Final beat of 2011.
I’m in a stupid moving asses mood at the moment, so that’s what this one is intended for, no more no less. This took maybe 15 minutes, tops.
With as much as the Republican primaries have been discussed as chaos, with front-runners bubbling up and flaming out right away to be overtaken by someone else who does the same thing, I have a modest proposal for whenever any party primary in the future looks like this:
Take a survey of a representative sample of likely primary voters, except instead of asking about particular candidates, ask nothing but questions about particular policy stands they would support or oppose. From the results, describe comprehensively what their ideal candidate would look like from a purely political standpoint. Anyone paying attention after that point would have an idea of what was being sought out.
If this is already being done, then no one is paying attention to it. If it isn’t, I doubt it will be done ever, as it makes too much sense. Either way, I’m just sick of hearing about it.
See you next year.
Is it possible for a newspaper article to be one long Kinsley Gaffe?
Reason I ask that question is that the Washington Post put up a lengthy story recently about the reach and operation of drones under Obama, filled with revelations that you would think the local paper of that company town inside the beltway would swallow, so as to not damage the coveted access their employees get for sticking to lame stenography. Here’s just a few of them (all emphasis mine)…
-Due to different claims of “legal authority”, the CIA & the military take turns to maximize their firing potential:
The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of lethal force.
In Yemen, for instance, the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command pursue the same adversary with nearly identical aircraft. But they alternate taking the lead on strikes to exploit their separate authorities, and they maintain separate kill lists that overlap but don’t match.
This means that when there’s discrepancies, they default to kill anyway. Interesting way to deal with obvious redundancy, huh? Sounds like it’d be in a book titled “Everything I Need to Know About Office Relations I Learned Playing Saints Row”.
-That overlap of command, when you look at how congress attempts to deal with it, rapidly looks intentional:
The convergence of military and intelligence resources has created blind spots in congressional oversight. Intelligence committees are briefed on CIA operations, and JSOC reports to armed services panels. As a result, no committee has a complete, unobstructed view. [...] Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.
Of course they weren’t going to blink — the president is from their party, after all. The obvious-yet-covert nature of the program is a rather clever absurdity, since it forces anyone who’d question the elephant in the room to phrase their remarks as gibberish, easily dismissed. Never mind the fact that it has crossed a line previously thought dealt with over 800 years ago, minor detail.
-This being the Washington Post, the inevitable Anonymous Administration Official makes an appearance to inject some Vitamin BS, downplaying the prospects for expansion of the drone program. Only this time, the remark basically gets debunked a few lines down:
“People think we start with the drone and go from there, but that’s not it at all,” said a senior administration official involved with the program. “We’re not constructing a campaign around the drone. We’re not seeking to create some worldwide basing network so we have drone capabilities in every corner of the globe.” [...] A recent study by the Congressional Budget Office counted 775 Predators, Reapers and other medium- and long-range drones in the U.S. inventory, with hundreds more in the pipeline.
What are those supposed to be used for then? You don’t just stockpile technology like this with the assumption it’s not going to be used. Unless…
-On armed drone strikes, Obama administration officials are actually more hawkish than that cowboy Bush:
Key members of Obama’s national security team came into office more inclined to endorse drone strikes than were their counterparts under Bush, current and former officials said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former CIA director and current Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan seemed always ready to step on the accelerator, said a former official who served in both administrations and was supportive of the program. Current administration officials did not dispute the former official’s characterization of the internal dynamics.
Anonymous Current co-signing Anonymous Former. I think I hear the space-time continuum cracking.
-Operational details of the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, including the code cited for doing so — and an example of just how jumbled this whole shiny new Death From Above thing is being handled:
On Sept. 30, Awlaki was killed in a missile strike carried out by the CIA under Title 50 authorities — which govern covert intelligence operations — even though officials said it was initially unclear whether an agency or JSOC drone had delivered the fatal blow. A second U.S. citizen, an al-Qaeda propagandist who had lived in North Carolina, was among those killed.
The execution was nearly flawless, officials said. Nevertheless, when a similar strike was conducted just two weeks later, the entire protocol had changed. The second attack, which killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, was carried out by JSOC under Title 10 authorities that apply to the use of military force.
