Brief Comment On Insults & Apologies

At least 28 people have been killed and hundreds wounded since Tuesday, when it first emerged that Bibles and other religious materials had been thrown into a fire pit used to burn garbage at Dover Air Force Base, a large U.S. base near Dover, Delaware.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials have apologized for what they said was a mistake in handling the Bibles, but their regrets have not quelled the deadly protests.

I can’t imagine what people might be upset about….  Certainly not bad policy and certainly not failed execution, right?

WeatherDem: Shut Up Already, Cheney

Dick “Puppet-Master” Cheney is one of the most immoral persons on this planet.  It appears he has more in common with Balloon Boy’s dad than I had previously imagined: he just can’t stand being out of the spotlight.  Seriously, what happened in this guy’s childhood home that he has to invade foreign nations, destroy economies and societies, then feels it necessary to lecture other Presidents when they don’t do the same?

Cheney wants President Obama to stop ‘dithering’ on Afghanistan.

Well I want Cheney to shut up.  He has no credibility with this nation or with any other nation on this planet.

“Make no mistake. Signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries,” Cheney said.

No, dumbass, our adversaries are emboldened because we’re occupying two Muslim nations with no plans to get out completely of either.  They’re emboldened because we continue to bomb residents of those countries who aren’t fighting us.  I know for a fact that Cheney’s daughter Liz would take up arms against a country that occupied the U.S. and bombed her father’s house.  It’s the same thing.  And the fact that he isn’t man enough to admit that to this country tells you all you need to know about his so-called “patriotism”.  Which is why he continues to make a fool of himself.

Cheney’s Daughter Is A Serious Foreign Policy Expert?

The Cons live in a very strange world.  It’s a world in which the “free-market” supposedly fixes everything by itself and so is pursued with religious vigor that would make Orthodox followers scratch their heads.  It’s a world in which every dark-skinned person in a viable, current threat to the safety and security of the Cons’ gated communities, except for the ones that are rich (see: Saudi Arabian royalty, etc).  It’s a world in which the term climate-change is a far-left conspiracy theory that has somehow grabbed power in nearly every country’s government, that nearly every scientist is somehow a part of and that nearly every media outlet is somehow a part of to boot.  It doesn’t have to make sense to the rest of us – the Cons excel at cognitive dissonance.

In this fantasy land, the daughter of the last Vice-President Puppet-Master is somehow considered to be a leader in developing Con opposition to President Obama’s foreign policy initiatives.  Never mind that saying the President’s foreign policies weren’t in America’s interests got you labeled “traitor” and “terrist-lover” by the same Cons just one short year ago.  The difference was the “President” was a Con, so his directives comes down from up-high, don’tcha know?  Now that the President is a half-black man, all that is out the window.  Nothing President Obama can or will do will ever be good enough for these rigid ideologues.

Unprincipled Whiners

No matter what the issue, Cons have demonstrated that their only party platform is whatever anti-Obama happens to be.  In a growing number of cases, this holds true … until the Cons end up working for the opposite of what they initially “stood for”.  Confused yet?  Don’t be – let’s look at the latest example.  The Cons were entirely against the stimulus funding late last year and early this year.  They issued their typical free-market-religious talking points that made no sense and patted themselves on the back for opposing anything that President Obama wanted done.

Now, a different story emerges.  The same Cons who voted against the stimulus are now begging for some of those stimulus dollars to be doled out to NASA instead of other places.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  They certainly haven’t had an epiphany about the role that science should play in our society.  No, we’re still a looooong way from that.  Like everything else, this beg-session is all about politics.  In this case, they can bring home some federal money (since they refuse to pay for things themselves, socialists that they are) and pat each other on the back about that.

The best part?  They continue to slam the stimulus funding while begging for it to be redirected toward NASA.  Two opposing viewpoints in the same request!  How uniquely conservative of them.

It would make more sense for these clowns to request an increase in NASA’s operating budget for FY10 or FY11, if they’re really so concerned about the space program.  But that won’t happen.  They’re anti-public-investment, anti-health care reform, pro-rich tax cuts and pro-occupation.  You see, Trillions of future taxpayer dollars can be spent occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.  Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars can be redistributed from the middle class to the rich.  But health care reform and stimulus?  Not a chance!  Unless they can get something out of it politically.  That’s immoral.

