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Digby revealed

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Yesterday I learned that the incomparable Digby, of Hullabaloo, was-of all things-a woman. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, and led to what we Catholic school kids remember as an examination of conscience. Why, after all, did I presume she was a man?

My conscience was somewhat comforted, however, by the fact that Digby’s gender was not common knowledge even in the upper reaches of the blogosphere, as this post by Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake demonstrates, It also proves that her gender came as something of a surprise to that august personage. Nonetheless, it is rather sad that in the absence of any external clues, one tends to default to an image of a white male.

In my defense, the logo on her homepage doesn’t help:

network-howard-beal.jpg

Apparently Digby had been anonymous, until she agreed to accept the Paul Wellstone Leadership Award from Take Back America. Here’s a video of her acceptance:

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=860546376283859020&q=digby+%22take+back+america%22&total=1&start=0&num=100&so=0&type=search&plindex=0[/googlevideo]

It’s long, but worth a listen.

In my humble opinion the award was well deserved. There is probably no progressive blogger who combines great writing skills, a deep fund of knowledge, and profound insight better than her.

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon showing a dog in front of a computer, telling another dog: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. There’s a lot of truth in that. People are judged by the quality of their minds, because that’s all you “see” on the internet. Digby is just an ordinary looking person, which of course completely disqualifies her from any role in the mass media, stuffed as it is with bubble brained babes. On the internet she’s a star because only her brains and talent matter.

(Edited to correct misplaced sentence)

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Not a good day for Rudy

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Some days it doesn’t pay to get up. It must be one of those days for Rudy Guliani, or, as he likes to think of himself, “the hero of 9/11 because I was Mayor then”.

First, we hear that the terrorist fighter couldn’t be bothered to attend meetings of the Iraq Study Group, of which he was a regular member.

Rudolph Giuliani’s membership on an elite Iraq study panel came to an abrupt end last spring after he failed to show up for a single official meeting of the group, causing the panel’s top Republican to give him a stark choice: either attend the meetings or quit, several sources said.

Giuliani left the Iraq Study Group last May after just two months, walking away from a chance to make up for his lack of foreign policy credentials on the top issue in the 2008 race, the Iraq war.

Josh Marshall is all over the story at Talking Points Memo, there’s a number of posts, so I suggest if you’re interested you go to the home page and just start scrolling. Josh thinks it’s a campaign killer. Every time Rudy talks terror his Republican opponents will shove this down his throat. Rudy’s trying to say that he quit when he decided to run for President, but the facts say differently.

Then, on a minor chord, so to speak, the news comes out that Rudy’s South Carolina has a coke problem-not just using-selling.

Being an old man, I can remember the days that you could look at the Republican presidential candidates and pick one or maybe even two that you could stomach as president of the United States. Not support, mind you, just stomach. Those days are gone. If Rudy goes down it just means someone just as bad or worse will go up, but that doesn’t diminish the schadenfreude one feels when an arrogant anal orifice like Rudy gets his just desserts. Here’s hoping Josh is right.

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Help make Lieberman toxic

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

More than likely, most or all of my readers get emails from Moveon, but I can’t resist passing on the message of the latest email. A while back I posted about fellow Bowdoin alum Tom Allen, who is going to run against Lieberfriend Susan Collins up in Maine.

Lieberman is going to Maine to raise money for Collins, proving yet again, if it needed proving, that he has abandoned any pretense of being a Democrat. Hard to believe that just one year ago he was questioning Ned Lamont’s Democratic bona fides because Ned agreed with some Republicans about where Greenwich should put stop lights.

Lieberman has made himself a pariah among Democrats. There’s one sure way to make him a pariah among Republicans-by making sure that every dollar he raises for one of them is matched by a dollar and more given to his opponent by way of an anti-Lieberman gesture. That’s precisely what Moveon is trying to do. Lieberman won’t be going back to Maine, or anywhere else to help his Republican friends, if they know that his appearance will net their opponents more than them. He’s expected to help raise $200,000 for Collins. That’s big bucks in Maine, but Moveon’s campaign should be able to match it and more if we all give just a little.

