How the Mighty Have Fallen

What the heck is Ellitot Spitzer thinking?

SPITZER-PROBE BOSS IN VACATION UPROAR

THE man supposedly leading a key state probe of Gov. Spitzer and the Dirty Tricks Scandal has abruptly taken a 21/2-week vacation in South America - after secretly receiving a $15,000 pay raise, The Post has learned.

Recently hired Public Integrity Commission Executive Director Herbert Teitelbaum's extended vacation in Argentina has left stunned commission employees questioning his commitment to a probe aimed at determining if Spitzer and his aides broke the law by using the State Police in an effort to politically damage Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Rensselaer.)

I voted for this guy. My wife voted for him. He was supposed to be the candidate that would "wipe out the corruption in New York" after his tenure as the AG. Time after time he makes us think that he's just another politician. I'd write more, but... this is just sad.

A look ahead

The 2008 presidential election is yet another important one. Very few on either side are happy with the choices they are being given. In March of 2006 I wrote the following:

I'm not going to predict any individuals but i will predict that the election will be decided by at least two strong third party candidates. I'm not saying one of them will win but they will decide the election. Of course it won't be the first time, Ross Perot's race gave Bill Clinton the win in 92 and Ralph Nader gave the election to George W. Bush in 2000.

This time it will be different there will be two strong third party candidates, one on the left and one on the right. If Hillary gets the nomination there will be a large chunk of the Democratic base will be looking for an alternative. It really doesn't matter who gets the Republican nomination. The party has reached the point where the party itself is polarized and a large portion will not support the nominee regardless of who it is. The 2008 election will be like none we have ever seen.

Jazz and I discussed the possible Bloomberg independent run here and here. That alone would all but guarantee a Republican in the White House in 2009 but will it be the only third party run?

The awakening of the Libertarians
Ron Paul's War Chest Swelled in 4th Quarter

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul may lag behind in public-opinion polls. But after raising about $19 million for the final three months of the year, he is now among his party's front-runners in the race for campaign cash.

Dr Paul has a lot of enthusiastic support. Just head over to the Libertarian site LewRockwell.com. Keep in mind that Ron Paul has not ruled out a run as a candidate for the Libertarian party. Now the Libertarian Party is already a recognized party in most states. He would be expected to take votes from the Republican candidate and would probably take some independent votes from Bloomberg. While he is a social conservative he would leave social issue decisions to the states - probably not enough for the theocons.

The Huckabee Factor

Mike Huckabee is the Republican's worst nightmare - a social conservative and an economic populist. The Republicans have been forced to attack Huckabee but run the risk of driving off the Religious Right in the process. Even if the Religious Right does not field it's own presidential candidate this important part of the Republican base may just stay home.

There are too many variables to predict who the next president will be but it is safe to say they won't get a majority of the popular vote and will not have a "mandate".

How not to solve partisan gridlock Part II

This is a follow up to Jazz's post below.
The entire "middle" meme is a myth and Bloomberg et. al. no more represent the so called middle that the Republican party. A majority of Americans are to the left of the Democratic Party when it comes to economics and after the never ending wars of the Bush administration are probably more closely aligned to the Libertarian isolationists like Ron Paul when it comes to foreign Policy. Bloomberg represents neither of these views. And about that Partisan gridlock - Chris Bowers did a good job of taking that on.

"Gridlock in Washington" must only be a major problem for people who are so rich and powerful that they have to make-up problems in their lives. This is because, over the last five years, Democrats in Congress have only blocked the following pieces of legislation:

• Three conservative judges (out of several dozen)
• Privatization of Social Security
• Retroactive immunity for telecom companies in the warrantless spying program.
• Legislation to deport millions of illegal aliens

Given that these are the only conservative pieces of legislation that Democrats in Congress have blocked in the past five years, one must assume that a "government of national unity" means a government that will confirmation 100% of all conservative judges, the destruction of social security, retroactive immunity of telecom companies, and the mass deportation of twelve million people. If this third-party did not favor these things, then there would be absolutely no need to form "a government of national unity." Those four things are the sum total of what Democrats in Congress have prevented Republicans from passing, and thus are the entirety of what Democrats have contributed to "gridlock in Washington." Every other reform has been blocked by Republicans.

It would be nice, for once, if the constant drumbeat from Aging Wealthy White Men for National Unity Under Billionaire Media Moguls (AWWMNUUBM for short) decrying polarization, the lack of bi-partisanship and gridlock in Washington would actually provide specifics on what legislation their hated polarization, partisanship and gridlock is blocking. Of course, they won't actually do that, because blaming national problems on vague, undefined concepts like "polarization" and "gridlock" is much easier than actually analyzing the contemporary political scene in America.

This is about Bloomberg and about keeping a Democrat out of the White House.

Glenn Greenwald reminds us that when it comes to foreign policy Bloomberg sounds like all the other neocon lunatics that are responsible for much of the polarization his group claims to be the answer to.

How not to solve partisan gridlock

By now, you know that I've become sickened by the "politics as bloodsport" partisan warfare which has ruined our government and political process. So, should a viable independent candidate arise to make a run at the White House, you might think I'd be the first to jump on board, right? Well... not so much.

Bloomberg Moves Closer to Running for President

Buoyed by the still unsettled field, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is growing increasingly enchanted with the idea of an independent presidential bid, and his aides are aggressively laying the groundwork for him to run.

Joe Gandelman, always one of the key voices in moderate, independent politics, sees the possibility of this being a good thing.

The American political process — if you include the way campaigns are run, negative campaigning, the tone of talk radio and some aspects of the blogosphere — may have disgusted enough people so that a candidate who doesn’t have the same predictable reactions, whose utterances don’t elicited the all-knowing smug wink and nod from those TV analyst talking heads and isn’t out of a politico cookie-cutter could have REAL appeal.

I'm afraid I'll have to disagree. While I admire Bloomberg's stated goals of eliminating partisan gridlock and getting the American government back on track to do real work, I also don't see him as a truly independent voice. There are a number of problems with a potential Bloomberg candidacy, but I'll only touch on a few.

First of all, a truly independent candidate would draw somewhat equally from both parties as well as the moderate, independent voter base. Mayor Bloomberg does not fill the bill on this count. The man is a Democrat, tried and true. He was a member of the party for most of his life, and his "conversion" to the GOP in the 2000 New York City mayoral race was nothing more than a blatant, calculated move to take advantage of a Democratic primary field that was beating each other to death. His long held stances favoring stringent gun control, endorsing gay marriage, raising taxes, and moves to ban smoking and trans fats put him firmly in a position where only the more hard core liberal voters would flock to him.

Plus, the Mayor has not yet been fully vetted on the national stage, and will face most of the same problems that his home town fellow Rudy Giuliani is facing. Bloomberg has also been steeping in New York City politics for most of his life, and nobody comes out of that without some serious stains. As the skeletons begin to come out of his closet, the shine will soon fade from his appeal.

Currently, poll after poll pitting the various candidates from each party against each other in hypothetical general election match-ups show the Democrats winning in '08 for nearly every combination. Republicans would cheer the entrance of Bloomberg into the race, as he would likely draw enough votes in the general away from the Democratic nominee to tip the White House back to the GOP next November. His ability to draw votes away from the Republicans would be virtually nill.

Checking in with one of the usual suspects on the Starboard wing, I found that the response was pretty much as I predicted. Wizbang describes Bloomberg as one of the "feckless, idle rich" and goes on with much less flattering prose.

The man is enamored of himself, consumed by egotism which led him to leave his lifetime Democratic registration to run for Mayor as a Republican ONLY because he could never have won the Democratic nomination. Earlier this year, he conveniently switched again, to an independent registration.

