CANNONFIRE

Kubrick, Polanski and Jacques Vallee

2009-12-18T04:37:00.000-08:00

I normally reserve non-political posts for the weekends, but you know what Thoreau said about a foolish consistency. Besides, how can I resist drawing your attention to an article by Jacques Vallee (the real-life model for Francois Truffaut character in Close Encounters) on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate?

Alas, the Vallee piece is a bit of a disappointment. I agree with his view that the Polanski film conveys a much more persuasive aura of real occultism than does Kubrick's offering. Of course, The Ninth Gate asks audiences to believe that the supernatural is real, and Kubrick does not. That's a big difference.

Vallee is correct when he says that EWS is -- on the level of plot -- hooey. Ultra-affluent Satanic sex clubs of that sort simply do not exist outside the fever-dream hallucinations of Alex Jones and his fellow Christian soldiers (such as these idiots). If such gatherings actually took place in the modern world, I would have heard of them. Very wealthy men usually do not go in for public rutting -- they are too vain to display their shortcomings.

Yes, genuine practitioners of sex magick do exist -- I used to date a high-ranking OTO disciple -- but I doubt that any of 'em have that kind of money. Usually, they live in apartments and drive used cars and eat off the value menu at Carls Jr. Butlers? Limousines? Oh, they wish.

Sex magick isn't nearly as much fun as it sounds. Basically, the idea is to keep your mind focused on some non-sexual goal during orgasm. Once that principle was explained to me, I said no thanks. Who wants to be thinking "Job promotion!" or "New headphones!" at that moment?

Incidentally, T9G -- if I may so abbreviate the Polanski movie -- also makes reference to aristocratic sex magick clubs. Pure myth. But nobody ever came into that movie expecting a documentary.

Vallee, like most other commenters, misses the most important theme of EWS: Monogamy. Yes, it really is that simple. And that complex. If the practice of monogamy were easy, then why are so many people bad at it?

I think I know the secret of Kubrick's long-standing attraction to that story. In my opinion, the film is rather more autobiographical than most suppose.

Eyes Wide Shut is based on Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, published during the 1920s. Kubrick first focused on making a film of this book in the early 1970s, between A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. That's the key fact.

If you've seen Clockwork, you must recall the scene in which the "reformed" Alex is tempted by a gorgeous platinum blonde who appears onstage wearing only sheer light-violet panties. ("She came to-ward me...") That fetching young creature was Virginia Wetherell, who first came to my attention in the Boris Karloff horror film Curse of the Crimson Altar, which was written by none other than Henry Lincoln. (Yes, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail guy. I don't think he lists Curse on his resume these days.)

An interview with Wetherell was on the net circa 1996-97. It's gone now, and although I saved a copy, I've blasted through quite a few hard drives since that time. So I must rely on memory. Relaying her memories of Kubrick, she told an extremely odd story about her, uh, costuming. Basically, she asked the great man what color and kind of panties she should wear. Kubrick asked her to model a few pairs. Then he had her go to the department store and pick up a few dozen more panties.

And she modeled all of them. Over and over. It got weird.

Well, many will chalk up that incident to Kubrick's notorious perfectionism. Many others will presume the obvious: Virginia Wetherell was pretty damned amazing, while Stanley Kubrick -- reports to the contrary notwithstanding -- was human. You bet your ass I'd have kept the fashion show going on as long as possible.

This is presumption on my part, but the "underwear incident" may have triggered his interest in Schnitzler's work. Clockwork was Kubrick's first film with nudity. He must have had dozens of nubile lovelies come in for casting sessions. Perhaps it finally dawned on Stanley Kubrick that he was Mr. Big Shot Movie Director and that he could chuck his marriage and play the "Hef" role -- if he wanted to.

Of course, all men experience temptation. I've never read a hint that Kubrick actually did anything to endanger his marriage. But is it just a coincidence that he became, at this point, fiercely attracted to Traumnovelle? It is, after all, the story of a successful man who is tempted to cheat on his wife, only to hold himself in check because, well, it's scary out there. Love keeps spouses in place -- but so does fear, and one might as well be honest about that fact.

The autobiographical underpinnings of EWS are indicated by the presence of Christiane Kubrick's artwork, visible throughout the film. She is, in my opinion, a terrific artist. On some viewings, I came away convinced that I liked her paintings better than his movie. (My feelings about the film fluctuate.) Who knows? 700 years from now, Stanley Kubrick may be remembered as the guy who married Christiane.

If you've seen Paths of Glory, you've seen Mrs. Kubrick: She plays the captured German girl who sings Ein treuer Husar during the moving finale. Fascinatingly, she was the niece of Third Reich filmmaker Veit Harlan, who, after the war, stood accused of creating anti-Semitic propaganda. Kubrick -- who was Jewish -- became fascinated by Veit Harlan and had hoped to make a biographical film about him.

I probably shouldn't mention this, but -- judging from interview footage -- Christiane Kubrick must be the only real-life woman in the history of the world who actually dressed the way Wendy (Shelley Duvall) dressed in The Shining. I have no idea what to make of that, but there it is. (Nothing here is meant to make the woman feel bad; as noted above, I admire her work.)

When EWS came out, many snickered at Kubrick's seeming prudishness. As Vallee puts it: "It could be summed up as 'Handsome young millionaire doctor tries to get laid in New York for three days and fails!'" But faithfulness remains a perfectly valid theme for any work of art. Arguably, faithfulness is a more courageous theme than is promiscuity. I may not believe in marriage, but I do believe in commitment. Sophisticates who cackle at that concept are not as sophisticated as they like to pretend.

About T9G: The abruptness of the ending pissed off a lot of people. But would the film have been better if Polanski had visualized whatever-it-is that lies beyond the gate? Imagine how Michael Bay would have finished the thing. Once you're done shuddering, you'll be grateful that Polanski tastefully rang down the curtain when he did.

New and shocking: Can Obama really be THIS bad?

2009-12-17T21:10:00.000-08:00

If this is true, then progressives, liberals and everyone whoever once had a kind thought for the Democratic party and/or its values must make a clean break with Obama and his sick crew RIGHT NOW. From lambert at Corrente:

Obama's mortgage mod plan lets banksters reject borrowers and auction their houses without any written notification

From McClatchy:

Ten months after the Obama administration began pressing lenders to do more to prevent foreclosures, many struggling homeowners are holding up their end of the bargain but still find themselves rejected, and some are even having their homes sold out from under them without notice.

In the fine print of the form homeowners fill out to apply for Obama's program, which lowers monthly payments for three months while the lender decides whether to provide permanent relief, borrowers must waive important notification rights.

This clause allows banks to reject borrowers without any written notification and move straight to auctioning off their homes without any warning.

Unbelievable.

In 2008, I thought that Obama was just another lousy pol. I honestly did not believe he would prove to be this bad.

Maybe he ISN'T the Kwisatz Haderach...

