McCain's America: Not so Current but Right Anyway

"I was concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days. One was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia. Apparently that is in reaction to the Czech's agreement with us concerning missile defense, and again some of the Russian now announcement they are now retargeting new targets, something they abandoned at the end of the Cold War, is also a concern." John McCain, speaking on July 14, 2008.

PRESS RELEASE
for immediate distribution

From: John McCain for President Committee
Re: Confronting the Soviet Union
Date: July 15, 2008

My friends, I want to expand and amplify some of my comments yesterday about the aggressive moves taken by the Soviet Union against some of its satellite states in the Warsaw Pact, including Czechoslovakia. The promise of the Prague Spring is now in jeopardy, and what I fear most of all is a domino effect where the democratic movements in these countries behind the Iron Curtain are nipped in the bud.

For these reasons, I have launched a new initiative to make sure that East Germany does not also come under the crushing heel of a Soviet crackdown. Planes will fly around the clock into the American Zone in West Berlin, bringing natural gas, coal and food to this island of democracy so that the Russians do not succeed in their plan to starve the West Berliners into submission. I will call this program the "Berlin Airlift" and it will continue until we win, for unlike my opponent, I know how to win wars, and this war is no exception.

We should take heart from the example set by President Tito in Yugoslavia. He has continued his brave stance of open defiance of the Soviet colossus and has held his country together, with all its different ethnic groups and religions, united in their belief that the tyranny of the U.S.S.R. must be resisted.

Premier Kruschev may believe that there are those in the West that he can bury simply by a display of force, as he has done recently with his targeting of cities in Czechoslovakia, a nation straining to resist fracturing along ethnic lines and to maintain cohesion through all its historic ups and downs. As President, I would summon the Soviet envoy Andrei Gromyko to the White House and make it plain to him that thermonuclear war is not a one-way street, and that our B-52s, circling at or near their fail-safe points, simply await the go-code to even the score.

There are those who will say, and I can probably include my opponent in their number, that this bold statement of America's strength is warmongering and out-of-date in an interconnected world. Yet I know I will have the full support of my Secretary of War and of the combined strength of the League of Nations in making clear to the Russian Bear that they cannot tread on us.

My friends, calls to action such as "Remember the Maine!" and "54-40 or Fight!" are not, to me, just empty slogans; they are recent news releases, as current in their relevance as our need, finally, to break the back of Japanese resistance by an assault on Okinawa in our pursuit of final victory.

Advantages of a McCain Presidency

UPDATED: Don't miss the comment; it's funnier than my post.

I note today that some national polls show Barack Obama's previous 15 point lead over John McCain has shrunk to about 3 points, within the statistical margin of error. Thus, although 90% (± 3%) of the American populace will not understand the concept, this means that statistically the race is now a dead heat. Translated further, this means that the twitchy, confused, borderline-insane, dull-witted senior senator from Arizona with a penchant for making nuclear war jokes has an even chance of becoming the next President of the United States.

While suicidally depressing at first glance, there are always advantages to any development on the American political scene. For those who say I sometimes strike too bitter a note in these posts, I offer this list of advantages to a McCain presidency:

#1: Continuity of shittiness in government: One very confusing recurrent theme in American politics has been the periodic interruption of extremely incompetent and promiscuously over-spending military juntas run by Republican presidents by short spasms of competence and sanity. Thus, the Reagan/Bush years of colossal government debt leading to a deep recession were stopped short, just as they were about to crash the American system, by the presidency of Bill Clinton. By using concepts known as "intelligent management" and "national priorities," Clinton's team reduced defense spending, brought the budget under control, created jobs and ushered in a period of prosperity. Disoriented, the American electorate panicked and voted for George W. Bush in huge numbers, bringing back a reign of idiotic government, unnecessary wars, gigantic deficits, unemployment, exploding defense spending and near collapse of the financial system. In return, the American Right received a veto on the stem cell research bill, thus sparing countless (well, they're easy to count, actually, because they're so few) murder victims and various negative remarks from the president about gay marriage. Given this huge head start by GWB, I think McCain will be able simply to finish us off, the lethal injection of incompetence the country has been waiting for, thus ending the boom/bust cycle and era of false hope.

#2 Eclipse of America as the World's Biggest Polluter: As President Bush left the recent G-8 meeting, he jauntily said goodbye "from the world's biggest polluter," shocking Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain and Nikolaus Sarkozy of France. Apparently, these two spoilsports don't think destruction of the Earth as a habitat suitable for humanity is all that funny, but maybe they don't get that George's somewhat nervous sense of humor is part of what makes him "special." Our ability to pollute, however, depends in large part on our ability to run an economy, which in turn depends on our ability to import oil. Since we're near the breaking point on that capability, during the McCain presidency we can expect America to fall to a status somewhere around Zimbabwe in terms of environmental impact. Leading to:

#3 Relaxation of America's Self-Image from High Maintenance to Low Maintenance: At some point shortly after McCain's inauguration, it's going to dawn on Americans, however inchoately, from the tract homes of Tustin, California to the trailer parks of Bullhead City to the sprawling megalopolis of Dallas/Fort Worth to the rusting industrial ghost towns of the Midwest and Great Lakes to the cratering financial markets of Manhattan's Wall Street, that electing imbeciles as President of a country such as this, election after election, also perforce says something about the quality of the electorate, which is to say, the American people themselves. While it is psychologically comforting to blame the incumbent dimwit for everything going wrong, a people so uneducated, uninformed, distracted, and maybe just so drunk as to keep putting up large numbers for such cretins on election day has a lot to answer for. When this sinks in, when we realize that although we're in a very, very deep hole, we nevertheless keep hiring excavators to get us out of it, we may come to terms with one of the most disabling of all American delusions, the idea we're "unique" and "exceptional," which is the narcissistic trait that has motivated our tendency to invade other countries and to fix everything so everyone can be just like us. Which has led to our (a) excessive militarization, (b) social backwardness and (c) bankruptcy.

After McCain (just a couple of years of McCain, in fact), we simply will not have the wherewithal to carry on our quixotic and messianic missions. Which will be a good thing, although it will be very painful getting there. So you see - 'tis an ill wind indeed which blows no one any good.

The Banality of Idiocy

For a couple of minutes there yesterday, I watched President Bush address the nation on the most current, desperate financial crisis in America, the implosion of the two big government-chartered mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie & Freddie sound like a couple of lovable losers in a British sitcom, but they're actually a couple of unlovable losers in the American subprime fiasco. They once played a starring role in Bush's "ownership society," but that was then. They're lucky if they can get a cameo spot in an infomercial now.

I didn't switch Bush off; he only talked for a couple of minutes. He had just met, or at least said he had, with that genial banker-about-town Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury. I've looked but I've been unable to find a transcript of the entirety of Bush's remarks, brief though they were. Here's what was available on the White House website:

"I want to thank you all very much for your briefing. These are tough economic times for the American citizens. There is a way forward to help relieve some of the pressure on their pocketbooks. And I'm looking forward to seeing -- watching this Congress respond in a positive way."

That is indeed the essence of his remarks, although it lacks some of the defining quality of Bush commentary. What I like to call the "descriptive meaningless." We've all heard examples of it. While in China at a G-8 summit, Bush reportedly told the President of China that China and Russia were "big countries." I don't see how any honest person could disagree with Bush's statement. Or why the President of China would need to be told. In his verbatim remarks this morning, Bush did the following:

1. Confirmed that he had just met with Paulson.
2. Stated that Paulson and his team (Bernanke, et al.) were "working the problem very hard" with Fannie & Freddie.
3. Confirmed that Fannie and Freddie were "important."
4. Said what's indicated up above, that these were "tough economic times."
5. Congratulated Secretary Paulson on sending out a lot of stimulus checks, and cited the number of checks, which Paulson must have just told him (in order to demonstrate Paulson was trying to do something to keep the country from unraveling completely.) Bush said consumers were spending this money.
5. Cited the cost of oil as one of the reasons for our troubles, and said the high price was caused by supply and demand.
6. Said that Congress should not go home for the August break until we're drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska's wild life reserve.

He then thanked us all for coming.

It's as if Bush, upon entering a room, would feel the need to name the furniture. Wrinkling his brow and squinting fiercely with those small eyes, Bush looks around the parlor: "That's a couch," he says. "There's some chairs there, by that table, and then there's the table itself. On the floor, down below us, is a rug, which covers the floor. Then there's some lamps, on these, which are end tables. Thank you all for coming out."

Somewhere along the way, Bush was told by one of his image-creators that he needs to stay away from anything remotely abstract, such as using words to express intellectual concepts. Thus, he is reduced to naming the actual events which have just occurred and applying a generic, uninformative adjective to (a) the event and (b) the subject, if any, which was discussed at the event. Let' see how these instructions are actually put into play by the bozo running our government:

Paulson came by to talk to Bush, and Bush confirmed that he did. He thanked his Secretary of the Treasury for telling him about how bad things are in America. Then he said the Secretary had sent out a lot of checks, and recited the number. Then he said the Secretary and the Fed Chairman were working on the problem "very hard." Then he said the two government-backed mortgage companies were "important."

