September 11 Thought: What If They Gave A War And Everybody Came?

As a child born three years to the day after the A-bombing of Hiroshima, I actually asked myself that question once in a while over the years, not as an hypothetical extreme, but as a real possibility. So, I believe, did most American kids who did literal duck-and-cover drills in our elementary school classrooms before we were old enough to understand what we were covering ourselves from.

As the years passed and the details of the consequences of even the smallest nuclear war were filled in for us... anyone else remember a made-for-TV movie titled "The Day After"? ... at least a few teens like me came to see what it meant for the world, especially the part of it divided into "the free world" and "the Commies," if that scenario were ever realized. The weapons to destroy literally all humankind existed; "we" had them; "they" had them... and every time the US and the USSR fought a proxy war, I wondered if it was to be our last encounter.

Fast-forward 25 or more years. Some actual reduction of tension was achieved, to a point at which many of us held some hope that the Cold War need not become hot, at least not right away. Some weapons reductions were actually performed, although both sides still had enough nukes to destroy the "civilized" world several times over. Most of us learned to live with the conflict. Uneasily. Looking over our shoulders every day...

... Except the likes of Ronald Reagan, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, and... Osama bin Laden and his ilk, including Bush Junior. Every nation had its share of nut-jobs willing at least in theory to blow us all to kingdom come in an ultimate ideologically triggered and driven war. I actually knew Americans in the 1980s who would say, out loud, the Russians have these weapons so we have to have more of them. You talk about people unclear on the concept...

Fortunately, I knew damned few ordinary American citizens... and "damned" those few truly were... who actually thought Armageddon was a good idea. As long as those held no leadership positions, there was still some hope that humankind would not be vaporized en masse. But then some of them, not in any real sense power brokers but still determined to have their way, discovered terrorism, and then some opponents of those people discovered they could use the terrorists for their own purposes in projecting the classic "fear, uncertainty and doubt" (FUD) onto understandably concerned and occasionally terrified ordinary individuals, to achieve the effect of their great ultimate ideological battle without having the raw political power to order the necessary ultimate engagement of forces.

Most people, even so, thought it was a crack-brained idea actually to do those things. But "most people" don't always control the disposition of real-world forces... and then there are the utterly crazy people who sometimes do.

We've managed to survive 14 years from Osama bin Laden's attempt at, and of course George W. Bush's collusion in, provoking their respective worlds into indulging in some sort of ultimate engagement of forces. I probably won't live another 14 years, but many of you will.

Can you... please, I urge you... stave off the crazies for at least another 14 years? What with ISIS and all, Armageddon kinda nervous about the direction of things...

Binge-Reading Ms. Klein

I haven't slept well the last couple of nights, and have devoted the otherwise wasted time to an attempt to finish Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine before I turn 67 years old tomorrow. In sheer number of pages, I have not that far to go, but the entire book is truly depressing reading, and it is so packed full of information and examples that one gets the most out of it by reading every word. And of course Ms. Klein, of necessity, takes the reader back to the George W. Bush presidency, which was IMNSHO even worse than the Obama era. Ah, well; I have plenty of good, cheap wine on hand, and an undeniably good book, to see me through the evening...

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AFTERTHOUGHT: let me clarify. Obama has been disappointing to me, while GeeDubya and crew were utterly disgusting. Got it?

Federal Judge Gags On Idaho ‘Ag-Gag’ Law — This Is No Gag

Gosztola

Kevin Gosztola at Shadowproof reports a federal court decision that deems an Idaho law forbidding certain kinds of ‘whistleblower’ speech... specifically in this case, the documenting and revealing of animal abuse in an agricultural processing plant... to be unconstitutional. The law runs afoul of the First Amendment to the US Constitution: the whistleblower has the freedom to speak or publish information supportive of his/her assertion that abuse of the animal(s) does take place and may be criminal in nature; otherwise, there would be no point in whistleblowing in that context.

Something similar was attempted in Texas in 1996: some cattlemen sued Oprah Winfrey and a guest on her show for libel under the False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act of 1995 when Oprah and the guest discussed mad cow disease in beef cattle. (Wikipedia has a decent short summary.) The jury found Winfrey did not libel the cattlemen and did not owe them the obscenely high monetary damages they sought, but after the trial, Oprah got cold feet, refused to provide copies of the video of the original broadcast to interested reporters, repeatedly refused to speak in public about the incident, etc. Living in Texas, I can understand quite well why she might exercise such restraint.

