Tom Toles: A Simple Plan for Afghanistan

Bryan Zepp Jamieson: Fort Nightmare

Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, November 8, 2009

It’s been about 48 hours since a inoffensive looking, balding, middle-aged army psychiatrist allegedly opened fire and shot 43 people in a major military base in Texas. The latest word is that the man accused of the shootings is off a ventilator at a nearby hospital, but paralyzed by the wounds he received from police. It’s not clear if he can communicate or not.

Like nearly everyone, I want to know why he did it. The only people who wish he had simply been killed outright are the ones who want to use the shootings as an excuse to go to war against all Moslems. But in this case, there is very little about the events that make any sense on the face of it – not that shooting 43 people and killing 13 of them makes much sense to begin with – and motive is only one of the big questions that need to be answered.

There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that he did it. The Independent reported that one of the police officers who shot him approached him and found him lying on his back, gun still in hand, and kicked it away. There is still doubt as to whether he acted alone or had an accomplice, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of any weapon other than the 5.7 handgun – a small caliber anti-personnel weapon with an extremely high muzzle velocity – being used.

That weapon is an anomaly in and of itself. It’s a high-end Belgian weapon, and costs well over $1,000. It’s designed very explicitly to kill people, and its manufacturer, FN Herstal, boasts of the extreme hydrostatic shock the high-velocity bullets will cause. It has a load of 20 bullets, and since Hasan fired at least 100 times, that means he reloaded at least five times. It was equipped with a high-end laser sight, which meant this army psychiatrist, who had no gun-range experience, spent over $2,000 just on this one weapon.

It’s not a military weapon, and the US army doesn’t even have an equivalent. But it’s very nearly the perfect gun for someone who wants to wade into a crowd of unarmed people and massacre a lot of them. I expect it to become a big item for Christmas at the gun shops this year.

How is it, though, that this man, a Walter Mitty sort with no special training in killing people, was able to open fire in a major military base, pausing only five times to reload, and kill all those people? Even if all the soldiers were disarmed on the base, were none of them trained in taking out an armed adversary in hand-to-hand?

Much has been made of how Hasan was about to be shipped off to Afghanistan (yesterday, in fact) and how he was deeply conflicted over the prospect of killing fellow Moslems. Except that doesn’t make any sense.

The man was a doctor, and a major. He wasn’t going to be riding patrols along the Kybar highway of death, or even doing street patrols in Kabul. He was going to be in a military hospital in Afghanistan, doing pretty much the same as what he was doing state-side; trying to ease the psychological and emotional injuries of war that are the biggest invisible damage the troops suffer over there.

Nobody was going to make him shoot and kill people, and in any event, you don’t usually protest being made to shoot and kill people by running out and shooting and killing people.

That his religion played a role in this seems beyond doubt, but it’s not what the hate-mongers on the far right think. They’ve been busily painting him as an extremist in the mold of al Qaida or the Taliban, and that’s sheer nonsense. He was American born, of parents who left Palestine long before Israel reduced it to a charnel house. There’s no shortage of people who have come forward and expressed shock because he loved America and was proud to be in the military. If his parents passed their grievances on to him, it manifested in a odd way, because he didn’t become an observant Moslem until after his mother’s death, in 2001. The pattern just doesn’t fit someone who is seething with rage against America.

What role did his religion play? It’s unlikely he thought he might have to shoot his fellow believers, since even in the Army, psychiatrists don’t usually get into firefights. Nor would he have felt any unusual affinity for the people of Afghanistan, since his family came from over a thousand miles away and a vast culture apart (Palestine is closer in customs to London than to Afghanistan).

He was apparently subject to slurs and taunting from other military people who felt that no Moslem should be in the military. While it wouldn’t turn him against America, it would have left him feeling largely alienated and isolated. Unfortunately, the army has a lot of mindless bigots in it, and as a consequence, gays, women, and people who aren’t Christian fundies all suffer to various degrees. These bigots really are the Achilles heel of the American military.

The first place to look is at how his role as a psychiatrist played into this. He specialized in treating returning soldiers with PTSD, and day in and day out shared the nightmares of those damaged heroes.

It’s a truism that psychiatrists need shrinks of their own more than most people, and the main reason is that the constant wading in the blackness of injured and diseased minds gets to them, and makes them a little crazy.

I would look at his profession as first cause, and reaction to his religion, rather than the religion itself, as the second cause.

