With Enough Shovels

One theoretical approach to surviving a thermonuclear war, at least outside of the immediate blast zone (the "overpressure area"), is to construct a primitive bomb shelter as follows:  Dig a deep hole, as deep as your age and physical condition will allow you.  It needs to be large enough for you and for whomever else you wish to protect, but not so great in area that it cannot be completely covered by a pair of stout wooden doors.  You're going to be down there for a while so you might want to consider lining the floor and walls with planks so it will be homey.  The important part of the construction is the roof.  On top of the doors you need to pile three feet of earth; this is the key protection against radiation in the immediate aftermath of the explosion of hydrogen bombs.  You need to work out ventilation, because let's face it, this shelter is a little like burying yourself alive.  On the bright side, however, if you die in the shelter from radiation poisoning, you will have saved the trouble of your interment by others who will probably be in no shape to dispose of you.

These joyous thoughts occur to me in the aftermath of Sarah Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson, in which she joins with Senator McCain in seeing all us here Americans as "Georgians now."  How can I say this?  These people are freaking crazy.  I don't suppose that Sarah Palin, in the course of bouncing around among various third-rate colleges for six years more than 20 years ago, read much history of the First World War.  But the way all of those European countries got themselves sucked into a stupid and ruinous war was through the existence of a bunch of "mutual defense pacts," which have their modern cognate in NATO. Substitute President's Saakashvili's stupid provocation of Russia for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and you get a sense of how these modern entanglements could spell doom.  George W. Bush wants every country he can find to be in NATO now; Poland, Georgia, maybe Russia itself. Maybe the new plan is to force Russia to attack Russia if one of our NATO allies goes to war with Russia.  That would make as much sense as stationing a battery of defense missiles in Poland as a first line of defense against Iranian missiles topped with nuclear warheads that don't exist.

This is getting extremely weird.  I'm beginning to wax nostalgic for George W. Bush.  Bush, in his naive, aw shucks way, at least wanted to get along with Vladimir Putin and to view Russia as a strategic ally.  I don't doubt that Putin was playing Bush a little, and if you have ever read any of the analyses of Russia written by the chess player Garry Kasparov, you would have little doubt about the kind of quasi-police state Putin is running over there with his United Russia party.  That, however, is not the point.  The point is simpler: why does the United States, and more particularly John McCain and his sidekick, Ma Barker Palin, want a new Cold War?

These are such dangerous games we're beginning to play.  McCain dispenses even with the pretense of coexisting peacefully with Russia.  He wants to kick Russia out of the G-8.  He wants to fast track Georgia into NATO so we'll be obligated by treaty to defend this little jerkwater hovel, Josef Stalin's home state, if Georgia decides to provoke another confrontation with Russia, as Georgia did in August.  Georgia cooperated with Bill Clinton, after all, in agreeing to construction of an oil pipeline between the Caspian and Black Seas, one that provides an alternative to the pipeline passing through Russia to the north.  This was Clinton's gambit in the neverending Great Game of access to oil in the Caucusus, which has prompted international conflict from Hitler to the present.  This lies at the root of everything going on over there.

South Ossetia, Abkhazia.  These are regions so vital to the U.S. that we should risk the destruction of human civilization to make sure they stay part of Georgia?  They're part of Georgia because Stalin, a Georgian, wanted them included in his home Soviet Republic.  So our defiant stand against Putin is to ensure that Stalin's legacy is honored and respected.  South Ossetia, not surprisingly, sees itself as naturally allied with North Ossetia, which is within Russia. Abkhazia is simply bitter because it knows its name is so stupid.

George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice actually said, with a straight face in admonishing Russia, that "nations do not invade other countries to resolve differences in the 21st century."  As Mark Twain once said, some things are simply beyond satire.  Bush and Rice are "satire incarnate." Bush, sensing that something was amiss, later amended the Bush Doctrine 2.0 to state that countries don't invade "neighboring countries to resolve differences," and one could hear the collective sigh of relief in Canada and Mexico when he did so.  Probably the White House should post on its website the minimum distance from a nation's capital the invaded country must be to make invasion okay.  That could clear up a lot of confusion in Putin's mind, because he's hung up on our ongoing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

McCain simply does not appear to understand the concept of a zero sum game.  We cannot actually go to war with Russia for any reason whatsoever, with the exception of a nuclear attack by Russia on the United States.  Bush showed good judgment in ranting and raving about Russia's retaliation against Georgia and doing nothing else, because nothing else can be done.  In agitating for war against Russia, Sarah Palin has already done an immense amount of damage to the foreign policy and relations of the United States.  There's been no general election, she's not in national office, and already she's messing us up.  You just don't make statements like that; no sane leader in American history has ever talked enthusiastically about a war with Russia in the post-World War II era.  Crazed militarists, like General Curtis LeMay (satirized unforgettably by George C. Scott in "Dr. Strangelove"), have talked about a nuclear war with Russia as if it's a legitimate subject for discussion, but anyone who wants to survive never talks that way.  Dick Cheney, even, doesn't talk about war with Russia.

Yet here we go again, we've got a half-insane militarist running for President for the Republicans, an elderly man of no intellectual distinction whatsoever, with recurring bouts of invasive melanoma, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, a doddering, confused manner suggestive of onrushing dementia, who is saber rattling about Russia; and he chooses as a running mate a nonentity with no background at all in foreign affairs, who's never been to Europe, Asia, South America or Africa, but who thinks she knows Russia because she can see it across the Bering Strait.  

Carl Sagan and others did some very valuable work concerning nuclear winter about twenty years ago when some of Reagan's advisers were suggesting we could survive a nuclear war with enough shovels to dig the rudimentary shelters described above.  Sagan's research indicated that a full-scale exchange of thermonuclear weapons between the superpowers would destroy the Earth's climate and most humans with it; there is no way to "confine" the damage done by H-bombs to the blast zone or the downwind victims of radioactive fall-out.  It's much, much worse than that.  More recent studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder led by Michael Mills have demonstrated that even a regional conflict between two countries such as Pakistan and India, which possess atom bombs, could spell the end of human civilization.  All that is necessary is for these countries to exchange 40 or 50 Hiroshima-sized A-bombs (10-15 kiloton range, cherry bombs by H-bomb standards) with cities as their targets.  The resulting soot plumes carried up into the troposphere would result in a 50% decrease in ozone levels in the Northern Latitudes (70% at higher latitudes).

So, knowing the answer before I ask the question: do these shitty students, McCain & Palin, know this?  Do they realize what they're playing with when they indulge themselves in all this uninformed macho posturing about Russia?  Does Bush realize how insane it is to station missile batteries in Poland, which reduce Russia's deterrent-reaction time from a few minutes to effectively zero if a missile is launched from Poland?  The Russians know.  They have told Poland that if they allow the placement of American missiles in Poland, the Russians will destroy them militarily.  And when you think about it, what choice would Russia have, regardless of your fond memories of the Cold War, when they were always bad and we were always good?  Would we allow the placement of "defensive" Russian missiles in Tijuana to protect their Venezuelan friend Chavez from North Korean missiles?

This is getting very, very serious.  

This is the way the world ends, 

this is the way the world ends, 

not with a bang but with an F in nuclear physics.

The Anti-Government Government and Its Fundie Enablers

There can be economies of scale even in blogging; for example, suppose I post a comment to Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times and then quote myself:

"Mr. Krugman's column strikes me as a very limited view of what Paulson's bailout is really all about. The reason the stockholders of Fannie & Freddie have been sacrificed is to conserve as much of the available assets of the two GSEs as possible in order to make timely payments to the foreign holders of the MBS bonds issued by these two companies under the implied assurance that the bonds were, in effect, backed by the full faith and credit of the USA, just as T-bills and bonds are. The Chinese in particular have voiced ominous warnings about the consequences of default. It was thus a no-brainer for the no-brain crowd of the Bush Administration. They've got to keep the house of cards intact at least through January 2009."

This post was recommended by 157 readers of the intelligent readership of the New York Times, more than anyone else on the first page of comments.  I didn't look farther than the first page to avoid finding a comment with a bigger readership.

Am I mad as hell and disinclined to take it anymore?  That's silly; we're all going to take a great deal more.  I console myself with the canard that the Bush Administration is the "no-brain" crowd; actually, they're smart as hell and they're going to take as much as they can on their way out the door.  What I hate to see is the house Liberal, Paul Krugman, running cover for the Bushies.  How can he write an entire column about the Paulson bailout of Fannie & Freddie and never once mention its true purpose?  Krugman is the kind of overrated analyst writing in mainstream publications who assuages the mostly unconscious and yet highly accurate suspicion among ordinary Americans that they're being taken for a royal ride by their own government.  The Treasury Department did not engineer a socialization of America's two biggest mortgage companies, which together hold about $5 trillion in mortgage and mortgage-related paper, so that Americans could once again "afford housing."  This idea is, you know, a sick joke.  In a sense, housing in America is becoming more affordable all the time.  The price declines in the real estate market are the largest since the Great Depresssion, and they're far from over.  Adjustable mortgage resets, declining wages and rising unemployment ensure that more and more foreclosed houses will continue to swamp the market at least through all of 2009.  Propping up Fannie & Freddie is not going to do anything for that problem.