News Survery 2/17/09: Oil, Afghanistan & Antarctic Station

Some recent articles caught my eye.  Here are three of them:

Crude oil is getting cheaper – so why isn’t gas?  Short answer first: greed.  Longer answer: the oil price reported in the media is West Texas crude.  It’s currently selling for less than other oil grades around the world.  The gas we fuel our vehicles with?  It’s processsed from that foreign oil.  The article actually mentions that refining capacity for West Texas crude is less than for other types of crude.  Why aren’t more refineries built?  Well, that would cost oil corporations money – money they’d rather see in executive bonuses and stock dividends.  Don’t think this benefits your retirement account.  As most of us are now aware, the only people who benefited from stock payouts were the already mega-rich.  That won’t change anytime soon.  So when you’re paying more than $2 per gallon again this year, keep in mind all the record profits the oil corporations posted last year.  The money that we’re all paying at the pump every day could go to building refineries and lowering the price at the pump, but it’s not.

Escalation of troops in Afghanistan.  I’d be happier to read news reports of large-scale, detailed plans to revitalize the infrastructure of Afghanistan.  At this point, I think troops are necessary.  But they’ll be worth less in the long-term if fundamental issues aren’t addressed at the same time.

New Antarctic research station is carbon-free.  It won’t stop deniers/delayers from further beating their dead talking-point horses, but this article is good news for realists.  The station uses wind mills, solar panels and water recycling … in Antarctica.  If buildings in Antarctica can be built as zero-emitters, do you think they can be built on the rest of the continents?  Darn right.

The only beef I have with the last article is its treatment of two separate facts.  Both are important (and correct) alone, but the writer did nothing to merge them coherently.  They are:

Scientists monitoring global warming predict higher temperatures could hasten melting at Antarctica, the world’s largest repository of fresh water, raising sea levels and altering shorelines. If Antarctica ever melted, world sea levels would rise by about 180 feet.

That would impact some 146 million people living in low-lying coastal regions less than three feet above current sea levels, researchers said.

On the path toward total Antarctic ice sheet melt (the continent itself can’t melt, by the way), sea levels would obviously rise 3 feet before they rose 180 feet.  So if a 3 foot sea level rise would impact 146 million people, what kind of an impact would sea level rises between three and 180 feet have?  More than the number indicated in the article.

A two-year old paper indicated over 400 million people for selected parts of the globe.  That’s bad enough.  When you factor in recorded sea-level rise amounts have already exceeded earlier estimates, that number is likely to be higher.  And what about the rest of the globe that the study didn’t examine, such as the west coast of the U.S. and most of Africa?

While the article could have benefited from some additional context, I was glad to see the information that did make it in.  We must rein in greenhouse gas emissions.  Millions of peoples’ livelihoods and untold numbers of plants and animals depend on it.

News Items From The Weekend 2/6/09

A number of items caught my eye in local newspapers over the weekend.  Starting with Friday’s paper:
Pentagon expanding funding to woo world public opinion.  $4.7 billion will be spent on spreading propaganda this year alone.  That’s as much as it spent on body armor for America’s troops in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006.  Interesting to note where the priorities are.

Deal on stimulus elusive.  In this L.A. Times article, the debate is identified as becoming increasingly partisan.  Darn right it’s becoming more partisan – it’s all Republicans know how to do.  They think delaying recovery and reinvestment in America (not Iraq) will somehow lead to winning elections in 2010.  Good luck with that.

A note here.  Most Cons’ objection to the bill centers around, “There’s not enough tax cuts!”  The Cons implemented every tax cut they could during the Bush years.  Guess how many jobs it created?  The fewest since the Great Depression.  Nearly all of them have since been lost as the Cons’ failed economic policies took full effect.  What do the Cons want in this bill?  More tax cuts to the rich, which won’t create one middle-class job.