Bloomberg stands for Bloomberg. Those who enjoy listening to the incessant droning of whiny assholes will flock to his banner - which, I suppose, means he might carry the District of Columbia.

Looking at the Left side of the Aisle, the Liberal Journal seems to have arrived at the same conclusion I did.

Personally, he is a rich northeasterner with a Boston accent. All of this means he will siphon votes primarily away from Democrats or independents who lean Democratic. His stance on guns and gay marriage alone will kill any real support from Republicans. So we're faced with a big fat spoiler here, and I don't think a conservative running mate like Chuck Hagel would change that.

This would be a gift to the GOP beyond their wildest holiday wishes. Bloomberg is no Ross Perot. He won't win and he won't have the same kind of impact on the vote count that Perot did. He'll just be a Nader on steroids and warp the electoral count. Here's to hoping that he chooses to use his power and influence to push the dialogue toward a more non-partisan stance without actually throwing his hat in the ring to disrupt election '08.

The upside of Kristol's new gig

How can you tell if Bill Kristol is saying something that's just simply wrong? His lips are moving.

"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."
~Willaim Kristol, April 4th, 2003

There has been a lot of outrage about William Kristol's new position at the NYT from both the left and the paleocon right. I see it as a good thing - he will have a wider audience. Yes even more people will be able to see what a bunch of dangerous lunatics the neocon "intellectuals" of the Republican party are. Kristol constantly beating the war drums in the NYT for a war weary nation to read may hurt the Republican Party in 2008. Is this in fact an almost Rovian plot on the part of the "liberal" NYT? Let him write!
John Cole seems to agree:

I guess there are two ways of looking at this- one is that people are afraid of opposing viewpoints, the other that people see Kristol for what he is, a complete imbecile who has (take your pick) either been completely wrong about everything or lying about everything, and thus unworthy of the column. On the upside, letting Kristol’s views out in public might be a good thing, as people unaccustomed with the the two-bit rag the Weekly Standard will now get a good look at what the current Republican party looks like. From a blogging standpoint, this is the equivalent of hitting the Powerball.

Update
Thanks to Mike at Crooks and Liars for the link which helped MEJ avoid having the slowest month in two years.

Of Pigs and Pokes

... or perhaps more appropriately, taking pokes at opponents using references to swine? In what really should have been a non-issue even in a news starved media circus, it appears that John McCain answered a question about Mitt Romney using a well known and even tired quote.

As Senator John McCain rolled down a New Hampshire highway today in his "Straight Talk Express" campaign bus, he listened to a description of the latest attack on him by his chief rival in this state's primary, Mitt Romney.

He smirked as he heard the former Massachusetts governor's assertion that McCain wanted to allow illegal immigrants to remain permanently in the United States.

Asked how he intended to respond, the Arizona Republican said: "Never get into a wrestling match with a pig. You both get dirty -- and the pig likes it."

If you've never heard that adage before, I'm not sure what rock you've been living under. I'll admit I don't think it's as popular as "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig." But still, it's a classic. So when I saw that headline in the Boston Globe, I assumed that it was a complete dud which would draw no attention. I tended to agree with Captain Ed, who said,

So no, John McCain did not call Mitt Romney a pig. He gave a cliche answer as a demurral from further engagement with Romney in sniping about immigration, and the proverb explained why; it's a battle neither one of them will win, especially in sound bites. Anyone who has graduated from high school before 2007 would have realized the context and the meaning of the remarks.

And yet it seems that people jumped on the bandwagon. And we're not talking about Democrats here... McCain's opponents in the GOP had supporters who seem to be trying to load this tidbit into the canons. Hugh Hewitt is a big Romney supporter, and over at his Town Hall blog, Patrick Ruffini put the quote out there without context, saying only "it looks like the pressure may be getting to [McCain]."

Byron York of the Korner Kids repeated the quote and went so far as to casually pin it as intentionally insulting.

But that name-calling, like the "phony" ad, doesn't seem nearly as effective as an ad starkly contrasting Romney with himself.

Over at Time, Mark Halperin also repeated the quote without any comment whatsoever, seeming to indicate support for the insult meme.

I wouldn't have imagined it would go this far. People have been using porcine references on general topics without actually calling people "pigs" for a very long time. Chaucer made references to The Miller in comparison to a Sow and has long been quoted as a general comment on society. The list goes on forever.

This is, unfortunately, one type of fallout from the primary process. I'm a big believer in this, of course, as the primaries are the only way that regular voters can have a direct say in choosing the nominee for their party. I dislike it when the two big parties hold a coronation for their next candidate with vast sums of money and media control before the voters ever step into a booth for the first time. However, if you are a candidate and you're simply not resonating with the voters, all too often the next step is to try to tear down your opponents at every step. The concept of saying, "Well, the voters seem to like the other guy's message better, so I think I'll just drop out and support them" is as foreign to politicians as the idea of giving up on pork belly earmarking.

McCain must be moving up enough in some of the polls to keep the attention of the other candidates. That's really the only explanation I see for their supporters grasping at straws like this.

The trouble with pork

There are two things a lawmaker needs to get elected:

1. Lots of cash from special interests
2. A list of pork barrel projects they got for their state/district

These projects take many forms; some like the bridge to nowhere are obviously absurd and others like a job producing defense contract, that the Pentagon doesn't want, for a local company are less obvious. Of course everybody hates pork unless of course it's their pork. The result is that DC becomes a secondary commodities market for pork - a bipartisan enterprise to be sure. I don't often join forces with my friend Captain Ed but in this case I'm on board:
Because Oil Companies And Pizza Hut Couldn't Afford It
He has a great example of the obviously absurd variety.
Sail Away Captain!

Note
This:
Millions in Earmarks Purchase Little of Use
is an example of the kind of pork that burns a lot more taxpayers dollars than the bridges and there is usually nothing to show for it - not even a bridge.

Best blog posts - 2007

Jon Swift let everyone on his "eclectic blogroll" send him what they considered their best posts of 2007 and he compiled them here. Go check them out - the right, left and middle are represented. Read them all, as Jon says:

You may not agree with what someone has written, but contrary to popular belief, there hasn't been a single documented case of anyone's head exploding from reading a post he or she disagrees with.

Yet another power play

This is yet just another tyrannical power play by the Bush/Cheney cabal.
In Surprise Step, Bush Is Vetoing a Military Bill

CRAWFORD, Tex. — For months President Bush harangued Democrats in Congress for not moving quickly enough to support the troops and for bogging down military bills with unrelated issues.

And then on Friday, with no warning, a vacationing Mr. Bush announced that he was vetoing a sweeping military policy bill because of an obscure provision that could expose Iraq’s new government to billions of dollars in legal claims dating to Saddam Hussein’s rule.

[....]

In a “statement of disapproval,” or pocket veto that lets the bill expire on Dec. 31, Mr. Bush said that the provision could result in preliminary injunctions freezing Iraqi assets in American banks — $20 billion to $30 billion, according to a senior administration official — and even affect commercial ventures with American businesses.

Of course The New York Times fails to mention that since the Senate is officially in session the "pocket veto" is not legal but of course this means nothing to the mobsters in the Bush administration who continue to shred the constitution. But I'm sure that Benito Giuliani approves.

So what should the Democrats do? The situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and the entire region is going to rapidly deteriorate in the next few months. If the Democrats do anything to obstruct the financing of the wars they will be blamed for that deterioration. On the other hand if they let Bush win this one it will be yet another step down the road to a tyrannical unitary executive. The Democratic "leadership" in both the House and the Senate was incompetent from the very beginning and it's too late to do anything about it now. They find themselves between a rock and a hard place with no place to go. As a result Bush will once again get what he wants.

