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I’m So Confused

Mar 11, 2010 maha --> Health Care About every half hour there’s more news from Congress about what’s going on with health care reform. Recent developments: Harry Reid sent a letter scorching letter to Mitch McConnell. Do read. Alex Koppelman wonders if the Dems will get the votes. The Senate parliamentarian may have just thrown Dems a curve ball. President Obama must sign the health reform bill into law before Congress can go ahead with reconciliation. Ezra Klein explains that the biggest barrier to getting HRC done is the “corrosive mistrust” between the House and the Senate. Spotlight 3 Comments Tags

Iraq = Fail 2

Mar 10, 2010 maha --> Bush Administration, Iraq War I’ve written in the past about how the wingnut political cosmos is something like old Greek mythology (see, for example, “Why Sarah Palin Is a Goddess.”) In rightie mythology, many presidents — Republican ones, anyway — are gods with the power of bending mortals to their will with simple words and the occasional lightning bolt.For example, in rightie myth, President Ronald Reagan went to Berlin in 1987 and called on the Soviets to “tear down this wall.” And then, in 1989, the wall came down. And if you listen to righties, you’d believe it came down entirely because of the godlike will of Reagan, who wasn’t even President in 1989. In the Real World, there were, um, lots of other things going on that caused the Berlin Wall to be dismantled. Brave people all over eastern Europe were rising up against Soviet dominance. And at long last the once-mighty Soviet Union was too depleted by its own blunders to maintain control. So the Berlin Wall came down, as it surely would have done anyway, even if Saint Ronald of Blessed Memory had never made the speech. But saying that out loud is blasphemy in Wingnut World.Lately some of the losers who were gung-ho to invade Iraq in 2003 are crawling out of the woodwork to declare victory (see, for example, “Iraq=Fail“). As I have written before, these declarations never take into account (1) the original, stated objectives of the invasion were never met; (2) the U.S. considerably weakened itself militarily and economically, possibly permanently. And, as of the most recent count, 4,382 American soldiers have been killed during their tours in Iraq.Now we’ve got Jeff Jacoby, in a column headlined “Mission Accomplished, Indeed,” arguing that George W. Bush is responsible for “the transformation of Iraq from a hellish tyranny into a functioning democracy.” And then later he wrote, “Where Saddam once ruled a ghastly ‘republic of fear,’ Iraqis live today in democratic freedom and relative peace, dispelling daily the canard that democracy and Arab culture cannot co-exist.”OK, so in the recent elections about 100 bombs went off, killing 38 people. I would say Jacoby’s standardas of “relative peace” are pretty low.I also liked this part:“Iraqis are not afraid of bombs anymore,’’ a middle-aged voter named Maliq Bedawi told a New York Times reporter as they stood amid the rubble of a Baghdad apartment building destroyed by a Katyusha rocket.See, back in the days of Saddam Hussein’s hellish tyranny Iraqis were afraid of bombs because they were so rare. But according to some figures, by 2007 about 78,000 Iraqis had been killed by coalition airstrikes. I suppose you have to get numb after awhile. And thanks to the invasion and occupation, Iraq became a lightning rod for terrorist hotheads.Further, I can’t tell from here whether Iraq is truly a “functioning democracy” or not. Voting by itself does not a “functioning democracy” make. The real test of a “functioning democracy” is whether the people of a nation are really governing themselves through elected representation, or whether the elected officials are mostly serving their own ends and just going through the motions of representing the people. One could ask the same question of the U.S., of course.But if Iraq truly does become a functioning democracy, the primary credit has to go to Iraqis. If they can dig themselves out of what was done to their country and make something positive come of it, this would be a monumental accomplishment. I also think there were many ways the U.S. and the rest of the world could have hurried Saddam out and helped Iraq become democratic that would have been much less costly and violent. Yes, there were some things the U.S. occupation did long after the invasion that were helpful to Iraqis, but this was not accomplishing our “mission.” This was cleaning up after our mess. But in Wingnut World, if Iraq becomes a functioning democracy, it will be because the well-protected George W. Bush bravely sat in front of a camera and declared the U.S. would invade Iraq. The simple brown people of Iraq are now enjoying the benefits of Bush’s godlike beneficence. Spotlight 17 Comments Tags