That actually concluded the "briefing." Bush, however, being a mean and vindictive little man who absolutely hates the widespread, completely accurate perception that he's grossly incompetent and has driven the country into an economic ditch, could not resist blaming things on the "Democrat" Congress. Thus, he wanted Americans to know, the ones enduring the "tough economic times" which Bush has been absolutely incapable of alleviating, that the "pressure on their pocketbooks" could be relieved by a "way forward," namely, lifting the ban on drilling off American coasts and in the ANWR. Bush did not mention that the most optimistic estimates of the effect of this effort would not be felt until about 2018, at which point the "pressure on American pocketbooks" would presumably have reached 5,000 lbs. per square inch. And even then, the oil production would have a marginal effect on the price of gasoline in that distant future, when it might cost $1,000 to fill up the family Tercel.

So again, to sum up, because I'm trying to get a handle on this guy: Bush had just been informed that a couple of major pillars in the American financial structure had crumbled and collapsed, rotted out by worthless loans and overwhelming liabilities. Presumably, Paulson had also told him that IndyMac Bank would be seized later that day by federal regulators to stop a bank run (one of many were going to be seeing over the next few months). The Dow Jones is slightly above 11,000, which measured against the Dow Bush inherited, minus the government's own lala-land inflation figure, means it's worth 15% less than when he took the oath in 2001. The euro is just shy of $1.60 American. Oil is at an all-time high, touching $146/bbl at one point on Friday. When the federal budget deficit is honestly tabulated at the end of the year (refusing to count the Social Security surplus as part of general revenue, in other words), and if the "stimulus [bribe] package" is added to the costs of bail-outs of huge financial institutions, and enormous ongoing costs of Bush's twin wars, all financed with borrowed money -- we'll be lucky if it doesn't add up to $1 trillion.

And what Bush proposes doing is drilling offshore. That's it. Stay in Iraq, make the tax cuts permanent, and drill offshore. Just what constituency do you think he might be serving? At this point, I only hope the worst happens before he can sneak out of town. After all, that was the purpose of the Bribe Program; to allow Bush to slither out the back way from the White House just ahead of the roof falling completely in.

The Ungrateful Nouri: Return of the Sultan

This guy is really starting to piss George off. He doesn't understand how the game is played with The Decider. Kind of like Mo Green in "The Godfather:" "You don't buy me out. I buy you out." Check out the latest token of Nouri al-Maliki's epic ingratitude:

"BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq's national security adviser said Tuesday his country will not accept any security deal with the United States unless it contains specific dates for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces. The comments by Mouwaffak al-Rubaie were the strongest yet by an Iraqi official about the deal now under negotiation with U.S. officials. They came a day after Iraq's prime minister first said publicly that he expects the pending troop deal with the United States to have some type of timetable for withdrawal. President Bush has said he opposes a timetable. The White House said Monday it did not believe Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was proposing a rigid timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals."

My favorite part, of course, is where President Bush "opposes a timetable." He's always opposed a timetable. It's worked with that group of Scyphozoa of the phylum Cnidaria (you know them as jellyfish) otherwise known as the Democratic majority in Congress, Man O' War Harry Reid, and Steny "the Stomolophus meleagris " Hoyer and the other invertebrates who keep caving into Bush. They timidly tried suggesting timetables in funding legislation but Bush told them to stop it. "Take 'em out!" he snarled, and they quickly did so, expelling water from their combination mouth/anus to propel themselves away to safety (Cnidaria have incomplete digestive systems so that one orifice does double duty - you know, they really should run for Congress).

Of course, Nouri's just being political. Provincial elections are coming up in the fall and he knows that the overwhelming majority of everyday Iraqis want Americans out of their country. On the order of two-thirds, and they've felt that way for a long time. As wonderful as we've been, they can't seem to wait till we're gone. The party that delivers on ousting the foreign occupiers has the inside track on loading up the local governing councils with their sectarian cronies.

Meanwhile, Bush is finding this whole thing a revoltin' development. The oil deals, at long last, were beginning to fall into place, just ahead of the United Nations eviction notice on December 31, 2008. We lose our legal cover for occupying Iraq after that, and you know what a stickler Bush is for doing things legally. And you probably also appreciate why this thing is such an 11th hour rush job; it's a quality shared by many alcoholics. He procrastinates and just can't seem to get things done. Look around the country and the world and see all the stuff he's left undone, things he started work on seven years ago and then put aside. Two-state solution for Israel/Palestine? He's workin' on it. Rebuilding New Orleans? Remember the Big Speech in Jackson Square? Ummmm.... I was just about to do that! Balance the budget? 30% of the national debt accumulated in the history of the country has accrued under Bush's "stewardship." Capture Osama bin Laden? Bring a single prisoner to trial in Guantanamo after he rushed through that Military Commissions Act in the fall of 2006? Look, I meant to tell you, I was going to do that next week...The one thing the dude's good at is getting Congress to pass bills exonerating him from past criminal conduct. I'll give him that. He spends an inordinate amount of time doing it, and I don't why Congress keeps complying...well, I do actually. Note that "Godfather" reference. Cheney must have watched that a hundred times, I'll betcha. The idea is you make everybody (or key players in the leadership, like Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman) into "made men." Brief them on illegal wiretapping, spell out the torture techniques years before anyone else knows, and then you've got them. What are they gonna do? They have to let you off the hook.

But Nouri is from, shall we say, a different tradition. Worked in the anti-Saddam Shiite underground, a very dangerous line of work, with a .000000000000000000000000000000001% margin of error, the penalty being a sulfuric acid transfusion. Nouri's were not the kind of mean streets where Steny and Nancy and Harry made their bones. A little more real, shall we say. Grittier. A desperate situation for Nancy Pelosi would be the discovery of a phylloxera infestation at one of her vineyard properties up in the wine country. Nouri, on the other hand, probably knows more about hardball than even L'il George himself, whose knowledge of the subject is typified by his decision to trade Sammy Sosa. So if we want to stay in Iraq under the terms of a Status of Forces Agreement after January 1, 2009, it's going to be on Nouri's terms, and I think The Decider will find that his veto power does not extend too far out into the Atlantic, and certainly not across the Tigris & Euphrates. There may be a phased withdrawal, it may take a few years, but I think Nouri is going to get us out of there unless we can get Nouri out of there first and replace him with someone a little more malleable, a more Chalabi-esque Arab perhaps.

But here's a bet: I think ol' Nouri can see that one coming. He survived by staying one step ahead of the occupiers for a long time, after all. He's working on his home turf, and I doubt that those elections in the fall are going to be tabulated on Diebold machines.

Never Mind Details, Barack - Just Give Us Some of that Change!

I just have to admit it: Barack is beginning to give me an uneasy feeling. In his campaign, he promised to filibuster any FISA re-write legislation that contained retroactive immunity for telecom companies that cooperated in President George Bush's program of felonious wiretapping. Here's what his campaign had to say in October, 2007: "To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." That's clear, all right. Let's imagine it in action. A bill comes to the floor of the Senate which contains retroactive immunity for telecom companies which cooperated in President George W. Bush's program of felonious wiretapping. Under these circumstances, how should Senator Obama react in order to fulfill his campaign pledge? Let's make it multiple choice to simplify the test. Barack should:

A. Filibuster the legislation to keep it from becoming law.
B. Move up the schedule for his trip to Iraq so he can skip the debate and vote.
C. Vote for cloture so that all debate (including filibustering) is brought to an end.
D. Vote for cloture and then vote for the bill granting immunity to telecom companies for their cooperation in President George W. Bush's program of
felonious wiretapping.

Well, we can certainly eliminate C. That's a position directly contrary to filibustering. D. is a ridiculous suggestion; of course Barack would not end all debate and then proceed to vote for a bill to which he was so opposed he was going to stop it from coming to a vote at all. B's out; he's not in Iraq. But they voted on Wednesday, and there was no filibuster, so A doesn't work. Hmmm. I think I'll just flip to the back of the book and get the answer, because the suspense is killing me.

The correct answer is D.

Huh?

Okay, I already knew, and ever since I found out, I've been trying to rationalize my way around his complete reversal of position. A few posts back, I took his, ahem, flip-flop as an aberration necessary for debating John W. McCain; you can't be such a softie on terrorists that you insist on compliance with the Bill of Rights in the government's relationship with its citizens. Hell, what is this? Denmark? We've got wars to fight and Muslims to kill, and if an American is talking on the phone overseas or sending an e-mail somewhere outside the borders (and here's a little secret for you: if an American is talking on the phone to anyone or sending an e-mail anywhere), he's just got to realize that Big Brother is watching. It's for your own good. Who knows what you're up to? Well, the Feds are going to find out because we've just done away with the two pesky impediments to free-for-all government spying: the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment.

