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Drinking Liberally Tomorrow

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

It’s that time of the month again. Tomorrow we will hold our 12th Drinking Liberally. Now is the time, by the way, for all good Liberals to come to the aid of the party. We can’t have any post election let downs or slack offs. We have to stay liberal and keep drinking. Also, since we now have control of two branches of the government, it is our bounden duties as liberals to start griping about what a disappointment the Democrats have been. While it’s technically true that the Democrats are not really yet in control, there’s no reason why we can’t start practicing. So don’t miss it!

  • Date: Tomorrow, December 4, 2008
  • Time: 6:30 (PM)
  • Place: Bulkeley House
    111 Bank Street
    New London, CT
    (Upstairs, same room as last month)

As I noted above, this will be the 12th meeting, which means we’ve actually made it for a year.


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Bush Revisionism begins

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Scott Ritter was one of the many who was right about the Iraq War from the start. As a former weapons inspector he had the credentials to venture an opinion about whether Saddam had WMDs. Ritter said he didn’t, and as a reward Ritter’s sanity was questioned. Having now been proven to be indisputably right, he has been banished, as is only right and proper, from the American media. In our topsy turvy world, nothing succeeds like being wrong (see, e.g., Bill Kristol) and nothing is more toxic than being right. Things are a bit different in Britain, where Ritter still has an audience.Today, in the Guardian, he comments on George Bush’s recent interview with Charles Gibson, which interview constituted the opening salvo in a new Bush War: the war against History, in which W attempts to absolve himself of incompetence, corruption and criminality. Ritter is having nothing of it:

Try as he might to spread responsibility for his actions by pointing out that “a lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein,” the fact is WMD was simply an excuse used by the president to fulfil his self-proclaimed destiny as a war-time president who would avenge his father’s inability (or, more accurately, sage unwillingness) to finish the job back in 1991, in the aftermath of the first Gulf war.

Of course, we all know that now. It’s worth repeating that a lot of us also knew it then.

No doubt Bush chose Gibson for a reason: the non-existent followup. I didn’t watch it-the man still makes me gag-but I did see this snippet on TV and it brought me up short:

GIBSON: What were you most unprepared for?

BUSH: Well, I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, “Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack.” In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents — one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.

It’s quite true. He didn’t tell us he intended to get us into war. He would have lost had he done that. But he intended it nonetheless. It was, in fact totally expected. Remember the first of the really solid anti-Bush books, The Price of Loyalty, in which Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill revealed the following:

On most mornings, O’Neill received a package of documents from his aides to prepare him for the day’s meetings. His papers for February 1, 2001, included an agenda for an NSC meeting to be held in the White House Situation Room that afternoon on U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf. The agenda, which refers to a classified paper on a “Political-Military Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq,” is one of several memos that showed how regime change in Iraq and handling the post-war nation dominated discussions of foreign policy in the first days of the administration.

That’s just one small bit of evidence among many others in the public domain that proves that from the very start, Bush was looking to start a war, and was perfectly happy, in the words of the Downing Street Memo, to see that “intelligence and facts [were] fixed around the policy”.

Naturally, Gibson didn’t bring up such uncomfortable facts. He just changed the subject.

Expect a lot more of this historical revisionism in the coming years. Much of the media will happily enable this historical whitewashing project, because they were so deeply enmeshed in selling the war at the time. If they can whitewash Bush, then they get whitewashed too.


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Hillary to Foggy Bottom

Monday, December 1, 2008

Hillary Clinton is now officially the Secretary of State designate. This has been the occasion for much bloviating among the punditocracy. Having been christened an “every day pundit” during my first and (hopefully) last talk radio appearance, I feel compelled to weigh in.