Put a man under severe emotional stress. Then isolate and alienate him, and then ratchet up the stress.

What happens? Keep in mind, Hasan IS an American, born and bred. He’s been told, even if he didn’t believe, that guns can solve all your problems. He’s been told this a million times.

What happens next?

In all this, there was a bright spot, a moment where one of the bereaved reached up and touched the ideals of his faith. This, according to the AP, whose tone was not approving:

“‘Lord, all those around us search for motive, search for meaning, search for something, someone to blame. That is so frustrating,’ Col. Frank Jackson told a group of about 120 people gathered at the post’s chapel. ‘Today, we pause to hear from you. So Lord, as we pray together, we focus on things we know.’

“Jackson asked worshipers to pray for the 13 dead and 29 wounded that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is accused of shooting, but also asked them to pray for Hasan and his family ‘as they find themselves in a position that no person ever desires to be.’

“‘And Lord, teach us to love and pray for those who rise up against us and pray for those who do us harm. We pray for Maj. Hasan. Asking that you do the work that only you can do in his life,” Jackson said.”

At the other end of the spectrum is Joe Lieberman, who was quick to run onto Faux News and exploit the tragedy for his vendetta against Moslems. From the same AP article: “Sen. Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he plans to begin a congressional investigation to determine whether the shootings constitute a terrorist attack. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said on Fox News Sunday that he wants to find out whether the Army missed warning signs that Hasan was becoming extreme.”

In the middle are the rest of us, who are glad Hasan is alive so he can answer the question we all have: Why? I don’t trust the American media to give us the answer. They’ve already come in and made a propaganda circus out of Kim Munley, one of the two cops who apparently shot Hasan. She supposedly, despite being shot and wounded herself, brought him down.

Except she took two rounds, one to each leg, from a weapon designed to maximize hydrostatic shock. I have a friend who took a rifle shot in the leg during basic training in the fifties, and he still has medical problems from it today. She would have been out of commission. She may well be a hero, but she isn’t the Amazon bravely returning fire after being shot that the press is painting. She may be getting the PFC Jessica Lynch treatment.

So if the media is bullshitting us already in their vapid desire to give us bite sized drama kibble in place of news so they get good ratings, don’t expect much in the way of insight or keen analysis if Hasan tells his tale.

But the truth will eventually out, and hopefully, we’ll learn why he murdered and injured all those poor people.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson: Weed

It’s harvest time.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, October 9, 2009

It’s harvest time here in Siskiyou County, and judging from some of the
crops around town, it’s going to be a bumper crop.

Mind you, we don’t have much of a growing season here, one kilometer up.
Last frost is usually early May, and first frost is about now, and this
year it’s already snowed once: last week. August is the only month where
nobody has seen it snow, And August only gets a frost once every 20
years or so.

So it’s not a real friendly place to grow vegetables. As the joke has
it, Siskiyou is an old native term that means, “Shit! My tomatoes!” This
year, all the tomatoes go bye-bye. That first frost did for them.

But marijuana, ah, that’s a different story. Most of it around here gets
grown out in the National Forests, which is a bloody nuisance. The type
of people growing weed out there tend to have Uzis and attack dogs, and
definitely aren’t your friendly hippy-dippy love children from the 60s.
They present a hazard to unwary hikers, since they don’t like the idea
of people seeing their 40 acres of top-quality weed and going back and
spreading the word. As a result, savvy hikers just avoid areas where
there are streams, since that’s where the growers are.

Here in town, it’s a different story. This is California, so if you can
get a prescription from a doctor for marijuana for medical purposes (and
that’s not hard to do), you can grow your own, quite legally, and a lot
of people do. The law says, “personal use” and that you can’t sell it,
but there’s a loophole that allows people to raise smoke for fun and profit.

A lot just have a small patch in their back yard, a dozen or so plants,
discreetly set behind a fence so it isn’t visible from the street (cops
aren’t a problem, but thieves are), and come this time of year, they
harvest a couple of pounds of bud, and use the leaves for salves or
tinctures or baking.

Then there’s the serious growers. A lot of them were around before 215
passed, and they learned a lot. Their operations are indoors, and
involve hydroponics, fertilization measured to exact grams and exact
minutes, and the amount of light they get from the high-tech gro-lights
is gauged very carefully. Outdoors, marijuana plants bud around the
autumnal equinox. The gro-lights liberate the growers from the tyranny
of the earth’s orbit, and they can arrange to have plants bud when they
think the plants should bud, for optimal quality and/or quantity of
harvest.

