Skip to content

Keeping politics out of it

Monday, July 30, 2007

Tonight we held a public hearing for our Charter Revision Commission, meaning we heard from citizens who has suggestions for possible charter changes. One speaker, who was otherwise quite reasonable, admonished us to “keep politics out of it”. This has become a standard piece of rhetoric in the debased —(get ready, here it comes)–politics of the present day.

I guess we can keep politics out of it. I suppose when the Catholic Church holds a Council, it can keep religion out of it. I suppose when we discuss global warming we can keep science out of it. In either case, it’s not likely much useful would be accomplished.

Here’s the first definition of politics in my dictionary:

The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.

I can’t come to any conclusion but that if we took politics out of our deliberations, we might as well disband, there being nothing left to discuss.

But, of course, that’s not what the speaker meant. A politician himself, he was using the word in a prejorative, dirty word sort of sense-the sense in which people use it when they say that the don’t get involved in “politics” (being much too good to sully themselves), preferring to leave it to scum like Bush and Rove. We see the results all around us.

There’s another dirty word sense of the word. Politics is what people I disagree with do. When my opponent takes a position, he or she is engaging in politics or is being political, when I take a position I am being or doing something else. Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be a word for what I am doing when I’m not being political, or if there is it varies because it doesn’t come easily to mind. Whatever it is that I do when I’m not being political, it is far nobler than “politics”.

For myself, I fully intend to be political during my time on the Commission. I think politics, rightly practiced, is a noble calling. I have decided political views and I have no intention of abandoning them for whatever it is one abandons ones views for in order not be be political.

Filed in Local issues, Politics | | Comments (3)

Our new art acquisition

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Last week I mentioned that my wife and I bought a painting by a young artist named Adam Peiffer at the Art on Groton Bank art show. This being a very hot Sunday, inducing extreme laziness, rather than doing any more thinking, I am just going to post a picture of Adam’s painting. From what I understand this was an exercise he did for an art class. He has what looks like more finished paintings here.

Per usual, you can view a larger image with better colors by clicking on the picture below.

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (0)

Fighting terror wearing blinders

Sunday, July 29, 2007

There’s an excellent book review in the Times today (Our War on Terror), in which Samantha Power reviews a number of books which, in one way or another, illustrate the problems with the American approach to fighting terrorism, particularly the disastrous Bush approach. In fact, the review is essentially a catalog of the all-wrong-all-the-time Bush anti-terror effort, but it also makes reference to some chronic American failings that are not exclusively those of George Bush, though he has raised them to high art. In this class is a failing closely allied to the classic American refusal to talk to those it considers its enemies, particularly those it feels are upstarts-the inability or refusal to try to understand the other guy’s point of view:

[Ian] Shapiro [author of CONTAINMENT: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror] argues, much as the Counterinsurgency Field Manual does, that the United States must learn to get inside the minds of its enemies, to try to see the world as they do. Take Iran, for example. A Bush administration that had stepped into Iran’s shoes might have toned down its inflammatory rhetoric, having seen that the American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq would be, in Shapiro’s words, “as if the Soviet Union had occupied Canada and Mexico at the height of the cold war, and had its fleet anchored off Cuba.” United States intelligence capacities, he says, must be revamped so that policy makers in Washington can guard against a “propensity to confuse leaders the United States might regard as desirable with leaders who actually enjoy legitimacy on the ground.”

She makes the point that this refusal to get into the heads of our rivals often renders us powerless to deal with them. In the case of terrorists, as just one example, it makes it extremely difficult for us to exploit their differences with one another, as we persist in seeing them as monolithic.

We make it impossible to achieve our own objectives by refusing to talk to our rivals until they meet preconditions that they cannot or will not meet, and we doom our efforts to deal with other people by refusing to put ourselves in their shoes. We insist on viewing the world through the distorting lens of our own ideology.

Recently Obama and Hillary Clinton got into a dustup about his “lack of experience” versus her hard bitten grasp of reality when he committed the mortal sin of saying he would talk to other countries without setting preconditions. She jumped on him for that, and he later called her approach “Bush-lite”. Give credit to Obama for being willing to burst our self imposed foreign policy shackles.

Filed in Iraq | | Comments (1)

Calling a spade a spade

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Just an observation. In this morning’s Courant we learn that the Libyans used “harsh interrogation techniques” on the Palestinian doctor that they accused of infecting children with AIDS. Except for some reason I can’t entirely fathom, the word “torture” is used. I noted a while back that the New York Times (and the Times is not alone) can’t seem to cough up the word when describing what we do to our prisoners, but apparently the word rolls off the tongue more easily when we’re talking about others.

Filed in Hypocrisy | | Comments (1)

More on Rudy

Saturday, July 28, 2007

In response to a recent comment, I’m not a gambling man. However, as the post concerned Rudy Guiliani, I thought I’d submit yet another reason why it will be hard for Rudy to get nominated by a party dominated by the Religious Right. Now I have nothing against cross dressing, being a tolerant guy, but some people do.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=4IrE6FMpai8[/youtube]

Filed in Presidential Politics | | Comments (1)

Friday night music

Friday, July 27, 2007

Bruce Springsteen singing We Shall Overcome:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovgPaVwgpdw[/youtube]

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (0)

Channeling Condi

Friday, July 27, 2007

When I was in college, I took a sociology course from a very bright professor, who told us that certain industries, including banking, avoid hiring intelligent people because they ask too many questions. It certainly does seem that the folks who have brought us he latest housing bubble are none too smart. Consider Angelo R. Mozilo, chief executive of Countrywide Financial, a company that was an innovator in subprime lending. Here’s Mr. Mozilo in this morning’s Times, reacting to comments from St. Louis Fed President William Poole, who, with amazing hindsight, blamed bankers like Mr. Mozilo for the current collapse of the housing and stock market:

Angelo R. Mozilo, Countrywide’s chief executive, doesn’t think he should be blamed. Talking to analysts this week, he called Mr. Poole’s comments “unbelievable” and criticized the Fed for first raising interest rates and then forcing banks to tighten their lending standards.