But IMHO, those cattlemen were effing paranoid, and they certainly never had any legitimate basis for attempting to suppress speech about cows. The Constitution establishes for us all the right to defame all the cows we feel like, Texan or Idahoan, now or two decades ago, mad or merely a bit quirky. Of course it speaks more about the cowboys than the cow-critics, but the notion that any commercial product, agricultural, automotive or simply asswiping, is above public criticism is, um, fucking crazy. Let it be, pardners [sic].

Flee The SWAT

It probably won't do you any good... if they come to you, you'll probably end up dead anyway... but it's all you've got in these days of militarized police forces (see previous post for an example).

Matthew Harwood at TomDispatch examines the growing phenomenon of police as militarized invasion force... that's what SWAT has become in the course of the past three or four decades, growing from its origins in the 1960s as an attempted answer to the most extreme situations law enforcement can face into a quasi-military home invasion force, used mainly for serving drug warrants and equipped with the best equipment and vehicles the Pentagon can offer.

MRAP, Queensbury, NY

Bill Moyers features Tom Engelhardt featuring in turn Chase Madar on The Criminalization of Everyday Life, confronting more or less the same subject and featuring a photo of an MRAP vehicle guaranteed to terrorize (word used advisedly) any innocent citizen into staying home... where s/he is, as Harwood indicates, still not safe from the militarized invasions of the police who now own this formerly military vehicle.

A short passage from Harwood's article drives home the point:

...

In 1984, according to Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop, about 26% of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had SWAT teams. By 2005, that number had soared to 80% and it’s still rising, though SWAT statistics are notoriously hard to come by.

As the number of SWAT teams has grown nationwide, so have the raids. Every year now, there are approximately 50,000 SWAT raids in the United States, according to Professor Pete Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies. In other words, roughly 137 times a day a SWAT team assaults a home and plunges its inhabitants and the surrounding community into terror.

...

And you thought your primary danger of being shot full of holes came from the criminals. What goes around, comes straight at us; the US has terrorized the people of other nations with these weapons for decades, most recently in preemptive, invasive wars, and now the remaindered weapons from those same wars are driving into our neighborhoods and shooting up our own children. Welcome to America!

The Obama Administration's Labor Day Message

Here it is...

[crickets]

Oh, wait, here's their Labor Day message:

SYRIA syria sYrIA SYRia Syria ...

Thanks to Flood the Zone, Inc., we can now rest assured that the evildoers in Syria will be bravely confronted.*

* and the workers of America will continue to be bravely ignored. Priorities, you know!

Rmoney's Closing Argument: Elect Me, Or My Brothers Will Beat You Up

Well, OK, that's not literally what he said. But it might as well have been:

In what his campaign billed as his “closing argument,” Mitt Romney warned Americans that a second term for President Obama would have apocalyptic consequences for the economy in part because his own party would force a debt ceiling disaster.

“Unless we change course, we may well be looking at another recession,” Romney told a crowd in West Allis, Wisconsin.

...

House Tea Party
Out Of Rmoney's Control

Fuck him. Just fuck him. If he has that much power over his own party, he has it whether in or out of the Oval Office, and he is obligated as an American to spare us the economic disaster. If he has the power to control the House Tea Party (which will very possibly be re-elected, or would have been before Rmoney said this), he is obliged to keep them under control. And if he doesn't have that influence, he has no business running for the presidency.

Can you imagine the late great Lyndon Johnson, who regrettably never ran for a second term, saying to America, "vote for my re-election, or the House Democrats will run rampant over everything"?

We have a lesser breed among those who govern us these days...

UPDATE: Krugman weighs in on "The Blackmail Caucus."

The End Of Science In America?

Paul Krugman:

...

Like others doing similar exercises — Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, and Pollster — Nate[ Silver]’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver, and has shown that edge widening over the past couple of weeks.

This could be wrong, obviously. And we’ll find out on Election Day. But the methodology has been very clear, and all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may.

Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all.

This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.

This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.

...