We (my wife and I) have put our money where my mouth is. I donated to Allen right after I got back from the reunion, and my wife just added another donation through Moveon’s site. You can rub Lieberman’s nose in it by donating at this link.

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The definition of hubris

Monday, June 18, 2007

From Thinkprogress:

In March, J. Steven Griles, formerly the no. 2 official at the Interior Department, pleaded guilty to “lying to the Senate about his relationship with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.” Griles asked the lobbyist “for many favors for close female friends and in exchange helped Abramoff’s clients at the government agency.”

As part of Griles’s plea, he is supposed to receive “10 months — five months in jail and five months in a halfway house or in home detention.” His lawyers are now arguing that Griles should receive no prison time and instead be allowed to perform “community service.”

But one of the two organizations he wants to do “community service” for — the American Recreation Coalition (ARC) — is actually a major lobbying firm that apparently benefited under Griles’ tenure in the Bush administration. ARC leads the “Wonderful Outdoor World” (WOW) program, which has close ties to various federal agencies and the Walt Disney Co. Griles helped ARC set up WOW during his tenure at the Interior Department. Greenwire reports:

….

In his “community service” role with WOW, Griles “would raise money, develop new public and private partnerships and conduct outreach to the government and media.” Bottom line: Griles is asking that his punishment be to perform the same activities that landed him in jail.

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Pulling out motes

Monday, June 18, 2007

From the Moscow Times we learn that Colin Powell, Bush enabler par excellence, has seen fit to lecture the Russians on Democracy:

Walking a tightrope between praising Russia’s post-Soviet progress and encouraging the government to open up, General Powell reiterated Washington’s line that the Cold War was over and U.S. military expansion would not hurt Russia. He told reporters later that Putin’s recent proposal to share a radar station in Azerbaijan would not “derail” U.S. missile defense plans in Central Europe.

Calling Putin a colleague and a friend, Powell told the conference that political pluralism needed to take root in the country and that people should be allowed to speak out.
“Democracy has to be a noisy system,” he said, adding that the media should have an opportunity to challenge the government on any occasion.

In a nod to Winston Churchill, Powell likened democracy to a life raft and the waves and winds pushing it to people.

“And people have to be trusted,” Powell, the guest of honor at the conference organized by Renaissance Capital, told the packed hall. “And the trust comes from an open political process.”

Where, one must wonder, was Colin when Ari Fleisher told the media “that in times like these “people have to watch what they say and watch what they do.”

Perhaps the Moscow Times’ reporter had her tongue at least partly in her cheek, or her irony emitter on high, when she penned this paragraph that follows hard upon the quote above:

In the eyes of some Western governments, Putin has stifled political opposition, deprived people of an opportunity to elect officials in free and fair elections and neutered the media.

Not for nothing does Bush consider Putin to be a soul brother.

Russia is a sorry excuse for a democracy, no question about it. But it takes a lot of damn gall for a loyal Bushie (when it mattered) to lecture anyone on democracy, fair elections, or a free and unfettered press. I’m no Christian, but I think Jesus hit the nail on the head:

Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.

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Good growing weather for the House of Blackwater

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Apparently the difference between a mercenary and a “contractor” is that a contractor doesn’t do offensive operations. At least that seems to be the line peddled by the various “security” companies to which the United States has thrown large amounts of money for off the book, and off the Geneva Convention (not that it matters) soldiers.

The Washington Post’s recent article (Iraq Contractors Face Growing Parallel War) exposes much of the reality of the mercenary armies we are employing, while sticking determinedly to the protective euphemism.

The security industry’s enormous growth has been facilitated by the U.S. military, which uses the 20,000 to 30,000 contractors to offset chronic troop shortages. Armed contractors protect all convoys transporting reconstruction materiel, including vehicles, weapons and ammunition for the Iraqi army and police. They guard key U.S. military installations and provide personal security for at least three commanding generals, including Air Force Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Scott, who oversees U.S. military contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I’m kind of practicing what I preach here,” Scott said in an interview on the use of private security forces for such tasks. “I’m a two-star general, but I’m not the most important guy in the multinational force. If it’s a lower-priority mission and it’s within the capabilities of private security, this is an appropriate risk trade-off.”

