On Hitchens

Ohh ooohh goody! Lets get smacking!

Agree or not, Christopher Hitchens is extremely serious, and so is his point. I disagreed with him about the war, but I never questioned his sincerity and found some of his arguments stirring, though in the end, romantically naïve. In this case, I think his reasoning is sound and so are his conclusions.

The Republican party made a deal with the devil in the last 40 years, and Sarah Palin is that deal's apotheosis. She is the goddess of ignorance, incuriosity, and bigoted exceptionalism that handed the Republicans from William F Buckley to George Bush. But she isn’t the cause. I don’t blame her. She is just another of the gifts from this fetid period in American politics along with collapsing bridges, flooded streets, overfilled prisons, incomprehensible debts, boiling oceans, blood soaked deserts, peeping toms in our inboxes and know-nothing religious fanatics on our school boards and bedrooms. This is the legacy of this president and the whole failed, bankrupt period of corporate maximalism he has happily killed. Governor Palin’s presence on the national stage –however galling- is just a trifle compared to that legacy of destruction.

But it is also in that context that Palin’s remarks must be heard. Is it defensible to say that she was critiquing our admittedly lousy and corrupt earmark system? Yes, but not plausible. It can only be read as it was intended: another attack on science, rigor, results competence and curiosity from the millennial wing of the republican party. Read Chris Mooney’s book The Republican War on Science for examples of ideology trumping sound science. Read Rajiv Chadresekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone for examples of how purity became more important than ability in the botched occupation of Iraq. Or Thomas Ricks’ book Fiasco. Or The Dark Side by Jane Mayer. Or just look at your 401(k) and then at the salaries of the heads of our non-existent banking sector to see how theological purity triumphed over merit these last years.

As for examples of how she has imposed her religious views on others, I can’t say exactly, because maybe her religious views are shared by many of her constituents and very few felt imposed upon. Beside the point. The point is that religious doctrine made into policy is un-American and dangerous. The example I will give of that is Intelligent Design. When running for governor she said:

Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.

This is… breathtakingly disingenuous. I don’t need to go into the charlatanism of ID here. Read Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, by philosopher Barbara Forrest and biologist Paul Gross. They exhaustively demonstrate it is religion, all the way down. ID has no place in our biology classes, period. You want to teach your kid the evangelical line? Religious liberty gives you the opportunity to do so, as you please. There are many places around the world, where the state has an official religion, where religious minorities don’t have that freedom. That isn’t her beef. Governor Palin and her ilk are pissed because they’re the religious majority, and they can’t force it on others. Its not enough to teach their own kids; they have to teach everyone else’s kids too.

Peggy Noonan wrote, “The Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country.”

I say Noonan has some brass putting it that way, but what the hell, better late than never. Now if only the republican party could pull itself out of our bedrooms, stop purging voting rolls, quit torturing people, close the American gulags, stop trying to replace science with theology, let whoever wants to vote vote and actually engaged the problems of the day, they might win back the country’s trust

And about Reverend Wright on AIDS. I wrote about that here:

But in brief:
• There is absolutely no credible evidence that the United States government or anyone else couled have engineered the HIV virus.
BUT
• Wright did not say the US invented HIV at the National Press Club this year. He said “Any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.”
• Wright was referring to US sales of biological weapons to Saddam Hussein that were confirmed in February 1994, when then-Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan held hearings on Gulf War syndrome
• There are many people who deny that HIV causes AIDS, the most famous being UC Berkeley Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Peter H. Duesberg, who isolated the first cancer gene. He is an expert in retroviruses and on that basis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. His letters and commentaries challenging the theory that HIV causes AIDS have been published in the Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Journal of AIDS and the New England Journal of Medicine.
• The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, left 400 black men with syphilis untreated and deceived. For 40 years. Federally employed doctors told the men they were getting an experimental drug. This was a lie. There was no drug.
• Many of the men’s wives and children were infected.
• The program was stopped not 100 years ago, but in 1972.

So which is crazier? To question whether a government that countenanced the needless suffering of death of its most vulnerable citizens “to see what happened” might have been involved in a repeat performance a couple of years later? or suggesting that evolution is a farce foisted on us by atheists?

