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America's Internal Pro-Democracy Movement

It has been quite a few months since the election, and the fact that we still live in the Modern Babylon is kind of vexing, but our nation's shitty electoral system makes me angry too.

It's a good thing, then, that Brad Friedman of BradsBlog, along with the support of many miscellaneous groups, has started an organization called "Velvet Revolution" to agitate for better electoral systems here, and accountability from officials who try to obscure how flaky those systems really are.

It is a little unfortunate that the Velvet website has the tacky yellow-caps headline style and whirling police light alert of the BradBlog; it appears they just tweaked Brad's layout a bit. Nonetheless they are trying with good faith to raise noise about some shame National Election Reform Commission, which has all sorts of top Bush apparatchiks all over the place,led by none other than James "Stop Counting you Filthy Swamp Yokels" Baker. Jiminy Carter comes along to provide some feelgood vibes, and the whole thing looks like a farce just ginnin' up... A RawStory feature breaks down the lineup. On April 19 the WaPo reported on the panel's initial hearing, which I suppose at least entered a number of disturbing problems into the record.

John Conyers is getting into the blogging game now at conyersblog.us, and he's pushing reform:

As you may be aware, on March 25 it was announced that former President Jimmy Carter and former Bush-Cheney Campaign lawyer James Baker, III, would co-chair a Commission on election reform. I think bipartisanship is desperately needed in the area of election reform. However, for many of us, Mr. Baker will be forever remembered for his ultimately successful efforts to stop the counting of legally cast votes in the 2000 election. Had these efforts not succeeded and had the true will of the voters been ascertained, Al Gore would have been elected President.

How can an individual who played a critical role in the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Floridians now co-chair a Commission which should have as its mission ensuring that every vote counts?

One of the appointees, Wall Street Journal lackey John Fund, was caught on tape talking about tossing out provisional ballots of people who "Don't look like they live in the neighborhood," and Conyer's blog provides the link.

This column below quickly recalled for me the bitter feeling of realizing that thousands of votes were prevented in the last election, and many more recorded on insecure machines. A columnist from Tribune Media penned the following recently:

The silent scream of numbers
The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we’re as alone — we citizens — as we’ve ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the nation’s founding: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

It’s time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It’s more like: “Oh no, this can’t be true.”

I just got back from what was officially called the National Election Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling together of disparate voting-rights activists — 30 states were represented, 15 red and 15 blue — sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering To Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775: citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the republic. This was the level of its urgency.
...
In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people’s choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care?

No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back.

There will be more to be seen, thank God.

The Think Tanks' 'Leninist' strategy against Social Security

This is too damn funny. I don't think it's a hoax, but hey it might be. Inside your many Washington think tanks, they use rather blunt language to describe how the public's heads should be warped. A great plan from the year I was born popped up, and damn it's funny. Apparently written for the Cato Journal, it was posted on zfacts.com, a site I haven't seen before, with various info and insinuations. So make what you will of this source, but I think it's awesome:

ACHIEVING A “LENINIST” STRATEGY
Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis
Introduction
Marx believed that capitalism was doomed by its inherent contradictions, and that it would inevitably collapse—to he replaced by the next stage on the ladder leading to the socialist Utopia. Lenin also believed that capitalism was doomed by its inherent contradictions, and would inevitably collapse. But just to be on the safe side, he sought to mobilize the working class, in alliance with other key elements in political society, both to hasten the collapse and to ensure that the result conformed with his interpretation of the proletarian state. Unlike many other socialists at the time, Lenin recognized that fundamental change is contingent both upon a movement’s ability to create a focused political coalition and upon its success in isolating and weakening its opponents.

As we contemplate basic reform of the Social Security system, we would do well to draw a few lessons from the Leninist strategy. Many critics of the present system believe, as Marx and Lenin did of capitalism, that the system’s days are numbered because of its contradictory objectives of attempting to provide both welfare and insurance.

All that really needs to be done, they contend, is to point out these inherent flaws to the taxpayers and to show them that Social Security would be vastly improved if it were restructured into a predominantly private system. Convinced by the undeniable facts and logic, individuals supposedly would then rise up and demand that their representatives make the appropriate reforms.

While this may indeed happen, the public’s reaction last year against politicians who simply noted the deep problems of the system, and the absence of even a recognition of the underlying problems during this spring’s Social Security “reform,” suggest that it will be a long time before citizen indignation will cause radical change to take place. Therefore, if we are to achieve basic changes in the system, we must first prepare the political ground so that the fiasco of the last 18 months is not repeated.

First, we must recognize that there is a firm coalition behind the present Social Security system, and that this coalition has been very effective in winning political concessions for many years. Before Social Security can be reformed, we must begin to divide this coalition and cast doubt on the picture of reality it presents to the general public.

Second, we must recognize that we need more than a manifesto—even one as cogent and persuasive as that provided by Peter Ferrara. What we must do is construct a coalition around the Ferrara plan, a coalition that will gain directly from its implementation. That coalition should consist of not only those who will reap benefits from the IRA-based private system Ferrara has proposed but also the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public.

As we construct and consolidate this coalition, we must press for modest changes in the laws and regulations designed to make private pension options more attractive, and we must expose the fundamental flaws and contradictions in the existing system. In so doing, we will strengthen the coalition for privatizing Social Security and we will weaken the coalition for retaining or expanding the current system. By approaching the problem in this way, we may be ready for the next crisis in Social Security—ready with a strong coalition for change, a weakened coalition supporting the current system, and a general public familiar with the private-sector option.
[........much intrigue.....]
Detaching Supporters of Social Security
The final element of the strategy must be to propose moving to a private Social Security system in such a way as to detach, or at least neutralize, segments of the coalition that supports the existing system. A necessary step toward this objective is to honor all outstanding claims on the current system. Without such a commitment, we can never overcome the political opposition to reform, because the retired (or nearly retired) population will continue to strongly oppose any package that threatens to significantly reduce their benefits. Retaining the obligation to fund existing liabilities, however, will necessarily place constraints on the mechanisms that can be used to move the country towards a private system.
[.....]
Detaching workers who have made substantial tax payments into Social Security may not prove to be too difficult. A number of proposals have been put forward in which the worker’s accumulated “contributions,” plus interest, would be given to him in form of an interest-bearing bond, payable at retirement.” This bond would have a market value and could be sold, with the proceeds to be invested in a tax-deductible IRA. Using an appropriate version of this proposal should make it possible to gain some support even fi’om those who have a substantial stake in the current system.
Conclusion
The last two years have demonstrated beyond a doubt that Social Security can be reformed only by treating the issue primarily as a political problem. There is little point in arguing over the nuances of theoretical plans ifthe political dynamics are not altered; no amount of logic will overcome an unfavorable coalition of interest groups. It is also clear that the strategy we adopt must be flexible. It would be self-defeating to lay down a rigid blueprint and blindly adhere to it. Indeed, we must be prepared to refine segments of the plan, such as the opting-out mechanism or the design of the “super IRA,” to meet the changing political circumstances. Finally, we must he prepared for a long campaign. The next Social Security crisis may be further away than many people believe. Or perhaps it will occur before the reform coalition is strong enough to achieve a political breakthrough. In either case, it could be many years before the conditions are such that a radical reform of Social Security is possible. But then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform.

