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Light posting ahead

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Saturday we make our annual trek to Vermont, and I’ll likely be pretty busy tomorrow getting ready. I’m hoping that once again once we get there we will have free Wi-Fi leaking into the house we are renting.

In any event, for the next couple of days, you won’t be hearing much from me.

By the way, a new kind of comment spam has been cropping up (no, not John McCommass), which I am doing my best to combat. At least two posts have slipped through the spam filters that I have installed, one for some sort of loan company and one that I don’t care to describe. I’ve deleted both. Unfortunately, if I’m unable to get on the internet for stretches of time I’m unaware of these things, so if you see a comment of that sort please chalk it up to the fact that I am unaware that it’s there. I am deleting them as soon as I find out about them. This isn’t a free speech issue, since these comments are all from spammers trying to sell something.

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Breaking the filibuster

Thursday, August 2, 2007

I love it when I see things on the net that echo something I’ve already written. I realize that such a reaction is rather childish, but there it is. I direct my readers to this article (Challenging the GOP’s Filibluster) from the American Prospect. In it, Andy Balkan makes the same points about the Democratic response to the Republican filibusters that I made here, here and here. (Since those posts were in real time they evolve a bit as I learned more about what Harry Reid was actually doing).

Balkan argues that Reid set a trap for himself by announcing beforehand that he would cut off debate on the Defense Bill after holding 30 hours of debate. The Republicans simply waited him out. He also argues that the Democrats should force the Republicans to really filibuster and that the first battle should be over a bill that has wide support in the country. He suggests that the debate be over the Webb Amendment, which mandates that American troops get sufficient rest between combat assignments.

Why? First off, the Webb amendment is exceptionally popular. Republicans can’t seriously oppose more rest and recuperation time for soldiers and marines. They’ll say that Congress shouldn’t micro-manage the war, but with many troops on their third tour in Iraq, that argument doesn’t carry much weight. Second, because the vote was so close last time, at the outset of this debate the outcome would be in sincere doubt. Add to that the fact that such Very Serious Republicans as John Warner and Dick Lugar have long billed September as the moment of truth regarding Bush’s surge, they may finally (with some pushing) feel the need to vote against the president, and the Webb amendment offers the perfect “non-defeat” bill on which to do it. All of this adds real uncertainty — which constitutes exactly the drama that the press loves. If Reid can keep the floor debate going for 3 or 4 days, the excitement will only build — if the Senate is deadlocked over the fate of thousands of U.S. soldiers, America will tune in.

I agree 100%. How could I not, since Balkan agrees with me 100%. I find it amazing that the Democrats apparently still believe that if they fight according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules, that guy kicking them in the balls is, at some point, going to see the error of his ways and stop.

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Still pawns in their game

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Digby has a (as usual) excellent post today in response to David Frum’s observation that Republicans would be ahead even among the youth of this country if we only count white people. Frum makes no attempt to hide the fact that his underlying assumption is that white folks are the only legitimate Americans:

the legacy that will damage [George Bush’s] party is the legacy of immigration non-enforcement. This has imported a large new community of people who are both economically struggling (and thus open to Democratic arguments) but who lack deep attachment to the American nation (and who are thus immune to the most potent of Republican appeals). It is these voters who will sway elections in future. And thanks to this president’s immigration policies, there are going to be a lot more of them than there might otherwise have been.

Digby does a good job at demolishing these arguments, which practically refute themselves in any event. More interesting, she goes on to argue that it is racism like Frum’s that has inhibited the development in this country of social programs resembling those in Western Europe.

Sociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard, who has long been interested in America’s underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question — “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality” which may give us some clues. Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, “Why Doesn’t the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?” (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001) he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy goes back to the beginning of the republic. But what is interesting is that both he and the economists offer some pretty conclusive evidence that the main reason for American “exceptionalism” in this case is, quite simply, racism.

Beyond the points she makes, I think another part of the dynamic is one explained brilliantly by Bob Dylan in one of his early songs: “Only a Pawn in Their Game“. Politicians and ruling elites in this country have used race as a handy tool to divide people who actually have common interests:

A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.

The demagoguery has become a bit more refined since then, though lately it has reverted to language almost as crude. The basic tactic hasn’t changed though. In fact, it can be convincingly argued that the modern Republican party’s achieved its recent (past 36 years) successes more to exploitation of racism than to appeals to religious bigotry or to its alliance with corporate interests. It is far easier to get a person in this country to feel resentment toward someone worse off than them (particularly if that person has a different skin color) than it is to get them exorcised about the fact that a hedge fund manager making hundreds of million dollars a year pays less taxes than they do.

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No more petitions-impeach.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

I just got an email from Joe Courtney asking me to sign a petition calling for Alberto Gonzales to resign. If you’re interested in doing so, you can sign at this link.

You can read the email here.

