Psychopolitik 2.0

Starting tommorow I’ll be out of town visiting relatives for about a week.  Barring some event that absolutely BEGS for my two cents, you will hear jack squat from me during that time.  Give my blogroll a shot.

As people actually read the immigration bill, the picture of just how much of a mess it is becomes clearer:

For weeks, U.S. senators wrestled among themselves and with White House officials over the question of what mix of skills, background and experience prospective immigrants should bring to their new country.

The answer they came up with, embodied in the immigration bill now on the Senate floor, would represent a radical shift in the philosophy of the U.S. immigration system. Rather than focus on reunifying families, the system would emphasize bringing in better-educated, higher-skilled immigrants who would help the United States compete in the world economy. [...]

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), one of the leading Democratic presidential candidates, is serving notice that he will try to change the proposal on the Senate floor, to give a higher value to reuniting families. The Senate will resume debate on the measure when it returns next week from the Memorial Day recess.

Obama has called the point plan a “radical experiment in social engineering.” In a speech last week, he said the bill “fails to recognize the fundamental morality of uniting Americans with their family members. It also places a person’s job skills over his character and work ethic. How many of our forefathers would have measured up under the point system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?” (emphasis mine)

Good point.  As nonsensical as our immigration policy already is, treating people like commodities within an even more complicated system isn’t smart.  On this matter, Obama is correct.  Problem is, he’s more correct than he is willing to admit: of course this plan is social engineering, yet by the nature of the concept any central planning of immigration is social engineering.  No matter what the criteria is, it all boils down to the federal government attempting to dictate (despite the futility of such) via policy the future makeup of U.S. culture.

If he wanted to turn his point from a essentially meaningless soundbite into a signal of a better strategy (which he doesn’t), then he’d call for tearing down the entire immigration maze, stating his case as “look, there’s no reason for the US to waste time & money chasing down people who just want a better life.  By treating migrant workers like invading hordes, all we’re doing is making it easier for the few who DO come in with bad intentions by letting them blend in with a crowd”.  Alas, Barack Obama isn’t going to hire Thomas Knapp as a policy adviser anytime soon…

This crap over gasoline prices is activating a lot of folks’ Stupid Mode:

Motorists pulled in to Harvey Pollack’s gas station, honked and gave him a thumbs-up — because he wasn’t selling any fuel.  The owner of Towne Market Mobil in this suburb north of Milwaukee shut down his pumps for 24 hours, hoping to start a movement aimed at convincing oil companies to lower their prices. [...]

Maria McClory, 38, drove 10 miles out of her way to buy a diet soda from Pollack’s station after seeing local television coverage of the protest.  “I just wanted to support them and thank them for making a statement,” said McClory, who drives about 100 miles a day for work in her sport utility vehicle.

Other drivers were more skeptical.

Jeff Bensman, 52, pulled in expecting to gas up his Honda sedan. He said he appreciated the protest but did not think it would make much difference.  “Most other places are going to be open in the area,” he said.

Jack Sobczak, general sales manager for Lakeside Oil Co., a contracted Mobil distributor that supplies Pollack’s station, said Bensman was probably right: “The demand will just move down the street to the next Mobil station.”

Lemme get this straight: to protest increasing gas prices, this guy, who admits he isn’t making much anyway (he hasn’t made a profit in over two years), stops selling gas.  For a day.  People, in support of this, go out of their way to go to his station, wasting more gas in the process.  That’s all before you even consider that all he did was shift fulfillment of demand to neighboring gas stations or to when he reactivates the pumps the next day!!  How exactly is this stickin’ it to the oil companies?

Y’know how usually poll results have to be taken with a generous grain of salt?  Well, Glenn Greenwald found some that, IMO, due to the subject, don’t:

Among four key predominantly Muslim countries — Iran, Pakistan, Egypt and Indonesia — the percentage which believes that there is never any justification for violent attacks on civilians is between 77-84%. By extremely stark contrast, the percentage of Americans who believe that such attacks are never justified is only 46%.

No amount of selection bias can explain this one.  Unless, of course, you assume they somehow tracked down those “sleeper cells” the fearmongers claim are all over the place in the US specifically to ask them what they thought about killing civilians.  What the fuck is wrong with people these days?!?

Shorter Ben Ferguson: “The US is a great big teddy bear!  Who can’t love us?”

Careful, if you tell him the tooth fairy doesn’t exist his head may explode…

This had better not turn out to be true:

Congressional Democrats plan to send to President Bush a war-spending bill without a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, two Democratic leadership aides tell CNN.

Earlier this month, Bush vetoed a war spending bill passed by the Democratically-controlled Congress that included a timetable for withdrawal. The president has insisted that he will not sign any bill that includes such a provision.

The bill is expected to include benchmarks that the Iraqi government would have to achieve. The bill is also expected to require the president to provide numerous reports to Congress before August 2007 on the Iraqi government’s progress, the aides said.

