Woodward

First Bob Woodward claimed that the Great Sequester was all the fault of the Administration. Now he wants us to believe (on rather iffy evidence) that White House aide Gene Sperling threatened him. David Plouffe has offered a memorable response:

"Watching Woodward last 2 days is like imagining my idol Mike Schmidt facing live pitching again" he tweeted. "Perfection gained once is rarely repeated."

This comparison is too kind. I don't understand why Woodward still commands the respect he maintains, and I don't know why so many Democrats and Republicans continue to cooperate with him.

His 1987 book Veil concludes with a scene in which Woodward pays a visit to CIA chief William Casey's deathbed -- a visit that almost certainly never happened. At the time, Ronald Reagan condemned the book as containing "an awful lot of fiction." Amusingly, Republicans who claim to revere Reagan now speak of Woodward as if he were unassailable.

Of Woodward's work during the Clinton years, Brad DeLong wrote:

It is certainly true that nothing Bob Woodward writes can be fully trusted without very, very careful, careful checking.... For the full Woodward treatment, read his The Agenda, then read his Maestro, contemplate how one and the same person could use the Third Person Omniscient to write both accounts of the making of Clinton economic policy, and collapse to the floor in helpless laughter...

In his 2004 book Plan of Attack, Woodward made no serious effort to counter the Bush administration's big lie about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. The book attempts to portray Dubya as a man pushed into a war he never wanted. The book was so helpful to the neocons that the Bush forces pushed it on his re-election campaign website.

But Woodward rarely calls Bush to account. Throughout, in fact, Bush controls his part of the story, and Woodward dutifully repeats what he has been told.

Bob Parry's view of Woodward-during-the-Dubya-years deserves more attention than it has received:

However, in the two years since publication of Plan of Attack, other evidence has emerged suggesting that Woodward was acting less as an objective journalist than as a stenographer taking down the preferred history of Bush’s inner circle.

As Parry notes, there is much evidence to counter Woodward's assertion that CIA Director George Tenet used the infamous term "slam dunk" to describe the WMD proof. Woodward's entire Iraq war project seems designed to absolve Bush of blame by claiming that the President merely acted on the basis of his intelligence.

But the Downing Street memo and other documentation clearly indicate that the intelligence was being fixed around a predetermined policy -- a policy set by Bush himself. The distinction is crucial.

Rather than the reluctant warrior, as portrayed in Woodward’s book, Bush appears to be hell-bent for war, according to the contemporaneous record which is now public.

Another leaked British document recounted an Oval Office meeting between Bush and Blair on Jan. 31, 2003 – a little more than a month after the “slam-dunk” meeting. Bush again was scheming to find excuses for invading Iraq, even as he was publicly telling the American people that he viewed war as a “last resort.”

Despite Bush’s record of deception, Woodward still treated Bush in Plan of Attack as a credible figure who was concerned about the evidence and went to war only after an ironclad assurance from his intelligence chief.

Even Woodward's most famous work -- All the President's Men -- has been questioned, primarily in its depiction of Woodward's source, Deep Throat.

Although Mark Felt of the FBI came out as Throat in 2005, most serious Watergate students believe that Woodward used "DT" as a catch-all term for multiple sources. John Dean's 2005 piece on the Felt mystery deserves a re-reading. Dean outlines a number of items ascribed to Felt that Felt could not have known -- and other items that Felt should have known but got wrong.

Felt retired from the FBI five months before this last contact during the first week of November 1973. As a result of the conversation, Woodward (breaking his prior agreement not to quote Felt directly) uses his words in the Post story, which told of gaps of "a suspicious nature" in Nixon's secret tapes that "could lead someone to conclude that the tapes have been tampered with."

How did Felt, no longer in the FBI, get information that "one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures"? And when reporting this story in The Washington Post, on November 8, 1973, why did Woodward quote Felt as an anonymous "White House source"?

Ed Gray, author of In Nixon's Web, has conclusively established that some "Throat" information actually came from a Woodward interview with Justice Department official Donald Santarelli; see here, here and here.

All the President’s Men is today accepted as a factual recitation -- and often the factual recitation -- of how Nixon and his “men” were driven from office. Until Woodward and Bernstein sold their notes to the University of Texas there was no way to test the book’s claim of historical accuracy. Those verifiable documents have provided the previously unavailable key. “Deep Throat” was a myth. So, therefore, is All the President’s Men.

I'm particularly proud to have posted this 2005 contribution from Jim Hougan, which argues that a key sources for Woodward's "Throat" material was Robert Bennett of the CIA. All the President's Men bends over backwards to keep the CIA out of Watergate, even though the Agency played a key role in the ouster of Richard Nixon. The under-appreciated Lukoski Memo establishes Bennett's secret relationship with Woodward (himself a former Naval Intelligence officer).

Now one of the most powerful men in the U.S. Senate, Bennett was President of the Robert R. Mullen Company in 1972-3. This was the CIA front for which Howard Hunt worked. (It was also the Washington representative of the Howard Hughes organization.) As I reported in *Secret Agenda*, Bennett's CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, drafted a memo to his boss, Eric Eisenstadt, reporting on his monthly debriefing of Bennett after the Watergate arrests. According to Eisenstadt, Bennett told him that he, Bennett, had "made a backdoor entry to the Washington Post through Edward Bennett Williams' office," and that he, Bennett, was feeding stories to Bob Woodward, who was "suitably grateful." (Williams was the Post's attorney, and attorney, also, for the Democratic National Committee.)

Woodward's gratefulness was manifest in the way he kept the CIA, in general, and the Robert R. Mullen Company, in particular, out of his stories.

Perhaps we now have an answer to Dean's inquiry: "How did Felt, no longer in the FBI, get information that 'one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures'?" Hougan's book Secret Agenda establishes that the CIA had itself bugged the White House, and thus had an independent method of checking the tapes. Woodward never mentions any of this in his book.

So why do so many people continue to confide in Bob Woodward? Why do so many buy his books?

I'm hardly Obama's greatest fan, and I agree with Paul Krugman that Republicans and Democrats both deserve blame for this sequester nonsense. (The Republicans deserve the greater share of the blame, due to their refusal to raise the debt ceiling.) But if asked to choose between the credibility of this administration and the credibility of Bob Woodward -- well, I'll have to go with the administration. Albeit with a cringe, a grimace, and much facial redness.

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Lots to say...

...but no time to say it. Busy today. I may do some blogging while waiting in The Waiting Place (a.k.a., the Department of Motor Vehicles, which has some other arcane name here in Maryland).

You may have noticed that I've said nothing about the Sequester. What can one say? It reminds me of the giant rolling boulder in the first Indiana Jones movie. Except you can't run away from it because you're chained to the opposite wall.

Of course, the Republicans (who don't really care about the deficit) would be amenable to any deal which ends Obamacare -- even though Obamacare will save money. But the big goal, as always, is Social Security. One shudders to think that Barack Obama is the only thing (or at least the main thing) standing between Social Security as it stands and a privatized system.

So. What do you think we ought to do about that big ol' boulder?

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Edgy

Everyone's talking about "edgy" humor today. The Onion got into trouble when one of its writers, in an online attempt at wit, referred to a nine-year old actress as a "cunt." A friend of mine said that one should never apply such a word to a child. My response: Why use that word to describe any female?

As noted below, I stopped watching Seth MacFalane's dirty cartoons when they degenerated into nothing but jokes about rape, sex with animals, vomit, shit and similar topics. The writers seem desperate to come up with "high-disgusto-factor" material; they seem to fear that the audience will drift if a single non-gross joke sullies the screen. My problem isn't with shit-blood-and-vomit per se; I just don't care for unfunny jokes about such things. 

In the second Austin Powers movie, there's a notorious bit in which Austen accidentally sips from a stool sample because he believes that he's drinking coffee. Nobody laughed at that scene. The "gag" was not just disgusting -- it was pure lead.