The sooner this time, and by extension Sarah Palin’s , passes, the better all of our lives will be.

Climate-Change Views: Republican-Democratic Gaps Expand in Recent Years

Acceptance by the American people of human-caused climate change has closely tracked by Gallup for the last decade. And the trend has the same direction as the scientific consensus. When asked what kind of action is needed to address global warming:




So people are getting the message. Maybe not quickly, but surely. In January of this year, 61% of Americans said the effects of global warming have already begun. I was a bit surprised that only a little more than a third say they worry about it a great deal, a percentage that held steady for 19 years.

Gallup did a follow on analysis to break apart those big numbers, and not surprisingly they found that party affiliation had an influence on the numbers. From Gallup -



That is interesting. The general trend is one way -

61% of Americans currently say "[effects from climate change] have already begun to happen." an... increase from 1997, when 48% gave this response.

So the trend is driven not by a general move, but a strong move among a sub-group. One group of people is moving strongly, while another is unmoved, unconvinced.

[O]ver three-fourths of Democrats (76%) believe global warming is already happening, only 41% of Republicans share that view.

This has all happened since 1997, when -

[N]early identical percentages of Republicans and Democrats (47% and 46%) indicated that global warming was already happening.

These are all interesting, but the number that needs to shift for their to be a viable green economy is this one:
Will global warming be a serious threat in my lifetime?

What Would You Have Asked?

Charlie sat down with Obama on June 4th. An African American man has clinched* the Democratic nomination. We are at war. The debt is $9,500,000,000,000. Is this what you care about hearing?

These are questions posed to Obama by Charles Gibson -

GIBSON: Senator, I'm curious about your feelings last night. It was an historic moment. Has it sunk in yet?

GIBSON: What'd [your grandmother] say?

GIBSON: Public moments are not your own. There's a million people pulling you in a million different directions, but when everybody clears out, the staff is gone, you're in your hotel room at night and you're alone -- do you say to yourself: "Son of a gun, I've done this?"

GIBSON: (inaudible) when you announced, did you truly, in your gut, think that a black man could win the nomination of a major party to be president of the United States?

GIBSON: You don't get much time to enjoy this before people immediately start talking about the vice presidency. On what criteria and what timetable will you choose a vice president? But there obviously is one name that looms over all. Hillary Clinton has already, to some extent, expressed her willingness. There are supporters putting out petitions. There is a drumbeat of pressure. There are those 18 million votes. Is she a special case that you have to deal with before the others, or is she considered just like everybody else? How long can you let the "Hillary Clinton on the ticket" question linger? Does there have to be a yes or no on the issue of Hillary Clinton before you get to the others, or can this issue linger on, because it pervades everything? So, you won't do -- you won't deal with her first, get that out of the way, and then either move on or not? As long as that question lingers, can you get about the business of unifying the party, or does that have to be taken care of first? Did she squeeze you in any way by making known her interest in the job? Should you choose her, how do you handle Bill Clinton?

GIBSON: On what three issues will this campaign turn to you?

GIBSON: Do you worry that it could turn on race, age and class?

GIBSON: John McCain has issued an invitation to do a series of town meetings (inaudible). Going to do it?

GIBSON: Will you go to Iraq?

GIBSON: Public financing: Going to take it or going to say no? But there's a dynamic on your side, as well. You originally said you would take it. If you already see that money coming in, it seems to me you're saying...

GIBSON: Is the hardest part of all this behind you or ahead of you?

GIBSON: The picture of you in the paper, this morning, with your wife, watching the Clinton speech. What did you think of the Clinton speech? She didn't exactly acknowledge your victory.

GIBSON: And finally your daughters. What did they say to you? Did they take it as a matter of course that Daddy could be nominated to be president? They never knew what older people know in terms of discrimination, although they may still feel some. What did they say about that?

GIBSON: I watched closely your countenance last night, your mien, as you stood in that hall. You didn't smile much. Has the joyfulness of this hit home yet? Do you take joy from it?

Questions Worth Asking

How will we get the questions we want answered to the candidates?