Maybe it was unrealistic to think the Bill of Rights could survive nineteen Arabs, mostly from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, commandeering our own planes and knocking buildings down, killing a lot of people. That was just a deal-breaker. For some reason. So the modern, post-9/11 Republican and Democratic Parties now operate in a new arena, one where Constitutional rules simply no longer apply. We're just winging it from here on out. That is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole. Senators such as Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania take to the floor of the Senate and declare, in grandiloquent prose, that it is unconstitutional to eliminate habeas corpus through the Military Commissions Act. He then proceeds to vote for the bill, despite his oath of office, which is to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. And every Senator who voted yesterday, including Barack Obama, for the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unlawful searches and seizures without a duly authorized warrant also violated his or her oath of office (and thanks again, Dianne Feinstein, for selling out your liberal constituency here in California).

It is very dangerous to operate without legal principles, without a Constitutional framework. We're told, however, that this is all just normal politics. Take this post yesterday on the Huffingtonpost from someone named Peter Clothier, who advises that our misperceptions about what's going on owe to brain-hemisphere problems:

"We progressives need to get our left and right brains working together, and to do this means first recognizing the conflict, which amounts to a significant "left brain" misunderstanding about what Obama stands for. Obama believes it is less important to defeat Republicans on every issue than to repair government so that good ideas can begin to flourish again."

So that's it: I'm using the wrong half of my brain. Clothier says that liberals need to let go of their "pet issues" and see the bigger picture. Barack is a centrist who's going to unite the country and work in a truly bipartisan way. Okay. But what is going to be the basis of that unity? Barack Obama has declared a truly astounding "centrism" lately, on a wide array of constitutional issues. For this is the slippery slope we're on: protection of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution has become a "pet issue" of those on the Left. Let's let it go so we finally get some "good government" to solve real problems. Or, let's execute mentally retarded child rapists. Never mind the Eighth Amendment, we need "good government." While we're at it, let's not worry too much about the First Amendment, with its separation of church and state. If we get fixated on it, we'll lose out on a chance at good government. The Second Amendment interpretation of Justice Scalia was ridiculous and impossible to apply rationally; that's okay, why do we need the 2nd, if we don't need the 1st, 4th or 8th? You know, actually the 5th Amendment's due process clause is kind of in the way too, and it was certainly ignored in the Jose Padilla case. Let's throw that out. Now we're getting somewhere. We're on the way to Good Government!

The kicker, of course, is that on every one of these issues, John McCain is much, much worse. With the Maverick, we go way beyond a congenital indifference to unconstitutional activity, as we have with Bush -- McCain doesn't even know what the Constitution says.

I'm not going to pile on Barack Obama. His fund raising has taken a serious hit as disillusioned supporters emotionally process all of this. All that's needed to revive his candidacy is to listen to McCain some more, maybe another hilarious joke about weaponized cigarettes exported to Iran.

What's that word the kids use? Whatever.

I see why they use it.

Newton's Laws Applied to the American Body Politic

Drawn back ceaselessly on a tide of inertia...where was I? Recently viewed the film, "Gonzo," about the life and fractious times of Hunter S. Thompson, innovative journalist, model for Duke in "Doonesbury," gun enthusiast, titanic drinker and drug-taker, chronicler of the death of the American Dream. He drank a quart of Wild Turkey a day just to keep his parts oiled, and that was before he mellowed out with hash, grass and God knows what else, as detailed in dizzying vividness in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, perhaps his trademark book.

Despite his air of world-weary (and hungover) cynicism, he did become a staunch supporter and completely subjective flack when it came to the candidacy of George McGovern in 1972. He believed in him, genuinely, admiringly. I did too, actually. It says a lot about the currency of my own ideas on America that McGovern was utterly pummeled by a gangster and war criminal, Richard M. Nixon, truly one of the despicable characters in American political history. McGovern carried the state of Massachusetts; that's it. The two-bit crook and Commie-baiter won everything else.

The movie makes a pretty good case, as seen through the jaundiced and often delirious prose of Hunter S. Thompson, that the American dream flicked it in about 1968. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, on the heels of the Tet Offensive, followed by the riots in Chicago, the secret, criminal bombing of Cambodia, Four Dead in Ohio, and the flattening of George McGovern. That's an awful lot of negative mojo. When the Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan murdered Bobby Kennedy, the country was only 17 years past the great speech of Dwight D. Eisenhower warning of the perils of the military-industrial complex. McGovern listened to him; he wanted to end the business of "old men sitting in rooms dreaming up wars for young men to die in," and he wanted to make massive cuts in defense spending and use the resources saved to implement universal health care and improve the social safety net. As a genuine war hero, a pilot of B-25s who flew the full complement of his bombing missions during World War II, McGovern had the unassailable credibility to challenge the MIC. A Democratic operative interviewed for the movie said it simply: "With that platform in this country, all I can say is: Good luck."

So now forty years later, we see that the U.S. is bound up inextricably, immovably, by Newton's First Law of Motion: I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

America is stuck in a militarized state of uniform motion it cannot alter. The motion of the country is toward war and more war, defense spending and more defense spending, security measure piled on top of security measure. At a moment when the nation's chief climatologist, James Hansen, is warning us that the next few years will be make-or-break for climate tipping points; when the seas are becoming too acidic to support coral reefs or the bottom of the marine food chain; when bees and bats are mysteriously disappearing from the ecosphere for reasons the mainstream government and media are not even curious about, we spend our time thinking about the influence of Iran on Iraq's internal affairs, and whether our security might be enhanced by yet another preemptive war.

So go back to Newton's Law and notice how he describes the force which changes the motion vector: external. I think in our case what will finally break the back of the military-industrial stranglehold on the nation is that largest of all external forces, Reality itself, soon to visit a force arrow near you.

Gee, What Could Be Making Those Salmon Die Off Like That?

Where have all the salmon gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the salmon gone,
Long time ago.
Where have all the salmon gone,
Down to the bottom, everyone,
When will we ever learn?
When will we ev--er learn?
- with a nod to Pete Seeger.

Wild Pacific salmon have pretty much disappeared from the West Coast fisheries. You can still get the farm variety, but people are reticent to eat fish which swim around in their own shit all day. The option, for awhile, was to eat Pacific salmon which swam around in acid all day, out in the Deep Blue, but that door is closing now, too. I did notice that the San Francisco Chronicle actually carried an article on Saturday, July 5, about the problem of ocean acidification. Right on schedule. I heard Dr. Inez Fung from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory give a detailed presentation on the details of this problem just about exactly two years ago at the China-U.S. Climate Conference. One of her points was that the temperature change problem, the global warming hypothesis, was one issue which, while not actually debatable, gets debated because ExxonMobil and other companies, foundations and CongressWhores working hard to kill off humanity can argue "we can't even tell what the weather will be next week," or "sun spots!" or "natural cycles!" And the human race goes back to sleep while another chunk of Antarctica the size of Russia goes spooo-lash! into the Southern Ocean. But ocean acidification is a little different, Inez ruefully explained. It's not hard to figure out why the oceans are becoming acid -- it's because of all the CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere.

It's nice to understand things at a basic level, even when the thing you're understanding maybe means you're going to die. Humans are just naturally curious that way. This is from Realclimate.org, that redoubtable website that bravely swims against an incoming tide of human stupidity and massive corporate fraud. First, how do you make carbonic acid? Simple, really. Take CO₂ and add water, H₂O, to form carbonic acid, H₂CO₃. Count 'em up; the H2 is there, the C is there, and the O2 became O3.

Realclimate continues:

"An acid is a chemical type that releases H⁺ ions into solution, as does H₂CO₃ to form HCO₃^- and CO₃^2-. Adding CO₂ to water causes the pH to drop. Coral reefs are built from limestone by the reaction Ca²⁺ + CO₃^2- == CaCO₃, where Ca is calcium. Acidifying the ocean decreases the concentration of CO₃^2- ions, which by le Chatlier’s principle shifts the equilibrium toward the left, tending to dissolve CaCO₃. Note that this is a sort of counter-intuitive result, that adding CO₂ should make reefs dissolve rather than pushing carbon into making more reefs. It’s all because of those H⁺ ions."

Unfortunately for those of us who love the taste of wild salmon (with a nice dill sauce and a squeeze of lemon), and even more unfortunately for the fleets of Pacific salmon fishermen, salmon depend heavily upon a species of plankton which builds a calcium carbonate shell. The plankton are having a harder time building their shells now because of a raw materials shortage, as noted above, and they're at the bottom of a very long food chain.

Different theories have been advanced to explain the disappearance of the salmon. The one I've sketched out is very unpopular with fishermen and Sacramento politicians, who prefer to think the salmon are infected with a gill bacteria which has caused a die-off, or water diversion from the Delta area, or perhaps the salmon are simply on strike this year, seeking better swimming and spawning conditions. It's better if they're right and the acidification hypothesis is wrong, because the acidity of the oceans is a permanent condition. If this is the reason, waiting till next year won't help. Nor the next. As we sit here in California beneath smoke-filled skies, skies which have not produced a drop of rain since late February, with the entire state on fire because of the crackling aridity, we're beginning to get the idea that things have really changed.

