Plus ça change

Not to ruin your lovely weekend or anything, but here are some fresh remnants of the depravity of the Bush administration.  Immigrant detainees dying in private jails and officials scrambling to cover up their deaths and mistreatment.
Every time stuff like this surfaces, I wonder how is it that Bush and Cheney and their despicable minions roam the Earth unscathed.
Instead of jail, why don't they just deport the people? Do you know that they have detained legal immigrants because of bureaucratic technicalities that then disappear into a nightmarish rabbit hole from which there is no way out? 
Enjoy the outrage!

Liberal Jews: It's About Time.

I have been saying this for years:

About J Street, a new, much needed liberal Jewish lobby in Washington (from the NYT Magazine):

We’re trying to redefine what it means to be pro-Israel. You don’t have to be noncritical. You don’t have to adopt the party line. It’s not, ‘Israel, right or wrong.’ ”

American Jewish voters are overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, but as Jewish groups moved to the right along with Israel in the 1980s, the groups increasingly made common cause with the Republican Party, which from the time of Ronald Reagan was seen as more staunchly pro-Israel than were the Democrats. Jewish groups also began to work with the evangelicals who formed the Republican base and tended to be fervidly pro-Israel. Indeed, when I met with Malcolm Hoenlein in July, he had just come from a huge Washington rally sponsored by Christians United for Israel, whose founder, the Rev. John Hagee, has denounced Catholicism, Islam and homosexuality in such violent terms that John McCain felt compelled eventually to reject his endorsement during the 2008 presidential campaign.

(AND THE JEWS ARE NEXT, BELIEVE YOU ME. BEING FRIENDS WITH RABID EVANGELICALS IS LIKE THE US GOVERNMENT GIVING MONEY TO THE TALIBAN IN ORDER TO FIGHT THE RUSSIANS. A VERY BAD IDEA)

As Martin Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel and now the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, puts it, “In the Bush years, when Israel enjoyed a blank check, increasing numbers of people in the Jewish and pro-Israel community began to wonder, If this was the best president Israel ever had, how come Israel’s circumstances seemed to be deteriorating so rapidly?” Why was Israel more diplomatically isolated than ever? Why had Israel fought a savage and apparently unavailing war with Hezbollah in Lebanon? Why were the Islamists of Hamas gaining the upper hand over the more moderate Fatah in Palestine? “There was kind of a cognitive dissonance,” Indyk says, “about whether a blank check for Israel is necessarily the best way to secure the longevity of the Jewish state.”

Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, was born in Poland in 1940, and he often sounds as if only eternal vigilance will ward off the Holocaust in the offing. Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, was born in a camp for displaced persons, to parents who were Holocaust survivors. The prophetic voice comes naturally to such men. So does the sense of besetting peril. Important Jewish organizations are normally reached through a series of locked doors presided over by glassed-in functionaries. The peril may be real. But it can also feel like a marketing device. “You know what these guys are afraid of?” says M. J. Rosenberg, Washington director of the Israel Policy Forum. “Their generation is disappearing. All the old Jewish people in senior-citizen homes speaking Yiddish are dying — and they’re being replaced by 60-year-old Woodstock types.”

Time for new blood and new and constructive ideas that will protect Israel, not help destroy it.

As for Norman Putzhoretz, Leon Wieseltier makes a very good case about why Jews are liberal and how Podhoretz is basically talking out of his tuches.

They Are Closing Hutto!

I wrote about this disgraceful prison for illegal immigrant detainees (and their children), after reading an alarming article in the New Yorker.
Apparently, the Obama administration is going to "reform" and make "more civil" the detention centers for illegal immigrants. I find it interesting that these news appeared exactly two days after the NY Times claimed that the Obama administration is continuing the inhumane policies of Bush's persecution of illegals. Things that make you go hhhmmm...
This is one case in which public outcry can bring about changes in policy and I feel like screaming hurray!, but I am wary of the Obama administration's claims of reform. Lately, they seem to be applying this word too liberally to stuff that isn't really changing all that much. Like health care, for example. Or torture. In Hutto's case I was exultant, until I read that they are going to transform it into a detention center for illegal female immigrants. Hutto was conceived as a maximum security prison, and the premises are not fit for the detainees, who are not dangerous criminals.
Still, it looks like we should count our blessings with this administration.
It's not change; it's change, kind of.