The mercenaries are dying and getting wounded in large numbers, numbers which have gone largely unreported.

The offensive/defensive distinction I mentioned above is drawn at least three times. It is not clear why it is important. The function that the mercenaries serve is military-they guard convoys that would otherwise be guarded by military personnel, at a cost per person far exceeding what we would pay for military personnel. That’s a bad deal for Uncle Sam, except that for the extra expense he gets to hold down casualty figures for “the troops”. As one of the contractors point out, every death of a not-troop is one less death of a troop that must be reported:

“When you see the number of my people who have been killed, the American public should recognize that every one of them represents an American soldier or Marine or sailor who didn’t have to go in harm’s way,” [Army Corps of Engineers logistic director Jack] Holly said in an interview.

For the companies involved, war is the ultimate growth industry:

ArmorGroup, which started in Iraq with 20 employees and a handful of SUVs, has grown to a force of 1,200 — the equivalent of nearly two battalions — with 240 armored trucks; nearly half of the publicly traded company’s $273.5 million in revenue last year came from Iraq. Globally, ArmorGroup employs 9,000 people in 38 countries.

The company, with headquarters at a complex of sandstone villas near Baghdad’s Green Zone, is acquiring a fleet of $200,000 tactical armored vehicles equipped with two gun hatches and able to withstand armor-piercing bullets and some of the largest roadside bombs.

At least they’re getting the armor they need, which is more than can be said for “the troops”. I suppose if you’re paying your cannon fodder $135,000.00 a year you have more incentive to protect your investment than if you’re hiring naive kids out of high school at low pay, or drafting unwilling National Guardsmen.

It really is time to end the charade about these people. If we are going to face up to the reality in Iraq, apparently a big “if”, we are going to have to stop playing with our language. If we used the proper terminology, e.g., “torture”, not “harsh interrogation techniques”, “mercenaries”, not contractors, it would be that much harder for Bushco to sustain its dirty war, not to mention its criminal enterprise in its entirety.

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General Taguba speaks out

Sunday, June 17, 2007

More reason to believe that we may never recover from the criminality of the Bush Administration in Seymour Hersh’s latest article in the New Yorker.

General Antonio Tagula, who conducted a circumscribed (by his superiors) investigation of the Abu Ghraib torture, was forced out of the military in January, and for the first time he has spoken on the record about his investigation and his personal conclusions about the complicity of Rumsfeld, et. al, all of whom were spared serious scrutiny as the full force of the law was visited on the hapless M.P.s who were “just following orders”:

A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”

Hersh paints of portrait of a military that has been morally hollowed. Apart from the luckless (though revolting) MPs, the only members of the military to be punished as a result of the Abu Ghraib tortures were those, like Tagula, who investigated or condemned them. Those, such as Major General Geoffrey Miller, who have, at best, looked the other way, or at worst, actively encouraged torture, have prospered.

Tagula is convinced that the torture at Abu Ghraib didn’t just happen. With Hersh’s help, he effectively demonstrates that Rumsfeld lied to Congress about what he knew about the torture (what else is new?). Hersh provides sufficient detail to allow one to conclude with confidence that those around Rumsfeld who didn’t connive in the torture either looked the other way or actively covered it up. Because no one in authority was punished, torture as an interrogative tool has been effectively legitimated. As for Tagula, he got his reward:

In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. “This is your Vice,” he told Taguba. “I need you to retire by January of 2007.” No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, “He offered no reason.” (A spokesperson for Cody said, “Conversations regarding general officer management are considered private personnel discussions. General Cody has great respect for Major General Taguba as an officer, leader, and American patriot.”)

“They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told me. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”

Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

They will never be held accountable. They will, instead, become the leaders in a new military, as people like Taguba are forced out. The stench and corruption (and concomitant incompetence) of the Bush Administration will infect the military long after Bush is gone.This is the face of empire.

