perfidy

So Scooter Libby, convicted by a jury of his peers, has been unconvicted by El Presidente. The ability of the President to pardon is enshrined in the constitution, and is generally constrained only by the ethics of the grantee of the power. Bush, determined to break down the agreements and conventions that have kept the country running for hundreds of years, has begun to pardon his inner circle. Under the Bush theory of the Presidency, any subordinate can commit a crime and be "pardoned", or have his or her sentence commuted in advance. This leaves us with the uncomfortable situation of having a rather unconstrained executive branch, to say the least. Near as I can tell there is only ONE remedy for a President that abuses his authority in this fashion: Impeachment.

The President can pardon like mad unless Congress decides to remove him from office; I wonder what it would take to begin the process. I've been curious about how the GOP intends to shield its minions from a pissed-off inbound executive. Pardons can only happen if a prosecution has taken place, so unless they get those prosecutions cracking now, they're going to be unshielded later on.

This is one of the highest profile cases on record that quantifies exactly how the dual system of justice in this country works.

Colleague Patton wrote not too long ago on this very topic, so I guess you could say that we disagree. The question remains: Where is the check and balance on the Executive when it comes to pardoning his own inner circle?

And just so we're clear, I believe that the GOP has, in this round of administration, done nothing less than break down the barriers between church, state AND party. When members of the executive are emailing each other on their GOP party accounts discussing the introduction of the church into policy, you've got quite a trifecta underway.

Dave Kilcullen is one of the top commanders in Iraq. He's written a short piece describing current operations. It rings so much truer than the punditry we are almost forced to endure (but then we turn the TV off). I hope he's right -- it sounds like he knows what he's doing.

From the Ministry of Minor Perfidy Social Calendar: Aging lefties sometimes get married. Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Buckethead for their attendance, and the support of so many other family and friends. The curious might want to view a few photographs from the wedding; I've managed to get a few up there.
http://www.terriandross.com/

Competition in the medical system is a Republican plank -- the theory being that normal business competition takes place in the medical sector, yielding market forces that optimize across the board. I don't think that medicine operates the same way as other areas -- normal competitive forces require that the buyer have choices and knowledge of those choices, so better decisions can be made.

I recently had some blood tests done as part of a normal checkup -- right down at the end of the hall, sir! Weeks later some handy information systems that my insurance company provides give insight into the costing side of the medical equation that I haven't really had before. I was stunned to see the lab charges.

I wasn't stunned by the amount that the insurance company had paid on my behalf, which was around $22. I was stunned by the "normal" fee for the service -- over $125! In other words, if someone was stupid enough to go to the doctor and pay fee-for-service, they'd get hijacked (or medi-jacked, if you like) for $100 more!

There's a trend right now for companies to offer their employees medical savings accounts; employees get a pool of money they can use to pay their medical expenses, with some assistance from the company. Leftover money can be rolled over into the next year, and some of it can be kept. The idea is to encourage employees to be smart buyers when it comes to medical expenses, but how can this work if there's such a huge disparity between what's charged to the insurance company and what a normal person must pay? With a medical savings account are those deep discounts still available? And for how long?

The biggest problem Republicans have with the current medical system is that there isn't a liberal in sight they can blame its deficiencies and cruelties on. Republicans continue their efforts to raise simple fear amongst citizens -- fear of drug tampering on medicines from other countries, like…oooo…Canada, with its notoriously dangerous drug supply chain. It's not like medicines in America can be sold to pharmacies by drug distributors dealing from the trunks of their cars. Oh wait…they can and do. Or it's the scary ghost of medical futures that might involve the public sector! My god, its full of stars, and they're falling…

There is exactly one reason why Republicans (and Democrats not worthy of their offices) have been so protective of the current dysfunctional medical system in America. They have contributors who benefit enormously from the current system, and that applecart isn't going to be overturned any time soon.

So smile, citizen, as you pay over twice as much for medical care that doesn't even get you into the top ten outcomes, world-wide. You bought into it, and now you're paying for it. And get ready to pay more -- much more -- if you continue to keep your heads in the sand. I can see the drug companies "researching" a miracle cure now: A drug that will let you keep your head in the sand! Miracles never cease.

Predicting weather is a strong science in the 10 day window, with that being slowly pushed upwards by distributed supercomputing and better algorithms. It's being held back by the current stall in Moore's law, which may be with us for a little while.

Of course not all scientists say the same thing! But you have to look at the overall picture here, and do the tough thing -- place numbers on it. If only one out of every thousand scientists working in this area has a serious, contrary view supported by what they've written...