AIPAC and the fake intel connection: noose tightens?

I'd like to note the unceremonious dismissal of some top AIPAC officials, due to the fact they were allegedly passing intelligence and secret government machinations about Iran to Israeli intelligence. This would apparently be fallout from the Larry Franklin scandal.

This particular case gnaws at the underpinnings of the case for war, and as more information becomes widely know about how much stuff was truly fabricated in order to start the Invasion of Iraq, it will extract a political price from the neo-cons and perhaps one day lead to their downfall.

Certainly John Bolton's role in spoofing information and intimidating honest analysts has become more prominent in recent weeks... even with all the madness in the Capitol regarding judicial nominees and the Nuclear Option, arguments about the threat they pose to "National Security" could still make a difference. Maybe the Democrats should take this and run with it for 2006?

Raimondo at Antiwar.com describes his view with characteristic bluntness:

...the FBI clearly has the goods, not only on Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman, but on AIPAC as well. They don't just start launching raids on one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington for the fun of it: this investigation has been going on for at least two years, and something has been sustaining it. Mowbray and Israel's amen corner insist it's anti-Semitism, but is AIPAC, too, part of the Vast Anti-Semitic Conspiracy? The once-powerful lobby is now running away as fast as possible from these two because they're the victims of a pogrom?

A nest of spies in the Pentagon, determined to bend policy – and the rules governing the dissemination of top secret materials – to Israel's benefit. That's what the FBI investigation has uncovered, and it's no accident that the core of this espionage cell is located in the policy department of the Pentagon, formerly overseen by Douglas J. Feith, who resigned earlier this year. Why did he resign so suddenly? Perhaps we are about to find out.

Franklin worked in the bureau for Near East and South Asian Affairs, under William J. Luti, until he was reassigned in the wake of the scandal: it was Luti who presided over the infamous Office of Special Plans, which was responsible for "stove-piping" patently false "intelligence" on Iraq prior to the invasion. According to Julian Borger of the Guardian, there was an identical unit based in Israel that was funneling phony intelligence to key decision-makers: Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski, now retired, also witnessed a strong Israeli connection, with IDF officers exempted from having to sign in on visits to agency facilities. What is under investigation by the FBI is what Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, writing in Mother Jones, dubbed "the shadow agency within an agency" – Israel's fifth column in the Defense Department.

The glorious fatness of David Brooks

Most times I just scowl or ignore the neo-cons' "scruffy little mascot," as the barmiest inhabitant of the NY Times opinion page is best described. (someone besides me described him that way, I swear, but Google disagrees :-/ )

Brooks is gloating today about how apparently fat people actually get to live longer. As a ball o' Establishment Corpulence himself, he's delighted that life is so unfair for the skinny ones like me. But perhaps my all-cheeseburger diet will pay dividends for decades!

I thought this was funny, especially the Hitchens bit. So in a rare moment i will turn a few bytes over to Brooks:

I've been happy because as a member of the community of low-center-of-gravity Americans, I find that a lifetime of irresponsible behavior has been unjustly rewarded. If this study is correct, I'll be ordering second helpings on into my 90's while all those salad-munching health nuts who have been feeling so superior in their spandex pants and cutoff T-shirts will be dying of midriff pneumonia and other condescension-related diseases.

I've been happy because now there will inevitably be a shift in the fashion winds, favoring members of the Zaftig Corps. Sports enjoyed by people with Rubenesque proportions, like floating, will come into vogue. More people will appreciate the thigh-rubbing musical rhythms you hear when overweight people wear corduroys. More people will realize we should all be patterning our lifestyle decisions on those made by Christopher Hitchens.

Mostly, I'm happy on an existential level. I like to be reminded that the universe is basically crooked. This is what the zero-tolerance brigades and all the better living gurus never quite get. They're busy trying to mold everybody into lifelong valedictorians, who spend their adulthood as carb counters and responsible flossers - the sort of organized folk who actually read legal documents before they sign them.

In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they deserve. The people with the worst grades start the most successful businesses. The shallowest people end up blissfully happy and they are so vapid they don't even realize how vapid they are because vapidity is the only trait that comes with its own impermeable obliviousness system.

And he will be back to his incontinent rambling next week, soiling himself with dribblings of whatever cocktail circuit swill winds through his porous and transfat-addled brain.

As long as I am eating my own soul and crediting rightwing humor, the "Take that hippy! Four more years" line of merchandise @ cafepress also has a certain Zeitgeist quality. Obesity and arrogance--at least the empire knows where it's at.

Check out the sweet new Google satellite imagery. Macalester from Space, In Color! Yeah, you can see the red bricks of the plaza in front of the Campus Center. Our house is a little to the west, next to the movie theater... Check out even more interesting Google Satellite Maps people have noted. I suggest Duluth because it has an interesting orthogonal appearance.

Hippo eats dwarf

Yesterday was strange. However I don't want to talk about that now, and instead pass along this news clipping from Alana:

John Bolton is fux0red

Read this: "Is John Bolton Going Down? An amazing afternoon at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. By Fred Kaplan"

you can download the most unlikely video of the committee hearing that halted Bolton's march. NY Times reports. Reuters. Agonist.org Bolton Watch thread.

Wow, yesterday was an unexpected political victory for the "reality-based community" as somehow Republican Senator Voinovich from Ohio (something of a maverick) said he wouldn't vote to get John Bolton out of his nominating committee. This came out of the blue and apparently surprised everyone. Now there are three more weeks to accumulate nasty information about Bolton and his radical duplicitousness, and I'd say he's probably toast.

This is without a doubt the first major public setback the neoconservative clique has had since the election. Aside from the harm to Bolton's reputation, his little trial is causing all sorts of well-cemented lies about the war (and WMD lies, in particular the Niger case) to slide apart. This could go very far, and there is quite a bit of energy suddenly floating around. It seems possible that moderate Republicans see a need to push back against DeLay-Bolton-style embarassingly corrupt petulance and bullying, let alone their many crimes and pathological lying.

The long-awaited Return of the Establishment Conservatives may be at hand, and the Great Battle of RightWing ThinkTankery may yet unfold. Perhaps Lewis Libby will go to jail after an opportune leak about the Valerie Plame CIA case, perhaps Cheney will have to resign. As the Republicans seem to be agitated like a tank of hungry piranhas, and the Lame Duck air that Bush reeked of back in 2001 has returned with force.

Washington Post: "Bolton often blocked information, officials say", somewhat related "The Neocons' Unabashed Reversal" by Michael Kinsley. A tidbit about Bolton lying about Cuba.

I have bumped into some nice blogs about the subject, some new, some not. Democracy Arsenal, Washington Note is totally essential, Obsidian Wings, War and Piece, Arms Control Wonk, Stygius, Mattie Yglesias, Juan Cole, hey why not CounterPunch?