A Christian Nation???

Over the last few years we have seen the theocons attempt to rewrite the constitution and the words of the founding fathers to demonstrate that the United States is a "Christian Nation". One of the most outrageous claims is that out legal system is based on the Ten Commandments. The latest to do this is the none too bright Mike Huckabee:

"The Ten Commandments form the basis of most of our laws and therefore, you know if you look through them does anybody find anything there that would be all that objectionable? I don't think most people would if they actually read them," he said.

Ed Brayton explains how this is utter nonsense. As it turns out commandants one through four are blatantly unconstitutional. Only two of the commandments, Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not steal, are actually part of our legal system and they are found in all legal systems in the world. The remaining four are simply not part of the legal system. Go read Brayton's post for the details.

Benazir Bhutto and the WOT

I was directed to this by Andrew C McCarty in the NRO by a commentor in the post below. Now I don't often agree with Mr McCarthy there are some things I think he gets right.

If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

And it's hard to disagree with this:

The transformation from Islamic society to true democracy is a long-term project. It would take decades if it can happen at all. Meanwhile, our obsessive insistence on popular referenda is naturally strengthening — and legitimizing — the people who are popular: the jihadists. Popular elections have not reformed Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon. Neither will they reform a place where Osama bin Laden wins popular opinion polls and where the would-be reformers are bombed and shot at until they die.

Here is where he makes the standard wingnut mistake:

We don’t have the political will to fight the war on terror every place where jihadists work feverishly to kill Americans. And, given the refusal of the richest, most spendthrift government in American history to grow our military to an appropriate war footing, we may not have the resources to do it.

But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.

Shortly after 911 another person I rarely agree with, Pat Buchanan said something that I did agree with, "they (the jihadists) don't hate us because of who we are they hate us because of where we are. Osama bin Laden himself made it clear that the major reason for attacks on the US was the presence of US military forces in Saudi Arabia. US forces are not in the middle east to protect the US or it's citizens - they are there to protect the interests of multinational corporations. It's certainly not about bringing Democracy to the region. The Bush/Cheney administration's original goal for Iraq was to replace the tyrant, Saddam, with a US friendly tyrant, Chalabi. Since he turned out to be an Iranian spy perhaps it's best that didn't work out.

The best way to protect the US from the Jihadists in the middle east is to get our military out. It's time that the US military be used to protect the US not the interests of Exxon-Mobile and the other multinational corporations. In 2007 46 percent of the Pakistanis supported bin Laden. I would guess it was significantly less in 2001.

The wingers are enraged that Ron Paul would say;

Ron Paul blames the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on the “interventionist” policy of the United States, and says Al Qaeda is justified in being “annoyed” at us.

I don't agree with Dr Paul on much either but he sure gets that one right.

I don't know

Benazir Bhutto Assassinated in Pakistan

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Dec. 27 -- Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday at a political rally, two months after returning from exile to attempt a political comeback.

Now I don't have a clue what this will lead to. It will further destabilize a country that is already unstable. Al Qaeda is taking credit but Musharraf is being blamed.

I also don't have a clue as to how this will impact US politics. Joe Scarborough thinks he knows - it will help Rudy the fascist but as Greg Sargent points out:

As Atrios says, the logic is very tortured here indeed. But it's actually worse than that. This rank bit of punditry serves as yet another reminder of just how gullible the pundit corps in general has been about Rudy's candidacy, on two levels: First, the near wholesale acceptance of the idea that Rudy's mayoralty counts as counter-terrorism experience; and second, the presumption that he automatically has a political advantage on terrorism over his rivals.

The Republicans themselves don't even see Rudy as being that strong on security.

Solar gets competitive

I can't get too excited about politics right now but this is exciting:
Solar cheaper than coal and falling
New developments in solar power make 'clean coal' look even dumber

Let me be the last in the greenosphere to note that Nanosolar has shipped its first panels, and it's no exaggeration to say that this moment will likely be seen as a historical turning point.

[.....]

Nanosolar's claim is that power from their panels will pencil out at about $0.99 a watt. The implications are pretty stunning:

"With a $1-per-watt panel," [CEO Martin Roscheisen] said, "it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems."

According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said.

So what is Nanosolar and what do they do different?
The New Dawn of Solar

The company produces its PowerSheet solar cells with printing-press-style machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute. With backing from Google’s founders and $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, Nanosolar’s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this year.

Cost has always been one of solar’s biggest problems. Traditional solar cells require silicon, and silicon is an expensive commodity (exacerbated currently by a global silicon shortage). What’s more, says Peter Harrop, chairman of electronics consulting firm IDTechEx, “it has to be put on glass, so it’s heavy, dangerous, expensive to ship and expensive to install because it has to be mounted.” And up to 70 percent of the silicon gets wasted in the manufacturing process. That means even the cheapest solar panels cost about $3 per watt of energy they go on to produce. To compete with coal, that figure has to shrink to just $1 per watt.

Nanosolar’s cells use no silicon, and the company’s manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt. “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the economics of solar.”

This is perhaps the greatest threat the corporate energy industry has seen. Coal was seen as the only alternative to large scale energy production. Alternatives have been far too expensive - until now. It represents an even greater threat; it can be decentralized making those thousands of mile of transmission lines unnecessary and eliminating the monopoly that electric power has been. There are no big profits in roof top electrical generation. Look for the powerful to attempt to erect roadblocks to stop it's widespread use. This represents a bigger threat to big energy than global warming.

Enemies in a "quasi-war"

As we welcome many of you back from a well deserved Christmas break, I would like to point your attention to another original interview by a blogger on an important topic. Over at Joe Gandelman's "The Moderate Voice" we see The Talking Dog sitting down for an interview with Cass Sunstein, the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, Law School and Department of Political Science, University of Chicago. The primary subject of discussion is the question of whether or not blogging communities have devolved into potentially dangerous echo chambers, rather than the forums for vibrant, healthy political discourse and the exchange of ideas which many had hoped for.

[E]cho chambers, made possible by the Internet, can increase (unjustified) extremism, decrease diversity among like-minded people, increase errors, and make people see their fellow citizens as enemies or adversaries in some kind of quasi-war.

The problem with echo chambers is that those who live there tend to end up thinking more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk – and that is unhealthy for participants and for democracy, at least if people have not heard conflicting views.

I hang out at and participate in a few blogs on both sides of the aisle, and the stark, polarized contrasts in extreme opinions can indeed be shocking. This is often not as apparent in the writing of the blog authors themselves, but truly comes to light in the comments sections, where regular fans of the blogger seem to compete to see who can have the most extreme, biased and often hateful views. Such pile-ons often appear to be a contest to see who can say the most insulting, derogatory things about people who support the opposite political party or espouse different social agendas.

Unfortunately, as the linked interview points out, such conditions are often exactly what people seek out.

It turns out that if people find that others agree with them, they tend to rate those others as more competent and more likable — and that if people find that others agree with them, they tend to rate themselves as more competent or more likable. So there is a natural human tendency to congregate with like-minded types. But from the democratic point of view, that tendency should be resisted.

Far from encouraging dissenting points of view, all too often these blogosphere echo chambers turn into conventions of intellectual grade school bullies. Visitors airing a differing point of view are scorned, insulted, and generally labeled as "trolls" for daring to contradict the prevailing wisdom.

Does this help democracy or advance the political discourse in our country? Just the opposite.

A Very Merry White Christmas From Baker City

Here's wishing the best of holidays to the MEJ crew from Chuck and the Chuck for... site. I'd especially like to thank Ron for providing another venue for me and his readers for taking time with my stuff. A special thanks to you who come over my spot.

