means is that they want to assure that their representation has sufficient “pull” in Congress to secure the maximum amount of pork for their state, and they vote for legislators based on the amount of pork which the representative is able to bring home.

During the Civil War it was said that “a nation divided against itself cannot stand.” That was at a time when this nation was divided into two halves. We are now divided into fifty greedy, self serving states, each trying to suck the maximum resources from the federal coffers for its own benefit and each willing to throw the nation under the bus in order to gain a “leg up” over its 49 competitors.

Whenever I bring up this concept in discussion, especially in liberal discussion, I am roundly slapped down and told that the true and proper role of a federal legislator is precisely to serve the best interest of his state/district. “If they don’t serve my interests,” I am asked, “who will?”

It never occurs to them that in matters of national governance perhaps their parochial interests should not be served at all, by anyone.

The rise of the Tea Party was actually a triumph of principle over greed, because for the first time the voters were in significant measure willing to elect legislators based on the principles they espoused rather than on what they could do for the district’s parochial self interest. Whether those principles represented valid governance is beside the point, the Tea Party was not based on “I’m going to bring federal money into your area.”

Yes, there was an element of self interest in voting Tea Party, in wanting lower taxes and smaller government, but it was not parochial self interest. These legislators were elected based on principles of national governance.

Oh, For God's Sake

Consumer spending dropped in April, after increasing less than expected in March. Unemployment claims rose in April, after being essentially flat in March. And bless the American public's little heart, consumer confidence rose in April, to its highest level in several years because home prices increased by 20% in one year and the stock market topped $15,000. My God, we are a stupid country.

Update, Friday evening: From Crain's New York Business news comes this, "The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits rose and an initial estimate of first-quarter economic growth was revised slightly lower." The article goes on to say that, "The stock market rose Thursday after a pair of lackluster economic reports convinced traders that the U.S. central bank will continue to boost the economy with its stimulus program."

Aside from the insanity of the stock market being "encouraged" by "lackluster economic reports," consider the moronic conclusion that such bad news will assure that the Fed will "continue to boost the economy." What idoit puts "lackluster economic reports" and "continue to boost the economy" in the same sentence?

More Empty Words

Just four days after Obama gave a grand speech outlining his new policy that drones would be used so carefully that no civilians would be killed or injured, we used a Hellfire missile to kill a Taliban leader in Pakistan and in the process killed six other people who happened to be nearby. We do not know who all of those people were.

Obama’s claim that Hellfire missiles fired from unmanned drones will only be used when there is “near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set,” is another case of him giving us nice words and assuming that we are really stupid. If the Hellfire missile could be used with sufficient precision to meet that asinine criteria, it would not bear the name “Hellfire” missile. In this case the missile killed the target and six other people, several of whom are unknown to us.

Does that meet the standard that Obama set just four days previously?

Of course not. There were six other people around the target, and we did not know who they were. Either that, or we had such a poor view of the target that we did not know who was around him. In either case was there a “near certainty that no civilians would be killed” when that missile was fired? On the contrary, it pretty much had to be assumed that innocent people would die, and the missile was fired anyway.

Again, why do we assume that anything that Obama says has any actual meaning? In the words of Glenn Greenwald, “Few things are as unreliable as Obama's speeches and rhetoric.”

False Economic Recovery

Heidi Moore at The Guardian has an article today titled “Don't be fooled by the false economic recovery,” which rather makes me think she has been reading my mind. She talks about “the power of illusion, to mask reality” and relates that to the actual meaninglessness of consumer confidence and housing prices as a measure of economic recovery, when unemployment is still persistently high, the number of people in poverty and on food stamps is still rising, and wages for the working class remain stagnant at best.

She makes good points. The people of this nation are prone to being taken by illusion, such as the one that a war in Iraq would make us safe from terrorism, followed by the idea that continuance and escalation of the war in Afghanistan would do likewise by “denying them space in which to plan their attacks.” Economically, people look at a soaring stock market and rising home prices and need no other evidence that the economy is booming.

Buoyed by such “confidence” they rush out and buy cars with nothing down and four year loans and bid $100,000 above the asking price for houses, and think that doing that sort of thing constitutes rational behavior. Confidence based on an utterly irrational stock market and the fact that other irrational actors are also buying houses at ridiculous prices.

My parents used to ask me, “If everyone else jumped off of a five story building, would you do so too?” Today's American answer economically is clearly, “Yes.”