Slate on some specific allegations:

The allegations were made by at least seven officials who have been interviewed by the committee staff (and leaked or otherwise provided to the press) as well as, in a public hearing, by Carl Ford, a conservative Republican and career intelligence official who, until recently, was assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. They boil down to these: On at least five occasions, Bolton intimidated and tried to get fired intelligence analysts at the State Department and the CIA who disagreed with his views. A former official with the U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a letter to the committee stating that during one run-in with Bolton, while she was working on projects in Kyrgyzstan, he harassed her in a Moscow hotel lobby, banged on her door, then went to Kyrgyzstan and spread lies about her—saying she was being investigated for absconding with government funds—that nearly derailed her work. Several officials have claimed, though anonymously for now, that Bolton blocked official documents about Iran from moving up the chain of command to Colin Powell.

During his hearings, Bolton was asked about some of these matters. He said that he'd asked for the reassignment of one intelligence analyst not because of a dispute over substance but because the analyst had gone behind his back. This claim has been thoroughly rebutted by several witnesses, who affirm that the dispute was over substantive intelligence analysis. A small but telling lie: When Biden asked Bolton whether he personally drove out to CIA headquarters to pressure one high-ranking official to fire the national intelligence officer for Latin American affairs, Bolton said that he'd gone there mainly to ask about intelligence procedures and that he drove there on his way home from work—it was no special trip. Biden said today that he'd since received Bolton's logs for that day. It turned out he made the trip in the morning, then came back to the State Department for a full day's work.

On a totally unrelated note, the George W. Bush conspiracy generator is awesome. It gave me "George W. Bush lowered taxes so that big corporations could oppress transgendered people."

Other stuff: More about oil-for-food, the real deal. That weird fake hostage thing shows sectarian tension growing. FT: Sunni Arabs face dilemma. Shiite bloc plans purge of Saddam-era officials. BBC: "Iraq militias 'could beat rebels'". A Hole in Bush's Exit Strategy (interesting stuff about Privatized Military Firms SAIC etc) Cockburn: "Iraqi Peace in Tatters". Is God taking sides in Iraq?

Fear and loathing with Republicans.

Israel's Military "Justice" system in occupied territories.

What the fuck are these Minutemen, really?

Now that's a memory hole

In times of difficulty we must not lose sight of our achievements, must see the bright future and must pluck up our courage.

Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, P. 373

Well now college is slipping away, but at least empirical reality is too. David Sirota depresses me. then i go to bed.

President Bush has said that "in a society that is a free society, there will be transparency." That means that in America, we have a government where the public gets to see as much information as possible about its government.

But as the record shows, Bush is anything but pro-transparency. A careful look shows the Bush White House has systematically tried to stop publishing government information that it finds embarrassing or disagrees with - the opposite of "transparent." See the record for yourself:

- Knight-Ridder reports today that the Bush administration announced yesterday that it has "decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered."

- When unemployment was peaking in Bush's first term, the White House tried to stop publishing the Labor Department's regular report on mass layoffs.

- In 2003, when the nation's governors came to Washington to complain about inadequate federal funding for the states, the Bush administration decided to stop publishing the budget report that states use to see what money they are, or aren't, getting.

- In 2003, the National Council for Research on Women found that information about discrimination against women has gone missing from government Web sites, including 25 reports from the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau.

- In 2002, Democrats uncovered evidence that the Bush administration was removing health information from government websites. Specifically, the administration deleted data showing that abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer. That scientific data was seen by the White House as a direct affront to the pro-life movement.

More stories of the fake intelligence and John "the Moustache" Bolton

Well Mr Bolton is winding his way through Washington and things look more dicey than many expected. He will probably get in, and go on to start Armageddon sometime this summer, but at least his nomination caused some mostly hidden contradictions about how we went to war in Iraq to burble up in Washington. It's pretty widely known that Bolton was an essential part of the war scheme.

I have returned yet again to the questions of Chalabi and fake intelligence that enabled the drive to war. The interview with a former CIA officer, Vincent Cannistaro basically describes the process of how the U.S. convinced itself to invade Iraq as an instance where the intelligence process went in "reverse," and various obviously false stories were pushed along at just the right moments and places through the system. (he also said that the Niger forgeries were manufactured in the U.S.)

I want to put huge chunks of this in, because it involves the closest details of how the members of Congress were wrongfully persuaded to support the war:

...there was an awful lot of so-called information coming from Iraqi exiles, primarily Ahmed Chalabi’s INC—the Iraqi National Congress. And that seemed to have a very receptive audience in some areas of the government, particularly at the Defense Department and at the vice president’s office. These were reports that tended to support the preconception of the administration that Saddam Hussein needed to be gotten rid of, and the primary reason for doing that was that he was in imminent possession of weapons of mass destruction, which could be turned against the United States of America or its allies.

So in that kind of environment — where there’s a tremendous policy need for information and you don’t have a great deal of source information that’s proprietary — then that’s how information that seems to be comprehensive, coming in from a foreign source, is overemphasized.
[.....]
The interesting thing to me is that the only DIA analyst who ever met with Curveball — who went to Germany and was given access to him — came back with an assessment which was very, very negative.

The problem was: what happened to his assessment? It didn’t get reported up through the senior levels of DIA — and therefore it didn’t get disseminated to CIA — until the Germans were directly queried by CIA on Curveball. That’s when they said, “Look this guy may be a fabricator, don’t trust any of his information.” His information had already gotten into the system, because it had been disseminated by the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. And it had been distributed through our government, where of course in some sectors — particularly the Defense Department policymakers civilian policy makers and at the vice president’s office — it found an extremely receptive audience.

It was believed because it fit the preconceptions of those policy makers. Now, why did the CIA — which ultimately was responsible for putting the National Intelligence Estimate together in 2002, which was the most critical assessment of any intelligence report that the U.S. government has to offer — put the information in there and play a part in its key judgment of alleged WMD programs by Saddam Hussein? And that’s the question which is still not answered. We do know that some of the analysts at CIA were very suspicious of the Curveball information, as well as information provided by other so-called Iraqi defectors in exile. But that information, that assessment, was reported up through the chain of command at CIA, but apparently nothing was done about it.
[.....]
...the point is that it’s being taken as conventional wisdom that there really wasn’t any pressure by policy makers on the analytical process itself. And that’s just simply not true. It’s simply not true because analysts, generally, are like anyone else. They are concerned about their careers, their futures. Many of them are ambitious. If they understand that a dissenting opinion against the conventional policy wisdom is heard, that it’s going to affect their careers. There was a chilled environment in which to express any kind of opposite opinion.

Not only that, there wasn’t very much of a receptiveness at the senior levels of the CIA — at George Tenet’s level, for example, because he was a very political director. And he was very concerned about getting along with the administration. He was formerly a Democrat, appointed by a Democratic President and he had to stay on in a Republican administration. And he had to compete with a secretary of defense, Rumsfeld, who really didn’t want the CIA playing a large role in the intelligence community, and wanted to supplant that role. So, George had a more political bent. He wanted to get along, and therefore he had to play along. And “playing along” really meant to sustain the conceptions of the policy makers — particularly at the Pentagon and the vice president’s office — that Saddam Hussein was a real and imminent danger.