Happy Holidays

Unless something really big breaks we here at MEJ and Mid Stream Radio are going to take a few days off. We wish you all a happy holiday season and we will be back in two or three days.

Update
OK, I'm back for a minute. This is just too good - Bill (I'm always wrong) Kristol makes his 2008 predictions.

Inspiration

I'm not a Democrat or a Republican and there is very little inspiration to be found it the Democrats or Republicans running for the highest office in the land. There is one thing that inspires me however - keeping Rudy Giuliani out of the White House. I have made it clear how I feel about Rudy and as it turns out I have allies on the right, the old right that is.
The American Conservative magazine has an issue with a cover story and an article by progressive Glenn Greenwald that attempts to deconstruct Rudy. The first is by Michael C. Desch, Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security Decision-making at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
Declaring Forever War
Giuliani has surrounded himself with advisers who think the Bush Doctrine didn’t go nearly far enough.

In one sense, his campaign is a big tent: it has by some estimates between 60 and 70 advisors. Some—British Soviet expert Robert Conquest and Reagan campaign defense advisor William Van Cleave—are clearly window-dressing. The core of senior advisors includes former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, Martin Kramer (Middle East), Stephen Rosen (defense), S. Enders Wimbush (diplomacy), Peter Berkowitz (statecraft, human rights, and freedom), Kim Holmes (foreign policy), and perhaps Daniel Pipes. Giuliani’s chief foreign-policy advisor is retired diplomat and Yale instructor Charles Hill. In the face of controversy about how many neoconservatives were playing prominent roles, Podhoretz bragged to the New York Observer,“Giuliani doesn’t think that this is a liability.”

Podhoretz is the person whose presence has done the most to set in concrete the notion that Team Rudy is all neocon all the time. Famous for arguing that we are in the midst of “World War IV,” Podhoretz is scathing in his criticism of those he suspects of not waging the war with enough vigor. He even charges that many senior military officers show insufficient stomach for the fight, singling out former CENTCOM commander John Abizaid and his successor, Adm. William Fallon. Podhoretz is also an assiduous peddler of the new neocon myth that the antiwar camp stabbed President Bush in the back.

And he doesn’t stop at Iraq: Podhoretz constantly beats the drum for bombing Iran to halt its nascent nuclear program. Air Marshal Podhoretz assured The Telegraph that the air campaign “would take five minutes.” His optimism that attacking Iran would be another cakewalk combines with pessimism about the prospects of multilateral sanctions preventing Iran from getting the bomb. “Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of the Jews back then,” Podhoretz sneers, “the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.”

That's right, Rudy's chief foreign policy advisor is none other than the bull goose looney of the neocon asylum, Norman Podhoretz.

But Rudy's threat doesn't stop there. The American Conservative calls on lefty Glenn Greenwald to explain Rudy's authoritarian personality

Authoritarian Temptation

Can we trust the the presidency to a mayor like Giuliani?

As constrained as a mayor’s power typically is, Giuliani never ceased pushing those limits. In a 2001 retrospective on the mayor’s tenure, the New York Times concluded, “the suppression of dissent or of anything that irked the mayor, became a familiar theme.” Giuliani’s idiosyncratic—one could say Orwellian—understanding of “freedom,” expressed during a 1994 speech, reveals just how literally authoritarian his worldview is:

What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

By the nature of the office, even the most excessively secretive, grudge-harboring authoritarian in charge of a municipality can only do so much damage. But the dangers posed by allowing such an individual to rule the most powerful nation on earth are boundless. And those general risks are greatly enhanced after eight long years of unprecedented expansions of government power and systematic erosions of virtually every check on executive authority.

A President Giuliani would inherit an office bestowed with such dark powers as indefinite detention, interrogation methods widely considered to be torture, vast warrantless surveillance authority, and an impenetrable wall of secrecy secured by multiple executive and judicial instruments. Set all of that next to a submissive and impotent Congress and an equally supine media—to say nothing of the prospect of another terrorist attack to exacerbate every one of those factors—and it is hard to imagine a more toxic combination than Rudy Giuliani and the Oval Office.

Rudy is the kind of leader/tyrant Orwell had in mind when he wrote 1984 and it Cheney on steroids. Now Rudy appears to be in a nosedive at the moment but he still has the support of the corporate media and the DC establishment.

Just In Case

you didn't realize just how dangerous BushCo is to the liberties of this nation, a little walk back in time to the Hoover FBI might be in order. July 7th, 1950 J Edgar sent the Truman White House his plan to suspend Habeas Corpus on the reach that the clause “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it” included “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”

The plan called for the arrest and indefinite detention of 12,000 Americans 97% of whom were citizens from a list compiled from 1948 when Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the go ahead to make a list of people it considered "dangerous." Some of this may sound familiar.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

Why bother with the niceties of evidence when these people wouldn't have been swept up if they weren't guilty of 'something.' Surely the Hoover FBI could be trusted. Now that volume of people would create a certain problem, for which Hoover was prepared.

Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.

Sometimes history and stupidly dangerous ideas have a way of repeating themselves, though there is no evidence that Harry Truman ever instituted this mess. Too bad such can't be said for George II.

Grandfather

I'm going to be out of town for the holidays, so this week we will be closing down Mid Stream Radio, and my blog posting will be limited. But we'll be back on New Years Eve for our regularly scheduled shows. In the meantime, however, I would like to leave you with some observations on my Grandfather.

Walter Shaw, were he still alive today, would have been 108 years old. Born in 1899, he lived for ninety years and saw the evolution of our culture through its most rapid changes in history. He was a mechanic, a farmer and a soldier - a dough boy as they were called at the time. He was a tireless worker well into his eighties, raising his own vegetables in his garden, always rising before dawn and having a full schedule of "chores" to fill his day. At the age of 17 he married my grandmother. The union would last for nearly seventy years. He looked with disdain on frivolous people who wasted their days in pursuit of entertainment or idle time. He never owned a television, preferring his old General Electric radio for when he wanted to catch up on the news.

Of course, it would be easy to stop there, looking at Walter though the kindly, soft lens of time. But like most people, he had his flaws as well and in great number. He was a hopeless bigot and homophobe. He would not suffer a black person to set foot on his property, had no use for "those jews" and thought a firm thrashing was the only proper treatment for "flakes." (read: homosexuals.) He felt that women were absolutely the "property" of their husbands and fathers and treated them as such to the point of abuse.

My grandfather was a lifelong subscriber to one of those weekly, full color tabloids (I believe it was something like the Weekly World Globe or something like that) and believed every word they printed as being the gospel truth. I still remember his telling me, when I was in junior high school, that the Japanese were actually a mutant race - the result of Chinese soldiers mating with gorillas during some long ago war. He believed that aliens were walking the earth on a daily basis and some were highly placed members of the Eisenhower administration.

Oh yes... and JFK was actually shot by Lyndon Johnson.

Walter was a complicated man, but certainly a product of his times. He was flawed but saw himself as well meaning and a dedicated believer in the vision that good would always triumph over evil. In his mind, there was very little that couldn't be cured by a hard day of work. Now that Christmas is nearly upon us, I thought it would be fitting to take a moment and remember him. This might be a good time for all of you to remember some of you ancestors as well. The older I get, the smarter they get.

Happy holidays to you all.

Hot Update on the Lakota Tribe

Working with Ed Morrissey at Heading Right Radio, we are setting up an interview with Russell Means of the AIM about his movements secession from the United States. Ed will be recording an interview with Russell and Ron and I will be discussing it at Heading Right Radio this evening. Tune in and or call in to get in on the discussion!