Here, as best as I can recall, is the dialogue:

AUSTEN: This coffee tastes like shit.

AUSTEN'S BOSS: It IS shit.

Austen makes a sour face, and that's it. End of scene.

Not funny.

But suppose the bit had gone differently. Austen picks up the stool sample, swirls it around, sniffs it like a connoisseur...

AUSTEN: Ah yes. Jamaica Blue. Unless I miss my guess, the beans were grown on the hills north of Kingston...(sips) Ah. Make that south of Kingston.

That, I think, would have worked better. The ick factor is still there, but it comes to you wrapped in an actual joke, derived from character. (If you disagree, come up with your own variant.) Of course, the producers probably would have nixed my rewrite on the grounds that much of the audience might not know that "Jamaica Blue" is an expensive type of coffee.

Longtime readers of this blog know that my language can be rough. And lord knows I've made many failed attempts at humor. One thing I've discovered: All humor carries a risk, but the risks increase when the jokes get edgy. If a normal joke bombs, you may annoy your audience -- but if a high-disgusto-factor joke bombs, then everyone will want you dead. They'll radiate the kind of hate we reserve for child molesters, puppy-kickers and unpopular presidents.

Peter Farelly found that out the hard way a short while ago.

Seth MacFarlane found out last night.

I remain a big fan of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, neither of whom are known for their dainty language. But the time has come for everyone to confess that jokes about misplaced cum and poop aren't automatic laugh-inducers -- in fact, they've gotten old. If that means telling our comics to err on the side of cleanliness, then so be it.

Unless, of course, the joke is truly funny. 

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By the way...

...I decided to forego watching the Oscar broadcast this year when I found out that Seth MacFarlane would host. So tell me: How bad was it? I stopped watching that guy's cartoon shows when they degenerated into puerile cum-and-poop wallows.

Added note: Okay, I just read a blistering review of Mr. Puerility's performance. Johnny Carson once said that he wouldn't do any jokes about the Lincoln assassination on the grounds that it was too soon. Apparently, MacFarlane proved Johnny right. 

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Manufactured terror

A short while ago, I caught a bit of a "Book TV" segment on Trever Aaronson's new work "The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism." For quite a while, some of us have suspected that the "terror" cells brought to justice by our federal agents hardly posed the danger that the newspaper headlines suggested. Aaronson has proven the point. He methodically went through the files and found the damning data: Terror cases owe everything to the work of infiltrators and informers who often play the classic "agent provocateur" role.

The FBI plants the ideas, makes the plans, provides the fake weapons and money, creates the attempted act of terrorism, makes an arrest, and announces the salvation of the nation.

Over and over again. The procedure has become so regular that intended marks have spotted the sting being worked on them simply by googling the name or phone number of the bozo pretending to recruit them into the terrorist brotherhood, and discovering that he's a serial informant.

Between 911 and August, 2011, the U.S. government prosecuted 508 people for terrorism in the United States. 243 had been targeted using an FBI informant. 158 had been caught in an FBI terrorism sting. 49 (that we know of, FBI recording devices have completely unbelievable patterns of "malfunctioning") had encountered an agent provocateur. Most of the rest charged with "terrorism" had little or nothing to do with terrorism at all, most of them charged with more minor offenses like immigration offenses or making false statements.

Mother Jones has published a story derived from Aaronson's book. One section of his piece impacts my suspicion that Anwar al-Alaki may himself have been Uncle's "inside man" within Al Qaeda:

Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born, high-ranking Al Qaeda official who was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011, became something of the terrorist group's Dear Abby. Have a question about Islam? Ask Anwar! Muslim men in nations throughout the Western world would email him questions, and Awlaki would reply dutifully, and in English, encouraging many of his electronic pen pals to violent action. Awlaki also kept a blog and a Facebook page, and regularly posted recruitment videos to YouTube.

Maybe I'm wrong about Awlaki. Still, a Murdoch paper once came that close to identifying him as an American agent, and the Yemeni government never confirmed his death-by-droning. If Awlaki was not "ours," then can you explain why YouTube takes down lots of terror-advocating videos while keeping the cinematic stylings of Anwar al-Awlaki available for your viewing pleasure?

Maybe Aaronson (or another writer) should write a follow-up book, demonstrating how our "terrorism" theatricals have become a global masquerade. The terror bugaboo has replaced the Cold War. Not much more than two decades ago, people called me a traitor and a communist whenever I said that there was no evidence that the USSR had engaged in a conspiracy to conquer the United States. Today, I can say those words without much fear of contradiction. When will it be permissible to state that terrorism, though real, does not pose anything like the threat that we've been led to believe?

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Aaron Swartz, Julian Assange...and JFK?

The DOJ has made clear that they pursued Aaron Swartz to make an example of him. To justify their case, they cite the damning words he wrote in his manifesto: 

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.

Why did the government suddenly become so interested in persecuting someone over scientific articles in which the authors no longer had any financial interest?

Underline the word "suddenly." As Marcy Wheeler points out, they arrested Swartz quietly on January 6, 2011 yet waited until February 9 to get a warrant to look at his computers. Then they let that warrant expire, necessitating a new warrant on February 24.

Obviously, the investigators didn't really care much about Swartz, not at first. They waited and waited, potentially ruining their case. But then someone high on the food chain said: "Go!"

I don't think that the government was all that concerned about protecting scientific information -- after all, JSTOR itself didn't want to pursue a case against Swartz. Their concern, as always, was political.

For one thing, the harsh example set by the Swartz prosecution could deter people from sharing long out-of-print (but hardly valueless) books about covert activity. Take the JFK assassination, for example. These days, only hard-core scholars of the case know about Joe Joesten, Penn Jones or "James Hepburn." (The latter pseudonym was affixed to an odd book written by members of the French secret service, and therein lieth a very weird tale. The rarity of the book owes much to the fact that the physical object was so ill-made, it literally fell apart in your hands!) But free distribution of such works could spur a new generation into looking beyond the tales told by Bill O'Reilly and Vince Bugliosi.

Okay, I wasn't entirely serious (as in serious serious) when I wrote the preceding paragraph. In truth, I don't think that the feds are overwhelmingly concerned about the distribution -- legal or otherwise -- of those books, or of any other books of that vintage.

And I'm quite sure that they weren't very concerned by those JSTOR articles. They made an example of Swartz for another reason entirely.

Marcy adds to the theory that the DOJ was motivated by a connection between Swartz and Julian Assange. Although she doesn't have a proper answer to the mystery of the six-week delay in getting a warrant, she notes that on the same February 9, the DOJ was having problems with its attempt to prove that Bradley Manning stole those State Department cables at Assange's behest.

They realized that they might not be able to get Assange via Manning. So they decided to try another route.

Obviously, Justice doesn't really care about Manning and didn't really care about Swartz; those two young men were just means to an end. Assange is the target.  I laid out my own theory last month, in a post that references the documented links between Aaron Swartz and the Wikileaks operation...

Turns out that the investigation into Swartz's dealings with the Assange operation yielded nothing prosecutable. So why did Ortiz persist? Here's where I get speculative. You tell me whether you think the speculation is well-grounded or outrageous.

Remember that episode of The Simpsons in which Homer, facing jail time over his tax problems, gets dragooned into working as an undercover operative?

That.

That's my theory of Carmen Ortiz and Aaron Swartz.

I don't think that Ortiz really wanted Swartz in prison. What good could he have done there? I think the feds wanted to turn Swartz, to pressure him into cooperation. Uncle feels confident that Assange will eventually end up in American hands, and they want witnesses to offer damning testimony against the Wikileaks founder.

So far, I've seen nothing to contradict that scenario. I also believe that Manning has been undergoing rough treatment because someone wants him to testify falsely against Assange.