Time out for a quick confession:

Fact is, I don’t use marijuana. I used to, but I quit back in the 80s.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. One time I was siting with some friends,
and a joint got passed around, and I passed it along without partaking,
and I got around to wondering when the last time was I took a hit.
Thinking back, I realized it had been over a year. Oh. Well, I guess I
quit then. Gee, that was hard. You gotta admire my moral character. The
main reason was that when it came to holding my smoke, I was a real
featherweight. One toke was all it took to leave me spending the rest of
the evening pointing at the Moon and giggling. Weed is inconvenient when
you have to stop and consider whether you might be driving in the next
six hours whenever someone passes you a joint. This being California, I
usually do have to drive somewhere in the next six hours, and I much
prefer the comfort of remembering which side of the road I’m supposed to
be driving on. Reduces the stress levels, you know.

But I’m doing this digression in case anyone out there thinks that I’m
some sort of expert on weed growing. I’m not. I know a female plant is
desirable and a male plant isn’t, but I couldn’t tell you with any great
certainty which was which.

Even before Proposition 215, the Compassionate Care Act, was passed,
Northern California had a reputation for growing and exporting weed. In
most northern counties on the coast north of San Francisco, it was
probably the leading cash crop, and might have been so here in inland
Siskiyou County, as well. The temperate rain forests and Mediterranean
climate of the inland valleys encourage the growth of nuclear marijuana,
stuff that would affect Cheech and Chong much the way one hit of Mexican
junk weed affects me.

Since the Act passed, things have changed. Medical Marijuana
dispensaries have sprung up all over the state, thousands of them. We
actually have more in Siskiyou County than we do McDonalds’ Restaurants,
although with a score of 3-2, that’s not a real impressive statistic.

Just about anyone can open a clinic so long as they get an ok from the
local authorities, so the clinics range from scrupulously law-abiding to
flat-out dodgy, usually reflecting the morality of the local police. Up
here, the cops are pretty skeptical about the whole thing (the first
dispensary opened only a couple of months ago) and so the local outfits
are meticulous about demanding proof of a prescription (usually the
’script itself) getting a clinic ID that they have to show before they
are even permitted to go back and look at the produce. Not all the
cops—I know a California Highway Patrol officer who recently retired and
is now happily growing marijuana in the back 40.

Further, a lot of the clinics are run by people for whom medical
marijuana has been a godsend. It’s effective in alleviating intractable
pain without the risks of morphine, heroin or oxycontin. It greatly
alleviates nausea from cancer treatments, and is effective in treating
the discomfort of glaucoma. In fact, I knew a guy back in 1987 who had a
marijuana prescription, then extremely rare, for exactly that, secondary
to severe diabetes. He showed me his little tin of state-grown weed. It
looked like the state made their joints using one of those clunky old
roll-your-own machines you could buy with Bugler tobacco.

What caused the dispensaries, and above-ground marijuana cultivation, to
explode in the past year is that the state decided that “personal use”
was too vague, and dealt with it in a relatively sensible way: a grower
is permitted to sell his excess crop to the dispensaries.

This basically ensures that there is an unlimited supply of weed. The
price of weed is already crashing (anyone growing a big crop in their
basement hoping to become rich is going to discover that they might get
$100 a pound, instead of the $400 an ounce of of last year). So at this
point, there’s probably two or three little back yard weed patches on
every suburban block in the state, millions of people growing. And some
of the serious growers are renting warehouses.

Grass is probably the most thoroughly socialized underground hobby
America has, even more prevalent than porn. Back before 215, I would
have guessed that about 1 in 5 adults in California smoked weed. Now I
would say it’s actually about 1 in 3. I’ve encountered people I would
never have in a million years have figured for pot smokers, grinning and
showing me their scripts.

Pot dispensaries are no more remarkable than liquor stores at this
point, although there tends to be a lot less vomit on the sidewalks
around the dispensaries. If Americans are going to embrace another
medically questionable habit, they could do far worse than marijuana,
and frequently do. Cigarettes, booze, double cheeseburgers, television,
twitter, you name it. Weed is less destructive.