Personally, I think she’s a good choice, and I doubt very much that the dire interpersonal consequences predicted by the professional pundits will come to pass. She’s a professional. She fought hard, sometimes maybe a bit too hard, during the campaign, and no doubt while the fur was flying she harbored some unkind feelings toward Obama. Those days are over, and there’s no reason to think she won’t do her best to implement Obama’s policies. Moreover, there’s no reason to think that her policy preferences will be much different than his. The fact is that her biggest mistakes consisted of doing what she felt was politic, rather than going with what I firmly believe would have been her preference. Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq war, because she made a decision based solely on political calculations. It is, in my opinion, not conceivable that she would have started the Iraq War, had she been the “decider” at the time. Now she is the decider, or at least she’s working for the decider, and she’s unlikely to disagree with Obama’s approach in any significant way. She is, by all accounts, an extremely hard working, dedicated person. Her success as secretary of state depends on her ability to implement Obama’s policies. If she crosses him or tries to act contrary to her brief, he’ll get rid of her, either outright, or by making her a figurehead. Think Nixon’s first secretary of state, William P. Rogers, or, more recently, of the manner in which Colin Powell was slowly but surely marginalized by the nutjobs running the Bush White House.

I hope, too, that after a decent, but not too long an interval, Bill Clinton can be brought on board to help out somewhere in the world. The latest meme on Bill is that he’s some sort of loose cannon. There’s not much basis for the charge, but where Bill Clinton is concerned, evidence has always been optional. Bush has been in charge of the Augean Stables for eight years. Unlike Hercules, Obama won’t be able to clean up alone. He’s going to need all the help he can get, and Bill Clinton is a resource too valuable to waste.


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Iraqi Justice for Women

Sunday, November 30, 2008

This is what we have accomplished in Iraq (reported, of course, by a British newspaper, The Guardian), via Americablog:

Authorities in the southern Iraqi city of Basra have admitted they are powerless to prevent ‘honour killings’ in the city following a 70 per cent increase in religious murders during the past year.

There has been no improvement in conviction rates for these killings. So far this year, 81 women in the city have been murdered for allegedly bringing shame on their families. Only five people have been convicted.

…

The figures come despite international outrage which followed The Observer’s coverage of the death of 17-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader, who was murdered by her father last April in an ‘honour killing’ after falling in love with a British soldier in Basra. The 4,000 British troops stationed in the city since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 withdrew to the airport last September.

Rand Abdel-Qader was killed after her family discovered that she had formed a friendship with a 22-year-old infantryman whom she knew as Paul. She was suffocated by her father then hacked at with a knife. Abdel-Qader Ali was subsequently arrested and released without charge.

Rand’s mother, Leila Hussein, who divorced her husband after the killing, went into hiding but was tracked down weeks later and assassinated by an unknown gunman. Her husband had told The Observer that police had congratulated him for killing his daughter.

…

Mariam Ayub Sattar, an activist in Basra, said that any woman caught speaking to a man in public who was not her husband or a relative was considered a prostitute and punished. A fortnight ago three women were burned with acid while walking through a market in Basra after stopping to speak to a male friend, Sattar said.

The going rate for “honour killing” hit men is $100.00.

We must exit Iraq, for a host of reasons. But we will leave behind a country that will become closely tied to Iran, and which will be in the grip of Islamic fundamentalists. Good work all around. But, as they say, who could have known?


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Chavez donates to Alaska

Saturday, November 29, 2008

It has been a rather hectic Thanksgiving weekend around the CTBlue household, which accounts for the paucity of recent posts. I am therefore doubly thankful to a regular reader who pointed me to this article from the wintry wastes of Alaska, which I herewith pass on to my other reader(s).

It seems that Alaska, the home of a certain governor who allegedly knows “more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America“, a state that is awash in oil, is also the home of $10.00 per gallon heating oil, and the recipient of charity from boogyman Hugo Chavez:

With heating oil prices approaching $10 a gallon in rural Alaska and reports of neighbors stealing fuel from neighbors to warm their homes, a Venezuela-owned oil company plans to supply free fuel to villages again this winter.

That’s what a Citgo executive who oversees the company’s free heating oil program told the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council earlier this month, said council director Steve Osborne.

Citgo has provided roughly 15,000 Alaska village households 100 gallons of heating oil each for the past two winters. If the company donates the same amount this year, some families will save as much as $1,000 on their fuel bills. It’s part of a program providing assistance to low-income communities in 23 states.

Some towns in Alaska are turning the assistance down. I would venture to guess that the folks making the decisions are not the ones needing the help.

One can’t help but wonder how the woman who is omniscient when it comes to energy policy can allow people to freeze in a state she claims produces 20% of domestically produced oil. Perhaps the problem is that in the real world, Alaska only produces 3.5% of that total. Maybe Sarah’s been sending the villagers the fantasy 16.5%, which, much to their misfortune, produces nary a joule of energy.