The government's Assange obsession leads me to wonder: Just what the hell is going on here? We've long heard rumors that the founder of Wikileaks has gotten hold of some Big Damned Secret which he will release if the brown-n-smelly hits the rotating blades. But if Assange does have an ace up his sleeve, then the gummint's actions seem designed to force him play that card.

Why would they do that? Doesn't make sense.

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Your rights

Dan, a friend to this blog, directs our attention to this important story. Lots of people have expressed their outrage at the (alleged) infringement of their rights under the Second Amendment. But what about all those other amendments? Take numero uno, the one about free speech....

However, the government is arresting those speaking out … and violently crushing peaceful assemblies which attempt to petition the government for redress.

A federal judge found that the law allowing indefinite detention of Americans without due process has a “chilling effect” on free speech. And see this and this.

The threat of being labeled a terrorist for exercising our First Amendment rights certainly violates the First Amendment. The government is using laws to crush dissent, and it’s gotten so bad that even U.S. Supreme Court justices are saying that we are descending into tyranny.

I really hate to say anything nice about Rand Paul, but he and I are on the same page here...

Senator Rand Paul correctly notes:

The domestic use of drones to spy on Americans clearly violates the Fourth Amendment and limits our rights to personal privacy.

Paul introduced a bill to “protect individual privacy against unwarranted governmental intrusion through the use of unmanned aerial vehicles commonly called drones.”

Emptywheel notes in a post entitled “The OTHER Assault on the Fourth Amendment in the NDAA? Drones at Your Airport?”:

These genuine assaults on our liberties have occurred under both Republican and Democratic presidents. This is not a partisan matter, although too many people insist on that framing.

Personally, I have no interest in owning an assault weapon. I'd rather have drone-free skies.

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Up above the world so high...like a death ray from the sky...

The drone scandal -- may I use that term? -- won't go away soon.

Lindsay Graham dropped one hell of a bombshell the other day when he let slip that the drones may have killed an estimated 4,700 people -- a much higher number than the previously released estimate.

The Washington-based New America Foundation says there have been 350 US drone strikes since 2004, most of them during Obama's presidency. And the foundation estimates the death toll at between 1,963 and 3,293, with 261 to 305 civilians killed.

According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 2,627 and 3,457 people have been reportedly killed by US drones in Pakistan since 2004, including between 475 and nearly 900 civilians.

A close look at John Brennan's testimony reveals that he may consider using drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil:

"It's astonishing" said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union. "But it's the logical end point of the administration's claim that our war against suspected terrorists has no geographic boundaries."

Charles P. Pierce wrote a brilliant take-down of the drone program for Esquire:

First, we have the ongoing charade of "transparency" as regards the president's assumed right to kill Americans anywhere in the world including, absent a clear statement from this administration, which has not been forthcoming, within the borders of the United States. Then we have the drone program itself, which is a constitutional abomination no matter how effective you presume it is. Then, we have another attempt to reach a kind of bipartisan consensus with the various vandals and predatory fauna in the other party. And then, last, as part of the attempt at bipartisan consensus, a deal is struck in which the president's hit list is kept in a vault while more fuel is fed into the Benghazi!, BENGHAZI!, BENGHAZI!!!!!!!111!!! infernal machine just as it was so sputtering to a halt that even John McCain was calling a cab to pick him up by the side of the road. I swear, if this deal goes through, Lindsey Graham is going to have a woody you could see from space.

This is what happens when you elect someone -- anyone -- to the presidency as that office is presently constituted. Of all the various Washington mystery cults, the one at that end of Pennsylvania Avenue is the most impenetrable. This is why the argument many liberals are making -- that the drone program is acceptable both morally and as a matter of practical politics because of the faith you have in the guy who happens to be presiding over it at the moment -- is criminally naive, intellectually empty, and as false as blue money to the future. The powers we have allowed to leach away from their constitutional points of origin into that office have created in the presidency a foul strain of outlawry that (worse) is now seen as the proper order of things. If that is the case, and I believe it is, then the very nature of the presidency of the United States at its core has become the vehicle for permanently unlawful behavior. Every four years, we elect a new criminal because that's become the precise job description.

Of course, what goes around comes around:

Germany’s federal prosecutor said yesterday that it had filed charges against two men over the alleged illegal export to Iran of dozens of aircraft engines for use in drones. It said a 30-year-old German-Iranian man identified as Iman J L and 54-year-old Iranian citizen Davood A were suspected of having contravened the law on foreign trade. They allegedly exported to Iran 61 aircraft engines for use in unmanned robotic drones without official permission between October 2008 and September 2009, the prosecutor said in a statement. It said the exported engines were “suitable for operating the ‘Ababil-3’ type drone which are used by the Iranian armed forces as target simulation-, reconnaissance- and combat drones”.

VoteVets claims that drone controllers are eligible for a special medal that ranks above the purple heart.

On the lighter side of this issue, we have the not-unreasonable theory that some flying saucer reports are actually drone sightings. See here:

Is it an extra-terrestrial ship, a spy drone of Pakistan, a space vehicle, or one of those Chinese hot air balloons launched by locals? Rumours are swirling after reports came of an unidentified flying object (UFO) hovering over the world’s largest oil refinery at Jamnagar in Gujarat, owned by Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL).

According to the local police, an object in the shape of a red bowl was found circling the RIL unit at around 8pm on January 24. Though it was neglected as a one-of-its-kind incident, the object resurfaced after three days in the morning.

This report, from the Amherst Bulletin, is a bit closer to home:

I was driving with my daughter the other night when I saw something curious fly right over the road near the Amherst landfill on the outskirts of town.

“That is one weird plane,” I said, referring to the cargo planes that we see all the time flying down to the Westover Air Force Base. This was much smaller though, flew much lower, with a different lighting pattern, and made not a sound.

“Daddy, that’s a UFO,” Hattie said to me. She’s 11.

I called my father, an engineer. The voice of reason. He offered an idea. “The military might have buried some radioactive material in the landfill there and were testing their drone to see if it could detect it.”

Drones, or unmanned aircraft, have a hoarier history than many people realize. Before she became an actress, Marilyn Monroe worked in a factory that made what we would now call drones.

In a previous post, I speculated that Dennis Kucinich's famous (or infamous?) 1982 "UFO sighting" was actually the sighting of an unmanned vehicle flying home to McChord Air Force Base, which was only ten miles away from Kucinich's location.

Kucinich may have seen a predecessor for the BQM-147A Exdrone (also called the Dragon Drone) which has been in production since the mid 1980s.

Yes, drones used to be fun. Until they started blowing people up.

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Obama wants to raid your fridge! It's the Apocalypse!

Being on all sorts of left-wing and right-wing mailing lists, I receive many emails perfumed with the distinct aroma of psychosis. For a particularly strong whiff, check out the following, which I received a few hours ago...

Fellow patriot,

There’s a reason why Obama wants to snatch our guns.

It’s not the safety of your kids. Or crime. Or mass murders. It’s something you’d never imagine the government wants:

Your food.

Because when it hits the fan… the government knows it can’t possibly feed 46 million food-stamp recipients.

FEMA will have to find food somewhere. But they can’t take yours if it’s protected.

But there’s one kind of stockpile they can’t steal… no matter how hard they try:

>> renegade prepper exposes Obama’s secret plan <<

God bless you, Alec Deacon

I'm not inclined to give the link to Mr. Deacon's "renegade prepper" page. You'll have to use Google.

What we have here is yet another example of how The Apocalypse drives the American imagination. Perhaps the world's imagination.

Our society has become a maniac's hells-broth of clashing apocalypses: The fellow who insists that Obama wants to raid your fridge vs. the hyper-feminist who argues that all heterosexual sex is rape vs. the ill-educated lad who wants to increase military funding because we may one day need to send in the Marines to fight against space aliens vs. the 9/11 "truther" who thinks that his beatific vision exempts him from the dictates of logic or civility vs. the Christian fundamentalist concerned about the imposition of Sharia law in Oklahoma vs. the atheist fundamentalist warning us that only a theocrat would say that Jesus was a historical figure vs. the Southern Baptist litterateur whose shelves curve under the collected works of Tim LaHaye vs. the pop-cultured geek who wants our government to make plans for the coming Zombie invasion.

