President, War Criminal

In an opinion piece published Tuesday, Joe Scarborough writes:

I suspect [history will be unkind] to those “progressives” horrified by George W. Bush’s anti-terror campaign but mute to the terror of the Obama administration’s savage drone wars. These sensitive souls, so repulsed by the waterboarding of three terrorists ten years ago, now celebrate their administration’s version of a war on terror that swapped out the targeted capture of terrorists with a drone program that all too often kills children, women, grandparents and scores of innocent young men.

Fair point. Barack Obama's record on civil liberties and executive privilege in the so-called war on terror is as bad as Bush's was. He has expanded the use of drones, which, yes, often kills innocent people and serves as a recruiting tool for terrorist groups, and has "embraced" a policy where all "military-age males" in a strike zone are presumed combatants, effectively rendering them guilty until proven innocent. He oversaw the passage of a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that includes, in the words of the ACLU, "an extraordinary expansion and statutory bolstering of authority for the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world." He even sidestepped the War Powers Act, the most symbolic and perhaps the most unequivocal restraint on executive power, during NATO's intervention in Libya.

Granted, not all liberals have been quiet about Obama's use of drones or other worrisome aspects of his civil rights record. (Glenn Greenwald immediately comes to mind.) But we on the left have far too often been quiet, when loud political pressure is needed if we ever want these policies to change.

So mea culpa, Joe, you are absolutely correct. Until you write:

The release of the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" will surely lay waste to at least one of the left wing's lies: that the CIA's enhanced interrogation did nothing to gain actionable intelligence. “Zero” is generating angst amongst movie reviewers and essayists who were swept away by the film but left conflicted and uncomfortable specifically because this first draft of history accurately shows how the CIA's program played a major role in finding and killing Osama bin Laden.

So let me get this straight. Shame on liberals for being silent on Obama's unacceptable use of drones while loudly decrying Bush's apparently acceptable use of torture? I suppose you could make the moral case that drones are worse. But you cannot claim that torture is acceptable. You can't even claim that torture was effective in gathering intelligence (unless you want to believe a Hollywood movie over a report approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee).

Doing so makes you guilty of the same intellectual dishonesty you just accused us of.

Bajoobahead #4: Ann Althouse

So I was watching this:

And I was growing increasingly angry. Althouse made two ridiculous points and Emily Bazelon did not push back at all. She only said, "That's plausible." No, they're not plausible. Not really.

The first point Althouse made was basically this, quoting Rush Limbaugh:

[T]he Great Unifier's [Obama's] plan, is to isolate... elected Republicans from their voters and supporters. He wants to make the argument about me. He wants to marginalize me. He wants me to be thought of as such an extremist that no mainstream Republican would ever associate with me....

He needs Republicans for cover only on his stimulus package. You gotta understand, folks, he does not need Republican votes. Maybe one or two in the Senate is all he needs and he doesn't need a single Republican in the House to get this done. Now, his definition of bipartisanship is when a bunch of Republicans cave on their own principles and agree with him and give him what he wants. That's magical, that's marvelous, why, that's bipartisanship....

This is a political play to marginalize me so that Republicans are afraid to associate with my ideas or any of us. He wants conservatism, mainstream conservatism to be thought of the way you and I think of communism.

Which is patently ridiculous. Obama's definition of bipartisan is not having his opponents roll over and accept what he wants. The stimulus bill itself illustrates this point. A third of the bill's cost was $275 billion worth of tax cuts, certainly not a Democratic measure. And the final House bill did not have a measure that would have "expand[ed] access to Medicaid-covered family planning services."

This measure, despite all of the Republicans' complaints, made a lot of sense. It would not have given the states any new powers; it would have simply removed a costly, time-intensive waiver process. The provision, if it had passed, was estimated to save $700 million over 10 years.

Now, the bill may have had components that the Republicans didn't like. It wouldn't have been bipartisan if it didn't. And still not one of the 177 House Republicans voted for it. I don't think Obama is the one being partisan.

Why isn't Rush Limbaugh being called the bajoobahead? That's self-evident, an almost ipso-facto truth; he is Bajoobahead #0, if you will. Especially after saying that he hoped Obama would fail. Any conservative American can say that they don't think liberal programs will work. It takes a true patriot to hope that the U.S. will go through four years of suffering so intense that we won't re-elect the guy who wants to institute those liberal policies.