It's not about who's right and who's wrong, because science is what it is -- and nothing is certain. But we have to look at the probabilities involved here...and right now the probabilities are showing that climate change is happening and that the basis is human. The most recent report from a few months back significantly tightened up the causative network that underlies all the science.

So we have a river of probability running forward and the center path goes through very scary territory. At this point the science can't say _exactly_ what's happening, but the distribution curve on the likely events is fairly well known.

Engaging on this requires more than an assertion that there are contrary views. Bring them forward! The web is a beautiful thing. But watch out for the Heartland institute!

War, I say, War! I think this is quite an admirable trend, in general...corrupt members of a party aren't often watching their backs, and...ka-blam. We of the center (known as the left to everyone on the hard right) really ought to respond in kind, locate a "troubled" Democrat, and out the bastard. I'm sure there are plenty out there.

It does bring me to this simple way of thinking about partisanship. Rank the following in order of preference:

• Honest Republican
• Corrupt Republican
• Honest Democrat
• Corrupt Democrat

For the majority of us, I think the resulting list ends up having a certain shared characteristic...we would do well to keep that in mind as we look at our friendly neighborhood pols this time around.

President Bush has declared that global warming and greenhouse gases will "greet Americans with flowers" in the upcoming century. Much to the chagrin of the "conservative" establishment, Fox News accidentally published a news article foolishly acknowledging the possible certainty of a global warming trend. As the news establishment of record Fox News executives will shortly fall all over themselves explaining the disruption of their tango with Bush as "left foot steppage", with an accompanying chorus/chant of "UFO!" and "Terrorist!" from the gallery.

"We greet the flowering of our democracy with hope and renewed vigilance", noted El Presidente, adding that "America will grow strong, her great garden of freedom plants will grown stronger still, and we will ride these great beanstalks of global warming into the terrorist skies! Let no-one mistake our intent! This is our country, and these are our trucks!"

Tom Tancredo, desperate for attention, added that "big giant junipers on the borders would prickle mexicans into staying home and destroying their own economies for a change. Maybe we could fund that with wall money."

Mitt Romney pointed out that African Americans would be able to use the beanstalks to live above Utah, where they have been freely able to join the Mormon church since 1978! "Horticulture", Romney reportedly snickered to himself repeatedly.

Giuliani decried the global warming story, stating that any topic of conversation other 9/11 was unamerican, and even the giant beanstalk in Central Park didn't count. Then he got divorced again.

I recently gave a eulogy for my father. This is a small part of it I'd like to share.

I’m a late sleeper by default, and I’d say that my father was my exact opposite in that respect. At the cottage I’d mostly wake up around 9 or so, or whenever the noise level would rise high enough. Some mornings I’d wake up earlier though, and on those mornings I’d see my father most at peace. He’d be up early, when mist would rise from the overnight cold of the water, and those first gold rays of sunlight would best the trees to the east end of the bay. That light scattered and glowed, and I think I have not seen more perfect mornings than those. Dad would quietly slide the canoe into the water, slip in, and paddle into it all, with only the sound of water trickling from wood as he faded into mist. I often saw him come back, but I rarely saw him leave.

There’s an early time for experiences, a less crowded time, and I think Dad had a yearning for paths less occupied. If we look around and see multitudes in comfort, that urge to look elsewhere has truth. As a kid I was too tired from being too energetic to wake up when peace and beauty emerged.

We’ve got a capable family, with lots of doers and shakers, engineers and boat-makers. In some ways I’m like that too, so as a young man and even sometimes as an adult I’d see Dad looking out over the water, or from a balcony, or just at a fire…and I’d wonder what he saw. I’m not an artist so I doubt I’ll ever see it his way, or remember it the same way…but watching Dad watching embers arcing up from the heat of a fire lit sparks in me that persist to this day, that have given me warmth and comfort, to recognize and accept, to appreciate the natural beauty around us all. That’s something we never see unless we stop and look.

When we stop and look we are sometimes enchanted, or even entranced and held there, in a timeless state of contemplation. I know I could not have become the person I am without learning that from him, without being curious about his state of mind in those times, and finding that same place within myself.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Every once in a while I read a quote that's so monumentally stupid I recoil. You may have read about the recent woes the Coast Guard has had refitting ships; modernizing and extending its cutters was intended to upgrade their capabilities. Alas, somehow it went wrong, and the eight ships "refitted" so far have been removed from service, as dangerous cracks in the hull plating appeared under stress. Steel bands were wrapped around the ships to try and keep them together, but they were sidelined anyway.