Perhaps I should mention our old friend b, a frequent contributor our comments section, who sometimes writes wistfully about the communards who burned down the Tuileries. Dammit, why can't we have days like that again?

Perhaps we will. And perhaps those who long for such a conflagration won't like it when it happens.

Maybe Alan Moore (who has written a few good Apocalypses in his time) was right when he wrote, in The Voice of the Fire, that history is a heat and the world is turning to steam. Or maybe I'm right: History is indeed a heat, and a bunch of idiots have been stuffing C4 into every cranny of our culture.

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The "party before principle" principle

Sorry for the light posting; I'm working on a major video project. No $$ involved (although...who knows?), but I'm addressing a non-political issue of great importance.

Right now, I invite you to glance at this comic from the same team who put together the one-page al-Awlaki graphic novel featured in our previous post. This strip will hit home with many of you, since most Cannonfire readers have mounted serious left-wing critiques of our current president. (Hard to read? Click to enlarge, or go the link above.)

All of which brings us to today's puzzler.

It's apparent that both liberals and conservatives are guilty of putting party above principle. We all get so caught up in the horse race that we forget why the race exists in the first place.

When Dick Cheney said "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," nobody on the right screeched at the veep. When a Democrat got into office, deficits suddenly mattered more than anything. Chalk it up to the "party over principle" principle.

On the other side of the aisle, many liberals voted for Obama because they thought he would be President Peace-Lover. When he turned out to be President Surge -- and then President Death-From-Above -- the Obots went into rationalization mode.

At least, some of them did.

Many did not. During the 2009-2011 period, lots of lefty blog commenters registered many a harsh complaint about Barack Obama, and there's no use pretending otherwise. In fact, I would say that -- for a while, at least -- the complainers outnumbered the rationalizers, even on Daily Kos. The left got scared back into Camp D only when the Republican primaries gave us a close look at the opposing forces.

So. Who is more likely to hold principle above partisanship -- your liberal friend or your conservative friend? Which one is most likely to concentrate on ideas rather than the endless game of shirts-vs-skins? Which one is most likely to fulminate at a leader of his or her own party?

Until very recently, I would have said that liberals are far more likely to express their disdain for Democratic politicians. (To cite but one example: Back in 2007, Nancy Pelosi probably had more left-wing enemies than right-wing enemies.) However, the Tea Party's recent activities -- particularly their extreme hatred of Karl Rove -- have forced me to reconsider.

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Al-Awlaki: The comic

Well, this is new -- a mini-comic about Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen who got the "death from above" treatment from Obama.

(Click on the image to enlarge, if the text is too small for you.)

Of course, there's another explanation for the Awlaki affair, which I have outlined in previous posts. Incidentally, nobody is doing better work on this matter than is the remarkable Marcy Wheeler. She makes two points which may (or may not, depending on your reading) buttress my little theory:

Awlaki was first targeted, by the military and before the OLC memo the white paper is based on was written, at a time when the intelligence community did not consider him operational.

During negotiations for a plea agreement that never happened, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab implicated Awlaki in a clearly operational role, but after plea negotiations fell apart, that testimony was never presented in an antagonistic courtroom (indeed, the government itself told a significantly different story at Abdulmutallab’s trial).

In my view, both of these factoids are congruent with my suspicion that Awlaki's killing was a ruse designed to cover an exfiltration. Of course, I could be wrong.

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Bout steak

The horsemeat-sold-as-beef scandal took a parapolitical turn recently, when it was revealed that the mastermind may be the notorious Viktor Bout. I once referred to Bout as the closest real life equivalent to a James Bond supervillain.

Some say that Bout should be pronounced "butt," which makes my headline a better pun than you probably thought at first. Others insist on pronouncing Bout as "boot", which means I need a new pun. You'd think that a guy with his kind of ill-gotten loot could afford a better suit than the one you see in the picture to your left. (Four buttons? And look at those sleeves...!)

Bout, formerly of the GRU (or KGB, depending on your source), is an arms merchant, most infamous for being the key supplier to Al Qaeda in the years before the World Trade Center attack. Before the American invasion, the Afghan airline -- yes, they had an airline -- had become your standard "guns in, drugs out" operation, and Bout supplied the guns. During our war with Iraq, Bout got hold of a lot of Bosnian weapons scheduled for destruction and got them into the hands of -- well, pretty much everyone on all sides. He's into shady airlines, blood diamonds, money laundering, surface-to-air missiles and all the other accoutrements of the modern fun-seeker.

To learn a lot more, try this New Yorker profile (and this one), along with this website (which needs updating). The New Yorker article indicates that everyone's favorite death merchant turned his attention to foodstuffs six or seven years ago.

In 2010, Bout was arrested in Thailand for making weapons deals with Colombian terrorists. Extradited to the U.S., he was convicted in November of 2011 and sentenced to 25 years in August of last year.

So the question becomes: How does a guy in prison have anything to do with companies connected to the horsemeat scandal?

The company many point to as the main culprit in the beef-substitution racket is called Draap Trading, headquartered in Cyprus.

Jan Fasen, who runs Draap and has denied any wrongdoing, was convicted last year of selling South American horsemeat as German and Dutch beef.

In a development that sheds light on the mysterious networks operating in the European food chain, it has emerged that Draap's sole director is an anonymous corporate services company called Guardstand, set up in 1996 and based in Limassol.

Guardstand, in turn, appears to be part of the Bout network. (Yes, I've simplified a very complicated tale; there's also a company called Ilex in there somewhere. If you want the fuller version, follow the links.)

Take another look at the photo above. Would you buy ground round from that guy? Given the appalling number of human corpses Bout has churned up, we should be glad that Draap turned to an equestrian substitute.

In his pre-prison days, Bout went to great lengths to curry favor with the Pentagon and the neocons -- a pretty neat trick, when you consider that he has also armed Israel's enemies. For more on Bout's Bush-era links to the U.S. and U.K. power elite, see here and here and here.

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Secret funding for climate denialists and Islamophobes

The Guardian has a good story up about the secret funders of the climate denialist think tank network.

Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120m (£77m) to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.

The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising "wedge issue" for hardcore conservatives.

The millions were routed through two trusts, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, operating out of a generic town house in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Donors Capital caters to those making donations of $1m or more.

The money flowed to Washington thinktanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore.

I've long said that most think tanks are a racket. If you want make a nice chunk of change, just make a video of that sort; the profits are baked in.

Here's the part that that the Guardian didn't get to: The Donors Capital Fund is also the largest funder of Big Islamophobia, another racket. There's more here.

The amazing thing about the CAP report is that it exposes people who try very hard to cover their tracks. It is one thing to be known for supporting AIPAC, but it is quite another to be identified with the likes of Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, and Pam Geller, who appears in the CAP report as only a second-tier hater but whose anti-Muslim vehemence is nothing short of disgusting. (She rationalised the killing of the kids in Norway by pointing out that the camp they attended was associated with Norway's Labor Party, which she claims is anti-Israel!)

The hate funders are particularly determined to lay low since the slaughter of 76 people in Norway in July by a self-described Christian conservative named Anders Breivik, who said that he was influenced by Robert Spencer, Pam Geller, and David Horowitz (another prominent propagandist against Muslims and beneficiary of the various anti-Islam foundations).

But CAP followed the money, went behind the innocent-sounding foundation names, and cross-referenced them. And now we have it: the hate network exposed.

It's pretty ugly. Jews whose main concern is Israel align themselves with Christian rightists who don't like Jews. There are even a few Muslims who are dispatched by the network to tell audiences at churches and synagogues just how bad their people are. It's weird.