The Terrorist Threat in America

The first bombing of the World Trade Center occurred in 1993, while Bill Clinton was President. Six people died when a urea/nitrate bomb enhanced with hydrogen exploded beneath Tower One. Investigators concluded that the principal operatives behind the attack were two Kuwaitis, Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, his uncle. Ramzi Yousef is serving a life sentence in the federal Supermax facility in Colorado, and KSM is awaiting trial by military commission in Guantanamo for his role in the attacks of September 11.

In 1995 Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols exploded a urea/nitrate bomb enhanced with hydrogen in Oklahoma City, destroying the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killing 168 people. McVeigh was executed and Nichols is serving a life sentence. At the time of the OK City attack, it was the deadliest terrorist incident in United States history. It was, of course, eclipsed by the attacks of 9/11, which succeeded in the object of Yousef's plan: to topple the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

That is more or less a complete list of the big terrorist attacks against the United States homeland in modern times. There have been other attacks against U.S. possessions and facilities overseas, of course, and Americans have been killed there, including two embassies in Africa, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and the U.S.S. Cole.

I have a simple question to which I doubt that I will ever get a meaningful, let alone definitive, answer from any responsible government official: just how serious is the threat of Islamic terrorism against the United States?

Vice President Dick Cheney often points out that there have been no attacks on the U.S. homeland since September 11, 2001 (which occurred, not mentioned as often, during the Bush/Cheney Administration). Cheney doubts that this is a "coincidence." He believes that the absence of further terrorist incidents owes to stepped-up security measures. Of course, it is also true that there were no Islamic terrorist attacks within United States borders between 1993 and 2001, a period longer than the surcease to which Cheney proudly points, and during this period the whole issue of "national security" was not the front-and-center, 24/7 Fortress America Reality Show it has become under Bush/Cheney.

That's what I wonder about. Have Bush & Cheney frightened away all terrorists, or interdicted all their plots, or, another possibility -- is the threat overblown?

One way in which I think we have been paradoxically blessed is that the Man Who Declared War on America, Osama bin Laden, seems to me a kind of Jihadist Drama Queen. He doesn't like plots that aren't showy and spectacular. He needs to take down a whole embassy, or the Capitol Building, or - and here he succeeded by joining the Mohammed/Yousef conspiracy already in progress - the World Trade Center. Big Symbols of American Power. He doesn't want to knock over Taco Bells or 7/11's, even though far more Americans identify with chain stores than with the World Trade Center. He doesn't send jihadis to blow up gas stations, or drop bombs in post office boxes, or, taking it up one notch, to park and detonate a panel truck as McVeigh/Nichols did. Or, more pertinently, al-Qaeda does not engage in the systematic bombing of buses and cafes in the United States, as Arab terrorists have done in Israel, even though American security is completely lax compared to the Israeli equivalent in such situations.

The effect of bin Laden's actual attacks has been aided immeasurably, I think, by the reaction of the Bush/Cheney group. The decision of the Bush Administration to politicize the terrorist attacks for partisan advantage, and to use them as illegitimate cover for an unrelated war in Iraq, greatly exacerbated the effects which the events of 9/11 would otherwise have had. I don't know if bin Laden actually "foresaw" all that. Sometimes he's given qualities that are more properly ascribed to fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes's nemesis, Dr. Moriarty. America actually "got over" the 9/11 attacks, in terms of economic recovery, in a reasonably efficient manner. What we're struggling unsuccessfully to overcome now, as the economy disintegrates, is the effect of Bush's reactions to the attacks.

If a group of Islamic terrorists actually (a) existed and (b) were capable of inflicting real damage against the American homeland and (c) were motivated to do so against the United States, common sense tells you it would be happening right now. Terrorists don't really need spectacular events to disrupt and paralyze the U.S. Recalling such episodes as the D.C. Sniper or the anthrax attacks of October, 2001, it seems that the kind of attack or crime wave that most disrupts everyday life here (as it would most places, as it has done in Baghdad) is the random, small-scale event that makes everyone wary, causes them to change habits, instills suspicion and pervasive fear. Regardless of what Dick Cheney says, it isn't really possible to stop such attacks in a bustling, crowded, anonymous place such as a large American city. The anthrax episode was never solved, for example. Smaller scale bombing in American city centers is probably not a great deal more complicated logistically than the drive-by shootings that are part of the normal abnormal life in Oakland, California and South Central L.A. It simply requires the will to do so.

It's generally conceded that American borders are like a sieve; thus, a terrorist can enter the country, if he's really determined. The wherewithal to build bombs (as McVeigh and Nichols did) can be obtained. It is estimated that there are as many guns available in the U.S. as there are Americans - freely accessed, thanks to our rights vouchsafed by the Second Amendment and Justice Antonin Scalia. And America is full of crowded downtowns, where bombs and guns can do terrible damage.

Things like that don't happen. Our streets are not like Baghdad's during the worst of the sectarian violence, or like Israel's during the Intifada. I don't think most of us expect random acts of terrorist violence to happen, except as a rare (and regrettably spectacular) occurrence. Yet I don't think we could actually stop terrorists from small-scale attacks any more than we can bring an end to all violent crime in America. Does that not say something about the true nature and extent of this endless obsession that dominates our budgeting and national priorities?

Independence Day

Tomorrow, I would recommend that you read the Declaration of Independence in its entirety. Not just the stirring opening paragraphs, which some of us may have committed to memory, or the closing words on pledging "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" to the battle ahead. It's not a bad idea, in this day and age, to read the "train of abuses" which Thomas Jefferson enumerated in order to justify breaking away from Great Britain in 1776 -- those reasons which "compelled them to the separation."

You will find in that long list an overarching theme - the abhorrence which the Founding Fathers held for tyranny in all its many guises and manifestations. Things such as abducting colonial prisoners, transporting them across seas, and holding them for "pretended offences." If that sounds a great deal like "extraordinary rendition" or the unraveling rationale for holding Guantanamo inmates without charges or a fair hearing, it's probably no coincidence. The United States has itself sunk to the level of using the tactics of a tyrant -- throwing prisoners in dungeons without recourse, never to be heard from again, all in the name of "state security."

A moment's reflection reveals that from the British perspective of 1776, tyrannical practices were advantageous. It kept the Colonies under the iron heel of the English Crown for about 160 years. What the king said was the law, and while the American colonists were granted rights such as local governing bodies, in essence any of these rights could be taken away arbitrarily, as Jefferson itemized in his "reasons." The British could quarter soldiers in your house; they could enter your house without a warrant and ransack it, looking for evidence of sedition; they could tax you what they wanted, and you weren't allowed to vote on the imposition; they could commandeer soldiers from the Colonies to fight in British foreign wars; they used Colonists to execute other Colonists for offenses against the Crown.

The Founding Fathers got mad as hell and they weren't going to take it anymore. Jefferson's magnificent bill of particulars throbs with passionate belief in the essential Rights of Man. It should make any American who cares about this country proud of his heritage, and jealous of guarding the democratic principles which these men laid down.

I just wonder, at this point, how proud they would be of us. The Founding Fathers, in 1776, put together a ragtag Continental Army to stare down the mightiest military and navy in the world. Signing the Declaration of Independence was akin to autographing one's own death warrant, and indeed a number of signers died in the war which followed under terrible circumstances because of their act of treason against England.
They thought it was worth it.

In modern America, a terrorist attack in September, 2001, knocked down some buildings and killed innocent Americans. I think it's fair to say that the openness of American society may have contributed to the feasibility of the plot organized by Saudi and Egyptian radicals. Does this one event portend the eternal insecurity of the United States, which became, in the two hundred years since the Revolution, a military power far more dominant than the British ever were? Was it necessary, in order never to expose ourselves to any threat whatsoever to pass the Patriot Act with all its violations of the Bill of Rights; to pass the Military Commissions Act with its abrogation of habeas corpus; to sanction systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment by exonerating telecommunications companies which spied on Americans? What does that say about American courage in this day and age? We'll dump the Bill of Rights if our leaders will just promise nothing will ever go "boom!" again?

I'm picturing a Signer of the Declaration in the dark days of the Revolution who has been captured by the British, as five of them were. They were tortured and horribly mistreated as prisoners of war. Yet they had the courage of their convictions. They put it all on the line, their lives, their fortunes. What would such a patriot say, returned to Earth to view modern America and the new, homegrown "train of abuses?" I think we owe it, as a matter of our own sacred honor, to do better than we've done over the last eight years, to vindicate the courage that put this great country on the map.