Paul Krugman often has the right idea; he sees the Bush Administration, in line with every Republican Administration since Reagan, as the anti-government government.  It is government by sabotage, a species of "vandalism," as Thomas Frank writes in his brilliant new book on Conservative rule called "The Wrecking Crew." It's just that Krugman, as a writer for a mainstream publication, just can't hold that (accurate) view steady.  He wants to believe that even this crew in power occasionally does something which you might call "altruistic," that is, designed to help the majority of the great masses of people they govern.  But:  they never, ever do. That is never, ever the function of an oligarchic government.  Every move they make is designed to benefit the Big Business Class, period, end of story.  The purpose of the Medicare Prescription Bill?  To prevent mass purchases of pharmaceuticals by Medicare itself, thus driving the price of drugs down (it's in the law, folks; is that for you?)  The Bankruptcy Reform Bill?  To make it more difficult for ordinary Americans to discharge credit card debt in bankruptcy.  The bill was written by banking industry lobbyists, with the assistance of Joe Biden (thanks, Joe!  Well, corruption is also bipartisan).  FISA reform?  To exonerate Big Telecom from felonious spying at the behest of the government.  Bush's tax cuts?  Okay, he couldn't help it if it also reduced average income taxes a little, but it was a huge break for the plutocrat class because it capped the high marginal rate at 35% (down 4% from Clinton) and brought capital gains to 15%, allowing hedge fund managers like John Paulson, who earned $4 billion last year to pay at a lower "marginal" rate (he pays capital gains rates) than his secretary.

The mania for deregulation, privatization and the unleashing of greed on the broadest possible basis has led us to this pretty pass, where the entire economic structure of the United States is teetering on the brink of implosion.  While the Fundamentalist/Evangelical voting bloc is brought into the Republican tent with promises of a few baubles like outlawing abortion, stigmatizing gays in every way possible, making automatic weapons possession legal (if not mandatory) and installing Christianity as the State Religion (just as the Pilgrims wanted), that's not really what the Republicans are all about.  That's simply the bait-and-switch technique which Thomas Frank described in another brilliant book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?"  Their agenda is simpler: free markets completely untethered from any government regulation.

The Republicans share one habit of thinking in common with their Fundie enablers; a tendency toward what "secularists" call a priori reasoning.  It works like this: my theory is correct.  Now here is a real world problem.  It will be solved by means of my theory.  What is my theory?  My theory is that the all-seeing, all-knowing "invisible hand of the market" routs out all inefficiencies, makes everything transparent and results in a completely fair and level playing field.  That this is complete and utter nonsense does not matter.  Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Howard Phillips, Jack Abramoff, John McCain, George W. Bush, they all believe it to the depth of their beings.  And the Fundies have kept them in power for 20 or the last 28 years, long enough to change everything about our government and regulatory agencies.  The Bush Administration did not even believe that disaster response should be "regulated:" it should be left to the open market to decide whether saving New Orleans was or was not a sound business decision.  I guess it wasn't.

Now John McCain adds a secessionist, inexperienced, and vindictive person to his ticket, someone who believes that polar bears are not endangered in her state but that dinosaurs walked around in Alaska as recently as 5,000 years ago, and what happens?  McCain gets a 15 point bounce in the "Southern tier," those states that have always been part of Nixon's "Southern Strategy."  What used to work down South was anti-black rabble rousing.  Now the appeal is softer and gentler: a return to a Golden Era before the "humanist" predations of abortion and gay rights turned our country into Sodom.

John McCain's solution to the Fannie & Freddie crisis is to pump them up with taxpayer money and then re-privatize them.  (Palin thought they were public entities all along; oh man, we are in such trouble; between a Republican who thinks Iraq and Afghanistan are contiguous countries and one who believes Fannie & Freddie are public agencies, we're never going to make it.) Privatized gain, socialized loss.  See how it works?  

Is there a unifying theme to today's screed?  Maybe this: it's worse than you think.

This Year's Election in Flohiovaynia

One of the funnier things Dmitry Orlov wrote in "Reinventing Collapse" was his take on the new American electoral innovation; the two Center-Right Parties nominate candidates who finish in a virtual dead heat and the winner is selected out of "statistical noise."  It does seem, after you factor in all the usual Republican election cheating, that about the same number of people vote for the Republican as for the Democrat.  And if the vote is especially close in one of three "battleground" states, then selection of a President can wind up the result of a rounding error.

Those three states, of course, are Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Florida decided 2000 (maybe), Ohio decided 2004 (maybe).  While both campaigns this year are excitedly talking about all the new states "in play," I doubt this is really the case.  This year will be another Flohiovaynia election.  Pennhiofla?  Hiopennorida?  Call this three-headed monster what you want, Flohiovaynia holds the key to our next President.  Barack isn't going to win Virginia or South Dakota; where does he think he is, Germany?  He isn't going to win West Virginia or Kentucky or South Carolina.  I do note with a mordant amusement that in the worldwide polls, among all other industrialized countries, Obama is the overwhelming favorite to win, by a factor of 4 to 1.  Just one of those things (racism) which makes this country so "exceptional," I guess.

If I don't vote in November, it will make no difference.  My state will be carried by Barack by 10+ points.  The job of us here progressives in this state is to give money to Barry and to do "campaign work."  Our votes are superfluous beyond a certain bare majority.  And our votes are quite dilute compared to, say, Wyoming or Alaska.  My vote counts about 33% as much as one of Governor Sarah Palin's subjects, all because we "decided" to freeze the number of elected Representatives from all states at 435, and those barren stretches of real estate in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and Alaska are entitled to a statutory minimum of 3 electoral votes each.  Simple math.  Alaska, 600,000 citizens, 3 votes = 200,000 people per vote.  California, 33 million people, 55 votes, = 600,000 people per vote.  Are people in Alaska really three times smarter than I am and ought to be given a weighted vote?  So it would seem.  Maybe what would make more sense is simply to disenfranchise enough Californians so that we are represented at the 200,000 to 1 level.  So let's get those Republican caging lists to work here and get 22,000,000 Californians off the voting rolls.  You know they want to, anyway.  Or, to be more "democratic," let's select a representative 11,000,000 Californians to do our voting each time around who conform to the state's voting profile.  That way I'd only have to vote for President once every twelve years.  And maybe I could "pair" my vote with some Republican somewhere, cancelling each other out (every other time, say), and I could vote once every 24 years.  If we think this system through, we could set it up so each American citizen of a populous state with a dilute vote could vote once in a lifetime.

Those Founding Fathers - geniuses.  Nah, it's not their fault.  They had 13 states, remember?  They were trying to balance the few powerful states against the relatively weaker majority.  They could not have foreseen that in 200 years, Flohiovaynia would be choosing the President every four years.  Only Pennsylvania was even a state at the beginning.  And guess what?  It would take a Constitutional amendment to change the Electoral College system.  Requiring three-fourths approval of all 50 states.  What do you suppose the odds are that all those over-represented states are going to willingly give up their advantages in the ratification process? What do you suppose the odds are such a bill would ever get out of committee?

No, we're stuck with the Flohiovaynia system.  There are options, however, if you want your vote to mean something.  You could move to one of those three states.  The other possibility for reform is if that political party that Todd Palin belonged to (and to which his heart no doubt still is pledged), the Alaskan Independence Party, succeeds in freeing itself from the Union.  I noted that the AIP (which has even elected a governor, and that governor served as Sarah Palin's campaign manager - think about that - a secessionist Vice President) has affiliations with other secessionist parties in other states.  I had no idea, until John McCain selected a secessionist as his running mate, that secessionist parties were even legal in the United States.  Goes to show - some people are always ahead of the curve.  But you know  -- is that something that we 22 million Californians who get to take this year off could work on ourselves?

Determining that Government is Too Big to Fail, Government Takes Over Government

The struggling mortgage-purchasing giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been placed in a financial "conservatorship," the maximally-stressed out Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson announced on Sunday. A conservatorship is the sort of legal vehicle you might consider for your failing Aunt Tilly when she acquires the distressing habit of dispensing thousand dollar checks to complete strangers. The gummed-up lending market in the United States is in desperate need of some fiscal WD-40, and so the Treasury Department, as in the case of Bear Stearns, is riding to the rescue with its usual implement of resuscitation, more money. Where does all the money come from? From the usual source: the printing press at the Treasury Department.

The problem, in a way, gets simpler and simpler as we go. The United States does not actually have any "money," as we used to understand the term. I am not talking about going off the gold standard, as Nixon decided to do a long time ago when we moved to the present system of "fiat currency." What we have is an international agreement among the nations of the world that the dollar, for now, is the agreed marker for how much money is available in the world. Most commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. This is one of the major reasons, in fact, that the price of oil moves inversely to the value of the dollar. The lower price of gasoline at present reflects a relative "strengthening" of the dollar against foreign currencies, but in part this is because the economic woes of the United States are dragging the rest of the world down with it, and all of this is particularly attributable to the flagging fortunes of that mightiest of all econ-drivers, the American Consumer.

To keep the consumer economy going in the first eight years of this millenium, the U.S. came up with a brilliant scheme for breathing new life into its profligate consumption. The hard assets, primarily the housing stock of America, were used as collateral for recycled dollars collected from around the world and the money thus raised was used to keep the consumer economy going despite the declining wages of the American worker. The collateral instruments, the mortgages, were sold in the secondary market to numerous purchasers, but especially to Fannie & Freddie who together are involved in about 70% of the secondary mortgage market in the United States. F&F bundled the mortgages into mortgage backed securities (MBS) and sold them domestically and around the world.