There's money to be made in Islamophobia. If you have the right ethnicity, you can claim to be a former jihadi. Then you can give lectures in churches about the great conspiracy you aided in the days before you found Jesus. Ka-ching!

I first found out about the sharpsters working the "former jihadi" angle while researching the oddballs surrounding the Innocence of Muslims video.

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More on the minimum wage

I've always been a strong proponent of a decent minimum wage. The previous post addressed that very topic, and the responses were so fine, I thought I would share them with a larger audience.

This comes from our friend Dan in Alabama:

San Francisco vs Alabama

San Francisco min wage: $10.55
Alabama min wage: $7.25

San Francisco unemployment rate: 6.5%
Alabama unemployment rate: 7.1%

San Francisco pays its workers at least 25% more and has less unemployment than Rock Hard Right Wing Alabama.

Sucks to be beat by a bunch of flaming Liberals don't it macho man!

Of course, life is more expensive in San Francisco. But that fact doesn't affect Dan's basic argument: According to Libertarian theology, unemployment should be much higher in the city by the Bay. Should be, but isn't.

Carolyn Kay sends the following, which originally appeared in ThinkProgress:

OOPS: GOP Rep. Inadvertently Makes The Case For Nearly Doubling The Minimum Wage

A stronger minimum wage, [Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R) ] said, would negatively affect the ability of young workers to enter the workforce as teenagers, and would prevent them from learning responsibility like she did when she was a teenage retail employee making a seemingly-measly $2.15 an hour in Mississippi…

Making $2.15 an hour certainly does sound worse than today’s minimum wage, which federal law mandates must be at least $7.25 an hour. But what Blackburn didn’t realize is that she accidentally undermined her own argument, since the value of the dollar has changed immensely since her teenage years. Blackburn was born in 1952, so she likely took that retail job at some point between 1968 and 1970. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the $2.15 an hour Blackburn made then is worth somewhere between $12.72 and $14.18 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on which year she started.

At that time, the minimum wage was $1.60, equivalent to $10.56 in today’s terms. Today’s minimum wage is equivalent to just $1.10 an hour in 1968 dollars, meaning the teenage Blackburn managed to enter the workforce making almost double the wage she now says is keeping teenagers out of the workforce.

Youngsters may not understand that, back in the days when real wages (as measured in inflation-adjusted dollars) were higher, it was possible to get by on a part-time job.

A reader named romero sent the following:

From the post war period right up till 1975 wage increases for ordinary workers tracked US national productivity increases. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that from 1975 till the present productivity increased by a massive 154% while wages increased by a measly 13% in real terms. Workers are now working twice as hard for the same or even less pay than they were earning in 1975. So there is no question that the middle and working classes have been totally ripped off by employers and the wealthy. See here and here.

The current public debate on wage increases has focused on the benefits to the economy and that the impact on employer costs and unemployment numbers will be minimal. These secondary arguments fail to address the economic elephant in the room -- that workers have been systematically robbed for a generation of wage increases to which they are fully entitled and it's about time they started getting it. The cash is out there and they have been owed it for a long, long time. It's about wage justice, not affordability.

I've taken the liberty of reproducing the chart which shows the great disparity between rising productivity and stagnant wages. My first reaction was to say "What hath Reagan wrought?" -- but in truth, the gap began to widen under Carter, possibly Ford. Reagan, however, turned the crack into a canyon.

Paul Krugman has more to say today:

So what should you know? First, as John Schmitt (pdf) documents at length, there just isn’t any evidence that raising the minimum wage near current levels would reduce employment. And this is a really solid result, because there have been a *lot* of studies. We can argue about exactly why the simple Econ 101 story doesn’t seem to work, but it clearly doesn’t — which means that the supposed cost in terms of employment from seeking to raise low-wage workers’ earnings is a myth.

Second — and this is news to me — the usual notion that minimum wages and the Earned Income Tax Credit are competing ways to help low-wage workers is wrong. On the contrary, raising the minimum wage is a way to make the EITC work better, ensuring that its benefits go to workers rather than getting shared with employers.

On the other side of the aisle, Marco Rubio demonstrated a formidable talent for missing the obvious when he uttered these memorable words: “Minimum-wage laws have never worked in terms of helping the middle class attain more prosperity.”

Yes, and laws against horse theft have never worked in terms of helping us go the Moon. Pretty much by definition, a minimum wage job is not a middle class job. Now that election season has passed, perhaps it's time for us to stop pretending that middle class Americans are the only citizens who matter. In fact, if we define our terms with any rigor, most Americans do not belong to the middle class.

In this country, politicians speak of "the rich," "the middle class" and "the poor." And that's it. Those three categories are the only ones that enter our discourse. But everyone else in the world recognizes the existence of a thing called "the working class," a category which comes between the middle class and the impoverished. Not only are the "middlers" not in the majority -- the workers are more numerous -- they usually have a higher-than-average income, certainly higher than that of most workers.

This blog may soon have more to say on the subject of class. I re-read Paul Fussell a few months ago; the book must still be around here somewhere.

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Minimum wage

Robert Reich offers (in Salon) an excellent argument in favor of the minimum wage. So has Paul Krugman, natch. So has fellow blogger Dakinkat, who teaches economics. Read all three, but Kat's piece is especially good.

Reich:

Employers won’t outsource the jobs abroad or substitute machines for them because jobs at this low level of pay are all in the local personal service sector (retail, restaurant, hotel and so on), where employers pass on any small wage hikes to customers as pennies more on their bills. States that have a minimum wage closer to $9 than the current federal minimum don’t have higher rates of unemployment than do states still at the federal minimum.

Kat:

Actually, there’s so much good rationale that even Walmart lobbies congress for increases. That probably will surprise you, but it’s pretty simple. Minimum wage workers are Walmart shoppers. Giving them more income turns them into customers. They don’t have any leftover money so they basically spend all they get.

Walmart, I would add, already runs a very tight ship at most stores. They can't fire employees and keep the doors open the same number of hours. So you can't argue that a nine-buck-an-hour wage will cause massive lay-offs.

Raising the minimum wage should reduce the number of people who borrow beyond their means to go to college. They will stay on the job if they feel that they can get ahead without higher education.

Kat directs our attention to this New Yorker article:

A second important and (largely) undisputed finding is that there is no obvious link between the minimum wage and the unemployment rate. During the nineteen sixties, when the minimum wage was raised sharply, unemployment rates were sharply lower than they were in the nineteen eighties, when the real value of the minimum wage fell dramatically. If you look across the states, some of which set a minimum wage above the federal minimum, you can’t see any sign of higher rates leading to higher unemployment. In Nevada, where the national minimum of $7.25 an hour applies, the jobless rate is 10.2 per cent. In Vermont, where the minimum wage is $8.60 an hour, the unemployment rate is 5.1 per cent. What these figures tell us is that other factors, such as the overall state of the economy and how local industries are doing, matter a lot more for employment than the level of the minimum wage does.

In August of 2011, this humble blog took notice of Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus. He made the news when he announced that he could not have started his business if Obama's onerous gummint regulations had been in place in 1978, when Home Depot began. This claim didn't convince anyone who could recall the actual regulatory environment in 1978; as noted above, the real minimum wage was higher then than it is now.

As I pointed out in that earlier post...

By the way: There are Home Depots in Canada! Plenty of 'em!

Those stores remain open for business even though those despicable job-killing gummint regulations are even more severe north of the border. (And yes, employers there do like to bitch about that situation.) Those unlucky Canucks agonize under the burdens of a socialized health care regime, which businesses large and small must help to fund.

And yet -- how can this be? -- Home Depot Canada is doing fine!

In Canada, the minimum wage is higher -- between $8.75 and $11.00 an hour (figured in "international dollars"). The government also imposes stricter environmental standards.