Faith-Based Request for Money

Memorandum

To: President Barack Obama
From: Henry Waldenswimmer, President, Church of Seinfeld ReRuns
Re: Funding request, 2009

Dear President Obama:

I was astounded to see that you intend to continue and expand former President Bush's program of "faith-based initiatives," particularly in light of your past work as a professor of Constitutional law. I would assume that the "Constitution" in question is that of the United States and not that of, say, Vatican City or the world's "newest democracy," Iraq, which uses Sharia as its fundamental source of legislation. That being the case, I am perplexed; is it possible that you taught only the unamended Constitution? That could explain a few things; for example, if you had gone on, you would have encountered the First Amendment, which reads as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Simple, economical language. Those guys were good, weren't they?

You know what I think they were saying? I think they were saying that the federal government should stay the hell out of religion. Period. End of story. G-Men don't go into churches or synagogues or mosques and tell the congregations how to pray; and in public school, we study science and other secular subjects and leave the prayer and "intelligent design" to the churches. There is no "national religion" in the United States. This is not a "Christian nation" despite what people like George Bush or Mike Huckabee say. The government tolerates religions; it doesn't get involved in their establishment, maintenance or practices. There are Christians in this nation, as there are Jews, Muslims, Hindus and millions and millions of atheists. The First Amendment guarantees that all are free to pursue their religions, or their irreligion, to their hearts' content. Justice Souter of the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the principle in the case of Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687 (1994), where he wrote for the majority "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion."

You're convinced that religions are good at delivering "poverty alleviation" and other services. So they well may be. People who attend churches often do good works. They also give money, their own, when the basket is passed. The churches can use this money to alleviate poverty, run a food bank, build a homeless shelter. The federal government should stay out of it and let the churches do what they want with the money they have. If you think that the federal government needs to do more to alleviate poverty, then you can dust off ideas from the Great Society, for example, and run something called a "government based initiative." Otherwise it looks like you're just trying to buy votes from churches by promising them money. You know? A "faith based initiative" is another name for "taxpayer supported religion," and please don't pretend you don't understand that. You're way too smart. George W. Bush walked around in the world with the guiding presumption that whatever he was, whatever he believed, should work for everybody, and so if he thought that the government should get involved in the religion business, particularly
Protestant religions of a decidedly Right Wing bias, then that's okay, because "it's the right thing to do," the Constitution be damned.

Now you're doing it. This is the way that a bad idea, a clearly unconstitutional idea, becomes standard operating procedure. The same kind of thinking led to the repeal of the Fourth Amendment. If the President does something long enough, like illegal spying, and Congress is "in on it" and does not draw a distinct line early, it becomes the new normal, and the process of devolution then begins from there with the new administration.

But if you're going to give religions money to do government work, then give me some too for my Church of Seinfeld ReRuns. We watch Seinfeld "religiously." It is true that the characters in Seinfeld ReRuns don't practice religion; in fact, they don't appear to believe in anything. They are all post-modern Existentialists who depict the other great trend in American culture, the one that isn't about End Times and the Rapture and the rest of it. The trend toward mindless narcissism, materialism, rejection of normal family life, lack of connection. As American as apple pie, really, and to give money to the local Baptist Church for their do-good projects while leaving out our group is "preferring religion to irreligion" in contravention of Grumet, supra.

I know what you're thinking: We're a decidedly irreligious group and perhaps for that very reason should not expect a government hand-out. Yet when you think about it, that can't be what Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, et al. had in mind - why should we be the ones who are disfavored? The federal government is supposed to be neutral on the question of religion. Why don't you give us a try? If you're going to violate the First Amendment as official policy, at least make it worth our while.

Tom Friedman: On the Case!

The text for today's sermon is derived from Thomas Friedman's most recent column. As you probably know, Mr. Friedman is the award-bejeweled star pundit of the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. Pulitzers drip from his masthead like bling. He is the Voice of Authority. And he's figured out something very important which you would be wise to heed. To wit:

"I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November — whether things get better there or worse. If they get better, we’ll ignore Iraq more; if they get worse, the next president will be under pressure to get out quicker. I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue.

"It’s the state of America now that is the most gripping source of anxiety for Americans, not Al Qaeda or Iraq. Anyone who thinks they are going to win this election playing the Iraq or the terrorism card — one way or another — is, in my view, seriously deluded. Things have changed."

Wow. Now that's chutzpah. You see, among Mr. Friedman's other titles is Chief Neocon Cheerleader for the Invasion of Iraq (sorry that doesn't work out as a cute acronym, but it's Monday morning). He is the inventor (perhaps discoverer, depending on whether you believe it existed in nature before his description) of the Friedman Unit. The Friedman Unit is six months. Mr. Friedman, at any point in the ongoing train wreck which is the U.S. occupation of Iraq, has counseled that six months are needed to determine whether a "decent outcome" is possible in Iraq. Unkind kibbitzers have pointed out that Friedman, in fact, has advised waiting a Friedman Unit about 13 times, which if linked together actually exceed the length of the U.S. occupation to date.

I think his tune has changed along with "things." Tom believes that anyone who now thinks that Iraq is the key issue for current America is "seriously deluded." Not just "deluded." "Seriously deluded." Let's look up "delusion" in the American Heritage Dictionary and figure out what Tom is calling people. "Delusion: a false belief held in spite of invalidating evidence, esp. as a condition of certain forms of mental illness." I cheated a little by leaping to the third definition, the one I liked best. But Tom Friedman cheats all the time. The way he's cheating you now is by jumping to a place in front of his new parade and pretending that Iraq-as-a-bad-idea is a brand new issue for Mr. Friedman to instruct you about. Instead of, say, devoting his next twenty columns to a detailed apology for the horrendous course of action he and a lot of other Makers of Fashionable Opinion enabled back in 2002-03.

Iraq was a tremendously bad idea in 2003, too. For exactly the same reasons, those "things" Friedman refers to. Those things include (a) America's bankruptcy and (b) economic destruction. In 2003 the United States was in no shape to invade Iraq. It doesn't matter if toppling Saddam Hussein was "the right thing to do." It doesn't matter if one hundred years of war in the Middle East, against one country after another, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, might finally produce stable democracies so we could finally quit worrying about losing another couple of skyscrapers to our own commercial jets. We never had the wherewithal to mount a big invasion and a long occupation in a distant Third World desert, spending $12 billion a month and breaking down the military, and allowing this one foreign policy project to dominate all national discourse and the attentions of Congress.

Because now look where we are. We have run deficits (as measured by growth in the National Debt) of a half trillion dollars per year, and the debt will be $10 trillion when Bush leaves office. The Dow Jones is now lower than during the Clinton Administration. The dollar has lost 40% of its value against the euro. Unemployment is on the way up. Consumer spending is on the way down (masked briefly by Federal Bribes financed by borrowing more money from foreign creditors, but that won't last). The banking system is teetering on the brink of insolvency. Unaffordable gasoline. A cratering real estate market. Mr. Friedman and many others like him who were so gung-ho for this war because it gave them something glamorous and adventurous to write about would have you believe that these developments fit into the neat confines of their perceived "news cycle," which is perhaps even shorter than a Friedman Unit. That America woke up one morning and said to itself, hey, we've got problems here at home, too. Maybe a constant fixation on violence in Iraq as a spectator sport is a diversion we can't afford any longer. We don't make our livings writing about the Iraq War. We have to participate in what you might call the "general economy," and the general economy sucks.

So yeah, Thomas Friedman, you might be right. Anyone who thinks Iraq is the major issue facing America is seriously deluded. And has been for at least five years.

I'd rather have a sustainable planet for the next generation than private e-mail

Currently, there is a blog war raging between two liberal darlings, Glenn Greenwald and Keith Olbermann, concerning who has the right attitude about Obama's cave-in on the FISA bill. Let us stipulate, at the outset, that Barack has caved in. He is not going to take the kind of heroic stand one associates with Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin or Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. Note, however, that these front-line champions of civil liberties are not similarly slinging mud in Barack's direction. This is because, unlike Glenn Greenwald on this issue, they are maintaining perspective. Greenwald has gone so far as to start a fund to defeat the reelection of the Democratic Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland. Once you become that emotionally and intellectually invested in one issue, of course, there is a tendency to imagine that unless you win, that absolutely nothing else matters, and even the election of John McCain would be acceptable just to prove this passing point.

Personally, when it comes to national politics I believe in game theory, practicality, choosing the lesser of two evils, compromise, tactical selling out, and incremental change. That is because I recognize better than Glenn Greenwald the kind of country I actually live in. I understand that Barack Obama not only has to convince Ivy League lawyers with 140 IQs to vote for him, but also people living in trailers in rural eastern Kentucky with sixth grade educations whose main issue is safety from alien abduction. Demographically speaking, this country has become a complete mess. In a lot of the ways in which we determine what a country even is, the United States does not measure up. Politicians invoke the word "American" and "my fellow Americans" and it seems to work every four years or so, maybe during the final lap of the medley relay at the Olympics, and our hearts then swell with national pride, but that's only because we each carry around some idiosyncratic concept of what the country is to us, and in many cases that idea is based on long out-of-date memories formed about 40 or 50 years ago, if you're old enough (as I am) for that to have happened.