While Fannie & Freddie are only "quasi" public entities, the quasi-CEOs of these outfits were not reticent about assuring foreign purchasers that MBS bonds purchased, inter alia, by the Chinese, Japanese, Cayman Islanders and others were really, when you think about it, a whole lot like Treasury bonds issued by the Unites States government, except, you know, they're not. In reliance on this fraud, our most important creditors went all in for this toxic crud. And so, when it came to pass that a great number of the MBS bonds were collateralized by houses whose former owners now live in tent cities in Ontario, California and other scenic locales, the international merde hit the ventilateur.

Henry Paulson's anal pucker factor, which had been hovering around 9.7 (10 is slammed completely shut) suddenly leapt to an untenable 9.9. We have relied for a very long time on the kindness of strangers, and if those foreign creditors, who hold about $1.3 trillion worth of the MBS (Mortgaged Bullshit), were to suddenly cast a gimlet eye on the Treasury securities they also hold, and were to logically decide that a country which runs half-trillion dollar yearly deficits, and which owes itself and others $10 trillion, and borrows money in order to buy oil and fund wars of aggression to ensure access to oil, might not be actually good for all that U.S. paper they were holding; well, it could start to sound something like this:

"Our new Chinese creditors have demanded their first payment. Several times in the last week, Chinese officials have stated in no unceertain terms that they would be VERY UNHAPPY if their Fannie and Freddie bonds weren't honored in full. Forget the Fed: US economic conditions are now dictated by the People's Bank of China." From Economic Populist.

What form might this unhappiness take? It might take the form of economic catastrophe for the United States if it dispelled the group hallucination on which American prosperity now depends; to wit, the consensus delusion that running our printing press entitles us to determine how wealthy we are. So Paulson really had no choice. It was obvious the "drunk" (Bush's term) execs at Fannie & Fred had managed the companies off a cliff, but their demise spelled huge trouble for the government's own viability. So, yet another no-brainer for Paulson. The Feds are calling the shots from here on out, with the "taxpayers" left to inject whatever operating capital the GSEs will need to service their foreign and other debts.

Of course, the idea of the "taxpayers" actually paying for this latest emergency relief is yet another fantasy. The Feds may as well pile on as much debt as they can get away with at this point, because the truth is we're not good for any of it. The taxpayers don't have that kind of money. The idea of enforcing some sort of financial discipline through the principle of "moral hazard" disappeared about the time that Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, engineered the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management. It's now standard operating procedure for the federal government to take over one huge financial company after another, as we gradually socialize the financial structure of the United States. It is the natural, inescapable action-reaction sequence after all the years of mindless, Ayn Rand-inspired, deregulated greed. But really, Paulson is just kicking the problem down the road. If you don't have the money, you don't have the money. He's staving off the inevitable until, let's see, about November 5, 2008.

Which might be the biggest, ironical joke of all. Paulson might help McCain get elected, and then this addled, goofy, querulous, forgetful shmegege can inherit the job of straightening out - what would you call it? - the financial meltdown of the United States economy. It would almost be worth it just to see that.

The Dadaist Phase of American Politics

"Marcel Duchamp was born in in the Haute-Normandie Region of France, and grew up in a family that liked cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Emile Nicolle, his maternal grandfather, filled the house, and the family liked to play chess, read books, painted and made music together." Wikipedia entry for Marcel Duchamp, innovative French artist and thinker.

I'm sure that sounds nothing like most American families you know. Our families like to snow mobile, watch the NFL, eat fast food, and as for music, it's mainly one of the parents yelling at the teenage daughter to turn the gangsta rap down. That's okay. Sometimes I'm pretty sure I was not only born in the wrong country, but in the wrong century as well. But as to Sarah Palin - you won't find me denigrating her family background or going on and on about her teen daughter's pregnancy or her husband's (then boyfriend) DUI arrest 22 years ago. That's ridiculous. What's the point? Her story is a fairly typical American story, except that Sarah herself is one of those preternaturally pushy and striving people who understand that in American public life, leadership is always there for the taking if you just go after it. The low quality of our political class, I've always thought, owes more to its abandonment by people of higher skills and intellect than it does to some intrinsic quality of politics itself. I watched Barbara Boxer, working the other side of the political aisle, accomplish the same sort of thing in California, a much bigger fish pond than Alaska. Barbara was a stock broker, then a Marin County Supervisor, then a U.S. Representative, then a Senator. When I watch her on C-SPAN, at a committee hearing, I'm always astounded at how ineffective she is. She stands for a lot of the right things, in my book, but she fumbles and flails to no good effect, at least in public.

From Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to Sarah Palin. This surely marks the American progress. My problem with Sarah Palin is that she's almost uniquely unqualified to be President. And a person running as McCain's VP is not a matter of casual interest. I would rate the chances of Sarah Palin becoming President sometime between January 2009 and January 2013, as you read this, at about 25%. I arrive at this prognostication through the multiplication of percentages, taught in American public high schools circa 1963-66. A 50% chance McCain will be elected, and a 50% chance he will not finish his term because of a physical or mental disability (such as death). McCain already shows signs of early Alzheimer's, and this would be obvious to the public if the media would stop screwing around with characterizations of his "confusion" as "senior moments" or the "stress" of the campaign. McCain has referred to: (a) President Putin of Germany, (b) present-day Czechoslovakia, (c) the Sunni trainers of al-Qaeda in Tehran and (d) the Iraq-Afghanistan border. Sometimes when he is asked a question in public, particularly if there is any sort of preamble or predicate to the question, he can't follow or retain the question. With the stress of the presidency, all of these problems would get worse in a hurry; and after the Constitutional crisis about what to do with a President who is not dead but definitely losing it, we would have Sarah Palin as our new leader.

I think a President, at the very least, must be conversant with all of the following in order to be minimally competent. The workings of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, including a detailed knowledge of the role of the dollar as the world's fiat currency. If the President doesn't get that, the entire American economy could go down the tubes in a hurry. (2) A deep understanding of nuclear proliferation, including the safeguards regime, the treaty arrangements and who's got what. (3) An overall comprehension of the U.S. legal system, how the courts interrelate, the role of administrative agencies, the principles of comity between Washington, D.C. and the states, and the function of the Bill of Rights. (4) An appreciation of modern science, the accelerating problem of climate change, the oceanic problems of acidification and hypoxia, and the pathways to alternative fuels to ameliorate all these problems. (5) The looming disaster of avian flu and contamination of the food supply because of the Bush era hollowing out and politicization of the regulatory agencies.

Marcel Duchamp is said to have inaugurated Dadaism by taking a men's urinal, mounting it on a base, and calling it "Fountain." There's a deep joke about modern perceptions contained therein. Something like that is going on here with Sarah Palin. I heard Lindsey Graham of South Carolina passionately defending her as McCain's choice on a Sunday talk show, talking about what a "great" commander in chief she would make, and sneering at the idea of Barack Obama (whose name he pronounced with the utmost disgust - where's the white sheet, Lindsey?) in the same role. (I hope Lindsey is happy with what he's done; because of his intolerance, God has directed Hurricane Hanna to smite South Carolina this weekend.)

What in the world is Lindsey talking about? Is just saying stuff like that enough now? Have the Bush years so degraded national standards that we take seriously the nonsense of people like Cindy McCain, who said Alaska's proximity to Russia gives Sarah "foreign policy experience?"

Oy vey iz mir. Alaska has fewer people than the city of San Francisco, and Palin has been governor for about two years. We're not really going to count her mayorship of Wasilla, are we? What next? Two terms as president of the Rotary Club of Tonopah, Nevada? And although she lives in Alaska, the state where the effects of global warming are most obvious, she doesn't see a connection between all the carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere and all the methane released by Alaska's thawing tundra, or all the dark sea water exposed by the melting of Alaska's sea ice, or the 3.5 degree F overall warming and 6 degree F winter warming of Alaska since the 1970s. Alaska is the poster state for global warming and its governor doesn't think humans have anything to do with it. Could we call that what it is? It's stupidity.

Sarah Palin has nothing in her background which indicates she can handle that list up above, not academically, not experientially. The Republicans can close ranks and claim another completely unqualified person should be put within a hair's breadth of the Presidency, but that doesn't make it true. It's still a bad idea. It's still a urinal on a base, not a fountain.

Look How They Massacred My Boy

I took a paternal interest in Hurricane Gustav from the very beginning. I knew him when he was just a lonely tropical depression out there in the Caribbean, trying to make his way in the world of big time weather, trying to attract the kind of attention from Coriolis-bent inrushing winds (sort of like campaign contributions) that build a nascent hurricane into a full-fledged monster storm. I could follow him on the NOAA website of the National Hurricane Center, the Public Advisories he generated, the 3- and 5-day cones of the path ahead. He waxed and waned, ol' Gus did, sometimes a Tropical Storm, sometimes a Hurricane, Cat-1.

He started getting it together after he roughed up Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He knew, of course, that destroying "buildings" on Hispaniola is not the real deal, because construction codes are pretty lax there. Maybe it made him a New Haven star, but Haiti is just not Broadway. After Hispaniola, Gus lost it. His confidence, his mojo, I don't know. He dropped back into Tropical Storm territory as he made the turn and headed north toward Cuba, the extreme western end of the island and the Isla de Juventud. It was there that Gus gave us a preview of coming attractions. Reaching deep into his eye and holding his breath (it's difficult to get these pathetic fallacies spot on when dealing with a hurricane), he lowered his central pressure into the 940 millibar range and the winds screamed as they topped 145 mph. Cat-4, baby, and he pummeled the Isle of Youth like there was no tomorrow. I began to suspect at that point that Gustav was an anti-Castro Republican, but politics seemed out of place when talking about a tropical cyclone of this power.

