Losing Our Way

I wish I could pinpoint the precise date and time but at some point in this GWOT we slipped a few notches on the humanity scale and sadly I doubt we'll ever recover.

From Slate...

More than 100 of the 166 detainees being held at Guantánamo are currently participating in a hunger strike that began back in February. More than 40 of those prisoners are being force-fed, according to the latest word from the U.S. Navy. What does that force-feeding look like? Yasiin Bey—the actor, activist, and rapper better known as Mos Def—teamed up with human rights group Reprieve to show us. 

What followed is difficult to watch, but then again it's supposed to be.  It's worth pointing out the obvious here: The video is a transparent work of advocacy. So when Bey begs for the exercise to be called off before it's finished, there is little doubt that at least some degree of acting is going on. Then again, Bey's cries are quickly answered, a luxury not afforded to those Gitmo detainees who refuse to give up their peaceful protest.

According to Reprieve, the feeding measures used on Bey followed the standard operating procedure used by the government, a process that was detailed in official documents leaked earlier this year.

The Presidents Bush Ancestor

As I start on an exploration of my own lineage, it goes without saying that one bears no responsibility for the actions of their ancestors, nonetheless, this is still interesting.

From Slate...

Twelve American presidents owned slaves, eight while serving in office, and at least 25 presidents count slave owners among their ancestors. But new historical evidence shows that a direct ancestor of George W. and George H.W. Bush was part of a much more appalling group: Thomas Walker was a notorious slave trader active in the late 18th century along the coast of West Africa.

Walker, George H.W. Bush's great-great-great grandfather, was the captain of, master of, or investor in at least 11 slaving voyages to West Africa between 1784 and 1792...

...The historical evidence suggests that Thomas Walker died at sea in 1797 when his own crew mutinied and threw him overboard...

...While records are scarce, it seems that Thomas Walker’s slave trading did not bestow lasting prosperity on his family. George E. Walker lost property in Maryland’s Cecil County inherited by his wife, Harriet, and the subsequent rise of the Walker family began several decades later, after they moved to Illinois in 1838.

Who's Better for the Economy?

The data speaks for itself.

From the Daily Dish...

In a new book, Richard J. Carroll [an economist at the World Bank] lays out an analysis of presidential economic performance since Truman. The results are unambiguous:

Five out of six Democrats reduced the national debt as a percentage of GDP, while four out of six Republicans raised it. The story is similar on budget deficits, with five of the top six performances recorded by Democrats and four of the bottom five recorded by Republicans. With respect to GDP growth, three of the top four performers were Democrats and four of the bottom five were Republicans. In reducing the poverty rate, the top three were Democrats and two of the bottom three were Republicans. The Democrats also had a better record on employment. Republicans had better records on reducing inflation, achieving four of the top five performances, while Democrats had four of the bottom five showings. Republicans also did well in lowering tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, claiming the top five spots.

How does Obama fare?

When all of the indicators are combined, [Obama] ranks ninth out of 12, one position below Reagan but above Bush 41, Carter and Bush 43.

The Long Game

An excellent fact based review of President Obama's first term which, if read objectively, would silence detractors from both the right and the left. 

From Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast...

You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual. 

A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.

Remembering

There wasn't a cloud in the sky on that crisp September morning.  It was a picture perfect day on the Chesapeake Bay.

2001 thus far had already been a difficult year.  My father passed away in the Spring and I found the familiarity and calm of the Bay to be the perfect place to mourn his loss.  It was also an ideal setting to concentrate on the development of an internet startup that I along with several others were pouring our days and nights into. 

During the early morning of September 11, I walked down to the Bay to try and catch a few crabs for lunch.  Unsuccessful after about an hour, I packed it in and went back to the house a little after 9am, completely oblivious to the fact that the world had changed in the past 30 minutes.  With my 28.8K modem, I logged onto the internet and soon saw a headline about a plane that had flown into the World Trade Center.  Like many, my immediate thought was that some amateur pilot had accidentally flown a small aircraft into one of the twin towers.  After the market opened and the Dow dropped by a couple hundred points, I finally decided to turn on the TV to see what was happening.  

In that split second when the first image appeared on the TV the magnitude of the situation was clear. In those early hours so many questions swirled around unanswered. Who? Why? Is more to come? What about nuclear weapons? How far from DC is safe?

