Osama Bin Laden is dead

I don't cheer at the deaths of my enemies, but I hope this gives some closure to all those who haven't had it.

Full credit to some very gutsy US operatives.
And to the Obama administration. It has to be said, because elements of the American Right have been drooling for an attack to blame on him just as they will now deny that his administration is due any credit for this.

Where's Sarah?

Normally I don't put unpleasant pictures up on my blog... but sometimes you have to show it, so people know what you're talking about....

If this has been around before and has nauseated everyone already, sorry to subject you to it again, but I hadn't seen it:



On THE SAME PAGE that proudly presented this I found the following crap:

"I just do not understand why the Germans(Nazi's ) are hated so much. Really what did Hitler do that was so wrong, other than being a damn Catlik? So they started a war with half the world. First it was the Pollocks and Checks, well know bastions of retards and gypsies. The French, who cares, same goes for Norwegians, Swedes, Hollanders, and the British, all are strong holds of Joo's. The only bad thing that the Nazi's did was pick the Japs and Dago's to be friends with."

"I'd vote for a make-believe SS officer in a heartbeat over a real Communist Muslim homosexual black militant drug addict."

THESE are the thoughts of people who LIKE and ADMIRE Sarah Palin - and believe it or not are off a "Christian Forum" - and is the cesspool that would be thrilled to see her get somewhere...

Context for Tucson

"Gabrielle Giffords was targeted by the Tea Party Right on the basis that she supported the Obama health care plan – a plan that Beck and others like him have regularly explained to millions of Americans as representing totalitarian communism. Indeed, Sarah Palin’s notorious gun site map was only part of the eliminationist rhetoric unleashed against Giffords. For instance, her local Republican opponents held a fundraising event for his campaign that included the following message: ‘Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.’"

Follow the below links to two articles, one post-Tucson recent, and one from August 2009, by Jeff Sparrow, an Australian Left-wing writer:

Have We Got A Show For You!
The Social Significance of the Arizona massacre.

There's a lot to read.
If you believe gun culture is healthy and the Tea Party are just nice people... you will blow a gasket.

"The toxic milieu of the Patriots spawned Timothy McVeigh — and a wave of other domestic terrorists responsible for over 40 violent incidents between 1995 and 2000.
The militias faded after the Clinton years, partly because of the economic recovery, partly because the far right felt less visceral antipathy to George W Bush and partly, perhaps, because the "war on terror" provided an external focus for internal rage. Yet, all through the Bush administration, the conservative infrastructure pushed the same populist message: the president was a swaggering Texan man of the people; his enemies, effete and treacherous intellectuals.
That strategy reached its nadir at the last election with the McCain/Palin ticket. Sarah Palin campaigned on almost nothing other than her anti-elitism: for her supporters, Palin was an ordinary hockey mom coming to clean up Washington, her very inexperience proof of virtue. In that respect, Obama’s victory — the defeat of the oxymoronic "Team Maverick" by a black liberal — was seen as the end of the so-called "Southern strategy", with the Republicans’ preferred talking points decisively rejected by an increasingly young and increasingly multicultural electorate.
In the wake of the Obama landslide, many Republican strategists recognised a need to change course but the populist forces they unleashed now possess their own momentum..."

Krugman on toxicity

"Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.
And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will."

A pig is a pig - but gun sights are butterflies

"Rebecca Mansour, an aide to Palin, said the images were never meant to evoke violence. Mansour, who has been tweeting in defence of her boss since Saturday's massacre, said the cross-hairs were never intended to be gun sights. "We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights," she said. "It was simply cross-hairs like you'd see on maps". "

Oh... like cherubs blowing from the corners and little sea serpents swimming around in unknown oceans. Of course.
Funny thing is I've NEVER seen cross-hairs on maps.
Not on ones that aren't hare-brained anyway.

"She added that "it never occurred to us that anybody would consider it violent" "

No. You don't see guns as objects of violence...
That and you're fucking stupid, lying, or both.

"Following initial controversy over the target map last year, Palin - who is known for her use of violent language and hunting lexicon - responded with her rallying cry: "Don't retreat. RELOAD." "

Yeah he tried to.

The toxic Glenn Beck

Christopher Hitchens on something very nasty and tragic unfolding in the United States today:

Beck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of “spending and deficits”? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

Read the whole thing here. Few can say it better.

I have to quote you this bit, however...

Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault.

Look upon the far Right... and be horrified.
They are slime under the rock of human enlightenment.