I'd been following Gustav for about 4 days before he made landfall at CNN and the hyper-excitable Chad Myers, their resident hurricane "expert." As Hurricane Hanna approaches North Florida, you can run the following experiment yourself: just go to the National Hurricane Center website, check the "Public Advisory" updates on the storm, and see if EVERYTHING Chad says, at great length and with a worked-up frenzy, isn't anticipated in the NOAA assessment. Now, there's a reason for this: Chad, or CNN generally, just doesn't have any way of knowing what's going on in the eye of a hurricane without those fearless pilots who fly out over the monster and drop their instruments into the storm to measure air pressure and wind speed. The hurricane tracks which NOAA generates are uncannily accurate; while Gus was still over Cuba, the 5-day cone's central track took it exactly over his point of ultimate landfall. It's hilarious, however, to watch Chad Myers breathlessly "update" us on the hurricane's progress as he reads the NHC's latest advisory on his teleprompter, then turns to his big screen loaded with NOAA satellite pictures (also available on the website) and spells it all out.

Of course, CNN also features reporters who stand in the wind and rain and report that...it's windy and rainy. Everyone's favorite is Anderson Cooper, stationed again in New Orleans. I won't speculate why Anderson likes spending so much time in New Orleans; this one isn't that kind of blog entry. He has perfect Hurricane Hair, and I think that's how he got the job. His thick, brushy gray hair acts as a kind of weathervane of the cyclone's progress. It doesn't swirl around, which would be distracting; it just gets pushed into a mound on one side of his head or the other. If you know that cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere spin counter-clockwise, you can make a first approximation of the hurricane's position by looking at Anderson's hair. If he's facing south on Bourbon Street and the hair has piled up on the right side of his head, then Gustav is just making landfall. The somewhat stupid part of stationing Anderson in New Orleans was that there were no hurricane force winds in NOLA this time around. It was too far away from Gus's center (Cat-1 force winds extended out about 70 miles, something which Chad Myers knew from reading the NOAA website). So what, exactly, was Cooper reporting?

Oh well. Gustav never got back to his Cuban glory, even out in the middle of the "bath tub," as the weather guys call the deep, warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Don't ask me why. He eased up to a Cat-2 when he came ashore. I think he pulled his punches, frankly. The thing is, he and his sibling hurricanes know their records are tainted at this point. Hurricanes Betsy, Donna, even Andrew, operated under the old regime of the "dead ball," before global warming really kicked in. Gus, Hanna, eventually Ike (you'll start hearing about him soon), work with the juice of higher ocean temperatures, and they know they'll never get full respect. If Betsy was a Babe Ruth among classic hurricanes, Gus was Barry Bonds. He's just a Tropical Depression at this point, dropping the rest of the water he picked up over the Gulf, blowing himself out.

The thing is, despite all the false expectations created for him by CNN, by their secret wish he would hit New Orleans head-on as a Category 5 and drown the city, I just want him to know I'm still proud of him. He did the best he could.

Gone Fishin'

Summer vacation at the Pond. I figure since the President doesn't work during August, and we pay him $400,000 per year, then Waldenswimmer, who works for nothing, should be afforded at least the same benefit. See you in September.

Henry

Blogging While America Burns

An old friend of mine from way, way back, a man who has served this country honorably in several capacities, wonders why I do this. I've often asked myself the same question. Part of it has to do with that quote from Edmund Burke featured on the vertical masthead to the right, the idea that one ought to do something when you think your own country is going down the tubes, however humble, however small scale. I don't think what I'm doing here is very much, frankly. I have done more, in fact. In 2004 I worked in Florida for the Election Protection Coalition as a voting site observer and legal adviser, part of a nationwide effort to reduce the level of illegal crap which had gone on in the 2000 elections in that very state and others. My reactions to that experience were mixed. It felt good to do something so tangible but it was also a window into how very broken our electoral system really is.

Anyway, most of the time I'm just blowing off steam. It doesn't take very long to write the blog because I have a left brain which tends to think in complete sentences, probably a vestigial artifact of the verbal era in which my friend and I were educated in the public schools. Sometimes I research what I'm writing, particularly on legal issues where I want to be certain I never say anything which is clearly inaccurate. I can usually avoid most glaring errors, at least.

A great writer once noted that good writing should sound like refined conversation. That's a good rule of thumb. I try not to write in prose which is stilted or overly complex, and to use colloquial phrases instead of formalisms whenever possible. Most writers unconsciously repeat words in sequential sentences (the power of suggestion), and my editing (which takes about 5 minutes) is directed to that quirk, to avoid monotony. You can usually spot unedited writing in blogs if you pay attention to that tendency.

I got started writing the blog because I just couldn't believe what was happening to the United States, and with the grandiosity of the uninitiated I thought throwing a few more words on the pile could turn things around. Humans are like that; we earnestly believe we can reorder reality by imagining it different. Have you ever sat around a dinner table and completely revamped America's energy regime? Then you wonder why your brilliant idea isn't implemented the next week. Same with all aspects of politics. I thought that if Americans realized that the Bill of Rights was under assault from the very government which they elected, they would immediately do the right thing. It turns out this is not the case. I never thought I would live to see the day when American citizens could be arrested on American soil, thrown in a dungeon, denied access to counsel, and kept in the dark about any charges against them without so much as a word of official protest. It's happened three times since Bush took office. Nor did I believe that the United States would ever implement a program to systematically violate the Geneva Conventions, torturing and killing many prisoners in the process. We've done all that, too.

So we've changed. A lot. A blog is useful for recording your impressions of those changes, as a kind of public diary. I don't think it makes much difference whether you record them publicly or privately anymore, because the concept of "privacy" is also a thing of the past. The details of your entire life are now available on government, credit reporting and mailing list database computers. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I don't wear a tinfoil hat. Far from it. I'm much less hysterical about all of this than a lot of the "celebrity" bloggers who write about the predations of modern American government.

Once, back in the mid Eighties, I was visiting German friends who live in Heidelberg. A good friend of theirs was an artist who lived in Czechoslovakia (when it was called that, Mr. McCain). I noted in talking to him, and to other people I met subsequently who had lived in police states behind the Iron Curtain, how utterly matter-of-fact they were about the impossibility of progressive change. One would think that a creative mind would be in a state of constant hysteria about the absence of free speech, about informers and arbitrary detention for dissent, the uselessness of the "elections." Quite the contrary. They possessed a wry and ironical detachment from the insanity of the social order. You can't go around in life all worked up and foaming at the mouth when you live in such places. You'll burn yourself completely out. I think, approaching things from the other direction (out-of-control, deregulated capitalism), we have arrived at a similar state. Big Money controls the organs of communication (television, radio and major newspapers) and Congress, through the lobbying system. That's enough to control everything. There is no need to lock up dissenters in the United States because their dissent is useless and unheeded. Seriously, all these Internet commenters and bloggers are just speaking quietly into hurricane-force winds. That's something you learn by writing one of these things. Companies which can write large checks to decision-makers do not need to worry about some guy wearing a pair of hiking shorts tapping away on his keyboard in his den. Similarly, major communications media are owned by a dwindling group of large corporate holding companies, and this has produced a kind of Pravda or Izvestia feel to the dissemination of "free speech" and opinion. Not just anything gets said - it has to fall within certain business-permitted and conventional parameters. These house organs drown out, by a thousand-fold, the whimpering of the Internet writers.

Our wholesale indifference to the huge changes in our government and legal system means that we are not going to return to those halcyon days when our system for maintaining civil liberties and human dignity were the envy of the world. I don't know exactly why we've become such a coarse, loutish and unprincipled country. My guess is that it owes to the deteriorating quality of our educational system. We still produce elites who can excel and make a lot of money, compete on the world stage, but we're growing a huge underclass in place of what was once the middle class, people who lead lives of quiet desperation and don't have time for the lofty musings of the self-styled blogger. That's a shame. The unexamined life, as the great thinker told us, is not worth living.

Philosophically, I think the time has come for the American people to think in terms of cultivating their own garden, perhaps literally as well as figuratively. Voltaire had that part right all along. And then my inspiration, Henry David Thoreau, fills in the rest of the blanks. Lead a principled life of your own and don't concern yourself over much with the stresses and problems of the world at large. Take care of that part of Mother Earth which lies close by you. America will proceed on its path of devolution and will become something else in time, maybe a fragmented regional confederation. As we see every four years or so, the strain of trying to strike balances between parts of the country which really do not see eye-to-eye, which have very little in common other than a collective memory of the way things used to be, has produced a political system which is utterly impotent to solve real problems. The only thing the country seems able to do on a consistent basis is to engage in war, and there's no future in that. Not one we should be interested in, anyway.

The Pushback Against Neoconservative Hijacking of American Foreign Policy

I was glad to see this commentary by Joe Klein in his Time magazine blog "Swampland,", analyzed approvingly by Daniel Levy on the TheHuffingtonPost:

"There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003... Happily, these people represent a very small sliver of the Jewish population in this country...I remain proud of my Jewish heritage, a strong supporter of Israel...But I am not willing to grant these ideologues the anonymity they seek...I believe there are a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who are pushing for war with Iran because they believe it is in America's long-term interests and because they believe Israel's existence is at stake. They are wrong and recent history tells us they are dangerous. They are also bullies and I'm not going to be intimidated by them."

