Caissons go rolling along

This HBO documentary made tears keep rolling down my cheeks this beautiful Memorial Day.

Semper Fi

(h/t Boston Globe)

Pure blame-shifting

It really shouldn't surprise anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the House teabaggers have zero sincere interest in a deal to forestall the sequester. John Boehner (R-no) is on record as having gotten 98% of what he wanted in the original deal, and even allowing for a bit of hyperbole in that number, he knows he's not going to get a better deal, especially now that President Obama has found his spine.

Instead, what Boehner wants to do is shift the blame for the cuts onto Obama and the Democrats. He and his party of mercenary bastards really do believe that perception is reality. Thus the only thing that matters to him in the sequestration fight is to win the battle of perception.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt people. Republicans don't care about anyone who's vulnerable.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the economy. Republicans have shown for years that the size of the economic pie doesn't matter to them. They in fact support economic inequality as a desirable goal, not merely a side effect of their desire to drown the government in the bathtub. When the economy hurts the middle class (and the forgotten poor), it also hurts the wealthy, but the wealthy recover their losses and attain even greater plutocratic power over the rest of us. And that's what Republicans support.

Never mind whether these cuts hurt the military, even. Since the voters no longer trust Republicans more than Democrats on the military, blame-shifting this is the GOP's way of trying to get that trust back. Obviously, an undeserving way.

Fortunately, Boehner seems to be failing to convince Americans that his lies are true. This must come as a surprise to him, since he and the Republicans have been so often successful at that in the past.

Update (3/1): Yep:

Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama.

Fly, little ones, fly away

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Ain't socialism if there's killin' involved

Balanced on this knife edge

Like a Phoenix from the ashes of its 1980 debacle at Desert One, JSOC has risen to possess America's licence [sic] to kill:

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command ... even existed.

This kind of elite force is not easy to create. But, once one is created, the hardest task of a democracy is to keep it restrained to uses against our enemies. Once the impossible doesn't take long at all to do, it's easy for politicians to turn elite military units into instruments of personal power instead of their intended use as instruments of national defense.

Under President George W. Bush, JSOC’s operations were rarely briefed to Congress in advance — and usually not afterward, either — because government lawyers considered them to be “traditional military activities” not requiring such notification. President Obama has taken the same legal view, but he has insisted that JSOC’s sensitive missions be briefed to select congressional leaders.

No surprise that a Democrat is better than a Republican. Also no surprise that he's not that much better.

JSOC has made brilliant use of sigint to locate targets.

The Iraqi insurgency’s reliance on modern technology also gave tech-savvy JSOC and its partners, particularly the National Security Agency, an advantage. The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. “We just had a field day,” said a senior JSOC commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe secret operations.

This is more than likely part of what Bob Woodward likened to the Manhattan Project three years ago.

Still, some of that technology has been in use in American cities for a decade or more. Our cell phones track our movements. Acoustic listening posts triangulate gunshots origins in high-crime areas. We seize and do forensics on alleged criminals' electronic devices (rightly so with a warrant).

It's only a matter of time before JSOC innovations get used domestically. How likely is it in the modern American surveillance state that there will be Constitutional controls? And I really don't have enough of a neo-Confederate sense of humor to laugh at one of JSOC's nicknames, "the Secret Army of Northern Virginia."

Killing the safety net

Zillions for offense, not a penny for anything else.

Or something...

Even saying fuck, fuck, fuck, which I seem to be doing a lot lately, is not cathartic enough to glide past $3.7 trillion.

Why truth is more important than civility

I don't give a shit if Glenn Greenwald is a rude bastard.  I don't fucking care if Michael Hastings is an arrogant asshole.  What I care about is whether they're telling me truths that I need to know to be a well-informed, effective citizen of a democracy.  Greenwald:

Granting anonymity to powerful political and military officials to attack journalists, watchdogs and whistleblowers is about the lowest and most journalistically reckless act a reporter and their editors can undertake -- recall this recent anonymous attack on departing TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky by a Treasury official and enabled by The Washington Post -- as it turns these media outlets into nothing more than protectors of those officials and mindless amplifiers of their attacks, which, thanks to the anonymity, can never be engaged. But that's what they want to be; it's what they are; and that's why these officials tell them they will comment only under the cover of anonymity: because they know it will be immediately granted the minute it's demanded regardless of whether there is any journalistic justification for it.