It's another clusterfuck courtesy of Northrop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin, who currently receive a very large slice of your tax dollars. A few congressoids got enthusiastically in favor of the program after being bribed (oops, sorry, lobbied). N-G and L-M take their 30-50% cut for doing nothing but handing it to a subcontractor. That sub was Bollinger Shipyards, whose colossal fuckup this predominantly is.

So back to stupid. There's no explanation for how Bollinger managed to get their engineering calculations so very, very wrong. The Coast Guard's own engineers predicted the problems (by doing, you known, math stuff). Bollinger's explanation?

Bollinger, it turned out, had overestimated how much stress the modified boats could handle, a miscalculation it cannot fully explain. “The computer broke for some reason,” said T. R. Hamlin, a senior Bollinger manager. “Whether it was a power surge or something, who knows?” The cursory oversight by the Coast Guard meant the mistake was not caught in time.

The computer broke? A fucking power surge? Who knows? Apparently the Coast Guard didn't even bother to fill up the oversight positions on the procurement panel. My cynical, Occam's-razor take on that? The fix was in, and there wasn't any point in overseeing a damn thing. The engineers who knew the difference between a lunchbox and a torpedo moved on to someplace they could make a difference.

So I search for "bollinger shipyards republican", on a hunch -- which these days we can also define as a "certainty". Yep, there it is. Hit #1:

Donald T. “Boysie” Bollinger is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Bollinger Shipyards, Inc., a family-owned business established in 1946 by Boysie’s father. Bollinger Shipyards, Inc. is a full service marine construction and repair operation headquartered in Lockport, Louisiana with 12 divisions in Louisiana, two divisions in Texas, and activities extending into the international market.

Boysie Bollinger participates at both national and state levels in the political area. He served as a delegate to every Republican National Convention since 1976, and was the State of Louisiana’s Finance Chairman for the George W. Bush for President Campaign and Campaign Chair for his General Election. Boysie Bollinger was State Finance Chairman of the Louisiana Republican Party on three occasions and served on the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee.

Boysie Bollinger currently serves on the National Petroleum Council. He previously served on the President’s Export Council under the administration of President George H.W. Bush. He is past Chairman of the Governor’s Maritime Advisory Task Force, on the board of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Military Affairs, and former Chairman of the Board of Commissioners, Port of New Orleans.

Great. Your tax dollars at work. And for half of you (perhaps less these days) -- welcome to your ideology at work.

Always foolin' with stuff that should just be legislated. Like sandwiches. Is a Burrito a sandwich?. Judges pokin' their noses in where they don't belong.

I thought a lot about the election in the lead-up. I thought about the things I wanted to say to voters, figured out positions on issues, and all of that. In the end, I just decided to keep it shut and let nature take its course. I think the results were positive, and given how delicate the results were in Virginia we can all see that butterflies in Argentina influenced this election.

I'll make one general observation, though. For years now we've been hearing that the "liberal media" was distorting the truth of what's been going on in Iraq, and we've been hearing that from the very top of this administration. I think it is generally recognized now that the "liberal media distortion field" theory was BS, and that the reality distortion field was being emitted directly from the White House.

Take a moment to consider what this means for other top-shelf issues. Administration policy on environmental issues was and is being created by the same folks who brought you the Iraq war, and lied about what we really going on there (as distinct from the reason for the war). Tax policy is being created by these people as well -- we've had a massive tax cut for the wealthiest, and the numbers are in. They got a lot richer. Otherwise, median incomes are down, and Joe Average is worse off than before. And that doesn't even begin to include Joe Average's debt for the war, and for the tax cuts.

While Bush focused the tax relief "love" only at the highest income levels, he saw fit to spread the cost of the wars very evenly across all income brackets.

A tax cut for the wealthy that is not accompanied by spending cuts is a tax increase on everyone else. Period!

I can't help but think that the window for fixing some of the fundamental problems that this society has been facing is simply closed. The politically accessible surpluses that could have made headway on the real problems has been foolishly wasted on an incompetent attempt at nation-building, birthed by an untested superiority complex. The timing couldn't have been worse.

It struck me a few days ago that now is the time for the blogosphere to declare its independence from the political order. In particular this is the time for the left wing blogosphere to send a strong signal to the politicians they're trying to get elected: We are watching you. We've been watching the right for a while now, and believe me when I say that we're going to be watching you the second you're elected. The GOP hoodwinked a lot of real conservatives and turned into garden variety crooks in astonishingly short order.

Let's try hard not to let that happen again. Let's tell them we're going to be watching. Positions on the issues don't matter if you're a crook and your ethics are in question. The starting point is honesty in opinion, self-reflection, and ethical discourse. These are dangerous times, and dangerous times require realism. Elected representatives need to engage in realism for the country as a whole; not for one part of it, or for themselves.