Klein has been viciously attacked by Jewish neoconservatives such as John Podhoretz, Jr. for his apostasy, or more colloquially, for his chutzpah in displaying such a shanda fur die goyim. As one who sympathizes with the plight of Israel, as unorthodox as that may be in modern liberal circles (lay it off to my love of George Gershwin and Philip Roth - I don't care), I have been distressed by the co-opting of right wing Jewish intellectuals such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby and, of course, the Senator from Israel, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, in Bush's scorched earth policies in the Middle East. Co-opting, of course, is too mild a word. They were active participants. I have always considered their influence fundamentally misguided and a near-disaster for Israel's image in the American liberal community. By throwing their lot in with George W. Bush's hamfisted, incompetent, violent approach to his "freedom agenda," they have made it more difficult to discuss rationally what is actually in Israel's long-term strategic (and existential) interest, particularly because Bush, in his monomaniacal focus on stabilizing Iraq by force no matter what the cost, abandoned the peace process in the actual Middle East (Palestine-Israel) in favor of an "Axis of Evil" bellicosity.

The American public, charming folk that they are, are often about as astute in discerning subtle distinctions as a kitten watching a string swinging before its face. Since these big Neocons represent the apparent weight of opinion in the American Jewish community, the tendency is to deduce that all American Jews have become, mutatis mutandis, Right Wing. This is simply not the case, as Klein and Levy point out, neither here nor in Israel. I have had occasion to refer admiringly to the "South Jerusalem" blog, for example, but one can multiply such examples endlessly. The Neocons are Jewish extremists. The identification of American Jewry with the worst aspects of Bush's foreign policy, such as the constant war drumming for a war with Iran, also gives those Americans with anti-Semitic tendencies, who were looking for something to hang their Jewish hatred on anyway, a "rational" hook for their bias. Lieberman, in his transparent cheerleading for yet another use of the American military in a preemptive war in the Middle East, is committing a form of treason, in my book, and the evidence for such a serious charge is supported by his shameless appearance at John Hagee's Christians United for Israel hullabaloo. Does he represent the USA, Israel, or does he just want to see the End Times roll?

Anyway - mazeltov to Joe Klein. I think what he's doing is therapeutic and heroic. Let's not forget that the official position of the U.S. intelligence agencies is that Iran is not working on development of an atomic bomb, and that as signatories to the Nonproliferation Treaty (unlike India or Pakistan, to name two examples without naming the third), they are currently within their rights to enrich unranium. Am I reassured by such legalities? No, I'm not, but it would be a welcome change if the United States operated within the bounds of treaties it has already signed. Bush's habit of ignoring all legalities (his unilateral rejection of the ABM treaty has been a disaster in American-Russian relations, for example) comes into play once again. If it is not permissible for Iran to enrich uranium, then change the damn treaty. It's nuts to threaten war over the legal exercise of an international right. It breeds utter contempt for American actions, which under Bush have become a series of ad hoc, unilateralist, rogue spasms apparently dictated by whatever his Magic 8 Ball tells him to do that morning.

Not an approach that any country, or ethnic group, should want to have anything to do with.

La Diva Sings Her Usual Aria

I caught Nancy Pelosi's act on Jon Stewart's Daily Show a couple of nights ago and was reminded yet again how much our elected Reps rely on the dismal state of American civics education to get away with forfeiting their Constitutional duty to rein in a runaway presidency. And was also struck again at how thoroughly out of place Nancy seems as Speaker of the House. She remains the perfect Pacific Heights socialite; all batting eyes, forced laughter, charming chit-chat. I don't say that as a sexist remark -- it's her choice to present herself as an airhead.

Maybe she's appearing on a comedy show but Stewart was asking her serious questions.

Like: did it ever occur to you people just to refuse Bush his allowance for his vanity war in Iraq? I was (somewhat) surprised to hear that the House of Representatives, under her leadership, had tried that very thing. Sure, they had voted the money; but they'd attached "conditions" to its use, like a "timeline." However, when the bill came back from the Senate, the timelines had been stripped out, so then they had no choice but to...And the problem all along was that darn 60 vote rule in the Senate, so poor Mr. Mumbles (Harry Reid) had no choice but to cave in to the wishes of the Republican, er, minority, because he couldn't get a timeline bill to the Senate floor for a vote.

Stewart, leaving behind his comedic persona, simply stared at her in disbelief. They're still using that pathetic excuse? Under Article I of the United States Constitution, no authorization bill for federal spending can originate other than in the House of Representatives. That's what Madison, Hamilton, et al. had in mind when they decided that the People's House should control the People's money. Really, it's the ultimate power; not even George W. Bush can do anything without money. He can rant and rave, hold his breath till he turns blue, blackmail Congress with the threat to expose them as a group of enemy collaborators, anything he wants - but he still can't do anything unless Nancy Pelosi agrees, as the leader of the majority party in the People's House, to give him the money to do it with.

One of the great ironies is that the Democrats, by funding everything in Iraq including the escalation in men and expense known as the "surge," have set the stage for their own unraveling. They have given McCain his best and only argument: I was right about the Surge, Obama was wrong. Let' face it, it resonates. As certain as I am this morning that it is a clear day in July, I am confident that those 30,000 troops were not decisive in bringing about the "progress" in Iraq. The prior ethnic cleansing, the walling off of sectarian neighborhoods, the cease fire called by al-Sadr, and sheer battle fatigue brought about a diminution of mayhem in Iraq, and the violence is far from over. The blood rivalries run so deep that Iraq will remain "fragile" (as the hawks put it) for a very long time, much longer than we can possibly afford to stay there. McCain talks as if what is going on there now is some sort of steady state that will sustain itself on its own momentum in perpetuity. This is crazy nonsense. Let's face it: we vastly underestimated how inherently unstable Iraq really is.

But such an argument, like the even better argument that the war was dumb to begin with, is slightly too nuanced for sound-bite America. Americans want to feel "safe," and the guy who can make you safe is the guy who can explain everything in a sentence -- there were bad people there, we stayed the course and got rid of them. Something along those lines. Never mind reality; we need something that will fit on an adhesive strip on my rear bumper. So La Diva and Mr. Mumbles needed to fulfill that mandate from the American people that was equally simple in its formulation: get this stupid war over with. They didn't do it. They played ball, played it safe, and Nancy, the perfect smiling hostess, is now serving canapes topped with roast crow, all washed down with a snifter of bitter gall.

An Open Letter to the Jews of South Florida

For Itz Brownstein,
to talk about at dinner (at 4 pm)

To begin with, I won't even pretend that I can appreciate, at an emotional, intellectual or visceral level, what you as a people have been through. Name another people and its genocidal treatment - Armenians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Native Americans - and what you will find is that they were once subjected to an awful pogrom which resonates through history, but that it was a singular experience, the product of specific historical circumstances. Not so the Jews. No, anti-semitism occupies a special place in human history, a blood libel and an institutionalized bigotry drawing its strength and endurance from religious sources, powered by hatred which never completely loses its potency. There are some, like David Irving or Ahmadinejad, whose hatred of the Jews is so complete, so consuming, that they even seek to deny you the dignity of remembering the truth about what happened in the Shoah.

Anti-Semitism is vile, diseased, a sickness which has served as the motive force behind the greatest crimes in history. The Inquisition, the wholesale pogroms and displacement in Russia and so many other places, and the most odious of all offenses against decency and humanity, the Holocaust. And beneath the skin of your supposed historical friends lies many an anti-Semite. Winston Churchill, who even after Kristallnacht in 1938 praised Hitler as a "great man." Charles Lindbergh, who was house hunting in Berlin even after the deportations began, who consulted with the Luftwaffe on their use of planes gladly sold to them by American aircraft companies. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as a young lawyer in New York proposed a system for reducing the numbers of Jews at Harvard, finding their representation there "excessive." Gandhi, who worked against the establishment of a homeland for Jews except in Tanganyika - there was a brilliant idea from the Mahatma - why not a refuge for the Jews in a former German colony? Churchill and Roosevelt again, who blocked the escape of the Jews from Germany at every turn, refusing to expand immigration quotas even as your parents and grandparents were rounded up and sent to death camps.

So you learned to trust yourselves and only yourselves. You could do without the "help" of such false friends. Jews built a country of their own in Israel. They built a mighty nuclear arsenal, probably the second most powerful in the world with the additional advantage that it probably works. The American nuclear arsenal is run by the same people who managed FEMA's response to Katrina. As your ancestors did, you entered the learned professions in numbers vastly disproportionate to your representation in society, the kind of thing that bothered FDR so much. Yet it was a survival mechanism; corporations, clubs, neighborhoods all could be restricted. You needed a direct means of making a living which did not depend on the solicitude or occasional enlightenment of Gentiles.

You learned to think for yourselves as well. You are not easily persuaded by the reassurances of the goy; you've been down that road too many times, and it has led to tragedy. Even Albert Einstein, still in Germany in 1933, wanted to believe that Nazism was not as bad as it appeared to be. It was exuberance, he said, as the German people shook off the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. They don't mean it.