Grading Obama

CNN has a fun and kinda stupid interactive report card for Obama's 200 days. It's interesting to look at the numbers. Everybody is unhappy with the performance so far. But the flaw of the grading system is that it doesn't say why. Both blue and red states give him bad marks on health care, but perhaps for totally opposite reasons. One can't tell from the poll. But a good thing is that except for 12 benighted states, the rest of the union gives the Republican party an F. This is encouraging.
CNN asks people to comment (read comments at your own peril.). Here is mine.

I give Obama an average of C-.
Obama has been disappointing for many of us liberals that voted for him for a number of reasons. The government bailout of the banks seems to have been conducted by insiders to benefit their banker pals, and even though it is possible that the measures may be helping stem our economic decline, unless more stringent regulation of banking practices in enacted, it's going to continue being business as usual and an ethical scandal.
I am extraordinarily disappointed with Obama and the Democrats' handling of health care reform. This country needs a single payer system, even if it means more taxes. Our health cannot be beholden to the greed of insurance companies. It's a pity that the people who are most affected by this unjust state of affairs are the ones who complain the loudest about getting health care for all. Obama is too busy trying to be liked by everybody to have the cojones to push real reform. In this case, he looks like politics as usual to me.
In terms of foreign affairs, anything is better than the preceding 8 years and we have regained some of our standing in the world. But he needs to stop the grandstanding and get down to brass tacks. Let's get out of Iraq as soon as possible. Let's push aggressively for a solution to the Palestinian issue. Let's understand exactly why we are in Afghanistan, what is it going to take, and if it's going to work. Let's look at our south of the border neighbor more actively, and push for improvements on the immigration problem and the drug war, which Mexico is waging on it's own to satisfy the insatiable demand for drugs of American citizens.
Obama promised to stop torture and close Guantanamo. It's not clear that this is happening.
The Republican leadership is an undignified freak show. They are imploding and they deserve it. They are completely out of touch. They are bizarre.
Congress in general is disgraceful. Our elected representatives work for the corporate lobbies and not for the citizens, regardless of party affiliation. There must be political reform.
The media is pathetic. There is no real coverage of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. More time is devoted to Michael Jackson or to absurd and offensive fringe movements like "birthers", than to informing the American public of the real issues facing us. No news organization can be trusted, because none is delivering the news. The media is overrun by hysterical personalities that bring the lowest polarizing discourse to the table. Walter Cronkite and the likes of him are gone forever.
Obama needs to act on his promises and he needs to stop behaving as if he is still courting favor with red states and blue states. He is the president now. Time to put his foot down.

Let's get outta there! NOW!

Colonel Reese, an American adviser in Iraq, is saying in no uncertain terms, (blunt is how the Times puts it) that it is time to say Adios amigous! and leave Iraq.
Hey, not a moment too soon! What took you so long?
His memo makes for great reading, even though it has the tone of a superior being who has finally ran out of patience with the pesky, stubborn natives. That is, the tone of a colonialist from the 19th century.
In a nutshell: we can't change their ways and we are not welcome anymore, plus they're bleeding us to death.
He says, let's declare victory and call it a day. I have a problem with the victory part, because it don't look like no victory to me, but just call it what you please, and let's vamoose.
Why do Americans insist that other people are going to abandon their culture and their entrenched ways and embrace, digest, and ape a totally different culture in a matter of months? Is this the height of naiveté or arrogance, or both? We can't even change our own culture HERE.
The US invades and occupies a country under false pretenses. This country is ruled by a truly evil bastard whose only way to keep the ethnic chaos in check is through a reign of utter terror. This is a deeply abused and traumatized country, but Americans think that they will "liberate" it and all of a sudden the grateful Iraqis, who would not know democracy or freedom if it bit them in the ass, have not known it and will not know it for the next thousand years, are going to all start acting like Thomas Jefferson. Instead, they start a massive bloodbath against themselves and the occupying forces.
We cannot invade a country over false pretenses, because of sheer greed and then pretend we were there to save it. And who should be held accountable for this criminal mess? To the gallows!