Notice that the booming portion of the economy is in two areas. One is cars and houses, both of which are bought on credit and means the nation is once again piling up debt at a furious rate. The other is the stock market, which as it functions today is not actually part of the economy at all, but is a parasite which sucks money out of the economy.

Europe is doing a slow motion economic implosion, and it is only a matter of time before the Euro is a thing of the past. Japan is circling the drain as it frantically devalues its currency an a last ditch effort to survive. China is slowing down, no matter how often it releases fancy numbers in an effort to disguise that fact. And yet this country, having apparently decoupled economically from the rest of the world, is entering an economic boom.

Hurry, get your reservation in for the unicorns that are coming.

War On Terror Speech

I haven’t had much to say about President Obama’s “War On Terror” speech, mostly because I’m still trying to figure out what the hell he actually said. What do you make of a speech filled with such inconsistent cliches as, “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” followed by the same tired old one about how we must, in Afghanistan, “sustain a counter-terrorism force which ensures that al Qaeda can never again establish a safe-haven to launch attacks against us.”

Further complicating my confusion is the downright schizophrenic reactions to it. Every warhawk who loves the war on terror was absolutely thrilled by Obama’s speech and drew from it the deepest reassurance that Obama intends to continue the war until the end of time, while progressives almost without exception were equally thrilled and drew from the speech an assurance that the last bomb will have fallen in no more than a week or two.

Except, that is, for those who will attack Obama no matter what he says, who are saying, of course, that Obama is himself a secret Muslim and is trying to leave the country so unguarded that Islamic jihadists will be able to make their way in and create Sharia law throughout the nation.

Anyway, progressives are hanging their hats on the concept that he is the first president in history to actually ask that presidential authority be reduced because he called for the “eventual repeal of the AUMF.” Yes, and he said that he would filibuster against immunity for the telecom industry, too, and then voted in favor of it. He said that he would not sign a bill extending the Bush tax cuts, and then extended them for two years. Why do we keep assuming that Obama will actually do anything that he says he will do?

Glenn Greenwald goes into this at much greater length and with his usual insight and eloquence, pointing out that Obama typically makes speeches that use a lot of words that say nothing. I recommend his piece to you. I particularly like the part where he compares the Bush WOT approach to that of Obama, saying that the only difference between the two is that Bush did it with a cowboy swagger while Obama is anguished and inwardly tortured by it.

He doesn’t point out that, anguished and inwardly tortured or not, Obama has said that ordering the killing of an American citizen was “the easiest decision” he ever made as president. When killing is an easy decision, how likely are you to end wars?

Memorial Day 2013

There was a discussion on another venue about the meaning of Memorial Day, which started when the original poster said that it is a day “that we thank those who served in the military.” After I and some others argued that it is a day that we remember those who have died in the armed service of their country he did change that to “we thank those who served in the military, especially those who served in combat and lost their lives.”

Which is, of course, still wrong and makes him invincibly ignorant.

Today is a day to watch auto races; one which will probably be exciting and another, later in the day, which will almost certainly be about as exciting as watching sewage ooze out of an overfull septic tank.

Tomorrow is a day to remember, and honor, those who have gone to war, in the words of Kenneth Roberts, “not to die for their country, but to place themselves, their precious lives, between their home and the forces which would destroy it.” Men like the crew of the USS Thresher, some of whom were close friends, the USS Scorpion, and all of the submarines “on eternal patrol.”

If there is a National Cemetery near you, go there tomorrow and take a look at all of the uniform white markers, aligned in neat rows no matter in which direction you view them. Note the little flags in front of each one, placed there in remembrance, and you will know the meaning of “Memorial Day” through its original name, which was “Decoration Day.”

Take a walk and read some names. No need to thank them. No ceremonies or grand gestures required. The military has a code that they do not leave their dead behind. We as a people should have the same code. Don’t leave them behind. Remember who they are.

Every year on 9/11 we read the names of those who were victims of that day. Why do we never read the names of those who fell in Fallujah? Why is there never a reading of the names of those who lost their lives on Iwo Jima, or at Chosin Resevoir?

Restoring What Constitution?

Obama will, in the future, assassinate American citizens without due process of law only if they present a “continuing and imminent threat.” No more killing them by accident, apparently, but still no actual evidence required, merely a departure from American soil and the decision by… Well, he doesn’t say who makes that decision. We knew before his speech that he was the “decider” of who would be executed by drones, but his speech sort of muddied those waters.