Never again. If Albert Einstein could make such a mistake...So now here comes this smooth talking guy with the Muslim middle name running for President, and he sat in a church in Chicago for twenty years, and one of the things that this pastor whom he admired so much did was to confer a lifetime achievement award on the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. When I lay it out like that, it's pretty heavy. That doesn't look too good at all. It's small surprise that Barack Obama stopped just short of dancing the hora when he visited with AIPAC not long ago. And that prayer he slipped into the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem? I think I know what it said: "Fellas, please - hak mir nisht ken tshaynik with this Reverend Jeremiah shtick."

Here's my sense, from a guy who has searched his own soul for traces of anti-Semitism and has never been able to find anything worse than occasional envy at the professional excellence of some of his legal colleagues: I don't think Barack Obama is an anti-Semite. I just don't think he rolls that way. I think he's spent some time around anti-Semites. So have I. Know how I know I have? I'm not a hermit. So all I ask, as an American who's very concerned about the possibility of an unsuitable, quite possibly unstable candidate like John McCain winning this thing and leading America to ruin, is just give to Barack Obama what you have always asked of the world, but have not always gotten: a fair chance. That's all. If you vote against him, make sure it's for a reason you've thoroughly examined, and that you're convinced your decision against him is not based on the kind of prejudice which you, as a people, have always abhorred. I'm not talking about prejudice against blacks, because Yahweh knows the American Jews, as Barack acknowledged in talking so movingly about the deaths of the Jewish Mississippi Civil Rights workers, have done more for civil liberties than all other American nationalities combined. Even today it is Jewish legal leadership which champions the rights of Muslims detained unfairly at Guantanamo, who represented them, and won, in the historic habeas corpus case just decided. No one can fairly question your commitment to ethics and equal justice. So I draw on that and ask you to exemplify, once again, that spirit of fairness in November. Delve deep, in that peerless intellectual tradition which has always been your hallmark. And then decide. For we're all in this together.

Shifts in the Zeitgeist: The Attempted Citizen's Arrest of Karl Rove in Iowa

The Boston Massacre occurred in 1770, five years before the shot heard 'round the world at Lexington Green, and three years before the Boston Tea Party. John Adams successfully defended the British soldiers involved in the shooting incident, but the die was effectively cast from that day forward. A revolution was coming, and the act of insurrection in Boston harbor was a violent harbinger of the conflict to follow. Great seismic shifts in public attitudes begin with such small steps, I think. Certain members of the citizenry, "crazier" than others and perhaps more sensitive to perception of tyranny, act first and they embolden the rest.

Not that I advocate the overthrow of the United States Government by force, because I don't. It would be contrary to my sworn duty as an officer of the court to uphold the law of the land, and I take that oath seriously. I write this blog partly in response to what I perceive as a mandatory duty under the legal Canons of Ethics. I think the United States Constitution and the United States Code are routinely and systematically violated by the President of the United States, by Congress and by the Supreme Court. I am far from alone in this perception, especially among the legal community. Indeed, the more you know about law and its processes, the easier it is to see just how arrantly lawless the Bush Administration is, and how completely it has corrupted the Constitutional system of the federal government. I doubt seriously we will ever restore the system fully to its former greatness. When the people and their elected representatives casually countenance official lawbreaking without remark or action, then "extralegal" ways of doing things become the new norm and a kind of arbitrary anarchy descends on the body politic. That's where we are. It is interesting to observe, but only in the sense of the ancient Chinese curse.

Recently, four troublemaking citizens in Iowa, not themselves peace officers or deputized as such, attempted to arrest Karl Rove. For their efforts, they were arrested for trespass and cited to appear. Karl Rove, after all, enjoys the privileges of status and quasi-official protection. So law enforcement sided with Rove and he went on his way. A citizen's arrest is a dangerous thing to do; a citizen taking the law into his own hands is not protected by the police officer's privilege of probable cause. If you're wrong about the guilt of the person detained, you can be held liable for kidnap or assault. Nevetheless, all fifty states have some form of citizen's arrest on their books. Here is California's statute: A private person may arrest another: 1. For a public offense committed or attempted in his presence. 2. When the person arrested has committed a felony, although not in his presence. 3. When a felony has been in fact committed, and he has reasonable cause for believing the person arrested to have committed it. (Cal. Penal Code Sec. 837). This is slightly (but crucially) different from the police standard; for a police officer to be liable for false imprisonment or malicious criminal prosecution, it must be shown that probable cause (a reasonable belief) was lacking both for the commission of a crime and that the person arrested was the one who done it. So if you collar Karl Rove on the suspicion, for example (among many of his possible crimes), that he conspired to blow the cover of an undercover CIA operative, and a court subsequently rules that no such crime was committed, you're in deep trouble.

So it's somewhat reckless to engage in such a citizen's arrest. Why would they do it? I think the answer is simple. Such canaries in the coal mine have come to the realization that no official avenue of redress is available. No one in a position of power is going to do anything about the day-to-day crimes committed by members of the government. When Scooter Libby was tried and convicted, for example, his sentence was quickly overturned as a personal favor from George W. Bush, who barely troubled himself to offer the laughably inadequate excuse of "excessive punishment" (the sentence was briefer than federal guidelines, and Bush had the option of reducing the sentence). This sort of preferential treatment and defiance of the law registers in the psyche of the citizenry. When the federal government tortures human beings, it then passes laws exonerating itself and its agents from the War Crimes Act. If it violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment, it passes a law legalizing the conduct and dismissing all civil actions attempting to find out when and against whom the spying took place.

What is unfortunate is that those of a conservative persuasion, seeing this criminal activity as part of the policy of the party which they favor, argue in favor of sanctioning criminality, and accuse those who simply point out, as calmly and methodically as they can, that crimes have been committed of "disloyalty." Yet these are not "Left/Right" issues. We don't care if a smash-and-grab mugger on the street voted Democratic in the last election; he's a criminal. The bravest of the dissidents are people like Bruce Fein, who served on the legal staff of Ronald Reagan, and yet points out (in my view irrefutably) that the Bush Administration operates outside the bounds of legal conduct.

Hosea 8:7: "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal." Citizen's arrests are one step up the legal ladder from mob rule. I don't know whether there will ever be a "Truth & Reconciliation Commission" in the United States, or any kind of organized legal response to what has gone on during the Bush years, but I'm fairly confident of one thing: if there is not, then I think we will be well down the road toward social and legal disintegration.

Thinking McCain Through

So I watched Senator McCain this morning on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, and decided to drop all preconceptions and simply come to terms with the somewhat improbable, but nonetheless existent, possibility that he might become the 44th President of the United States. In which case, I must ask myself, what then? What's he like?

The interview occurred in one of Mr. McCain's many nice homes, this one in Cottonwood, Arizona, where two chairs were arranged before a stone fireplace in a light and airy room. At one point two of McCain's dogs romped into the room, which had a homey, if somewhat contrived, feel to it. I mean, if an interview for national television is in progress, with all the tech and camera people present in and around the house, with electric cable and light stands everywhere, are we really to believe that the dogs were simply running loose? I'll let that go. I was determined to listen with an open mind.

The first thing I noticed was that Senator McCain is enormously proud of his decision to support President Bush's decision to add 30,000 American troops to Iraq in January, 2007. McCain sees this decision as the fulcrum point for the survival of Western Civilization As We Know It. Without his courageous support for a decision which Bush was going to undertake anyway, the opposition be damned, a kind of End Times scenario would be spooling out in Iraq even at this very moment. Genocide, Iranian invasion, Kurdish-Turkey combat, a wider war involving all countries with Arabs or Persians in them - you name it, it would be happening. A kind of Express Down Elevator to Hell. It's somewhat unnerving that Senator McCain recites the grim details of Armageddon in a completely wooden, almost somnambulistic monotone, as if he accidentally doubled up on the Xanax.

Back to the objectivity, the attitude of the day. None of these terrible things happened because John McCain had the courage of his convictions and voiced his support for the introduction of 30,000 additional troops into Baghdad. Since I am so utterly gracious in honoring his victory, the victory of being right, I know I can count on Senator McCain's similar magnanimity in granting the truth of the related observation that Iraq was in a condition to fall completely apart in January 2007 because of the dumb idea of invading the country in the first place. If I think this, Senator McCain has a few words for me, to wit: not so fast, my friend. For this very question was asked and McCain had the following, zinging comeback:

MCCAIN: I said that Saddam Hussein caused a -- imposed a threat to the United States of America and our security. And the Oil for Food scandal, the $12 billion he was skimming, the fact that he had said that he had in operation and he wanted to have weapons of mass destruction, the fact that this society that he ruled in such a brutal fashion was really awful. And he did pose a long-term threat to the security of the United States of America.

So let's take a look, objectively, and see what we have here. The first sentence and the last, in my opinion, do not follow from the factual predicates of the other sentences. The conclusion that Iraq posed a threat to the security of the United States needs some sort of empirical support, and that I don't see. In more detail:

1. I don't know of anyone, even W, who actually contends that we invaded Iraq because Saddam was skimming from the Oil for Food program. We knew he was doing so for about twelve years before we invaded, we knew he was building increasingly opulent monuments to himself with the money, but it's not why we went to war.

2. "The fact that he [Saddam] had said he had in operation and he wanted to have weapons of mass destruction." It was the public position of the Iraqi government, in the months immediately before the invasion and as announced by Tariq Aziz, Iraq's Ambassador to the United Nations, that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Hans Blix, as Chief Inspector of the UN weapons detail, said that he could not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. While their contents have never been disclosed (only scoffed at by W), Iraq made a 13,000 page document dump to Blix's team shortly before the invasion, in an effort to verify the destruction of all weapons (all part of the very difficult task of proving the negation of a proposition). Adding the phrase "and he wanted to have weapons of mass destruction" does not add anything to the argument. Even under Bush's rather elastic standards for justifying "preemptive wars," I don't think we ever got to the point where we invaded based on "announced intention."