Althouse's second point is this: if Obama is using rhetoric similar to Bush's, why is everyone saying that Obama "signaled a shift...from the Bush administration"? She even referred to this Daily Show clip:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Changefest '09 - Obama's Inaugural Speech

Daily Show Full Episodes
Funny Political Videos

Important Things With Demetri Martin
More Funny Videos

But the answer was sort of embedded in the end of the clip: Obama has not yet done anything that would make his words ring hollow. And he has thus far signaled that he would be willing to sit down, listen, and work with other countries instead of running roughshod over them.

Mr. Wolverine Goes to Washington, Part 3

Part 3: "A Moment That Will Define a Generation"

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

I slept through my alarm that morning. I set my alarm on my watch instead of the hotel's clock radio as my roommate was already in bed. I thought we were meeting for breakfast at 6, set my alarm for 5:15, and woke up at 6:57.

Luckily we were supposed to meet at 7, and there was at least one other person who didn't get there until 7:30. Then we headed out on our circuitous route to the National Mall. The group halved early as the people in the front walked quickly and didn't look back.

Our half of the group stopped at the expectant crowd gathered near the Hay-Adams Hotel. It was customary for the president-elect to pray at the church across the street and Obama was scheduled to arrive soon. His motorcade rolled in just as we were giving up. I didn't see Obama directly, but I did see Joe & Jill "Went-Up-the-Hill" Biden, and I can say that I was within 200 yards of Barack Obama.

We continued our trek to the Mall, momentarily ducking into a hotel for warmth, and finally entered by the WWII Memorial. We moved forward to the Washington Monument towards the cafe tent before our subgroup split. Four of us chose to go (and stay!) at the Hard Rock Cafe for warmth. Sara and I elected to stick it out. We headed back to higher ground at the base of the Washington Monument.

We tried to stay warm, talked to a family from Louisiana, and snapped pictures. Some highlights:

The signs. ("No more Bushit" and "From King to President")

The crowd's reaction to Bush. They booed when he was presented. Folks closer to the front sang, "Na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye." When Bush the Elder was introduced, a lady behind me yelled, "Your son sucked as president!"

I swear the entire Mall laughed at Rick Warren's exaggerated pronunciation of "Ma-LI-a and SA-SHA!"

Aretha's still got it. The photo must not have turned out well, but she looked exactly as I pictured her, ridiculous hat and all.

"Air and Simple Gifts." John Williams, Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Aaron Copland. 'Nuff said.

Way to go, Justice Roberts!

Reverend Lowery's benediction was hilarious. "...when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what's right." At the time it was hard to tell if he had planned on saying that or if he was just trying to get the crowd's attention. Most of us, myself included, were headed out, as the benediction followed that hideous poem ("Picking lettuce"? Of all the crops that you could have chosen--oranges, apples, strawberries--you chose lettuce?) and Obama's inaugural address.

The part of the address where Obama discussed all of the problems we're currently facing was a major downer. Now, I understand that he needed to knock us down to bring us back up, and he needed to lower expectations.

The speech, as a whole, was amazing. There was one particular turn of phrase I enjoyed: "...we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." Brilliant. Throughout the speech, I kept nodding my head and thinking, 'Finally, a president who gets it!' My eyes welled up, but I didn't cry.

It was, unsurprisingly, chaos getting out. But I think it was particularly symbolic that the huddled mass of which I was part coped by singing "Lean On Me" and "I Will Survive." I wanted to start a rendition of "Don't Stop Believing," but I didn't think I had the support.

Sara and I didn't get back to the hotel until 3. What normally would have been a thirty-minute walk or so took two and a half hours. But that's what happens when you're one of two million people and they decide it's a good idea to send in a line of buses to block the foot traffic once it's over.

I had been out in the cold for seven and a half hours. My lower lip was literally white. I ate the pretzels they handed out, watched the parade on TV, and called people. It was impossible for anyone to call in when I was on the Mall. The cell phone towers were overwhelmed. I managed to get a text message out, but I didn't get the response until after I had left.

Around 6:30, I started changing into my tux for the UPIC gala. The buses took forever to ferry us from the hotel to the gala in the traffic-clogged streets. The gala was split between the Air & Space and Hirshhorn Museums.

