Thursday, August 09, 2007

When Mendacity is the Best You've Got

The pallets are starting to overrun the loading dock here; I guess impending Dog Days among other things (early-onset senility?) are to blame.

I have several posts on standby for various reasons, most prominently the need to maintain mainstream life and relations. Several of these theoretical posts relate to vacation follow-up and that "other life" I allude to and hence picture-processing and such, but frankly once back into current events it's tough to do the proper compartmentalizing.

Other pending posts, including one I was immersed in last night, are more in the category of trying to fit Tolstoy into a Harlequin Romance package. (Not that I have a readerly familiarity with either, come to think of it.) Too much vital info to be so crunched and oversimplified. My ideal may not be realizable with my limited talents.

So instead you are getting this, more in accord with my skill-set. And timely and urgent to boot, especially if, like me, you were offended by the disgustingly slap-happy and dishonest "report" by warmongers O'Hanlon and Pollack after their Disneyworld Adventure in Baghdad-on-the-Riviera. I was intrigued that in the self-incriminating media swooning over their idea that "we might win!" no journalist at all from what I could tell remarked on the previously-observed concept that visits like this are often largely stage-managed. In particular I would have thought that any journalist with at least the courage of a mouse would have considered and prominently commented on whether this particular bit of flackery might be worth reflecting in the mirror of Senator McCain's outrageous report from his April visit. (He talked of Happytown after being escorted by an armored battalion with multiple gunships overhead - but we all knew that.)

The military has been from what I can tell increasingly prone to engage in full-out propaganda a la Viet Nam. Lies are basically the routine now. Not that they weren't willing from the start to frag those rogue journalists (rarely from here, obviously) when they strayed into gathering information that was not DOD-sanctioned. But there was a period when, perhaps naively (them and me both), we seemed to get an honest general or higher-up with the courage (and sense!) to disavow the rabid propaganda of such as rumsfeld and cheney. Sadly most of the actual vertebrate senior military types seem to have curiously willfully or not taken retirement. It would sure be nice to hear some candour from them now!

Petraeus seems to be fully kool-aided, err, indoctrinated, as one who both swoons at 43's feet as his paymaster and is totally complicit, given the failure of his prior responsibilities In Country. That was, as I recall. something like training Iraq security forces.

The Horse's Mouth has some fascinating insights on the performance of "our" "media" on this topic:

Here is a list of the big news orgs and network shows -- compiled from here, here, and here -- that lavished coverage on Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack over their now-infamous Op-ed saying that we just might win the war in Iraq:

Pollack:
CBS Evening News
CNN Newsroom
CNN Evening News
CNN Situation Room
MSNBC Tucker
NPR Talk of the Nation
O’Hanlon:
CBS Early Show
CBS Evening News
Fox News Special Report
MSNBC Hardball


O'Hanlon and Pollack:
Fox News Sunday

As noted here yesterday, national security analyst Anthony Cordesman went to Iraq with O'Hanlon and Pollack, and reached a strikingly different conclusion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, where Cordesman works, just told me that they sent out a release about this yesterday morning.

Over 24 hours later, here's a list of the media outlets that have covered it, according to a Google news and Nexis search:
CNN
Agence France Press
UPI


Yep -- one major network.

Really, it's worth stepping back and pondering just how unprofessional and dysfunctional the media's performance has been on this story to date. It starts with The Times's editors, who actually allowed these two to con the paper's readers into forgetting their unflagging support for the invasion and the surge, letting them get away with describing themselves only as war critics. That embarrassing flub then colored virtually all the coverage that followed. Because of it, the big news orgs persuaded themselves that there was something counterintuitive about their conclusion -- and proceeded to report, in one outlet after another, that these war "critics" had suddenly found reason to be hopeful.

Now we have a story that's genuinely counterintuitive -- that is, that a companion of the two went along and reached very different, and far more pessimistic, conclusions about the prospects for success in Iraq. Not only is this counterintuitive, but there's also conflict here, too -- Cordesman flags his disagreement with his esteemed colleagues in the first paragraph of his synopsis. This also puts Cordesman at odds with the White House, which relentlessly flacked O'Hanlon and Pollack's findings. And the media response to Cordesman thus far? Virtual silence.

I'm told that some reporters have inquired about the report, so things may change; I really hope they do. As of now, however, the silence that has greeted Cordesman's far more detailed report -- from the same news orgs that gave exceptionally generous, and outright misleading, coverage to O'Hanlon and Pollack's optimism about Iraq -- stands as a sad, though perhaps fittingly pathetic, postscript to this whole affair.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Two plus Two equals Seventy-nine When Your Name is Rudy

I'm no economist. I struggled through 102 my Freshman year and as I recall ended with a B maybe, baffled as to what the hell these people were thinking and saying while seemingly waddling through some of the same techniques used by real scientists. The concept of "elasticity" resonated with me, and just last week I remember reading an article of significance where, w/o using the term, the concept was evoked in talking about how the projected petroleum reserve quantity fluctuates wildly depending on the barrel price.

Econ 102 was a more than a few years ago. I'm number than that now. Well, and younger too, Bob!

But here's the thing. I've never actually been able to endorse this idea that we can radically and persistently cut tax rates and yet increase the incoming monetary stream to fund vital government programs. Like, say, repairing dike, bridge, and viaduct structures (Crescent City, Minnesota, Seattle, etc., etc.). I guess the working, unproven (or, frankly, disproven) theory is basically that reduced tax rates so encourage enterprise that the economy automatically flourishes and all boats float. The fans no doubt have a multitude of spokes-ers who can botox it better than that, but that I suspect is the entire tuna right there.

Need I point out that there's a lot of folks who do not own boats?