The country is divided along a huge number of fault lines. There is, in the first instance, the gigantic disparity in income and wealth between a tiny super-rich class and everyone else. Politics are driven by Big Money; everyone recognizes that without necessarily thinking through the consequences. The "telecoms" belong to this group; large, extremely powerful corporations who control the flow of information in this country. Big Oil dictates much of the foreign and energy policies of the United States; again, a profoundly anti-democratic influence.

Then we have the religious/secular divide. The conservatives play to their religious base by designing an agenda catering to a vast array of niggling hang-ups. Abortion; school instruction in premarital sex; birth control; stem cell research; gay marriage; gays, for that matter. The "progressives" (as they must call themselves now because "liberal" was taken away from them by the conservatives) try not to offend the religious right while steering a course right-of-center in appealing to their perceived base, the secularist well-educated. They can only go so far. Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, with his electoral base, can approve of gay marriage. Barack Obama can go as far as "civil unions" before calling it a day. Let's not get hysterical here.

Overlapping with this schism to a certain extent is the huge nativist/immigrant divide. The United States has never been more a "nation of immigrants" than it is right now, and border states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have huge Latino populations which are unassimilated to one extent or another in terms of language, culture and political agendas.

A politician in America running for our one national office has to navigate among this bewildering array of power centers, special interests, subgroups, cultures, educational levels, regional concerns and religions and yet emerge as a "consensus" candidate with enough pull to get a majority of votes in enough states to get 270 electoral votes. Such a process obviously requires him to check his "purity of conscience" at the door. The more cynical you are about manipulation and artifice, the more successful you can be. This and only this explains the successes of Karl Rove. One can feign purity of conscience; indeed, this is considered appealing, and the candidate who is better at simulating sincerity often wins the election, as George W. Bush once did (in 2004). The process, however, is about mounting a general campaign, not soliciting the votes of tiny constituencies with axes to grind, like Glenn Greenwald.

So, just to go on a bit longer, and to explain the reason for the title of the post: I agree with Glenn Greenwald's position on FISA. He's right, in my opinion. I wish I lived in a country where my preferred presidential candidate could simply agree with us and vote accordingly. But I don't. However, I do live in a world where James Hansen, testifying before Congress, said this just last week:

"The difference is that now [as opposed to 20 years ago when he first testified] we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next president and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

"Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control."

Returning to the fearless Dow forecast of the recent past

Yes, among Dow prognosticators (and from what I can see in the mass media, there are no apparent credentials necessary for entrance into the club), only I have risked setting out my algebraic "proof" that the venerable market indicator will sink to 9,100 as its "essential" level. As a quick review, my GIGO, back-of-the-envelope calculation used the Dow's high point in the summer of 2007 (14,000) and then considered the following data: Americans were borrowing equity out of their houses in the period 2001 to 2006 at a phenomenal rate. Some analytical writers put this figure at 50% of the total "income" received by Americans during this period. For the most part, this source of money has dried up as housing prices have moved south. The Case-Shiller index puts the year over year decline in home values for April 2008 at -15%, the worst performance of the "housing sector" since the Great Depression. Thus, so much for the house-as-piggy-bank economy.

Since the American economy is based on consumer spending for 70% of its action, removing half its juice results in a 35% contraction of the GNP. 14,000 x .35 = 4,900. 14,000 - 4,900 = 9,100. An oversimplification? Of course. A little arbitrary in its equation of the Dow (with its big multinational corporations to an extent insulated from strictly American woes) with the overall economy? I agree. Naive, trivial? Take it easy there. The Dow is down to 11,590 as I write this and General Motors is at its lowest point since 1955. Imagine if you had bought GM at the midpoint of the Eisenhower Administration at $11/share and held it till this morning. Subtracting out inflation for those 53 years...Is it just barely possible that General Motors was a little shortsighted in not anticipating the increasing scarcity of oil, its high cost, and the climate change scenario now bearing down upon us?

When I made my fearless call, I did not take into account oil at $140 a barrel or gas approaching $5 per gallon. Thus, I'm going to embellish my terminology with a new term, which is calling the 9,100 number the Essential Floor. Where else can you read about the Essential Floor than here, in this blog manned by one fearless jeremiah living in rustic squalor, surrounded by drought-stricken trees a mere 3,000 miles from the legendary pond which lends its name to the site? Anyway, when we get to 9,100, most of the water will have been squeezed out of the watered stock of the American financial markets and our new standard of living will begin to click into place. The Dow will then begin to wobble around this new level.

Not all bad, by a long shot. For all I know, this may have been George W. Bush's secret plan for dealing with global warming. If the American economy swirled down the toilet under his stewardship, at least his subjects would finally be forced to curtail their reckless spending and promiscuous energy wasting. If that was the plan, it's definitely working.

I remember about four years ago, I was walking the Philosopher's Trail above Heidelberg, looking down on the pretty Neckar River as it flows past the castle. And I came upon a rude sign, white letters on red cardboard: "Amerika: Climate Killers." I suppose it was placed there by the trail's side because whatever German chose the spot knew that the large American presence in and around Heidelberg (military, etc.) would encounter it on a regular basis. Indeed, here I am, spreading the word. Well, I suspect it won't be long before our per capita consumption of carbon drops from its dubious position of first in the world, and our place in that category will begin to match some of our other rankings, such as those for education, infant mortality and health care. But it will all take a lot of time. The U.S. had built up such a fantastic capital base during the good years, that we can, as in the last, desperate phase of a Monopoly game, sell off the red hotels and the green houses, and finally mortgage the deeds themselves, in an effort to stay in the game. It's just that a lot of the players around the board observing our liquidation will be wearing burnooses or speaking Mandarin.

For Whom the Bell Tolls? Could be your wake-up call, Mr. President

I commend Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut for his courageous speech on the Senate floor yesterday concerning the revamped Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), spelling out his reasons for opposing the bill. Rather than limiting the basis for his objections to the telecom immunity provision of the bill, Senator Dodd listed the long "chain of abuses" (language remarkably similar to the "train of abuses" phrase employed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence) of the Bush Administration. The speech is worth reading in its reasonably long entirety, linked here. Senator Dodd conducts a survey course in the unconstitutional actions of the Bush Presidency since September 11, 2001. It's the sort of speech, in its tone and and radical language (from the Latin, radix, of the root) I used to hear on a daily basis from the steps of Sproul Hall in Berkeley a few decades back. Live long enough, I suppose, and you'll see everything happen, including radical speeches from Senators who look as if they would be comfortable on the back nine at the Westchester Country Club.

A surprising trend seems to be underway these days. I would have surmised that as the Bush Presidency wound down, the American commoners and Beltway insiders alike would have been so relieved to see him leave that a spirit of reconciliation and letting bygones-be-bygones would have become the ruling zeitgeist. This does not seem to be what's happening. Rather, the criticism of Bush, particularly in Congress, has grown increasingly shrill and, for want of a better word, more fundamental. Repesentative Dennis Kucinich's 35 Articles of Impeachment are a further case in point. These are an extremely detailed list of charging allegations against virtually every aspect of Bush's unconstitutional, extra-constitutional and felonious activities while he's been in office.

Bush's entire defense to such charges, boiled down to its essence, rests on a very slender reed. Bush, who is not a deep or nuanced thinker, was seduced by the blandishments of a group of executive power extremists who convinced him that Article II of the Constitution in a "time of war" confers almost limitless power on the President. This was a dangerous concept to sell to a man as emotionally insecure as Bush, who overcompensates for his sense of inadequacy with a megalomaniacal assertion of self. So: 9/11 provided the war, and the first Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) gave him his charter to ignore the Constitution and any federal statutes which were seen by his bellicose advisers as contrary to free use of his power.

The theory has never been used successfully in court. One way or another the concept that the United States is a government of laws and not of men has been confirmed by all cases which have considered the issue. Bush relied too much on the counsel of intellectual lightweights like Alberto Gonzales in going down this path. When Gonzales attempted to justify all of the FISA violations on the basis of the AUMF, he was laughed out of the hearing room, and eventually out of Bush's administration. Bush's other mistake was listening to the extreme views of ideologues such as David Addington, Cheney's Chief of Staff, who is responsible for outlandish claims such as the Vice Presidency's exclusion from the Executive Branch. You add them up - Gonzales arguing that habeas corpus is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, the free-floating Vice Presidency, that certain Arabs are not human beings for Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the signing statements which selectively ignore Congressional enactments that don't comport with the SuperSized Presidency -- and an unmistakable picture forms of an Executive Branch which has gone completely out of control.