2009-12-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

David Axelrod (who has probably come to hate being called Barack Obama's Karl Rove) calls Democrats who oppose health care mandates "insane," even though Obama himself campaigned against mandates.

Axelrod said left-leaning Democrats should not let their "feelings" about Lieberman keep them from working with him to pass a bill, and warned that it "would be a tragic, tragic outcome" if Democratic senators vote against the legislation, as Dean is encouraging them to do.

"We're on the verge of doing something that would make an enormously positive difference for people," Axelrod said, adding later, "I don't think you want this moment to pass. It will not come back again."

Pressed for further details, Axelrod cryptically added: "It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."

Progs, paradox, class and health care

2009-12-17T03:03:00.000-08:00

We now come to the moment of progressive self-examination. As health care reform loses support, as the progressives turn against Obama, all those on the left side of the political dividing line must ask the big questions: "What do we stand for?" "Who are we?" "What the hell went so wrong in one short year?"

Here are some answers.

Many thanks go to reader G for drawing my attention to this piece by Sam Smith of the Progressive review, which highlights the major reason why the Obama movement was doomed to fail:

My sense is that the infatuation over Obama was based on much larger problems including the iconization of politics, an excessive infatuation with words over deeds, as well as naive assumptions of what having the first black president would be like. Few recognized that true equality among ethnicities includes a balanced dispersal of sins and weakness as well as virtues.

That's the lesson I started to draw while mulling over the cartoon republished in the post below. (Sometimes you don't understand your own work until months or years later.) Everyone looked at Obama and saw two-and-only-two things: Skin color and the (D) next to his name. From those two factors, most of the country wrote a narrative that had nothing to do with reality. Everyone drew conclusions at odds with the man's history, to the extent that he had a history.

The right saw those two factors and concluded that Barack Obama must be a bolshie. Of course, they say that about all Democrats. It is a measure of this country's collective insanity that the Marxist bogeyman has become a political issue in 2009.

The left saw the same two factors -- the skin color and the (D) -- and concluded that Barack Obama must be the Progressive Messiah, the Lightbringer, the Kwisatz Haderach.

Neither side allowed itself to contemplate the possibility that Obama might be just another compromised politician with conservative instincts.

Those of us who didn't judge Obama by his skin color were -- paradoxically -- called racists. Yes, I had a bias, but not that bias. My prejudice was founded on geography, not parentage. Chicago. Fucking Chicago. Chicago Democrats were the most corrupt kind, as virtually everyone in the party admitted in the days before the ascent of Obama.

Let's get back to Sam Smith's piece. All liberals and progressives should study this next passage the way clerics study scripture:

Most of all, however, Obama represented a triumph of a generation of liberals dramatically different from their predecessors, most markedly in their general indifference to issues of economic as well as ethnic equality.

This heavily professional liberal class never once - in the manner of their predecessors of the New Deal and Great Society - took the lead in pressing for economic reforms. It wasn't that they opposed them; they just never seemed to occur to them.

They, after all, had risen in status even as much of the rest of the country was slipping. Over a quarter of a century passed and the best the liberal Democrats could come up with was to slash welfare and raise the age for Social Security.

Remember how the Kos Krowd radiated utter contempt for the working class voters who favored Hillary? The sheer spectacle of this historic turnaround still astounds me: Democrats disparaging workers.

And now, as a direct result, we have a Democratic congress tossing money at Wall Street and allowing the escalation of an unpopular war in Afghanistan. How could it have come to this?

The first thing that needs to happen is for there to be a clear distinction between smug, self-serving liberalism contemptuous of so many Americans and a populist progressive movement that seeks unity with those [whom] many liberals prefer simply to condemn.

The magnets for this unity are such obvious yet ignored issues as the creation of jobs, the preservation of pensions, decent treatment of endangered homeowners, an end to credit card usury, respect for local decision-making, and, yes, a healthcare plan based on providing financial assistance, not bureaucratic nightmares.

The healthcare reform bill is the turning point. The sleeper must awake. Yeah, a lot of the people who voted for Obama were idiots -- but none of those idiots voted for this.

Right now, the progs have Lieberman as their "shield of dreams": The Thing From Connecticut functions well as blame-catcher. But no less an authority than Russ Feingold tells us that Lieberman has acted as Obama's avatar:

On Tuesday, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) pointed the finger at President Barack Obama, rather than Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), for the disappearance of the Medicare buy-in and public option from the Senate health reform bill.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” Feingold said...

(So vote against the bill, Senator. Why should the Thing From Connecticut make all the grand gestures?)

Anthony Weiner is one of the best on Capitol Hill, but he still misses the essential point that Feingold has grasped:

“Snowe? Stupak? Lieberman? Who left these people in charge?" Weiner asked. "It’s time for the President to get his hands dirty. Some of us have compromised our compromised compromise. We need the President to stand up for the values our party shares. We must stop letting the tail wag the dog of this debate.”

The president is the one who left those people in charge. He's not the tail. He's the wagger.

Obama's health care bill is now decidedly unpopular -- polls indicate that more people would now rather keep the horrid status quo than go for mandated health insurance. Meanwhile, the reimportation of Canadian drugs is very popular. So is single-payer. Yet single-payer and Canadian drugs are unthinkable in DC, while health insurance mandates may well carry the day. This, at a time when Democrats control both Congress and the presidency.

Why is this?

Why do popular ideas flounder while unpopular ones move forward? Who are the eldritch eminences defining the politically permissible?

And what can those on the left do to change this situation?

Much of the problem, I think, goes back to the aforementioned schism between the snooty, college-educated progs who idolized Obama -- the "Whole Foods nation," as some have called them -- and the working class. As Sam Smith notes (in sections of his essay not quoted above), workers sense the antipathy of the progs, and disingenuous reactionaries have stepped in to fill that void. By now, it's a familiar trick: We've all chuckled at the sight of opera-loving Ann Coulter pretending to be spiritually aligned with the NASCAR crowd. It's an old trick, yes, but it works. In fact, the strategy is more effective now than ever before.

Even after eight years of George W. Bush, the working class accepts right-wing framing of the issues, no matter how deceptive and ludicrous that frame might be.

For example, here's how the Republicans in Feingold's state see the problems with Obama's health care reform bill:

Government-Run Health Care Will:

-Take health care decisions away from patients and doctors.
-Undercut private insurance rates.
-Empower government bureaucrats to set prices and determine what treatments to cover.
-Force private insurers out of business.
-Raise taxes and reduce the quality of care

Bullshit.

Yes, it's a bad bill -- but it's not bad for those reasons.

Granted, there is some truth in the assertion that a robust public option might undercut private rates. That would be a good thing -- if there were still a public option in this bill. But there isn't. Most of the public option was taken out ages ago, and now even the wispy remains have been swept away. All we have left is a compromise of a compromise of a compromise, just as Weiner said.

Nothing in this bill has anything to do with "Government-Run Health Care." The Republicans are lambasting a plan which simply does not exist.

