Locomotive Mule

Press Gaggle by Scott Mcclellan

Q Scott, oil is now creeping up to $50 a barrel. And people are saying that it could threaten recession, et cetera, a very serious problem. I know you keep talking about the energy bill, but the energy bill doesn’t appear to be going anywhere at this point, and the problem is really very serious. What’s the administration going to do?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, remember, we called for passage of a comprehensive energy plan more than three years ago. The President remains concerned about rising energy prices and the impact those prices have on families and workers.

And it is for this reason, now, that the President, on day one of this administration, has been working to pass a comprehensive energy plan. The President continues to call on Congress to pass his comprehensive energy plan that will reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy. We need comprehensive solutions, not patchwork crisis management. And this is something we go through every year, because Congress has not acted on the President’s plan, and because the Senate – certain members of the Senate, including the President’s opponent, have blocked passing the comprehensive energy legislation.

So George is concerned about rising oil prices. Okay, but what’s he doing about it? I’m kinda thinking that when the temperature goes down and people start cranking up those ol’ oil heaters in the norhteast, he’ll become a lot more interested in oil prices.

Saying that Congress is at fault for not passing a 3 year old Energy Bill is not exactly helpful, especially when it’s a Republican Congress. (Seems to me that if a President can’t get his own party to pass a Bill, it must really stink.)

Here’s my Conspiracy Theory O’ The Day: The Saudis are eventually gonna run out of oil which means their income will drop to virtually zero. Artifically high oil prices right now are generating HUGE incomes for the Saudis and other producers - think of it as a retirement plan the Saudi ruling family. And of course we can’t forget our own, U.S. based oil companies who are reporting record profits (imagine that).

NYC to GOP: Drop Dead

Tourists are pleasantly surprised when New Yorkers act as friendly and polite as the people back home in Mayberry. However, delegates to this month’s Republican National Convention shouldn’t expect to be treated to our standard out-of-towner treatment. The Republican delegates here to coronate George W. Bush are unwelcome members of a hostile invading army. Like the hapless saps whose blood they sent to be spilled into Middle Eastern sands, they will be given intentionally incorrect directions to nonexistent places. Objects will be thrown in their direction. Children will call them obscene names. They will not be greeted as liberators.

Rejecting ex-mayor Ed Koch’s call to “make nice” with the party that used the deaths of 2,801 New Yorkers–most of them Democrats–for everything from tax cuts for the rich to building concentration camps at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib to invading Iraq to enrich Dick Cheney and his fellow Halliburton execs, some groups are encouraging liberal-minded New Yorkers to volunteer for the city’s squad of official greeters. Creatively altered maps of streets and subways will be handed out to button-clad stupid white men. Other saboteurs wearing fake RNC T-shirts will direct them to parts of town where Bush’s policies have hit hardest. Rumor has it that prostitutes suffering from sexually transmitted diseases will discourage the use of condoms with Republican customers.

Read more…

The battle for Najaf

Thursday, 10 a.m.

The city is largely abandoned when we arrive. Ad hoc barriers - a street light post, lines of rocks, trashcans - have been left in the road, directing us away from the center of the old city and from the police station, the two places we intend to visit first. On the horizon, we can see plumes of smoke. In our chests we can feel the thud and percussion of heavy weaponry. Our minds race in two opposite directions: safety on one hand, and journalistic curiosity on the other. Curiosity wins.

Read More…

To Defeat Terrorists, try Listening to Feminists

To Defeat Terrorists, try Listening to Feminists
by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Democrats couldn’t be more butch if they took to wearing codpieces. Every daily convention theme contained the words “strength” or “strong,” and even Hillary Rodham Clinton was relegated to the role of wife.

The idea, according to the pundits, is that with more than half of the voters still favoring President Bush as the guy to beat Osama bin Laden, John Kerry needs to show that he’s macho enough to whup the terrorists. Of course, everyone knows that the macho approach is notably less effective than pixie dust - otherwise, we wouldn’t be holding our political conventions under total lockdowns.