I phoned my family (some calls went through others didn't) and then dialed my best friend (and business partner at the time) in California and told him wake up and turn on the TV.  The remainder of the day was spent anxiously waiting for my sister, niece, and mother to navigate the mass exodus out of DC and glued to the television trying to make sense out of the senseless.

The following week was surreal.  With air traffic grounded and no flights overhead, the sky over the Bay was the quietest I'd ever experienced.  Later that week, I spoke with a friend in Sweden and [mistakenly] mentioned that having Bush rather than Gore as President might not be such a bad thing.

Slowly the immediate fears receded and life got back to "normal" but after 10 years and an estimated $3.3 trillion spent, two wars, countless lives lost, warrantless wire taps, full body scans, increasing religious intolerance, U.S. government sponsored torture, and a society that treats fear and paranoia as part of the everyday experience it's difficult to call this normal.

Dubya's Greatest Hits

Dubya was always good for a laugh but I don't need a President for laughs...I'm glad we now have one with some intelligence. (thx AJ)

Dubya's Wipe

Bush.

No class in office. No class out of office.

Pay close attention starting at the 10 second mark.

Charlatans

For a change my political ire isn't directed at Bush, well at least not Dubya Bush. It's his Daddy that's in my sights right now.

Last week, it was reported that in '89 Maggie Thatcher secretly told Gorbachev that she and other leaders in the West (including George HW Bush who was about 9 months into his term) were all a bunch of two-faced liars.

From the Times (UK)...

The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe. It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at Nato meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it. We do not want a united Germany. This would have led to a change to post-war borders and we can not allow that because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.

In the same way, a destabilisation of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests. Of course, internal changes are happening in all Eastern European countries, somewhere they are deeper than in others. However, we would prefer if those processes were entirely internal, we would not interfere in them or push the de-communisation of Eastern Europe. I can say that the President of the United States is of the same position. He sent me a telegram to Tokyo in which he asked me directly to tell you that the United States would not do anything that might put at risk the security of the Soviet Union or perceived by the Soviet society as danger. I am fulfilling his request.

It's staggering to think that two pillars of U.S. foreign policy for over four decades, the reunification of Germany and political freedom within Eastern Europe, were being secretely undermined by Bush Sr. and others just at the point in time when history demanded their staunch support.

Bush's Final Report Card

Last Thursday, the Census Bureau released statistics on income, poverty and access to health care. To put it mildly, the report paints a picture over which Dubya, the Republicans, and the Teabaggers should hang their heads in shame.

From The Atlantic...

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms.

• Under Clinton, the median income increased 14 per cent. Under Bush it declined 4.2 per cent.
• Under Clinton the total number of Americans in poverty declined 16.9 per cent; under Bush it increased 26.1 per cent.
• Under Clinton the number of children in poverty declined 24.2 per cent; under Bush it increased by 21.4 per cent.
• Under Clinton, the number of Americans without health insurance, remained essentially even (down six-tenths of one per cent); under Bush it increased by 20.6 per cent.

The wretched two-term record compiled by the younger Bush on income, poverty and access to health care should compel Republicans to answer a straightforward question: if tax cuts are truly the best means to stimulate broadly shared prosperity, why did the Bush years yield such disastrous results for American families on these core measures of economic well being?

Looks like it was really Dubya who was bent on destroying the country.

Atta-boy George!

From Lincoln to Cheney

Andrew Sullivan has a great post over at his blog about yesterday's Fox News (is that an oxymoron?) interview with Darth Cheney. I'll repeat the brief post here because it's so good and stunning in its implications...

Cheney Endorses Torture Even Beyond His Own Limits

by Andrew

Here's the salient quote from the Fox "interview" with former journalist, Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?

CHENEY: I am.

The former vice-president of the United States is here backing torture techniques that even his own hack lawyers believed were illegal. He is basically saying that the law had no salience or relevance in his program of torturing prisoners. He is attacking the rule of law in its entirety. Let that sink in: we had a vice-president who had contempt for the rule of law.

At moments like these, when a war criminal is given a totally supine platform to spew propaganda, it's worth recalling the following quote from 1863. It's from Abraham Lincoln:

"Military necessity does not admit of cruelty nor of torture to procure confessions."