The ball was a major letdown. The gala wasn't official, and no VIP showed up. The live band at Air & Space sucked and the DJ at Hirshhorn just played nightclub music. I don't know what I was expecting him to play, but suffice it to say that I didn't do any dancing. I went off with Teddy instead and explored the lower floor of the Hirshhorn. Some pretty interesting stuff. The fact that you could see my reflection in some of the pictures I took just adds another level of post-modernism to the works.

The buses going back to the hotel were even more nightmarish than to the ball. They weren't coming back frequently enough to accommodate those who were leaving. So Teddy and I took the Metro from L'Enfant Plaza back to the hotel. I turned in and left the packing for morning.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

I packed, went down for breakfast, texted my newfound friends goodbye (Heck, I would have slept in too if I could), and caught the bus to Reagan, making sure I had plenty of time to spare that day. One flight and three bus rides later I was back in my apartment in Ann Arbor.

DC was cold, crowded, and exhausting, but it was completely worth it.

Pardon My French

Ah, it's that time of Olympiad. The time when a lame-duck president issues pardons with little political fallout. So who is and who isn't getting a pardon?

Donald Rumsfeld

After a bipartisan Senate report unanimously concluded that Rumsfeld and other Administration officials were directly responsible for abuses committed at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, Amnesty International was afraid Bush would grant them a blanket pardon:

After eight years of defiling America's reputation and renouncing our founding principles, the Bush administration wants to jet off into the sunset without answering to the American public...One of our three main objectives during President-elect Obama's 100 days is to ensure an independent commission investigates abuses committed the U.S. government in its "war on terror". Pardoning key officials, or even worse, issuing a blanket pardon, would undermine this critical goal towards restoring our commitment to human rights.

But White House officials have said that such pardons are unnecessary; that would imply that what those officials did was wrong and illegal. You gotta love these guys.

Especially Keith Urbahn, a Rumsfeld spokesman. (Someone still likes Rumsfeld enough to work for him?) Said Urbahn of the Senate report, "It's regrettable that Senator Levin has decided to use the committee's time and taxpayer dollars to make unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation." Yeah, right, it was a political hit job. That's why all twelve of the Republicans on the committee went along with it.

Isaac Robert Toussie

Toussie was a real estate scammer who helped a hundred people illegally qualify for HUD-sponsored mortgages. His father donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee. And on Christmas Eve it was announced that he would be receiving a presidential pardon.

Presidential pardons, once granted, are irrevocable. But Toussie's pardon had not yet been executed. And due to popular opposition, President Bush directed the Pardon Attorney not to execute it.

Headlines: 7 August 2008

• Karadzic protected by US until he broke 'deal': Supposedly, we promised he would never be brought to trial if he completely removed himself from politics.
• French sailors seized in Nigeria: What's up in the Niger Delta
• Detroit Mayor Ordered Jailed: No trips to Canada for Kwame

Conn Carroll was referring to this:

and this. (I got 6 out of 9 right by the way.)

The McCain Roller Coaster

You must be at least 54" tall to ride the Straight Talk Express.

The McCain campaign has been going through some ups and downs lately, while Barack Obama is flying high on his world trip.

Last Friday, McCain submitted an op-ed about Iraq to the New York Times after Obama's was published four days before. On Monday, the Drudge Report, erm, reported that the Times asked McCain to rewrite it, as it largely criticized Obama's plan and presented no strategic vision of his own. Once this story broke, conservatives were immediately up in arms about media bias.

Two things: (1) There isn't really any bias here: The Times will gladly publish what McCain has to say, as soon as he has something substantive to say. True, Obama's op-ed criticized Bush and McCain, but it largely laid out (and made the case for) his own plan. McCain's simply tore Obama down. (2) Why didn't the Times simply avoid conservatives' grumbling about media bias, publish the editorial in the first place, and watch as others criticized McCain's criticism and lack of a coherent strategy?

The Times may have caused conservatives to rally around McCain, but now, with Obama largely succeeding abroad, Maliki supporting Obama's 16-month withdrawal timetable, and Bush negotiating with the Iranians, McCain seems to have lost his foreign-policy cred...and his temper. His comment that "Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign," is a sign of unpresidential frustration.