But it doesn't even work for the folks with 35' fishing boats. These government-starving tax breaks only help those who are so embarrassingly wealthy already that none of us actually ever encounter them.

I don't believe any of us support the idea of expensive bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing other than paying the salaries of the bureaucrats. Especially when our "elected" officials are devoted to flushing government and its functions down the drain - those folks are obviously expendable. Numerous vulnerable republs come to mind.

But it is also vital to remember that when the subject of cutting taxes comes up, it rarely if ever has any bottom-line relevance for any but the richest, most-indulged and greedy members of our "society."

And yet there's this abject clown the Repubs have apparently trotted out to do a little bad tapdancing while they desperately search for a real candidate or try to subborn a democrat (no, wait - what about Joe!) who obviously missed 102 (and some know the vacuousness to be far larger):

It doesn't take much for a Democrat to be labeled "naive" or "unserious," something Barack Obama has been finding out the hard way of late. But Republicans can say the darnedest things without causing anyone to so much as raise an eyebrow. Consider this exchange between David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register and Rudy Giuliani in the Republican debate on Sunday:

YEPSEN: Mayor Giuliani, how do you answer -- in Minnesota, Governor
Pawlenty, who vetoed an increase in his state gas tax said now he may consider
one. Is this Republican dogma against taxes now precluding the ability of you
and your party to come up with the revenues that the country needs to fix its
bridges?

GIULIANI: David, there’s an assumption in your question that is not
necessarily correct, sort of the Democratic, liberal assumption: “I need money;
I raise taxes.”

YEPSEN: Then what are you going to cut, sir?

GIULIANI: But wait, wait, wait. Let me explain it.

YEPSEN: What do you cut?

GIULIANI: The way to do it sometimes is to reduce taxes and raise more
money. For example...(APPLAUSE) ... I ran the city -- I ran a city with 759
bridges; probably the most used bridges in the nation, some of the most used in
the world. I was able to acquire more money to fund capital programs. I reduced
the number of poor bridges from 5 percent to 1.7 percent. I was able to raise
more money to fix those bridges by lowering taxes. I lowered income taxes by 25
percent. I was collecting 40 percent more from the lower income tax than from
the higher income tax.

Just shoot me. Is it even possible to a give a dumber, less serious answer to a legitimate question? How would Giuliani come up with the money to fix the nation's aging infrastructure? Why he'd cut taxes, that's how. Good grief.

Giuliani suggests that when he cut taxes by 25% in New York City, he ended up collecting 40% more revenue. Nevermind that this happened to coincide with the stock market boom of the late 90s. I'm sure this principle works across the board. The more you cut taxes, the more money comes flowing in. Maybe we should cut taxes to zero and use the inevitable revenue windfall to pay off the national debt, fund Medicare and Social Security indefinitely, and give every American a pony. Yippee.

-clip-

Sunday, August 05, 2007

George W. Stalin

I'm amazed to learn of an FBI raid relating apparently to the release of information that eventually spawned the NYT article revealing the illegal NSA FISA-free spying authorized by george the most insecure - err - younger.

Of course this is also another instance of the NYT-Gray Lady having been a trollop for holding the story at White House request for a year or so. It might have mattered when they had it prior to election time, but when you are so accustomed to lifting your skirts I guess it was inevitable.

With all that has gone on about this topic, it is frankly astonishing to me that there is any possible excuse for pursuing this were we a country that even pretended to adhere to the principles of a democratic republic. Of course we know that "pretends" is as close as our "elected" officials get these days, and that apparently includes not a few democrats. I learned today that the following "Democrats" voted to give GB Stalin even more spy-power:

Evan Bayh (Indiana); Tom Carper (Delaware); Bob Casey (Pennsylvania); Kent Conrad (North Dakota); Dianne Feinstein (California); Daniel Inouye (Hawai‘i); Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota); Mary Landrieu (Louisiana); Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas); Claire McCaskill (Missouri); Barbara Mikulski (Maryland); Bill Nelson (Florida); Ben Nelson (Nebraska); Mark Pryor (Arkansas); Ken Salazar (Colorado); Jim Webb (Virginia)

Maybe we could help these swine understand through some appropriate communications how it will come home to haunt them that they did not have the courage to actually support the constitution and the principles on which our country was founded.

Who knows if total fascism, a communist despotism, or merely an oligarchy would be their preference? You tell us, Dickheads! Do you care? It's really all about power and control isn't it, and you have no loyalty when it comes down to it to any system until you know it will finally give you that power.

But we care. We are not empowered. We are not in that 0.01% that continues to benefit from the tax cuts while the other 99.99% are bled. We are not tallying the greatest quarterly earnings ever recorded now, are we?

Per Anonymous Liberal:

From Newsweek:

The controversy over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm's desktop computer, two of his children's laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants.

It's astounding to me that the administration would still be pursuing this criminal probe. Remember, these leaks relate to a program that has been declared illegal several times now, most recently in a secret opinion handed down by the FISA court. Moreover, given that the New York Times elected to sit on the story (at the administration's request) for well over a year, it's quite possible that the leaks in question date back to the time period when the Justice Department itself had determined the NSA program to be illegal and most of its top officials were prepared to resign over it.

In other words, this is a classic whistleblower scenario. Investigating people who expose illegal government conduct is a terrible way to expend prosecutorial resources.

Moreover, the administration itself recently leaked classified information on these very same activities in a transparent effort to push back against charges that the Attorney General perjured himself. Where's the criminal probe? And I look forward to the raid of House Minority Leader John Boehner's residence in response to his divulging the existence of the secret FISA court opinion on Fox News the other day.

I have no idea what Thomas Tamm's role was in this affair, but if he is being investigated solely because he was one of the dozens of sources who leaked information about the administration's illegal surveillance program to the New York Times and other news organizations, then that's a travesty.