If the Iraqi government fails to meet the benchmarks, the aides said, reconstruction funds could be cut. The bill may also allow the president to waive the penalties for failing to meet the benchmarks if he feels they are necessary. (emphasis mine)

Saying “oh, if the Iraqis don’t do X, Y, & Z we might cut funds for rebuilding, but even if we do you can ignore that for whatever reason, up to and including no reason at all” is not a compromise. It is an offer to be cornholed.

It’s obvious what’s going on here: Democratic operatives fear the old phantoms of the party being “soft” — despite their record of being no more hesitant to use force than the Republicans — rearing their ugly heads if Memorial Day passes without a funding bill Bush will sign. No, if they have any sort of redeeming quality despite being politicians they will fight this tooth & nail, parrying the slightest bit of suggestion of having it in for the troops by pointing out what they’ve been subjected to because of this entire clusterfuck. Falling for emotional tricks on such matters would be the real insult to the ones that serve, not standing up for the end of a mission that is inherently unwinnable.

Edit: Yup, they rolled over:

Democrats reluctantly gave up their demand for troops withdrawal dates in an Iraq war spending package today, conceding to President Bush on their number one goal in a debate that has roiled Congress for months.

The confrontation sparked bitter exchanges between liberals and conservatives, yielding no middle ground where party leaders and Bush could compromise. In the end, Republicans had the ticking clock of troop funding and the presidential veto pen on their side, and Democrats were forced to blink. [...]

The final agreement was hammered out by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and followed extensive consultations with GOP leaders and the White House. Party leaders did secure two other priorities, a long-sought minimum wage increase and $20 billion for domestic projects, both of which Bush had initially resisted.

So they sold out based on completely unrelated spending.  Check out the party spin:

Reid called the benchmark language “extremely weak,” but noted that Bush had initially demanded a bill with no strings attached. “For heaven’s sake, look where we’ve come,” Reid said. “It’s a lot more than the president ever expected he’d have to agree to.” (emphasis mine)

Bush never expects to have to agree to anything, his philosophy begins and ends with “I win!!”.  As for Reid, his balls must be halfway to Siberia by now.

Government re: the War on Drugs: “buying weed supports TERRORISM!!!”

Etherious Response: “By that logic, so does paying your taxes…“:

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government’s $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

Facing tough questions before a congressional panel last week, Broadcasting Board of Governors member Joaquin Blaya admitted none of the senior news managers at the network spoke Arabic when the terrorist messages made it onto the air courtesy of U.S. taxpayer funds. Nor did Blaya himself or any of the other officials at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the network. (emphasis mine)

If the point that we ESPECIALLY shouldn’t be meddling in the middle east because we know squat about what we’re dealing with got any more food, it’d be obese & need to ride one of those motorized carts to do its shopping.

Re: Ron Paul & the right-wing’s hatred of foreign policy truth, a thought I just had:

“Heh, the Republican cheerleaders call him an anti-american conspiracy-theorizing surrender monkey for just pointing out that people hate us because of what our government does to them.  Imagine if he’d had time to explain why the US government intervened in the first place…”

I don’t really keep up with the names from the neo-imperialist backbench, so it’s not surprising that I didn’t realize right off who Robert Kagan was when I picked up his book “Dangerous Nation” at the library.

The gist of his book (according to this review of it, at least), in a nutshell, is this: “When people say that the US was founded on non-interference, that’s actually a bunch of crap. We intervened then, and should intervene now”. I haven’t gotten very far in the book, only through the first two chapters. Despite that, I think I’ve got standing to argue those first two are the only important parts — though not for the reason Kagan had in mind. The chapters are about the early days of the US, from the tail-end of the colonial era to shortly after the revolution, and contain background on how the political elite at that time on both sides of the ocean really thought about the situation, including quotes. From my interpretation of it, if his sources are correct, then the reason the revolution even happened was the colonies wanted to expand the British empire further than the British even wanted, thinking they were destined to “civilize” the world.

Now, I take this with a grain of salt, for obvious reasons. Also, it’s not like it wasn’t already obvious the atrocities committed simultaneously with the high-minded rhetoric pointed at in the history books of public government schools. Yet I feel like this puts the current debacle of ours in a perspective that I and fellow anti-war & anti-State types would be well served to embrace & point out to others as much as possible: there is nothing new about any of this. Contrary to Robert Kagan’s conclusion, this is all the more reason to STOP trying to remake the world, that not only is it illogical and downright despicable now, but it always has been and always will be. The IMF & a US consulting firm writing oil profit legislation for the Iraqi government isn’t a divergence from previous policy, it’s just the modern day equivalent of when wealthy Brits were granting each other titles to land that already had people on it.

Forgot about the warrantless surveillance on US citizens?  Glenn Greenwald hasn’t.  He’s pointing out for all to see how, after being caught red-handed, the administration is yelling “we HAD to!  FISA was outdated!” — despite that being, y’know, completely false.