When an analyst suggested that Countrywide, the country’s largest mortgage lender, should not have made those loans, Mr. Mozilo sounded as if he had no more choice than a lemming going over the cliff.

“Our place in the industry would have changed dramatically because we would have arbitrarily made a decision that was contrary to what everything appeared to be — values going up and no delinquencies, no foreclosures — and we suddenly stop the music,” he said.

“Nobody saw this coming,” he added.

Apparently Mr. Poole is to home mortgage lending as Condoleeza Rice is to fighting terrorism.

But how can I criticize? How could anyone see this coming? They had an ironclad business plan.

First, find a person who has bad credit. Lend that person 100% of a mortgage on a home, 80% at an initial low rate that balloons beyond what they can pay in a mere two years, and finance the 20% balance at a fixed, high rate. Look the other way when scam artists loan brokers like Jose Guzman submit loan applications that overstate borrower’s incomes. Now, do the same thing a few million more times and sell the debt to suckers even stupider than you. When those rates balloon the buyer can always refinance or sell at a higher price to someone else, because real estate prices will just continue to rise.

What could go wrong?

What’s that you say? How can the pool of people with bad credit bail each other out of these loans at ever higher prices when wages for the working and middle classes are stagnant? Isn’t all this just a variant on a Ponzi scheme? Won’t we end up with an astronomical rate of default? Sorry, I can’t hear you.

Of course, besides normal ordinary people who nobody listens to, there were people with national platforms who saw this coming. Paul Krugman has been writing about the coming housing collapse for years, see, e.g., Running Out of Bubbles and That Hissing Sound from May and August of 2005.

But the fact is, folks like Mozilo have no incentive to see the obvious, anymore than Mr. Ponzi did. They have even less, because what they do is perfectly legal. They’ll walk away with millions, leaving us holding the bag. Maybe my old professor had it wrong.

Filed in Issues | | Comments (0)

Saint Joe visits the asylum

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Max Blumenthal has guts. Here he visits a convention of Christians United for Israel, a group of certified nutcases who want to provoke a war with Iran in the hopes that they can bring on Armageddon. Featured Speaker: Our own Joe Lieberman. Is there a way to impeach a Senator?

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour from huffpost and Vimeo.

What I find odd about all this is Lieberman’s lack of historical perspective. Who does he think is using who? At bottom, it’s pretty clear these people are anti-Semites. They’ll turn on the Jews as soon as it becomes clear that sane people in Israel aren’t really interested in being burned to a crisp so that Christians from Texas can ascend to the right hand of Jesus.

Filed in Lieberman | | Comments (1)

House votes contempt, but …

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

The House Judiciary Committee has voted to hold Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolton in contempt. The vote was along party lines. Yet more evidence that the system of checks and balances has been all but destroyed. One must wonder whether the White House has conveyed more than brilliant legal arguments to the House Republicans in order to keep them in line. Are there any horses out there that are missing their heads?

For reasons that are mystifying, the Democrats have decided to cite them for statutory contempt, which is unenforceable without the cooperation of the United States Attorney. There is no reason to think the U.S. Attorney will depart from the legal “principle” that was leaked last week. In other words, the U.S. Attorney will decline to present the case to a grand jury.

It was observed in the Federalist Papers that the executive would always be the most energetic branch, but there is something about the slow, plodding style of the Congressional Democrats that would surprise even Hamilton.

Bush has announced in advance that he will frustrate the will of Congress. We are beyond the point where any reasonable person can believe that he will act responsibly. There is no reason to believe that he will not do just as he says. Why go through the charade when a perfectly viable option, that of inherent contempt, exists. At the very least, Miers and Bolten will be rotting in jail while the case plays out in court. Congress merely advertises its own impotence by taking what should be a momentous step, only to have absolutely nothing happen as a result. It’s not as if they have to go this route to hold on to Republican support. They have no Republican support. They do, however, have the support of the nation. Put the nice lady in jail and let Bush play catch-up. If the courts are going to make Bush into a dictator, we might as well find that out now.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, Issues, Republican Corruption | | Comments (2)

Another impeachment target

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

So many criminals, and always the same excuse: so little time.

Apparently the news networks were obsessed with the fact that soda can be harmful to your health, so they didn’t give much coverage to the serial perjury being committed by the Attorney General of the United States. There is extensive coverage at TMP Muckracker. The coverage consists of a series of posts starting here. You can get to succeeding posts by clicking the “next” link. Each posts contains a video. Here’s the first, in which both Leahy and Specter question Gonzales credibility.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWIxG-ww2Ms[/youtube]

I haven’t watched them all, something I intend to do after I hit the publish button on this post. But it seems clear that at this point Gonzales doesn’t care what they think. He is basically in their face because he knows that ultimately, there’s nothing they can do to him. After all, only the Justice Department can bring perjury charges against him, and he runs the Justice Department. He doesn’t even attempt to make his lies credible or his excuses defensible. The wonder is that he hasn’t just told the Senate that he won’t testify invoking the magic doctrine of executive privilege.

There is something they can do, although I’m getting tired of typing the word. Impeach him too. There might actually be enough Republican votes to convict him.

By the way, no posts yesterday because I was attending a meeting of the Charter Revision Commission about which more, perhaps, in the next few days.

Filed in Republican Corruption | | Comments (0)