Finally someone puts all that nifty information visualization stuff to a use we can all understand. Even if maybe we really didn't want to. Check out the spiffy graph of "who did who". The sheer number of stories amazes me. It's a red pixel/blue pixel soap opera, complete with tragedy (slept with one hot guy and never recovered), opportunistic men, settlers, searchers, and bona-fide hoochie-mommas. Ah, the human condition.

The Post has a follow-up to their article on George Allen's pseudo-Jewishness.

At the table in Palos Verdes, Calif., Allen's mother, who is 83, said she told her son the truth: That she had been raised as a Jew in Tunisia before moving to the United States. She said that she and the senator's father, famed former Redskins coach George Allen, had wanted to protect their children from living with the fear that she had experienced during World War II. Her father, Felix Lumbroso, was imprisoned by the Nazis during the German occupation of Tunis.

"What they put my father through. I always was fearful," Etty Allen said in a telephone interview. "I didn't want my children to have to go through that fear all the time. When I told Georgie, I said, 'Now you don't love me anymore.' He said, 'Mom, I respect you more than ever.' "

I can't help but wonder exactly why Etty Allen was worried that "Georgie" wouldn't love her any more? I mean, a mother usually knows her child pretty well. And she was worried.

Let's also point out that it is quite clear that Allen flat-out lied about it when asked by a reporter. Good thing he wasn't under oath, huh? No double standard, right? Anybody recall George Allen's position on the Clinton/Lewinsky crap?

The other George, fool! :)

Speaking with The Times-Dispatch, Allen said the disclosure is "just an interesting nuance to my background." He added, "I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops."

Everybody repeat after George: I am not a Jew!

Remember the whole "macaca" thing? Turns out that macaca is common slang for n---g-er in French/Northern Africa(Wiktionary). Turns out that Allen's mother is from Tunisia.

Maybe his cradle songs were a little different. Maybe when he said it was a "made-up word" he wasn't being entirely truthful.

Maybe, just maybe, this guy is exactly what he appears to be. Which to me is a very stupid version of Cartman.

Found this fantastic graphic, courtesy of the NO Times-Picayune. It challenges a lot of "common wisdom" about the flooding, with a very clear depiction of how and why flooding occurred. I was curious about the effects of Mr. GO (the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) on New Orleans during Katrina. Mr. GO is a 70-mile canal dug from the gulf straight through the wetlands to New Orleans' inner harbor, creating a kind of "express highway" for storm surge. It and the other artificial constructs (canals and levees) are the real reason that Katrina had the devastating effect on New Orleans that it did. Each mile of wetlands reduces storm surge by approximately 1 foot, according to what I've read. Wetlands could have reduced away five, ten, or fifteen feet of storm surge if they had been present. By eliminating hundreds of square miles of wetlands over the past 70 years (and even farther back on a more limited scale) the "protection" of New Orleans has resulted in its inevitable destruction. If you watch the graphic, pay close attention to the locations of the levee breaks. The river didn't flood its banks, and neither did the lakes. The breaches occurred at points along the artificial canals.

Each year that the river's sediment has been prevented from being spread out over the flood plain (a natural result of flooding) the land has declined. The sediment has actually ended up out in the gulf, wasted, because the "bird's foot" extension of the Mississippi into the Gulf extends out to the edge of the continental shelf. The bottom line is that the continued survival of the landmass depends on consistent flooding by the river so that that replacement land is created at (or above) the rate at which the soil is removed (into the Gulf).

Enough with the science already. Since I'm writing this post, everyone must be curious as how to how this means Republicans suck. To be fair, it's not just the GOP -- it's been a number of governments not paying attention to the problem. First, the fix.

The fix is an engineering program that uses the Mississippi river like a muddy garden hose, moving it around and "spraying" the delta with the sediment, replenishing over many years what has been taken away. There's universal agreement on both sides of the political aisle that this is the best and only long term solution. The problem is the cost, which prior to Katrina was considered to be absolutely prohibitive.

The price tag was $14 billion, in 2000. The current price tag from Katrina's damage is at $100 billion and climbing. Way back in 2000-2001 politicians of all stripes and bents came together in recognition of the long term problem and solution, and went with their proposals to the federal government. Bush struck nearly the entire program from the budget, replacing it with a single $250 million allocation for further "study". Decades of study had already been done, and the enormously difficult work of pulling together many parts of the political spectrum too. All of this was tossed away like garbage by a President that treats science like an unwanted stepchild.

