Category: Politics

From “The Daily Show”, 5 May 2009:

FAREED ZAKARIA: I have some friends in Pakistan who used to always denounce the American drone attacks, you know these Predator strikes on the al-Qaeda, and in the last month what I’ve noticed is they’re all in favor of them.

JON STEWART: Really? So now they’re afraid.

ZAKARIA: Yeah, yeah. They say that: “You know what? If that’s the only thing that’ll work, kill those guys.”

STEWART: Wow. You know what this is a perfect time for? India to attack.

AUDIENCE CHEERS

Of course, the problem with the Predator attacks (and really any aerial bombardment strategy back through WWII) has been the number of innocent civilians killed and maimed as a reult of poor intelligence, uncontrolled munitions, or simply bad judgment. It’s not, as Zakaria implies, simply a matter of national soverignty. Of course, if you scare people enough, I suppose they’ll approve of their government doing anything to “protect” them, including torture.

Don’t you know we got smart bombs,

It’s a good thing that our bombs are clever.

Don’t you know that the smart bombs are so clever,

They only kill bad people, now

Don’t you know though our kids are dumb,

We got smart bombs, what a joyous thing, now

Here we go so let’s drink a toast,

To those clever bombs, and the men who built them

There they go now, there go all my friends

There they go now, marching off to war again

Smiling proudly, with their heads in the clouds

Don’t you know this is better than any video friend,

It’s an action movie

Here we go watch the bad guys get their butts kicked

Really makes me feel good.

Here we go watching CNN, the adrenaline rushes through my veins now

Don’t you know it’s a feel good show, electronic bliss

It’s a video, video…

Boingo, “War Again,” Boingo

[UPDATE] And then there’s this:

The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed yesterday that “dozens of people, including women and children,” were killed in U.S. air strikes on villages in Western Afghanistan Monday night.

You might think something like this would weigh heavily on President Obama’s heart.

Yes, it’s a war he inherited from George W. Bush, but it’s one he has ardently advanced as his own. Air strikes in Afghanistan — along with missiles fired from drones in Pakistan — have continued to be a staple of the American approach to the region. And now, under his command, the U.S. military appears to have made a tragic mistake.

So far, however, Obama’s public response has been muted. This could be because the military is refusing to confirm the reports from the ground.

But it makes me wonder: Have we all, including Obama, gotten so desensitized to the violent death of civilians at our hands, ostensibly in the name of fighting terror? Is this another tragic Bush legacy?

I was just out for a walk along SE Belmont St. and posters for the event above with a former Californian Green Party candidate for US Senate as the speaker are up on almost every telephone pole in the neighborhood with MARX IS BACK in big, black, block letters.

Now, I’m as much of a fan of socialism as the next guy, but from a marketing standpoint I have to question whether this isn’t just a bit over the top. Perhaps a more oblique approach to reintroducing socialism into public discourse as something other than a fearmonger’s touchstone might be more helpful.

Then again, who am I to say anything?

The Oregonian has a knack for making non-stories about Oregon Senators into front page news, and the latest puff piece to come off the assembly line is Sunday’s article by Charles Pope about how the voluble Ron Wyden supposedly keeps his lip zipped about his work on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where he is the third-ranking Democrat.

Lost in the blizzard [of talk about health care, county payments, town halls] is this significant fact: Arguably Wyden’s most important contribution to the nation as a U.S. senator comes from his work on the Senate Intelligence Committee, a panel with territory that is sprawling, crucial and controversial, but whose members are prohibited from discussing most of their work in public.

Among the intelligence-related accomplishments Wyden is credited with — in a piece that buys into the supposition that everything about the committee is so secret that it can’t be discussed even when an administration is breaking the law and defying Congress rendering it effectively null — is Wyden’s participation in the effort to shut down the Total Information Awareness program proposed by former Iran-contra felon John Poindexter. That effort, however wasn’t initiated by Wyden or any other member of the Intellignce committee. And elements of the program continued to be developed under different rubrics. The article also lists a couple of failed efforts, including the attempt to restrict the CIA from using torture.

What made me laugh, though, was the reporter’s apparent lack of follow-up on a Wyden “win.”

And he led the successful effort to defeat the nomination of John Rizzo to be the CIA’s general counsel. Wyden opposed Rizzo after he refused to repudiate a memo that defined torture as any action that causes organ failure.

Long-time readers may remember back in August of 2007, when Wyden put a hold on Rizzo and he got ink from Jane Mayer at The New Yorker for questioning whether there had been “adequate legal oversight” of CIA techniques. The problem then was that Rizzo had been — according to the International Herald Tribune — “acting general counsel off and on for most of the past six years.” In other words, most of the Bush administration by that point.

I wrote Wyden’s office at the time to ask what would happen if Rizzo didn’t get his confirmation, he replied that he was pleased the nomination had been withdrawn. That, of course, was a month or two before news of the destruction of the recordings that the CIA had of interrogations that potentially showed torture, about which the New York Times had to say this:

In describing the decision to destroy the tapes, current and former officials said John A. Rizzo, the agency’s top lawyer at the time, was not asked for final approval before the tapes were destroyed, although Mr. Rizzo had been involved in discussions for two years about the tapes.

Despite the hold on his nomination and its withdrawal, John Rizzo served out the remaining year and a half of the Bush administration as the acting general counsel of the CIA.

As a matter of fact, according to the CIA’s web site, he’s still there.

