Category: Politics

How reading fellow Reed College graduate Barbara Ehrenreich’s work can get you sent to Gitmo for seven years.

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the offending article – called How To Build An H-Bomb – was first published in a US satirical magazine and later placed on a series of websites.

Written by Barbara Ehrenreich, the publication’s food editor, Rolling Stone journalist Peter Biskind and scientist Michio Kaku, it claims that a nuclear weapon can be made ‘using a bicycle pump’ and with liquid uranium ‘poured into a bucket and swung round’.

Despite its clear satirical bent, the story led the CIA to accuse 30-year-old Mohamed, a caretaker, of plotting a dirty bomb attack, before subjecting him to its ‘extraordinary rendition programme’.

Ehrenreich’s take.

Mark Leibovich of The New York Times has discovered the latest phenomenon:

It seems that “socialist” has supplanted “liberal” as the go-to slur among much of a conservative world confronting a one-two-three punch of bank bailouts, budget blowouts and stimulus bills. Right-leaning bloggers and talk radio hosts are wearing out the brickbat. Senate and House Republicans have been tripping over their podiums to invoke it. The S-bomb has become as surefire a red-meat line at conservative gatherings as “Clinton” was in the 1990s and “Pelosi” is today.

I hate to burst Mr. Leibovich’s bubble, but Republicans calling anything that Herbert Hoover wouldn’t have approved of “socialist” is something they’ve never stopped harping on. Leibovich says “the socialist bogey-mantra has made a full-scale return after a long stretch of relative dormancy,” but as it was in full flare during the 2004 election, with people like then-Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) decrying billionaire-by-marriage Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) as “advocating socialism within the United States and appeasement overseas” during a Bush/Cheney campaign press phone call (according to The Los Angeles Times), the reality is it never really went away. If Kerry had won, you can be sure the charge that he and the rest of the Democrats were socialists (I wish!) would have continued. Consider, for instance, this little gem from Tom Nugent at National Review Online, published just after Bush beat Kerry:

Capitalism Beats Socialism, Once Again

Here comes the bull market.

When Jackie Gleason played the character of Joe the Bartender, one of his famous lines was, “Mmmmmmm, how sweet it is!” For Republicans, the outcome of the 2004 national election couldn’t be any sweeter. Same for investors. The bull market in stocks is now likely to resume, and it should sustain for some time to come.

Why? Once again, capitalism triumphed over socialism.

The socialist crowd in America never gets it and never will: Tax-rate cuts are good for all Americans. The godfather of tax-rate cuts — Arthur Laffer — will tell you that tax-rate cuts are not meant for rich people; they are meant to increase the incentive for everyone to produce, invest, and save. Such an incentive applies to all human beings, including those who are not rich but want to be rich.

Seriously, just Google “‘John Kerry’ socialist”, and between articles in socialist publications discussing the 2004 election (and usually with some unkind words about Kerry), you’ll find much along the same line, including criticisms of Kerry for singing Woody Guthrie’s (socialist) anthem “This Land Is Your Land” and denunciations of Kerry for his support from the Socialist Prime Minister of Spain Jose Luis Zapatero.

It’s been there all along. Just because people like Mr. Leibovich haven’t noticed it before doesn’t make it new.

Of course, there are plenty of Democrats who quake at the thought of socialists under their beds, too.

From The New York Times:

The Sam Adams Project

AUSTIN — The Sam Adams Alliance, a nonprofit conservative organization, has started an ambitious project this year to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues.

Yeah, I don’t know if I’d want to feathering my conservative nest with the down of that particular Father of the Nation this year.

Via scout prime at First Draft, Attaturk, and Gawker, John McCain tweets that the #5 pork item in the stimulus bill is “$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi”.

#5. $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) February 27, 2009

Huh. He said “beaver.”

Funny that he should bring that up, considering the GOP’s great efforts in creating Our Nation’s Greatest Urban Wetland (aka New Orleans). Because, y’know, one of the things beavers (and their cousin the nutria) do is dig holes. They dig holes in things like earthen levees which can weaken the levees in flood conditions.

Then, of course, they do build dams (PDF):

Beaver populations have increased in recent years due to a poor fur market and the fact that they have few natural predators. Beaver management in the Southeast consists mainly of controlling beaver densities. In Mississippi, beaver damage is estimated at $3 to $5 million annually. Beaver population monitoring and management is the foundation for all other operations on the Delta National Forest. Without it, unacceptable economic and ecological losses occur.

…

In 1994, over 14,000 acres (or nearly one-fourth) of the Delta National Forest were under beaver-impounded water. This happened during a time of year when natural floods do not occur. Trees flooded during the growing season suffered a loss of growth. Even species adapted to periodic high water can die if their root systems remain under water for one or more growing seasons. Timber growth loss was estimated at over 5 million board feet annually. Over 4,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest died due to the inundation. Uncontrolled beaver populations plagued the forest to the point that flooding spread onto adjacent private lands. Campers had to contend with muddy conditions in campsites, on trails and forest roads.

