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December 21, 2005
Hugo Chavez Welcomes Morales' Victory in Bolivia
Update to yesterday's post:
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez wrote Bolivia's new president, saying his victory represented "a real and true historical vindication" since it is the first time in 500 years that a native American (Morales is an Aymara) was the sovereign ruler of the area.
Check out the article at Venezuela Analysis.
Now it's time for me to join the rest of Manhattan in the walking commute. No time to blog about the transit strike. I have been ambivalent on the strike from the beginning and the more I read or hear about it, the more ambivalent I become. No doubt my feelings would be different if I had to walk two hours like some folks or, worse, be out of a job altogether.
Posted by MJuhre at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2005
As Fascism Rises in U.S., South Leans Further Left
Fostered by the popularity of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales's "Movement Toward Socialism" party appears to have captured the Bolivian presidency.
It has been a decade and a half since communism was supposedly defeated, many would argue, by the policies of the then most right-wing president ever, Ronald Reagan.
And yet, after a steady flirtation with capitalism throughout the Clinton 1990s, Latin America is going red again (and we ain't talking GOP red).
Curiously, this trend is a direct reaction to the policies of a U.S. president born again with fascist cravings that make Reagan look like FDR. The world has looked on for five years as Bush led his country, and thus the "free world" as they used to say (do we/can we still?), with a megolamaniacal hubris and disregard for democracy expected of Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin, but not a U.S. presisdent.
And so could it be that the domino effect the United States feared during the Cold War -- the idea that if one state fell to socialism (e.g. Venuzuela), nearby states might also fall, one after another (Boliva) unless America did drew lines in the sand (Guatamala - 1954, Chile - 1973, Nicaragua - 1980s) -- might now be a reality, and that the United States, of all actors, is actually to blame?
Perhaps in 20 years we can look back at history and make that determination. But shit, something major is happening. The "New World Order" of George Bush I has been amended a few times since it's product launch on March 6, 1991. Where it lands, nobody knows, but in the meantime, look for some good old fashioned coups and assasinations in Latin America (that is, if we can muster the resources, considering the current strain on our intelligence services).
Posted by MJuhre at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2005
Jesus Toy Just in Time for Christmas
It's good to know that when I don't have time to post things myself, I can count on friends like Brett to send in great stuff like this.
Go to the Jesus Butt Plug.
Posted by MJuhre at 04:25 PM | Comments (0)
Robert Novak Finally Flees to FOX, but Says Bush is a Liar
(Is it yet painfully clear that I've been too busy to do much paying attention to the world lately?)
So, on Dec. 14 Robert Novak said that Bush knows who the leaker is.
"I'm confident the president knows who the source is. I'd be amazed if he doesn't," Novak said at a Tuesday lunch address to the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh. "So I say, 'Don't bug me. Don't bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is.'"
If this is the case, then Bush may be caught in yet another lie (sort of).
The following day, the White House team responded that they have no idea what Novak is talking about.
And then today, it is announced that Novak will leave CNN and go to FOX. So curious.
On the one hand, it's about time Novak officially joined GOP TV propaganda outlet known as FOX News. On the other, it is curious that Novak should end up joining Bush's cable-news mouthpiece just as he ends up on the Bushit list.
Posted by MJuhre at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)
On Air Marshals and American Cities
Very little time for blogging lately, but I had to relay this little anecdote. I work right above Penn Station in New York City. Today I went down into the station to retrieve some lunch, as I often do when the weather is bad.
Shortly after passing by several policemen and national guardsmen, I encountered a clearly mentally ill man in his late 20s or early 30s. He was preparing to throw a soda can at a wall, and I imagined him doing so, perhaps coincidentally, just as people passed before him. He did not seem particularly dangerous, but evinced an air of mild, delusional belligerance such that I made sure to keep my eye on him as I passed. A small group of quasi-homeless types stood nearby him, and seemed to know him.
As I passed by, I thought about how the Federal Air Marshals are testing a plan to patrol more than just planes, but also public transit systems.
I thought about how the Air Marshals shot that mentally ill man recently in Florida. I don't claim to know the facts of that situation, and so cannot judge the Marshals' actions. But, I couldn't help think that expanding their turf to include urban public ground transportation centers, a hotspot for mentally ill homeless folk, could lead to a number of similar shootings.
As I passed the can-throwing man, I could easily see him doing something that could result in his being shot, simply by his demeanor -- especially if he encountered an Air Marshal not familiar with New York City, rather than someone in the NYPD who might detect that it was obviously just a Manhattan street person, rather than a terrorist.
After collecting my sandwich and heading back up to work, I sensed an altercation ahead, just by the body movements of several people in the crowd about 40 feet ahead of me.