The constitution says that conviction of treason (although he never used that word) requires “the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act,” which seems to require a trial in a court of law, and Obama sort of acknowledges that while dismissing it at the same time by saying that, “Of course, the targeting of any Americans raises constitutional issues that are not present in other strikes – which is why my Administration submitted information about Awlaki to the Department of Justice months before Awlaki was killed,” Apparently he shares Holder’s rather loose definition of “due process.” Due process means we tell a bunch of lawyers about it before we do it.

He also seems to think that citizenship is conditional on good behavior, using his common tactic of saying something that sounds really good unless you actually think about it, in which case it makes no sense.

But when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.

Really? A sniper in the act of firing on a crowd is a “clear and present danger” against whom lethal force is justified. However, Obama’s “swat team” can only use lethal force to meet lethal force. They cannot use lethal force unless their lives or the lives of others are endangered by the present actions of the person they are engaging.

Nor, if the police know that a person is planning to act as a “sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd” can they preemptively kill him, or even arrest him simply for his intention. They go to the place where he is planning to commit the crime, prevent him from doing so and arrest him in the act. We do not arrest people for thought crimes in this country, but Obama does execute people for them. In Obama’s world, planning to do something bad is a capital offense.

He has a vastly different definition of “justice” than I do.

Absurdity Abounds

Commentary on the Oklahoma tornado is entirely predictable. The same people who passionately claim when there is a blizzard that “one weather event proves nothing” are using this tornado as proof that civilization as we know it is doomed as a result of impending climate change.

Major Speech Today

President Obama is going to make an “important” speech today about “national security” in which he will once again issue high sounding phrases about the importance of closing Guantanamo, which we have heard before, and about “the dangers that the nation still faces.”

I can’t wait. I suspect this one is going to set a new record for bullshit.

He has paved the way by announcing yesterday that four Americans have been killed by Hellfire missiles fired from drones, but that only one was on purpose. So that’s okay then, we can all rest easy. If our president kills us it will be by accident, which will make our families feel so much better.

That answers the question I asked about legitimacy a few days ago, too. Legitimacy, it seems, is only lost if you are “killing your own people” deliberately. Accidents don’t count, so Obama retains his “legitimacy to govern.” Assuming, that is, that that’s what he’s doing.

Odd Statement

CBS Evening News was reporting on the Oklahoma tornado this evening and commented that, while early reports said that 51 deaths had been reported, it has now been confirmed that only 24 deaths were caused by the storm because "some bodies were counted twice." Actually, with those numbers it wasn't "some bodies" that were counted twoce, it had to have been all of the bodies, with three of them counted three times. The miscount is happy news certainly, but their explanation seems entirely bogus to me.

Spurious Defense

Obama loyalists are defending him regarding the three “scandals” of Benghazi, the IRS affair and the AP telephone surveillance by claiming that there is no scandal involved and/or that no harm was done. They may be right on the first, but the other two are silly, in that if they want to defend Obama himself they have far better defenses.

I’ve already given my take on the Benghazi nonsense. I don’t think for a moment that Obama or any of his people were “covering up” anything; they were just a bunch of politicians more interested in looking good than they were in being informative. That’s hardly flattering, but it’s not unusual for politicians of either party. In fact it’s so routine that it would be freakishly remarkable if they didn’t take such an approach.

As to the IRS business, the most common defense is that no harm was done. No groups were denied the 501(c)(4) status, they were merely delayed, and in any case, so what if a few conservative groups were minimally harmed, they were just conservative assholes anyway. Obamabots only believe in equal treatment under the law when it is liberals who are getting the short end. When conservatives get the short end of unequal treatment that is merely justice because conservatives are evil.

A better argument, if defending Obama is one’s goal, is to admit that the IRS action was illegal and reprehensible, but that to suggest that it was done at Obama’s direction is utterly absurd, and that there is absolutely no evidence or suggestion that it was. Obama supporters are so accustomed to giving Obama credit for everything and claiming that their man can do no wrong that the “he didn’t do it” defense never occurs to them.

On the AP telephone records Obama defenders are just hilarious. Their defense consists of bashing the media, citing what a horrible job it does and reminding us that it is corrupted by corporate greed. Not sure than I can argue with much of that, but all of it is entirely beside the point. Good or bad, they are still the “press.”

If one walks up to a child pornographer who is unarmed and shoots them in the head, it is murder. It was a very bad person who was killed, but it is still murder. I’m not comparing AP to a child pornographer, but… My point is that it doesn’t matter how well the press is doing it’s job, it is still entitled to freedom from interference by government.

It never fails to amaze me the way Obama loyalists will defend everything Obama does, even when it wasn’t him who did it.