Beaver management began on the Delta National Forest in 1995 when the beaver population was at a higher than normal level. Management includes removing dams, clearing culverts, constructing and maintaining beaver exclusion devices, and trapping and killing beavers.

Republicans probably wouldn’t have a problem with “beaver management” if they were shooting beavers from planes.

I watched Street Fight last night, a documentary about the 2002 Newark, New Jersey mayoral race between four-term incumbent Sharpe James and 32-year-old city councilman Cory Booker, and there was a point at which the story reminded me of Portland’s current mayoral kerfuffle.

A month or two before the election, police raided Sights — a Newark strip club — found a 16-year-old girl working there, charged the owner with running a brothel, and picked up Booker’s chief of staff standing in the line to enter the club. Although he wasn’t actually arrested, Jermaine James (no relation to the mayor), and his association to Booker were the highlighted items in the press release on the raid from the Newark Police Department.

Mayor James went on the high moral offensive, embellishing the actual events and attacking Booker:

In a speech to mark the beginning of his re-election campaign two weeks ago, Mr. James veered from his prepared text to obliquely criticize Mr. Booker for not taking action against the aide who was in line at the club. “If any member of my staff frequents a place of prostitution and narcotics that’s illegal in the city of Newark, where 14-year-olds are doing live sex acts, they don’t even have to touch them; I’m still going to fire them,” he said indignantly with the governor and a coterie of elected officials at his side.

As a side note, that governor was named Jim McGreevey.

Then, two weeks after James’s fusillade, the owner of the club and four other current and former employees disclosed that Mayor James himself had spent an hour in the club a couple of years earlier.

In an interview Monday, Mr. Wilson, the owner, said the mayor had visited the club in May or June of 2000, the same night his son, John James, was there. The mayor, however, arrived with a man Mr. Wilson said appeared to be a bodyguard. “The first time he came, he didn’t hide it,” said Mr. Wilson. “He came in, shook hands with staff and members who recognized him.” Mr. Wilson recalled that when he told Mr. James that his son had been there earlier, the mayor laughed and said, ‘Oh, he likes these places.'”

The mayor, Mr. Wilson and others say, returned a few weeks later, but left after learning that Mr. Wilson was not working that evening.

Martin Mathis, 34, the club’s former security chief, said the mayor sat and drank a soda as several women approached. “He was definitely looking at the women that were there,” said Mr. Mathis, who now works as a medical technician in East Orange. “The girls were coming over; they were just talking to him, touching him, although I don’t think it was in a sexual manner.”

The manager, David E. L. Melvin, 31, of Jersey City, said other patrons seemed honored by his presence. “He was just there like a regular meet-and-greet situation,” he said.

After that revelation, the mayor refused to deny that he had ever visited Sights, nor did he offer to step down after having raked Booker over the coals for not firing his chief of staff (the city’s business administrator determined that the other James had done nothing to violate rules of conduct).

To me that’s the crux of the Adams story. Sanctimonious, bald-faced lying and deceit. A willingness to not only lie in the face of facts that any number of people know to be true, but to do so by wrapping oneself in a sheep’s clothing of purity and innocence. Some of the interviewees in Street Fight exclaim their disbelief that the mayor would be so stupid as to make a case out of Booker’s aide’s detention at the strip club, but then again, James went on to win the election with 53% of the vote.

James didn’t run for mayor in 2006 (Booker took 72% of the vote). He was sentenced to 27 months in prison in July 2008 after being convicted on five counts of fraud by a federal jury, for selling city property at bargain prices to a former girlfriend who sold them for a 1200% profit.

It’s not my normal time of the year to run this, but if middle-of-the-road Democrats like Sen. Claire McCaskill are taking up limits to executive pay to institutions taking taxpayer bailout dollars (something socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed months ago), then who knows when they’re be dusting off this gem from Huey Long’s autobiography Every Man a King:

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE MADDENED FORTUNE HOLDERS AND THEIR
INFURIATED PUBLIC PRESS!

The increasing fury with which I have been and am to be, assailed by reason of the fight and growth of support for limiting the size of fortunes can only be explained by the madness which human nature attaches to the holders of accumulated wealth.

What I have proposed is:—

THE LONG PLAN

1. A capital levy tax on the property owned by any one person of 1% of all over $1,000,000 [dp: $14,275,000 in 2005 dollars]; 2% of all over $2,000,000 [$28,550,000] etc., until, when it reaches fortunes of over $10,000,000 [$145,750,000], the government takes all above that figure; which means a limit on the size of any one man’s fortune to something like $50,000,000 [$728,750,000]—the balance to go to the government to spread out in its work among all the people.