You can check in for the show this evening at Heading Right Radio.

Update
You can hear the interview here and also catch Ed, Jazz and Ron's comments afterword.

The Next Wounded Knee?

On Dec. 29, 1890 United States troops of the 7th Cavalry opened fire on members of the Lakota Indian tribe at Wounded Knee, South Dakota and massacred more than 140 men, women and children. This effectively ended the last armed resistance and independence movement of indigenous North American people inside the continental United States.

Until this week.

Descendants of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull Break Away from US

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

Over here in New York, the Oneida Indian Nation - a historical descendant of the Iroquois Nation, which included the Mohawk tribe from which my mother is descended - still has a copy of a treaty on display at their headquarters. It dates back to the 1700's, signed by the President of the United States, and states that all the lands in present-day New York west of the Hudson River and north of the Mohawk River will be the property of the indigenous tribes "for as long as the sun shall shine and the rivers shall flow."

Clearly many of us missed out on an extremely long spell of drought and darkness, as the Oneida lands comprise a still large, but vastly reduced patch of land south of Utica and Syracuse. (They have quite a nice casino,however.) Most of the treaties signed by our government with the indigenous peoples were largely ignored or modified without the consent of the Native Americans.

The Lakota have apparently built a strong constitutional case for their claim this week, with supporting documentation from the Geneva Conventions and various United Nations rules which the U.S. is a signatory to.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been "repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life," the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.

"This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution," which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

"It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent," said Means.

This comes at an awkward time for the present administration, coming as it does right before Christmas and weeks before the primary elections begin. Nobody wants to see a modern day slaughter taking place with the Lakota yet again, and particularly not now. But the timing of this declaration, which effectively has them seceding from the Union, seems too much for coincidence, given how it's only ten days before the anniversary of the slaughter.

I'll be waiting to see what the government's reaction is to this. Stay tuned.

Update
See the above for an exclusive Heading Right/Mid Stream Radio interview with Russell Means.

Time Dumps Kristol and Krauthammer

I was going to comment on this but I procrastinated long enough and TRex did it for me.

My Own War On Christmas

This will be enough to put the wingnut Bible thumpers in overdrive.
Archbishop says nativity 'a legend'

The Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday that the Christmas story of the Three Wise Men was nothing but a 'legend'.

Dr Rowan Williams has claimed there was little evidence that the Magi even existed and there was certainly nothing to prove there were three of them or that they were kings.

He said the only reference to the wise men from the East was in Matthew's gospel and the details were very vague.

Dr Williams said: "Matthew's gospel says they are astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that's all we're really told. It works quite well as legend."

The Archbishop went on to dispel other details of the Christmas story, adding that there were probably no asses or oxen in the stable.

He argued that Christmas cards which showed the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus, flanked by shepherds and wise men, were misleading. As for the scenes that depicted snow falling in Bethlehem, the Archbishop said the chance of this was "very unlikely".

In a final blow to the traditional nativity story, Dr Williams concluded that Jesus was probably not born in December at all. He said: "Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival."

The Christmas celebration is the creation of the early Roman church to inject the state religion, Christianity, into the various celebrations of the winter solstice. What few details that are actually documented come from Matthew, the Gospel written eighty plus years after the death of Jesus. In fact the entire Roman church and modern Christianity is based largely on Matthew. It contains facts and details not found in any of the earlier gospels and the source is the authors imagination not historical fact. In fact Matthew was probably written to make Christianity a politically acceptable state religion. The source of most Christmas traditions are the pagan customs that preceded Christianity. The Christmas tree dates back to pre-Christian winter solstice celebrations and the thing that makes Christmas politically acceptable to the consumer driven modern world, the buying of gifts, has it's origin in the Roman celebration, Saturnalia, at which the Romans commemorated the dedication of the temple of the god Saturn. Enjoy the holidays but don't think you can keep Christ in Christmas because he was never there.

Barbara Oakley on Mid Stream Radio

There will be a very special edition this Friday (Dec. 21) of Mid Stream Radio when Ron and I will interview New York Times best selling author Barbara Oakley. Her latest book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend is an interesting study in how genetics affects the essential goodness or evil of people. It's a controversial topic and we'll be trying to get to the bottom of it, along with discussing Barbara's upcoming piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Click on the link to tune in via your computer and join in the web chat, or call in to (646) 595-3963 to join in on the conversation. In the second half hour, we'll be doing a wrap-up of some of the top political stories of the week. And be sure to sign up for a free Blogtalk Radio account to have your own user name in the web chat, and get notified of upcoming Mid Stream Radio shows!

NAFTA on Steroids - Part II

I discussed the North American Union below. Thanks to commenter cheechw we have some additional links.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION IN DENIAL OF 'NORTH AMERICAN UNION' PLANS

In response to its critics, the SPP has added a “SPP Myths Vs Facts” section to its website at www.SPP.gov. According to the “Myths Vs Facts” document the SPP is simply a “dialog” among the three countries to “enhance prosperity.” It goes on to say the SPP is not an agreement, nor is it a treaty. It says “no agreement was ever signed.”

The truth is, on March 23, 2005, President Bush met at his ranch in Crawford, Texas with Vicente Fox and Paul Martin (then PM of Canada) in what they called a Summit. The three heads of state then drove to Baylor University in Waco, where they issued a press release announcing their signing of an agreement to form the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP).

This year, on March 31, 2006, Bush. Fox and new Canadian PM, Stephen Harper met in Cancun, Mexico. This time their press release celebrated what they called the first anniversary of the SPP.

The use of the word “dialog” is a carefully selected euphemism designed to make the SPP sound like an innocent discussion among friends. To admit that it is anything more would force the government to provide Constitutional justification for its actions.

Moreover, the SPP says it won’t change our court system or legislative process and that it respects the sovereignty of each nation. And, says the SPP Myths and Facts document, it strongly rejects the idea that it is creating a European Union-like structure.

That defense is almost laughable in light of the massive activity-taking place in the SPP office located in the Commerce Department.

One lawmaker has been speaking up, Rep Ron Paul the Libertarian/Republican presidential candidate.
Impeach George W. Bush over North American Union agenda says Republican Presidential candidate

Republican Congressman and Presidential candidate Ron Paul says U.S. President Bush has presided over a system wide doctrine of violating the Constitution, from the Iraq War in the "War on Terrorism" and pursuing a North American Union agenda, without legally required Congressional oversight. Such oversight is legally prescribed by the U.S. Constitution.

Ron Paul has also warned about the proposed 'NAFTA Superhighway' - a big part of the plan.
Congressman: Superhighway about North American Union
Paul says goal is common currency, borderless travel, bigger bureaucracy

Rep. Ron Paul, a maverick Republican from Texas, today denounced plans for the proposed "NAFTA superhighway" in his state as part of a larger plot for merger of the U.S., Canada and Mexico into a North American Union.
"By now many Texans have heard about the proposed 'NAFTA Superhighway,' which is also referred to as the trans-Texas corridor," he said in a statement. "What you may not know is the extent to which plans for such a superhighway are moving forward without congressional oversight or media attention."

Paul explained that most members of Congress are unaware of the plans because only relatively small amounts of money have been spent studying the plans and those allocations were included in "enormous transportation appropriations bills."

"The proposed highway is part of a broader plan advanced by a quasi-government organization called the 'Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,' or SPP," he explains. "The SPP was first launched in 2005 by the heads of state of Canada, Mexico, and the United States at a summit in Waco."

No treaties were involved, and Congress was not included in discussions or plans, he says.