Has someone not sat her down and TAUGHT HER SOMETHING already....?

ahem..

Palin: Well, North Korea, this is stemming from a greater problem, when we're all sitting around asking, 'Oh no, what are we going to do,' and we're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do. So this speaks to a bigger picture that certainly scares me in terms of our national security policy. But obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies – we're bound to by treaty....

Interviewer: South Korean.

Palin: Yes, and we're also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.

Even granting it was a slip of the tongue and she meant South Korea all along (questionable at best)... what did she mean by "strong enough policy to sanction"?

Sanction meaning "impose sanctions" or sanction meaning "give approval for"?

What the heck is she on about? Does anyone know? Does SHE know?

As someone commented in The Guardian.... " Yo, my fellow Americans: remember all those Civil War lessons we sat through in history class, learning how the heroic Abraham Lincoln led the Confederate Army in glorious battle against Hitler to free the Jewish slaves in Egypt? Sarah Palin does. "

Plutocratic Fascism?

I was idly poking around the net and found some interesting quotes by people who are extremely concerned about the future of their country. I don't know who wrote them.

Nearly 10 years old, but it hits the mark:

" I'm afraid your suspicions regarding the rise of plutocratic fascism are correct. Southern Conservative Christians are peripheral to the ultimate purpose of this coup, but are essential to provide popular support. The truth is that really big money has coalesced for the purpose of turning back the tide of economic leveling that was quickly destroying the basis of the relative power upon which plutocrats rely. "

this dated to 6 months before 9/11 (and no I'm not one who thinks it was an inside job):

" Republican representatives are almost openly advocating a state religion. A destruction of welfare and social security. A militarized USA and the creation of foreign provocation to set off the need of military action which will facilitate internal police control of dissent. "

and...

" We fear the term fascism because it exists very close to the surface of America's skin. Corporatism, or corporate fascism, is the American form of this disease. It has thrived here unchallenged for several decades. And it has rewritten our language of social discourse at the same time it has taken half the wealth of this nation and concentrated it in the hands of a few. "

Murdoch's machine moves against hope in the US

News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch has been questioned by shareholders about a series of large donations made to right-wing organisations.

Normally a tightly controlled and sober affair, the News AGM was diverted by questions about million-dollar donations to the Chamber of Commerce and Republican Governors Association.

The American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organisations representative Laura Shaffer Campos politely but pointedly wanted to know why the donations had been made.

Mr Murdoch said the donations had nothing to do with the editorial opinions of the corporation.

"It has nothing to do with the editorial policies, or the journalism, or the films, or anything else," he told the meeting.

However, he did say the donations were aimed at driving changes in Washington DC.

"It is certainly in the interests of the country ... that there be a fair amount of change in Washington."

He did not elaborate on that comment.

News board member Rod Eddington was also pressed on the donations.

"The board takes advice from the management team and considers it on that basis and also refers it to the company's general counsel," Sir Rod told the meeting.

Source: AAP via The Age newspaper

Before it gets lost again... I'll point out that Rupert Murdoch is a US citizen now, and has been for 25 years.
I doubt the Republican Governors Association was much interested in HIS birth certificate.

Brooker's mosque commentary

Charlie Brooker offers an ultra-precise description of what the so called Ground Zero Mosque will look like...

"The planned "ultra-mosque" will be a staggering 5,600ft tall – more than five times higher than the tallest building on Earth – and will be capped with an immense dome of highly-polished solid gold, carefully positioned to bounce sunlight directly toward the pavement, where it will blind pedestrians and fry small dogs. The main structure will be delimited by 600 minarets, each shaped like an upraised middle finger, and housing a powerful amplifier: when synchronised, their combined sonic might will be capable of relaying the muezzin's call to prayer at such deafening volume, it will be clearly audible in the Afghan mountains, where thousands of terrorists are poised to celebrate by running around with scarves over their faces, firing AK-47s into the sky and yelling whatever the foreign word for "victory" is."

The rest of his article, as published in The Guardian, is here.

(in case you're a reactionary troll... he's "exaggerating")

Let's recap on where the American Right is...

Thoughts on the US economic crisis

I'm not keen on describing the influence of the USA as the "American empire". The allure of words like "empire" can warp what it is they attempt to describe. Yet I've heard the word used a lot recently, whereas once it would only have been used by hawkish politicians to describe something such as the old USSR.

Niall Ferguson, the British historian, uses the word "empire" a lot. Mostly in the context of the (theoretical) imminent decline and fall of America, and what world will come after.