Legitimate Much?

President Obama held a press conference Thursday in which he said that Assad had “lost his legitimacy to govern” and that “he needs to step down.” He did not spell out what gives him the authority to dictate the actions of other heads of state, but he does so as a matter of course.

He went on to say that Assad had “lost his legitimacy when he began killing his own people,” which is an interesting thought. Just a couple of years ago Obama said that giving the order to kill an American citizen, and his son, was “one of the easiest decisions” he’s made since he became president, so, what does that say about Obama’s legitimacy?

The "Danica Rule"

In addition to the winner of today's "Showdown" race, one car voted on by the fans will be promoted to the "All Star" race this evening. Last year, and most previous years, only cars finishing on the lead lap were eligible for that voting, but this year any car that "finishes in racing condition" is eligible.

There are those with nasty, dirty little minds who think that the rule change was made to assure that Danica, with her proclivity for not finishing on the lead lap, would be eligible for the fan vote. The race is 40 laps and she lost her first lap after 27 laps last week, and after 38 laps the week before. All of which would suggest she'll go a lap down on lap 18 or so this week.

Actually, though, I'm predicting she'll stay on the lead lap. Charlotte is a high speed track with wide turns, and drivers pretty much keep the gas pedal on the floor all the way around the track. The more similar to Daytona a track is the better Danica does. It's this braking, accelerating and steering all at the same time that stumps her. Walking and chewing gum at the same time is tricky for her, too. Merely steering alone she can handle reasonably well.

Talking to a reporter without a prepared script, bye the way, is utterly beyond her. She knits her brows, looks very serious, and produces absolute gibberish, leaving the reporter to walk away shaking his head.

Intellectual Honesty

I have been waiting to see how Paul Krugman would respond to the CBO report on the future of the national debt, the one that says it will shrink in the future, and that this year’s deficit estimate has been reduced to a trivial $642 billion. That’s for those of you who think that anything below $1 trillion is trivial.

The report does not, of course, say that the debt will shrink. What it says is that the debt will become smaller as a ratio of GDP, because it assumes that the GDP will increase by leaps and bounds since we will not have another recession and the economy will soon resume a nice healthy 5% growth rate. There are people who think that. They also think that unicorns live on the other side of every rainbow.

It also mentions, just casually in passing, that this year’s deficit reduction is due to “higher-than-expected revenues and an increase in payments to the Treasury by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” due in no small part to the resumption of trading in mortgage backed securities. Related to that is that home values in San Diego just increased a whopping 20% in just one year. All of this is not actually good news, or won’t be when 2008 happens again.

Paul Krugman exhibits his usual degree of intellectual honesty by mentioning none of this, and merely says gleefully that everyone predicting gloom and doom about the national debt were wrong. He breezily admits that, “Yes, there are longer-term issues of health costs and demographics,” but dismisses them as irrelevant to what we should be doing now “in the face of economic crisis,” even while everyone including him is saying that the recession is over and that the recovery is proceeding nicely.

And certainly now is not the time to address long term problems. If a bridge is burning, it is certainly stupid to think about putting the fire out before it is time to cross the bridge. It would be silly to worry about the bridge being gone when you get there.

Now, how’s that for mixing some metaphors?

Preparing The Response

Bloomberg, discussing the various ramifications of Washington “scandals,” “The White House also released 100 e-mails Wednesday detailing discussions among administration officials on how to respond to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.”

They don’t seem to think that it’s remarkable that the administration needed over 100 emails to decide how to respond to an event. How about a simple “tell people, truthfully, what you know” approach? How long and how many emails does that require?

For me the problem is not so much what the response was, or what it was not, but that it needed to be so carefully and laboriously prepared. As Judge Judy says, “When you tell the truth you don’t need to have a good memory.”

Seriously?

Andrew Leonard at Salon.com introduces us to something which he calls “sheer genius” and “true smartphone brilliance” in a technology article, “App of the Week.” Yes, I still read Salon, but I have no real idea why. It goes back to when they paid their writers and had people like Glenn Greenwald, but now all of their writers work for free and the articles are worth exactly what Salon pays for them.

Anyway, back to the “true smartphone brilliance” that Mr. Leonard has discovered. It turns out that it’s an app that makes your phone sound like the shower is running, and is intended to be used to cover up the sound of you going to the bathroom.

He describes the horror he has felt over the idea that someone might hear him performing either of two basic bodily functions, and how he turns on the shower to prevent that from happening. Apparently he has the idea that this social anxiety afflicts virtually everyone, and that turning on the shower while using the bathroom is causing millions of gallons of water to be wasted every week.