Another Question Worth Asking

Are the people who believe these are the important questions a large enough block to sway this election?

Should Obama fear the legacy of the long primary?

The RNC just released this:




How damaging is this? I guess you'd have to ask who it is aimed at. What is the audience for this? Does this motivate their base? Not for any reason I can see. They may not like Obama, but their beef is with McCain and this doesn't give any of the Ron Paul, Bob Barr or Evenagelicals a reason to come out for McCain.

Will this sway independents? Might. Other than Edwards, these are not super popular politicians swinging at Obama. Do independents sit up and take notice because of a warning from Joe (who?) Biden? meh.

So why use voices of Congressional Democrats? Who don't Republicans and Independents, especially Independents, want to hear from? Congressional Republicans. Or the President. Or anyone else in the Republican Party.



McCain needs the evangelicals to come out for him. From CBS -

White evangelical Republicans were 14 percent of the 2004 general electorate. More importantly, white evangelical Republicans comprised 25 percent of Bush's vote, favoring him 97 percent to three percent for Kerry. Losing this bloc of support, or even a portion of it, would be fatal to McCain's candidacy.

Does this hit their issues? Is this what their concerned about? Will this kind of negative appeal get them out to the polls?

We'll see, but this sure looks like an appeal to the disaffected Clinton voter, and well done by the RNC. This is the best time to twist that knife. Now is when they are most upset. And therein lies the...

Question worth asking:

Will the iron cool in the next five months as disappointed (bitter?) Clinton supporters meet the charming Senator McCain again?

Another question worth asking:

Are the Republicans betting that the personal antipathy the older women - who are really the angry folks here- feel towards Obama is stronger than than their antipathy to Antonin Scalia, a $9,500,000,000,000 debt or the War in Iraq?

The Fountain of Youth: History is Not a Cage

From the Washington Post -

For much of the world, Sen. Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic primaries was a moment to admire the United States, at a time when the nation's image abroad is in tatters.

How big is this?

"This is close to a miracle. I was certain that some things will not happen in my lifetime," said Sunila Patel, 62, a widow encountered on the streets of New Delhi. "A black president of the U.S. will mean that there will be more American tolerance for people around the world who are different."

"The primaries showed that the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be...," said Minoru Morita, a Tokyo political analyst.

I am drawn to this and repelled to this, but not exactly in equal measure. After so much nastiness, disorder and hope in the dark, it's beautiful to see hope back out in the light. And yet...

I interviewed the author Russell Banks on Your Call on June 3rd for his new book Dreaming Up America. Banks' believes that the American Dream is actually three dreams, interconnected, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes opposed. The three are:

El Dorado- The dream of Paradise through material acquisition.

The City on the Hill- We can create a society where all people are free.

The Fountain of Youth- History is not a limit on what you can become. You can always be reborn.

Our dream since at least Ronald Reagan has been an intoxicating combination of the Fountain of Youth and El Dorado. Our fantasy is that we will all one day be rich, so one day we will be happy because we are good.

Banks traces that combination of dreams - freeing ourselves from history and the search for material wealth - to the mindset of the Conquistadors, who wanted nothing but gold from our shores and time enough to enjoy it.

The result is well documented in the sanguinary pages of our history books. When you read them, or just look outside your window, it is easy to see that an individual may leave their history behind, but it doesn't just sit where you left it.

We can say 9-11 had nothing to do with American policy. We can believe and even act on that. But there it will be.

So it is appealing to read this:

"Obama is the exciting image of what we always hoped America was," said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London think tank.

It is appealing to see the Fountain of Youth appear again to challenge us, not simply to comfort us. Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream Speech, after all, was about transcending a racist past. But not forgetting it. bringing it with us, but not letting it doom us.

Much of the interest simply reflects hunger for change from President Bush, who is deeply unpopular in much of the world. At the same time, many people abroad seemed impressed -- sometimes even shocked -- by the wide-open nature of U.S. democracy, and the history-making race between a woman and a black man

.

Many people here too. And here is that dream again.

On Leadership

Heard an interview with Ralph Nader today on KALW in San Francisco. When he was asked why he was running as an independent and not in the Green Party he said there was too much petty, bickering in the Green Party.

