Needlenose

I’m not supporting James O’Keefe’s take-down of ACORN, but I thought it was a brilliant and funny bit of political theater.  As we all know, his latest ‘caper,’ to tap or otherwise mess with Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones, fizzled out as suspicious staffers called in the fuzz, turning wanna-be political thespians into political miscreants.

So how did Jimmy go from genius to doofus in a single step?  First off, hubris, common plight of the young and brash fresh off a recent victory.  I guess Jimmy figured he was so gifted he need give nary a thought for the gross difference in scale between pranking an overworked ACORN staffer and the staff of a U.S. Senator.

Secondly, the first prank worked well because it was funny, regardless of your political stripe – and that was especially great because as we all know, reactionaries are so rarely funny!

Maybe Jimmy had something funny planned, but by not leveling with us and telling us what he was really up to, we can only assume it was a ho-hum act of wrong-wing political thuggery.   Ergo – doofus.

Happy to see this reactionary terrorist convicted of murder, but unclear why he doesn’t get the death penalty – they still have that in Kansas, don’t they?  I’m normally opposed, but my litmus test is – would I volunteer to execute?  Hand me the syringe!

(Images via Witty Comics.)

In or around San Francisco on 1/28 at 4:30P with nothing better to do?  Why not go give a neighborly hello to God’s Own Wingnuts, the folks from the Westboro Baptist Church during their inexplicable protest of Twitter, at the Twitter HQ 795 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA.  They actually have an action-packed schedule, so if you can’t make 4:30, check the link and catch them at one of their other odd protests.  And if you do go, find some creative way to express your support…I’m thinking smelly liquids that don’t wash out of clothes.

Tip ‘o the ‘Nose to Training Buddy

The Bush-appointed SCOTUS majority hastens the end of representative democracy with their catastrophic ruling eliminating Corporate campaign donation limits.  Well we had a good 200-odd year run, give or take a few misAdministrations.

A Repug Senator wins in Massachusetts?  Seriously?  Shows you how fucked up the Dem leadership really is.  The idiots dicked around so long with trying to appease the Repugs, the Repugs in drag ‘Blue Dogs’ and the lobbyists and now they’ve screwed the pooch.  Barney Frank pretty much said ‘back to the drawing board on health care.’  This is fucked up.  Forget Lincoln, Kennedy, Clinton…Obama is Jimmy Carter.

Yesterday was a day of déjà vu news from Iraq:

• The nominally independent election commission barred nearly 500 candidates from the voting scheduled for March 7, after receiving a request from the government to remove individuals accused of having ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. (Iraq expert Reidar Visser referred to the commission’s explanation as “making up the law.”)
• 11 men were sentenced to death for their roles in a massive bombing of two Iraqi government ministries last summer, an alleged Baathist-led plot. The regime claimed to have broken up a similar plot earlier this week.
• Perhaps in reaction to either the conviction or the political maneuvering, multiple bombs exploded in Najaf yesterday evening, near the Imam Ali shrine (shown above; an especially holy site for Shiite Muslims) and the home of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

In the previous national elections, it was Sistani’s endorsement of a slate dominated by Shiite political parties that put the current government in power — and those same parties have consistently used anti-Baathism as a rallying cry for sectarian policies that disenfranchised Sunni Muslims.

In short, the factionalism that tore Iraq apart after the American invasion continues to simmer, even as (to quote Juan Cole) “the remaining 110,000 U.S. troops in Iraq seldom do patrols and seldom see combat any more.” Which shouldn’t come as any surprise.

For the hawks who foisted the Iraq war on us, the invasion and occupation were all about imposing the will of the United States on that country, not to mention the rest of the Middle East. Some who opposed the war saw it through a similar American-centric prism, claiming that the horrific internal violence that followed was purely in response to U.S. imperialism.

In fact, neither was the case. We removed the ruler of a country awash with armaments, and various factions have been fighting ever since for the power to rule it next. The colossal, stupid tragedy of the U.S. involvement there was our government’s decision to set off the conflict in the first place, and then to stay in the middle of it.

Of course, for some, there is an apparent silver lining:

A wave of American companies have been arriving in Iraq in recent months to pursue what is expected to be a multibillion-dollar bonanza of projects to revive the country’s stagnant petroleum industry, as Iraq seeks to establish itself as a rival to Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer.