So with marijuana out in the open, and widespread, it’s no surprise that
there are no less than three different initiative petition efforts going
to get propositions on the ballot next spring that will just simply
legalize marijuana.

I’ve always favored it; I suspect that zero-tolerance for marijuana,
including poisoning it with paraquat and giving life sentences to
dealers, played a big role, first with the rise of easy-to-transport
“white drugs” such as cocaine, and then the scourge of cheap,
easy-to-make meth. People like to get high. That’s human nature (and one
shared by most warm-blooded animals), and if marijuana is too expensive
or unavailable, they’ll turn to something else.

The second big plus to legalizing it is that this will make it possible
to grow large amounts of hemp. This is an incredibly valuable plant, one
that makes superb textiles and paper, is far more eco-friendly (doesn’t
deplete the soil like cotton, doesn’t decimate forests or require
bleaching like wood pulp paper) and the seed is nearly the perfect
nutritional food. It makes great paper—I have some hemp paper that is 15
years old, exposed to air, and it’s never yellowed or become brittle,
the way wood pulp paper does.

Even if the state doesn’t tax weed (and it will, you can be sure), it
will save hundreds of millions in police time, courts, and jails. If
weed is legalized, the governor will have little choice but to pardon
all non-violent prisoners who were jailed for selling weed, releasing
tens of thousands of people. And California needs the money. I heard an
estimate that just the sales tax on weed could raise $25 million a year
in revenues. I got a good laugh out of that. Even with the price
collapse, Siskiyou County alone could produce that much weed.

An article today reported that the district attorney of Los Angeles
County is fighting to close down the dispensaries. That article noted
that if subject to sales tax, weed would bring about $1.3 billion into
state coffers.

As for neighboring states, they’re just going to have start thinking
about legalizing it too. Because constitutionally, they can’t put up
search stations on the state borders.

It’s a change long overdue. Forty years overdue.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson: Sit

Who says right wingers can’t be trained?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, September 27, 2009

My wife and I have been training a rat terrier pup for the past few
weeks. He’s a smart little guy, and prompt and eager to obey the two
most important commands: “come” and “sit”. He’s not yet four months old,
so more elaborate commands await him.

This morning, Rygel and I walked down to our local post office, a
distance of about a kilometer. It was his longest walk to date, and he
was frisking and jumping on the way home, not even slightly tired.
(Proper leash training begins this week). As we came back, we would stop
so he could sniff something exciting (our neighborhood has, along with
dogs and cats, ducks, chickens, and a lot of wildlife that traverse at
night from the surrounding forest. Lots of adventurous scents for a
little puppy, and I was indulging him.)

But he would get overstimulated, so we would stop, and I would say
“Rygel. Sit” with the appropriate hand gesture. He would plop his butt
right down with a happy and eager expression on his face. He would get
praised on what a smart boy he was, and we would continue. When we
started teaching him that command we would (as with all new commands)
give him a doggie treat when he did what we wanted, along with praise.
But once he gets halfway reliable with a specific command, the treats
cease. He always gets praise, of course. But he’s just the right size,
and he’s brown and white, and if he starts getting thick around the
middle, he could be in mortal danger if the local HS football team were
to make an understandable mistake. That’s no way to treat a dominaar.
And the limitation of treats to new training adds emphasis to the new
commands.

His adolescence is rapidly approaching, and he’s going to be willful and
defiant. But just having those two commands in our arsenal will make
getting him through that difficult stage a lot easier.

We got a kitten for a companion for Rygel (named “Lally” by the kitten’s
original owner, an eight year old girl, and it stuck) and while we were
horrified the first time we spotted Rygel dragging Lally around the
house by her throat, it quickly became clear that Lally could escape
when she needed to, and that the roughhousing was consensual. The two
adult cats and the ancient Samoyed have all taken turns teaching Rygel
to Know His Place, a process that involved loud puppy shrieks of outrage
but left no permanent marks. And now the animals have all pretty well
settled in with one another. Moon, the preposterously old (14½ years)
Sammie, seems to enjoy mentoring Rygel.

All that said, I’m going to compare poor little Rygel to America’s right
wing. But don’t worry: I’m not out to defame my dog. He’s intelligent,
friendly, sweet tempered and anxious to work with others. Everything the
right wing isn’t.

The comparison is mostly the training.