"Instead, the SPP is an unholy alliance of foreign consortiums and officials from several governments," according to Paul. "One principal player is a Spanish construction company, which plans to build the highway and operate it as a toll road. But don't be fooled: The superhighway proposal is not the result of free market demand, but rather an extension of government-managed trade schemes like NAFTA that benefit politically connected interests."

Paul says, however, the real issue raised by the superhighway plan and the SPP is national sovereignty.

It is essential that all presidential candidates be asked where they stand on The North American Union, the SPP and the NAFTA highway. So far nearly all of talk about the North American Union has come from the conservative side. It is time that the progressive side start talking about it. It will be the American worker who will suffer.

Natalee Halloway - the end

Nancy Grace, Greta van Susteren and Beth Twitty are furious that Aruban authorities have all but closed the case on Natalee Halloway's disappearance. I wrote the following at the time placing the blame on Natalee's parents.

With all of the coverage I see no blame placed on the parents of Natalee Halloway. Yes they are to blame as are all of the parents who not only allow but pay for their high school seniors to go on these trips. It is irresponsible parenting to allow a recent high school graduate to take off unsupervised to an exotic location at the time in their life when they are most likely to do something irresponsible and stupid. An unsupervised 17 or 18 year old in a location where alcohol and even drugs are readily available is courting disaster.

My message to Natalee's mother is this. While I feel your pain and sympathize with you, do something constructive. Admit that it was a mistake to allow her to take the trip and tell the parents of future high school seniors of the dangers of such irresponsible decisions.

Over at the Moderate Voice Shaun Mullen seems to agree:

As the father of a son and daughter who were once 18 years old, I had a hard time reconciling how a bunch of teenagers could be allowed to booze day and night (even if Arbua’s drinking age is 18), do drugs, screw and otherwise carry on.

It turned out that Natalee was rip snorting drunk and had sex with at least one of the primary suspects. Before you could say “boffo Nielsen Ratings,” this bimbette — a straight-A student who apparently missed school the day common sense was taught — had pushed the Iraq war and other major stories from the top of CNN’s newscasts. Beth Twitty, Natalee’s beyond obnoxious mother and a fount of bad information, soon became as familiar a fixture on the station as Condoleezza Rice.

Police, soldiers, volunteers and tracking dogs combed hillsides and beaches of the 75-square-mile island. A pond was partially drained, a landfilled picked apart and the seabed offshore combed by divers. Dutch fighter jets equipped with search equipment conducted overflights.

Investigators interviewed hundreds of potential witnesses, but unlike their American counterparts would not talk to reporters on or off the record.

This really pissed off Nancy Grace, Greta van Susteren and other TV talking heads who proceeded to dump all over the Dutch legal system because it differed from the U.S. in some significant ways, and we know how perfect our system is. In retrospect, it is apparent that Natalee’s mother and her posse from Alabama did as much to hamper the investigation as help it.

Having covered a goodly number of missing person and murder cases, my hunch is that in the absence of a body or even a shred of evidence of a crime, a bombed Natalee stumbled or fell off a cliff and into the ocean where she became shark chum. Were any of the three primary suspects present, let alone hands-on participants in her demise? Given that none of them have admitted as much after nearly three years of on again, off again grilling, I tend to doubt it.

As I said at the time this was a case of bad parenting and the right thing for Beth Twitty to do would have been to use her celebrity status to warn other parents of the dangers.

NAFTA on Steroids

Have you ever heard of the North American Union? I hadn't until it came up on Mid Stream Radio today. So what is the North American Union? The best description I could find was at the conservative site Human Events
North American Union to Replace USA?

President Bush is pursuing a globalist agenda to create a North American Union, effectively erasing our borders with both Mexico and Canada. This was the hidden agenda behind the Bush administration's true open borders policy.

Secretly, the Bush administration is pursuing a policy to expand NAFTA politically, setting the stage for a North American Union designed to encompass the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. What the Bush administration truly wants is the free, unimpeded movement of people across open borders with Mexico and Canada.

President Bush intends to abrogate U.S. sovereignty to the North American Union, a new economic and political entity which the President is quietly forming, much as the European Union has formed.

The blueprint President Bush is following was laid out in a 2005 report entitled "Building a North American Community" published by the left-of-center Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR report connects the dots between the Bush administration's actual policy on illegal immigration and the drive to create the North American Union:

At their meeting in Waco, Texas, at the end of March 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin committed their governments to a path of cooperation and joint action. We welcome this important development and offer this report to add urgency and specific recommendations to strengthen their efforts.

What is the plan? Simple, erase the borders. The plan is contained in a "Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America" little noticed when President Bush and President Fox created it in March 2005:

And this Security and Prosperity Partnership has it's own .gov website where SPP is explained:

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) was launched in March of 2005 as a trilateral effort to increase security and enhance prosperity among the United States, Canada and Mexico through greater cooperation and information sharing.

This trilateral initiative is premised on our security and our economic prosperity being mutually reinforcing. The SPP recognizes that our three great nations are bound by a shared belief in freedom, economic opportunity, and strong democratic institutions.

The SPP provides the framework to ensure that North America is the safest and best place to live and do business. It includes ambitious security and prosperity programs to keep our borders closed to terrorism yet open to trade.

The SPP builds upon, but is separate from, our long-standing trade and economic relationships. It energizes other aspects of our cooperative relations, such as the protection of our environment, our food supply, and our public health.

All of this is being done without involvement or input from the congress. Human Events has more.

Pastor also proposed the creation of a Permanent Tribunal on Trade and Investment with the view that “a permanent court would permit the accumulation of precedent and lay the groundwork for North American business law.” The intent is for this North American Union Tribunal would have supremacy over the U.S. Supreme Court on issues affecting the North American Union, to prevent U.S. power from “irritating” and retarding the progress of uniting Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. into a new 21st century super-regional governing body.

Robert Pastor also advises the creation of a North American Parliamentary Group to make sure the U.S. Congress does not impede progress in the envisioned North American Union. He has also called for the creation of a North American Customs and Immigration Service which would have authority over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within the Department of Homeland Security.

Pastor’s 2001 book “Toward a North American Community” called for the creation of a North American Union that would perfect the defects Pastor believes limit the progress of the European Union. Much of Pastor’s thinking appears aimed at limiting the power and sovereignty of the United States as we enter this new super-regional entity. Pastor has also called for the creation of a new currency which he has coined the “Amero,” a currency that is proposed to replace the U.S. dollar, the Canadian dollar, and the Mexican peso.

It will certainly be necessary to bypass the congress to implement this since it is something that would be opposed by both the right and the left. The beneficiaries of all of this will be the large multi-national corporations who would be running the show.

Digby

Now if there is a better and smarter blogger than Digby I don't know who it is. She is asking for a little help again this year to help cover the cost of Hullabaloo. If you think as much of her wisdom and incite as I do you might drop by and help out.

But they left out the politics

The editorial board of the New York Times talks about the subprime crisis and tells us how it happened and who's to blame but leaves out why it happened.
A Crisis Long Foretold

An article in The Times on Tuesday by Edmund L. Andrews leaves no doubt that the twin crises of the subprime lending mess — mass foreclosures at one end of the economic scale and a credit squeeze afflicting the financial system — are rooted in the willful failure of federal regulators to heed numerous warnings.

The Federal Reserve is especially blameworthy. Starting as early as 2000, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from another Fed governor, Edward M. Gramlich, about subprime lenders who were luring borrowers into risky loans. Mr. Greenspan’s insistence, to this day, that the Fed did not have the power to rein in such lending is nonsense.