Question Worth Asking

Mr Nader, if you can't organize and lead a party composed of people who agree with your policy positions, how are you going to lead a country filled with people who don't?

Another Question Worth Asking

Petty? Bickering? You sure he was talking about the fringes of the far left?

Another Question Worth Asking

Do the numerous lefties who say that "politics isn't/shouldn't be a popularity contest" listen to what they are saying?

The Origin of the Origin of the AIDS Myth

I was listening to Talk of the Nation Science Friday. Jon Moore, a Professor of Microbiology at Cornell University Hospital was on discussing the state of the art in AIDS treatment. He said something that surprised me. It seems that the source of the myth that the US created AIDS is actually well known.

He said it was a propaganda campaign from the old KGB coordinated by the Stasi, the German Secret Police. This is from the book Comrade Kryuchkov's Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975-1985 published by Stanford University Press.

[Service A's] main triumphs occurred in the Third World where it was able to tap a rich vein of anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism, combined with receptiveness to conspiracy theory about the West. In 1983, Service A began to disseminate the claim that AIDS virus had been 'manufactured' at Fort Detrick,Maryland. The story was slow to take off. But form late 1985 onwards it swept the Third World as well as taking in some Western media. In the first six months of 1987 alone, the AIDS fabrication received major news coverage in over forty Third World countries.

The source for this revelation is former KGB Col. Oleg Gordievsky, who was also a double agent for British intelligence.

Question Worth Asking

How do you combat a pernicious misperception when facts don't do the trick?

Another Question Worth Asking

How many people have died for this clever bit of spy craft in support of a government that no longer exists?

Another Question Worth Asking

Do the people who cooked this up still find it funny, or only then?

Another Question Worth Asking

Have the lives saved come anywhere close to the lives lost because of covert intelligence agencies?

Popular Will

The American working man needs defending, and the army of supporters is vast.

Well mostly from rich people. Rich media people. Rich foppish, WASPy millionaire elite fanboys of the supernal Homo Americanus.

That man is George F. Will. Barack Obama only the second non-millionaire to win his party's endorsement for President in since 1964 impugned their impugnable honor:

Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

Awww! Burn! And sliming the man's wife isn't all he's got: Will has more:

What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

Will's column is a bravura performance. He bludgeons Obama with FDR, marries Bhim to the ineffectual -and equally weirdly named- Adlai Stevenson, makes a brief detour to kick the corpse of Marxism, before watching the glory of the American sun set over heroic Muncie, Indiana.

Of course this about the bitter comment. But what truly was he saying? Sometimes people's economic interests aren't the only thing that determines their vote.

Clearly this is some new post-racial creeping fascism? Will has surely done it this time and relegated the quasi-fascist ideology of liberalism to history's ash can.

I do like Jonathan Chait's response to Will in the New Republic called Popular Will -

[C]onservatives routinely express their fury that a majority of Jews stubbornly flout their own "self-interest"--defined as low tax rates and a maximally hawkish Middle East policy--to vote Democratic. The process of trying to persuade others to reconsider the nature of their self-interest is not some Marxist exercise or an accusation of false consciousness. It's what we call "democracy."

Question worth asking:

Can we stop using Brazil to illustrate inequality and instead wave our hands around and say,"mmhmmm"?

Another Question Worth Asking:

In a speech in 2007 Warren Buffett pointed out that his tax rate was 17.7 per cent while his secretary was taxed at 30 per cent. Does he hate working people too?

What does it take to get fired around here?

Jerk -

On the April 27 edition of CNN's Sunday Morning, National Public Radio political editor Ken Rudin, during a discussion about the Democratic presidential primary race, stated: "[L]et's be honest here, [Sen.] Hillary Clinton is Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. She's going to keep coming back, and they're not going to stop her."

Question worth asking:

What is an NPR political editor doing on Fox and not, you know, editing another Juan Williams hack job?

Another Question Worth Asking:

Is that what happened to Socks?

Another Question Worth Asking:

Why is witty so hard and witless so hard to recognize before political editors open their mouths?