But McCain's foreign policy ideas have largely been ridiculous from the start: Permanent bases in Iraq? Militancy with Iran? Removing Russia from the G-8 (which is impossible, considering that the other member nations would have to agree) and establishing a "League of Democracies" that would only ostracize the Russians and freeze Russo-American relations to nearly Cold War levels?

In short: "He has appeared brittle and inflexible, slow to adapt to changes on the ground, slow to grasp the full implications not only of the improving situation in Iraq but also of the worsening situation in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan."

And that's why for all of his experience, John McCain's foreign-policy views are worse than Barack Obama's.

The Fairest of Them All

Der Spiegel, Der Spiegel, auf der Wand, wer ist von ihnen alle das angemessenste?

In a Saturday interview with the German news outlet Der Spiegel, Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki said that "US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes." And although "this is by no means an election endorsement," "[t]hose who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems."

How does the Bush administration respond? The day before Maliki's comments, Bush had spoken for the first time of a "general time horizon" for withdrawal. The day of Maliki's comments, someone within the White House accidentally emails the Spiegel article to the press corps mailing list. The day after Maliki's comments, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq contacts Maliki's office and Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh comes out and says that someone had mistranslated Maliki's remarks. Even though the translator worked for Maliki, not Der Spiegel. And even though that's what Maliki said.

Headlines: 15 July 2008

• Army Secretary Asks for Probe of Firing: Gina Grey was fired from her posts as public affairs director of Arlington National Cemetery after she opposed imposing new restrictions on the media's coverage of funerals, even when the families had consented.
• A war that nobody wants but everybody needs: "[War with Iran] may become inevitable due to the fear of peace. After eight years of Bush-Cheney, such is the state of our world." Three lame ducks want one last quack. Apparently they think it won't echo.
• Nozzle Rage!
  

Oops. Our Bad.

Dear World and future generations,

Oops. Our bad.

<3 ,

US Government


PS: So, while the United States government felt that detaining people in Guantanamo Bay and subjecting them to interrogation methods that were unconstitutional and in violation of international law, the government did this to protect innocent people. Really? Because when one thinks of the perfect way to create enemies where none existed before, this methodology pops into mind, but such actions probably are not the best way to protect innocent lives.

According to Tom Lasseter, "Militants found recruits among Guantanamo's wrongly detained."

Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan . He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however - after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers - he'd made connections to high-level militants.

In fact, he'd become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 "most wanted" playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan - with Osama bin Laden at the top - Farouq was 16 cards into the deck.

A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam - thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them - and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.

So, instead of detaining those who were responsible for the deaths of so many people, the United States government mixes up a recipe to turn people that posed no such national security threat, the guise under which they were detained, into real threats.

Given the gravity of the situation, an "our bad" wouldn't be the appropriate response. How about an ever-patriotic bit of encouragement for such a misguided administration (and those who voted for it twice):


Way to go?




For the full article, click here.

Pass on the Grass

So, according to yet another new study, this time of seized marijuana from 48 states, THC levels are almost double what they were in 1983. This translates into "increased potency of marijuana, including the risk of mental impairment, respiratory problems, addiction, the correlation between pot use and teen depression, and its status as a gateway drug," according to the press release from the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy. The press release also states, "Baby boomer parents who still think marijuana is a harmless substance need to look at the facts."

However, for many, this is not new information. The real concerns are first, what took so long for the White House to pick up on this dangerous new trend and secondly, what effective policies are being developed and implemented to combat the damaging effects?

If anyone has any good suggestions, aside from reinstating Reagan's War on "Drugs," feel free to post them as comments and let's hope the White House gets a whiff of this.



For the full report in PDF format, click here.

For the full press release, click here.

Surprise, Surprise

Headline: "Pentagon lawyers sought harsh interrogation" from the Associated Press.

Here's some excerpts:

The Pentagon in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks pursued abusive interrogation techniques once used by North Korea and Vietnam on American POWs despite stern warnings by several military lawyers that the methods were cruel and even illegal, according to a Senate investigation...

"The guidance (administration lawyers) provided will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an Air Force Reserve colonel who teaches military law for the service.

The hearing is the Senate Armed Services Committee's first look at the origins of harsh interrogation methods and how policy decisions were vetted across the Defense Department. Its review fits into a broader picture of the government's handling of detainees, which includes FBI and CIA interrogations in secret prisons.