Personally, I’m tired of empty gestures which, with all due respect to Joe, I consider this to be. Gonzales isn’t going to resign unless he’s forced to do so, and public opinion doesn’t matter to these guys. If they want him gone, they should impeach him, and put it on the fast track. When was the last time a petition made any difference to George Bush or his comrades in crime? I won’t sign the petition. I’d like to see Joe come out for using the constitutional process to get rid of this guy.

Filed in Democrats, Joe Courtney, Republican Corruption | | Comments (1)

Lots of Republican dogs eat lots of ballots in Ohio

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

I have always been averse to conspiracy theories, though Lord knows I’ve been proven wrong in some cases. I remember back in the ’60s when people were accusing the CIA of all kinds of crazy things, and lo and behold, almost all the accusations turned out to be true. Still, it’s hard to believe, for instance, that the 2004 presidential election in Ohio could have been stolen through massive voter fraud, since it seems like it would take so many people to do it. But when you read articles like this report by Steve Rosenfeld on Alternet, you have to wonder:

Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.

The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.

…

“The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election,” said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. “We’re in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General’s office.”

“On the one hand, people will now say you can’t prove the fraud,” he said, “but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side.”

The Republicans responsible for retaining those ballots used a number of “dog ate my homework” excuses to explain the missing ballots.

The presidential ballots and election records were lost, misplaced, damaged by water, taken to landfills – all apparently by mistake, due to miscommunications, or because the local election administrators were not aware of the state ballot preservation law or the federal court order, according to letters to Brunner’s office from the various county election boards.

“Our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in (Brunner’s) Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions,” wrote Butler County Board of Election Director Betty McGary and Deputy Director Lynn Kinkaid in a May 9 memo. “Several boxes containing all the wire-bound ballot pages were discarded into a Rumpke dumpster. The dumpster would have been emptied into the local landfill.”

“The Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Board of Elections was unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled precinct ballots,” wrote John Williams, Hamilton County Director of Elections on May 16, 2007. “To the best if my knowledge, the above ballots were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of ’06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system.”

“No one could remember the disposition of said ballots,” wrote Mike Keeley, of Clermont County’s Board of Elections on May 10, 2007, referring to the “unvoted” or unused ballots from the 2004 presidential election.

Lest we forget, this is the state in which arithmetical miracles took place on election day, along with other strange events:

Compared to Ohio’s Democratic urban core, turnout in the Republican districts was higher than the 2000 election. Moreover, in a handful of counties there were vote count anomalies that made post-election observers question whether Bush’s vote was padded. The most notable example is more than 10,000 voters from several Bible belt counties who voted for Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the results are true. In a dozen rural counties, virtually unknown Democrats at the bottom of the ballot received more votes that Kerry, an oddity in a presidential year.

…

In Warren County, where county election officials said on Election Day that the FBI had declared a homeland security alert – which they later retracted – ballots were diverted to a warehouse before counting. The local media was not allowed to observe the vote count. According to a letter from the Warren County Board of Election to Brunner’s office, the election board cannot find 22,000 unused ballots from the election. In nearby Butler County, unused ballots are also missing, fueling speculation that they might have been used by Republican partisans to pad the president’s totals.

“The missing records reveal where the fraud occurred,” said Arnebeck. “You take as an example, Warren County. It is well documented that there was a phony homeland security alert and that was the excuse for excluding the public and the press from observing what was going on during Election Day. So the missing unused ballots would suggest that ballots were remade to fit the desired result.”

“The same situation occurred in Clermont County,” he said. “We have sworn affidavits from people who saw white stickers placed over the Kerry-Edward ovals in this optical scan county,” he said, referring to one way of masking a would-be Kerry vote, because optical-scan machines read ink marks on paper ballots. “So the missing unused ballots would suggest they were used to remake ballots to reflect the desired vote for Bush.”

…

Another big category of votes that will never be explained are the nearly 129,000 ballots that were rejected by voting machines and not counted. Many of these 2004 ballots – a mix of computer punch cards, paper ballots to be marked by ink and electronic votes – are among the incomplete 2004 election records. One post-election analysis found 94,000 of these ballots come from Democratic-majority precincts, and estimated these that ballots could have cost Kerry an additional 26,000 votes.

It’s perfectly possible that some of these ballots may have been mistakenly discarded. But it is impossible to believe that the extent of the loss could have been so great if the people involved were acting in good faith. They violated federal law and a court injunction. They should have known about the former and had to know about the latter.

We can only hope that now that the Democrats have taken over the statewide offices in Ohio that the Republicans will be unable to steal the election there in 2008. Florida is obviously still vulnerable, as are any other toss up states in which Republicans hold the pertinent state offices.

It seems clear in retrospect that Kerry should have challenged the Ohio results. Had he done so, it would have pushed this issue into the front burner in the national media. As it is, very few people are aware that the 2004 election was probably stolen. National Democrats have been strangely silent about this issue, no doubt worried that the beltway pundits would cluck disapprovingly if they did something as unseemly as demand honest elections.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

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