Anonymity does have a valid purpose in journalism: its legitimate purpose is to protect the vulnerable and powerless when they expose wrongdoing by those who wield power. But most establishment journalists have completely reversed that, so that anonymity is used to protect those with the most power: to enable them to make all sorts of public claims and launch all kinds of attacks on critics without being accountable. When anonymity is used for those purposes, it is inherently and incomparably corrupt (that, of course, is the dynamic that led to public acceptance of patently false claims justifying the Iraq War). But this perversion of anonymity from what it was supposed to be (a means of holding the powerful accountable) into a power-shielding weapon is simply a microcosm of the broader reversal by establishment journalists of the old dictate to "afflict the powerful and comfort the powerless." Most establishment journalists -- by definition -- do exactly the opposite, and their eagerness to indiscriminately grant anonymity to the nation's most powerful officials is simply one manifestation of that power-serving mindset.

What I want is to avoid the big media's serving me bullshit, calling it foie gras, and expecting me to like the fucking taste.

The use by the military of psy ops on elected officials is not treason, but it's a crime.  I'm not disposed to treat that lightly.

"My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave," says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. "I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line."

I'm guessing the only bird Holmes will ever see won't be very goddamn polite, but even so, a Lt. Col. is not exactly a wet-behind-the-ears OCS graduate.

One true exceptionalism of America has been our unwillingness to sit still for official bullshit.  When did we lose that?

If deficits really mattered

Someone in government would make a credible plan:

First, spending on high-return public investments should be increased. Even if this widens the deficit in the short run, it will reduce the national debt in the long run. What business wouldn't jump at investment opportunities yielding returns in excess of 10% if it could borrow capital – as the US government can – for less than 3% interest?

Second, military expenditures must be cut – not just funding for the fruitless wars, but also for the weapons that don't work against enemies that don't exist. The US has continued as if the cold war never came to an end, spending nearly as much on defence as the rest of the world combined.

Following this is the need to eliminate corporate welfare. Even as America has stripped away its safety net for people, it has strengthened the safety net for firms, evidenced so clearly in the great recession with the bailouts of AIG, Goldman Sachs, and other banks.

...

Creating a fairer and more efficient tax system, by eliminating the special treatment of capital gains and dividends, is also needed. Why should those who work for a living be subject to higher tax rates than those who reap their livelihood from speculation (often at the expense of others)?

Finally, with more than 20% of all income going to the top 1%, a slight increase, say 5%, in taxes actually paid would bring in more than $1tn over the course of a decade.

Instead, it's left to the fantasy of liberal economists who have zero power.

Republicans don't care about the deficit

They just don't.

Anyone who claims otherwise is lying or a fool.

Let's pretend

The Department of Defense and the rest of the government to employees: We prefer you to be ignorant even if it means not reading something potentially embarrassing to your management that everyone else in the world has access to.

"Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority," said the notice sent on Friday afternoon by the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, to agency and department heads, urging them to distribute it to their staff.

The strange thing is that doing something stupid like sending this notice is not embarrassing to the White House.

What Republicans really care about

Lower taxes for rich people outweigh all other issues.

The deficit? Not as important as lower taxes for the rich.

A reduced risk of nuclear proliferation or war? Not as important as lower taxes for the rich.

Citizenship for immigrant soldiers? Not as important as lower taxes for the rich.

Extension of unemployment benefits? Of course, not as important as lower taxes for the rich.

Repeal of don't ask, don't tell? Oh, right, they're against that anyway.

The core Republican view of the world holds that, if rich people are even better off, everyone else is either better off or doesn't deserve to be better off. Mostly the latter. Peons.