Make It So

Mar 9, 2010 maha --> Wingnuts Being Wingnuts Limbaugh says he will flee to Costa Rica if health care reform passes!FYI, Costa Rica has an excellent national healthcare system somewhat more “socialist” than what President Obama is proposing, but don’t tell Rushbo. Please. Spotlight 9 Comments Tags

Another Shooting

Mar 9, 2010 maha --> Social Issues With apologies to the families of both people who died in the shooting at Ohio State this afternoon — The campus police said that they believed the gunman, who arrived carrying two handguns, may have been disgruntled about a poor work evaluation. Rightie translation: He was unhinged over labor issues and therefore a Leftie.The shooting comes as state legislatures are debating whether to ban guns on college campuses. … Twenty six states, including Ohio, forbid guns on college campuses …Brace yourself for a solid week of screaming nonsense about how if workers/students at Ohio State could carry concealed weapons, a shooting like today’s could not possibly ever happen, ever. Because. Spotlight 4 Comments Tags

It’s Official

Mar 9, 2010 maha --> Bush Administration Stanley Fish is an idiot.Update: Steve M comments. Spotlight 11 Comments Tags

Post Oscar

Mar 8, 2010 maha --> entertainment and popular culture This is brilliant (h/t Jeff F):I missed the Oscars themselves, but I have now waded through three photo galleries of The Dresses. Mostly everyone looked very nice. “Howevers”: The critics loved Maggie Gyllenhaal’s gown, which to me looked like wrap made out of a beach towel. Kate Winslet’s dress, which also drew many comments of admiration, looked like the foundation of a Valkyrie costume; add a cape, a spear, and a horn helmet, and she’d have been ready for Wagner. Note: I’m tired of hard bustier bodices. Miley Cyrus needs posture lessons. Today Sarah Jessica Parker probably wishes she had worn something else. But I guess the days when Cher would show up in Bob Mackey showgirl beads and feathers are over. Spotlight 7 Comments Tags

Cablevision and ABC

Mar 7, 2010 maha --> entertainment and popular culture For the record, I’m one of the people who will be Oscar-free tonight, thanks to the spat between ABC and Cablevision. In place of ABC television, Cablevision is running a “no-TV-tax” promo. But today we get free “on demand” movies.ABC seems to think that they’re hurting Cablevision, but I’m not so sure. I rarely watch ABC. I never got into “Lost” — maybe someday I’ll rent it. I sometimes watch the latest episodes of “Castle” and “Grey’s Anatomy” on my computer when I need a break. But that’s it for ABC programming. I don’t know who’s at fault, but I do like Cablevision internet service. It’s fast, it’s reliable, and on those rare occasions I’ve had a problem I’ve gotten very good tech support. And it’s part of a package deal from Cablevision. So, bye ABC. It’s been real. Update: The drama is over; ABC is back. Whoopie. Spotlight 8 Comments Tags