3. "The fact that this society he [Saddam] ruled in such a brutal fashion was really awful." I think McCain's saying that Saddam's brutal reign was awful, not the society itself, but that's one of the difficulties of McCain's very inarticulate way of expressing himself. It's hard to know what he means. Either way, this again is not a legitimate casus belli. Elsewhere in the interview, McCain talked about his desire to kick Russia out of the G-8 because of its "autocratic" tendencies, itself a very stupid idea, of course. We're not going to get anywhere with Iran or China if we drive Russia into isolation again. But I assume even McCain would draw the line at ostracism and not propose war because of the "awful regime" in Russia.

McCain's odd bill of particulars seems to betray an uneasiness about the actual reasons we invaded Iraq; essentially, he's admitting we didn't have any good reasons. McCain doesn't say, as Bush did, that "everyone knew" Saddam had WMD, probably because he knows that just isn't true and he lacks Bush's ease with casual lying (to McCain's credit). But despite the absence of a good reason, at least according to his own logic, the decision to invade was right.

Elsewhere, McCain confirmed that he's against gay adoption and affirmative action, and for nuclear power, drilling for oil and making permanent the Bush tax cuts. Remaining as objective as I can, I nevertheless found his talk more or less devoid of any important ideas which are commensurate with the serious challenges (economic and environmental, primarily, but also in terms of health care) actually facing the country. I don't think he really has any ideas about how to reinvigorate the country; I think the McCain presidential run is about a series of attitudes and positions on certain issues which he sees as (a) defense-related or (b) moral values. In that sense, I think he's a classic reactionary, and I think the election of a reactionary, at this perilous time, would be a tragic mistake for the country.

Barack & the Bradley Effect

Barack Obama's triumphant tour of Europe and our various theaters of war has now come to an end, and he returns to this buzzkill report from the always-respected Quinnipiac poll: Quinnipiac University/Wall Street Journal/ Washingtonpost.Com Poll Finds --- COLORADO: McCain 46 - Obama 44 MICHIGAN: Obama 46 - McCain 42 MINNESOTA: Obama 46 - McCain 44 WISCONSIN: Obama 50 - McCain 39.

Any lead is welcome in the Obama camp, of course, but a different issue is at play in this year's election, namely, the so-called "Bradley Effect," which calls into question the validity of any polling at all, and more on that below.

The above results are for the so-called "swing states," those schizophrenic electorates which bounce between red/blue, Repub/Dem, conservative/liberal. As we all know, we do not actually have a national election, per se; rather, the election of a president essentially boils down to the tallies in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with a few crucial swing states in play to offset the loss by one of the candidates of one of these decisive states. Almost all the other states (Alabama, Georgia, California, New York, Utah, etc.) really do not need to hold elections at all. A great deal of money could be saved if the two parties would simply stipulate, for example, that California will vote Democratic and Texas will vote Republican. Living in California, I don't think I've ever seen a presidential candidate's ad on TV. I hear about them, if they're especially outrageous, but candidates don't waste their money here. For Obama, California's in the bag and for McCain, he's got less than an ice floe's chance in the Arctic summertime. And despite all the talk of a "50-state" strategy, I doubt seriously that Barack is going to spend a lot of time in Wyoming and Utah.

By doing the sort of superficial research for which bloggers are famous, I have discovered, as I suspected, that all 43 Presidents to date are of just seven nationalities: English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, German and Swiss. I actually don't know who the Swiss is, but I don't think that really counts as a separate "nationality." Whatever. The overwhelming majority are of the first three British derivations, and even some of the "Irish" are no such thing but Scotch-Irish, which is really UK, not Irish. Like John McCain, for example. The Dutch are easy to spot: Van Buren, the two Roosevelts. Eisenhower's the German. There was one Catholic, as we all know, and all the rest were Protestants, which leaves us with an almost unbroken line of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. No Jews, no Italians, no Greeks, no Poles, no Asians, no Hindus, Muslims or Zoroastrians. Mostly just guys from the Northeast with names like Bush, Wilson, Madison, Lincoln and Adams, and a few Southern crackers like Lyndon Johnson, Carter and Clinton.

Then we got Barack Hussein Obama. The Bradley Effect, as I've noted before, refers to the stunning defeat of Tom Bradley in the gubernatorial race against a nonentity named George Deukmejian in the 1982 California election. Bradley was comfortably ahead in the election eve polls but lost by a slim margin. Pollsters hypothesized that voters were reluctant to answer questions honestly where their real criterion for decision was racially based. However, Obama might take solace from this most recent study of the effect:

"A 2008 study of 133 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006 found that the effect had largely disappeared by the mid-1990s. It concluded that, 'As racialized rhetoric about welfare and crime receded from national prominence in the mid-1990s, so did the gap between polling and performance.'"

But as we've been musing, a nationwide study is not really directly germane to the question at hand. If we look at things from a macro-perspective, Obama has a large lead, as big as 9 points, at the national level. This data point, however, is almost meaningless; it takes into account his huge leads in the most populous states of California and New York. As I've said, California and New York could save money which they increasingly don't have by drawing straws and then sending a representative group of 1,128 (Gallup can give us the exact number) of their citizens to the polls on election day to lock up the electoral delegations for Obama.

The question is whether the Bradley Effect has any residual currency in states such as -- well, not states such as, the states of --Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. If Obama loses all three of these states, he can't win the election. The problem is, he may very well lose all three states because of the Bradley Effect, and if I were going to pick three populous states where such an effect might come into play, those are the three I would choose. It does not surprise me that Hillary Clinton won Ohio and Pennsylvania handily, and doubtless would have carried the day in Florida by a double digit margin if the primary had not gotten derailed.

So anyway -- on election night, I'll be interested, as I am every four years, to see which candidate Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida elect as their president this time. I don't mean to be too uncharitable, but I have not been too impressed with their choices over the last 30 years or so, with a couple of exceptions. I hope they realize the awesome responsibility they carry, not just to their fellow Americans but to the world at large.

The Rock Star Candidate

I watched Barack give his speech in Berlin this morning. He was careful not to pander to his German audience, or to invite comparisons to John F. Kennedy's speech at the Brandenburg Gate, by using German phrases or greetings. Anway, it's not really necessary to speak German to the usually trilingual Berliners, who are in general educated to a level far beyond their American counterparts. This is especially true among German youth, who seemed to dominate the crowd in the Tiergarten.

The speech itself, of course, was mostly content-free. Barack actually seemed a little off his game; the rigors of a long trip were taking their toll. Missing a few words here and there, stumbling, his energy level a little low. It lacked the soaring oratory and accelerating finish his speeches usually feature. Still, it's hard to go too far wrong with anodyne tales of the Berlin airlift or the defeat of Communism when you're speaking to Germans in modern Berlin. Barack reaffirmed his commitment to good things, like international cooperation and an end to oppression. I'll go out on a limb and say I'm for those things too. He took a few swipes at the American unpopularity caused by Bush's intransigence on global warming, the war in Iraq and the torture regime, but they were mild and elliptical. Obama is always a smooth operator; he's more Sugar Ray Robinson than Joe Louis. Beats you on the accumulation of points rather than the knockout punch.

I recall, long ago, an interview with Peter Yarrow, the Peter of Peter Paul & Mary, who has always been a very thoughtful (and talented) singer/songwriter/musician. He was comparing the standing of PP&M to such super-groups as the Stones or the Beatles. "Let's face it," he said, "their magic is bigger than our magic." Gracious and simple in the admission of the obvious. That's the deal with Obama; his magic is bigger than your magic, bigger than John McCain's, bigger than Hillary Clinton's. It doesn't really matter whether he says anything substantial; Bush, with one or two tweaks, could have given the same speech today, or could if it were not inevitable that boos would drown him out. It isn't difficult to be for good things like justice and freedom. You're for 'em, right? Yeah, me too.

I think it's telling that modern campaign honchos use the word "brand" now to talk about candidates and political parties. While it's meant to be hip, I'm sure, it's also a recognition that anything sold by means of mass media winds up subject to the invariant laws of mass marketing. Obama's a product, in this sense, and his style (in some ways connected to his "issue positions," but not essentially) is his "brand." His brand can take a hit when he seems to take a position a little off the public grok of his persona - such as on telecom immunity in the FISA debate, for example. It would be like Pepsi-Cola claiming to be the "Real Thing." Or Avis shouting, "We're No. 1!" A carefully developed marketing campaign can go off the rails with too many variations. Hillary thought she should win by dint of her policy positions and wonkish presentation of detail, and indeed I don't know too many people in American politics with her command of the specifics, or who has such a carefully designed set of solutions to real problems. Thing she never figured out? Her brand's kind of, you know, so '90's, and she never got how much things have changed since 1992 (neither did Bill). That grasping for the job, that trying so hard. Not rico-soave like O.