Nevertheless, this hallucination is very real in the minds of millions of working class Americans.

Now here is Deborah White, a liberal, describing the problems with the very same bill:

The Obama-Lieberman health care plan eliminates all proposed competition for private insurance corporations in what Dean calls "a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG."

An Obama-Lieberman plan mandate that all Americans purchase health care coverage will translate into tens of billions more annually for private insurers, but with absolutely no measure to control costs charged to consumers.

Thus, the same private insurers who caused our current unaffordable mess can (and will, according to history!) charge sky-high prices, and we have no choice but to pay.

That's a lot closer to reality, innit? And here's Jane Hamsher:

And what are senators planning to call a “win”?

• A removal of the ban on annual limits that Reid slipped in at the last minute, in violation of the president’s promise in his September address to Congress;

• an exemption from antitrust law for insurance companies, which will reduce competition;

• taxes that start up in January but benefits that don’t start until 2014; and

• a tax on middle-class insurance plans that is designed to cut back insurance benefits, reduce coverage and increase co-pays and deductibles.

Again, one has to sit back and bask at the spectacle of the thing. Both Republicans and an increasing number of progressives now condemn the same piece of legislation. Yet they do so for very different reasons. Republican propagandists attack a "socialized medicine" bill which does not exist. White and Hamsher are attacking a bill that does exist.

Here's the problem: More blue collars have heard the Republican argument than will ever read what Hamsher, White or even Howard Dean have to say.

Why? Because working people have stopped listening to them.

Yes, it is true that working people favor single payer; polls have demonstrated this. And yet -- paradox! -- they have also internalized the Republican framing of the health care issue, of every issue. Workers want socialized health insurance run by private industry. They want Medicare without gummint. They want welfare without the State. They want a cubical sphere and a dog that meows.

Clean, but obscene -- know what I mean?

Workers want contradictory things because the Republicans, who don't have their interests at heart, have learned to talk their language.

Until "progressives" find a way to rebuild a base among those who toil -- until they stop attending the Cabernet Sauvignon soirees and sit down with the guys swigging Miller -- the Democratic party will fail. So will the country.

Poor proggies!

2009-12-16T16:20:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald on the health bill fiasco. You've probably already seen this video (which I first saw guess where), but if you have not, here it is. My questions:

1. What is Jay Rockefeller on?

2. The strange man standing behind Obama: Why doesn't he blink? I probably should recognize him, but I don't.

Lying...?

2009-12-16T14:13:00.000-08:00

Remember this cartoon, published during the general election campaign? It takes on rather interesting overtones when viewed today.

One can say that Obama really didn't lie, at least not after he had secured the nomination of his party.

Why, then, are the progs screaming about betrayal? Because they had projected so much onto him, the way we scry images into clouds and Rorschach blots.

This is one of the most interesting sociological developments I've ever witnessed.

Rewriting history: They're at it again!

2009-12-15T13:33:00.000-08:00

All over the blogosphere, commenters suffer from unvented spleens. The PUMA contingent has been proven utterly right about Obama, and now all the (former?) Obots don't know how to react. Those arrogant bot bastards would rather bite off their own nipples than say "I got it wrong and I'm sorry."

(Incidentally, I am not a PUMA, being too ornery to accept any categorization not of my own devising. I am, and have been since early 2008, an anti-Obama Democrat. Keep it at that, and make no further presumptions.)

Naturally, the demoralized bots have resorted to the one activity that gives them solace: Blaming Bill Clinton for everything that has ever gone wrong in the world, up to and including the film version of The Spirit.

That's why the blogosphere brims with snarling references to Bill Clinton's alleged gutting of Glass-Steagall, the banking reform act put through in the days of Hoover and FDR. Glass-Steagal kept banks out of the insurance and stock brokerage game; if the law had remained on the books, wheeler-dealers could not have turned mortgages into a worldwide Ponzi scheme. The bots want you to believe that Barack Obama has been forced to clean up a mess made by Bill Clinton.

The "Blame Bill!" contingent never mentions that Obama has always ruled out renewing the Glass-Steagall provisions:

The argument is not to go back to the regulatory framework of the 1930's because, as I said, the financial markets have changed substantially. The question is, how do we build new regulatory systems that are flexible, that reflect new realities, that aren't going to put undue constraints on innovation in the financial markets...

He said those words in 2008. Since that time, Obama has done little or nothing to regulate the financial markets, aside from offering a grandly odious scheme to institutionalize government backing of the "too-big-to-fail" financial institutions. What Obama wants goes beyond moral hazard: It's moral suicide.

In fact, the basic idea behind Glass-Steagall remains valid, and it was valid in 2008. Things have not changed that much since 1933. A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh, and Wall Street is still filled with hyenas. That is why some in Congress are, thank God, talking about bringing us back to sanity on the Glass-Steagall front.

And as we scan that front, where is Barack Obama? Nowhere in sight. Steny Hoyer, not the White House, is fighting for the return of Glass-Steagall.

Oh, but it gets better: Former Citibank Chairman John S. Reed -- the businessman who instigated the 1999 repeal effort -- now wants Glass-Steagall back. But not Barack Obama. Wrap your brain cells around that flabbergaster, kitties: Obama stands to the right of the guy who ran Citibank.

Let's return our attentions to the "Blame Bill" contingent.

What was Clinton's real role in the repeal of Glass-Steagall back in 1999? I shall repeat some material published previously. These are facts which most "progressives" don't want you to know, because most progressives suffer from an incurable case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. To paraphrase a popular Upton Sinclairism, it is difficult to get a person to understand something if his CDS depends on his not understanding it.

As mentioned above, Glass-Steagall divided commercial banks from investment houses; it also created the FDIC (which, I am happy to report, is still there). Banks grew to dislike this "separation of powers." Why? Because in boom times, people put their money in stocks, while in hard times, people put cash into savings accounts. Banks wanted to get in on both rackets.

In 1998, Travelers (a really big insurance and financial services company) announced a merger with Citibank (a really big bank headed by the aforementioned Mr. Reed). This was not legal. This merger violated Glass-Steagall. That's why a lot of helpful people in Congress decided to change the law. You may decide for yourself whether campaign contributions affected that decision.

Thus was born the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which replaced Glass-Steagall. A growing number of economists believe that this Act helped to create the current subprime crisis, because it allowed bad loans to be packaged and sold in a global game of three-card monte.

Here's the key fact that the the progs won't tell you about: The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed by a veto-proof majority in a Republican-controlled Congress.

You can blame the Republicans, but not just the Republicans. There were also powerful Democrats, such as Dodd and Schumer, who wanted to kill Glass-Steagal.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed the House by a whopping 343-86.

Did Clinton try to fight the act? Yes. Every step of the way. Contemporary reports prove the point, however much the progs may attempt to rewrite history.