Well, I’ve been reading bin Ladin - Carmen, that is, not her brother-in-law Osama (she spells the last name with an i) - and I’d like to present a brand-new approach to terrorism, one that turns out to be a lot more consistent with traditional Democratic values.

First, let’s stop calling the enemy “terrorism,” which is like saying we’re fighting “bombings.” Terrorism is only a method; the enemy is an extremist Islamic insurgency whose appeal lies in its claim to represent the Muslim masses against a bullying superpower.

But as Carmen bin Ladin urgently reminds us in her book Inside the Kingdom, one glaring moral flaw in this insurgency, quite apart from its methods, is that it aims to push one-half of those masses down to a status only slightly above that of domestic animals. While Osama was getting pumped up for jihad, Carmen was getting up her nerve to walk across the street in Jeddah fully veiled but unescorted by a male - something that is illegal for a woman in Saudi Arabia. Eventually she left the kingdom and got a divorce because she didn’t want her daughters to grow up in a place where women are kept “locked in and breeding.”

So here in one word is my new counterterrorism strategy for Mr. Kerry: feminism. Or, if that’s too incendiary, try the phrase “human rights for women.” I don’t mean just a few opportunistic references to women, like those that accompanied the war on the Taliban and were quietly dropped by the Bush administration when that war was abandoned and Afghan women were locked back into their burqas. I’m talking about a sustained and serious effort.

So, Mr. Kerry, announce plans to pour dollars into girls’ education in places such as Pakistan, where the high-end estimate for female literacy is 26 percent, and scholarships for women seeking higher education in nations that typically discourage it. (Secular education for the boys wouldn’t hurt, either.) Expand the grounds for asylum to all women fleeing gender totalitarianism, wherever it springs up. Reverse the Bush policies on global family planning, which condemn 78,000 women yearly to death in makeshift abortions. Lead the global battle against the traffic in women.

I’m not expecting these measures alone to incite a feminist insurgency within the Islamist one. Carmen bin Ladin found her rich Saudi sisters-in-law sunk in bovine passivity, and some of the more spirited young women in the Muslim world have been adopting the head scarf as a gesture of defiance toward American imperialism. We’re going to need a thorough foreign policy makeover - from Afghanistan to Israel - before we have the credibility to stand up for anyone’s human rights. You can’t play the gender card with dirty hands.

If Mr. Kerry were to embrace a feminist strategy against the insurgency, he’d have to start by addressing our own dismal record on women’s rights. He’d be pushing for the immediate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which has been ratified by 169 countries but remains stalled in the Senate. He’d be threatening to break off relations with Saudi Arabia until it acknowledges the humanity of women. And he’d be thundering about the shortage of women in Congress, an internationally embarrassing 14 percent.

In my dreams, you say, and you’re probably right. Maybe Mr. Kerry will surprise me, but it looks as if the Democrats are too frightened of being labeled “girlie men” by the party of Arnold Schwarzenegger to do what has to be done. If you want to beat Osama, you’ve got to start by listening to Carmen.

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Bush like Custer

George W. Bush takes pride in being strong and decisive, comparing himself to FDR and Reagan. Republicans keep trumpeting the president is bold and resolute.

Bush has been decisive alright – decisively wrong. The American leader he most closely resembles is Col. George Armstrong Custer, an arrogant, opinionated, headstrong fool who spurned all warnings, boldly and resolutely leading his command to disaster on the Little Big Horn.

Speaking of national security competence, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika either blundered the U.S. into a mistaken war based on grotesquely unreliable “intelligence” – a farce worthy of The Three Stooges – or lied the U.S. into war, purposely deceiving Congress and the public.

If so, such malfeasance would demand impeachment.

Half of all U.S. ground forces are stuck in Mesopotamia while National Guardsmen, who should be fighting fires and floods at home, are press-ganged to Iraq.