Much of what he says about the US economic situation, however, is hard to refute...

His speech in Sydney last night presented the following:

"The most obvious point is that imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises - sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, and the mounting cost of servicing a mountain of public debt.
Think of Ottoman Turkey in the 19th century: debt service rose from 17% of revenue in 1868 to 32% in 1871 to 50% in 1877, two years after the great default that ushered in the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. Consider Britain in the 20th century. By the mid 1920s, debt charges were absorbing 44.5% of total government expenditure, exceeding defence expenditure every year until 1937, when rearmament finally got under way in earnest.
But Britain's real problems came after 1945, when a substantial proportion of its immense debt burden - equivalent to about a third of gross domestic product - was in foreign hands.
Alarm bells should therefore be ringing loudly in Washington, as the US contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $US1.47 trillion - about 10% of gross domestic product, for the second year running.
Since 2001, in the space of just 10 years, the US federal debt in public hands has doubled as a share of GDP from 32% to a projected 66% next year"

Ferguson addresses a particular point of interest to me: the amount of US debt that is exiting the country....

"Remember, half the US federal debt in public hands is in the hands of foreign creditors. Of that, a fifth (22 per cent) is held by the monetary authorities of the People's Republic of China, down from 27 per cent in July last year."

I found that shrinkage curious but Ferguson clarifies "Quietly, discreetly, the Chinese are reducing their exposure to US Treasury bonds. Perhaps they have noticed what the rest of the world's investors pretend not to see - that the US is on an unsustainable fiscal course, with no apparent political means of self-correcting."

In other words... they're leaving a sinking ship.

I was pondering that when I read that the Governator has declared a state of fiscal crisis in what was the wealthiest state in the USA, that state workers are being forced to take three days unpaid leave per month and that a budget cannot be delivered - bizarrely because it takes a two thirds majority to pass a budget.

California bankrupt? If it was a country it would have the 8th largest economy in the world, and it has come to this..

Meanwhile the loony Right is running around saying taxes for the rich have to fall further. What is it with these idiots that they think the only way out is to let unelected plutocrats have what ever they want in the vague hope it will somehow translate into prosperity for the man on the street? If trickle-down economies ever worked it was in a peculiar set of circumstances... much as a broken clock still shows correct time twice a day. The rest of the time it is completely wrong.

One thing will save America: massive revitalisation of production coupled with investment and overhaul of infrastructure. A controlled economic course. The alliance of government and industry that is at the heart of Obama's vision.

I am less than certain the will exists though. The linkage of the American sense of identity to uncontrolled free markets is so strong it is near faith-like, blinding and perverting, a rhetorical tool of those who do not feel prosperity is for everyone.

Ratigan slams Brady

Quote of the segment is probably Ratigan's where he talks about his country being raped of its money...



Meanwhile the robber barons of Wall Street continue to get away with it.

Ratigan must have known that Brady would evade his question and stick to Republican talking points, so in a sense all this was just theatre. It might have served everyone better if he'd had Brady paired with someone who is prepared to answer the question, and then people would have information along with the theatre.
But Ratigan makes his point: "What's keeping our recovery from gaining steam is the fact that the financial industry is stealing America's money, depriving this country of any investment whatsoever..."

Like I said...robber barons.

O'Brien interviews Obama

Sorry for the lack of posts and minimal visits to friendly blogs but I've been very busy.

Earlier this evening I watched Kerry O'Brien, a senior Australian journalist, interview President Obama.

A transcript of the whole thing is here and I think my usual commenters will find it very interesting.

Obama touches on relations with Australia (obviously), the present and future for Afghanistan, Climate Change and China, the future of America vis-a-vis its pre-eminence as an economic and military power, the plight of stuggling Americans, financial regulation, and how he sees his presidency.

Fighting disease / Fighting for the Rights of Children

Positive action in Mogadishu, one of the worst places on the planet:

"10 February 2010 – Despite fighting that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Mogadishu, health workers have fanned out across the war-torn capital of Somalia in a three-month United Nations-backed campaign that has immunized nearly 300,000 women of child-bearing age and 288,000 children.

The children were vaccinated against polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus and provided with vitamin A supplements, de-worming tablets and nutritional screening, while the women were immunized against tetanus in the Child Health Days campaign, supported by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN World Health Organization (WHO) as part of a nationwide effort to provide life-saving health and nutrition services to every Somali child under the age of five and every woman of child-bearing age."