Finally, here's Paul Krugman:

The truth is that top Republicans have so little regard for ordinary workers that they can’t even manage to pretend otherwise. Case in point: on the last Labor Day, Eric Cantor declared,

Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.

Yep: even on Labor Day, Cantor had nothing positive to say about workers, just praise for their bosses.

This really is new. Even in Reagan's time, Republicans always managed, on Labor Day, to scrounge up a few pro-forma words of praise for the American worker. Either the ideology has grown more severe or the personal insecurities of our modern Randroids have reached the level of psychosis.

Maybe next Labor Day, Sarah Palin will tell us that Paul Revere made his famous ride to warn the British not to impose further regulations on our Job Creators.

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Watch the skies

The meteorite event over and around Chelyabinsk, in Russia, poses a challenge to bloggers. Everyone wants to talk about it and to read about it. Unfortunately, online opinionators can bring no "value added" to this kind of story. You'd have to be a very, very clever monkey to find some way to politicize the incident.

Initially, I was very intrigued by any possible connection between this meteorite and Asteroid 2012 DA14, which is passing close to our fair planet as I write these words. But the European Space Agency resolved that issue when they announced that the meteorite's trajectory bore no relation to that of the asteroid.

In 2010, as you may recall, Obama announced the goal of landing a manned craft on an asteroid by 2025. The asteroid Apophis -- what a wonderfully sinister name! -- is scheduled to make a close fly-by in 2029. Originally, scientists thought that that this body had a 2.7% chance of striking the Earth, but that figure has since been rounded down to zero. Not to worry, apocalypse fans: A "gravitational keyhole" could deflect the asteroid into a course that might cause an impact in 2036.

If you were of a conspiratorial turn of mind, you might posit that the real numbers (which the gummint keeps secret, of course) are more frightening, and that Obama announced the 2025 goal in order to ready us for an apocalypse-averting asteroid intervention.

Do I believe that? Not really. But when you're a blogger who is trying very hard to be a clever monkey, you work with what you have.

Added Note: Our long-time contributor b is a very clever monkey indeed. In a comment appended to the preceding post (the one about Marco Rubio), b offers some very strange speculation about this meteorite. Normally, I discourage off-topic comments -- but this one is fun, and you may want to look it up.

Added added note: And then there's dear old Vladimir Zhirinovsky...

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Marco Rubio lies about the 2008 meltdown

I didn't watch the Rubio response to the SOTU, so I missed the slurp heard 'round the world. But it seems clear that the guy has wedded himself to the undying GOP lie that Fannie and Freddie -- not lack of regulation, not Wall Street greed -- caused the great recession.

This nonsensical claim flies in the face of the evidence presented in a sizable library of books, including Matt Taibbi's Griftopia (the best of the lot) and Stiglitz' Freefall and Sinn's Casino Capitalism and...and and and. One could also mention some great documentaries, like Inside Job and Frontline's Money, Power and Wall Street and Inside the Meltdown and...and and and.

There's really no point in listing more examples, because anyone who blinds himself to the facts would have to be the kind of idiot who also thinks that evolution is "just a theory."

Here's Paul Krugman's response:

Deregulation, the explosive growth of virtually unregulated shadow banking, lax lending standards by loan originators who sold their loans off as soon as they were made, had nothing to do with it — it was all the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie, and Freddie.

Look, this is one of the most thoroughly researched topics out there, and every piece of the government-did-it thesis has been refuted; see Mike Konczal for a summary. No, the CRA wasn’t responsible for the epidemic of bad lending; no, Fannie and Freddie didn’t cause the housing bubble; no, the “high-risk” loans of the GSEs weren’t remotely as risky as subprime.

This really isn’t about the GSEs, it’s about the BSEs — the Blame Someone Else crowd. Faced with overwhelming, catastrophic evidence that their faith in unregulated financial markets was wrong, they have responded by rewriting history to defend their prejudices.

"GSE" stands for Government Sponsored Enterprises -- that is, Fannie and Freddie. Mike Konczal has written his own excellent response to Rubio; see here.

Another fine long-ish explanation as to why Freddie and Fannie should not be blamed for the disaster can be found in this NYRB article. It was written in response to a book called Reckless Endangerment, which the rightwingers use as the intellectual cornerstone of their pseudoargument.

In fact, as abundant data show, Fannie and Freddie’s affordable lending programs had virtually nothing to do with the recent crisis. The crisis was caused by Wall Street’s bad bets on complex securities based on subprime mortgages. These bets were mostly placed during the mid-2000s.

The right-wingers believe that Bill Clinton's revision of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act forced Fannie and Freddie to ruin the economy by giving mortgages to undeserving black people. In a 2008 Cannonfire post, we published an excellent rejoinder to this absurdity...

• Did the 1977 legislation, or any other legislation since, require banks to not verify income or payment history of mortgage applicants?

• 50% of subprime loans were made by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal supervision; another 30% were made by banks or thrifts which are not subject to routine supervision or examinations. How was this caused by either CRA or GSEs ?

• What about "No Money Down" Mortgages (0% down payments) ? Were they required by the CRA? Fannie? Freddie?

• Explain the shift in Loan to value from 80% to 120%: What was it in the Act that changed this traditional lending requirement?

• How exactly did legislation force Moody's, S&Ps and Fitch to rate junk paper as Triple AAA?

• What about piggy back loans? Were banks required by Congress to lend the first mortgage and do a HELOC for the down payment -- at the same time?

• Internal bank memos showed employees how to cheat the system to get poor mortgages prospects approved that shouldn't have been: Titled How to Get an "Iffy" loan approved at JPM Chase. (Was circulating that memo also a FNM/FRE/CRA requirement?)

• The four biggest problem areas for housing (by price decreases) are: Phoenix, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; Miami, Florida, and San Diego, California. Explain exactly how these affluent, non-minority regions were impacted by the Community Reinvesment Act ?

I doubt that a recitation of these facts will change Republican mythology. People will believe whatever they want to believe -- and if they prefer to blame black people and Bill Clinton, they will twist reality itself into knots.

Perhaps that is to be expected. What bugs me is that the official "inside the beltway" responders to Rubio didn't call him out on his myth-making. But they did talk about that swig of water.

Added note. Konczal offers a "fun fact" which reminds us of some history that Republicans want us to overlook.

Fun fact: These same conservatives sang a different tune before the crash. They argued that the CRA and the GSEs were getting in the way of getting risky subprime mortgages to risky subprime borrowers. See Should CRA Stand for ‘Community Redundancy Act? from Cato in 2000 or AEI’s Peter Wallison in 2004 arguing ”study after study has shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are failing to do even as much as banks and S&Ls in providing financing for affordable housing, including minority and low income housing.”

Before 2008, the Libertarians were telling us that Fannie and Freddie were not aggressive enough in giving loans to poor people. Now, the Libertarians want to erase from our collective memory the words they wrote then. They want us all to pretend that they said something very different. But the record is the record is the record.

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Dorner

So far, I seem to be the only person in bloggerland who has taken a somewhat detached view of the Dorner case. This isn't an emotionally simple tale. On the one hand, I've heard too many stories about the LAPD to doubt most of the claims in Dorner's manifesto. On the other hand, I (of course) take the view that a protester who feels the need to inflict severe bodily injury should do harm only to himself -- as did, for example, the guy who set himself on fire in order to send a message to Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War era.

That said, the latest reports indicate that no body has been found. I like that. I like the possibility that this whole thing may end on a D.B. Cooper note. (Of course, I'm the kind of guy who prefers to think that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid.) How long has it been since we had a mystery of that caliber to chew on?

Realistically, chances are very good that a charred body will soon turn up in that cabin. If and when that happens, we'll have nothing to argue about, to speculate about, to theorize about -- except for, y'know, the politics.

Ew.

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Anonymous threatens to disrupt the SOTU

Let's see what happens... The threatening message lists the persecutions of Aaron Swartz and Bradley Manning as two of the motives for this proposed retaliatory action.