The Bush-Cheney “crusade” against so-called terrorism enraged the Muslim world and is incubating ever more violent anti-American groups. Administration bungling allowed Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora. Now, 20,000 U.S. troops are tied down in Afghanistan hunting him.

Bush & co. have ruined America’s good name around the globe. George W. Bush has become, quite possibly, the world’s most detested political leader.

Only the brain dead could call this grand failure a successful national security policy. It’s very hard to imagine Kerry doing worse than Bush.

Twenty years from now when we hear references to Bush & Hitler in the same breath from our “allies”, will our children understand? We need to make sure that they do.

Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention was a masterful political tour de force, covering almost every issue in the election. The senator came across well and established himself with the public as a credible presidential candidate.

Still, while being reassuring, Kerry failed to emotionally connect with voters, to electrify them. He needed fire to go with the brains.

His unisex convention speech could have been delivered by either a Republican or Democrat. Two failed wars and a runaway deficit is no time for pussyfooting.

Kerry should follow the example of his intelligent, feisty wife, Teresa, who seems to have bigger cojones than her husband. She brings the sophistication, worldliness, and street smarts so lacking in the insular, even xenophobic, Bush administration.

The wild card in this race is bin Laden. Bush wins if U.S. forces can capture Osama before November.

Otherwise, George Armstrong Custer Bush and Decaffeinated John Kerry appear to be in a dead heat.

Attack dogs

Here’s the most basic news report from America’s Iraq over the last half-year, a recent Associated Press piece in its entirety; three sentences, each a paragraph – a kind of journalistic haiku from hell headlined, U.S. soldier killed in roadside bombing:

“A roadside bombing near the town of Samarra on Sunday killed one U.S. soldier and wounded two others, the military said.

“The attack, about 12:30 p.m., hit a passing patrol of 1st Infantry Division soldiers in Samarra, a hotbed of violence 60 miles northwest of Baghdad.

“As of Friday, July 30, 909 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq in March 2003, according to the Defense Department.”

Fill in Baghdad or Ramadi or Falluja or Baquba or numerous other Iraqi cities and towns (without dropping that “hotbed of violence") and you’ve got a template for the post-war war as it’s been fought for months. One rigged roadside bomb, one dead American and two wounded Americans – which may mean a young woman without a limb, a young man without his sight… who knows? This has been the drip-drip-drip of Iraq for us. One death, now generally tucked away well off the front page, because when anything becomes the norm in our media world, it ceases to be the news. In the same way, constant kidnappings or regular beheadings, if endlessly repeated, will also migrate sooner or later into the deep interiors of our larger papers and drop off the half-hour that each night (minus ten minutes of medicine ads for the aging) passes on network TV for our planet’s news.

Powerful piece - well worth the read.

I spent some time reading on the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security site. This for example.

I’ve come to the conclusion that we cannot make ourselves safe from terrorists. Our world is simply too complicated and interconnected - any disruption can halt the flow of products/services. Bombs in 3 or 4 of our major ports or disabling the Panama Canal. A couple Stingers outside of the Memphis airport (FedEx central hub). Any of these things can deliver a staggering blow to us.

As a designer/fixer of software, I learned long ago that there are two ways to attack a problem, 1) apply fixes and patches to change the behavior of the system or 2) determine the underlying problem, grit your teeth, cancel weekend plans and fix it. The second approach is always preferable and always more successful. It may take longer and blow the budget but the first approach will bleed the project over a long period and eventually sink it.

As an example, Microsoft has a fundamental security problem in their OS. They have yet to address the underlying problems - they just continue to patch/modify the overlying behavior trying vainly to keep up with their antagonists. We all know how well they’re doing.

If the desired result is to ’secure’ our economy, people and life style, then we have to attack the problem. Band aids and quick fixes (airport security, tanks on Wall Street, orange alerts) are not going to even come close to solving the problem. Hell they don’t even address the problem, they just try to prevent some behavior that we think might happen. We need to 1) determine what the root problem is and 2) develop a truly international solution to the problem.