In 1994, Congress passed a law requiring the Fed to regulate all mortgage lending. The language is crystal clear: the Fed “by regulation or order, shall prohibit acts or practices in connection with A) mortgage loans that the board finds to be unfair, deceptive, or designed to evade the provisions of this section; and B) refinancing of mortgage loans that the board finds to be associated with abusive lending practices, or that are otherwise not in the interest of the borrower.”

Yet, the Fed did nothing as junk lending proliferated — including loans that were unsustainable unless house prices rose in perpetuity, riddled with hidden fees and made to borrowers who could not repay. Mr. Greenspan has said that the law was too vague about the meaning of “unfair” and “deceptive” to warrant action.

OK as far as it goes but why did Greenspan choose to do nothing? The answer is politics - the desire to keep the myth of a good economy going to keep the Bush administration and the Republicans in power. As I discussed in Booms are always followed by busts! the so called Bush recovery was never sustainable. Now Alan Greenspan is many things but stupid is not one of them and he had to know that. But he had to keep Bush and the Republicans in power for as long as possible to get the maximize the tax cuts for the wealthy elite. The best way to do that was to keep pumping air into the housing bubble and that's just what he did.

The Health "Care" Industry

Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. ... Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the U.S. Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.
~Marcia Angell,MD

My mother is 85 years old. She has had some cardiovascular difficulties and a history of high cholesterol. About nine months ago her doctor increased her dose of medication to reduce her cholesterol level. Almost at once her health started to deteriorate. The doctor ran multiple tests in an attempt to determine what was wrong with her all of which came up negative. All the time we told him that her problems started when he increased her medication but he continued to insist that the medication could not possibly be responsible. Finally about three months ago he agreed to take her off of the cholesterol medicine and within days her symptoms disappeared. She feels good and walks one or two miles a day, something unheard of a few months ago. This brings us to a must read article at alterNet:
How Scientific Is Modern Medicine?
The following is an excerpt from The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy, by Dana Ullman.

Conventional medicine adherents have consistently asserted that its methods are scientifically verified, and they have ridiculed other methods that are suggested to have therapeutic or curative effects. In fact, conventional physicians have consistently worked to disallow competitors, even viciously attacking those in their own profession who have questioned conventional treatments or provided alternative modalities.

And yet, strangely enough, whatever has been in vogue in conventional medicine in one decade has been declared ineffective, dangerous, and sometimes barbaric in the ensuing decades. Surprisingly, despite this pattern in history, proponents and defenders of "scientific medicine" tend to have little or no humility, continually asserting that today's cure is truly effective.

The good news about conventional medicine and one of its remarkable features for which it should be honored is its history of consistently and repeatedly disproving its own treatments. The fact that only a handful of conventional drugs have survived thirty or more years is strong testament to the fact that conventional medicine is honorable enough to acknowledge its mistakes.

So what is the truth about these "truly effective cures"?

Medical history uncovers an obvious pattern in the discovery and application of drug treatments. Initially, there is great excitement about a new drug's discovery. Research has seemingly proven its safety and efficacy and leads to widespread appreciation for the drug's ability to provide relief. Over time, there are minor concerns about the drug's side effects, until more research and clinical practice uncover more serious concerns about its side effects. Then, more research and clinical experience lead to more serious questions about the drug's real safety and efficacy, until there is general acknowledgment that the drug doesn't work as well as previously assumed, and there is recognition of an increasingly long list of serious side effects over time. However, these problems are not really problems because a new drug emerges, with short-term research that suggests it is a better drug after all. That is, until new research con- firms that it is neither as effective nor as safe as previously thought. And the cycle has continued like this for a century or more.

Like the fashion industry with its regular changes in style, the drug industry makes its profits on the newest drugs rather than on the older ones -- and not just any profits, but sickeningly high profits.

So go re-read the quote at the top of this post. There is a great deal of talk about the failures of the US health care system. The insurance companies that contribute nothing to health care and make a great deal of profit get much of the attention but the problem goes much deeper than that and even a single payer system won't fix it. The entire system is broken. That includes the pharmaceutical industry which is more about marketing and profit than it is about health care. Big pharma spends millions of dollars on TV advertisements for prescription drugs. Now they really don't expect most of these ads to actually sell drugs - it's primarily a way for them to slip some money to the TV networks in exchange for favorable editorial treatment. Big Pharma spends even more to sell physicians on the latest and most profitable cure and they have to make the profits quick because they never know how soon those cures will be shown to be ineffective or even hazardous. It would be easy to blame the physicians but thanks to the capitalist version of socialized medicine, HMO's, they work longer hours for less pay than they used to and they have those huge student loans to pay off.

The article goes on to point out that there is an alternative to the medical industry, homeopathic medicine. It is under constant attack by the "scientific" medical community and that attack is driven by the profit oriented medical industry. There not a huge profit to made selling fish oil and garlic which is what my mother is taking now to replace the Lipitor that was killing her. And of course there is the fight against medical marijuana.

Related Update
No. 1 Book, and It Offers Solutions

But here was the stunner: Vermonters who lived in towns with more aggressive care weren’t healthier. They were just getting more health care.

A bad day for al-Qaeda

If bin-Laden and al-Qaeda really hate us because of our freedoms they had a bad day today.
Democrats Delay a Vote on Immunity for Wiretaps

WASHINGTON — In a setback for the White House, Senate Democrats on Monday put off until at least next month any decision on whether to give legal protection to the phone carriers that helped with the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program.

The Bush administration had pushed for immediate passage of legislation to grant immunity to the phone companies as part of a broader expansion of the N.S.A.’s wiretapping authorities. But that will not happen now.

After daylong debate in the Senate on the wiretapping issue, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, announced at the end of the day that there would not be time to consider the legislation this week as he had hoped. With a dozen competing amendments on the issue and an omnibus spending bill separately awaiting consideration, Mr. Reid said he believed it would be difficult to give the wiretapping issue the close consideration that it deserved this week before the Senate leaves for its Christmas recess.

Of course the real reason it was delayed is this:
Dodd's Filibuster Threat Stalls Wiretap Bill

Senator Chris Dodd won a temporary victory today after his threats of a filibuster forced Democratic leadership to push back consideration of a measure that would grant immunity to telecom companies that were complicit in warrantless surveillance.

Yes, Chris Dodd really does love America. Now the battle is far from over. The spineless Democrats like Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein are still looking for ways to buckle under to White House pressure. This is an excellent example of why it is necessary to get more freedom loving progressive Democrats in the Senate.

We have a chance to do that here in Oregon. Jeff Merkley had this to say today.

PORTLAND—Oregon House Speaker Jeff Merkley, Democrat for U.S. Senate, this evening praised Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Democrats in the Senate who successfully prevented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act overhaul from being brought up for consideration today. The FISA overhaul includes provisions to grant immunity to telecommunications companies who participated in President Bush’s allegedly illegal domestic spying program:
“Senator Dodd, Senator Wyden and the Democrats did the right thing today by delaying action on the FISA overhaul. Only a handful of Senators have been given access to the classified information necessary to make an informed decision on the bill.

“Senator Wyden needs a partner in the U.S. Senate – someone who will stand up with him on issues that are so vital to the American people. Once again, while Senator Wyden is in the trenches fighting to protect our rights, Gordon Smith supported amnesty for telecom giants who turned over the private records of law abiding Americans.

“It is the sworn duty of the President and Members of Congress to uphold the constitution of the United States, including the right to privacy guaranteed by the fourth amendment. If the telecom companies violated the privacy of Americans, we must have a full public airing of the facts.

“It isn’t clear to most members of Congress, much less the American public, why exactly these telecom companies deserve immunity. Did they break the law? Did they help the President spy on Americans? And why should Congress give them a free pass if they violated the constitutional guarantee of privacy for ordinary Americans?