Iraq = FAIL

Mar 7, 2010 maha --> Iraq War There is nothing more pathetic than someone who continues to grasp at his delusions after the real world has told him he’s a fool. A good example is the hack economist sited in the last post, who approvingly repeated a Wall Street Journal claim that a rise in teenage unemployment was caused by minimum wage increases. Apparently someone pointed out to him that, um, dude, unemployment is up everywhere. He writes in a newer post, “It’s true that unemployment rates for all groups were rising over that period, and the rising jobless rate for teens might have been because of the general economic slowdown and not necessarily as a result of the minimum wage hikes, and that’s a valid criticism.” Actually unemployment rates for teens did not increase as much as unemployment as a whole.Anyway, then the economist writes, “However … ” and follows this with a bizarre word salad of a “rebuttal” that boils down to “because I said so.” He still refuses to compare teen unemployment increases with unemployment increases among other Americans, including skilled workers, for the same time period, which the most basic logic dictates is the first thing he should have done before drawing conclusions of any sort.Now we’ve got Marty Peretz, the man who turned the once-fairly-decent New Republic into mostly a suckfest, writing “Sorry, But The Verdict Is In On The Long American Excursion In Iraq. And It Is Favorable.” I’m serious.First, a number of bloggers have already smacked Peretz for blatant racism against Arabs in this piece; see Jeff Fecke and Glenn Greenwald. I have nothing to add to what’s already been said about this, so I’m wading further into the article.Peretz implies, but weasels around arguing directly, that the decision to invade Iraq will be justified by the eventual outcome — “Iraq is on its way to making its own inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian history, and it will be a relatively democratic history.” He bases the argument that invading Iraq was “right” on three “pronunciamientos” — his word, not mine –Gordon Brown said so. Tom Ricks thinks it’s too soon to evacuate. (To me, the question of when and how to leave is separate from the question of whether we should have gone in the first place.)Fouad Ajami said so. Fouad Ajami is the new Ahmed Chalabi. In fact, he’s an old pal of Ahmed Chalabi who no doubt noted the, um, opportunities to be had in playing the role of “good Iraqi” to delusional neocons. Robert Dreyfuss:More than anyone else, it was Chalabi who convinced the neocons that he and his Shiite religious friends would install an American-friendly democracy in Iraq, and they suggested that the US invasion of Iraq would create momentum that would topple the domino next door, in Iran. Unfortunately, Chalabi and his allies, including the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Islamic Dawa Party — that would be the party of Prime Minister Maliki, who supports the purge — were Iran’s friends and allies, and in some cases, outright agents. Oops! Over the past several months I’ve tripped over a bucketful of arguments that the invasion of Iraq should be considered a success because Saddam Hussein is dead and Iraq is now more or less a republic. Yes, but as I remember our objectives at the beginning of the invasion were (1) destroying al Qaeda — didn’t happen — and (2) saving the world from Saddam Hussein’s dreaded weapons of mass destruction — which didn’t exist. Basically, the apologists are saying that the invasion was justified because we’ve cleaned up some of the mess we made doing it. Or, put another way, we wanted to set a fire in the fireplace and burned down the house, but we saved the photo album and the silver candlesticks, so it’s all good.But in the great chess game of international relations, the truth is that Iraq was a bad move in our part. We were lured into taking a pawn so we could be checked by the rook. And after we were lured there was no “good” move left to us that wouldn’t damage us further.Since the rest of Peretz’s column is just repeating the dubious claims of the self-interested Fouad Ajami, I want to move on to the comments. A commenter named roidubouloi wrote,Let us grant for the sake of argument all of the wonderful achievements recited by Peretz above. If Bush, or Peretz for that matter, had said to the American people in 2003 that we will go to war in Iraq to achieve these ends at the loss of some 4,000 American lives and many more grievous injuries, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost, a cost to the United States of roughly $1 trillion, the exhaustion of our military, and the erosion of our diplomatic stature in the world, including … our ability to deal with more threatening problems including terrorism, what do you suppose the reaction would have been? Anyone suggesting such a thing would have been branded forever as insane. That, however, is the most favorable possible description of what actually occurred.I dimly remember that in some college political science course the professor told us that nations had a hierarchy of interests, and that sensible nations don’t rush off to war over every foreign policy objective. For one thing, costs and risks have to be weighed against potential gains. The history of human civilization is littered with once great nations that exhausted themselves through war. So sensible nations only go to war when the survival of the nation and its most vital institutions are facing a real and present threat. They don’t go off to war, suffer the loss of lives, weaken the economy through debt, deplete the military, and erode relations with other nations because some tinpot dictator on the other side of the world who was no direct threat to us is a bad guy who once insulted the President’s daddy.No, the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq are not a “success.” They are a fail. The only thing history has to determine is the size of the fail.Other stuff to read, unrelated: the New York Times, “If Reform Fails,” and Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman, “Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?“ Spotlight 5 Comments Tags

Blinded by Data

Mar 6, 2010 maha --> Financial Crisis Noted in passing: The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial titled The “Lost Wages of Youth” that claimed the recent increase in the minimum wage had caused a rise in unemployment in teenagers. It’s behind a subscription wall, but you can read their data at New Republic, courtesy of Jonathan Chait. WSJ even published a line graph showing increases in teen unemployment superimposed over a timeline of minimum wage increases, 2007-present.Now, anyone who has not been in a coma during that time period might have noticed that unemployment is up all over, and not just among minimum-wage earners. So Chait and Brendan Nyhan published another chart that shows teen unemployment has actually gone up less than unemployment as a whole during this same time period. In other words, although data show a rise in unemployment among teens, there is no reason to assume that minimum wage increases were a cause, never mind the cause, unless you also assume that the rise in minimum wage also caused the nation’s financial meltdown. As Brendan Nyhan put it, “a preliminary examination shows no obvious statistical evidence of a relationship between the minimum wage and the teen or black teen unemployment rates once we account for the upward trend in joblessness.” Of course. One has to ask, how stupid do you have to be to not have seen the big, honking flaw in WSJ’s presentation? As stupid as this guy. Spotlight 16 Comments Tags