Blind faith is practice for conservatism

There's no possible doubt that many people choose the beliefs they take to be true. Reason, as I'm learning the more I read about neuropsychology (currently, How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer), is only part of the decision to believe.

Often, a very small part. Some believers intentionally push reason aside for a heady brew of reflex, prejudice, and blind faith in received wisdom. Even if that wisdom was only slightly wiser than the violent and tribal surrounding society of 2000 years ago...

Bushists believe that Duhbya went to church a lot, not because it's true but because they know it. Facts - he didn't - and memory - his absence was reported in real time - don't bleedin' enter into it. Duhbya talked about Gawd all the goddamned time - and talked about prayin' and blessings and reading Scripture (capital S, by gum). Flaying his faith like Elmer Gantry, they're sure that he surely must've been sitting in a pew nearly every Sunday, not just Christmas, Easter, and National Prayer Day. Even if their senses should tell them that he wasn't.

Who you gonna believe - faith or your lyin' eyes?

When Duhbya recently met some soldiers at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on their return home on a two-week break from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other, unspecified billets, one of my Facebook friends, an evangelical Christian, commented about how much the Bushes love our troops. I bit my tongue and didn't ask her for evidence. You can find more of her faithful compatriots among the commenters on the Dallas Morning News site.

There was one previous time that Duhbya greeted returning sailors. Mission accomplished!

But Bush was in office for more than seven years while our troops were in combat in Afghanistan and for nearly six while they were in combat in Iraq, and I don't recall any other time that he greeted them. He never went to greet the fallen in their caskets at Dover AFB (something President Obama had done already ten months ago), and he only went to Walter Reed to see the wounded after the scandal of the grim conditions there broke.

But Duhbya loves him some fighting men (and women).

If you are practiced well at believing in your own personal Jesus and you thank him every time another Vicodin relieves the pain of your kidney stone (Facebook again), you're well prepared to believe that a man who got 4000 Americans killed and many more maimed in a war of choice loves the troops.

Don't ask, don't tell

Click image for full Bado/Le Droit cartoon.

Independence

Still slinging it

McChrystal, fired for insubordinately trying to make his biggest boss look bad, again tries to make President Obama look bad.

Good riddance! Take your fired ass back wherever you'd like to retire.

McChrystal's gambit

You're running a war. It isn't going well. Your troops are trapped in swirling dust populated by hostile Pashtuns around Kandahar. When the local Taliban need to, they can slip easily across the border into the safety of Pakistan.

Worst, you've agreed to a deadline, you've stated in public that you'll be finished with counter-insurgency by summer 2011.

What do you do?

You either need to be fired, in which case it will be President Obama's fault for nicking the indispensable man (heh) on the threshold of success. Or you need to paint the President and other civilian authorities into a corner so that they'll have to acquiesce to grinding more meat in Afghanistan. You care about your place in history and even project it on your government:

“[Ambassador Karl Eikenberry]’s one that covers his flanks for the history books,” General McChrystal is quoted as saying. “Now, if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

You think Obama can't afford to be a firm manager of the military in the run-up to the difficult 2010 midterms. So you thumb your nose and dare him to fire you.

It's time to reassert civilian control of the military.

Update (6/25): Chan Lowe sees McChrystal's escape too.

If other people can say "What Digby said"...

... so can I:

"Deficit reduction" doesn't mean deficit reduction. It means welfare state reduction, period. Military spending is sacred --- like the right to pack heat in church and gas guzzling. It is non-negotiable.

Update (6/18): Yet again, deficit hawks on anything that doesn't benefit their wealthy corporate sponsors...

Dishonorable discharge

Under UCMJ, desertion carries the death penalty. But reduction in rank and 25 years in the stockade ought to be enough.

By the way, even though it's clear that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, I would assert that he is a natural born citizen no matter where he was born because his mother was a citizen at the time of his birth. And there's no explication of the phrase nor any case law to contradict me.

The young apprentice

Click image for full Jack Ohman/Portland Oregonian cartoon.