The opposition was simply too powerful. Clinton had no choice but to focus like the proverbial laser beam on a more restrictive goal: Maintaining the Community Reinvestment Act, which Gramm hoped to kill with the same piece of legislation. The CRA, as expanded by Clinton in 1994, helped minorities and the working poor get home loans and business loans.

The Republican majority (and quite a few Democratic sell-outs) forced Clinton to compromise. Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and even said a few laudatory words as he did so. That was the price of maintaining CRA. Blaming Bill Clinton for Gramm's stupid law is like blaming Raoul Wallenberg for not defeating the Wehrmacht single-handed.

The CRA is a major reason why most black people used to love Bill Clinton.

That love affair lasted until the Obama cultists began crying "racist!" at any perceived enemy, especially if that enemy was named Clinton. The resultant frenzy made a lot of people forget all about those loans.

Shall I come out and say it? Yes, I think I shall: Any black homeowner or small business owner who got loans thanks to Clinton's CRA, yet who later fell for the "Clintons-as-racists" canard, is an ungrateful asshole who deserves to be spat on.

Fortunately, many African Americans are finally starting to notice that Barack Obama has never helped any black person not named Obama.

Here's the irony: The Republican version of the "blame Bill" strategy is really a "blame the blacks" strategy. Ever since the disaster of 2008, conservatives have argued that the CRA caused the economic meltdown. All such arguments are pure bullshit.

Nothing in the Community Reinvestment Act forced fly-by-night mortgage outfits to hand out houses to anyone with a pulse. Nothing in the CRA permitted lying on loan application forms. Nothing in the CRA allowed for tossing out basic underwriting principles. Most importantly: Nothing in the CRA forced large financial institutions to slap a triple-A rating on weird new financial instruments based on crap loans, which were then sold worldwide. (And nothing in the CRA stops the Obama Justice Department from prosecuting the miscreants who lied about the value of those instruments.)

Bill Clinton did the right thing, given the tenor of the times. Nevertheless, everyone blames him.

The right blames Bill for preserving the CRA.

The left blames Bill for signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley -- which would have passed under any circumstances -- while never crediting him for preserving CRA.

Now you know what really happened. Any strained argument which attempts to rewrite this history is nothing more than CDS-fueled casuistry.

Oh. By the way. Do you recall the name of the 1999 bill? It was called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The "Leach" bit refers to Congressman Jim Leach. He's a Republican. And in 2008, he strongly supported Barack Obama.

We're on the same page

2009-12-15T06:14:00.000-08:00

On January 24, 2008, this squib appeared in Corrente:

A new Barack Obama radio ad:

"Hillary Clinton. She’ll say anything, and change nothing. It’s time to turn the page. Paid for by Obama for America."

NAFTA. FISA. Iraq. Afghanistan. Single Payer. Canadian drugs. Stimulus. Mortgage relief. Employment. State Secrets. Privacy. Patriot Act.

By the way: The rediscovered Bush emails almost certainly will prove that the W administration did not comply properly with Fitzgerald's request for evidence. The Obama Justice Department could subpoena those records and mount an obstruction of justice case against the Bushies.

Could, but won't. Why? Because nothing has changed, and the page has not been turned.

No business like Joe business

2009-12-15T04:43:00.001-08:00

Why was Joe Lieberman endorsing the Medicare extension plan just three months ago, even though he now threatens to filibuster any bill which contains such a notion? (He's even lying, I think, within the context of the video -- but let's let that business pass for now.) Is he acting at the behest of the White House? Or -- interesting thought -- perhaps he is acting at the behest of the Republicans, who (conceivably) have offered him a cushy position which he can assume after the voters of Connecticut kick him out...

I'm not sure that he is doing this at the bidding of the health insurance industry, because I'm not sure that the industry really wants to be dealing with the over 55s. They get sick more often than younger folk do.

So why is Joe doing this? Why did he insist on ruining one of the few good things about this legislation?

Is it possible that the Obama administration secretly wants rid of this bill, and has asked Lieberman to kill it? That's the kindest view, but I don't consider the theory likely.

The partial screen cap to your left comes from TPM. That combination of image and text seems to offer a snapshot of everything that is corrupt and wrong with this administration and this Senate. You should read the comments evinced by that story: The poor bastards who read TPM regularly are petrified that they will soon have to apologize to the PUMA contingent, whom they still despise.

It's obvious to me that Lieberman has a hidden agenda, one that has little or nothing to do with ideology. To me, this looks more like ye olde bribe-ola, even though the pay-off may not be strictly monetary. You know the old joke: An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought.

Incidentally, Darcy Burner at Huffington Post has produced a review of this legislation that is so scathing, one might almost conclude that she originally wrote it for Corrente. Matthew Ygelesias also has some noteworthy observations:

Can’t liberals be just as stiff-necked as Lieberman? Sure, they could. But liberals members do have an incentive to compromise—the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.

Polls say that the public option (which the average dullard believes to be the same as socialized health insurance) is popular. Polls also say that the Afghanistan war is not popular. Yet we are doubling down on Afghanistan and gutting even the flimsy public option passed by the House. Can you explain this situation? I can't.

Well, it's Joe Lieberman's country now. You and I just live in it.

Lieberman controls the Senate!

2009-12-14T19:21:00.001-08:00

The Medicare-at-55 provision is gonna go, because Holy Joe wants it gone. There is no longer any reason even to consider supporting this bill. If Lieberman gets his way -- and he will -- write to your senator and demand that she or he vote against this thing. State that any Democratic senator who supports this bill will get not one dime from you come next election; donations will go to primary challengers.

Dave Sirota is a fucking liar

2009-12-14T07:06:00.000-08:00

This post began as an addendum to the one below. But I've decided to give it greater prominence, because -- to be candid -- I am pissed off.

In the preceding post, I link to this piece by little Davey Sirota, the staunch Hillary-hater and Obama supporter who now says that he is disgusted by Obama's betrayal on the issue of drug re-importation from Canada. A reader told Davey that he had nobody to blame but himself. To which Davey responded:

Your assumption that Hillary was better - and would be better - is a hilarious fantasy. Yes, the person who voted for the war, was in the administration that thwarted reimportation, campaigned publicly for NAFTA, yes - we should all believe she'd be better.

What a total joke, really. Try telling another.

You're the joke, Davey. And you're a liar. Here's the reality of the situation:

During the primaries, Obama deliberately told a flagrant untruth about his NAFTA stance. In speeches, ads and pamphlets, he claimed that he would renegotiate the treaty. He has not done so and he has made clear that he never will. This broken promise came as no shock to those who had done a little research, as I had: Before he ran for president, he told at least one interviewer that he favored the treaty.

While he was busy lying to audiences in Ohio during the primaries, Obama had Goolsbee offer back-channel assurances to the Canadians, assuring them that the anti-NAFTA stance was no more than an election-year pose. Worst of all, the O campaign (via Daily Kos -- which all sentient creatures recognized as an arm of the campaign) peddled an outrageous and disgusting fabrication blaming Clinton, not Obama, for those double-dealing communications with our northern friends.