This strikes me as yet another manifestation of the right-wing concept of science as simply a belief system, like Catholicism or Islam or Mormonism: as though, if you don't like one "faith," you can choose another; if you are offended by one scientific theory, you can replace it, based not on whether the replacement truly describes the world we live in, but on whether it is compatible with your political outlook. It's the same situation as in any other search for truth in reality: you don't get to choose your own facts. Honest seekers across the spectrum freely acknowledge this. Right-wingers, even the ones who are not utterly nuts, do not: the facts themselves, as they see them, are subject to reshaping based on one's political philosophy.

That simply doesn't work... at all... in scientific research. You cannot "pray away" global climate change. You cannot merely assert loudly, or even pass a law in Congress, that the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe has no ongoing environmental consequences. You cannot pass a law about when human life begins, and thereby change the physiology of the process. And as Krugman reminds us, you cannot legislate underlying motivations for human economic behavior, the ones that are truly wired in, as if they were simple matters of policy. You can't make trickle-down supply-side economics "true" by fiat. You can deny Keynes until you're blue in the face, but his message will nonetheless haunt you in the real world if you ignore it.

Newton

Galileo

There have always been science deniers; this is nothing new. Indeed, before a few people in 17^th-century England, Italy and Germany framed the basics of how one does science, of the notion of a hypothesis to be tested, of experimental confirmation, of mathematical description, there was not a great deal of science done anywhere. (The age of Archimedes, c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC, mathematically enlightened and technologically clever as he was, was all too brief, and had no thread of historical succession directly connecting him with the beginnings of science as we know it.) For millennia, most people did not think in scientific terms; those who did often paid dearly for their troubles. Today's science deniers would take us back to that time. (Hey, the torture apparatuses are already in place, thanks to the political system!)

And that is the crux (!) of what is frightening about right-wing politics: the wingers wish to establish a new age of "truth" by fiat, not truth through research in scientific matters, not even political truth by honest debate among people of differing interests, but truth by reference to authority. Regular use of the argument from authority leads almost inexorably to more emphasis on the authority than the argument. Spare us, please!

Recipe For A Thought-Provoking Hour Spent Reading About Economics, Theory And Practice

Start with "Neoliberalism Kills, Part One" and "... Part Two" by FDL's letsgetitdone (a.k.a. Joe Firestone). Follow some of the links until you understand what letsgetitdone means by "neoliberalism" and how the current crew in Washington preach the faith. Particularly read the Wikipedia entry on the Washington Consensus (mostly on the work of Pete Peterson via John Williamson). If you're not depressed yet, YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION! No, if you're not depressed yet, try to fit this into the context of the looming Grand Bargain, of which IMHO nothing good can come.

Then please explain it all to me...

Avedon Carol And Stuart Zechman: Vote To Make A Statement, Knowing The New Deal Is Going Down No Matter How You Vote

Please read. Ms. Carol (interleaving quite a bit of Mr. Zechman's prose) has contemplated the same bone-chilling possibilities I foresee, whoever is elected. She comes to a different conclusion on whom to vote for, but only by a hair. You'd better start thinking about what life will be like without the crux of the New Deal to civilize the jungle that is America today, because neither major party candidate will keep it safe, and no minor party candidate has a chance in Hell. Go vote, and Dog preserve you all from the worst possible results.

How Does Mitt Lie To Thee? Let Me Count The Ways...

I'm running into bandwidth problems viewing my own blog on this ancient computer, so I don't want to post yet another video right away. But when I refer you to this YouTube video of Mitt Rmoney's lies (H/T TPM) from last Wednesday's debate, thirty (30) of them laid end to end (apologies to Dorothy Parker), I hope you take it as seriously as if I had posted it right here. Seeing all of Rmoney's lies debunked in one place is no shocker, of course; it must have been a systematic if tedious effort by the debunkers. But seeing that virtually every significant statement Rmoney made that entire night long was a lie, including all his manifestly false accusations against Obama, surely gives us insight into Rmoney's character. Why would anyone consider voting for this con man?

I Am One Of The 89 Million

There was considerable argument last night over Rmoney's unsupported statement that his proposed replacement for Obamacare assured coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions.

Well, apparently, he held that position for the duration of the debate and a few hours on either side of it. Via Paul Krugman, we have Sarah Kliff on Ezra Klein's Wonkblog:

...