I have to say that never in my life of seventy years have I turned on the shower to hide the sound of me going to the bathroom. It has just never occurred to me to do that. I’ve never imagined that anyone who knew me would think that I don’t...

I’ve never known anyone else to do it either. In fact if someone did do it I would think something weird was going on. Someone asks if they can use my bathroom; I tell them it’s the first door on the left and pay no more attention, unless I hear the shower running, which I would notice. Wtf? They’re taking a shower?

Tell me, if a visitor uses your bathroom, do you go listen at the door?

Besides which, only a portion of the sound of a shower comes from the shower head and water in the bath; how is a cell phone successfully going to sound like water running through the pipes in your house? Weird.

Stock Cars This Week

There has always been debate as to whether or not NASCAR race drivers are or are not athletes. I have no opinion on the subject, and don’t really care, but am not swayed by many of the arguments I hear from proponents of either point of view.

Pete Pistone at Motor Racing Network, who probably cannot be accused of being impartial on the subject, points to the return of Denny Hamlin to the Darlington 500 last night, six weeks after having surgery for stress fractures on several vertebrae in his lower back. “Anyone that doubts NASCAR drivers are athletes need only to look at Hamlin’s effort to see how wrong they are on the subject,” he says.

That’s one way to look at it, I guess. Another point of view might be that driving a stock car is so physically undemanding that it can be done even with a broken back. I’m not taking that position, you understand, I’m just saying that sometimes what you think is proof…

Danica Patrick Watch: She started 40th and finished 28th, gaining 12 positions because 11 cars ahead of her wrecked. She was 5 laps down to the leader, needing to be only 27 laps into the race this week to lose her first lap, which I think is a new record for her.

Question for Fox Sports: How many people would watch a football game if the television only showed one player at a time? Right, then why do you think that people watching an auto race only want to see one car at a time?

My Benghazi Question

I think that all this Benghazi nonsense is just that; nonsense, political posturing and hot air. The exhibition discredits Congress more than it does the Obama administration.

That being said, to some degree Obama’s people walked into this mess by being politicians and using more words in their “talking points” than were needed. Instead of saying “we have no indication that it was a terrorist attack,” which sounded like and was interpreted as a denial, simply say, “we don’t know the cause and are investigating.”

If a reporter goads you by asking, “Was it a terrorist attack?,” merely repeat your original statement that “we do not presently know the cause.”

There is a certain arrogance in trying to avoid saying that one does not know an answer, and that leads politicians into talking around the answer rather than simply giving the answer. Almost never does that really turn out well, and this is a case of that arrogance backfiring rather badly. You spend all that time carefully tailoring “talking points” to assure that you are going to sound good, and the result is this.

In my opinion, this "Benghazi-gate" affair is about nothing more than the typical political habit of talking with a greater concern for sounding good than for being informative.

The one point in all of this that bothers me, and that no one else seems to be paying any attention to, is the interaction between the State Department and the CIA in the Benghazi mission. It appears that the only person stationed in that mission who was not a member of the CIA, or a private contractor working for the CIA, was Ambassador Stevens, and I for one would like to know what he was doing there. Why was he with the CIA and why he was assigned to what appears to have been a CIA operation?

Definitions

I was reading an article last night that referred to our modern military as a "professional military caste of mercenaries."  A bit harsh, perhaps, but more accurate than an "all volunteer military."  Volunteering is not a career, and volunteers do not work for salary, benefits and a retirement plan.

Perceptions Count?

President Obama is still talking big on Syria, even though John Kerry is in Russia agreeing with Putin that we will join Russia in hosting peace talks between Assad and the rebels. Obama is still pounding the pulpit and saying that “Assad must go,” so there seems to be the usual lack of communication within the Obama Administration. Perhaps they need to learn how to use email.

Obama was asked about his “red line” statement during a press conference with the president of South Korea and told the questioner not to worry, that he was definitely going to bring Assad to justice. I'm not quoting there, because what he actually said was, “in the end, whether it's bin Laden or Qaddafi, if we say we're taking a position, I would think at this point the international community has a pretty good sense that we typically follow through on our commitments,” which is a clear implication that he is merely waiting for a convenient opportunity to assassinate Assad.

Well, given the shaky grammar and convoluted sentence structure, it's not really a clear indication of anything. If you make your sentences long enough and complicated enough no one can figure out what the hell you are talking about, but you'll sound intelligent and they'll think it's their failure.