A Canadian investigation established the truth; the report damned Obama while exonerating Hillary. I document the entire story here. None of my many critics have ever been able to challenge a single fact in that piece.

Now let's talk about the war.

Obama spoke out against the idea of invading Iraq during a 2002 speech which he delivered in front of a crowd that would have tolerated no other stance. Indeed, he was the most conservative speaker on that occasion. Soon thereafter, he drifted further to the right. He refused to denounce the invasion when he ran for senate. (Look up his record. He said nada.) He refused to denounce the invasion when he spoke at the 2004 convention. (Look up the speech on YouTube -- and this time, pay attention to what he actually says, not to what you think he says.) That speech placed him well to the right of both Kerry and Clinton, who did denounce the invasion at that convention. (Again, look it up.)

Obama admits in his book that he began to favor the invasion while watching the "shock and awe" television coverage -- images which made me want to vomit. During his brief time in the Senate, he continually voted for war funding. His voting record in Iraq was to the right of Hillary's. After winning his senate seat, he never made a strong anti-war statement until his campaign started and the polls turned decisively against Bush's folly.

Yet throughout his 2008 campaign, Obama repeated the lie that he had been a consistent and courageous opponent of the war. He was nothing of the kind.

And by the way: We're still in fucking Iraq!

Davey's biggest fabrication concerns Hillary's stance on Canadian drugs. Here's the truth about Hillary's record:

Voted YES on allowing reimportation of Rx drugs from Canada.

S. 812, as amended; Greater Access to Affordable Pharmaceuticals Act of 2002. Vote to pass a bill that would permit a single 30-month stay against Food and Drug Administration approval of a generic drug patent when a brand-name company's patent is challenged. The secretary of Health and Human Services would be authorized to announce regulations allowing pharmacists and wholesalers to import prescription drugs from Canada into the United States. Canadian pharmacies and wholesalers that provide drugs for importation would be required to register with Health and Human Services. Individuals would be allowed to import prescription drugs from Canada. The medication would have to be for an individual use and a supply of less than 90-days.

Dave Sirota dares to leave his readers with the impression that Hillary opposed the very measure she championed. SIROTA IS A BALD-FACED LIAR.

I'm not a blinkered Hillary fan. I've said many times that I wish she had never run. For much of the primary season, I took an "anyone but Clinton" stance -- not because I thought she would make a bad president (she would certainly have been better than the ghastly creature now inhabiting the oval office), but because I don't like the reek of political dynasties. My support for her stemmed from the fact that she was the only thing standing between Barack Obama and the nomination. I don't run fawning pieces about Hillary's work as Secretary of State because I feel uneasy about some policies, or at least about her employer.

Even so, I will not tolerate Sirota's smear-jobs and lying. And I will never -- ever -- forget or forgive the deceptive bastards who commandeered my party in 2008 and replaced it with a thuggish cult of personality.

We need to recapture the Democratic party. Incorrigible liars like Sirota, Moulitsas and Huffington have no further place in the national discussion. The CDS-addled "lefty Libertarians" (such as Kos and Arianna) have lost all credibility. Those clowns have utterly embarrassed themselves. They've pissed their pants on national television, yet they refuse to admit that their thighs are dripping.

To your health

2009-12-14T04:53:00.001-08:00

Joe Lieberman is going to oppose cloture if the final bill contains the "Medicare at 55" provision.

On one hand, Lieberman is an asshole. You know that and I know that. Also, I am closer to the proposed new Medicare eligibility point than you probably are -- and that factor has started to affect the way I think about this legislation.

On the other hand, I'd like to see this bill get more than 50 and fewer than 60 votes. We need a real filibuster, because only under those circumstances can the Senate rewrite the rules in order to get rid of the whole idea of the filibuster.

On the third hand: I'm guessing that Reid fears to take that step -- tossing aside the filibuster -- because he wants the Democrats to maintain filibuster power when the Republicans get back into power. And maybe that's a valid point. If the minority-power Dems did not possess the filibuster, might we not have had (say) a net neutrality law in 2006?

On the fourth hand: I work freelance, and this is not a freelancer-friendly piece of legislation.

On the fifth hand: If I actually had five hands, just imagine the amount of work I'd get done!

(I'm curious. Does anyone know of any polls indicating how popular Lieberman is these days in Connecticut? I cannot believe that the voters are still happy with the guy.)

More proof that Obama is not on your side: The White House is behind the move to destroy Senator Byron Dorgan's amendment to allow for the importation of cheap drugs from Canada. Obama's FDA claims to be bothered by "safety concerns" -- the usual dodge.

Obama's new stance places him well to the right of John McCain, who strongly favors allowing the importation of drugs from Canada.

What we are seeing here is a direct and irrefutable betrayal of an oft-repeated Obama campaign promise. Remember that naive era known as 2007, when ideals were fresh and anything seemed possible? Here is what Senator Obama was saying back in June of that year:

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama speculated Saturday that his prescription drug plan could save seniors on Medicare $157 billion over the next decade.

The potential saving is proof that the nation needs to change the Medicare system, he said.

"There is no reason for this other than the fact it makes the drug companies more money," said Obama. 'It's wrong that Americans have to spend more for their prescriptions because drug companies can spend billions on lobbying."

The prescription drug plan pushed by Obama would allow Medicare officials to bargain for lower prescription drugs prices, allow Americans to buy prescriptions from Canada and other developed countries where safe drugs are available and increase the use of generic drugs in public health programs like Medicare.

In this instance, I don't even have the luxury of being able to say "I told you so," since I did not yet have Obama clocked in June of 2007. Let's continue to quote from that story, which seems so astonishing in light of current events:

At a series of appearances across Iowa, Obama cited a study conducted by his campaign that compared drug prices paid by Medicare to those for patients in the Veterans Affair system, those getting drugs from Canadian pharmacies and online pharmacy providers.

Obama, a first-term Illinois senator, said his study found that Iowa seniors on Medicare pay 71 percent more for prescription drugs than do VA patients and 47 percent more than those who get drugs at Canadian pharmacies.

Dig: His own campaign conducted the study. At that time, he didn't voice any concerns about safety -- because he knew, as we all know, that these drugs have already received FDA approval.

"The drug and insurance industries spent $1 billion over the last decade on lobbying and campaign contributions, and so when the Medicare prescription drug bill came up a few years back, they found more than enough friends in Washington who were willing to do their bidding," Obama said.

We must therefore presume that the "finance factor" explains President Obama's change of tune.

Guess who now describes Obama's "betrayal" on this issue as "disgusting"? It's little Davey Sirota! Yes, the very same Davey who used to brag about hanging out with the Lightbringer. One reader offered this noteworthy response to Davey's show of outrage:

You've Only Yourself To Blame

Sorry, David, but anyone with common sense and a knowledge of history could see Obama for what he was before the primaries, which is why I supported Hillary...