To clean up the mess we are leaving behind would probably require at least 50 years and too much money to count, neither of which we can afford. As many commenters say, let's bring the troops back and use the gazillions we are wasting over there for better things at home; i.e, single payer healthcare.

I quote Mr. Byron Jones from Pennsylvania:

...we spend trillions of dollars for stupid "regime changes" aka Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. without so much as flinching. Saving lives and providing affordable medical care for our own citizens, well, that is something entirely different. Can anyone explain the logic? In other words, you can use my tax dollars to kill someone I don't know, but God forbid that you use my tax dollars to help my neighbor obtain affordable health insurance!

Bring the troops home NOW.

And no, it's not refreshing if you can't speak English while in office, or while running away from it.

I've had it with the people who think that inarticulateness in politics is charming and refreshing.
Go read a fucking book!
And I am always amazed that the people who champion this ignoramus are the same people who get all bent out of shape when immigrants don't speak the King's English. For crying out loud. At least they are immigrants. They already speak one language. And they are not the governor of anything.
Having said this, the edited version of Palin's resignation speech is very much fun and a good grammar lesson to boot.
Thanks to Ethan for posting in FB!

P.S.: And yes, the "liberal" media laughs at you, because you are laughable. You fully deserve the excoriation.

Fear is your best friend

Great article in the Times about intuition and how it can save lives in battle.
One would have thought it obvious, but now that they are mapping the brain they can see how this works physically.
I'm reproducing parts of the comment posted by one Tom Colton, an ex-soldier. I don't know if it's true, but it is quite compelling:

Lots of infantry platoons have a guy who can sense an ambush. The keys to knowing if you should rely on him are: Success. Does he keep you alive on a regular basis? And adjustment. Is he squared away, or a neurotic? If the latter, then his senses may be more often than not, skewed...
And something else was noted frequently in Vietnam by those who conducted combat actuarial studies:
In a firefight, Jocks are the first ones usually killed, because they never learned about fear during sports.
Thugs and Gangstas get killed next, because they have an inflated idea of their prowess.
Then the Bullies buy the farm while trying for the first time to move beyond their real cowardice.
And finally: In Combat-The four eyed pencil necked geeks rule, because they work as a team, follow orders, feel responsible for and protective of the other guys in their rifle squad and and most importantly-they paid attention during training. They advance thru their fear, surmount real terror and commit great acts of selfless heroism. And they almost never get a medal.
This country is full of dopey lookin' old guys who once confronted stark terror in extreme danger and carried out great acts of valor and sacrifice against armed enemies engaged with them in a combat zone. Most of these guys are never honored at the time and their families will most likely never know. Instead, we worship phoney war heroes like Bob Kerrey, John Kerry and John McCain who milk their hero status for power, wealth, trophy wives and adulation.
I was never a hero, but I saw regular guys do things that no Bruce Lee, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Steven Segal, nor Arnold Schwarzenegger, or any other phoney Hollywood hero would ever do. Hunches about danger and escaping from it is baloney. Hunches about danger and fighting thru it to complete your mission are what really counts..."I am the Infantry... Queen of Battle...Follow ME!

As I think Mr. Colton is saying, we are the only country on Earth with an inflated and deeply distorted sense of heroism, which among other things is responsible for bullshit like saying "Mission Accomplished" at the beginning of an endless, tragic war. If we were more respectful of fear, perhaps we would not be in this predicament right now. Too much fear can of course be cowardly and paralyzing, but lack of fear is arrogance and hubris.