Walling ourselves off from our enemies will not prevent them from attacking. Eyeing our own people with suspicion will not solve the problem, nor will it prevent even one attack - all we’ve done so far is to close the proverbial barn door. (I may be wrong here but our government is so tight with information that we have no way of knowing.)

Bush’s doctrine is wrong. It’s illogical at best. Immoral at its worst. Kerry needs to hammer on this theme, determine the root of the problem and fix it in the most expedient fashion. We’re not alone in this problem, every secular or non-Islamic nation on the planet is in this with us. We need to put aside nationalism, throw off the dogmatic knee-jerk reactions and get down to fixing the problem.

Americans need to be pulling together on this one, not dividing, not hiding and most of all, not falling victim to those that say “trust me”.

I’m fond of telling my kids that “you know that, you learned that in kindergarten”. Well for most of life’s problems that’s very true - the solutions are simple and we know exactly what the problem is and its solution (whether we act on that knowledge is something else again). But this is a very adult problem - it may be insoluble.

Insoluble or not, we need to be very adult, very pragmatic in our approach to this problem and so far very few of those that can actually affect changes are acting either adult or pragmatic.

Fencing in looters and saboteurs in Iraq

With its social and economic infrastructure in shambles, it will take many years before Iraq can offer the world markets something other than oil. In the mean time the joint success of Americans and Iraqis to rebuild Iraq depends on the ability to bring the country’s crude back online. Without oil revenues Iraqis will soon be disillusioned with America’s ability to rebuild and reform their country and Americans frustrated by the huge cost inflicted on their struggling economy by what James Fallows from the Atlantic Monthly once called “the fifty-first state.”

Minding Its Business

Saudi Arabia, which has demonstrated its willingness to use its vast oil reserves as a foreign policy tool, has not acted to aid U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq.

Contrary to frequent assertions that Saudi Arabia is a loyal U.S. ally, Riyadh has pursued policies and taken actions that have caused grievous harm to vital American interests.

Apart from being a hotbed of Islamic radicalism and a source of terrorist funding, Saudi Arabia is known as the home of a quarter of the world’s oil reserves and supplier of about one-sixth of U.S. oil imports.

Attacks on Iraqi pipelines, oil installations, and oil personnel:

Just a sampling:

31. December 20 - rocket-propelled grenades hit storage tanks in southern Baghdad on Saturday; resulting fires burned about 2.6 million gallons of gasoline.
…
66. June 16 - Chief of security for Iraq’s Northern Oil Company, Ghazi Talabani, 70, was shot and killed in Kirkuk as he was being driven to work. His driver was badly wounded. The assassins escaped.
67. June 21 - blast on pipeline transporting crude oil from the northern town of Bayji to Daura refinery at point near al-Mashahidah, 20 miles (32 km) north of Baghdad. The explosion interrupted supplies to the refinery, that provides the domestic Iraqi market with gasoline, kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas.
68. June 26 - explosion near Latifiyah, about 30 miles (48 km) south of Baghdad, on small pipeline that feeds crude oil to storage tanks in Latifiyah.
69. June 29 - another blast on pipeline near Latifiyah.
70. July 3 - Fire in Al-Maqalai, southeast of the Az-Zubayr oil fields, on one of the two pipelines that feed the southern terminals resulted in a drop by half of Iraqi oil exports to 960,000 barrels per day. Exports in the South fell from 84,000 barrels per hour to 40,000. While one Iraqi oil official said, “Fire is raging in the 42-inch pipeline on the Faw Peninsula. It was sabotage,” an official from the Southern Iraqi Oil Company said “News that one of the key oil export pipeline in the Faw peninsula was attacked by saboteurs are baseless.”

Pentagon stalling on abuse inquiry

“The Pentagon is stalling on several investigations, and congressional inquiries have ground to a halt,” Rolling Stone editors wrote in the foreword to the article titled The Secret File of Abu Ghraib by Osha Gray Davidson.