To do that, you had to accept some of these alarming reports that kept coming in, being fed by Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group. In many cases, the information was fabricated. Information, for example, about an alleged attempt by Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear material, uranium, from Niger. This, we know now, was all based on fabricated documents. But it’s not clear yet — either from this report, or from any other report — who fabricated the documents.

The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and you had to do it soon to avoid the catastrophe that would be produced by Saddam Hussein’s use of alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Q: Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly the 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE—I’m not sure which one.

It was SISME, yeah. ... [D]uring the two-thousands when we’re talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn’t that anyone had a good source on Iraq—there weren’t any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.

Q: Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ...

I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case...

Q: If I said “Michael Ledeen”?

You’d be very close . . .

The great thing about John Bolton is that he was a key element of the scheme, as he managed to Box In Colin Powell.

Here's a great post from Antiwar.com which sums up a great deal of the story. Also interesting is the claim that the famous Curveball was in fact the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides.

The stroke of genius was to put Bolton into the "Arms Control" undersecretary slot, where he could make hell for Colin Powell, going over him and behind his back, intimidating the segment of analysts who correctly believed that the WMD stuff (needed to build up the imaginary threat from Saddam Hussein) was really, truly fake.

Bolton also seems to be an enthusiast about using the weird MEK matriarch cult/terrorist organization/something-or-other, which opposes the Iranian government, as an instrument to bring them down. (via the well named armscontrolwonk.com) StopBolton.org, yet another website dedicated to an impossible cause. (informative agonist.org news thread about Bolton)

So it seems that Bolton may have caused State Dept. employees to lie to Congress about where the WMD discrepancies came from. (Steve Clemons on the Washington Note is All About This) The Great Niger Uranium forgery returns to play a role, it seems. Rep. Henry Waxman (D) wrote a letter about this (PDF):

Concealment of a State Department Official's Role in the Niger Uranium Claim
In April 2004, the State Department used the designation "sensitive but unclassified" to conceal unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, in the creation of a fact sheet distributed to the United Nations that falsely claimed Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.

On December 19, 2002, the State Department issued a fact sheet entitled "Illustrative Examples of Omissions from the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council." (9) The fact sheet listed eight key areas in which the Bush Administration found fault with Iraq's weapons declaration to the United Nations on December 7, 2002. Under the heading "Nuclear Weapons," the fact sheet stated:

The Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger.
Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?

It was later discovered that this claim was based on fabricated documents. (10) In addition, both State Department intelligence officials and CIA officials reported that they had rejected the claim as unreliable. (11) As a result, it was unclear who within the State Department was involved in preparing the fact sheet.

On July 21, 2003, I wrote to Secretary of State Colin Powell, asking for an explanation of the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, in creating the document. (12) On September 25, 2003, the State Department responded with a definitive denial: "Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John R. Bolton, did not play a role in the creation of this document." (13)

Subsequently, however, I joined six other members of the Government Reform Committee in requesting from the State Department Inspector General a copy of an unclassified "chronology" on how the fact sheet was developed. (14) This chronology described a meeting on December 18, 2002, between Secretary Powell, Mr. Bolton, and Richard Boucher, the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Public Affairs. According to this chronology, Mr. Boucher specifically asked Mr. Bolton "for help developing a response to Iraq's Dec 7 Declaration to the United Nations Security Council that could be used with the press. According to the chronology, which is phrased in the present tense, Mr. Bolton "agrees and tasks the Bureau of Nonproliferation," a subordinate office that reports directly to Mr. Bolton, to conduct the work.

This unclassified chronology also stated that on the next day, December 19, 2003, the Bureau of Nonproliferation "sends email with the fact sheet, 'Fact Sheet Iraq Declaration.doc.'" to Mr. Bolton's office (emphasis in original). A second e-mail was sent a few minutes later, and a third e-mail was sent about an hour after that. According to the chronology, each version "still includes Niger reference." Although Mr. Bolton may not have personally drafted the document, the chronology appears to indicate that he ordered its creation and received updates on its development.

Waxman's a good guy on some important matters, and has done stuff about the famous Cheney energy task force, Halliburton and other stuff...

Bolton was also tied to some sketchy business and foreign fundraising, as well.

More about Google searches: I am happy to have the top Google result for "disinformation designed to direct the united states in a certain direction," a quote from Dr. Rashid Khalidi regarding the wild stories used to persuade Americans to support invading Iraq, from a Mac Weekly interview in October 2003:

DF: A Frontline interview with Richard Perle was published with the documentary “Truth, War and Consequences.” He talked about the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which reviewed intelligence on Iraq prior to the war. Perle said the office was staffed by David Wurmser, another author of the Clean Break document. Perle says that the office “began to find links that nobody else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way.” Were the neo-cons turning their ideology into intelligence data, and putting that into the government?

RK: I can give you a short answer to that which is yes. Insofar as at least two of the key arguments that they adduced, the one having to do the connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and the one having to do with unconventional weapons programs in Iraq, it is clear that the links or the things they had claimed to have found were non-existent. The wish was fathered to the reality. What they wanted was what they found.

It was not just the Office of Special Plans, or whatever. There are a lot of institutions in Washington that were devoted to putting this view forward. Among them, other parts of the bureaucracy, and the vice president’s national security staff. [....] Basically any fantasy that Chalabi's people brought in, “we have a defector who says,” was turned into gold by these folks.

We now know this stuff, with a few exceptions, to be completely and utterly false, just manufactured disinformation designed to direct the United States in a certain direction. Whether the neo-cons knew this or not is another question, but I believe Chalabi’s people knew it. I would be surprised if some of them didn’t know it.

So apparently Mr. Bolton was the man at State making the disinformation happen. That's not a great reason to send him to the UN, but it is a fabulous reason to send him to prison.

Bin Laden gets away with a bribe, and more wars a-comin

Blah, it is bad when you write a few paragraphs, cut them and forget to paste them, they're gone for good. Damn, that just happened. Dan Schwartz sent me a news item about how protesters arrested at the Republican National Convention last fall have been getting mostly let off charges, as video evidence has shown that the police exaggerated incidents and arrested people without justification. As someone who was there, I felt lucky that we managed to avoid getting arrested... I don't want to go through the details now...

US Draws Up List of Unstable Countries:

03/28/05 "Financial Times" - - US intelligence services are drawing up a secret watch-list of 25 countries in which instability might lead to US intervention, according to officials in charge of a new office set up to co-ordinate planning for nation-building and conflict prevention.

The list will be composed and revised every six months by the National Intelligence Council, which collates intelligence for strategic planning, according to Carlos Pascual, head of the newly formed office of reconstruction and stabilisation.

The new State Department office amounts to recognition by the Bush administration that it needs to get better at nation-building, a concept it once scorned as social work disguised as foreign policy, following its failures in Iraq.

Shocking! Bin Laden bribed Afghan militias in 2001 to let him escape, says the head of the German intelligence agency BND. What, you require cash for loyalty in Afghanistan? That's a historical lesson that brought down two Global Empires, yet the U.S. either doesn't quite get it. If we build permanent bases, we will fully, permanently embrace the heroin smugglers which dominate Afghanistan's economy.