It is worth noting that Obama has made plans to meet with tribal representatives, to get their ideas for actually addressing their problems.

I should add here that I hope, or at least think I hope, that I am beating a dead horse here. Part of me thinks that over the course of the next few months Sarah will recede back into irrelevancy. Part of me thinks that she will remain the Great Female White Hope for the Republican right, which may very well lead to a fractured Republican party in 2012. But yet another part of me fears her as a potentially successful 2012 demagogue. We don’t know where we’ll be at that point, and there’s always the chance that the country will respond to her appeal to ignorance and resentment. So, until we are absolutely sure that the horse is dead, we should definitely keep beating it.


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Friday Night Music-Paul Simon.

Friday, November 28, 2008

I perused the archives, and I see that though I’ve put up a couple of Simon and Garfunkels, I’ve never put up Simon all by his lonesome.

I think this is one of his best, and I’m guessing he agrees, as he featured this decades old song on his recent appearance on Colbert. This clip is from the old Dick Cavett show.

An American Tune


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Arlo

Thursday, November 27, 2008

My wife and I split up the Thanksgiving duties. She prepares most of the food (though I make a mean onion soup, for the first course). I do the dishes. Since we have no dishwasher, it’s a formidable job, usually lasting just shy of two hours. So I actually do pull my weight.

Tradition is important this time of year, and my tradition, while washing the dishes, is to listen to Alice’s Restaurant while scouring the dishes. If you haven’t watched or listened yet this Thanksgiving Day, you have about 35 minutes less to do so, and you need go no further than where you are right now, for here’s Arlo, forty years removed from those storied days.


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An obvious solution that will go untried

Thursday, November 27, 2008

I couldn’t agree more with this from Firedoglake:

It’s not hard to rein in executive compensation, all you have to do is decide what the maximum pay you want someone to be able to receive is and tax most of the rest of it away. The simplest thing is to just count all income equally, tax it all at the same rate, don’t allow deductions beyond a certain level (50K or so) and tax all income above, say 1 million at 90%, 95% for all income above 5 million. Don’t allow too much income deferral and there you go. Slap on some “in kind” rules for corporations (yes, if your corporation pays for your car, that’s salary) and while there will always be loopholes, you’ll still rein in the worst excesses.

…

And that’s the bottom line. As long as executives know that in 5 years they can make so much money they’ll never need to work again, they won’t take care to make sure that their business is long-term viable. Rule #1 of designing incentive systems isn’t “more money equals better performance” it’s “match incentives to the behaviour you want.” If you want an economy that doesn’t have bubbles, don’t pay people for creating bubbles, pay them for long term steady growth, paying high salaries and creating new jobs.

In fact, I’m absolutely sure I’ve made the same argument, but I can’t find an example. Too many posts, too little memory. Anyway, this would be a return to the system of taxation we had in the fifties and sixties. Limiting income in this fashion would, in fact, force executives to concentrate on the long term advantage of the company, rather than focus on the short term quick kill. We are not going to embarrass these people into limiting their looting of the corporation and shareholders, whose interests they supposedly protect. They are beyond embarrassment. Just tax almost everything above a set threshold.

Unfortunately, Democrats have been well trained to Republicans. They are afraid of the “T” word, and are also afraid of the charge that they are engaging in class warfare, something that the Republicans and the corporate chiefs have been waging for years. Unfortunately, to date, only one side has been fighting, while the other side takes all the casualties.


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A third way

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

For the life of me I really can’t understand how people like David Sirota can deal with complete idiots like Grover Norquist:


The man is a one trick idiot.

I would like to suggest, however, that there is a third alternative to Obama either sticking with his original tax plan or keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place until 2011. His original plan was designed to be revenue neutral. If he delivers on his promised cuts for the middle class, and leaves the rich alone, that would not be revenue neutral. Presumably that’s okay, given the crisis we are in. Since we are abandoning the revenue neutral aspects of the plan, why not figure out how much of a “deficit” we would be running if we didn’t raise taxes on the rich. Then, raise them anyway and give the middle an even bigger tax break, taking care to see that the “deficit” remains the same. The stimulative effects of putting more money in the hands of lower earners will be much greater than the like effects from preserving the rich people’s tax cuts. In other words, tax the rich and give the middle an even bigger break.