From Lincoln to Cheney, from a lawyer president to a lawless thug.

These Guys

Nothing surprises me anymore about the Dubya/Darth era.

From the Huffington Post...

Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

The Bushies of course denied the charges.

The thing that disturbs me the most is that I could flip a coin in terms of who to believe and that's a very sad statement on the former "leaders" of our country.

Office 39

North Korea is a criminal state, yet the prior adminstration declined to persue charges of currency counterfeiting as well as other criminal activities against the regime of the "Team America" star. Chalk up another fine foreign policy move to Dubya!

Atta-boy George.



From Slate...

Liu had been convicted of conspiracy and fraud involving millions of dollars made not by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing but by counterfeiting presses in a foreign country, presumably North Korea. The quality of these “supernote” forgeries is so high that he’d managed to pass enormous quantities through the electronic detection devices with which every Vegas slot machine is supposed to be equipped.

Liu’s crimes were part of a vast criminal enterprise believed to be controlled by the North Korean state, set up and used to finance its nuclear-weapons program. All of this, intelligence analysts say, is coordinated by a secret agency inside the North Korean government controlled directly by “the Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, himself. The agency is known as Office 39.

“They need money,” says Park. “Where else can they get it?” The answer, senior U.S. officials believe, is by means of organized crime: not only the production of counterfeit currency but also the manufacture and export of counterfeit cigarettes and pharmaceuticals, and the sale of drugs such as heroin and crystal methamphetamine.

As noted, at the center of this activity lies Office 39. And a question that remains to be answered is whether the Obama administration will revive the efforts against it that President Bush declined to pursue.

An Excellent Point

The passage below (the last paragraph in particular) is an excellent observation about an article that appeared in the Washington Post earlier this week entitled "Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush."

My first thought was to avoid like the plague a Veep pick who doesn't have ambitions (or is too old) to be POTUS in eight years but that's a dumb idea. Finally a moment of clarity prevailed and I realized that as much damage as Darth Cheney reaped on the world, ultimately it really wasn't his fault.

Darth C was just a kid in a candy store whose Daddy was too intellectually barren to know that jawbreakers aren't weapons of mass destruction. Many mistakes were made and crimes committed but let's not forget the real error came from selecting Dubya to begin with.

From the Spectator (UK)...

But note too the sense, as relayed by this Cheney confidante at least, that Cheney was disappointed the President moved away from him. It's almost as if the Vice-President was horrified to discover that the President had ideas of his own. In this piece at least, Cheney actually endorses the caricature of a black-hatted Veep pulling the stings and manipulating a callow, incurious President.

Republicans used to claim that Cheney's lack of Presidential ambition was a good thing since it meant he had no axe to grind, no position to take that would advance his own political interests. Instead he would be the candid friend and the source of much sage advice, drawn from his decades spent in Washington.

And there was something to that idea. But it's also apparent that Cheney's lack of political ambition was also a weakness. It seems to have persuaded him, in the instances cited by Gellman at least, to ignore any and all political calculations as though they didn't matter and only the weak or the foolish would pay any attention to political realities. In that sense, Cheney was a deeply irresponsible Vice-President.

Torturing prisoners, illegal surveillance of American citizens, agitating for regime change in Tehran and Pyongyang while Iraq and Afghanistan remained in turmoil: these are not the policies of a man who gives a damn about public opinion.

Freed from any kind of electoral or political reality, Cheney was able to rampage through Washington, doing all kinds of damage to almost every institution or office or agency he touched. That's the price you pay for Cheney's lack of personal political ambition. We often think of political ambition as something to be wary of - and rightly so - but Cheney demonstrates that the quiet lack of personal ambition can have disastrous consequences too, for it frees a man from having to be accountable for his actions, permitting him to justify anything and everything if it moves him an inch closer to achieving goals that he, and he alone, has set.

Bush, Gog and Magog

I guess I'm a bit rusty on the Old Testament and Ezekiel in particular. I had no idea who Gog and Magog were (will be?). Too bad Dubya knew.

If this is true he was nuttier and more dangerous than I ever thought. No denials from the Bushies yet. Even if there was a denial who would you believe Dubya or Chirac?

From Secular Humanism...

The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal.