They didn’t even realize who fired at first. So, who can’t be trusted with firearms again?
BTW: Has anyone ever explained why the kid was killed? There was plenty of talk with regard to Awlaki attempting to justify ignoring that he was a U.S. citizen, but why his son? Preemptive strike redefined? Practice? Did he diss the wrong person on Twitter? Seriously, I’d like to know where the call on that one came from, because it’s looking so far like it emerged from where the sun doesn’t shine.
-”Hey, we just killed so’n'so, and a few stragglers in the area. Okthanxbai. -CIA”
“Um…y’know that explosion that was on the news a couple weeks ago? No, not that one, the other one. That was us. -JSOC”:
Within 24 hours of every CIA drone strike, a classified fax machine lights up in the secure spaces of the Senate intelligence committee, spitting out a report on the location, target and result. The outdated procedure reflects the agency’s effort to comply with Title 50 requirements that Congress be provided with timely, written notification of covert action overseas. There is no comparable requirement in Title 10, and the Senate Armed Services Committee can go days before learning the details of JSOC strikes.
Yeah, that overlap is definitely deliberate. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if some strike were carried out by the CIA but claimed by JSOC for this reason. Then again, someone could just break that fax machine (aside: why do people still fax? It’s backwards to have to print something out, run it through a machine that dials like a phone, and have it reprint at the other end when faster paperless options exist. Just send a text to their Blackberries, ffs).
-Blowback is not only acknowledged, but practically encouraged:
Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab is based, is surrounded by American drone installations. And officials said that JSOC has repeatedly lobbied for authority to strike al-Shabab training camps that have attracted some Somali Americans.
But the administration has allowed only a handful of strikes, out of concern that a broader campaign could turn al-Shabab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.
Think this through: al-Shabab is a regional thing. JSOC wants more strikes at them. Possibility is raised that more strikes could piss them off enough to actually try something against the U.S. — making them no longer a regional thing. JSOC wants more strikes anyway. Here’s an alternative proposal: if people do not threaten the U.S., they are not the U.S.’s problem, so leave them alone. The people of Somalia can deal with them on their own terms. Besides, if you treat it as a free fire zone then recruiting for that group is gonna go hammers.
“Somalia would be the easiest place to go in in an undiscriminating way and do drone strikes because there’s no host government to get” angry, the senior administration official said. “But that’s certainly not the way we’re approaching it.”
Whoever this is basically just said “governments matter, people don’t”. Blargh…
I wonder how many angry calls & emails from government officials this has drawn so far.
Via ZeroHedge, Phillip Bagus talks about the problems with the Euro — and by extension all state-operated currency — and ways to approach it. Among those is effectively to ditch the euro entirely (which in itself makes sense: establishing a central currency without unifying fiscal policy across the nations involved was and always will be stupid, period) and switch to a gold backing by backing all money in existence by gold, adjusting the price of gold accordingly.
Now, as a particular method of stabilization there is merit. But the strategy itself has nothing particularly of value to spontaneous market order. To say that X is worth Y amount of currency is still to set a fixed price, even if the variable X is replaced by a quantity of gold; in other words, there is nothing particularly Laissez-faire about such a policy. Even if you claim a policy that the value will henceforth NEVER for any reason be changed, politics will always find a way to change it — and honestly, the total freezing of value doesn’t strike me as inherently making sense anyway.