Update: Well, that was disappointing. Must be getting hard to hack while wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Trustworthy anarchists are so hard to come by these days....

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A few points...

Burger King. Just now, the local Fox news station did a "news" segment breathlessly describing the ten new coffee flavors offered at your local Burger King. Footage supplied by the fast food company illustrated this piece. At one time, a restaurant had to pay for advertising. At one time, news broadcasts delivered news.

The SOTU. Shall I watch the speech? Probably not. Better, perhaps, to catch the highlights on the rebound. However, I am delighted that the response will be upstaged by Ted Nugent, who will no doubt be pressed to say something outrageous -- preferably a riff on how Obama engineered the Sandy Hook massacre. As long as people like Ted Nugent represent the voice of conservatism, the Dems can rest easier.

Drones. Here's a topic that you shouldn't expect Obama to address. Bill Moyers and Michael Winship have it right:

The Times told of a Muslim cleric in Yemen named Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, standing in a village mosque denouncing al Qaeda. It was a brave thing to do — a respected tribal figure, arguing against terrorism. But two days later, when he and a police officer cousin agreed to meet with three al Qaeda members to continue the argument, all five men — friend and foe — were incinerated by an American drone attack. The killings infuriated the village and prompted rumors of an upwelling of support in the town for al Qaeda, because, the Times reported, “such a move is seen as the only way to retaliate against the United States.”

Our blind faith in technology combined with a false sense of infallible righteousness continues unabated. Reuters correspondent David Rohde recently wrote:

“The Obama administration’s covert drone program is on the wrong side of history. With each strike, Washington presents itself as an opponent of the rule of law, not a supporter. Not surprisingly, a foreign power killing people with no public discussion, or review of who died and why, promotes anger among Pakistanis, Yemenis and many others.”

Rohde has firsthand knowledge of what a drone strike can do. He was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008 and held for seven months. During his captivity, a drone struck nearby. “It was so close that shrapnel and mud showered down into the courtyard,” he told the BBC last year. “Just the force and size of the explosion amazed me. It comes with no warning and tremendous force… There’s sense that your sovereignty is being violated… It’s a serious military action. It is not this light precise pinprick that many Americans believe.”

A special report from the Council on Foreign Relations last month, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies,” quotes “a former senior military official” saying, “Drone strikes are just a signal of arrogance that will boomerang against America.”

I will go so far as to say that Obama is starting to do some more of the right things in his second administration. But any progress he makes in other areas will be wiped out if he does not reform his drone policy. More than that: Congress must set standards for future presidents to follow.

Horsemeat: One of the markets hit by the Mr.-Ed-in-your-burger scandal is Aldi, which has branches here in Balmer. Thanks to the Guardian (by way of Skydancing), we learn that much of the problem in Europe concerns the Euro equivalent to our "pink slime" scandal...

The change meant that "desinewed meat" (DSM), a fine mince rubbed under pressure from carcasses, could no longer be called meat on packaging. DSM produced in the UK was the main ingredient in most value-range burgers, sausages, pies and kebabs and the change meant that thousands of tonnes of meat had to be sourced from elsewhere and at low cost.

Well, at least they didn't attempt Mrs. Lovett's solution.

Dorner? I guess I should mention that, at this writing, the cops may have Dorner in a corner. Damn. I was betting that the bears had already gotten to him. An LAPD commander is quoted as saying that the best thing would be for Dorner "to surrender." Surrender? Heh. Everyone who knows the LAPD knows that they would react to a white flag with a hail of gunfire. Dorner, I am sure, understands that they have no intention of taking him alive.

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The artificiality of the Tea Party

Did the Tea Party arise spontaneously in 2009? Or was it a long-in-the-works creation of the Koch brothers? This FDL story offers intriguing new evidence...

Shattering the public perception that the Tea Party is a spontaneous popular citizens movement, a new academic paper provides evidence that an organization founded by David and Charles Koch, attempted to launch the Tea Party movement in 2002.

The peer-reviewed study appearing in the academic journal, Tobacco Control and titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party,‘ shows that the group Citizens for a Sound Economy launched a Tea Party movement website, www.usteaparty.com, that went live in 2002.

According to the website DeSmogBlog.com, who broke this story earlier today, CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch in 1984. David Koch sat on the board of CSE for many years and the group’s first president, Richard Fink, went on to become a senior VP at Koch Industries.

The 2002 Tea Party website intro screen is reproduced below:

Some will argue that the 2002 Tea Party (which was basically a tool of Big Tobacco) and the 2009 variety were two different operations with the same name. I tend to think that 2009 was entirely planned and stage-managed, using repurposed material first cobbled together years earlier.

Whenever you see an instantly-ubiquitous political phenomenon -- and whenever the thing just reeks of big money and co-ordinated effort -- you know that are dealing with something ersatz. Much of modern politics is the equivalent of wrestling. If you think the drama is real, you're a rube.

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Righty-right

Listen, I know I should be blogging about the resignation of the Pope. Frankly, I don't know what to say. Dude got old.

Perhaps I should also write about the Dorner case, which currently has the folks in my old home town all a-fluster. Well, there's a lot to be said about that goatfuck. But frankly, I've got a project to do this evening, and I can't spare the time needed to do a proper job of working through all the ramifications of that drama. I don't know where Dorner is right now, but I suspect that, since his vehicle was found in the Angeles National Forest, much of him may already have gone through the innards of one of California's more ursine residents.

Nevertheless, since you were kind enough to visit this blog, I feel obligated to give you something. So here's a picture of Malcolm MacDowell in droog regalia, then and now.

There now. What more could you possibly need?

Well, in my case, I could use a good sword cane, like the one wielded by Little Alex in the movie. This is a tough neighborhood, and the local louts and I have entered into a mutual hate agreement.

The trouble is, Maryland's rules on which personal weapons one can and cannot carry are infuriatingly vague.  See here and here; take special note of § 4-101 (b)(4). I have no desire to break the law, but around here, the law appears to be whatever an individual cop or judge decides. And that ain't fair!

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Privacy invasion: It's worse than you think

The Guardian "liberated" a video demonstration put together by the defense firm Raytheon in which a cheerful fellow explains how the new Riot software can track where you've been and what you've doing, thanks to the GPS in your mobile device. I suppose similar capabilities have been around for a while, but Riot makes hyper-accurate spying as easy as using Google. In fact, the interface looks exactly like Google's.

The Guardian's story is here.

The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.

The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a "Google for spies" and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.

Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person's life – their friends, the places they visit charted on a map – in little more than a few clicks of a button.

In the video obtained by the Guardian, it is explained by Raytheon's "principal investigator" Brian Urch that photographs users post on social networks sometimes contain latitude and longitude details – automatically embedded by smartphones within so-called "exif header data."

Riot pulls out this information, showing not only the photographs posted onto social networks by individuals, but also the location at which the photographs were taken.

The responses to this video, so far, have been predictable. Many people are unnerved, as well they ought to be. Others have retreated to those standard defeatist cliches: "Nothing you do on the internet will ever be private, so just suck it up." "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

That last phrase (and yes, I'm going to repeat this line each and every time) was commonly heard in the days of Nazi Germany.

Here's a better response: Fight.

We don't have to live with these intrusions. We have a right to demand regulations and laws which will protect our privacy. For example, why should our camera phones record location when we take a photo? The EXIF information should record only that data which we wish to have recorded.

Those devices are ours. We pay for them. They should work the way we want them to work.

Similarly, the law should make it impossible for Facebook to transmit any personal data without a warrant.

Why isn't there a larger movement favoring internet privacy legislation? Why isn't there a lobbying group for a comprehensive Internet Privacy Act? Your forebears would never have allowed anyone to track their movements or to read their private letters. Why does the current generation passively accept spying?