Suddenly the crowd kinda scattered, and a large space opened up between me and the can-throwing man, who was clearly in a physical exchange with two teenage girls or young women. I couldn't determine who had begun grabbing or punching first and continued walking toward them, assuming it would not heat up any further, since it was my most direct path back to work.
It did heat up, and move around for that matter, however. One or both of the women were grabbing him and swinging him around. I looked around for all the cops I'd seen before, but none were around. Some people seemed to try to intercede and a woman started calling for "La policia."
There were none around, and clearly there needed to be. I knew where a police desk was about 100 feet away. So, about ten minutes after imagining Air Marshals gunning this guy down for thinking he might have a bomb or something, there I was running through the crowd of waiting Amtrak passengers to actually bring a cop into the guy's life.
The situation had ended by the time the cop arrived, and neither the young women nor can-throwing man were anwywhere to be seen. The cop began asking people what happened and, as I went on my way back here to my work station all I could hear was a woman from the quasi-homeless group of folk telling the cop "they [garbled]... They beat him up anyway."
Posted by MJuhre at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2005
Reading Between the (Head)Lines
Quickly, there are two main points to absorb from today's The New York Times we learn the following points:
1) The dubious (and later disproven) claims by the United States of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, which was used to justify the invasion of Iraq, was obtained by outsourcing the torture of a detainee to Egypt.
NYT: ("Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim")
2) Democrats are seeking copies of drafts of two of President Bush's pre-Iraq war speeches to determine whether he commited an impeachable offense; that is, whether he deliberately lied in his 2003 State of the Union address, when he made the claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger (a claim that discredited Ambassador Joe Wilson as well as the CIA). The question is why did this claim appear in the 2003 State of the Union, but not in a high-profile October 2002 speech Bush gave in Cincinnati to outlined his case for invading Iraq? The Dems want drafts of the 2002 speech to find out if the Niger claim had been included in any drafts, but ultimately pulled out of the speech. If that is the case, it would be strong evidence that Bush knew the claim was false when he used it in his 2003 State of the Union speech. And lies by the president, as the right wing itself have insisted satisfy the criteria of "high crimes and misdemeanors," required to invoke articles of impeachment against the president.
NYT: ("Bid for Prewar Iraq Files Raises Political Heat")
Posted by MJuhre at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)
December 06, 2005
Main Stream Press Still Have No Balls, Says CultureFreak.com
An Italian Court says the CIA lied to the Italian government about its role in kidnapping, according to the Washington Post. The New York Times discovered that George W. Bush's "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" was penned by a political scientist hired to gauge public opinion on the war.
But what headlines do the wussie editors give these stories? "Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst" and "Italy Allegedly Misled by CIA: CIA Ruse Is Said to Have Damaged Probe in Milan."
What horseshit. Why don't the headlines reflect the strength of the copy in these stories? The latter article writes that "the CIA's tip was a deliberate lie, part of a ruse designed to stymie efforts by the Italian anti-terrorism police..." yet the Post pusses out and replaces "lied" with "mislead" for their headline.
Well, I'm rewriting your headlines, bitches.
Read the Post story here.
As for the Times, the reason "Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst, is because most of the speech was lifted from a document the White House hired that analyst. The speech didn't "reflect" Dr. Peter Feaver's voice, the good doctor (not to be confused with Dr. Johnny Fever from TV's WKRP in Cincinnati wrote that shit. And the Times story itself says as much, because the reporters checked the document properties to find out who the author was. (Continue to the bottom of this post to read the whole New York Times story.
Full New York Times Story
BUSH SPEECH ON WAR ECHOES VOICE OF AN ANALYST:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - There could be no doubt about the theme of President Bush's Iraq war strategy speech on Wednesday at the Naval Academy. He used the word victory 15 times in the address; "Plan for Victory" signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."
Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war.
Despite the president's oft-stated aversion to polls, Dr. Feaver was recruited after he and Duke colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. They concluded that Americans would support a war with mounting casualties on one condition: that they believed it would ultimately succeed.
That finding, which is questioned by other political scientists, was clearly behind the victory theme in the speech and the plan, in which the word appears six times in the table of contents alone, including sections titled "Victory in Iraq is a Vital U.S. Interest" and "Our Strategy for Victory is Clear."
"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."
Dr. Gelpi said he had not discussed the document with Dr. Feaver, who declined to be interviewed.
Dr. Feaver, 43, who is also a lieutenant commander in the United States Naval Reserve, wrote three books on civilian-military relations. He worked on military issues on President Clinton's National Security Council staff in 1993 and 1994, but he has written critically of Mr. Clinton and other Democrats and sympathetically of President Bush in The New York Times and other publications.
Last year in an op-ed article in The Washington Post, noting Mr. Bush's determination to invade Iraq in 2003 in the face of doubts, Dr. Feaver wrote, "Determined commanders in chief have the mind-set and the resolve to act in spite of the political climate and military resistance."