It's an ominous sign for Bush that the chorus is swelling, not diminishing. I would be very nervous in his situation. James Hansen, the climate scientist who at one time had his communiques edited by a Bushie corporate lawyer with no background in atmospheric science, testified to Congress and wrote an Op-Ed in which he suggested that trials for "crimes against humanity" might be appropriate for those who knowingly stood in the way of remedial action on climate change. He mentioned the CEO of Exxon, by specific name, but the principle obviously has broader application. This is Bush's Achilles Heel, ultimately; his presidency is confined to a certain finite period (mercifully), but the downstream effects of many of his actions will clearly extend well beyond January, 2009. The American people are going to be reminded of Bush next year, each and every day, by reports of continuing casualties in Iraq, by the crushing burden of the national debt, by the declining dollar, by the skyrocketing cost of fuel as the country sinks deeper into recession. And there will be no Bush Administration around for message control. Many of the secret proceedings and communications will be divulged, and the courts will be clogged with habeas corpus petitions from Guantanamo prisoners detailing their treatment.

Maybe there's something to the idea that Bush's third term will be twenty to life.

The victory lap of the neocons

Now that the surge has worked and everything is fine in Iraq, we are beginning to see the first tentative signs of gloating from previously much-maligned war cheerleaders such as David Brooks, William Kristol and other members of the brave commentariat who have fearlessly encouraged, from the safety of their air-conditioned Manhattan offices, our "brave troops" to keep up the good fight. They were in a terrible dilemma for several years there. Their entire ethos, their whole Weltanschauung, is premised on the idea of sounding like tough realists who are willing to pay the price, to do the hard thing even if it's not pleasant, and to risk everything, even the deaths of anyone but themselves. They also put on the line their most precious commodity: the perception of others that they're always right. Or, in Kristol's case, the illusion that he's ever right. Take this latest from David Brooks, for example:

"The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one."

Here's a question which you might find difficult to answer right now because of the virtual black-out on war coverage by major media. In the first two months of the war, during the actual invasion of Iraq and just before George W. Bush, our astute leader, declared Mission Accomplished, how many American soldiers died? And while you're thinking about that, here's another question: during a period when we can all completely agree that the surge has been a triumph, say during the first six months of 2008 (with about a week to go), how many American soldiers have died?

These are the answers: in the invasion of Iraq, the actual subduing of the country and conquering of Baghdad, the U.S. sustained 119 fatalities (during the latter part of March and all of April, 2003). In the first six months of 2008, 130 American soldiers have died (so far). This seems to be a point that Brooks and other brave, laptop-totin' journalist-soldiers don't necessarily take into account while they extol Bush's astute escalation of his endless war of occupation. Guys are still getting shot and blown up on a very regular basis.

It's also noteworthy that during the recent uprising in southern Iraq in April, when Muqtada al-Sadr ceased his cease-fire, American deaths rose to 52 for the month, a number very typical of pre-surge mayhem. Close to two body-bags per diem, two flag-draped coffins secreted aboard a cargo plane for the clandestine off-load in Dover, Delaware, every single day. That was a couple of months ago.

This is the triumph that David Brooks and William Kristol are celebrating, and I admit that it could be worse and it has been worse. But here's another question: I have never understood how the calculus of win/lose in Iraq degenerated into a consideration of whether there is more or less violence on the streets of Baghdad. The consciousness of the nation is centered on this far-off conflict, it dictates and constrains so many choices, the opportunity costs are sky-high -- and yet the question remains: what are we doing there? It isn't like a basketball game which is played solely to see who scores more points. We aren't in Iraq, I hope, to find out whether the people who used the word "civil war" were right versus those who said it wasn't a civil war.

And yet I think that's exactly what it's degenerated into. After all his screw-ups, and leaving the United States of America in much worse shape than he found it, George W. Bush was not going to admit that Iraq was also a total fiasco. Conditions in Iraq were going to improve, dammit, no matter what it took. So they sent in Petraeus. And Petraeus built blast walls to carve Baghdad into sectarian enclaves and installed checkpoints everywhere to thwart the movement of suicide bombers. These ideas, obviously, were borrowed from Israeli practices in the West Bank, which have had similar successes in decreasing random explosions. Yet there's a critical difference: everyone acknowledges the de facto separation of the Palestinian state from Israel, which awaits a de jure treaty. Iraq is supposed to be one country. Gimmicks such as dividing Shia from Sunni with blast walls, and flooding the streets of Baghdad with occupying troops, and metering the movement of Iraqis from one neighborhood to another with harassing checkpoints, appears to produce a "win" for George W. Bush, because he's ahead in the game of reducing violence in Iraq. So he can leave office with the situation "under control."

Yet what good does that do? Note the careful use of the words "tenuous" and "fragile" in the David Brooks column. It's tenuous and fragile because unless we're willing to go bankrupt by maintaining an occupying force for one hundred years, as McCain urges, as soon as we leave Iraq is going to dissolve into chaos. There's no serious doubt about that. If Iraq can't really get it together politically while we're patrolling the streets with 150,000 soldiers, what are the odds things will hold together as we withdraw?

It's nice to see an American oil company (Exxon) join BNP, Total and Shell in securing no-bid contracts for oil exploration and development in Iraq. Now maybe Bush can harrumph about pushing the Russians aside in the great Iraqi oil rush. Maybe he'll feel vindicated enough to give up the rest of the violence up/down game. Would it help if we say he was right all along? Just tell us what to say so he'll end this thing.

Okay, so Barack is not a "LightWorker"

It's not my phrase, actually. I read the term "LightWorker" in a Mark Morford column on SFGate, and it seemed kinda twee, really, but that's life on the West Coast. A "LightWorker," I take it, is some sort of avatar of enlightened beings who visits us and leads us away from darkness and despair, dispatched by The Force when It sees we're in over our heads. I don't know if a LightWorker is actually armed with a LightSaber, for example, but one can hope, if only for ease of identification. When I read Morford's column, I thought maybe the canonization of Barry had ventured into dangerous, unsustainable territory. Lest we forget, Obama is the official nominee of the Democratic Party, that stained, compromised and completely co-opted political organization which also features Nancy Pelosi at the top of the org chart.

Obama has put matters to rest on the LightWorker front; we can now regard him as a canny political player who shows increasing signs of knowing, at least, what it takes to get elected in this sound-bitten society. Barack has backed off an earlier promise to filibuster the House-approved FISA rewrite in favor of "trying to amend" that part of the 4th Amendment Abolishment Bill which grants the big telecoms immunity for past illegal conduct. Otherwise, Barry is on board with the rest of the "compromise" legislation which essentially grants the Executive Branch unfettered access to all e-mail and telephone communication of Americans while...well, while using the Internet or the phone. The "restrictions" and "court review" built into the new FISA process are essentially meaningless. It's way too much to call them "warrants," that good ol' fashioned Fourth Amendment word. If the President, the Attorney General or a fourteen year old hacker in Beijing thinks he needs to read your e-mail to see if you're planning to blow something up, that's good enough. Be forewarned: the concept of a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in your heretofore private communications is about to be repealed.

Thomas Jefferson had this to say in 1799: "Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence . . . . Let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitutions." Wise Tom was telling us that we should never forgo a freedom on the promise of a well-intentioned man or woman who tells us they have our best interests at heart and won't abuse the license. Keep your freedom and demand that the elected official do his best with the latitude he has left. And, as a specific, historical example, no one has ever demonstrated that the attacks of 9/11 resulted from the exercise of civil liberties by the American people. Indeed, the rough outlines of the plot were exposed while respecting these rights. It was a question of Executive Branch competence, not of restraints upon its freedom of action.

Some commentators, such as Glenn Greenwald linked over on your right, have been very, very hard on Obama for this lapse in "principle." I can't go quite as far as he does. Barack Obama is trying to get elected President in a country which elected George W. Bush President for a second term less than four years ago. Think about that for a moment. A vote against the FISA bill approved by the Democratic leadership will expose Barry to charges of "radicalism" and worse by the always-scrupulous John Sidney McCain. And then from the vast trailer parks of Florida to the lean-to shacks of Appalachia to the tent cities of Ontario, California, will issue the cry, "Barack can't keep us safe because he really is a Muslim!"

So what the hell's he supposed to do? Listen to civil libertarian eggheads like Glenn Greenwald and yours truly? Or get elected and use his new, unConstitutional powers responsibly, that is, until with a new majority on the Supreme Court made possible by his LightWorker appointments, the Court strikes down the FISA bill he supported on grounds it violates the Fourth Amendment? That's about as good as it gets in this, our 232nd year.

Post No. 400: Another Milestone

I only wish I had something highly significant to say. I could talk about the Boumediene decision again (establishing habeas corpus for Guantanamo prisoners), and how John McCain's reaction to the decision ("the worst in U.S. history") convinced me that he's (a) preposterously ignorant about American judicial history, (b) a racist and (c) disturbingly similar to Joe McCarthy in his xenophobia.

Actually, it's not a bad topic for a post, but I don't know...how much can you say? Dred Scott vs. Sandford established that an erstwhile freed American slave (Dred Scott) could be returned to his "owner" because an African-American slave was not actually a person at all, but property. Because it undermined the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott decision has been cited by many historians as a precipitating cause of the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history. Could that have been, maybe, a worse decision than a case holding prisoners held indefinitely without charges in a concentration camp can file a piece of paper in a federal court asking, why am I here?