What Did He Say: AIDS

ISSUE 1: US involvement in AIDS

On Sept. 16, 2001, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright said from the pulpit: "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color."

If this were true, then we live in a nightmare. If this were false, then Wright has reinforced an ignorant and destructive calumny. I see no evidence to believe that this accusation is true.

But he didn't say that at the National Press Club. He was asked if he honestly believed those words and he said:

Have you read Horowitz's book, "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola"? Have you read "Medical Apartheid"?

I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven't read things, then you can't -- based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the -- one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non- question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.

So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

It must be said at the outset that this answer is incoherent, veering widely in search of a handhold on something to throw, some way to regain the offensive. But the two points, while unrelated to one another, are true.

Selling Biological Weapons to Iraq


Let's take the second one first, because that one is easy. We sold them chemical weapons. This is from GlobalSecurity.org:

US government documents showed that from 1985 to 1989 pathogenic, toxigenic, and other hazardous materials were legally exported from the United States to Iraq... [T]he list of biological items legally exported during that period includes botulinum toxin, anthrax, gas gangrene, and vials of West Nile fever virus and Dengue fever... [T]he information first surfaced in February 1994, when then-Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan held hearings on Gulf War syndrome.

The US sold biological weapons to Saddam Hussein. He used them, people died. Period.



- December 20, 1983-Iraqi television; courtesy CNN

Tuskeegee

The Tuskeegee experiment is also undeniably real. Its proper and full name is the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. It was run in Macon, Georgia by the United States Public Health Service.

400 black men with syphilis were left untreated, lied to and told they were receiving an experimental medicine. For 40 years, government doctors studied the course of the easily curable disease. When press exposure finally brought this "experiment" to a close, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.

So when was this? Jim Crow days? Just after reconstruction?

The denial of care for these men ended in mid-1972, the year my sister was born. Five survivors attended an apology ceremony at the White House in 1997. Mary Harper, the last surviving nurse who assisted in the experiment died a year and a half ago. To this day, 19 widows and children affected by this inhumanity are still receiving government benefits.

This isn't history yet; these people live on. And they live on in the memories of black kids alive today, some who will survive to see the 150 year anniversary of the experiment's launch in 2082. And they will make it real for another generation.

Tuskeegee is alive in the popular imagination because it is fresh and it because it distills America's degradation of black people: we watched them die to see what happened.




Reverend Wright is unimpeachable when he says, "I believe our government is capable of doing anything." The unsupportable claims about the origin of AIDS have resonance because of Tuskeegee. What won't a government do if it will countenance the needless suffering of its most vulnerable? What won't a government do if it will allow other people to be infected and die?

The outraged act as if Wright invented this history.

AIDS deniers were never the majority and have been isolated in a scientific backwater, but they were not all charlatans. UC Berkeley Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Peter H. Duesberg isolated the first cancer gene. He is an expert in retroviruses and on that basis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. His letters and commentaries challenging the theory that HIV causes AIDS have been published in the Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Journal of AIDS and the New England Journal of Medicine.

From the condemnation of Reverend Wright, you'd think a bunch of ghetto black folk ginned up this whole AIDS conspiracy theory around a plate of crack when they should have been working or raising their kids. Bettering themselves.

Lets look at what he said again, (cleaned up for enhanced comprehensibility which was in short supply in the original answer):

[A] government [that] can [sell] biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when [they] use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

Is it a pity that many African-Americans believe what is not justified by science? Yes. It is a pity because AIDS infection and mortality rates are significantly higher in the African American community than in any other.

But it is not a pity because they believe what dominant culture dismisses as paranoid fantasy. Tuskeegee is the most infamous, but it is not the only experimentation on black people.

In Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, author Harriet Washington tells the story of James Marion Sims, a 19th-century surgeon who was celebrated in his day as the founder of gynecology for advances he made repairing severe vaginal injuries that can occur in childbirth.

Sims honed his skills by performing scores of painful operations on the genitals of black slaves.

Question worth asking:

Does white America too easily dismiss the possibility that it is true?

Another question worth asking:

Does white America too easily dismiss the possibility there is something to learn from people who are sometimes wrong?

Another question worth asking:

Who gets a second chance to be taken seriously?