Rest of article here.

Incidentally, the Somali cabinet - such as it is - promised to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child last November, which would leave the United States has the only country in the world which has not.

Long a contentious issue, US conservatives love their "war" rhetoric:
"On February 14, 1995, war was declared on parental rights in America", splutters the Home School Legal Defense Association in a 'special report' in 1999, " On that day, the Clinton Administration announced that the United States would sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and send it to the U.S. Senate for ratification." Rest of that here.

And note this bit:
"If the United States ratifies the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the U.S. government will be obligated to “ensure” the following ... That every child shall receive the highest attainable level of health care services. Article 24 (1). In Chapter 11 of the American Bar Association book by Davidson and Cohen, they state that this provision indicates that a mandatory federal health insurance plan would be necessary to comply with the Treaty."

Oh dear... well they can't have THAT, can they?

And is it just me... or is any one else sick to death of conservatives stamping "declared war" over everyone who does not agree with them or give them what they want - even those in their own government?
What if I said to one of them "no, you can't drink my coffee"...? Have I "declared war" on their drinking habits...?

Among the other 'warlike' things the Convention does is... forbid executing juveniles.

Roper v. Simmons 2005 (one of those U.S. Supreme Court decisions that Sarah Palin can't think of other than Roe v. Wade) forbids this now anyway, but putting them away for life without parole is another thing you can't do under the Convention, and Roper v. Simmons does not cover this.

The book pictured is a children's book designed to encourage creative thinking. More about it here on the US AID East Africa site

Keep America Safe for Justice

Liz Cheney is apparently is not familiar with the notion that a trial is meant to be conducted by professional lawyers and that justice requires the accused have a competent defence.

She has been royally smashed from elements of both political vectors over the "al Qaeda Seven" slur.
Deservedly, although the comparison to McCarthyism is held at arms length on the conservative side.

I don't think I could - were I a lawyer - stomach being the defence lawyer for a lot of people in this world. Yet because of that... the more I recognise the professional detachment, commitment to the rule of law and the moral courage of those who do.

I note with amusement that the Keep America Safe site has a link to none other than Rush Limbaugh defending Liz Cheney.
No professional legal defence for Liz - just a Youtube of drug-addled shock jock instead.

The Christian Science Monitor - not exactly a force for Left-leaning dialogue - notes John Adams himself wrote that his defence of enemy British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.”

Defending terrorism suspects did not come without cost to those who did it in the military justice system either...

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Mori - then a Major - was the military lawyer for David Hicks.

David Hicks is an Australian man who was captured by the Afghan Northern Alliance in December 2001 and turned over to US Special Forces. He was then detained in Guantanamo Bay till 2007. In a very murky and controversial process of legal bargaining he was given over to Australian authorities in May 2007 and finally released in December 2007.

Major Mori was passed over for promotion twice subsequent to taking on the Hicks case.

Incidentally, Hicks alleges that while at Guantanamo Bay he was beaten, forced to run while shackled which causes ankle injury, injected without consent and subject to sleep deprivation, and that he witnessed attack dogs being used to maul detainees.
He was subject to a control order after his release, but 12 months later the Australian Federal Police declined to renew it.
Hicks has since married and has lived a quiet life in Sydney.

The Australian Lawyers alliance awarded Mori a civil justice award for recognition "of unsung heroes who, despite personal risk or sacrifice, have fought to preserve individual rights, human dignity or safety".

Mori was in time promoted and is now a senior military judge. He was very critical of the military justice system and at lack of promotion was considering retirement. Since promotion he has decided to continue his career. His criticism is also "more guarded" now.

I wonder what he would say of it had he not been promoted...

What lies behind the lies

Over the past few days the subject of truth and lies have come up in my conversations on the net, and in my professional life.

I find myself appreciating a comment Andrew Sullivan made in June of 2009:

A Clinton lie is "the typical political lie, the Clintonian parsing of truth or lying when the truth cannot easily be discovered"

A Palin lie is "categorically denying things that are categorically and patently and verifiably true....It is the statement that it is night when it is clearly, by universal agreement, three o'clock in the afternoon."

To the latter point Sullivan adds separately " People who lie like this are not politicians. They're sociopaths."

Now THERE is a thought....

Palin sexist when it suits her

Time to take a swipe at America's noisiest non-entity, Sarah "witchproof" Palin, with some commentary by Jessica Valenti of The Guardian newspaper...

My own thoughts on hearing of "Going Rogue" were....