We already know that right wingers will cheerfully go against their own
best interests on the behest of Faux news and all the rest of the right
wing echo machine. That’s why we are treated, on a daily basis, to the
ludicrous and even grotesque sight of seniors campaigning to keep
“socialist” government away from their Medicare, or out of work factory
workers supporting “right to work” laws, I refer to the phenomenon as
“cultivating fools”. Not politic, I agree, but perfectly apt.

These people are TRAINED. Rupert Murdoch or Karl Rove snap a clip on the
ring through their noses, and lead them down any path they care to, and
they trail along obediently, tails wagging behind them. Rygel could
learn how to be a good little dog from them.

The latest example involves the big foofooraw over ACORN. The advocacy
group has long been a target of the GOP, because it focuses on getting
the poor and minorities to vote, and attempts to empower them with legal
and social aid. The GOP utterly hates people who do that, and will stop
at nothing to destroy them. Indeed, the whole thing of the Bush
administration illegally firing federal District Attorneys stemmed from
the refusal of many of those DA’s to carry out Karl Rove’s vendetta
against ACORN, arguing that it was their job to investigate and
prosecute actual crimes, and not to frame people for political reasons.

Two sleazy clowns, apparently at the behest of Andrew Breitbart, a Matt
Drudge protègé with pretensions of being a journalist, went into ACORN
offices and passed themselves off as a couple looking to set up a
business. They gradually worked around to saying they wanted to open a
brothel, and wanted to know the tax advantages to hiring illegal
underage girls to work there.

It’s safe to assume that the majority of ACORN offices threw them out on
their slimy asses. But a couple played along, mostly waiting to see
where they were going with this. One, realizing they were frauds, pulled
her own head game on them, claiming that she had murdered her
ex-husband, but shhh! Don’t tell anyone! Another one, the one accused of
conspiring to set up a child prostitution ring (conspiring with whom?
Shhh!) called the police after that loathsome pair had slimed out.
The two clowns playing the class act of a prostitute and her pimp were
James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. They were secretly recording the
proceedings. Given that they were in a office, asking for tax advice,
confidentiality rules were in place, which meant that the ACORN people
had a reasonable expectation of privacy. In other words, O’Keefe and
Giles violated the rights of the ACORN volunteers, and since they did
this in Maryland where non-consensual videotaping is illegal, may face
criminal charges along with the civil suit they already face. Definitely
class acts. Rygel would kick sand over them.

Highly edited tapes of the ones that played along—although none of them
actually agreed to the scheme—got wall to wall coverage on the vicious
and dishonest pseudo-journalistic outlets such as Fox, Drudge, and all
the Kangarupe Murdoch “newspapers”.

A couple of the volunteers were “fired” (ie, told not to show up until
the heat was off, but reckless outfits like Faux called it being fired
anyway), and Congress, in a spectacular display of cowardice, suspended
funding for ACORN. Since this makes up less than 10% of their funding,
it won’t do them any real damage.

And of course, the howls of moral outrage and breast beating among right
wingers was endless. “They were ENDORSING CHILD PROSTITUTION!”

The horror, the horror!

Of course, it never occurred to any of the howlers that the two were
soliciting on behalf of child prostitution. Never mind that the intent
of O’Keefe and Giles was just to entrap people; they were soliciting
criminal activity.

The main howl, of course, was that taxpayers were supporting this
incredibly vicious, evil criminal enterprise in which a couple of people
actually bandied about thoughts on opening a brothel. Right wingers were
apoplectic about that. Along, of course, with the usual pretenses that
Obama was secretly the head of ACORN and they were a recruiting office
for the Nazi Party and all the other insanities we’ve come to expect
from the lunatic right. (I was amused to see that even Ann Coulter
thinks it’s getting out of hand – given that she did much to instigate
such insanity, that’s a bit surprising – and is now trying to blame the
Obama/Hitler comparisons on liberals sneaking in with signs to make
right wingers look stupid. As if “Keep your government hands off my
Medicare” doesn’t.)

But the howlers are the same people who have been utterly silent about
the billions of dollars in tax payer money (tens of thousands times as
much as went to ACORN) that went to Halliburton, Kellogg-Brown-Root, and
Blackwater (now Xe). These are outfits that used those billions of
dollars to steal from the public, kill civilians for the fun of it,
endanger legitimate troops with provocations of the populations in Iran.

Their employees raped, looted, stole and burned people alive. While
there are doubtlessly decent people working in those outfits, there are
a lot who are sheer filth, who really are no better than Nazis.