“The foot-dragging is astonishing, given that Congress has access to classified documents detailing the abuses outlined by Major-General Antonio Taguba in his report on Abu Ghraib,” the editors wrote.

CIA got ‘legal guidance’ for torture

The US Justice Department offered justification for the use of torture against al-Qaida detainees in an August 2002 memo to the White House, The Washington Post has reported.

The memo said if a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, “he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al-Qaida terrorist network”, the newspaper reported.

The memo also said that arguments centring on “necessity and self-defence could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability” later, according to the Post.

Neither of these is exactly new - the second is old and the first is old hat. But what’s interesting is their prominance on Aljazeera’s site.

US backs out of nuclear inspections treaty

In a significant shift of US policy, the Bush Administration has announced that it will oppose provisions for inspections and verification as part of an international treaty to ban production of nuclear weapons materials.

For several years the US and others have been pursuing the treaty, which would ban new production by any state of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons.

At an arms control meeting in Geneva last week the US told other countries it supported a treaty, but not verification.

US officials, who have demonstrated scepticism in the past about the effectiveness of international weapons inspections, said they made the decision after concluding such a system would cost too much, require overly intrusive inspections and would not guarantee compliance with the treaty.

“Overly intrusive inspections”? Listen up guys, you can’t have it both ways - either a country is sovereign and allowed to refuse international inspections or it is not. It should not depend on the size of the stick they hold.

This is just sickening - the moral inconsistencies displayed by this administration are getting so grossly obvious. How can anyone with a modicum of intelligence defend these guys? Oh yeah, Hannity and his ilk stand to gain something from all this - and integrity ain’t it.

Intel that sparked alert dates to 2000

WASHINGTON – U.S. officials say the detailed surveillance photos and documents that prompted higher terror warnings dated from as far back as 2000 and 2001 - some of it well before the Sept. 11 attacks - and it’s unclear whether the individuals who amassed the information are still in the country or plotting.

Nevertheless, top Bush administration officials said Tuesday that some of the surveillance was apparently updated as recently as January of this year. And they denied any allegations that the public release of the information now, and the raising of the terror alert, were politically motivated. They said the information was released now because it was just uncovered in Pakistan.

OK so the info could be valid, or it could be bogus. We don’t know (at least that what they want us to believe). The end result is that for the foreseeable future we’ve got a (para)military presence on Wall Street, New Jersey and D.C.

I have no real ideas on what we should do with this kind of info, but to one-by-one, piece-by-piece turning our country into Fortress America is not the way to do it. All they (al Qaeda) have to do is to make some plans, sacrifice a couple of people so we see those plans and BAM! we’ve got yet another infringement on our liberties. They’ve got us so paranoid and reactionary that we’re making their goals ridiculously simple to achieve.

So should we just ignore any info we get? Should we let ‘em blow up anything they choose? Of course not, but for the $100+ billion dollars we’re spending in Iraq it seems to me that we could have bought a lot of good will ’round the world and developed a first rate, international police force to route the bastards out and deal with them.

Instead we’re building a police state and allowing our entire society to be manipulated and played by a few madmen.

Army Finds More Abuse Cases

The U.S. military has found 94 cases of confirmed or alleged abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan since the fall of 2001, the Army’s inspector general said Thursday in a long-awaited report.

Sen. John Warner, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had been pressing for the results of the inspector general report for several weeks, called a last-minute hearing Thursday before Congress leaves for the rest of the summer Friday.

And how does this square with the ‘a few bad apples’ statements by Rumsfeld and others?

In contrast to its own findings that there were no systemic problems, however, the Army report also cites a February report from the International Committee for the Red Cross that alleged that “methods of ill treatment” were “used in a systematic way” by the U.S. military in Iraq.

Gee, and who are the cynics gonna believe in this one?