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Buying time expecting a miracle

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Today I played a little catchup on my newspaper reading, since I hadn’t been around yesterday to read the Times when it first came. I sort of hopped from yesterday’s paper to today’s, and serendipitously happened to read the following two articles one after the other.

The first (The Laptop is Mightier than the Sword), written by Owen West and Bing West, proposes that we use our technological prowess to institute a Big Brother type state in Iraq, where we can effectively track every human being in the country and imprison anyone remotely suspected of being the “enemy”, whatever is meant by that term in this context. Whether it would work or not is something I can’t express an opinion about. What struck me was this:

Part of the problem was that when the military surge was announced, it became commonplace for officials to assert that political compromise, not military force, would determine the outcome of the war. This vacuous idea would startle George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, to mention only a few unlikely bedfellows who forged success during an insurgency.

Buying time with American lives is not a military mission. No platoon commander tells his soldiers to go out and tread water so the politicians can talk. The goal of American soldiers is to identify and kill or capture the Shiite death squads and Sunni insurgents. (Emphasis added)

Whether intentional or not, the Wests have confirmed what many of us have argued, that we are fighting both sides in a civil war, a distinctly uncomfortable place to be. Why they feel comfortable about that mission is beside the point, however, because it appears to be the case that the mission they reject is the mission that the soldiers still there have been given.

After reading their column, I read this article, in today’s paper (In Iraq, Gates Says Progress Toward Peace Is Lagging). Here’s the money quote, at least from my point of view:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates arrived here late on Friday bluntly expressing disappointment with the pace of political reconciliation under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, even as the final units of the American troop increase were moving into position and bombings threatened to inspire more sectarian violence.

Mr. Gates, making his fourth trip to Iraq in six months as defense secretary, said his message to the Iraqi leadership would be that “our troops are buying them time to pursue reconciliation and that, frankly, we are disappointed in the progress thus far.” (Emphasis added)

So, while buying time with American lives may not be a military mission, it appears to be the mission that has been imposed upon our military. The Wests are right that it is doomed to fail, not so much because it can’t be sold to the troops by their platoon commanders, but because it is a policy that ignores the reality of a thousand years of history. This war was brought to us by those who rejected the reality based view of the world, but reality has a way of asserting itself.

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At the Diner

Saturday, June 16, 2007

zippy_the_pinhead.gif

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The Yes Men Strike

Friday, June 15, 2007

This is cool:

“Without oil, at least four billion people would starve. This spiral of trouble would make the oil infrastructure utterly useless” – unless their bodies could be turned into fuel.

That was the satirical message delivered by two corporate ethics activists to the Gas and Oil Exposition 2007 in Calgary, Alberta. The activists, part of political trickster collective the Yes Men, used the Exposition to stage their latest theatre of corporate absurdity, with Exxon/Mobil and the Natural Petroleum Council playing the fools.

The prank, intended as a critique of the fossil fuel industry’s influence on energy policy, caused confusion and consternation on the final day of the Exposition, one of the industry’s largest gatherings.

The NPC, which is led by former Exxon-Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, advises the White House on gas and oil issues. They were expected to announce the findings of a Raymond-chaired study, commissioned by the Department of Energy, on joint US-Canadian energy policy.

Instead, attendees of the day’s $45.00 keynote luncheon were addressed by the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum, who identified himself as an NPC representative named Shepard Wolff.

After noting that current energy policies will likely lead to “huge global calamities” and disrupt oil supplies, Wolff told the audience “that in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could “keep fuel flowing” by transforming the billions of people who die into oil,” said a Yes Men press release.

Yes Man Mike Bonnano, posing as an Exxon representative named Florian Osenberg, added that “With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of disaster, but that means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will continue to flow for those of us left.”

The impostors led growingly suspicious attendees in lighting Vivoleum candles made, they said, from a former Exxon janitor who died from cleaning a toxic spill. When shown a mock video of the janitor professing his desire to be turned in death into candles, a conference organizer pulled Bonanno and Bichlbaum from the stage.

There are pictures, and supposedly videos (though I couldn’t find them) here.

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