The howlers were silent about the abuses of these outfits during the
Bush years, despite swarms of complaints from the military, despite the
stories of soldiers being electrocuted in the showers because of the
incredibly shoddy contract work, of civilian populations in an uproar
because mercenaries were shooting people for sport. I suspect the right
knew that these guys were utter slime: in a famous incident in the early
days of the Iraq occupation, an Iraqi mob got their hands on three
Blackwater employees, burned them, and left the charred corpses to hang
from a local bridge. The right’s response to this was muted. Even if the
individuals did nothing to deserve such a horrific fate, there was a
general appreciation that as Blackwater employees, they were a logical
target for such treatment.

How is it possible for people who howl about ACORN — an outfit that,
when all is said and done, is guilty of nothing worse than encouraging
people whom the GOP doesn’t like to vote — but yet remain silent, even
now, to government paying tax dollars to rapists and murderers to
endanger US troops?

Training. “Sit!” “Stand!” “Bark! Bark mindlessly and endlessly, until we
tell you to stop.”

If the right wing echo machine has taken nearly every moron in America
and turned them into inferior versions of dogs, the Democrats aren’t any
better, because they show only cowardice. The Democrats who voted to
defund ACORN should be hit with serious primary challenges next year to
get their craven asses out of Congress and replaced with Democrats who
can show even a little courage.

As for the Republicans, well, Ann Coulter is right, although she won’t
admit it: the right wing is beginning to lose control of their morons.
If you train dogs to be vicious and dishonest, you get vicious and
dishonest dogs.

Eventually, the GOP will learn why such demagoguery is always, in the
end, self-destructive.

And if Rygel had a tail, I’m sure he would wag it at the news.
Republicans are giving dogs a bad name.

Timothy Egan: Working Class Zero

Timothy Egan, The New York Times, September 16, 2009

“A working class hero is something to be. Keep you doped with religion and sex and T.V.”

— John Lennon

The first nine years of the new century have yet to find a defining label, something as catchy as Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” of the 1970s or the “Silent Generation” of 1950s men in gray flannel suits. Bookmarked by the horror of 9/11 and the history of a black president, the aughts certainly don’t lack for drama.

But last week, lost in the commotion over the brat’s cry of Joe Wilson and the shotgun blast of rage in the Washington protest, something definitive was released just as this decade nears its curtain call.

For average Americans, the last 10 years were a lost decade. At the end of President George W. Bush’s eight years in office, American households had less money and less economic security, and fewer of them were covered by health care than 10 years earlier, the Census Bureau reported in its annual survey.

The poverty rate in 2008 rose to 13.2 percent, the highest in 11 years, while median household income fell to $50,303. Ten years earlier, adjusted for inflation, it was $51,295.

Of course this reflects the ravages of a horrid recession. But the decline started before the collapse in the housing and financial sectors — and it was calculated, in the eyes of some.

Harvard economist Lawrence Katz called it “a plutocratic boom.” If anything comes close to defining the era, that would be my nomination. President Bush cut $1.3 trillion in taxes — and the biggest beneficiaries by far were the top 1 percent of earners. At the same time, Wall Street was inflated by the helium of a regulation-free economy that eventually gave us Bernie Madoff and banks begging for bailouts.

Now consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots with a love of equality.

And they have the wrong target.

Read More Here

William Rivers Pitt: Ku Klux Klowns

William Rivers Pitt, T r u t h o u t, September 15, 2009

How many white, middle-aged, overweight, pissed-off right-wingers does it take to unscrew a light bulb?

Depends on who you ask.

Organizers for this past weekend’s anti-Obama protest in Washington, DC, were slinging around crowd-size estimates of two million people before the curtain was thankfully drawn on the thing, despite the fact that the number was actually in the tens of thousands. They were in the nation’s capitol, so they said, to protest against too much governmental control over the lives of Americans, to protest taxation in general, to screech about birth certificates, to denounce President Obama and to see and be seen amid a throng of fat, white people who look just like them.

Call it a group hug for the demonstrably deranged. But there was more to it than just standard-issue anti-Obama sentiments being aired in the streets. Layered beneath the whole scene was a hard vein of bitter racism the participants didn’t even try to hide.