The panel is expected to hold further hearings on the matter and release a final report by the end of the year.

Among its initial findings is that senior Pentagon lawyers, including the office of general counsel William "Jim" Haynes, sought information as early as July 2002 regarding a military program that trained U.S. troops how to survive enemy interrogations and deny foes valuable intelligence.

Much of the training program, known as "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape," or SERE, is based on experiences of American prisoners of war in previous conflicts, including those in Korea and Vietnam.

In response, SERE officials provided Haynes' office a list of tactics that included sensory deprivation, sleep disruption and stress positions.

For more, click here.

Aside from the government knowing that what they were doing was illegal and being advised against such actions by their own employees and advisers, is it troubling to anyone else that one is no longer enraged by the Bush Administration's actions and has simply come to accept the fact that one will be lied to many times a day?


Life will begin to pick up the pieces and put itself back together on January 20, 2009. Inshallah!

Changing Climate, Stagnant Politics

So, we haven't posted in a while, which of course means that nothing important happened in the past nine days.

Except the brief life of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. The act, which I first heard about on Monday, would have (1) created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases--in my opinion, the best way to limit such pollution--and (2) allowed states to have tougher environmental regulations than the federal government, which California tried to do, but the Bush Administration's EPA denied California this right last December.

And now the bill has been filibustered to death. The supporters of the bill were 12 votes shy of the 60 necessary to invoke cloture and end debate. (Both Sens. Levin and Stabenow voted for cloture.) Senators will now wait until next year, when they will have a more supportive president and hopefully a more favorable legislature, until they try again.

Also on the climate change front, the NASA inspector general released a report stating that "political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years." Shock.

On a lighter note, there's a wolverine in Michigan's thumb!

The '01E Wolverine, North Campus, U-M, munching on the head of an Easter Bunny. (4/5/08)

Bajoobahead #1: Chester Bartels

Chester Bartels writes to the Grand Rapids Press:

Why has the press crowned Obama? [I mean so what if he has more delegates/votes than Hillary and has generally acted more ethically than she has?]

He is the most liberal senator, by record, and he has avoided voting on any issue of substance by voting here or not being present at all. What has he done? What has he proposed other than raising taxes and redistributing wealth (pure socialism)?

He is a hollow shell with no substance. Yet the media are largely behind him. Why? Do the media, too, find nothing to be proud of in the United States? [I am nothing but a patriot. I always wear a flag pin, even when I'm not wearing a lapel.] Do they want to ruin "the rich" so government can be the chief if not the only employer?

Do they want to stop an unfavorable war only to let the fundamentalist Islamic cults rule the Middle East? It would seem that a man with the given name of Barack Hussein Obama would have to be scrutinized a bit before we would want him to be a senator, let alone a president! [You can tell a lot about people by their middle name. For instance, my middle name is Hitler, and I'm a secret Nazi. That's why I didn't include my name because I'm hiding something.] Never forget that it was capitalism that won World Wars I and II, not socialism. [But do forget that capitalism also lost World Wars I and II and that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was on the winning side of WWII. And don't consider Marx's complaint that capitalism leads to the objectification of the working class because that will only lead you to conclude that Hitler's Germany was the apotheosis of capitalism.] The opportunity for profit is what drives men to succeed, not the opportunity to be given someone's else's hard-earned dollars.

If the Democrats win the Congress and the presidency, increase taxes as they have promised, institute national insurance as they plan to do, and increase government size and influence, then we can forget freedom as we know it. [I'm talking real freedom here, not the due process and the Geneva Conventions that only the socialist Democrats care about.] Thinking citizens must keep these socialists out of office. Let's find out a lot more about Obama before we even consider him as fit to rule this country[, but not before we write a letter to the editor filled with no new information and conclusions that aren't supported by non-trivial facts].

This post was written in Sarcastic Trebuchet font. This post was intended to mock Chester Bartels' letter to the editor and to expose certain beliefs/conclusions as baseless or illogical. Any feelings of pique caused by this post are purely coincidental.

Headlines: 20 May 2008 (and Older)

• 'W,' Oliver Stone's Bush Biopic
  

  A little crass.
  