Politics collide over road tolls in transporation bill.  When do the Cons like a tax?  When it’s called anything else.  They want tolls on highways that the public have already paid for.  The Cons didn’t fund their maintainence for years as part of their Drown-Government approach.  Tolls aren’t the answer.  How about mass-transit instead?

Lennon or Lenin, it stinks.  Right-wing editorialist David Harsanyi does his part to confuse the details of loans and recovery monies.  He asks:

Why did we just allow the president to dictate the pay of private citizens working in the private sector?

After writing that beggars can’t be choosers, he then asks:

However, in Obama’s trillion-dollar “stimulus plan” rushing through Congress, nearly every sector of the economy will, at one point, have allegedly benefited from taxpayer bounty. Does this mean that all industries can be subjected to similar central control?

There is a big difference between the TARP money financial institutions received and the recovery funds currently being negotiated in Congress.  The former went directly from the federal government to individual corporations who were screaming they were about to fail.  Instead of using the money as the TARP legislation spelled out, those corporations instead used the money to buy other banks and give out $13 billion in executive bonuses – for doing a good job, they said.  President Obama rightfully called them out on the practice.  If they want money from the taxpayers, there will be conditions set on it, just like the conditions customers agree to when asking banks for money.  There is really very little difference.

The recovery money will be provided to generate programs and projects, which will create middle-class jobs.  In contrast, none of the money from the TARP program went to creating middle-class jobs.  The other big difference is individual corporations aren’t begging the federal government for corporate welfare.  The government is instituting the programs under which money will be distributed.  The difference is quite clear to those who take a moment to look for it.

And though we didn’t hear Vladimir Ilyich, we are hearing the creeping sound of centralized Western European top-down economics — a system, where even with all the glorious over-regulations, there is a deep recession.

Ah, the token swipe at other industrialized nations’ economic policies.  Of course, Harsanyi doesn’t mention that the U.S. initiated this recession.  It started here and is getting worse here than in parts of Western Europe.  That simple fact is one of the biggest reasons why Western European countries’ economies have also slid into recession.  The demand from the world’s largest economy has come to an abrupt and very significant halt.  That has to have an effect in today’s interconnected world economies.  To warn U.S. policy makers away from Western European economic policies makes no sense.  They didn’t create the problem.  American Cons did.

Foreign Policy & Slippery Slopes

The recent Mumbai attacks led Tom Brokaw to pose a very serious question to Barack Obama.  Obama’s response is worth examining.  Here’s the exchange:

MR. BROKAW:  I want to move now to international affairs, the war on terror. Obviously, we have all been stunned by what happened in India at Mumbai.  It is still playing out in that part of the world.  You have said that the United States reserves the right to go after terrorists in Pakistan if you have targets of opportunity.  Does India now also have that right of hot pursuit?

PRES.-ELECT OBAMA:  Well, I’m not going to comment on that.  What, what I’m going to restate is a basic principle.  Number one, if a country is attacked, it has the right to defend itself.  I think that’s universally acknowledged.

The acceptance of the Bush Doctrine by Democrats will continue to stymie Democrats foreign policy for years to come.  It stymied what should have been an otherwise straightforward answer by Obama.  Common wisdom inside the D.C. punditry will compare everything Obama does to Bush’s policies because Obama and other prominent Democrats didn’t speak out forcefully against them during the past six years plus.  When Democrats didn’t speak out against them, I wondered why.  Would it be because they agree with it but don’t want to be seen as similary lawless and morally bankrupt as the Cons have been?  Obama’s response tells me that that very well could be the case.

He did comment on that by stating that country’s can respond to attacks, much like the U.S. did after 9/11.  He didn’t qualify his answer to indicate that any response would arise from moral underpinnings.  His answer is disturbing.  The U.S. should in no way encourage Indian and Pakistani tesnsions to escalate.  Both have nuclear weapons.  A nuclear disaster should be avoided at all costs.  Any oblique non-response to Brokaw’s question moves the world further down a slippery slope we shouldn’t be on.  Russia recently identified the Bush Doctrine as an open door to their invasion of Georgia earlier this year.  How many cases should be allowed to happen before the policy is emphatically rejected by Obama and other future U.S. Presidents?