Obama's brand is cool, hip, smart, young, in touch with the modern world and its problems, connected, multi-cultural, intermarried, integrated, inclusive. That's the way things are moving, in the global village of the Internet and television. That's what his speech was about, this sense of international nexus and breakdown of barriers (his coolest rhetorical flourish was to compare the breaking down of the Berlin Wall to these modern trends). His brand makes a fascinating contrast with John McCain, who is old-fashioned (in fact, old), out-of-touch, unconnected (it's here where his incompetence with a computer is most telling - he really doesn't know what's going on out there), corny, belligerent, fearmongering, us vs. them, reactionary, and with his major issue continuation of a war which most Americans and almost all of the world see as a mistake from the beginning.

One of these two brands will carry the day in November. I suspect that if Obama does not win, it will be simply because he arrived on the scene a little too soon, a bright star who went supernova in a country not ready for him. There is an old, crotchety, out-of-it America which clings desperately to ideas about the country which have come and gone, and there may be enough of them left to determine the outcome: racists, homophobes, religious zealots, xenophobes, those who think the world can still be kept at bay by bombing the hell out of it. Obama represents what the rest of the world hopes America has become. Maybe. There's no question he could be elected Mayor of Berlin, but here on Main Street, USA, it's still very hard to tell.

Why Is McCain Upset About Winning the War in Iraq?

So did the surge work? How would I know? If a chicken crosses the road on South Padre Island in Texas and Hurricane Dolly hits one hour later, did the chicken cause the hurricane? I assume that all of the major media, the MSM, would assume that the chicken did, for such is their trenchant level of "analysis."

As I followed the war in Iraq, it always seemed to me that there would come a time when Iraqi insurgents would "mature out" of their desire for armed conflict, much as crime rates fall as a population ages. It takes a lot of energy to cause trouble. Let's face it: that's a draggy way to lead your life. Holed up in hovels, hiding ammunition, building bombs, getting blown up by American helicopter attacks or shot down in the street. I suspect that Muqtada al-Sadr reached an accommodation with the Ungrateful Nouri at some point and decided to cool it with his Shia militia brigades. If you look at the casualty count over on the right and scroll down to April, 2008, you'll see that in that month of militia uprising in Basra and elsewhere in Shiite Iraq, American casualties resumed their "pre-surge" levels. I suspect also that General David Petraeus is a crafty tactician and used other means to reduce the incidence of IED violence, such as walling off enclaves at the border of sectarian neighborhoods. And of course that most trusted of American methods: we bought off the Sunni insurgents by putting them on the payroll. Petraeus was hired, after all, because of his record of success up north in Kurd country. He's good at his job. These factors seem more important than 30K/130K = 23% increase of American troop levels, especially if we recall that General Shinseki pegged the correct level of troops to control insurgency in 2003 at somewhere around 300,000, and was fired for his trouble. He was right, and a lot of Americans died because the Bush crew does not like inconvenient disagreement.

Yet Petraeus has obviously done good work. Maybe too good. Now John McCain is fulminating because he thinks Barack Obama is proposing to accept defeat when victory is within our grasp. I doubt that victory is ever going to look more permanent than it does now. As I was saying yesterday, I think the Bushies got punked by al-Maliki. I was amused to read a Maureen Dowd column today in which she continues the MSM trope that Maliki is a marionette. In haec verba: "McCain is hopping mad that the surge that he backed, and Obama resisted, has now set the stage for the Bush puppet Maliki to agree with Obama’s exit strategy." No, Maureen, I don't think Nouri is a "puppet." Haven't you been paying attention? [Dear Readers, you really should write your own blog; the great pleasure is in talking back to these self-appointed know-it-alls, and since their stuff is mainly read on line and for free, you have the same access to the public they do and in the same way.] Why would Maureen Dowd think that a guy with perpetual 11 pm shadow who persists in saying things Bush doesn't want to hear is his "puppet." Doesn't Maureen Dowd even want to try to make sense?

Never mind the "surge" and other phrases devoid of content, like "aspirational goals" within a "time horizon." The simple fact is that the Iraq war played out too fast for John McCain's purposes. He wanted there to be carnage, bloodshed, American casualties, chaos, and political divisions right through the election season. That isn't going to happen, and that's what he's mad about. Maureen Dowd completely misses the point. [Seriously, go to Blogspot and get started. You'll love it.] McCain is now in the same position as the liberals were in the heyday of the insurgency; kinda hoping for another bomb in some Baghdad market area.

Which is the true tragedy of Iraq. It's a cynical exercise in pointlessness, used by political factions for domestic advantage. Bush started the war to assure his reelection in 2004; McCain wanted the war to get worse so he could win in 2008. Bush's defeat comes about because Nouri outflanked him on the oil issue, borrowing our army to solidify his own grip on power long enough to build a police state to take over after we leave, while stalling cleverly on any oil concessions until our departure became inevitable. And now McCain has to run on some other issue. And what the hell would that be? His economic leadership? His gas tax holiday? His sexist jokes? His pledge to pacify the Iraq-Pakistan border?

The Bush Countdown, and End of an Era

As I write this, George W. Bush has about 181 days left in his dubious tenure as the 43rd President of the USA. I'm beginning to think that no more terrible things are going to happen while he's in charge, other than the playing out of things which his presidency has already set in motion. For example, the kangaroo court trials in Guantanamo, with their corrupted rules of evidence, admissibility of hearsay and coerced confessions, and juries comprised strictly of military officers who can convict with a 2/3 majority. Oh well. No one ever explained to my satisfaction why Zacarias Moussaoui, who by government account was actually involved in the 9/11 plot as a principal, was tried and convicted in open court in the regular federal court system, using all the normal rules, while Osama bin Laden's chauffeur must be tried under these medieval procedures. It doesn't make the country look particularly good. It is this strange arbitrariness in everything the Bush Administration does that is so unsettling, such as arresting and denying all due process (assistance of counsel, confrontation of accusers, speedy trial) of three American citizens who were placed in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in South Carolina carefully chosen for its location in the most reactionary federal judicial district in America (the Fourth). The British Home Secretary has now issued this great ally's official report stating categorically that President Bush is "not to be trusted" when he states that the United States does not engage in human rights abuses such as the torture of detainees.

We've come a long way, baby. Still, we're miles ahead of such countries as Russia and China when it comes to basic civil liberties. Let there be no doubt about that. Russia has sunk into a kind of fascist oligarchy again in a country ruled by ex-KGB agents. China remains one of the world's most repressive tyrannies. I wouldn't write a blog like this if I lived in either of those places, of that I assure you. Americans are free to express their opinions here, mostly without official hassling other than the enhanced possibility you'll be unable to print your boarding pass at home. Ah hell, the airlines are going out of business anyway.

The truth is, like a lot of amateur socio-political critics on the Internet, I feel an odd kinship with ol' W. We would not exist without him. He is the font from which all satire flows. He is maybe the most intellectually and temperamentally unsuitable man ever to occupy the Oval Office. The irony of his reign is stupendous. At a moment when the country, and the world, most needed a visionary, brilliant, dynamic leader to deal with environmental stresses and an emerging new world order...we came up with him. So we devoted those eight years to one thing, and to one thing only. Not to dealing with the energy crisis, nor dealing with the increasingly terrifying specter of global warming and ocean acidification, nor revitalizing America's declining economic base -- no, none of that. Our goal was, first, last and always, to assure the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. That's it. That's what the last eight years were about.

And in that one project, W painted himself into a corner. Would you like to know how Iraq is going to turn out, what that "victory" John McCain insists upon will actually look like? Okay, here goes. First, there is no one in this country who really has the street-level background of Nouri al-Maliki. All of our guys, like Bush, Cheney, Obama, McCain, are typical American softies. We love our nice cushy life. It's why 95% of the country pays no attention to Iraq; it's a bummer, dude. To play in Nouri's league, you have to live Nouri's life, and that doesn't happen here. So how has Nouri played this situation, and us? Very simple. He's said, "Thank you very much, now get the hell out of here." Bush really has no comeback. Isn't he the one who's insisted Iraq is a "sovereign nation," the "world's newest democracy," where the joyous citizens hold their purple fingers up high? Yes, Bush is the one. So Nouri now says, no long-term deal on a Status of Forces Agreement, and as soon as the U.S. military is gone (along with all of those "permanent" military bases we've spent a fortune building, which will now be expropriated by the Iraqi Army), al-Maliki will do what all the oil-rich countries do: he'll create a "sovereign wealth fund" based on Iraq's oil patrimony. He will nationalize the oil industry. He will cut deals with Russia, China, anyone else who wants to play ball his way. Eventually, he'll be in a position like his Gulf neighbors to buy Manhattan skyscrapers. Will Iraq be a "democracy?" Kind of. A Shiite theocratic regime with "elections," just like Iran. Massive corruption. Sporadic sectarian violence, ruthlessly suppressed, as it is now.

The only uncertainty is the fate of Kurdistan, up north. Their blessing, and curse when it comes to Nouri, is that they also have a lot of oil around Kirkuk. How autonomous will the Baghdad, Shiite government allow them to be? Will they crush the Kurds, as Saddam did before them?

So what did we get out of this? With our 4,100 dead, our multiple tens of thousands of wounded, amputees, blinded, brain-damaged? Our $540 billion spent so far? "The world's a better place without Saddam Hussein." Yep. It would probably also be better without Putin in Russian, the junta in Myanmar, Assad in Syria, Musharraf in Pakistan, Mubarak in Egypt, Quaddafi in Libya, Ahmadinejad in Iran, Kim Jong Il in North Korea. Mugabe, killing squads in Darfur...we could go broke making the world a better place. In fact, maybe we did.