He was recruited by the White House this year as public support for the war declined steadily in the face of mounting casualties and costs. A Newsweek poll this month showed that just 30 percent of those interviewed said they approved of the president's handling of the war, while 65 percent disapproved - an almost exact reversal of the numbers in May 2003, shortly after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Wednesday underscored the need for a clear, straightforward summary of the administration's Iraq policy. Asked whether they thought President Bush had a plan to achieve victory in Iraq, 55 percent said no and 41 percent said yes.
Based on their study of poll results from the first two years of the war, Dr. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver and Jason Reifler, then a Duke graduate student, took issue with what they described as the conventional wisdom since the Vietnam War - that Americans will support military operations only if American casualties are few.
They found that public tolerance for the human cost of combat depended on two factors: a belief that the war was a worthy cause, and even more important, a belief that the war was likely to be successful.
In their paper, "Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq," which is to be published soon in the journal International Security, Dr. Feaver and his colleagues wrote: "Mounting casualties did not produce a reflexive collapse in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."
The role of Dr. Feaver in preparing the strategy document came to light through a quirk of technology. In a portion of the document usually hidden from public view but accessible with a few keystrokes, the plan posted on the White House Web site showed the document's originator, or "author" in the software's designation, to be "feaver-p."
According to Matt Rozen, a spokesman for Adobe Systems, which makes the Acrobat software used to prepare the document, that entry indicated that Dr. Feaver created the original document that, with additions and editing, was posted on the Web. There is no way to know from the text how much he wrote.
Asked about who wrote the document, a White House official said Dr. Feaver had helped conceive and draft the plan, though the official said a larger role belonged to another N.S.C. staff member, Meghan L. O'Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, and her staff. The official would describe the individual roles only on condition of anonymity because his superiors wanted the strategy portrayed as a unified administration position.
Frederick Jones, an N.S.C. spokesman, said the document "reflects the broad interagency effort under way in Iraq" and "incorporates all aspects of American power," including political and economic as well as military efforts. He said major contributions to the plan came from the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury and Homeland Security, as well as the director of National Intelligence. In his news briefing on Wednesday, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, characterized the document as an unclassified, publicly accessible explanation of strategies that the administration has been pursuing in Iraq since 2003.
In a news briefing from Iraq on Friday, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the top American military official in charge of training Iraqi troops, surprised some reporters by saying he first saw "Our Strategy for Victory in Iraq" when it was released to the public on Wednesday.
The White House official said that while not all top officers in Iraq had necessarily seen the strategy document, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday, "I have had multiple opportunities to read this document, to critique it, to send it back," with the goal of making "sure that what it says is a) accurate, and b) executable."
The Feaver-Gelpi hypothesis on public opinion about the war is the subject of serious debate among political scientists. John Mueller, of Ohio State University, said he did not believe that the president's speech or the victory plan - which he described as "very Feaverish, or Feaveresque" - could produce more than a fleeting improvement in public support for the war, because it was likely to erode further as casualties accumulated.
"As the costs go up, support goes down," he said, citing patterns from the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Dr. Gelpi, of Duke, said approval of the president's handling of the war was probably close to being as low as it could go, because his core supporters were unlikely ever to abandon him. But he said the poll numbers were likely to improve only if enough Americans saw evidence that the Iraq strategy was succeeding.
Dr. Gelpi added, however, that the speech and the strategy document "hit exactly on the themes our research said they should."
Posted by MJuhre at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)
I might be done with Hillary Clinton
Every time I try to forget that Hillary Clinton does things to infuriate me ... she does something to infuriate me. And it's always pretty much the same thing -- each time she engages in some wimpy, posturing, opportunistic, political tactic that she thinks will appease right-wing voters.
Clinton announced she is co-sponsoring a law with Senator Bob Bennett (R -Utah) to make desecration of the American flag a crime ... but says she opposes a Constitutional amendment to the same effect.
That's it Hillary, stand up for what you believe in!
While right-wing candidates win elections by appealing to their base -- making NO concessions to appeal liberal voters, Clinton continually goes out of her way to never take a stand on anything.
Does Hillary get off from straddling the fence or something? I just don't get it.
The one thing about the Democrats that talking heads on both sides of the political spectrum agree on is the notion that the Democrats have no conviction.
I'd like to say that this assertion is not true (Democratic Committee (Chairman Howard Dean seems to have conviction, for example), but it is hard to make that argument when prominent Dems like Hillary pull crap like this.
Clinton's flag-bill nonsense comes on the heels of her bill for the Family Entertainment Protection Act (FEPA), which she says would "empower parents by making sure their kids can’t walk into a store and buy a video game that has graphic, violent and pornographic content."