… The contracts will be administered either directly by the Iraqi government or as part of Baghdad’s oversight of international oil companies that have signed agreements during the past few months to develop the country’s most promising oil fields.

… Among the companies that have started sending workers and equipment to the country or have plans to are Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Weatherford International and Schlumberger, all Houston-based oil-services companies, and several construction and engineering giants, including KBR, Bechtel, Parsons, Fluor and Foster Wheeler.

… While American oil companies have enjoyed only modest success in winning oil development deals in Iraq, the numerous contracts signed in recent months have created an enormous backlog of work that leaves Baghdad with limited alternatives to Halliburton and the other American companies that dominate the oil industry services sector.

Funny (or sad, I guess) that some folks always seem to come out on top, isn’t it?

Truth is stranger than fiction! None other than Bob Barker of 70s and 80s TV game show fame has come to the rescue of Sea Shepherd, through a $5 million gift to go buy a boat that won’t get crushed in the ice in Antarctic waters.  And believe it or not, the new ship, the ‘Bob Barker’ has already proven it’s worth – it came to the rescue of several crew members of their little ‘attack’ vessel the Ady Gil after said boat was deliberately rammed by a whaler.

While I like and support Sea Shepherd’s work, I’m no big fan of their founder, Paul Watson.  Case in point, he’s equating the potential end of Japanese Antarctic whaling with the end of commercial whaling:

“Whaling was shut down today,” Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson said via satellite phone from aboard a nearby ship. “There’s no whaling now and hopefully no whaling after this.”

Well…what about Iceland?  What about Norway?  What about so-called Russian & U.S. “traditional” indigenous whaling?  I think his organization would have a much easier time putting pressure on those countries and shutting down whaling faster than playing faux pirate in the Antarctic waters with the Japanese cast as the only villains.

Anyway, hopefully Bob Barker’s courageous donations will be a clarion call that will inspire other game show hosts to donate additional money and tools to pro-environmental groups…how about a 16 inch/50 caliber Mark 7 naval gun for the new ship?

Just assume a kayak and 2,756 miles' worth of stamina, and you're there!

Speaking of Fubar (as Green Boy was just below), about a month ago he passed along an off-site remark about Google Maps providing “driving directions” from San Francisco to Hawaii — including the awkwardly roundabout need to kayak from Washington state across the Pacific.  My reply, based on that week’s progressive disappointment in the White House, was that  President Obama must have used similar software in figuring out his escalate-in-order-to-withdraw strategy in Afghanistan.

Little did I know that despite my terminal procrastination in posting about that topic, the same half-hearted snark would be appropriate with regard to the state of healthcare reform… and even that requires a large quantity of optimism.

As you undoubtedly know by now (um, unless you’ve been depending on this blog to keep you informed of breaking news developments), separate reform proposals have passed in the House of Representatives and the Senate — with the latter bill’s benefits so thoroughly diminished that whether it’s any improvement at all over the present system is a matter of fierce debate in the progressive blogiverse.  In fact, Obama himself is under intense criticism for having exerted so little visible effort to avoid the legislative emasculation that occurred in the Senate.

In Obama’s defense, though, this is a situation that he apparently planned for early on in the year, as Brian Beutler reported for TPM back in August:

Dick Durbin (D-IL), the number two Democrat in the Senate, says President Obama wants to move forward with some form of health care bill quickly, and then fight the fight over particulars in negotiations with the House of Representatives. . . .

“… we are trying to walk this tightrope to get this bill through. The House [of Representatives] is likely to include it [a public option]. The Senate may not. Then we go into conference committee and President Obama has to roll up his sleeves and see if he can bring us all together. And when I’ve spoken to him about this a couple times, all he’s said is: ‘Get me to a conference committee. Let me bring these folks into a room, and let me work and get it done.‘”

Okay, so the Democrats in Congress have gotten healthcare reform to a conference committee, as Obama claims to have wanted.  Indeed, in his own comments on the subject, the president echoed Durbin’s language:

“… we hope to have a whole bunch of folks over here in the West Wing, and I’ll be rolling up my sleeves and spending some time before the full Congress even gets into session…. I intend to work as hard as I have to work, especially after coming this far over the course of the year, to make sure that we finally close the deal.”