He also got rather Clintonesque with another the “red line” questioner, saying that, “The operative word there, I guess, Stephen, is ‘perceived.’” Apparently everyone else is convinced on the chemical weapons thing, but he is not and, “I don't make decisions based on “perceived.’” Indeed. And it depends on “what ‘is’ is,” too.

Not to mention that the decision as to whether or not to go to war in Syria is for him to make, not Congress. Screw the constitution.

The international community may have “a pretty good sense that we typically follow through on our commitments,” but the domestic community is somewhat less sure according to recent polls which show that only 49% believe that he is “able to get things done.” They didn’t ask about whether or not he even wants to get things done.

As to his claim about “typically following through on our commitments,” I guess that doesn’t apply to closing prison gulags on Caribbean islands, or keeping campaign promises not to raise taxes on middle class. The latter might be back to the “operative word perceived,” however, as when Republicans let tax cuts expire it counts as a tax increase but when a Democrat lets the payroll tax cut expire it doesn't count as a tax increase. It’s all in how you “perceive” it, you see.

Policy Redefined

I have certainly not been alone in being baffled by Obama’s incoherent and inconsistent positions on foreign policy. Why, for instance, make didactic statements about how “Assad must go,” when we have neither the means or the influence to make that happen? Why the list of fifteen reasons why we are in Afghanistan, none of which make any sense whatever? The list of questions is almost endless.

Then a blog commenter made a remark which lit the lightbulb. He said that Obama regards foreign policy as an extension of domestic policy. That made very little sense to me until his amplification revealed that by “policy” he meant “the means by which Obama pursues his own political success.” Ah, yes. That’s when the light dawned.

That’s what “policy” has come to mean in today’s political arena. It is no longer a set of principles which guide governance, it is a series of actions by which individual politicians advance their own political success. This is by no means limited to Obama, but as the Chief Executive of our nation, his practice of it is the most damaging.

As the commenter pointed out, “Obama's trip to Israel, for example, accomplished nothing internationally. However, it did quiet the daily attacks by the Israel Firsters in the US.” Which is exactly what it was intended to accomplish and is the point being made by the commenter.

Guantanamo is another case in point. So long as it was not damaging him politically, Obama did not care that it remained open and served as a severe blot on our national escutcheon. He did not care that, in his words, “it is not who we are.” He did not care that it was serving as a rally cry for the recruiting of soldiers in the “holy war” against us. But when the hunger strike called attention to the gulag which he had promised more than four years ago to close, he suddenly became overwhelmed with a passion to close it. What changed? The risk of it damaging his political success changed.

Republicans are “serious about cutting spending,” until it becomes politically risky to do so. They are opposed to Obama’s proposal to reduce the Social Security COLA, for instance. They oppose defense spending cuts that “will make America weaker,” which strikes me as silly, but is supported by many who are terrified of… You get my point.

We are no longer governed in the best interest of the nation as a whole, and certainly not in the interest of the common man. We are governed in the interest of assuring the political success of the people who are governing us, which is a form of government that is hard to define. It most certainly is not democracy.

Bogus Award

Trust me, this cat does not do "brave."  Seriously, does that look like a brave cat to you? It's just getting your teeth cleaned, Molly. As of today she's still barely speaking to us.

The More Things Change...

I haven’t written in a while because I am finding the whole thing just too depressing. The stock market is over 14,000 again, home prices are rising 10% and more per year, with buyers bidding against each other and condo builders holding lotteries, consumer confidence is soaring and pundits are crowing about recovery. We’ve been here before, remember? It was in 2007 and we were on top of the world.

It’s all different this time, we are told. The fundamentals of the stock market are different and the housing market is not a bubble this time. Right, exactly how is it different?

The only difference I can see is that fewer people are supporting this garish display of greed and excess, given that the lowest percentage of our population is employed since 1980, and more of those who are employed are working in jobs that produce nothing. The bulk of our employment today is retail, entertainment and financial services; jobs supporting and catering to a lifestyle of consumption.

Government no longer even pretends to be anything but utterly corrupt; openly displays that it is controlled by corporate and special interest money, and nobody cares enough to vote them out of office.

We are still at war or threatening war against several nations who are no threat to us, and practicing assassination as an instrument of foreign policy; killing others in the name of preventing the possibility of a smaller number of American casualties. And nobody cares enough to even hold up a sign asking for it to stop.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We don’t care what the oligarchy does or what happens to the rest of the world, so long as we have our “bread and circuses.” Hail Caesar.