"US Appears to Have Fought War for Oil and Lost It", amusing headline of piece in the Financial Times by Ian Rutledge. "US Has no Exit Strategy for Iraq, Rumsfeld Says" (we have a victory strategy, hurr hurr):

The U.S. has no exit strategy or timetable for withdrawing its forces from Iraq and a pull-out depends on the readiness of the Iraqi Security Forces, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.

``We don't have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy,'' Rumsfeld told soldiers during a surprise visit to Baghdad, according to a pooled broadcast report from the capital. ``The goal is to help the Iraqi Forces develop the skills and the capacity to provide their own security.''
[....]
The Defense Secretary, whose visit wasn't disclosed until his arrival for security reasons, praised the U.S. soldiers he addressed in Baghdad and told them that they'll earn their place in history for fighting ``a war where victory depends not only on military successes but on reconstruction and civil affairs.''

Some stuff by raimondo @ antiwar.com about the various ethnic fissures opening up in northern Iraq, and how that might sink what he terms the Iraqi potemkin village. He points out that Article 58 of Iraq's TAL (transition administrative law-the temporary basis for the interim government) has some rather explosive logic to it:

"Expeditiously to take measures to remedy the injustice caused by the previous regime's practices in altering the demographic character of certain regions, including Kirkuk, by deporting and expelling individuals from their places of residence, forcing migration in and out of the region, settling individuals alien to the region, depriving the inhabitants of work, and correcting nationality. …

"With regard to residents who were deported, expelled, or who emigrated; [the Iraqi Transitional Government] shall, in accordance with the statute of the Iraqi Property Claims Commission and other measures within the law, within a reasonable period of time, restore the residents to their homes and property, or, where this is unfeasible, shall provide just compensation."

This is going to cause some ethnic cleansing, then. One of those nice little time bombs that Saddam built into the tortured society of that country, which the Americans have now appointed themselves to untangle. But it probably won't work, and the preconditions for a stable Democracy probably won't gel.

This does not stop Michael Ledeen and some guy named Peter Ackerman, the chair of the "International Center for Nonviolent Conflict" from proclaiming the sweeping democratic revolution that will go on throughout the region. (is Ledeen really just working for Iran anyway? ha!)

Anyhow, they are dressing up the next stage that they want to see: using some exiles and smuggled weapons to start fighting more directly against the regime in Tehran. All the "democracy" talk is stapled on, and they are counting correctly on the Western media's ability to persuade their audiences that the chosen destabilization agents are Vanguards of the Democratic Revolution.

Ledeen has that element of Trotsky in him (one view) and you can always spot the repackaged Advanced Red Guard of Freedom type thing. It has great appeal, it's got all the buzzwords, but it has a certain Stalinist-utopian quality. Teaming with this International Center guy, the Creative Destruction/Utopian Terrorfighter ideology is getting a nice solid institutional engine:

In recent months, skepticism about the appeal of freedom has given way to a new belief: that democratic revolution is now possible, even inevitable, in places such as Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Kyrgyzstan. But "people power" is not an unstoppable tidal wave, and it would be wrong and naive to conclude that we need only step back and let it happen. The Western world has a lot at stake, and our support for democratic forces in the Middle East and beyond will be important, perhaps even decisive.

Freedom-loving people know what we want to see in Beirut, Damascus and Tehran: the central square bursting with citizens demanding an end to tyranny, massive strikes shutting down the national economy, the disintegration of security forces charged with maintaining order, and the consequent departure of the tyrants and the beginnings of a popularly elected government.

A successful people's revolution is the outcome of careful planning and mass discipline, but it requires political and economic support from outside the country — and maybe some from within.

There are three indispensable requirements: first, a unified opposition that can put aside internal disagreements over the details of what will follow the downfall of the tyrannical regime; second, a disciplined democratic movement that rigorously applies the rules of nonviolent conflict; and finally, careful preparation of the battlefield — which means that members of the armed forces must be persuaded to make individual decisions rather than act as part of a collective organization.

In Iran and Lebanon, and probably in Syria, the prerequisites for democratic revolution are in place. Opposition groups in Iran are united in their call for free elections, perhaps preceded by a national referendum that will either legitimize or reject the theocratic state. In Lebanon, 1 million people just demonstrated their support for the quick removal of the Syrian occupiers.

Now the West needs to help. The lessons learned in Georgia and Ukraine need to be passed along. Indeed, this information is so important that Western governments should provide funding so that it can be broadcast around the clock.

The activists will need to communicate with one another, and the West can provide them with suitable equipment — satellite phones, text messaging, laptops and servers — that they may not be able to get by themselves. Just as the West provided Solidarity and Soviet dissidents with fax machines during the Cold War, we should help contemporary dissidents get the best tools available.

Finally, outsiders seeking to aid democratic revolutions must remember this: Only indigenous forces can be the prime movers. There must be no replay of 1953 in Iran, when the United States and Britain stage-managed mass demonstrations against the government in order to restore the shah to his throne. We must trust the judgment of the people who are, in all cases, the foundation of lasting change.

If they want open support, they should get it. If they want it delivered discreetly, donors should respect their wishes.

Americans, Europeans and others who freely choose their own rulers cannot be indifferent about the success or failure of democratic revolution around the world, and we must not limit our support to rhetoric. There is every reason to believe that this latest surge of revolution will succeed, provided that the courage and passion of the people of the region receive suitable assistance from the democratic world.

So, then, the anti-Tehran MEK will be getting its weapons from us promptly. And there is even more to say about the connections between the MEK and John Bolton. Yes, surprise surprise, a paragon of soup-straining integrity like Mr. Bolton might be connected to listed foreign terrorists. What, the "Iran Policy Committee" wants the MEK delisted? (which sparked a reaction) Also can't forget this classic by Josh Marshall and others about "Iran-Contra II?" in the making.

There were previously reports that the recent vote in Iraq was fraudulently manipulated, and now former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a somewhat odd character (of unknown trustworthiness) in the Iraq saga, says that Bush has already approved plans to attack Iran in July (story originally by United for Peace of Pierce County, WA):

Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.

Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia's Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
[...]
The principal theme of Scott Ritter's talk was Americans' duty to protect the U.S. Constitution by taking action to bring an end to the illegal war in Iraq. But in passing, the former UNSCOM weapons inspector stunned his listeners with two pronouncements. Ritter said plans for a June attack on Iran have been submitted to President George W. Bush, and that the president has approved them. He also asserted that knowledgeable sources say U.S. officials "cooked" the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.

On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran's alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million -- a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism.

The former Marine also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called "a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom," were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.
[....]
Scott Ritter said that although the peace movement failed to stop the war in Iraq, it had a chance to stop the expansion of the war to other nations like Iran and Syria. He held up the specter of a day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration.

Amazing photo galleries and dispatches from Iraq by Dahr Jamail who is going around with Ritter. Later, more about John Bolton & the fake war intelligence we know and love...

Google's a drrrty beast

Here are some quick things.
Henry Earl: I heard about this guy before, but nowadays he really has more sense of purpose than anyone I know... Buy a t shirt. Best mugshot ever.