• Klein on Obama:
  

  A general-election campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama doesn't need any hype. It won't be boring. The question is whether we, politicians and press alike, will grant this election — and electorate — the respect that it deserves.
  

• Make wearing a flag pin the 28th Amendment
  

  And the award for Best Use of Sarcasm goes to...
  

• The Fall of Conservatism
  

  The pendulum swings left? Long, but interesting.
  

• Obama and
  Ahma-gonna-kill-myself-if-the-primary-season-doesn't-end-soon-ijad
  

  Obama said that he would meet with the leadership of Iran, but he never said he'd meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So why does McCain and everyone on the Right say he did? And when is that McCain-Obama foreign policy debate going to be?
  

• Underplayed Story of the Day
  

  Remember when the EPA denied the state of California to legislate its own fuel-efficiency standards? Well, it turns out that, like everything else in the Bush Administration, the decision was based on sound science, and not politics.
  

• Obama Is Expected to Hit a Milestone in Today's Votes
  

  After primaries in Kentucky & Oregon, Obama will have the majority of pledged delegates, which will hopefully trigger a superdelegate-slide in his direction.

In Case You Missed It

The last few days have seen George W. Bush's outrageous comments comparing Obama's willingness to engage in diplomacy with appeasing Hitler (while Bush was on a trip to Israel to mark the country's 60th anniversary, no less)...

...and the fracas between Obama and McCain that ensued.

Cents-less

Currently, the cost it takes to produce one penny (1.26 cents) is greater than the value of that penny. Same thing for nickels (7.7 cents). But Congress is acting! The House unanimously passed H.R. 5512, the Coin Modernization and Taxpayer Savings Act, on Thursday. (I had two friends--one liberal, one conservative--who said that if they agreed on something, they must be right. Expand this to 435 friends and you can see how right this bill is.) The bill would require pennies and nickels to be primarily made of steel and is estimated to save $1 billion over the next decade.

But the Bush administration is balking at the bill, mostly because it doesn't like Congress telling any twig on the Executive Branch what to do. Never mind that the Constitution says, "The Congress shall have Power...To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures."

So President Bush doesn't like this bill, even though it clearly has wide popularity and makes good business sense, because he doesn't like being told what to do. Now I understand why the oil companies in which he had major stakes in the 80's failed miserably.

Headlines: 27 April 2008

• Oil refinery strikers hold rally
  

  A strike forces BP to close a pipeline that supplies Britain with 30% of its oil. Gas shortages have started to affect Scotland, ironically not because there isn't enough oil, but because people fearing a gas shortage are stocking up.
  

• Clinton Challenges Obama to Debate
  

  Clinton wants a moderator-less, Lincoln-Douglas-style debate. Nobody's told her that Douglas was the experience candidate.
  

• Bush pokes fun at his successors
  

  I'd tell him not to quit his day job, but he hasn't done so well at that either.
  

• Karzai unhurt after parade attack
  

  At least four dead and nine injured after Taliban militants fire into the grandstand.

Old New Orleans

John McCain showed up in New Orleans today, still damaged almost three years later by Hurricane Katrina, vowing that the Bush Administration's mishandling would never happen in a McCain presidency.

The Democrats' response? The DNC reminds everyone that McCain opposed emergency assistance back in 2005. MoveOn.org starts a petition asking McCain to repudiate the endorsement of John Hagee, who said that Katrina was "the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans," (You can sign it here if you like.) much like Obama had to denounce Louis Farrakhan.

Kudos to John McCain for drawing attention to what still has to be done along the Gulf Coast, but shame on everyone--including McCain--for politicizing it.

Were You Aware?

Radical Islam Awareness Week was last week. Apparently it comes earlier every year. In an opinion piece in the Michigan Daily, the "Young Americans for Freedom" write:

National Islam Awareness Week is a way to educate students about the genocidal agendas of the global jihadists and the fact that these radical ideas are far more mainstream in the Muslim world today than most Americans are willing to believe. It is also to remind students not to forget about Sept. 11, to remember what our troops are fighting for: Our freedom, the same freedom that allows you to learn at this university without the fear of attack because of who you are.