You destroyed whatever credibility you had by backing Obama the way you did, and now that you've discovered what a complete and total ineffectual fraud he is, you feel betrayed. Well, boo-frickin'-hoo for you.

Naturally, this injection of reality evinced a CDS-addled response from O-heads who still -- even now -- absolutely refuse to admit the simple truth that they were wrong and we were right. The bots have erased the line between obstinacy and surrealism.

Seriously, I'd like to know: Does anyone know of any way to find out Obama Girl's reaction to the President's "disgusting betrayal" on this issue? (And am I the only one who still remembers Obama Girl?)

So what do you think of this blog post that I stitched together rather hastily? I'd give it an A-. If I gave it an A, people might consider me egomaniacal.

Spying

2009-12-13T15:03:00.000-08:00

I didn't tell the full story of why I became so paranoid about cyber-spying last week.

I received an email message allegedly from Evelyn Pringle, the author whose investigative pieces on Tony Rezko and Barack Obama I discussed in several posts published in 2008. I corresponded with Pringle a few times, though the messages were never substantive or sensitive. Her email address was lodged somewhere in my Yahoo email account -- and presumably my address was in her account.

The new message from "Pringle" contained nothing but a link. The link went to a web page selling consumer items. I had never seen that particular site before, although we have all seen that kind of site. I closed the page within a few seconds, then studied the Pringle message more carefully.

It did not come from the account of the real Evelyn Pringle. Someone was pretending to be her.

After that odd incident, my computer began to act very strangely. Among the strange happenings: I had to press "publish" or "reject" twice when moderating comments. I got the hinky, uncanny feeling that someone else was reading those comments, even the ones that were never published. (The vast majority of these are spam.)

As you know, I also received a message informing me that other people were logged onto this computer.

Thus, a total re-install on a new HD. Took the whole damned system apart. Got everything perfect -- then saved an image to an external drive so I can re-attain perfection within half an hour. Ever since, Blogger has been acting normally.

The "Pringle" business haunts me. Maybe someone learned of my respect for her work by reading old blog posts. More likely, someone hacked into either my Yahoo email account or hers. My account was apparently hacked once before -- and a year-and-a-half's worth of messages were deleted, or downloaded onto someone else's system.

Naturally, I changed passwords, and I've loaded even more anti-malware programming onto this system.

Forgive the rant, but what happened to me may happen to you. Alas, few people these days care much about internet privacy.

At least people are starting to wise up about Facebook. See here and here and here.The last link goes to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation:

The Ugly: Information That You Used to Control Is Now Treated as "Publicly Available," and You Can't Opt Out of The "Sharing" of Your Information with Facebook Apps

Facebook has eliminated users' ability to opt out of sharing private information.

These changes are especially worrisome because even something as seemingly innocuous as your list of friends can reveal a great deal about you. In September, for example, an MIT study nicknamed "Gaydar" demonstrated that researchers could accurately predict a Facebook user's sexual orientation simply by examining the user's friends-list. This kind of data mining of social networks is a science still in its infancy; the amount of data that can be extrapolated from "publicly available information" will only increase with time. In addition to potentially revealing intimate facts about your sexuality — or your politics, or your religion — this change also greatly reduces Facebook's utility as a tool for political dissent. In the Iranian protests earlier this year, Facebook played a critical role in allowing dissidents to communicate and organize with relative privacy in the face of a severe government crackdown. Much of that utility and privacy has now been lost.

For chrissakes, just AVOID the thing. You don't need it! The only information you need ever share with the world is a shout of defiance: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered -- OR DATA-MINED!"

NEVER USE FACEBOOK FOR ANY REASON. If your friends use Facebook -- subject them to ridicule!

A planet far, far away

2009-12-12T20:49:00.000-08:00

(This is a non-political weekend post.) Did you know that David Lynch was asked to direct Return of the Jedi?

Actually, he did direct one scene. And here it is...

Why did Iceland melt down?

2009-12-12T04:46:00.000-08:00

I never quite know what to make of John Perkins. Even so, his argument that Iceland was targeted by economic hit men is worth pondering.

Taibbi, Colbert and bubbles

2009-12-11T14:53:00.000-08:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Matt Taibbi

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

U.S. Speedskating

What's amazing to me is that Colbert manages to ask intelligent questions while remaining in his "idiot" persona. My favorite line: "But that's what we make now -- BUBBLES!"

Just war

2009-12-11T11:50:00.000-08:00

Cinie has a brilliant piece up -- the best thing I've read so far on the Nobel Peace Prize going to Obama at the very moment when he is ramping up our military presence in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama’s performance today only highlighted the mass of contradictions one can only be when one’s entire raison d’être is to hoodwink and bamboozle, to sell ice to Eskimos, snake oil to snake charmers, and yet more treaties to Natives. “Now you see it, now you don’t. I don’t think I said what you think you heard, and if I did, you know I thought I meant it, sometimes. Hello, I must be going.”

That's how he won the office, and that's how he'll lose. Double-talk is a good starter, but a bad finisher.

Big Question for Andy Breitbart

2009-12-11T00:24:00.001-08:00

Andy Breitbart -- the intellectual son of Zsa Zsa and Matt Drudge -- is trotting out more Big websites. You guessed it: He'll be providing even more propaganda outlets for all the YALs and YAFs out there.

(Long-time readers know my terminology: YAL = Yet Another Libertarian; YAF = Yet Another Friedmanite.)

As always, these sites will operate under the grand pretense that the YAFs are outsiders, perpetual underdogs struggling to be heard. In actual fact, the YAFs have been running, and ruining, most of the world for quite a few years now.

In the preceding post we looked at Matt Taibbi's piece on Obamanomics -- which proves that the present administration is extremely YAFfy, despite all the tripe about "socialism" which you hear from the teabaggers. Thus, our dilemma: We have YAFs running the show and YAFs leading the revolution -- which means that, no matter what happens, we face a YAF future.

One of Breitbart's new sites will be Big Tolerance:

The site “will be run by my own version of the rainbow coalition: black and Hispanic conservative libertarians, Jewish, gay conservatives and libertarians. Those who are viewed in multicultural realm as traitors to their race, sexual orientation, and other cultural Marxist categories...

If you ain't YAF, you're a bolshie. False dichotomy is a YAF specialty.

So is Orwellian nomenclature. Big Peace will try to rehabilitate Cheneyism "in an era of ‘progressive pacifism.'" How many days will pass before a Michael Ledeen byline appears? I'm guessing maybe five.

Anyone can maintain a blog -- hell, even I can do it. But making money at this game is a very different matter. It takes a large amount of capital to set up a high-profile website with paid staff and "name" writers and an advertising budget and all the rest. So where is Breitbart getting his dough?

That's the Big Question.

And the Big Answer may be lurking within this paragraph:

He plans, in the not-too-distant future, to unveil new sites as part of his “Big” network, including Big Education, Big Tolerance, Big Jerusalem, and Big Peace, among others. Each site will be a mix of aggregation and group blogging. There will be overlap among the sites’ contributors: For example, if an Israeli politician wants to offer his perspective on a Hollywood film, he will be able to post something on a number of relevant sites.