"I suppose she and her supporters think that sounds romantic.."

Sure, the Davy Crockett frontiersman image of rugged self-sufficiency is a legitimate aspect of the American identity.
So is the steel worker union rep, the care-free Californian beach bum, the inner-city social worker... etc etc etc.

And being able to shoot a moose doesn't qualify you to lead what still is the most powerful country in the world.
Sorry. It just doesn't.

And if the theme of your book is your own exceptionalism, then by implication, you automatically absolve yourself of all your political failings. But, hey, everything is always someone else's fault for her anyway.

Here is an abridged version of Valenti's comments regarding the "sexism" narrative:

"Palin keeps insisting her failed political career is everyone's fault but her own. Even worse, Palin is alleging sexism (when it's convenient) while simultaneously relying on sexist notions of women in politics to pass the buck....
In her widely watched Oprah appearance, for example, Palin said that she resented people questioning her ability to serve as vice-president while being a mother to five children - something a man would never be asked. But Palin also complained that in her interview with Couric, she thought she would be speaking to the reporter ''working mom [to] working mom'' and that she was annoyed with ''her badgering and questions''.
In other words, Palin thought that because Couric was a woman, she wouldn't take her job as a journalist seriously. Palin expected a puff piece instead of pesky questions about economics, abortion and Palin's policies - you know, things a ''working mom'' couldn't possibly be bothered with....
You simply can't have it both ways - it's ridiculous to be upset about being treated differently by the public because you're a woman and a mother, while demanding the same biased treatment when it might give you the edge in an interview. Hers is a gender politics of convenience, one that insults all women in politics.
Of course, this performance of martyrdom is nothing new. During her run, Palin blamed everyone from the media to the Obama campaign for her faltering public image, instead of owning up to the fact that this has always been a narrative of her own creation."

Valenti makes some comments too about Palin's relaxed attitude to truth:

"...Palin continues to change her story again and again.
She wasn't really happy about her daughter Bristol's pregnancy, she tells us on Oprah - that was just McCain campaign spin. In Going Rogue she writes that she was excited about the notion of appearing on Saturday Night Live to ''neutralise'' Tina Fey's unflattering impression; but campaign emails show she didn't want to go on the show. Palin says in the book that after she was prank-called by someone pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy, McCain's campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, called her screaming; former operatives say Schmidt actually contacted her via email. (Schmidt calls her criticisms ''total fiction''.)"

McCain's own campaign manager... saying Palin is making stuff up. Pretty damning.

So..

Going Rogue. Not just... "going away".

Not while there's a buck to be made anyway.

Afraid of competition?

I like this little passage from The New York Times regarding Obama's intentions for health care reform:

"The idea, he has said, was to “keep the private sector honest” and hold down costs by injecting more competition into the system. Insurers balked, saying it would put them out of business. Conservatives called Mr. Obama a socialist. "

The juxtaposition is the newspaper's, of course, but it points to the self-contradiction in the Conservative camp:
How can a more competitive marketplace for health insurance possibly be described as "socialist"? And does it not come down to their puppeteers - the corporate lobbyists - simply not wanting to let go of their ability to rip people off?

Sort it out...

I was reading about the tribulations of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford while incidentally listening to the song "Lost and Running" by Powderfinger, and it occurred to me the song choice was rather apt.

I wonder what it is that people who excoriate those that become involved in extramarital affairs have... that gives them such lack of imagination.

It can't have been just the sex, otherwise he would have played saucy games with a hooker in some dive motel like any other self-respecting God-spouting Republican hypocrite, or gone upmarket like Spitzer, foolishly convinced he can return to home and hearth - that it never happened if he never mentions it.

Putting aside his politics for a minute, Sanford seems to have hit that dread dilemma of too many positives:
What do you do - when you've got it all (and he was in a good place) - but it isn't enough? There's still something else.
He could have bided his time, ended it with his wife, rolled up his career and then quietly slipped away with his mistress... but he didn't do that. Instead he dropped off the scope for 5 days, which turned every spotlight for miles in his direction when he reappeared, broken with torment.

He'd not so much lost his "moral legitimacy", with which he had branded Bill Clinton a rascal, as had it fall back on him like an anvil rolling downhill.

But the uber-conservative self-righteous twerp blogger brigade will have to excuse some of us if we don't stone the man.
I don't even want to stone him for the perceived hypocrisy. I'll just say "sort your life out, sport", and reflect of the complexities of human nature.

What strange creatures we can be..