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Block that meme

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

Winston Churchill

Right now the left wing of the blogosphere is trying to put the pants on a bit of truth about union workers at GM, so I thought I’d do my share.

This particular lie started its journey in the pages of the New York Times, a week ago today. Dean Baker explains:

The New York Times told readers that GM’s autoworkers are paid $70 an hour (including health care and pension). This is not true. The base pay is about $28 an hour. If health care cost per worker average $12,000 per year, that adds in another $6 an hour. If the pension payment takes up 25 percent of base pay (an extremely high pension), that gets you another $7 an hour, bringing the total to $41 an hour. That’s decent pay, but still a long way from $70 an hour.

How does the NYT get from $41 to $70? Well the trick is to add in GM’s legacy costs, the pension and health care costs for retired workers. These legacy costs are a serious expense for GM, but this is not money being paid to current workers. The person on the line in 2008 is not benefiting from these legacy costs.

This particular lie is doubly outrageous, because the fact is that those legacy costs have largely been contracted away. If GM manages to hold on for a few years, the actual average pay for GM workers will be less than non-union workers. From Jonathan Cohn, at the New Republic (via digby):

In 2007, the Big Three signed a breakthrough contract with the United Auto Workers (UAW) designed, once and for all, to eliminate the compensation gap between domestic and foreign automakers in the U.S.

The agreement sought to do so, first, by creating a private trust for financing future retiree benefits–effectively removing that burden from the companies’ books. The auto companies agreed to deposit start-up money in the fund; after that, however, it would be up to the unions to manage the money. And it was widely understood that, given the realities of investment returns and health care economics, over time retiree health benefits would likely become less generous.
…
One can debate the propriety and wisdom of these steps; two-tiered wage structures, in particular, raise various ethical concerns. But one thing is certain: It was a radical change that promised to make Detroit far more competitive. If carried out as planned, by 2010–the final year of this existing contract–total compensation for the average UAW worker would actually be less than total compensation for the average non-unionized worker at a transplant factory. The only problem is that it will be several years before these gains show up on the bottom line–years the industry probably won’t have if it doesn’t get financial assistance from the government.

It is a staple argument of our opinion leaders that Detroit’s woes can be laid at the feet of the unions. Until union members return to a proper level of destitution, Detroit deserves no bailout. The same rules don’t apply to the bankers, of course. As Barney Frank observed, “There is apparently a cultural condition that’s more ready to accept aid to a white-collar industry than the blue-collar industry, and that has to be confronted.” Detroit must show us a plan to mend its ways or we can not give them their $25 billion. That amount is thrown at the banks like chump change, and they are not required to reform their practices at all. Nothing the Bush Administration has done (or that Obama has yet proposed) will stop these same banks from doing the same thing once conditions are right.

Since this lie started its journey it has gone quite a distance. A by now partial list of the media outlets and politicians who have helped it on its way can be found here.

Meanwhile, the truth is getting dressed. The folks at Media Matters are doing their best to help it along (I’ve linked to several of their articles above). I’m doing my bit to get the word out about this. The times are too serious. We can’t let the right wing hijack this situation and force us to make economic policy in the Obama administration like we did foreign policy under Bush. This time we need to be a bit more reality based. Our futures really do depend upon it.

UPDATE: A Study in contrasts. While the people who know are busily blaming unions for GM’s mess, and consigning the US auto industry to the dustbin of history, they are totally silent about the shortcomings of the Citibank get out of jail free card. Media Matters reports that:

On their November 24 broadcasts, all three network evening news programs included reports on the bailout of Citigroup that included interviews with supporters of the deal. The report on NBC’s Nightly News, for example, featured clips from interviews with Citigroup CEO Gary Crittenden and with “[o]ne of Citi’s biggest investors,” Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. However, only the CBS Evening News‘ report included any criticism of the bailout, and that criticism came from Egan-Jones Rating Co. founding principal Sean Egan, who said that the bailout was not large enough. None of the reports featured criticism of the bailout on the grounds that it is a poor deal for taxpayers, even though several economists have strongly criticized the bailout on those grounds.


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