Update: An interview with a theologian at the University of Lausanne who was contacted in 2003 by Chirac's advisers for an explanation about Gog and Magog, is here.

RANdom Thought

The cable channels and various websites have been aflutter today with stories about Bush Sr. taking a skydive to celebrate his 85th B-day.

One thought comes to mind...

Who cares!

Reaping What is Sown

I realize that there are a bunch of hate-filled crazies in the U.S. and that at any given point any of them is capable of performing a heinous act. I also realize we simply can't ignore the environment that spawns these nuts and empowers them to go out and kill people.

Might there to be a slight connection between the politics of fear and divisiveness as practiced by Rove, Bush, Limbaugh, Cheney, Gingrich, Hannity, Fox News etc., etc. and the hate filled murders of an abortion doctor and a guard at the Holocaust Museum?

From MSNBC...

“Right across the board, extremist groups are thriving right now,” says Mark Potok, Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

The SPLC has been tracking hate groups for almost 30 years. In its spring 2009 Intelligence Report, they found that 926 hate groups are currently operating in the U.S., an all-time high.

Potok attributes this rise in hate groups to the recession, the election of the nation’s first black president, and the immigration debate.

Missing from that last sentence is eight long and dark years of the Republican Party practicing a brand of extreme Rovian partisan politics whose tools included setting groups against each other, instilling fear and paranoia, unleashing their propagandist attack dog Fox News, and otherwise seeking to divide and conquer.

A Dark Day

Normally I don't delve into the news story of the day but on this day the top story is of such importance that I have no choice.

Torture.

I can't begin to do justice to the release by Obama of numerous memos created under Bush that "speak to techniques that were used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects during that period." So instead, let me point you in the direction of an excellent blog that provides insight and perspective on the subversion of our Constitution and criminal acts committed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

From Andrew Sullivan...

I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith.

If you want to read the actual memos, they are available for downloading from the ACLU by clicking here.

Calling It Like It Is

Clearly Obama's election was a transformational moment in this country's history. Now Barack is busy working to make his time in office a transformative presidency.

From a historical perspective the first step to becoming a "reconstructive leader" is to repudiate your predecessor and Obama has gotten a good start on that front.

From The Atlantic...

From his inauguration address forward, President Obama hasn't pulled any punches in criticizing the record of his predecessor, George W. Bush. In that process--which reached a new peak with the release of the administration's budget plan last Thursday--Obama is aggressively employing a strategy used by the presidents who have most powerfully realigned the political landscape through American history. It is an approach that Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek has shrewdly termed "the authority to repudiate."

Skowronek noted that the presidents who most successfully constructed lasting electoral majorities all followed presidents widely viewed as failures. These repeated couplings between "manifest incapacity and towering success" have included John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800; John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in 1828; James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln in 1860; Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932; and, most recently, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The White House took its indictment to a new level in the budget blueprint it released last Thursday. In a relentless 11 pages, the first chapter offers a withering point-by-point critique of Bush's economic record and governing performance, from anemic job creation and income growth (the median income among working-age families fell by nearly $2,000 from 2000 through 2007) to rising poverty (up by 5.7 million from 2000 through 2007). It denounces Bush as overly secretive ("It is no coincidence that the policy failures of the past eight years have been accompanied by unprecedented Governmental secrecy"), incompetent, fiscally irresponsible, short-sighted, ideologically rigid (pursuing "a dogmatic deregulatory approach") and favoring the rich over all others. The White House sums up the previous occupant's record this way: "This is the legacy that we inherit--a legacy of mismanagement and misplaced priorities, of missed opportunities and of deep, structural problems ignored for too long."

Ouch.

The truth hurts George. Deal with it.

Like Father, Like Son

Although Dubya wasn't as astute in the international arena as his father was it seems like he followed in his papa's footsteps when it comes to the economy.

From the Washington Post...

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges.

The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush's tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans' incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush's father.

"It's sad to say, but we really went nowhere for almost ten years, after you extract the boost provided by the housing and mortgage boom," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com, and an informal adviser to McCain's campaign. "It's almost a lost economic decade."

In looking at the highlight reel (or lowlight as the case may be) of Bush's last press conference today, one thought comes to mind: "He was in over his head from Day 1."

Our National Nightmare...

...is almost over.

Bye-buh Dubya and good riddance.