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More American insanity

After being sued by Donald Trump over an orangutan joke, Bill Maher responds with one of his funniest routines ever. The "short form birth certificate" bit at the end ties in directly with the points made in the preceding post.

Count me among the "Apers." Even though I've seen the Trump COLB only in this lo-res video, my expert knowledge of Photoshop leads me to suspect that the document is fraudulent. I'll offer a technical analysis as soon as Maher publishes a good, high resolution scan of the document on the internet.

My fellow Apers should note that Wikipedia offers an interesting article on the possibility that humans and apes might actually produce offspring.

Also: How do we know that "Fred Trump" was not, in fact, an orangutan? My memory may be fuzzy, but wasn't there an ape named Fred Something-or-other who regularly appeared on a morning chit-chat show?

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America is going insane

Maybe this blog should specialize in rooting out the loopier conspiracy theories available on the net.

A short while ago, I ran across a doozy -- this fanciful piece on the CIA's Project MKULTRA, written by an entity who calls himself David Michael Dunbar:

MK ULTRA, an acronym for Martin Luther KING, Jr. or
niTRAM rehtUL gniK=CIA Project MK ULTRA aka The Negro Project which began in 1953 (http://www.wanttoknow.info/050626mkultra).
The MK ULTRA program was a communist program designed to run under the guise of the civil rights movement without being detected. If detected, any criticism could be deflected with accusations of racism and the strategy of Division Fallacy accusing the critic of racism rather than addressing the actual matter.

Before you interject: Yes, I know that Project MKULTRA was real. And no, I will not allow discussion of that project here; that is not our current purpose.

Right now, I want you to understand one key fact: Everything Dunbar has written about the project is garbage. All of it. MKULTRA had nothing to do with King; the MK digraph was applied to all projects associated with the Technical Services Division of the CIA. Dunbar links to a source which buttresses none of what he says.

Basically, the guy is making shit up. Like many a conspiracy salesman before him, he presents conjecture as fact.

So who is this guy? There is a David Dunbar who wrote a book exposing 9/11 conspiracy myths. At first, I suspected that a denizen of wackyland has been posting bizarre material under the name of a perceived enemy -- but now it seems that there really is a second David Dunbar who writes extremely strange material, which he self-publishes.

Thanks to the efforts of this bizarre man, thousands of people will now believe that MKULTRA had something to do with Martin Luther King -- and that the CIA was in the business of promoting communism. And, of course, that King was a communist. (Back in the 1960s, the Birchers and their compatriots promoted the very same ideas.)

This is just one further example of how real history gets buried under an avalanche of inanity.

Folks, this shit has gotten out of hand. This country cannot survive if an increasing number of citizens go bonkers.

Case in point: Aurora "Truthers" are now saying that the massacre in Colorado never happened.

Jordan Ghawi, a 26-year-old firefighter and paramedic whose sister was killed in the shooting, explained to Salon how the harassment started. “I think it started with me because my presence online is a little further out there than the rest of the families,” he said, noting his active Twitter feed and website detailing his adventures skydiving and traveling.

The first email came from a man asking, “have you ever seen your sister’s body?” He ignored it. When a second email came, Ghawi replied, saying that he wasn’t going to entertain the man’s questions, but accidentally left his phone number in his email’s signature field. Then the phone calls started: “Did you see her body? It didn’t happen, it was a government coverup, etc., etc.

“From there, it went to threatening emails that included death threats … he did threaten my life at one point,” Ghawi explained.

Also see this piece in the Los Angeles Times.

But beyond Capitol Hill, and outside the popular airwaves, a constant murmur of paranoid skepticism has accompanied these attacks and occasionally bubbled into public view: So-called Sandy Hook truthers believe the Newtown, Conn., massacre was staged as part of a government-media conspiracy to galvanize support for gun control.

Some theories, tinged with anti-Semitism, said actors made up their interviews about the killings. Newtown resident Gene Rosen, who helped six students after they escaped the massacre, said he had faced phone calls and emails accusing him of being a phony.

Wanna see an actual Aurora "truther" in action? Try here. As near as I can tell, this article from last September may have been the first to print the insane charge that the theater was filled with actors, and that the massacre may have been a hoax.

The best response: Treat the "truthers" as sub-humans. Do not engage them on an intellectual level; they have no intellects. Ridicule -- unrelenting, merciless ridicule -- is the best way to insure that the pathogen does not spread among the young.

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HUMAN FILTH

A 28 year-old woman went into a branch of the Louvre and used permanent marker to scrawl "AE 911" on Delacroix's immortal "Liberty Leading the People." The phrase stands for "Architects and Engineers for 9/11." In other words, she's a "controlled demolition" conspiracy freak.

I blame Alex Jones and the Libertarian conspiracy-mongers for this outrage. They are the ones who have spread this diseased notion.

Although there is a false perception that the "controlled demolition" theory was formulated by liberals, a different story emerges if you trace the origins of this pernicious lie. As I have shown in previous posts, the CD theory was created by Libertarians -- who, as we know, are the most conspiracy-addled group in American political life today. The idea was honed by extreme right-wingers such as Christopher Bollyn and Eric Hufschmid. True, there was a period (2004-2006) when this inanity had a certain popularity with young and naive lefties, but the progressive blogs (such as Demoratic Underground and Kos) banished these infants or locked them away in the closet. The most prominent current proponents of this nonsense are Alex Jones, Jeff Rense, and the commenters on Ron Paul's boards -- right-wingers all.

Anyone who believes in the "controlled demolition" theory should be spat upon. These people are monsters. Shun them. Ridicule them. Do not engage them in discussion; do not break bread with them; do not treat them as fellow human beings.

Above all, do not pay them any heed when they claim (as they surely will) that they should not all be judged by the actions of the woman who defaced the Delacroix. Damn right I'm going to judge 'em -- every single one of them -- by her example. The leaders of the "truth" movement have spent more than a decade spewing psychotoxins into the meme-stream. If their efforts have resulted in an outburst of psychotic behavior -- well, what else did you expect?

These "CD" obsessives used to deface this very blog, back in the era before comment moderation. They didn't like what I wrote, so they tried to censor me. In those days -- I'm thinking, in particular, of December of 2006 -- they hit this blog with incessant comment spam, which overloaded the system, making regular posting almost impossible. It was a deliberate attempt to drive me off the net, simply because I had pointed out the flaws in their absurd and anti-scientific arguments.

We all know how these fuckers treated Bill Maher. Frankly, I'm not surprised by what happened in the Louvre.

I believe that a truly great work of art is one of the few things worth more than human life itself. Anyone who defaces such a work is worse than a murderer.

Yes, it may well be possible to remove the unwanted message from the Delacroix. Let me say two things about that:

1. Restoration experts sometimes overestimate their abilities. An example would be Picasso's "La Reve," damaged in 2006 by its current owner, Steve Wynn. Although the restorers proclaimed their repair work to be undetectable, the previous owners of the painting could immediately spot where the harm occurred.

2. Attacks of this sort increase pressure on museums to place their finest works under glass. Even the best glass will result in unwanted reflections and desaturated colors. When placed under glass, a painting becomes more difficult to appreciate -- especially if the work achieves delicate effects through layering and glazing. The public cannot truly see the Mona Lisa nowadays.

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Drone City: This must be the place

A couple of posts down, I said I'd publish the location of the secret U.S. drone base in Saudi Arabia -- the one that has everyone so angry right now. Wired says they've found the thing, by way of Bing maps (but not Google Earth). Go here.

How do we know this is the right place? It's right near the border with Yemen. The base disappears when you zoom out, indicating recent construction. (Older Satellite photos were no doubt used at the farther range.) While I'm anything but an expert at interpreting satellite imagery, I know that the desert sands quickly reclaim tarmac or paved areas unless they are kept clean. You'll see no drones in the Bing imagery, but you'll see hangars. No roads link this base to any city. This looks right to me.

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