Our group, the Young Americans for Freedom, is expecting and has had protests against our views. However, we are familiar with the way the Left wages its political wars on conservative students. If someone happens to disagree with its position on racial issues - if one believes, for example, that government-enforced racial preferences are misguided or immoral - the Left will denounce that person as a "racist." The Left's only logic is emotional, and the character of that emotion is hatred - hatred for those who want to raise awareness of the threats we face from radical Islam. This hatred has only one purpose: to silence those who oppose the jihad.

We see members of our generation ready to put their lives on the line to defend our freedoms. We know that this war is being waged at home as well, and we will not let our brothers and sisters in uniform shoulder the burden alone.

First of all, nobody has forgotten September 11 and nobody ever will. People will remember where they were when they first found out about the attacks, much like the MLK or JFK assassinations or Pearl Harbor. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: What people did forget was the shock and the fear that was so easily taken advantage of in order to begin an unnecessary war and expand the reach of the Executive Branch. But apparently trying to ignore any feelings of terror to ponder reasonable solutions to the problem is "emotional logic," and opposing Bush's decisions to invade Iraq and to erode our civil liberties is supporting jihad.

And I'm sorry if the remarks David Horowitz made while visiting Michigan struck me as racist. His insistence that "the Muslim Students' Association is not an ethnic group. It is not a religious group. It is not a cultural group. It is a political organization created by the Muslim brotherhood," and use of the word 'Islamofascism' paints all Muslims as, if not bona fide terrorists, part of a community that unanimously and passionately hates the United States and all things Western. Don't believe that 'Islamofascism' is offensive to Muslims? What if I call Hitler, Mussolini and Franco 'Christo-fascists'? "But they weren't real Christians," you might say. The same argument can be made for Muslims, who, despite what Horowitz thinks, do not universally hate the U.S. This line of thought is particularly damning because victory over the terrorists ultimately depends on supporting moderate Muslims, to which the Sunni Awakening Councils' practical removal of al-Qaeda in Iraq can attest.

The letter to the editor from Aaron Bailey, an Afghanistan veteran and B-school student, which appeared in Monday's Daily, is so good that I have to share it with you in its entirety:

I read Wednesday's viewpoint by the University's chapter of Young Americans for Freedom with both surprise and disgust (The war at home, 04/09/2008). The one clear idea that resonated throughout the viewpoint was YAF's gung-ho, pro-war, chicken-hawk agenda and its contempt for the soldiers who are actually fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While YAF used the typical neo-conservative tactics of mentioning the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (which our own government has determined had no links to Iraq), discussing the suppression of minority rights (although the Bush administration continues to support the Saudi Royal Family's despotic regime) and continually using words like "freedom" to describe its agenda, this group did not speak for me as a veteran.

War, unfortunately, is a complex and occasionally necessary way to confront the greed, corruption and evil in our world. But chastising an entire region by calling mainstream Middle Easterners "jihadists," many of whom I served with, only serves to unnecessarily enflame the disaffected population I worked to assist. If YAF really wants to help our country, I encourage its members to visit www.goarmy.com and join the "brothers and sisters" the group claims to support. In lieu of that, perhaps YAF will advocate deploying troops with proper equipment, a clear mission and veteran's benefits when they return from war, something the group's fellow neo-cons forgot.

Make no mistake, the people who attacked us were, and still are, in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But for reasons unclear to me, my commander-in-chief has decided to ignore these threats. YAF's members continue to cover for our incompetent leaders, who place America's military at risk to further their own self-interests, all the while advocating others to fight and die in their places.

Also: Were you aware that "[i]f the President were the longest recorded flight by chicken, he would be thirteen seconds?" (Stewart 36)

Fear and Trembling

From Joe Klein:

[Attacking Moqtada al-Sadr] would have been extremely foolish. The U.S. would have been inserting itself into a part of Iraq that we don't know very well—the south—and taking sides against what is probably the most popular mass movement in Shi'ite Iraq. But the Petraeus battle plan apparently includes an anti-Sadrist move, which may mean a spurt of violence as widespread and vicious as the worst of the Sunni insurgency. Is that why the general wants a "pause" in the U.S. withdrawal this summer?

What could possibly be the rationale for this? Perhaps it is that Sadr's Mahdi Army is the most potent force opposed to long-term U.S. bases in Iraq—and that a permanent presence has been the Bush Administration's true goal in this war. I suspect the central question in Iraq now is not whether things will get better but whether the drive for a long-term, neocolonialist presence will make the situation irretrievably worse.