At least with FEPA it seems plausible Clinton might actually believe in her bill (even if she did follow up the previous statement with "This is about protecting children," a statement that obviously translates to "Look at me conservatives! Me is stopping porn and supporting family values!").
But this lame flag law is just such obvious posturing.
Can someone like that be elected president? I just don't know. My gut says 'no' but I'm not a political scientist, and national elections these days tend close and surprising.
Maybe she is making a bid to be John McCain's vice presidential nominee. Oh wait, no. That's Joe Liebermann (who, rumor has it, Bush is considering as a candidate to replace Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary).
The pool of would-be Democratic presidential candidates thus far looks to me to be so weak that I'm basically prepared to throw up my hands and just think "at least McCain will be better than Bush."
God I miss Paul Wellstone.
Posted by MJuhre at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)
December 02, 2005
Dead American Soldiers Haunt, and Hunt Bush
Tonight's one of those nights I wish I had more than basic cable. Those of you with Showtime, I could watch "Homecoming" the movie about dead American soldiers from the Iraq war who return as zombies to vote Bush out.
See Village Voice and Crooks and Liars stories.
Posted by MJuhre at 03:17 PM | Comments (0)
Air Force Unveils "PHaSER" Gun (or "U.S. spends $1 million on giant flashlight")
Can't make this crap up...Well you could, but who needs to?
The United States Air Force had a coming out party this week for its nonlethal, Personal Halting and Stimulation Response (PHaSER) gun.
Mr. Demille, I'm Ready For My Closeup.
"When you 'dazzle' an individual with laser light, it’s pretty much the same effect as if someone shines a flashlight in your eyes," said Maj. Monte Anderson, project leader at ScorpWorks, an internal division within the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate. "The brightness and intensity of the light is so much that it obscures your vision and you can’t see," Anderson said. "The intent is to obscure the adversary’s vision so they can’t make you a target." (MSNBC.com)
Perhaps this can be used to replace white phosphorus as a method for obscuring troop positions.
I have one small question. Why did the airforce develop what appears to be an infantry weapon?
Bedazzled
Posted by MJuhre at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)
FOX News and State Dept. Team up to Promote Patriotism
Fox News and USINFO, the State Department's public information wing, will upgrade their joint efforts advocate patriotism later this month.
On December 31, a third batch of USINFO's 66 demonstrative patriotism bases for patriotic education will be established to mark the 230th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Canada.
Between 2001 and 2005, USINFO set up a total of 200 national demonstrative patriotism bases for patriotic education. These bases have been an important place for Americans to learn the history of the American patriotism and enhance ethics and moral quality, Fox News said.
Local governments are urged to take the advantage of the bases as tourist spots to publicize patriotism to visitors, especially youngsters, it says.
Okay, I admit it. The above is all bunk. (Or is it?). In fact, it is just a creative rewrite of this below story, posted by China's Xinhua news agency.
BEIJING, Nov. 20 (Xinhuanet) -- The People's Daily, China's leading newspaper, is to issue a commentary to advocate patriotism Monday.
A third batch of 66 demonstrative patriotism bases for patriotic education will be established to mark the 70th anniversary of the Long March of the Chinese Red Army and the 60th anniversary of China's victory in the War Against Japanese Aggression, it says.
In 1997 and 2001, the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) set up a total of 200 national demonstrative patriotism bases for patriotic education. These bases have been an important place for Chinese to learn the history of the CPC and enhance ethics and moral quality, it says.
Local governments are urged to take the advantage of the bases as tourist spots to publicize patriotism to visitors, especially youngsters, as well as CPC members, it says.
Posted by MJuhre at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)
South Africa's Civil Rights Trump Those in "Land of the Free"
For someone of my generation, or older, it is extremely difficult to fathom a world in which South African citizens enjoy greater civil rights than we do here in the United States.
Yet after little more than a decade since the end of apartheid, the white-minority imposed legal code that enforced a separation of the races in South Africa and denied the black majority's right to vote, South Africa's highest court ruled Thursday in support of same-sex marriages.
The Constitutional Court's ruling stated that the wording of section 30(1) of the country's Marriage Act was unconstitutional because it allowed only for marriages between men and women.
"The common law and Section 30 [1] of the Marriage Act are accordingly inconsistent with sections 9[1] [equality] and 9[3] [dignity] of the Constitution to the extent that they make no provision for same-sex couple to enjoy the status, entitlements and responsibilities they accord to heterosexual couples," Justice Albie Sachs Sachs said.
The ruling effectively legalizes same-sex marriages, though such unions may not be recognized for another 12 months. That is the court-imposed deadline by which parliament must amend the law to include the words or spouse after the words wife or husband.
The Independent (South Africa)
Posted by MJuhre at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)