Just got my first quarter statements from my self-employment retirement plans. They have funny names like: Growth Fund of America, Capital World Growth and Income Fund, and Income Fund of America. But there seems to have been a radical redefinition of the words “growth” and “income” lately, because the one-quarter change in value of each fund is -4.15%, -11.0%, and -9.53%, respectively.

Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg, projecting his own ignorance and lack of imagination onto the rest of the world:

Before 2001, few Middle East scholars worried that the United States was vulnerable to a major terrorist attack.

Really? Aside from the fact that the Middle East isn’t the only potential source of terrorism (see, for instance, Japan’s 1995 sarin gas attacks; the 1983 hotel bombing and mass poisonings in Oregon by followers of an Indian guru; many acts of terrorism in Europe by Irish, Italian, and German groups throughout the 1970s and 1980s; oh, and the 168 people killed in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh) did Weisberg assume his “Middle East scholars” somehow forget the 1993 bombing of the same New York City complex destroyed on September 11, 2001? Sure, it wasn’t “major” compared to 9/11, but that wasn’t for lack of trying.

Watched the short documentary Without the King, about the kingdom of Swaziland the other night. I’m eagerly awaiting the verdict of one of my cousins, who spent time there as a Peace Corps worker. The film’s essentially a series of interviews, largely with members of the Swazi royal family, including King Mswati III, his first wife Queen LaMbikiza, and the king’s eldest child Princess Sikhanyiso, who at the time the story begins is just about to set off for Biola University, a Bible college in Southern California. The other interviewees include members of various local aid organizations and inhabitants of the shantytowns where the average Swazi lives on sixty-odd cents a day and many rely on food from the UN’s World Food Programme. The king of the nation of 1.1 million people, on the other hand, lives in a palace and has a private jet. And did I mention that Swaziland has the world’s highest incidence of AIDS? The film reports one in two Swazis are infected with the virus, other reports say that’s only one in four, but it’s at the top of the charts by anyone’s measure (the rate of infection in the US stated in the film is nearly 1/70th that of Swaziland).

Crazy stuff.

But maybe not as crazy as some of the comments left on the review of the movie by a Toronto film blogger.

Why do the international media and community take one side? And why can’t these organizations take time to listen to both sides and also read the constitution of Swaziland ? And last but not least, why can’t they take time to see for themselves who the majority of Swazi citizens really support? Do the majority of Swazi citizens support the banned political parties or do they support the current Tinkhundla system of governance?

Alternatively, one might ask, since the current system of government bans all political parties (and has done so since well before the current king took his place), do the citizens have any choice about whether they support them or the current system?

Tunisian pilot who prayed as his plane went down jailed in Italy

A pilot accused of praying when he should have been taking emergency measures to avoid a crash in which 16 people died has been sentenced to 10 years in jail by an Italian court.

Captain Chafik Gharby was at the controls of a plane belonging to the Tunisian charter airline Tuninter that crashed in the sea off the coast of Sicily four years ago. The 23 survivors were left swimming for their lives, some clinging to a piece of the fuselage that stayed afloat after the turbo-prop aircraft broke up on impact.

I wish I could say that it was me who immediately thought of this clip from the Upright Citizens Brigade TV show, but it was Barbara, when I read the story to her from the paper this morning.

On a very related note, if you want a good movie about how the laxity of government enforcement in an industry can cause disaster, check out the Argentinean film Whisky Romeo Zulu, which I saw last night. It’s the story of a fatal airliner crash which ended in the convictions of a number of company officials, as well as members of the military who oversaw (or were supposed to oversee) safety enforcement and training.

From a New York Times article (in the “Business” section, oddly enough) about the operators of the Preadator and Reaper drone planes used over Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan):

At other times, the crews monitor insurgent compounds and watch over troops in battle. “When you’re on the radio with a guy on the ground, and he is out of breath and you can hear the weapons fire in the background, you are every bit as engaged as if you were actually there,” Major Morrison said.

I wonder if they asked the guys on the ground what they thought about that.

Everyone wants into the fun. Supposedly, an Iranian drone was shot down in Iraqi territory by US planes in February.

From MarketWatch.com’s comments section on an article about The Daily Show’s castigation of CNBC, commenter guss66, responds to another comment alleging the media tends conservative:

99% of media is right-wing? You’re the bafoon.

Over at Jack Bogdanski’s blog, he resurrects a video from a simpler time in Portland’s civic history. Last fall, to be precise, after Sam Adams had locked up the mayoral race, and was celebrating with fellow City Commissioner Randy Leonard and singer/reality-show personality Storm Large at the Candidates Gone Wild party:

Decent people, I warn you: it’s not safe for work. Indeed, it’s not even safe to look at if you just want to keep living here.

I have no problems (as many of the commenters at Jack Bog’s do) with the language or crudity of the video (although I don’t find those things funny in and of themselves) but what’s amazing about it to me is just how flatly unfunny the whole thing is.

The idea that public officials have to maintain some false sense of “dignity” is also a crock so far as I’m concerned, but you’d hope that they’d at least have the good sense to not participate in something that makes them (i.e. Randy Leonard) seem mentally deficient. (Couldn’t the “writer” come up with some synonyms for “hussy”?) Of course, Adams may have been in the restroom when the good sense was being passed out.

With all of the truly talented people in this town, you’d think that they could have come up with someone to expunge this line from the credits: “Written by Storm Large”.

Though it does all set one to speculating about next fall’s Candidates Gone Wild….