Data sets for emergency management scenarios in Minnesota - LOGIS - some sort of coordinated government IT system for MN municipalities. Weird.

I ran HongPong.com server log files through an analyzer for the first time since February and I found that there was a certain absurdity to the hits I get through Google. Site traffic is doing all right, although about 40% of it seems to be spam attempts.

As it is now, the old posts on this site have lots of comment spam, thousands of them, attached as dirty little digital barnacles to manipulate some sleaze merchant's search engine ranking. However, I let the practice go on for a while because it improved my own search ranking, and provided a certain surreal quality, a sort of natural accretion of Internet gunk.

In the long run this seems to lead some insane perverts (the "dark magician girl" searcher(s) were quite persistent) to my site, as well as some bizarre political and/or dirty searches such as:

• "kurdish sexi"
• "big penis dick cheney"
• "i salivate at the sight of mittens"
• "5 animal king fu schools in stillwater mn"
• "saddam hussein striping to nude in front of george bush on pics"
• "tbilisi girl dating"
• "salvia victoria hallucinogens"
• "poker addiction campus"
• "hamas organizational pattern structure"
• "ashcroft bacon whitehouse"
• "white house blurred satellite image defenses"
• and of course "xanax hell".

More in a bit....

Israel's Internal War (coming soon)

Haaretz: PM: Settlement blocs to stay ours in any final deal

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, speaking at a new conference with President George W. Bush in Texas on Monday, said large West Bank settlement blocs would remain in Israeli hands in the framework of any final status agreement with the Palestinians.

"The settlement blocs will remain in Israel's hands in any final-status agreement no matter the repercussions entailed," Sharon said.

"We are very interested in having (territorial) contiguity between Ma'aleh Adumim and Jerusalem, however the matter will take many years and we will have many more opportunities to discuss it with the Americans," Sharon added.

Bush, concerned about the progress of negotiations toward peace in the Middle East, asked Sharon both publicly and privately Monday not to expand the key West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim.

PM: Atmosphere in Israel looks like eve of civil war
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Sharon spoke of the growing threat of violence by extreme-right Jewish activists in Israel ahead of the disengagement plan.

"The tension here [in Israel], the atmosphere here looks like the eve of the civil war," Sharon said. He also said that although he had been defending Jews all his life, steps are now taken to protect his own life from attacks by Jews.

PBS Frontline "Days of Rage":

Scene III: Late February, the Jerusalem headquarters of the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza
Twenty-five settler leaders gather in emergency session around a long polished boardroom table a day after the cabinet's authorization of Sharon's plan. The morning is devoted to political and PR action against the plan, the afternoon to "practical steps." The leaders emerge with a two-pronged strategy: to go on pressing for a referendum on disengagement and, failing that, to flood the areas designated for evacuation with tens or even hundreds of thousands of supporters to help settlers physically block police and army efforts to remove them. The council members set up a "general staff" to work out the details. Settler leader Pinchas Wallerstein, who a few days earlier declared that settlers and their supporters should be "ready to risk their lives" to reach the evacuation areas, dubs it the "Judgment Day" team.

These scenes demonstrate what lies ahead in the struggle over evacuation. Together they reveal the three major strategies that Israeli authorities expect opponents of disengagement to adopt: precipitating "a cata-clysmic event that changes the course of history"; using the system to beat the system; and scuttling the disengagement plan by sheer weight of numbers.
[.....]
Besides the threat to [Ariel] Sharon, the police identify two other potentially "cataclysmic" events: An attack on the mosques of the Temple Mount, sacred to Muslims the world over; or indiscriminate gunning down of Arab civilians, following the example of Kahanist Baruch Goldstein's massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs in February 1994. An event of either kind could inflame the Muslim world, disrupt the nascent accommodation with the new Palestinian leadership and jeopardize Sharon's disengagement plan.

In early February police reported "intelligence of a general sort" of an impending attack on the Temple Mount. On February 22, National Police Chief Moshe Karadi told the Knesset's Finance Committee that he wanted 187 more men and an additional 61 million shekels ($14 million) to beef up security at the holy site. Over the next few days, police called in the media to show the tight measures already in place to cope with what they see as an emergency situation: cameras in strategic places, stringent body checks for all visitors, ground patrols and spotter planes.

Today I heard Bush and Sharon's press conference in Texas, wherein Bush basically handed the major West Bank settlement blocs to the Likud, and "at least" managed to extract a promise from Sharon to remove the more recent outposts and freeze construction. This disturbed the morality of my worldview, and came as yet another signal reinforcing the new Israeli-American hegemon in all its ever-expanding glory. However, the engine of this spatial acquisition, the settlers themselves, will prove to be a hazardous geopolitical tool as political friction increases inside Israel...

I'm going to turn this one over to a bunch of extended blockquotes.... I want to go to bed and leave these elements for the record. See also the extended section...

Also, shame on the neoconservatives who have, by and large, supported the Likud party quite closely, since of course neo-cons have an ideological debt to the patron saint of Likud, Vladimir "Iron Wall" Jabotinsky. I have been over this all before, but now we are really going to see the nasty fallout from their militant ideas...

There are rumors that Israeli settlers will try to attack the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa complex in Old Jerusalem in July, in order to Precipitate a Regional Conflict and forestall the evacuation of settlers from Gaza and a few West Bank points. On the other hand, Hezbollah sent an unmanned drone whizzing into northern Israel. Things nearly got out of hand just the other day:

Haaretz: Vigorous law enforcement needed:

Rightists opposed to the disengagement, including MKs Aryeh Eldad, Uri Ariel, Yehiel Hazan and Michael Ratzon, wanted to go to the Temple Mount yesterday during Muslim prayers, to actualize what they called "the State of Israel's sovereignty" over the site. They apparently forgot that the decision on the content and meaning attributed to the historic cry, "The Temple Mount is in our hands," is not in the hands of MKs or the citizens of the state, but rather in the hands of the political echelon of the government.

Given the level of sensitivity at present, Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra's decision not to allow the rightist MKs to reach the mount was particularly justified. Security considerations can override the special "freedom of movement" afforded MKs. Calls by the Revava organization for a mass demonstration of Jews on the Temple Mount created the "real possibility" of violence. The relative quiet with which the Muslim prayers ended yesterday is not necessarily a harbinger of what is yet to come.

While the police were concentrating enormous forces on and around the mount yesterday to prevent violence, rightist activists managed to surprise the police by blocking a major transportation route - the Ayalon highway. The demonstrators burned tires and blocked traffic in both directions during the morning rush-hour traffic. The police gradually managed to open the route and arrested dozens of activists. This was not the first time the highway was blocked. Presumably, in the coming months there will be more scenes of refusal to obey the law on main thoroughfares.

ArabNews.com:

Prevent Jewish Moves on Al-Aqsa: Cabinet
JEDDAH, 12 April 2005 — Saudi Arabia yesterday called for prompt action by the international community to prevent Jewish extremists from invading the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem and warned that such moves could destabilize the region.

The Council of Ministers, chaired by Crown Prince Abdullah, said that the move by ultranationalist Jews would also derail the Middle East peace process.