Still Deranged and Confused

Mar 6, 2010 maha --> Wingnuts Being Wingnuts Yesterday I wrote about the futility of pegging extremists as purely “Right” or “Left.” I postulate that, just as an absolute moderate is neither Left nor Right, the closer one gets to absolute extremism the more the ideologies of “Left” and “Right” tend to blur. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that the political beliefs of people like John Patrick Bedell (Pentagon shooter) and Joseph Stack (flew plane into IRS building) don’t neatly align with any one partisan group. I also think that sometimes extremism becomes its own point; people who are psychologically hellbent on being extremists are not necessarily all that discriminating about the cause to which their extremism is committed. Whatever loose nuts and bolts are rattling around in an extremist’s psyche no doubt push him/her in one direction or another. But if the Great Cause were to suddenly disappear overnight, an extremist will have latched on to another Great Cause by suppertime.However, that doesn’t mean external stimuli don’t play a part in pushing a person predisposed to extremism into becoming more extreme, to the point of becoming dangerous. There’s a progression from apathetic to interested to opinionated to obsessively opinionated to hair-on-fire enraged/paranoid to self-and-other destruction. Inflammatory rhetoric is something like a positive feedback loop that makes the extremism “progress” from one stage to the next. And, while they refuse to admit it, right-wing rhetoric in the U.S. tends to be much more violent and much more oriented toward eliminating the opposition than left-wing rhetoric tends to be. And while the most extreme left-wing rhetoric generally is limited to off-the-beaten-track websites and fliers handed out at the occasional mass protest, the inflammatory right-wing rhetoric gets spewed out by national radio and television networks.That said, I think the meme — justified or not — that John Patrick Bedell was mostly a Right-wing extremist seems to be the meme that has taken hold in mass media narratives. This has infuriated the rightie blogosphere, which is sputtering that the guy is a registered Democrat, for pete’s sake, so he must be a leftie. But if it’s true he is a devotee of Ludwig von Mises, then he’s staunchly pro-capitalist, which more or less puts him on the Right, per our current partisan configurations. I mean, last week the Freepers decided that Joe Stack was a leftie because he appeared to be (although I’m not sure it’s clear) anti-capitalist. So by that standard, someone who is pro-capitalist must be a rightie. But no; the Freep are not claiming Bedell, either. Go figure.But the pattern we keep running into is that somebody is inflamed enough by rhetoric to kill or attempt to kill somebody else in the name of the Cause, and afterward the leaders of the Cause issue statements saying it is so unfortunate that this happened, but they are not to blame because they don’t condone violence. They think websites with “wanted” posters on them don’t count. Partisan violence is rare in the U.S., compared to some other places (i.e., Afghanistan; Somalia). But it also seems to come more from the Right than the Left. According to a story in the New York Times,Between 1990 and 2009, there were about 120 attacks in the United States by far-right extremists that led to deaths, according to a study funded by the Department of Homeland Security and the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. The number of incidents has hovered around three per year since 2002, down from an average of eight annually from 1990 to 2001 and a peak of 16 in 1999, according to the U.S. Extremist Crime Data Base. About 45 percent of incidents were motivated by white supremacist, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant or other racist ideologies, and 15 percent by extreme anti-government views, the top two categories, according to researchers Joshua D. Freilich of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York and Steven M. Chermak of Michigan State University. I guess we have to admit to “eco-terrorism” as left-wing violence, but U.S. eco-extremists are more into destruction of property than homicide. I can think of some anti-military “protests” that resulted in minor property damage. Both sorts of “demonstrations” are stupid and counter-productive, IMO. Spotlight 5 Comments Tags « Older Posts About this blog About Maha Comment Policy Vintage Mahablog Email Me if (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget('2b8c9a3e-a88c-447e-bfd8-bd0b272ba6bc');Get the Barbara's Buddhism Blog widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox! 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