Around the same time, Bush's "Iraq Recovery Fund" proposed over $100 million in spending to replenish wetlands in Iraq. Congress struck that provision from the package, but it gives you an understanding of the priorities at the time.

$14 billion is what this nation spends every six weeks in Iraq. Iraq is costing this country a sum of money (say a minimum of $500 billion) that could have cured cancer, or introduced a hydrogen infrastructure to the entire continent, or compensated the victims of Katrina many times over. That's what you've given away.

Sure, hindsight is 20-20. And yes, previous governments could have done something about this, and didn't. But Bush was the one who rejected the "real solution" when it was finally put in front of a national politician. And he is the one who presided over emergency mangement so incompetent that people were dying while standing on the interstate after waiting for five days in the sun for a bus to arrive.

Bush wants to talk about anything but New Orleans and Katrina in this election cycle. The same goes for the GOP as a whole. During Katrina, we found out exactly how the Bush administration would react if disaster struck a major American city: They would fuck it up beyond belief, and the well-connected would make money from it.

New Orleans and the disaster's management is the Bush Presidency in a microcosm. Incompetent from top to bottom, winking at corruption, ignorant of science, lacking the common sense necessary to compensate for lack of knowledge, and above all, utterly lacking in compassion for hardship, heartache, death and destruction their policies cause.

Could Bush have prevented Katrina? Of course not. But he could have begun the process, and if the post-hurricane disaster had had anything resembling leadership much suffering would have been prevented.

We have heard hundreds, if not thousands of evocations of Saddam Hussein's evil gassing of his own people, which killed perhaps 5,000 of them in an afternoon. Where does this adminstration note that its policies and activities have resulted in or contributed to the deaths of at least 30,000 Iraqi citizens?

No remorse. No explanations. No admissions of error. In general, no information is provided by this administration other than jingoistic rhetoric directed at staying the course.

You are not safer with these people in charge, or with anyone they've trained or groomed.

Canadians are widely seen as the closest thing to being American, world-wide. So what's up with the US government torturing Canadians? Should the Canadian government begin torturing US citizens? As a Canadian living here in the US, I am hopeful that black-masked thugs will not show up in the middle of the night, slap my fiance to the floor, and extradite me to a secret CIA prison in Syria, where I can be tortured into saying just about anything. It won't be hard; I won't last.

As a "guest" of the CIA, Maher Arar confessed, under torture, to having attended weapons training in Afghanistan and being an al-Qaeda member. We know now that he's never been to Afghanistan (or anywhere near it). So good job there on the "interrogation" -- what we've shown is that someone being tortured will say whatever they can to get it to stop.

This guy is a regular guy. He's an engineer who was doing nothing but minding his own business.

If you support Bush's policies in this area, your positions are fairly limited:

• This was wrong and it shouldn't have happened, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Nobody was supposed to know.
• This was wrong, it shouldn't have happened, and it's illegal. Someone should be held responsible.
• This was OK because he was a foreigner. Americans don't have anything to worry about.
• This was OK because he was of middle eastern descent. Normal Americans don't have anything to worry about.
• We're in a war and we don't have to explain shit to any other stupid country.

I've left this article plural deliberately. This is the one guy that we know about. Are there others? How many other Canadian citizens has the US government abducted? And where are they?

What's the official position of the US government on compensation for Arar?

Kevin Drum notes that the California legislature has passed a measure that would direct the state's electoral votes based on the national results, rather than the results in California. There's speculation on whether or not the Governator will sign it; I hope that he does. The odd and divisive strategies of national elections are driven by the craziness of the electoral vote system, and if enough states adopt this legislation, the country will be heading firmly back in the direction of "one person, one vote". With any luck the tyranny of rural America will end.

Under the legislation, California would grant its electoral votes to the nominee who gets the most votes nationwide — not the most votes in California....The California legislation would not take effect until enough states passed such laws to make up a majority of the Electoral College votes — a minimum of 11 states, depending on population.

It's bad for Republicans, of course. More populous states would gain in overall power. I do note the irony that under this system California's electoral votes would have gone to Bush in the last election, which is fine with me (in the numerical sense).

Once again, Bush makes it crystal clear that he, personally, does not believe there's a direct link between 9/11 and Iraq. Doesn't it wear this guy down even a little to have to go out there and push this crap, continuously? Bush speaks.

We're approaching the fifth anniversary of the September the 11th attacks -- and since that day, we have taken the fight to the enemy. Yet this war is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.

He spoke to the Seafarer's union too:

And my message to the world is this: Just treat us the way we treat you. That's all we expect.