Well, I'm terribly grateful to hear about this. Jews have had an awfully difficult time getting their voices heard in Hollywood, what with that glass ceiling and all.

Here's Andy on his plans for Big Jerusalem:

“If you think it’s bad to be a conservative in the mainstream media or Hollywood, think what it must be like to be a small democracy in the Middle East and challenge the postcolonial approach. Israel is the ultimate victim of Marxism, which is ironic, since its economy was initially founded on Marxist principles. A nation that preaches and practices tolerance is treated worse by the world media than they treat radical Islamists who practice violent jihad.”

As if many Israelis aren't violent, radical, or driven by religious fanaticism. Israel is the most racist nation on the face of the earth today -- and it will never deserve the title "democracy" until every person under its governance has the right to vote. At least Andy admits that Israel is colonialist, although that's rather too nice a word for a country founded on 19th century principles of racial and cultural superiority.

Is being anti-colonialist necessarily Marxist? Here, I suspect, is another example of Andy playing that familiar YAFfy game of setting up a false dichotomy. Andy tends to toss the word "Marxist" at anything he doesn't like. If a bad pizza comes to his door, he blames Uncle Karl. He screams "Pinko!" whenever his dog soils the rug.

Another question: Is Breitbart really trying to convince us that Hollywood and the media continually foster hatred of Israel? If that's his game, he'll have an easier time convincing people that the Earth is cubical. Then again, I'm sure that there are paranoids out there who will accept Andy's nonsense at face value -- just as there were people who didn't laugh when Alan Dershowitz called Desmond Tutu a "racist and a bigot."

I think you may now guess my suggested answer to the Big Question. The one about funding. Get real. Could the answer be any more obvious?

Obama -- a SOCIALIST? Yeah, right.

2009-12-10T21:22:00.000-08:00

Next time some right-wing fruitloop wants to sell you on the Barack-the-Bolshie canard, just show 'em this piece by Matt Taibbi. To paraphrase Lord Buckley: Lotta cats try to lay it down, but when Taibbi lays it down, WHAM-BOM! It stays there.

Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

If you want to see the video version of this piece, go here.

As Taibbi notes, the new "regulations" -- if we can even use that word -- mean that the largest Wall Street firms now operate under a permanent bailout system. TARP was not a one-time deal; we will soon enter the perma-TARP world, in which the taxpayers will stand behind every move made by the fatcats, no matter how foolish. And the White House will be the sole determiner of whether or not a Wall Street firm is in trouble.

Doesn't Congress have the power of the purse? Not any more, it seems.

Why couldn't we just nationalize the too-big-to-fail firms? Because that would be socialism. So we are making the taxpayers subsidize all future errors made by large private firms. And still Obama is getting the "socialist" rap, even though what he's doing is the exact opposite of socialism as previously defined.

I have one disagreement with Taibbi:

Just below Summers is Jason Furman, who worked for Rubin in the Clinton White House and was one of the first directors of Rubin's Hamilton Project. The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like "Walmart: A Progressive Success Story" — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. "NAFTA's shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them," Obama declared. A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal.

"One of the first clues..."? Nah. Cannonfire readers were clued in to Obama's hypocrisy on that score long before the primaries were decided. Dammit, why wouldn't anyone listen to us?

Conversion narratives

2009-12-10T06:34:00.000-08:00

What a headline: Obama defends US wars as he accepts peace prize

President Barack Obama entered the pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize winners Thursday with humble words, acknowledging his own few accomplishments while delivering a robust defense of war and promising to use the prestigious award to "reach for the world that ought to be."

There must be some PUMA sympathizers working for the AP. Well, they seem to be everywhere these days -- even on the progblogs.

The Markos zombies are officially turning on their beloved Lightbringer.

Obama spent all year enabling Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe, and he thinks we're supposed to get excited about whatever end result we're about to get, so much so that we're going to fork over money? Well, it might work with some of you guys, but I'm certainly not biting.

Actually, Moulitsas has been both biting and sucking for some time now.

(They say over at Corrente that Chief Cheeto's post has evinced some particularly hilarious commentary. I'd offer a few samples, but for some reason, my freshly-installed system froze when I tried to open the comments.)

Jane Hamsher endorses Der Cheeto's anti-Lightbringer views. The first reader comment is noteworthy:

I’ll be giving my time and money to primaries for Progressive candidates against Lincoln, Landrieu, Baucus, Nelson, Reid, and Lieberman.

One name is conspicuous by its absence. Why not back a progressive alternative to Obama in 2012?

Here's Arianna Huffington on what she calls Obama's "Sartre" strategy -- as in, no Afghan exit:

What came through loud and clear from Obama's announcement and the subsequent multiple walkbacks of the notion that we might ever leave Afghanistan -- followed by Gibbs' steadfast certainty that we will on or before July, 2011 -- is that this White House has a serious credibility crisis.

I like this bit:

Shouldn't decisions that require enormous costs -- in blood as well as resources -- be met with ferocious questioning by the media? Articles sent to academic journals get more rigorous vetting these days than do decisions to escalate wars.

Very true. But Ms. Stassinopoulos, you forget one fact: You are the media. For you to adopt a "blame the press" strategy is hypocritical.

Did you do any rigorous vetting of Obama in 2008? During the campaign, did you publish many articles which ferociously questioned the man's claims? For example, did you print anything about his outrageous NAFTA lie -- a lie which told me all I needed to know about Obama's character? Did you vet any of the outrageous commentary you published smearing Obama's opposition?

In 2008, the prog mafia insisted that anyone who opposes Obama must be motivated by racism. Well, look who has joined Team Bigot: The Congressional Black Caucus. They are angry about Obama's inattention to the struggling, jobless poor.

During the stalemate, the lawmakers issued a statement saying they would no longer support public policy "defined by the world view of Wall Street."

Here's a particularly telling bit:

Some have sought to pin blame on the president's advisers.

"It's not the president. It's his economic team," said Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla. "I don't think they're doing their job."

Have you noticed the pattern?

In the early years of the 20th century, reactionaries who didn't like Czar Nicholas' policies blamed Count Witte. Today, those disappointed by Obama keep pointing fingers at someone -- anyone -- other than Obama. The CBC wants to blame the economic team, as if some malign outside force had inserted Timmy and Larry into this administration. Stassinopoulos instructs us to blame za media, dah-link. The progs want to place all blame for the health care disaster on the blue dogs.

Nobody wants to admit that chief blue dog is the top dog.

Obama came to office on the power of the "conversion narrative." His campaign team filled the blogs with how-I-came-to-the-Lightbringer stories -- which, in the accurate judgment of the strategists, were thought to be more compelling than were articles about policy.