***

Also in foreign policy news, the planned strategic deployment of Marines in Afghanistan is likely to change.  Instead of being posted close to the Afghan/Pakistan border, some Marines will instead be posted closer to Kabul, the capital.  That’s in response to this year’s Taliban advancements through Afghanistan.  It’s a situation that deteriorates every day.  President-elect Obama won’t have enough troops available to him to sufficiently take care of events in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  One has to take priority.  To boot, Bush is leaving Obama a severely depleted military – personnel and materiel have been significantly weakened.

Afghanistan Personnel Levels; Sen. Lieberman; Credit card defaults; Voter Suppression

Here’s something that got no coverage today.  The requested troop buildup in Afghanistan (set for next year) is quickly growing in size.  The ever-present, mysterious “officials” have said for months that trainers and and two additional combat brigades were needed, or about 10,000 more personnel.  Recently, a third combat brigade appeared necessary, putting the number of personnel at 15,000.  Now, an additional 5,000 to 10,000 personnel might be requested.  That would put the total somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.  There are, of course, over 150,000 U.S. forces currently occupying Iraq.  If McCain were to be elected (thankfully, an increasingly unlikely scenario), where would the 20,000+ personnel come from?  He has no plans to stop occupying Iraq.  Obama, if elected, will face the leftover question: what about the equipment the troops need?  Under Bush, that equipment hasn’t been maintained.  Current estimates of taking care of the maintenance backlog include years of time and billions of dollars.  Expanding operations in Afghanistan isn’t going to make that task any easier.

Sen. Lieberman might lose his committee chairmanship.  It’s about damn time.  He isn’t a Democrat, as seen by more than his b.s. party he formed in 2006.  As chair of the Homeland Security committee, Sen. Lieberman hasn’t held any meaningful hearings on the status of domestic security.  He has allowed himself to be used as a pawn by the worst President America has ever had.

Credit card defaults on the rise.  Not primarily the fault of either banks or borrowers.  It’s the failed CONservative economic policies of keeping workers’ wages low and offering risky credit as the path toward continued consumer spending.  Those policies have allowed executive pay and stock prices to skyrocket in the past 30 years, while workers’ income hasn’t risen.

Fliers in being distributed in minority neighborhoods in Virginia with false information about a change in election day.  It says Republicans are to vote on Nov. 4, while Democrats are to vote on Nov. 5.  There is only one voting day, of course, and that day is Nov. 4.  I’m sure Fox, Drudge and the McCain campaign are going to be all over this immoral voter suppression effort.  Democrats: vote early.  Do not allow the cons to prevent you from voting.

Colorado Daily Asking CO-02 Candidates Questions: Afghanistan

The Colorado Daily has been asking the candidates of CO-02 about leading issues. I previously shared my thoughts on their responses to the Daily’s health care question. This time, the topic was Afghanistan. Note: this originally ran about one month ago. I became aware of this series only last week. Here is the original Daily webpage introduction. Here is their question:

Should the U.S. still be in Afghanistan, and why or why not? If so, what would some of your objectives for a successful mission be?

Jared Polis‘s answer was pretty good. He shared a 9/11 anecdote, questions why bin Laden remains free, discusses troop realignment as it relates to the number of troops in Iraq, and identifies drug production as one aspect of the Afghani reality that has unfolded. Jared also speaks to the need to protect human rights and secure womens’ resources in order to bring about a more balanced Afghani society. Jared’s approach to the Afghani state of affairs revolves around stabilization. Without stabilizing the region, progress won’t happen.

Will Shafroth‘s answer was just as good as Jared’s. He starts by calling for a reanalysis of our goals to determine if we have the capability to achieve those goals. He identified the Afghanistan approach as being better than Iraq (identifying allies, etc.), and recognizes the importance of implementing diplomacy first in any foreign affair. He employs what I consider to be the correct language with respect to Iraq: invasion and occupation. We are not conducting a war there and the more people recognize that, the sooner we can disengage and stop occupying the Iraqi people’s country. Like Jared, Will identifies restoring stability as a worthy goal, and his definition of success would include no reestablishment of Al Qaeda in the region.