Saddam Wasn’t a Satisfying Scapegoat, So Now it’s Off to Iran
Iran: Time for steely resolve
A dismaying increase in death rate of U.S. troops in Iraq
Sen. Robert Byrd on Losing America and Confronting A Reckless & Arrogant Presidency
Public Letter to 9/11 Commission Chairman from FBI Whistleblower
Let’s Not Devalue Ourselves
Bush Like Custer
DNC Convention: Predictable Banality and Commercialism
Canadians love Kerry. Should they?

And to think I’ve asked “why aren’t Americans more informed, more involved?”.

I don’t think things are going well in Iraq. Although from from watching our own media you’d never know it.

This morning, I saw a story on Google News that Kerry recieved no ‘convention boost’, the numbers stayed essentially the same. This afternoon I see this:
Kerry Leads Bush in Post-Convention Poll. What’s the real story?

Barack Obama gave a tremendous speech the other night - almost had me going - but I just couldn’t ignore the discrepencies. A couple blocks away from where he made his speech was a ‘protest zone’ that was (presumably) full of anti-Kerry protesters. John Kerry also raised the issue of civil rights and their loss. Again no mention of the quarantined Americans just trying to make their opionions known.

Are they being hypocritical? I believe so. It’s not like they don’t know it’s going on, it’s more like they condone it by their silence. Shouldn’t they be screaming from the roof tops that Americans are being deprived of their most fundamental rights by the administration? It seems to me that a few good points could be made at the paranoia and arrogance of both the president and vice-president. But for some reason, silence on these issues rules the day.

I am not impressed with Kerry or Edwards. It’s not just the ‘protest zones’ thing. I see no real information, no meat, just platitudes and generalities that noone will be able to hold ‘em to later on. I see no real distinction between the R’s and the D’s other than the tone of their messages. The R’s are a downer and the D’s are trying to be upbeat. That’s not much of a difference on which to elect a President.

Noone seems to be telling the truth anymore (well, except maybe Helen Thomas - you go Helen!). The mass media sure aren’t - they show themselves to be lying mo^%$#^%kers every day - either boldly lying because they know noone will call them on it (and what could they do anyway?) or through gross omissions. The omission thing seems to be the more prevelant form of ‘news lie’. Take for instance this little tidbit: Iraqi Civilian Death Toll More Than 37,000. Why is it that this is not on the evening news, or the Sunday morning talkfests? Sure the numbers could be wrong (and more than likely are inflated) but even reducing it by 50% leaves a rather newsworthy item.

The right accuses the mass media of being ‘liberal’ and ‘biased’. If you happened to catch FOX news the morning after Kerry’s acceptance speech, you’d have seen the media’s true colors. Biased? Duh. Liberal? I’m thinking not. What really frightens me is that there’s a concerted effort to label the media as ‘left’ so they can get away with being ‘way right’ - and then justify it by pointing to the right and say “but they accuse us of…..”. It’s kinda sad really.

I read stuff like this: Can’t Bush and Blair See Iraq Is About to Explode? and it just doesn’t square with what my own government and media are saying. There’s no hint in the major press that Iraq is falling apart - now I’m not stupid and I can see that it is imploding simply by the dearth of information in the main stream press (if it was going well they’d be making a lot of noise about it - silence in this case is really not good). But the main reason I tend to believe this article is the simple fact that I do not believe the official news sources nor my own government. It’s terribly wrong and depressing to realize that no matter what is said, you can’t beleive it - in fact you immediately suspect the opposite.

I’m starting to understand how people can become frothing radicals.

It is depressing.

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At this point I have two reasons to vote for Kerry 1) He does not seem to exhibit the personal hubris which I find so appalling in Bush&Co. and 2) he’s not the incumbant. That the only thing I can get excited about (at least in politics) is that I get an opportunity to ‘vote the bastards out’ is telling I think. I’ve really tried to get interested and excited about this race - reading up on the issues and trying to stay abreast of what’s going on but all that does is feeds my cynicism (which can’t be entirely healthy).

Quick! What’s wrong with this picture?