“Packs of taxpayer marchers shuffled down Pennsylvania Avenue proudly waving signs,” wrote author and political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson. “‘The Long Legged Mack Daddy,’ ‘Where’s the Birth Certificate,’ ‘Mississippi Freedom Riders,’ ‘Whoa Boys Take it from Here’ (Obama waving to black and Islamic militants). Many defiantly waved Confederate flags and the Texas state flag (separatist movement emblem). Meanwhile, South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, Congresspersons Mike Pence, Phil Gingrey and Marsha Blackburn, and organizer mouthpiece scandal-plagued former House majority leader Dick Armey profusely swore that the march had nothing to do with race, politics, or even President Obama. The racist flags, symbols and signs, though, gave big lie to their profuse denials. Racism was on full and ugly display on the Capitol Mall. No attempt was made to mask it. Some protesters seemed quite proud to openly send a message about race and Obama.”

The Agonist blog provided the following sharp analysis of the overall meaning behind the DC protest this weekend: “These teabag parties represent the newly disenfranchised white, rural voter – the backbone of the Republican Party and its southern strategy. The outburst this week by Rep. Joe Wilson, the obscure South Carolina Congressman who called President Obama a liar during his speech to a joint session of Congress, was prompted by Obama’s statement that nothing in the healthcare reform package he is proposing would provide care for illegal immigrants. The fear of immigrants is a primal constant in American politics, but since the adoption of the southern strategy, this fear is at its core a racial concern. Immigration in the past 30 years is no longer about poor white people coming from Europe, it’s about brown people coming from Mexico. Now that an African-American is president, protests against illegal immigrants can be a respectable way for people to say what is really on their mind – they cannot accept a black person as president.”

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Frank Rich: Obama’s Squandered Summer

Frank Rich, The New York Times, September 13, 2009

The day before he gave his latest brilliant speech, Barack Obama repeated a well-worn mantra to a television interviewer: “My job is not to be distracted by the 24-hour news cycle.” The time has come for him to expand that job description. His White House has a duty to push back against the 24-hour news cycle, every 24 hours if necessary, when it threatens to derail his agenda, the nation’s business, or both. This was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted. The president deserves his share of the blame.

After a good couple of years of living with the guy, we know the drill that defines his leadership, for better and worse. When trouble lurks, No Drama Obama stays calm as everyone around him goes ballistic. Then he waits — and waits — for that superdramatic moment when he can ride to his own rescue with what the press reliably hypes as The Do-or-Die Speech of His Career. Cable networks slap a countdown clock on the corner of the screen and pump up the suspense. Finally, Mighty Obama steps up to the plate and, lo and behold, confounds all the doubting bloviators yet again by (as they are wont to say) hitting it out of the park.

So it’s a little disingenuous for Obama to claim that he is not distracted by the 24-hour news cycle. What he’s actually doing is gaming it for all it’s worth.

As a mode of campaigning, this tactic was worth a great deal. Obama not only produced eloquent speeches — especially the classic disquisition on race that silenced the Jeremiah Wright pogrom — but also executed a remarkably disciplined tortoise-vs.-hare battle plan that outwitted and ultimately vanquished the hypercaffeinated political strategies of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. As a style of governing, however, this repeated cycle of extended above-the-fray passivity followed by last-minute oratorical heroics has now been stretched to the very limit.

Wednesday night’s address on health care reform was inspired, lucid and, in the literally and figuratively Kennedyesque finale, moving. It was also (mildly) partisan, a trait much deplored by high-minded editorial writers but in real life quite useful when your party is in the majority and you want to rally the troops to get something done. But there was little in the speech that Obama couldn’t have said at the summer’s outset. Its practical effect may prove nil. Short of signing a mass suicide pact, the Democrats were always destined to pass a bill. Will the one to come be substantially better than the one that would have emerged if the same speech had been delivered weeks earlier? Not necessarily — and marginally at most.

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Tulsa Mayor says Putting Creationism Display in the Zoo is Top Priority

Brian Barber, The Tulsa World, August 11, 2009

Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets.

“It’s first,” she said to calls of “hallelujah” at a rally outside the zoo. “If we can’t come to the foundation of faith in this community, those other answers will never come. We need to first of all recognize the fact that God needs to be honored in this city.”

Falling, who has founded several Christian nonprofits and is a former city councilor, also said the next mayor needs to appoint people to city boards, authorities and commissions who will “honor God.”