Joan Fitz-Gerald‘s answer was good, but I think it was somewhat weaker than the other candidates’.   She begins by pointing out the unfinished mission of finding Osama bin Laden and preventing Al Qaeda from regrouping.  She cites the troop number differential between Iraq and Afghanistan, then shares an anecdote regarding women and sub-par civil projects the US constructed.  She identifies the importance of Pakistan (neither Jared nor Will did so).  I’m with her up to this point in her response.  It’s after this portion that I part ways.  Her solution would include finishing the military mission.  With respect to both bin Laden and Al Qaeda, I don’t think the mission is exclusively military.  The mission should include apprehension of suspected terrorists and letting established justice systems deal with them, if necessary.  Continuing to invade, kill and occupy foreign lands cannot be the de facto approach of our foreign policy.  Joan wants to know what the status of intelligence on bin Laden and Al Qaeda is, which I do agree with.  Then she brings up losing a PR war in addition to a military war.  In my opinion, Joan is utilizing immoral language to further policies.

Two days ago, I wrote about the right-wing extremist that shot up the church in Tennessee and identified violent language as an impediment to identifying and implementing policies that work for the American people.  There is no difference in my mind between the violent language that right-wing pundits use and the violent language that Democrats use.  Violent language is violent language, regardless of who uses it.  I think saying, “losing a PR war” is a horrible frame from which to operate.  It doesn’t exemplify progressive values of opportunity and equality in discussing Afghani policy.  The word “war” has been overused to an extreme degree.  Are there troops from separate nations lining up fighting with film and pens?  Of course not.

All three candidates sound like they’re fairly close on the Afghanistan issue.  I think their effectiveness in Congress in developing and implementing an updated policy is highly dependent on how they approach the issue.  Jared and Will are closer to matching my approach.

Sound bites

I just read this over at SquareState. Part of me applauds Rep. Udall for making the trip to Afghanistan to get a better idea of what conditions might actually be like over there. Another part can’t give a shit less. It’s all words – Democratic politicians just want to make enough noise in the press to make it seem like they really care a lick about what’s going on in the region. If they really felt that Afghanistan and Pakistan posed the kind of threat they talk about, they would have forced Bush’s hand by now. But somehow, they view the situation as politically expedient for themselves as well.

And note: despite Udall’s mention of Pakistan, where was the announcement of a plan to do something about that country? A nation (with a former U.S.-supported dictator re-exerting dictatorial rule) that we arm and supply to the teeth has a governmental crisis on its hands. Oh, and they have nuclear weapons at their disposal. But where is the rebuke to our Dear Leader to stop bullshitting about Iran and get serious about Pakistan’s crisis?

Another thing that has bothered me about the Iraq/Afghanistan debacle is the amount of taxpayer dollars being funneled into the toilet. You’ve probably heard that argument before, but here’s my more personal take on it. Every dollar we spend over there is one less dollar for our single-payer health care system. It’s one less dollar for public education funding preschool through college. It’s one less dollar going to fight the greatest threat that we are facing: global warming. Folks, this planet will change in ways we can’t imagine. The Earth my children (if I ever have any) grow up in will not be recognizable to you or I today. And every dollar we waste on financing mercenaries and fraud is a dollar that should have gone to mitigate our horrendous treatment of this planet.

Every dollar we waste to fund an illegal occupation means we’ll have to waste more and more dollars to react to the next series of terrorist attacks. And we’ll face more attacks, but not for the reasons the fringe right would have you believe. We’ll be attacked again because we have a military presence in other people’s countries. And forget the bullshit that neocons spout about that’s the responsibility of being a superpower. Why shouldn’t being a superpower include supporting the will of the world’s populace? The vast majority of us just want to live our lives. Why do we continue to prop up dictators and governments hostile to their people’s interests? That’s why America’s standing in the world is in the toilet.

So stop sending out releases like this, Rep. Udall.  Or if you truly believe the words you put in them, then pay attention to the people you’re paid to represent.  Take action and show some guts.  If you don’t, why should I donate to your campaign?  Why should I vote for you?