2. An inheritance tax which does not allow one man to make more than $5,000,000 [$71,375,000] in a lifetime without working for it, all over that amount to go to the government to be spread among the people for its work.

3. An income tax which does not allow any one man to make more than $1,000,000 [$14,275,000] in one year, exclusive of taxes, the balance to go to the United States for general work among the people.

The forgoing program means all taxes paid by the fortune holders at the top and none by the people at the bottom; the spreading of wealth among all the people and the breaking up of a system of Lords and Slaves in our economic life. It allows the millionaires to have, however, more than they can use for any luxury they can enjoy on earth. But, with such limits, all else can survive.

That the public press should regard my plan and effort as a calamity and me as a menace is no more than should be expected, gauged in the light of past events. According to Ridpath, the eminent historian:

“The ruling classes always possess the means of information and the processes by which it is distributed. The newspaper of modern times belongs to the upper man. The under man has no voice; or if, having a voice, his cry is lost like a shout in the desert. Capital, in the places of power, seizes upon the organs of public utterance, and howls the humble down the wind. Lying and misrepresentation are the natural weapons of those who maintain an existing vice and gather the usufruct of crime.”

—Ridpath’s History of the World, Page 410.

In 1932, the vote for my resolution showed possibly a half dozen other Senators back of it. It grew in the last Congress to nearly twenty Senators. Such growth through one other year will mean the success of a venture, the completion of everything I have undertaken,—the time when I can and will retire from the stress and fury of public life, maybe as my forties begin,—a contemplation so serene as to appear impossible.

That day will reflect credit on the States whose Senators took the early lead to spread the wealth of the land among all the people.

Then no tear dimmed eyes of a small child will be lifted into the saddened face of a father or mother unable to give it the necessities required by its soul and body for life; then the powerful will be rebuked in the sight of man for holding what they cannot consume, but which is craved to sustain humanity; the food of the land will feed, the raiment clothe, and the houses shelter all the people; the powerful will be elated by the well being of all, rather than through their greed.

Then those of us who have pursued that phantom of Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Theodore Roosevelt and Bryan may hear wafted from their lips in Valhalla:

EVERY MAN A KING

Via Dennis Perrin, from the long-ago late-night comedy show “Fridays,” a bit of nostalgia from the bleak period between Ronald Reagan’s election and inauguration (surpassed only by the even bleaker period of his presidency).

Everyone who’s claimed that the current economic crisis couldn’t have been predicted (e.g. most recently, Dick Cheney) should be sat down with a copy of Michael Moore’s The Big One.

Filmed during a Moore book tour that spanned the 1996 presidential general election (Bill Clinton v. Bob Dole) and released in 1998, The Big One follows Moore from city to city, where he meets with a variety of front-door security officers and PR flaks at large corporations, Garrison Keillor and Studs Terkel, and workers from plants that have announced closures.

It was a period when the economy was ramping up to the Internet boom, but it was also an era of massive nationwide layoffs for workers in trade and labor industries (something that Moore had documented a decade earlier, on a smaller scale, in Roger & Me). Despite the cheery numbers on job creation from the Clinton administration, we were already living in an America where many people worked more than a single job in order to get by, and as many studies have pointed out, a lot of the jobs that were created in Clinton’s second term paid a fraction of the salaries of the jobs that were lost. Then, of course, there were the Bush(2) years.

The seeds of the current economic collapse do indeed go back that far (and farther). Maybe it was just easier to see the squeeze taking place from the bottom than it was from the top.

Please, Democrats, for a real change, just listen to George McGovern on foreign policy for once:

As you settle into the Oval Office, Mr. President, may I offer a suggestion? Please do not try to put Afghanistan aright with the U.S. military. To send our troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan would be a near-perfect example of going from the frying pan into the fire. There is reason to believe some of our top military commanders privately share this view. And so does a broad and growing swath of your party and your supporters.

True, the United States is the world’s greatest power — but so was the British Empire a century ago when it tried to pacify the warlords and tribes of Afghanistan, only to be forced out after excruciating losses. For that matter, the Soviet Union was also a superpower when it poured some 100,000 troops into Afghanistan in 1979. They limped home, broken and defeated, a decade later, having helped pave the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams was set to give a speech on ethics at PSU on Friday, but the mentor-sex kerfuffle led him to cancel. The quote from PSU according to Willamette Week:

“He just pulled out,” PSU spokesman Scott Gallagher says.

Ouch. My sides hurt.

Seriously, though, one of the commenters had an exceptionally good point, which, of course, Adams doesn’t appear to have through of on his own:

caveman writes on Jan 21st, 2009 5:24pm

you know, if the guy had integrity and really was sorry he would re-write his ethics speech to cover the current situation and give it anyway. He missed a real opportunity to cover “ethics and social responsibility” in a more meaningful way.