The question is, rolling up his sleeves to do what?   Conventional wisdom has already hardened that whatever comes out of the House-Senate negotiations will be essentially identical to what passed the Senate (even if that bill is at least slightly improved over its worst incarnation) — lest it fall prey again to the unpredictable whims of Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman as they threaten to join a Republican filibuster.

It seems like daydreaming at this point to imagine that Obama could move the bill in a more robust (and progressive) direction, then finally mount the bully pulpit, using the inherent popularity of a “public option” and similar features to pressure the centrist corporatist Dems into allowing a simple majority vote.  And yet, Obama’s speech to Congress in September showed that he could move the needle of popular opinion on healthcare reform, if only he cared enough to try.

Another possibility is the strategy that Nate Silver outlined a couple of weeks ago:

… the idea is to “surprise” the Senate by unexpectedly introducing additional provisions under reconciliation once you’ve already got the main portion of the bill passed. Does this sound attractive to you? Well then, the best thing to do would be topass the bill as is now, since that is the first step in the strategy. To repeat: the most promising application of the split-bill/reconciliation strategy involves passing what you can now — not killing it.

Silver sees this as also being unlikely, but it was also proposed by wonk-blogger Mark Schmitt back in July…

Use the 60-vote Senate to pass whatever they can pass now — we liberals will grumble but live with it — and then use reconciliation next year to fix it. With the exchange structure and subsidies established, it wouldn’t be hard to add an employer mandate, which would save money. With the rudiments of even a weak public plan in place, it wouldn’t be complicated to expand it and modify its eligibility rules, in ways that might save or cost money but in either event, involve budget changes to an existing program rather than creating something new. Aggregating small changes over the next few years (on the model of the steady expansion of Medicaid engineered by Henry Waxman and others over the 1980s and 1990s) could non-controversially build the kind of robust and equitable system we dream of.

… and Sen. Tom Harkin, a public option supporter, hinted at it two weeks ago (“We have to get this bill passed, and then we’ll come back and revisit the public option at some point.”)

Assuming the House and Senate finish making their legislative sausage by Obama’s “State of the Union” address to Congress, wouldn’t it be something of a political masterstroke for the president to announce a plan to strengthen and complete the watered-down bill by passing an expansion of Medicare using budget reconciliation rules?  That would be a classic example of doing the hard, unpleasant work during the off year, and delivering the most popular aspect of reform right before the 2010 elections.

If Obama lacks the chutzpah to even try that, instead settling for the cautious, least-resistance path of accepting whatever meager reforms the Congress will pass on its own, then he deserves whatever he gets — in terms of public opinion and a demotivated base going into the 2010 elections — for his failure to lead.  Just standing by and watching as others do all the rowing isn’t enough; at some point, the president has to grab an oar, too, or we’ll never get anywhere.

Guest post from Spy Buddy:

Kazakhstan is now heading up the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) for 2010, which is ironic since the Associated Press has reported Kazakhstan has almost concluded a deal with Iran to export 1,350 tons of purified uranium ore .

States from Europe, Central Asia and North America to form the largest regional security organization in the
world.  According to the OSCE’s website, that Organization addresses a wide range of security-related issues such as military and human rights.  And we all know that Iran has been determined a rogue state due to its political and military policies (i.e. building nuclear weapons and holding fraudulent elections) and continues its poor human rights records with ordering death sentences to the opposition party as well as raping, torturing and murdering rounded up protesters.

While its chilling to think Iran getting hold of so much uranium its even worse seeing Kazakhstan leading the OSCE since its does little to uphold the organization’s charter. Kazakhstan is ranked 142 out of 174 by
Reporters Without Borders.  Just recently the government jailed Yevgeny Zhovtis-a prominent human rights activist, and in December Gennady Pavlyuk, a Kyrgyz opposition journalist, was apparently
thrown from the sixth-floor window of an apartment with his hands and feet bound with duct tape.

I now understand why Sacha Baron Cohen selected Kazakhstan as the home nation for Borat.

I guess defenestration is making a comeback!