How about Korematsu vs. United States, which affirmed President Franklin Roosevelt's decision to intern Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast during World War II, and to deny them due process rights to (a) challenge their detention or to (b) recover all of their confiscated real and personal property, leaving them penniless, although not a single instance of disloyalty or sabotage was ever committed by a Japanese-American during the entire war?

Here's my guess: John Sidney McCain would approve of the Dred Scott decision (if he knew about it, a huge assumption) for the same reason he voted against the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday. Korematsu? They looked like the enemy. Boumediene? They're Arabs. It's simple, really, once you get the hang of the decision-making process.

I like what the great Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter had to say about due process and civil liberties. The greatness of a nation is measured by the justice it affords its enemies, not just its friends. That's a concept that is lost on John McCain for the same reason it's lost on George W. Bush. They don't really know how to think. They can't make elementary distinctions between situations which are presented as analogous.

Take the Guantanamo situation, for example. Contrary to popular belief, many of the inmates who have cycled through there, or are incarcerated there now, were not captured by U.S. forces on foreign battlefields. In fact, only a small percentage of them were. Most were turned over by foreign bounty hunters, police or military forces. They're not just "Taliban" or "al-Qaeda," either. Many of them deny an affiliation to any terrorist organization. Thus, if the argument is made that the United States has not historically granted the right of habeas corpus to enemy soldiers captured during war (an argument made by Justice Antonin Scalia in his willfully stupid dissent), one can rejoin that this "war" bears no resemblance to the wars it is being compared to. And the first rule of distinguishing putatively analogous situations is to note differences in the facts of each case.

So follow along, John Sidney, as well as you can with your class rank #894 out of 899 at Annapolis (Barack has already finished the test, nailing it, and his pen lies atop his blue book). In World War II, for example, the United States fought Germany and captured German soldiers who were held in POW camps in the United States. There was no reason to grant them the right of habeas corpus because they were uniformed soldiers captured on the field of battle and served a nation-state which could, when the war concluded, sign a treaty covering such matters as the repatriation of POWs. And that's what happened.

Contrast that situation to Lakhdar Boumediene. He's a Bosnian. The United States is not in a state of war with Bosnia. He's not a uniformed soldier in the Bosnian army, and there is no treaty between the U.S. and Bosnia on the horizon which will deal with his fate. The United States "says" that he is a foot solider in the "war on terror." The war on terror has no end-date and no clearly defined parameters. We do not identify any particular nationality as the enemy (if we did, Congress would have declared war on Saudi Arabia in September, 2001). Someone thrown into Guantanamo, as Boumediene was, thus has to "hope" that he's "tried" before a Military Commission and is exonerated. But he's never been charged with anything, the same situation which pertains to hundreds of other Guantanamo prisoners, now and in the past.

This is completely unjust, particularly when we know from empirical data that the United States has wrongly imprisoned many Guantanamo inmates and released them without ever charging them. So there cannot be any reasonable claim that an infallible system exists for holding men in a concentration camp without recourse (other than the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which do not allow a full factual exploration on the merits, and deny the effective assistance of counsel). In other words, the Guantanamo inmates are denied a fair hearing, even though they may be completely innocent.

Mouth-breathing simpletons like George W. Bush and John Sidney McCain equate the existence of detention with proof of guilt. When you think about it, so many of the problems they cause stem from this style of a priori thinking. It is a profoundly unscientific and undisciplined way of analyzing situations. A Guantanamo inmate who files a writ in federal court demanding to know the basis of his incarceration has not been set free. The jailer is simply required to demonstrate that probable cause exists for detention, meaning, would a reasonable person believe that it is more likely than not that this person has committed a crime on the facts presented? Why is the Bush Administration afraid of such a right? Why is the "creation" of such a right (which has only been around since Magna Carta) the result of the "worst case in U.S. history"?

It's regarded as the worst case in United States history by someone who wants to succeed the worst president in U.S. history and become the new worst president in U.S. history. We really ought to deny him the opportunity.

Let's Check in with the Dow!

This is not a blog about Eastern Mysticism or I would simply ask, "What is the Dao?" When I ask about the Dow, you know that I'm into something equally mysterious yet less, how shall we say, spiritually rejuvenating.

I generally start the day, now with sunrise so eerily early with Daylight Saving, by turning on CNBC about the time of the opening bell on Wall Street. 6:30 am PDT. And there she is, Erin Burnett, with that perky, Katie Holmes-like crooked grin and luxuriant dark hair, next to the old puffy guy with the comb-over and sour disposition. Mark, I think his name is. Quite a couple. Erin is the real star, of course, because what these cable channels are selling now are pretty young women. The information is useless because the market is stagnant and the only people making money are the players, the short-sellers, the commodities manipulators, the arbitrage wizards.

The Dow is hovering around 12,000 now. This is a new "psychological resistance point." It dips a little below 12K once in a while, but it's almost too embarrassing for it to remain there. You see, when Bill Clinton was president, the Dow achieved an all-time high of 11,500. Bill inherited a Dow of 3,500 and proceeded to more than triple it. Ah, those were the days! I wish the Dow would simply revert to 11,500, instead of levitating 500 meaningless points above it, in order to simplify the math which follows, but there's that psychological resistance point...Bill's zenith was achieved in December 1999, more than eight years ago. In the 8.5 years since, the Dow has "gained" about 500 points. So you see the difficulties I face now. If the Dow were simply flat, I could use some reasonable discount rate for inflation and tell you how much poorer we are (measured by the Dow) today versus December 1999. Now I have to figure out...hell, do I even want to do this?

Okay. George W. Bush is too intellectually lazy to do this kind of number crunching, but someone has to carry on the great American tradition of scholastic rigor. Why not me? Let's first figure out the percentage increase by calculating the ratio of 500 to 11,500. So: 500/11,500 = 4%. (Notice that I show my work. Would W do that?) Let's divide 4 by 8.5, = .47%. So the yearly average of increase is less than 1/2 of one percent. It feels like that out there, doesn't it? I thought W was the CEO President? Oh that's right. He's being a CEO as he was always a CEO.

Now that we've got some basic numbers, we really should adjust them to reflect inflation. We can't accept flat numbers. Just for the hell of it, and to give the Bush Administration a break, and since it doesn't really matter because these numbers suck no matter how you look at them, let's use 2% per year, something like the CPI number, a contrived statistic to keep Social Security recipients on the verge of starvation, while we carry on the real business of government, wars of foreign conquest. So we have to discount the Dow by 17%. Here we go, W, follow along now! 12,000 x .83 = 9,960. That's pretty generous too, since it incorporates Alan (Let Them Eat Cat Food) Greenspan's "substitution" principle for inflation. So the Dow has lost about 13% over the last 8.5 years.

To have more fun with this number, however, let's consider an alternative way of looking at the Dow. Suppose we hypothesize a German investor who decided to invest euros in the American stock market in December 1999. Let's call him Klaus Fuchs, because he's going to get fuched at the end of this. (I apologize to anyone who finds him/herself on this site because you Googled "atomic espionage," but to make it up to you, I'll throw in a fun fact at the end about Klaus.) Klaus is tired of German investments and German life generally, with its universal health care, 8-week vacations, superb beer, great cars, smooth roads, clean bullet trains and the rest of that tedium and wants some real action, the kind you find in America. I realize that in December 1999 the euro was sort of a notional currency and didn't become paper currency for a couple of years, but the principle is sound nonetheless.

At the point of his investment (let's say Klaus puts in 100,000 euros) the dollar and euro are at rough parity. Klaus buys into a Dow Index Fund to track the overall market. The market is at 11,700 when he puts his money down. 8.5 years later, wie geht es ihnen, Klaus? Schade, nicht so gut.

Nicht so gut at all. Klaus' investment was denominated in dollars, of course, just as the vast majority of Dick Cheney's investments are denominated in currencies other than the dollar (don't you wish you were an insider?). The first of many haircuts which Klaus must endure is that his dollars are now worth 64% of the original euros, leaving him with $64,000. Which we now must reduce by 13%, the real loss over that 8.5 year period, leaving him with $64,000 x .87 = $55,860 in constant dollars. Ach du Lieber. With what Klaus lost, he could have bought a new 530i.

This may suggest why the United States may have increasing difficulty convincing foreign governments to balance our budget for us in the immediate future. It is also an object lesson in another uncomfortable fact: the U.S. economy is moribund, the banks are broke and Americans are having an extremely difficult time affording not just the cost of living, but something more basic - living.

Oh, when Richard Feynman's wife was sick during World War II, he had to leave Los Alamos to visit her in a nearby hospital. He didn't have a car of his own, so he borrowed one. It belonged to Klaus Fuchs. Professor Feynman had no idea Klaus was a spy.