“We will also look for people who want to characterize the origins of both man and animals in a way that honors Judeo-Christian science that proves God as the creator,” she said.

When asked whether she meant she would recruit Christians to serve the city, Falling said she was talking about “people committed to their churches,” and when asked whether she meant Christian churches, she said, “churches, yes.”

Falling’s campaign has been overtly Christian-themed. But she said she wants to embrace people of all religions, not alienate them.

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Who Was that Gun-toting anti-Obama Protester?

Joan Walsh, Salon, August 12, 2009

One of Tuesday’s big mysteries was the motivation behind anti-Obama protester William Kostric, the man who brought a loaded gun to the town hall meeting and carried a sign referencing Thomas Jefferson’s famous credo, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

On Tuesday afternoon MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked Kostric why he carried “a God-damned gun” to a meeting with the president, “given the violent history of this country with regard to presidents and assassinations,” and whether he supported the Birther movement. Kostric insisted his intentions were peaceful, and that he’s not affiliated with Birther groups.

But at least one of those statements doesn’t seem to be true. A right-wing activist named “William Kostric,” who’s left a lot of footprints around the Web, is listed as a “team member” of the Arizona chapter of We the People, the far-right group best known for joining a lawsuit challenging Obama’s right to be president based on his not being a U.S. citizen. Kostric told MSNBC he recently moved from Arizona to New Hampshire. (Kostric did not reply to Salon’s e-mail request for an interview.)

And on his MySpace page (h/t Lavender Newswire), Kostric also lists as one of his heroes Robert Schultz, the anti-tax activist and We the People founder who spent a ton of his own money on ads promoting the Birther movement. At a press conference in December, Schultz told reporters: “This nation is headed towards a vortex of a Constitutional crisis. While on the one hand, the Obama citizenship issue is so simple a schoolchild could grasp it, if left festering and unanswered, it possesses the potential to send our nation into a time of great peril.”

Kostric’s MySpace profile also lists among his heroes Randy Weaver, the white supremacist and right-wing activist who survived the Ruby Ridge confrontation with federal agents, along with Ayn Rand’s John Galt, Thomas Jefferson, libertarian/GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul and William Wallace, the Scottish resistance leader portrayed in Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart.”

The profile also includes, as one of Kostric’s “Top 12 friends,” the Free State Movement, a group organizing libertarians to move to New Hampshire and expand on the state’s “Live Free or Die” credo, and ultimately secede from the union. A “William Kostric” also signed two pledges at PledgeBank, a site that lets people organize around various causes. Kostric’s two pledges include: “move to New Hampshire by 12/31/2008 where I will work to bring about a society in which government’s maximum role is protecting life, liberty, and property” — the credo of Free State Movement members — and “refuse to accept a national ID card,” a cause among many far-right libertarians.

There’s no overt reason to conclude from his Web presence that Kostric is violent, although on the Web site of Reason, the libertarian magazine, someone posting under his name defends drug dealers who kill police officers who enter their homes to arrest them:

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Frank Rich: Is Obama Punking Us?

Frank Rich, The New York Times, August9, 2009

“August is a challenging time to be president,” said Andrew Card, the former Bush White House chief of staff, as he offered unsolicited advice to his successors in a television interview last week. “I think you have to expect the unexpected.”

He should know. Thursday was the eighth anniversary of “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the President’s Daily Brief that his boss ignored while on vacation in Crawford. Aug. 29 marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s strike on the Louisiana coast, which his boss also ignored while on vacation in Crawford.

So do have a blast in Martha’s Vineyard, President Obama.

Even as we wait for some unexpected disaster to strike, Beltway omens for the current White House are grim. Obama’s poll numbers are approaching free fall, we are told. If he fails on health care, he’s toast. Indeed, many of the bloviators who spot a fatal swoon in the Obama presidency are the same doomsayers who in August 2008 were predicting his Election Day defeat because he couldn’t “close the deal” and clear the 50 percent mark in matchups with John McCain.

Here are two not very daring predictions: Obama will get some kind of health care reform done come fall. His poll numbers will not crater any time soon.

Yet there is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent, anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president’s supporters. And not merely those on the left. This concern was perhaps best articulated by an Obama voter, a real estate agent in Virginia, featured on the front page of The Washington Post last week. “Nothing’s changed for the common guy,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been punked.” She cited in particular the billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks that still “act like they’re broke.”

But this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.

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