“The move by Israeli extremists to storm into Al-Aqsa Mosque will endanger security and stability in the Palestinian territories as well as the region as a whole and will obstruct all efforts to establish peace in the region,” said a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency.

Haaretz:

IDF to disarm four West Bank settlements set for evacuation
Jewish settlers in four West Bank settlements will be disarmed about two weeks before they are to be removed from their homes this summer, military officials said Monday, reflecting growing concern that settler resistance to a West Bank pullback will be particularly intense.

Settlers, however, said they would not give up their weapons.

Israel plans to dismantle all 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the northern West Bank in July and August, removing about 9,000 Israelis from their homes. While the Gaza operation will be much larger, Israeli officials have grown increasingly worried about violence in the West Bank.

Gaza is surrounded by a barrier and access can be easily controlled, while West Bank settlements can be reached from many directions. The West Bank also holds special significance for religious Jews, raising the likelihood that Jewish ultranationalists might pour into the West Bank settlements to resist the evacuations.

Military officials, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said troops will collect all military-issue weapons from residents of the four settlements slated for evacuation about two weeks before the pullout. Military commanders expect more settler resistance in the West Bank than in Gaza, the officials said.

Gaza settlers will also be disarmed, although the timing of the weapons collection remains unclear, they added.

The West Bank withdrawal, meanwhile, is increasingly shaping up to be a more complicated operation than the Gaza evacuation. "We are worried more about settlers coming from the outside, not necessarily the residents," said a military official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Yedioth Ahronoth daily quoted a senior military officer as saying "violent cells" have already been established in two of the West Bank settlements slated for evacuation, Sa-Nur and Homesh. The four settlements have a total population of about 500 people.

PBS Frontline: Israel's Next War? Against the Extremists: (interview with producer)

How many people are we talking about -- those who believe the country should be exclusively Jewish?

Latest polls show that 30 percent of the people in Israel support the idea that the land belongs exclusively to the people of Israel, to the Jews, and that the state should be exclusively Jewish.

Can you break down this 30 percent into smaller groups?

Think of it as a pyramid. At the very bottom is the foundation, the ideology. At this bottom level you get to those who believe that Israel should be inhabited by Jews only, that the Arabs should find another place to live in. Go higher and you have less people, but more determined ones, who say something should be done to reach that goal. At the very top are the people who are willing to do something about this themselves, to take some action to escalate events, to help bring about the final biblical redemption. They are a small minority, but it only takes a few to change the course of history. We saw what happened when one man assassinated Prime Minister Rabin [Yigal Amir]. It stopped the peace process, changed its course. It took a while until it was resumed again. This was a very traumatic event that is still fresh. It has not been forgotten.

Now there's a chance that we resume the process. And what the security forces and many people in Israel are concerned about is that some of these extremists will derail the fragile process again, using violent means.

Is there a sense that the security forces and the media didn't take these extremists seriously enough before Rabin's assassination in 1995?

Yes, very much so. Or else how can you explain the easy way in which it happened? No one believed this was possible. That a Jew would murder a Jew?… Even those who did not accept Rabin's views and his ways were shocked at the very fact that this was possible, that it happened. And if it happened once, it can happen again. Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, came from the same circles, the same ideology as the people in the film. He might be from a different background, but he shares the same values and was just as determined as they are. In essence the extremists are very much against the way Israel is run and want to change it. They want a Jewish Kingdom, a monarchy. They want a king. They want the Torah to be the law.
[....]
What did [convicted violent settler] Shlomi and the others think of the film?

The people I portray in the film, and many like them, weren't shocked by what they saw. They felt I represented what they believed in, although I'm told they didn't like the tone.

The wider Israeli audience [see press reaction in Israel] was shocked by what these guys had to say. Again, they knew about radical settlers, but suddenly, it came to them in full color along with the real "revelation" if you want, that having the Arabs leave is only their first step. What the extremists really want is a different kind of country altogether. A different way of life. They don't want a democratic state. They don't want a country with Western elements. They don't want a country with cinema and television and what have you, all the Western kind of culture, Western music, secular books and all that. They want a pure Jewish country. A Jewish theocracy with a king who rules by the law of the Torah. They want a Temple. They want to destroy the mosques on the Temple Mount and rebuild the temple that's their temple. They want to have sacrificial rituals.

Frontline excerpts "Talking with Jewish Extremists" by Jessica Stern:

...But what about the murder of [Itzak] Rabin? I ask. Do you believe it was religiously acceptable, given that there exists today no ultimate authority to sanction such a step?

"You've got a ticklish point," he says. "Contrary to popular belief, the highest value for a Jew is not the preservation of human or even of Jewish life. The highest value is doing what God wants you to do. So in an attempt to put Jewish values in a hierarchy, human life in general, Jewish life in particular, is high on the list. But it's not the top."

But how, I wonder, does a Jew know what God wants him or her to do in any given instance? Why is it that the only people who seem to know with absolute certainty are the people who become terrorists?

"There are a number of circumstances under which the individual is enjoined to take a Jewish life if necessary without consulting a court," Lerner continues. "If you see a person preparing to commit a capital crime -- rape or murder -- it is your duty to stop him. You must stop him any way you can. It's similar in some respects to the right Jewish law accords the individual to restore his own property from a thief if it is stolen. You don't have to bring him to court. If you can catch up with him, you can take your property back by force. You don't have to bother the court with stuff like that. Rabin was stealing Jewish property, proposing to give it away."

So the death of Rabin was simply "collateral damage" in an effort to recover stolen property, according to Lerner's convoluted reasoning. His murder would not even have required a ruling by the Sanhedrin, if it had existed.

"I had been convinced for some time that Rabin's death was coming, that it had to come," Lerner continues. "I understand what motivated Yigal Amir [Rabin's murderer]. I am convinced that he felt that Yitzhak Rabin was putting the survival of the Jewish people in danger by his policies. There was no other way of removing Rabin from the gun he was pointing at the Jewish people. I'm ninety-nine percent positive that that's what he thought. Honestly, I can't argue with it."

After his arrest, Amir proclaimed that the killing of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was justified, even commanded, by the rulings of Din Mosser and Din Rodef, as described in the Jewish religious law, or halakha.

According to the halakah, the rulings of Din Mosser and Din Rodef apply to those Jews who have committed the most despicable crime imaginable -- the betrayal of their fellow Jews. The punishment of the Mosser -- a person who hands over sacred Jewish property to the gentile -- as well as that of the Rodef -- a person who murders or facilitates the murder of Jews -- shall be death. Since the execution of the Mosser or the Rodef is aimed at saving the lives of other Jews, there is no need for a trial.
[....]
Kach and Kahane Chai were declared terrorist organizations in 1994 by the Israeli cabinet. The banning of the two groups followed one of the most well-known incidents of Jewish extremism, namely the massacre of twenty-nine Muslims in Hebron by Dr. Baruch Goldstein on February 25, 1994. Goldstein, a thirty-seven-year-old doctor and father of seven at the time of the shooting, was a prominent member of Kach. The group had issued statements supporting Goldstein's attack.