Gold, in my interpretation, is not itself an intrinsic use, but a signal, a canary in the proverbial coal mine — if people more want to hold shiny rocks than currency, then your currency and the economy that goes with it is screwed. What I fall back on effectively is an open market in currency that in practice pegs itself to labor, because what I see as the most important issue is not that money fluctuates. Of course money fluctuates, it even did so before its creation at all, as different people engaging in barter valued different things as equivalent to different other quantities of different items. Money moves, that is unavoidable. The true issue, from my interpretation, is why money moves (currently it moves in ways designed to serve state-connected banking interests, which the mainstream Left then inaccurately thinks of as private, thus the result of the free market gone crazy), and how well or not it tracks productivity. In a rapidly moving economy with explosive growth, faster than usual expansion of money strikes me as reasonable, as long as it tracks with the pace of activity. If, in contrast, activity is limited to shuffling around of the same few lumps of debt, as is the case now with modern state-capitalism, with little or no attachment to growth, then no, the monetary supply should not grow, because nothing is being created. As I’ve asserted previously, with a spontaneous market order with regard to currency, over time money would attach itself not to gold, nor to vague state promise that government swears to rob enough people to cover all denoted debts — which is impossible, as if they remotely attempted it there would be war (note how persistently across demands regardless of size debt balloons. You show people how expensive the modern state is to pay for all that is promised through it, they will balk at the price tag, period) — but to a measurement of labor, adjusted for efficiency by default simply to keep things honest. Want more money? Make more shit. Want less in the system? Then eat more of what you kill.
Where we’re at right now, there is in practice a huge class divide where a few people have access to cheap money for gambling, while the rest of us are stuck with expensive credit to paper over bills, if anything. Assertions that this is simply the way things are, as opposed to intentional result, are false.
+4…
Scanning the headlines, spot the following — “Web gambling gets boost from Obama administration“. Look at the actual article and see an explanation:
A Justice Department opinion dated September and made public on Friday reversed decades of previous policy that included civil and criminal charges against operators of some of the most popular online poker sites.
Until now, the department held that online gambling in all forms was illegal under the Wire Act of 1961, which bars wagers via telecommunications that cross state lines or international borders.
The new interpretation, by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said the Wire Act applies only to bets on a “sporting event or contest,” not to a state’s use of the Internet to sell lottery tickets to adults within its borders or abroad. [...] The question at issue was whether proposals by Illinois and New York to use the Internet and out-of-state transaction processors to sell lottery tickets to in-state adults violated the Wire Act.
This sounds more like “State-run lotteries get expansion of artificial market dominance” to me. How does this narrow reconsideration by request of state lotteries open up non-state-run betting?
For all the risk described with online gambling, it’s revealing how this is targeted and how little it has to do with said risk. You can blow thousands on E-trade or whatever all you want, but gawd forbid you play poker or bet on a fight regardless of amount. Meanwhile, betting directly through state government is totally different because The People Are The Real Winners or something.
Other events have pushed this off the front pages lately, but it speaks volumes that after all that time of alarm over Brad Manning and Wikileaks, with shrieks of horror over the grave damage given to national security, even in a freaking military hearing, slanted rules and all, the government can’t back up its claim:
After seven days of testimony and the submission of more than 300,000 pages of documents, a key question remains unanswered in the case against Army Pfc. Bradley Manning:
How exactly did his leak of hundreds of thousands of secret documents, logs and at least one video — which he passed to WikiLeaks — directly harm U.S. national security? [...] As both sides gave closing arguments Thursday, the government presented no evidence of a death, injury or harm done to the United States that was caused by the release of the information. Instead, military prosecutors argued that Manning knew that what he was doing was illegal and could help America’s enemies, which they specified as terrorist organizations. (emphasis mine)
Information leaks as they stand are a gray area, one where the difference between prosecution and praise — or at the least, quiet nod of acceptance — seems to come down to whose goals the leak fulfills. A key part of political reporting today leans on inside information from anonymous sources, and foreign policy reporting is practically impossible without regular bypassing of the carefully constructed filters the ones creating and/or carrying out said policy erect. But to be generous, say hypothetically the description of what Manning is accused of as illegal with no qualifications whatsoever were settled:
The second part of the prosecution argument effectively boils down to “al-qaeda could read it!!”:
The prosecution showed an al Qaida video encouraging members to seek information about U.S. activities from places like WikiLeaks. It also referred to an article in al Qaida’s Inspire magazine — produced by the terror group’s propaganda arm — which referred to the leaks.
Most of what was leaked was past information, having largely squat to do with al-qaeda operations. Fat lot of good it has done them anyway, considering how many of their high-ranking members have since purchased that farm they’ve had their eyes on.