Another question worth asking:

Is this too the legacy of Tuskeegee: black men are less likely to wear condoms because they don't believe what they're told about AIDS?

Rand did a study in 2005 that found:

* 59 percent [of African-Americans] agreed with the statement that “a lot of information about AIDS is being held back from the public.”

* 53 percent [of African-Americans] agreed that “there is a cure for AIDS, but it is being withheld from the poor.”

* Nearly 27 percent [of African-Americans]agreed that “AIDS was produced in a government laboratory.”

* About 16 percent [of African-Americans]agreed that AIDS was created by the government to control the black population.

* About 15 [of African-Americans]percent agreed that AIDS is a form of genocide against African Americans.

So black men use condoms less and black women are the fastest growing population of new HIV infections.

Writer Earl Ofari Hutchison was on to something when he wrote

If, as AIDS activists claim, and the RAND study at least inferentially seems to confirm, reckless conspiracy theories about the AIDS plague among blacks are a cause of needless deaths and suffering within black communities, black leaders must speak out loudly against them. It's not a matter of racial one-upmanship. It's a matter of saving lives.

Reverend Wright had the opportunity to set something right. To heal and reveal. He chose not to do so and that should be pointed out. He could have said, because of the truth of America's past, there are those who fall prey to falsehoods today.

Bigots with degrees gussied up their racist untruths in white labcoats. Now, many people, black and white, are wary of the fruits of science.

Another question worth asking:

What needs to change in America for both parts of that paragraph to be appalling?

Reverend Wright could have struck a blow against some of the many faces of ignorance. For all the failings of the scientific endeavor, it is open to correction. It is not the only path, but science has been a powerful tool for liberation. Ignorance and superstition leave us bound.

Was what he said outrageous? Sadly, not at all.

What Did He Say? Part I

Obama has condemned the speech given by Reverend Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club on April 28th. This was Obama's reaction. -

I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday... His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either.

There are Lefty bloggers applauding Obama for "finally" starting to show justified anger at Wright. Others regret that the crude racism of American politics and risks of the GOP frightening white voters made it necessary.

I'm asking again though about what he said. The man's words. What did he say that was so objectionable? Here is Obama's line up:

[W]hen he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS, when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century, when he equates the United States wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans.

So there are three outrageous things:
1. U.S. government somehow involved in AIDS
2. Farrakhan is one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century
3. Equating United States wartime efforts with terrorism

We'll take them one at a time.

Yet Again Finland Shows the Way

From the paranoid geniuses at Stratfor -

At the end of World War II, the Soviets wanted to ensure that Finland could never again bloody the Russian nose (casualty ratios in the Russo-Finnish War, or Winter War, of 1939-1940 were the worst Soviet Russia ever suffered). Yet the bulk of Finland was not in Soviet hands at war’s end, and the Western powers certainly did not want to see the balance of power in the Baltic states altered... The result was a “free” Finland with a capitalist economy and a robust defense force, but a country that did not join either NATO or the European Economic Community and remained strictly neutral in international affairs.

Replicating the Finnish example in Iraq would create a united Iraq with American security guarantees that could prevent any Iranian incursion into Arabia, but with sufficient Iranian aspects to prevent the formation of a powerful offensive military.

Question worth answering:

Can decisions that have fear and suspicion as their root bear anything but fear and suspicion as their fruit?

Another Question Worth Answering:

Does it matter if it is a personal or a political decision?

Reality Based

From an interview with the author of The Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, British lawyer Phillippe Sands -

In the course of our conversations it emerged that "24" had played an important role, in the sense of contributing to a climate in which the governing assumption was that 'torture works.' The second season of "24" went to air--and was broadcast around Guantanamo--at the very moment in which the new techniques of interrogation were being authorized. It sent out the signal that "torture works". [Colonel Diane Beaver, Legal Adviser to General Dunlavey Guantanamo Bay Naval Base] told me the program had "many friends" at Guantánamo...

The question that needs answering:

Does not impeaching also mean war crimes trials are off the table?