“Those questions absolutely must be answered by this administration before Congress acts on the FISA overhaul.”

Now the Oregonian is trying to convince you that Gordon Smith is a moderate but his voting record shows he's a wingnut who has supported George W. Bush 98% of the time. Gordon Smith may represent the Oregonian but he doesn't represent Oregon. Jeff Merkley will!

McCain Reaching for the Joementum

While browsing The Moderate Voice this morning, I saw David Schraub's article pointing out that Joe Lieberman (I - Conn.) will be endorsing John McCain (R - Az) for the presidency.

Senator Joe Lieberman will finally come clean on Monday, unleashing his inner-Republican to endorse the struggling campaign of Senator John McCain, according to several news reports. It is a bittersweet alliance for both men. Lieberman's move confirms his critics' longtime argument that he is a "Democrat in Name Only," while McCain looks desperate by leaning on backers beyond the G.O.P. base in the homestretch of a partisan primary.

My first thought was to wonder if anyone could really be surprised at this news? Lieberman remains a social progressive on many topics, but his hawkish foreign policy stand, among other issues, brought about the train wreck of his last campaign when his home state's Democrats ousted him, making him technically an "Independent" leaning Democratic. As the linked article points out, though, Lieberman is developing an increasing credibility problem.

During his 2006 reelection campaign, Lieberman emphasized that he would support Democratic candidates in 2008. "I want Democrats to be back in the majority in Washington and elect a Democratic president in 2008," he said during a televised debate in July. Lieberman promptly backtracked after his reelection, announcing this January that he was "open" to supporting a Republican or Democrat for president, depending "on a whole range of issues." By not even waiting to see who the Democrats nominate, now Lieberman is revealing that the issues aren't important to him, either.

I'm with David Schraub on this one. Will it make any difference? Probably not. Lieberman has pretty much taken the dubious place of Zell Miller in 2004. I find it doubtful that many Democratic voters around the country are suddenly going to say, "Oh? Joe likes McCain? Maybe I should give him another look!" I'm not sure what is stopping Lieberman from simply caucusing with the Republicans, or entirely switching his registration to the GOP. Perhaps his many, many statements about remaining loyal to "his party" would make it too embarrassing. Possibly he knows that the GOP wouldn't place him in any position of great power. Aside from his position on the war he doesn't have an agenda that wins any friends among conservatives.

But if you want one early prediction from me, regardless of who wins the presidency in 2008, if the Democrats widen their lead in control of the Senate, look for Joe to lose his committee seats in early 2009. Right now it's such a slim margin that Harry Reid needs Lieberman, at least on paper. If the majority margin goes up, Joe's value goes down and he will likely be receiving a probably well deserved slap that's been a long time coming.

What to do?

I have spent a lot of time discussing the circular firing squad that is the Republican race for the presidential nomination. But what about the Democrats? A few months ago a Giuliani - Clinton race seemed almost inevitable. Well Rudy is sinking and Hillary is sitting a lot lower in the water. Matt Stoller reports that Hillary has a lower approval rating now than she did in 2000. Why is this? There is the irrational hatred of the Clintons on the right but that really hasn't changed any. Hillary is too hawkish and too corporatists for many on the left. Over at The left Coaster eriposte reports on attacks on Hillary from the left, much of it from the Obama campaign although they deny it. So what about Obama? As you know I am no fan of Hillary or Obama. Obama seems to be rising and Frank Rich looks at why.

This movement has its own religious tone. References to faith abound in Mr. Obama’s writings and speeches, as they do in Oprah’s language on her TV show and at his rallies. Five years ago, Christianity Today, the evangelical journal founded by Billy Graham, approvingly described Oprah as “an icon of church-free spirituality” whose convictions “cannot simply be dismissed as superficial civil religion or so much New Age psychobabble.”

“Church free” is the key. This country has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not acceptable religious and moral practice. Instead of handing down tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified, live-and-let-live democracy that is greater than the sum of its countless disparate denominations. The pitch — or, to those who are not fans, the shtick — may be corny. “The audacity of hope” is corny too. But corn is preferable to holier-than-thou, and not just in Iowa.

A majority of Americans remain religious/spiritual but after seven years they don't like the march to theocracy they have witnessed. Church free religion and a church free government is what many want - again.

Now I still see Obama as an empty suit. George W. Bush was an empty suit who surrounded himself with the craziest of the crazies - the neocons and the theocons. An Obama presidency would be determined by who and where he choose to get advice and policy. That at the moment remains an unknown.

So what to do? The most important thing to do is make sure that the House and the Senate are not full of members who will be little but sycophants for the President regardless of who that might be. Here in Oregon we need to make sure that we have a new Senator in 2008. One who will be independent of the President regardless of party. I see Jeff Merkley as the one most likely to make that happen.

Running Scared

Yes that's the name of Jazz's old blog. Jazz was a Republican at the time and he was running from what his party had become. Today it's the people Jazz was running from who are Running Scared. I have already discussed their sudden intolerance of "too much" religion as Mike Huckabee is suddenly a front runner. Now their target is Huckabee's lack of foreign policy experience. Of course neither Rudy or Mitt have any either but at least they are saying the right words. Huckabee isn't.
The Perils of Huckaplomacy

More problematic for his presidential prospects, when Huckabee did speak clearly he often sounded more
like Dennis Kucinich than Dick Cheney, something Republican primary voters are not likely to find appealing.

The Bush administration is guilty of a "bunker mentality," said Huckabee. The war in Iraq has "distracted" the administration from pursuing al Qaeda. Although Iran wanted better relations with the United States, he averred, "when President Bush included Iran in the axis of evil, everything went downhill pretty fast." And according to Huckabee, it was not Saddam Hussein but "the U.S. occupation" that "destroyed Iraq politically, economically, and socially." (Huckabee's remarks won praise as "nuanced and comprehensive" from the host of the event, a senior adviser on Bill Clinton's National Security Council.)

In the 11 weeks since that speech, Huckabee has made several other statements about foreign policy in a Huckabee administration. He favors a comprehensive ban on the use of harsh interrogation techniques to extract information from terrorists, and he has urged the Bush administration to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. And as the writers at the Powerline blog have pointed out, Huckabee seems to believe the best foreign policy is one guided by the Golden Rule--"you treat others the way you'd like to be treated"--and mutual respect, "showing the kind of respect that other nations would want and deserve."

Now all of this of course blaspheme to the corporate elite and neocon wings of the Republican party. As Kevin Drum points out:

But then along comes Huckabee, and guess what? He's the real deal. Not a guy like George Bush or Ronald Reagan, who talks a soothing game to the snake handlers but then turns around and spends his actual political capital on tax cuts, foreign wars, and deregulating big corporations. Huckabee, it turns out, isn't just giving lip service to evangelicals, he actually believes all that stuff. Among other things, he believes in creationism (really believes), once proposed that AIDS patients should be quarantined, appears to share the traditional evangelical view that Mormonism is a cult, and says (in public!) that homosexuality is sinful. And that's without seeing the text of any of his old sermons, which he (probably wisely) refuses to let the press lay eyes on.

I think this brand of yahooism puts off mainstream urban conservatives every bit as much as it does mainstream urban liberals. They're afraid that this time, it's not just a line of patter to keep the yokels in line.

The party needed the "yokels" to win and tolerated the nonsense as long as it didn't threaten to actually go anywhere. But now one of the Republican's front runners actually believes this stuff. He is also familiar with what Jesus actually said and thinks it might be a good idea to apply it to foreign policy. That makes him almost sound like one of those dreaded "liberals". Yes the Republican party elites are Running Scared.

Update

Digby has some thoughts worth reading