Pretty soon we will see a spate of very different conversion stories, as people recount the moment when they finally confessed that Barack bamboozled 'em. Of course, for many people the snapping point occurred months before Obama won the nomination. For me, that moment came during the "darkened video" smear. When the progs refused to apologize or to back down even after the claim had been exposed as phony, I made a decisive break with all Obama supporters.

Was there a moment like that for you?

Sorry...

2009-12-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

I had the computer rebuildS from hell -- yeah, two of 'em, making any jaunts online nearly impossible. And right now I have actual perfeshunal-type work. So I must do that rather than hop online and pretend to know what I'm talking about.

I don't even know what's happening in the world right now, frankly. Is Obama still president? Are we who did not vote for him still racists? Is the economy still tanking? Is that delightful scalawag Bart Simpson still on the air?

Update

2009-12-08T02:37:00.000-08:00

I'm doing a full re-install. Actually, I took apart all the hardware and dusted everything. You know, this computerizin' stuff is hard.

Yow!

2009-12-07T06:49:00.000-08:00

I tried to shut down my system just now, only to receive this uncomfortable message:

Other people are logged onto this computer. Shutting down Windows might cause them to lose data.

I'm the only person who uses this machine, and no other computers in the home are even on right now.

Time, I suspect, for a complete clean re-install. Of everything. Paranoia is our friend. See you tomorrow.

Guess who's coming to the tea party?

2009-12-07T06:16:00.000-08:00

A Confluence thread directs our attention to this bizarre story, which Dakinkat appropriately labels "malinformation": Obama Orders 1 Million US Troops to Prepare for Civil War.

Russian Military Analysts are reporting to Prime Minister Putin that US President Barack Obama has issued orders to his Northern Command’s (USNORTHCOM) top leader, US Air Force General Gene Renuart, to “begin immediately” increasing his military forces to 1 million troops by January 30, 2010, in what these reports warn is an expected outbreak of civil war within the United States before the end of winter.

Although Renuart is indeed the head of the Northern Command -- which, since 2002, has held the job of combating insurrection -- I think that we may safely assume that this piece is a hoax.

I'm interested in the publication carrying this tale, the "European Union Times." I've never heard of this thing before, and Wikipedia is no help. Does anyone out there have any background info? Who is behind this enterprise?

One of their categories for reportage is "White extinction." And an EU Times article on internet anonymity carries this subhead: "In times of Internet spying, White Nationalists must become Anonymous!" These is the kind of lingo one would associate with an American neo-Nazi organization. It is a little alarming to see these sentiments ascribed to what is clearly meant to look, at first glance, like a quasi-official EU publication.

This rather fetid cyber-rag, displaying distinctly anti-American loyalties, appears to have close ties to the teabagger movement -- which, in turn, seems to be a gathering force within the Republican party. So I would suggest keeping an eye on these creeps.

Where is Osama Bin Laden?

2009-12-06T02:20:00.001-08:00

Where is Osama Bin Laden? Defense Secretary Robert Gates doesn't know. He says that the U.S. has not had any good intelligence on Bin Laden for years.

Oddly, this statement implies that the U.S. cannot even pinpoint the country that Bin Laden calls home. Last June, Leon Panetta stumped for Pakistan: "The last information we had, that's still the case."

Yet the BBC has published a report stating that a Taliban detainee supplied information -- second-hand, admittedly -- that Bin Laden was in Afghanistan in February or January.

"The sheikh doesn't stay in any one place. That guy came from Ghazni, so I think that's where the sheikh was."

Ghazni, near the border with Pakistan, is usually considered out of bounds for American troops. This is the place where the Taliban destroyed an historic statue of Buddha.

The same informant offered some further details which have received insufficient attention:

The detainee, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said that militants were avoiding Pakistani territory because of the risk of US drone attacks.

"Pakistan at this time is not convenient for us to stay in because a lot of our senior people are being martyred in drone attacks," he said.

Pakistan's Prime Minister says that Bin Laden is not in his country.

And then there's this:

It is widely believed that Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan sometime in 2002 after his December 2001 escape from the Tora Bora mountains into Pakistan's tribal areas. Pakistani leaders have consistently claimed Bin Laden has never been in Pakistan and is more likely hiding out in Afghanistan or Iran.

This assertion, if true, conflicts with everything that we have been told for years. In 2005, CIA Director Porter Goss said that he had an "excellent idea" as to Bin Laden's location. His commentary indicated that politics, not a lack of information, impeded further pursuit -- at least, that's how I would interpret this gnomish pronouncement:

That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play.

Cryptic as these words may be, they seem to indicate that Bin Laden was -- to the certain knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community -- alive and residing in Pakistan (at least as of 2005), and that the difficulty in capturing him had to do with our relations with the Pakistani government.

So how do we square what Goss had to say with the recent suggestion that Bin Laden has been in Afghanistan since 2002? If the Afghan claim has been "widely believed" for years, then why was not the American public allowed to share in this wide belief?

I cannot help but note how convenient these stories are.

During the Bush era, the American public would not have tolerated being told that Osama was "widely believed" to be in Afghanistan -- a country where the niceties of international relations did not forbid us from operating. Now, President Obama wants to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan -- and I will not be surprised to see the administration announce that American troops have to go into the Taliban-controlled areas in order to capture Bin Laden.

Osama Bin Laden is wherever we want him to be.

In 2006, the CIA shut down the unit tasked with hunting Bin Laden. Intriguingly, this move occurred some months after Dr Clive Williams, director of terrorism studies at the Australian National University, claimed that he had received documents from a colleague in India providing evidence of Bin Laden's death in April of 2005. (Perhaps Porter Goss had an "excellent idea" that Osama was under the sod...?) I'm wondering why we've seen no further discussion of these documents -- after all, if a college professor can see them, so should we.

Also in 2006, semi-official sources in Pakistan spread the report that Bin Laden had died of Typhus.

Michael Ledeen, quoting "Iranians I trust," said that Bin Laden died that same year in Iran. Ledeen says that Bin Laden spent most of his time hanging out in that country since his expulsion from Afghanistan. Fat chance, say I. The kind of Iranians Ledeen might trust are not necessarily people I would trust -- and everyone knows that Ledeen and his associates have spent years trying to stir up a war against Iran.

Earlier this year, two UCLA professors came out with this interesting report (pdf) indicating that Bin Laden was probably hiding in or around Parachinar, Pakistan, in Kurram province, near the Afghan border. The overhead photos reproduced here represent their three best guesses as to his current (or recurrent?) locale.

The paper states that the largest of these photos depicts a complex which may be a prison, although it has unusually well-maintained grounds. The other buildings seem to be rather large private residences.

Last April, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said that his country has found no trace of Bin Laden. He further opined that Osama was probably dead. Last month, George W. Bush "guessed" that Bin Laden was still alive.

Final note: This is one of those topics that tends to bring out the hyper-macho asshole in many readers. I do not disrespect your opinion, but may I humbly ask you to refrain from offering your opinion as hard, proven, testable fact?

As if you know.