Pants on Fire!

It started with the Republican presidential candidate saying during an appearance on “Meet the Press” that he liked the Affordable Care Act’s provision that requires insurers to cover preexisting conditions, and would support something similar. Hours later, his campaign clarified he did not, however, support a federal ban against denying coverage for preexisting conditions. Around 10 p.m., the Romney camp had circled back to the same position it held back in March: that the governor supports coverage for preexisting conditions for people who have had continuous coverage.

...

Please read both Krugman's and Kliff's posts; both are informative... and eyebrow-raising. In short, Rmoney lied about favoring coverage of preexisting conditions. How many Americans would fall through the cracks if continuous coverage were required to obtain coverage of preexisting conditions?

About eighty-nine million... 89,000,000.

I am among the 89 million. Many of my friends are among the 89 million. How many of those people watched the debate, but did not stay tuned for long enough to hear Rmoney's staff issue the correction? In essence, Rmoney used the way the debate is framed to swindle the American people out of preexisting condition coverage... while telling them the exact opposite.

Older Republicans and Republicans with chronic illnesses must be desperate to capture the presidency if they can vote for this chronic liar.

AFTERTHOUGHT: this phenomenon may explain in part why Rmoney effectively won the debate. Obama saw it as his duty to explain how things are and how they can be repaired. Rmoney, not the first politician to do so, feels free to promise anything... anything, true or false... if it gains him votes. Republicans promise pie-in-the-sky; what they deliver is all too often pie-in-the-face. But some Americans inevitably believe them. Suckers!

CPPP: If Rick Perry Accepted Texas Participation In ACA, Texas Uninsured Count Would Be Cut In Half

According to a new report, Choices and Challenges, issued by the Center for Public Policy Priorities (press release [.pdf], full report [.pdf]), thanks to "Gov. Goodhair" Perry's rejection back in July, along with other Republican governors, of his state's full participation in all parts of the Affordable Care Act, we are losing an opportunity to cut Texas's uninsured rate in half.

In other words, half of the people in Texas who have no medical insurance now would be able to obtain insurance, if Gov. Perry would relent on his heartless commitment to... well, to whom, exactly? His refusal is even bad for the state's health care industry! ThinkProgress put it this way back in July:

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Perry’s announcement is an especially harmful move because Texas will benefit more from the Affordable Care Act than any other state. Texas was recently ranked worst in the country for health care delivery by the federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, scoring “weak” or “very weak” in nine of 12 categories. Perry’s office discounted the study as overly broad, and has argued that Texans’ real problem is personal health choices, not lack of health insurance.

More than 25 percent of Texans – 6,234,900 people – are uninsured, the highest rate in the nation. ...

...

Between Perry's dismissal of people's need for medical insurance (reminiscent of the CEO of Whole Paycheck a few years ago) and Mitt Rmoney's remarks about the 47% who are dependent on the government, this seems to be "National Republican Blame‑the‑Victim Week." They really are proper bastards, aren't they?

So WTF are Perry and three other Republican governors thinking? Matthew DeLuca at The Daily Beast attempts to answer that question:

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Perry may not like the idea of expanding Medicaid,  ... Some studies show that without the Affordable Care Act, the number of uninsured Texans could climb all the way to one third of the population.

Health care is one of the state’s biggest industries, and hospitals in Texas are likely to push hard in the coming months to get the Lone Star State to take Obamacare into its warm embrace. ...

...

Let me insert a note: a quick glance does not show any change in Perry's position since July (ThinkProgress Aug. 27, Dallas Morning News Sep. 17). Resuming DeLuca:

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The Affordable Care Act is supposed to go into full effect in 2014, but Perry says he will not implement the expansion of Medicaid or creation of a state health-care exchange prescribed by the law. ...

“To expand this program is like adding a thousand people to the Titanic,” Perry said Monday on Fox News. “You don’t expand a program that is not working already.”

...

Could we please arrange for a deck chair for Gov. Perry? His disinclination to implement federal law (even if he is legally entitled... can I say "entitled" about a Republican?) reminds me of the Tea Party, or worse. Say, could we arrange for the TP to make up the rest of the "thousand people"?