History Repeating

HL Mencken defined democracy this way:

Democracy is the theory that the booboisie know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Mencken, a fellow Baltimoron and probably the most gifted writer to have come from the gentle bosom of Mob Town, couldn't sustain much enthusiasm for the promise of democracy except as sport

What grotesque false pretenses! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing?

The natural inclincation is to rise up on our hind legs and reject his corrosive brand of cynicism. And then you read this -

6 percent of Clinton's own [Pennsylvania] voters said that they would defect to John McCain in the fall against Clinton herself.

6% of 2 million is 120,000. How many of those 120,000 are just funning with the pollster or didn't quite grok the question? Having lived near Pennsylvania it could be substantial.

kid.

Exclude the stumped and mistaken, and also set aside the Limbaugh Democrats, and you're still going to be left with -optimistically- tens of thousands of people who are sincerely voting for Clinton, all the while pretty sure they won't do it again in the fall.

The question that needs answering:

What does a sincere, reasonably well-informed voter who fits this profile think he or she is accomplishing?

Another question that needs answering:

Are they more racist than they are misogynist, but definitely misogynist?

Lets give the last word the HL and see how much we hind-leg-dismissing we muster now:

One cannot observe [democracy] objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity... Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves.... I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world.

Last question that needs answering:

If Democracy always and forever fails to deliver on its premises -let alone the promises- is it really better, as some have said, than all the others?

Cheer Up, Democrats!

The message is: the sky is where we left it. As you were.Cheer Up, Democrats! -

Since 2002, according to ... Gallup Poll, the percentage of Americans identifying with or leaning toward the Democratic Party has increased by about seven percentage points to... 52% while the percentage identifying with or leaning toward the Republican Party has decreased by about six percentage points to... only 39 percent.

The question that needs answering:

When the world we live in looks so different from the "Reality" on cable and in our newspapers, which bends first?

What Makes a Good Black Man

Via Attytood I read this op-ed by Robert Maranto with this key passage -

All of that explains why Powell was the perfect black candidate. As the hard-working son of Jamaican immigrants, a Republican, a general and a hero of Desert Storm, Powell was immune from charges of laziness, liberalism, incompetence and corruption. He was the perfect black candidate since he played against type. No one considers Republicans too liberal, or generals shiftless.

The question that needs answering:

What "type" have all the other black candidates been?

Another question that needs answering:

Do white candidates have a type?

Another question that needs answering:

Was Bill Richardson the perfect hispanic candidate because he was immune from charges of being an illegal welfare cheat who had stolen a job from an American because no one considers such a light skinned guy a Mexican, or a Governor of being juiced up on tequila?

Another question that needs answering:

Are all black people lazy, liberal, incompetent and corrupt, or just assumed to be until sufficient evidence is provided that proves otherwise?

Another question that needs answering:

Did he use the word shiftless in reference to black people and purposely leave out references to cotton, water-melon and Dixie, or did he just assume that it was a understood?

Another question that needs answering:

Did this guy ignorantly write an op-ed about race without understanding the fraught relationship between African-Americans and recent immigrants from the islands, or did he just want to pour gasoline all over it and see what caught on fire down where the non-perfect black candidates lived?

Let Mr Maranto know what you thought of his incisive commentary by sending him a note at robert.maranto@villanova.edu

Must be Super Powers.

Jonathan Landay continues his record of being dead right about this endless war. And timely, always ahead of everyone else. Like he's looking for things even if they aren't immediately obvious. Facts that might not be pronounced in a press conference. Must be super powers. From today's McClatchy papers -

The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.

The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

The question that needs answering:

If this is not picked up in the media narrative, does it matter that one reporter and his paper are getting it right?

Another question that needs answering:

Why has the President's narrative about the Iraq War been so invulnerable to buffeting by facts and public opinion?

Another question that needs answering:

If it isn't facts, and isn't popular support, what is sustaining the President's narrative about this war?

Bush on success

Finally our president weighs in on how he measures the progress of his economic, military, health, education [fill-in-the-blank] policies.

From his Joint Press Availability with Prime Minister Gordon Brown -

And so, so long as I'm the President, my measure of success is victory and success.

The question that needs answering: What stupid way are YOU measuring success?