By the way: the thing about propaganda that people get hung up on sometimes is that it isn’t unidirectional. Knowing that they’re being tracked and that their magazine would find its way to desks in D.C., if they could keep up the fear on the cheap by exaggerating the worth of Wikileaks (and the spread of the material via mainstream media — again, consistency implies that those who’d see Julian Assange marched into a U.S. court would have to make room in that black SUV for Arthur Sulzberger II, among others) to themselves, why pass it up?
That said, even the defense has something stupid to say:
In addition to asserting there was no real damage done to U.S. security, the defense argued that Manning was a troubled man struggling with gender-identity issues, that the command structure in his unit failed him and that the information should not have been classified. (emphasis mine)
This isn’t the 50′s, you don’t get to toss off a claim that Gays Are Teh Crazy as if it’s nothing. Sexual identity has as much to do with exposing the hypocrisy and tin-pot paranoia embedded in U.S. foreign policy as my hobby of homebrewing has to do with traffic in Johannesburg.
A long time pet peeve of mine has been the coverage of the economy by the mainstream media. Listening to them pontificate, you would assume that other than the state-backed-to-the-hilt Wall Street and the vaguely defined “middle-class”, no one else existed. When is the last time you heard remotely serious coverage of poverty?
Well, ask and you shall receive apparently, because I was just greeted with the following headline: “Census: 1 in 2 Americans is poor or low-income“:
Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The latest census data depict a middle class that’s shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government’s safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.
“Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too `rich’ to qualify,” said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.
They even mentioned rising cost of living, ffs!
This fact of the working poor flushes the lie on the Right that poverty is just a matter of lazy people who don’t want to work. The rise in costs and wages not keeping up with inflation throws a monkey wrench in the Yglesias/Krugman type mainstream liberal claim that there somehow isn’t enough inflation. But also, notice how thanks to the convergence of the two more people are falling into the poor-but-not-poor-enough-for-help category.
Given that, contrary to common portrayal, the current economy has jack squat to do with a natural market order due to corporate welfare and the regular state intervention in finance, the purpose served by social spending is as a form of revolt insurance — “hey, minimally attached people, we have an offer for you! You refrain from questioning or attempting to dismantle this system, and we’ll give you some scraps to make the injustice a little more bearable. Deal?” This essentially history-book conservative scheme, save the occasional skirmish, has served its purpose longer than could have been expected.
Now? This is what a scalability problem looks like. How do you bribe half the country?
A huge defense War department spending bill talked about lately in the U.S. Senate has a provision in it which would effectively void a chunk of the 5th Amendment. Specifically, what it would do is legalize the holding of U.S. citizens accused of being terrorists by the military indefinitely without…without…what’s that thing that suspects have which decides whether or not they are guilty? Oh yeah, a TRIAL.
The outright insane provision in question was inserted by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan. Here’s how the Huffington Post reported that story at first:
The Senate voted Tuesday to keep a controversial provision to let the military detain terrorism suspects on U.S. soil and hold them indefinitely without trial — prompting White House officials to reissue a veto threat.
The measure, part of the massive National Defense Authorization Act, was also opposed by civil libertarians on the left and right. But 16 Democrats and an independent joined with Republicans to defeat an amendment by Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) that would have killed the provision, voting it down with 61 against, and 37 for it.
“I’m very, very, concerned about having U.S. citizens sent to Guantanamo Bay for indefinite detention,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of the Senate’s most conservative members.
A threatened White House veto? What, an actual response to ultimate entrenchment of the Unitary Executive principle and shredding of due process once and for all of “no”? I know I haven’t been drinking that much, there’s a catch in here somewhere…
In defense of his endorsement of tyranny, Levin lets the cat out of the bag: the Obama Administration specifically requested the power he is attempting to hand them. The veto threat was an empty toss towards a still-gullible base, now revealed to be a lie. Might as well bring back the Sedition act while you’re at it, kick it real old school.
Multiple state legislatures have followed the lead of Arizona* and passed Juan Crow laws, making it illegal to exist in the state (even to the point of making business transactions illegal) without proof of citizenship on hand at all times. Alabama has been in the news lately for who their heavy hand has been smacking around in the process:
“Hey, this guy doesn’t have his license! Okay, Miguel, outta the f*cking car!“:
A German manager with Mercedes-Benz is free after being arrested for not having a driver’s license with him under Alabama’s new law targeting illegal immigrants, authorities said Friday, in an otherwise routine case that drew the attention of Gov. Robert Bentley.
Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson told The Associated Press an officer stopped a rental vehicle for not having a tag Wednesday night and asked the driver for his license. The man only had a German identification card, so he was arrested and taken to police headquarters, Anderson said.
The 46-year-old executive was charged with violating the immigration law for not having proper identification, but he was released after an associate retrieved his passport, visa and German driver’s license from the hotel where he was staying, Anderson said.
“We are terribly sorry about that, Mr. Hager. Please, tell your associates back in Germany they are always welcome here.”
(a couple weeks pass)
“License, registration and papers! Habla Inglés, imbécil?“:
A second foreign auto worker has been stopped by authorities in Alabama, where the nation’s toughest immigration law recently went into effect, officials said on Wednesday.
A Honda worker on assignment at the company’s Lincoln, Alabama, factory was issued a citation.
The immigration law requires proper identification to be produced during routine traffic stops. People suspected of being in the country illegally can be detained.
“We understand he is working with authorities to resolve this matter,” said Ted Pratt, spokesman for Honda Manufacturing of Alabama. He described the worker as “a Japanese associate on assignment.”
“We understand, sir. This will be taken care of, no problem. Have a nice day and drive safely.”
Shorter State Government of Alabama: “Dammit, this was supposed to just harass poor Mexicans, what the hell were we thinking?”
Notice how quickly enforcement ratcheted down once Detlev Hager got caught up in it? They didn’t even arrest the guy from Japan! That these stops are considered such embarrassments despite adhering to the letter of the law, based entirely on who just happened to drive into that spider web, shows the racial and class-based assumptions behind even passing the law in the first place: people with ties to the (now inaccurately named due to domestic production) import car industry that has bloomed in Alabama and other southern states largely because of their comparative success in crushing labor organization and offering big fat subsidies — a practice with deep and ironic roots in New Deal era Managerialism — are Not Intended Targets. The German executive that runs across “papers, please” is a friendly fire incident, meanwhile Hispanic low-income workers…eh, who needs them?
The proper reason to reconsider such laws is the erasure of dignity inherent in them, by assuming anyone without papers is some kind of parasite — guilty until proven innocent. Provided you are not violating the liberty of another person, there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to care why you are here or where you’re going, period. Instead, Alabama is blushing because the legislation they aimed at these…
…misfired and hit Important People.
They even fail at realizing they failed.
The “Super Committee” doing what political committees generally do (that is, waste time) has provided opportunity for yet more claims of toughness on the part of the anointed Serious People on the U.S. government’s budget. Latest example: on one side of the Janus of state, Obama threatens to veto any attempt at sidestepping the Big Deep Cuts in war — ‘scuse me, “defense” — triggered by the nested dithering, while on the other congressfolks in panic over the Big Deep Cuts in “defense” weigh their options in public, in line with the fear that if even a single penny is not dedicated to blowing stuff up The Terrorists Will win. Jay Carney in his role as Official Disinfo Provider for the administration completes the cycle:
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney categorically dismissed on Monday the idea that the president would change the construction of the cuts triggered by the super committee’s failure to make them more lenient on defense spending.
“Congress voted to impose this sequester to hold its own feet to the fire, to get it to act,” said Carney. “To suggest that they should undo what they did just a few months ago, to declare to the world as they did when they held this vote on the Budget Control Act -– ‘We are going to hold ourselves responsible’ — and then a few months later say ‘never mind,’ that’s not acceptable.”
A day earlier, super committee member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) had argued that the sequester came with wiggle room, despite President Barack Obama’s threat to veto efforts to lessen its blow.
Speaking of things that hold less room than claimed, take a look at this:
You may have to squint to see the gap between spending with the Big Deep Cuts and spending without. Luckily for the sight-challenged among us though, the relevant information is that the line with the Big Deep Cuts continues upward. In fact, the word “decrease” appears nowhere on that entire chart. Sound and Fury, signifying nothing…