Both Kach and Kahane Chai organize protests against the Israeli government and harass and threaten Palestinians in Hebron and the West Bank. Groups affiliated with them have threatened to attack Arabs, Palestinians, and Israeli government officials. They claimed responsibility for several attacks of West Bank Palestinians in which four persons were killed and two were wounded in 1993. In April 2002, the current leader of Kach, Baruch Marzel, was arrested by Israeli police in connection with a plot to leave a trailer laden with two barrels of gasoline and two gas balloons outside a Palestinian girls' school in East Jerusalem. The West Bank settlements of Tapuah and Kiryat Arba are strongholds of the Kahanist movement. According to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, both organizations receive support from American and European sympathizers. ...

I ask Erzion to explain his feeling of urgency about rebuilding the Temple. "If you seek the kernel of meaning in the Temple," he says, "it is akin to the meeting of love between the Jewish people and God, or the attraction between men and women. The Jewish people are the female aspect, and they are missing their other, an other which can only be recovered when the Temple is rebuilt. The view of God is symbolized by the man, and the Jewish people as a woman.

"It is something so wonderful you can hardly imagine it. None of us has ever seen or touched anything like it. It is not just the stones it's built of. That's just the framework, like the peel of an orange. The Temple is the collective spirit of the people." Erzion is clever, like Lerner. But he is also poetic. Listening to him, I start to feel the loss of this mystical place. I feel the longing. For the Temple, and for this sensual union between God and man that he describes. Fundamentalism is always about longing, I remind myself, often for something that never existed.
[.....]
On May 2, 1980, Fatah threw a grenade into a group of Jews who were praying in Hebron, six of whom were killed. The Jews in Hebron wanted to take revenge. Most of them wanted to go to a market and blow up as many Arabs as they could or do the same in a mosque. But Erzion persuaded his colleagues that wounding, not killing, several Palestinian leaders was a better strategy. Erzion felt that killing them would only make them heroes. This was a clever strategy. The group managed to wound several Palestinian mayors.

In subsequent attacks, Erzion failed to prevail over his more violent colleagues. On July 17, 1983, an Israeli yeshiva student was killed in Hebron. Erzion's colleagues entered the Islamic College in Hebron, determined to kill as many Arabs as they could. They killed three and injured over thirty.
[.....]
Although Erzion appears to have given up violent struggle, at least for now, he has not given up his efforts to prepare Israelis to rebuild the Third Temple when the time is ripe. Yehuda Erzion, Yoel Lerner, and Avigdor Eskin are all members of the Temple Mount Treasury, a group that continues to raise funds to rebuild the Temple.

Gillon believes that the radical right continues to pose a grave threat to Israeli national security, perhaps even more than Hamas. "Here in Israel we don't like to say this very loudly, bur the radical-right Jewish groups have a lot in common with Hamas," he told me. Hamas and the radical-right groups have twin objectives: one religious, the other political, Gillon explains. Both use selective readings of history and of religious texts to justify violence over territory.

Etzion tells me sadly that he has learned the Jewish people are not ready for redemption. He serves as the leader of the group Chai Vekayam (Alive and Existing), which regards itself as "the catalyst for a Jewish renaissance." The group focuses on encouraging Jews to prepare themselves for the imminent redemption through prayer.

The Temple Mount is the only holy place for the Jews, Etzion explains. "The one thing I am sure of," he says, "is that the Dome of the Rock is a temporary building. It must come to an end. Exactly when and exactly how I cannot say. But as a principle, I am sure its end is near."

Other nice links: so who was this Kahane fanatic anyway? See what his fans put on the Internet.

1957: "Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature" by Daniel S. Feidt

Thursday was a very interesting day. I went to the Capitol to try to do some research about my grandfather, Daniel S. Feidt Sr., who once served in the Minnesota legislature. As it turned out, there was a GLBT rally that afternoon, with at least a few hundred gays, lesbians and their heterosupporters around on the Capitol lawn.

For older state archives I was directed to the Minnesota Historical Society across the freeway, where their top-notch library has all sorts of state resources going back before 1900.

I found my grandfather's sole published contribution to the state's library: a curious 15-page pamphlet entitled "Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature," a 1957 reflection on why he, as a serving senator, loved the non-partisan system. The piece rails against the party machines common in so many states, and he makes the compelling argument that an independent legislature, free of individuals 'subservient' to political parties, provides more sound, economical and progressive administration of the state.

It's a paean to a totally lost form of politics in America, written straight from its heart. This piece helped explain to me why I so distrust the arbitrary power of political parties and their cynical manipulations. Feidt's potshots at the political machines of the day show me how right it always is to whack at the bastards...

It's a rare sort of freedom he and his colleagues had: no national party shadowing them, no executive bureaux, no matrix of special interests to kowtow to. This piece forces us to ask: what the hell do political parties really do for us, anyway? As Minnesota swiftly becomes a scorched-earth partisan battleground, we could all use some more independent wisdom.

Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature
by Senator Daniel S. Feidt
Minneapolis, MN
April, 1957

FORWARD

The states of Minnesota and Nebraska have the unique distinction of electing their legislators without a designation of party affiliation of the candidate on the ballot. The Minnesota Legislature became non-party by a law enacted in 1913 and Nebraska by a constitutional change in the 1930's.

The purpose of this writing is to consider, in summary form,

(1) the historical background of the Minnesota law,
(2) the present system of electing public officials in Minnesota,
(3) the validity of arguments against the non-party elective system,
(4) the record of the Minnesota Legislature since 1913, and
(5) to evaluate the personnel, functioning and legislative results of the Minnesota system in comparison with her sister states who elect legislators on a party basis.

The author has been a member of the Minnesota Legislature for twenty-two years [ultimately twenty-six] which has included service in both its House and Senate.

GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE FIRST CONGRESS WERE ELECTED NON-PARTISAN

The federal constitution and the constitutions of the original thirteen states were drafted and adopted under the belief that these governments would function without political parties. George Washington and members of the first Congress were elected on a non-party basis, but by the close of Washington's second term as president, political parties were developing and thereafter for a period of about one hundred years the phenomenon of the American political scene was the strengthening of political party controls at all levels from the ward and township to the national capitol. By the early 1900's it was not the elected official who was making independent decisions in his representative capacity for the voters as had been intended by the founding fathers, but rather these decisions on public questions were frequently made by subservient public officials under party dictation.

WITH POLITICAL PARTIES CAME POLITICAL SCANDALS

Political scandals followed the rise to power of the political party in much the same way that scandals followed the rise to power of the unscrupulous labor boss. Domineering, graft-corrupted political machines of both parties, of which Tammany Hall in New York and Boyse Penrose in Pennsylvania were perhaps the most notorious. The party boss became an accepted figure in the American political arena. The party boss selected judges, dictated judicial decisions, determined entire legislative programs, and it is common knowledge that even presidents became subservient to party domination.

In the 1890's and by the early 1900's it was notorious that judgeships, postmasterships, seats in state legislature and even in Congress itself were being sold by political racketeers to the highest bidder. It was the heyday of the party boss and political racketeer.

POLITICAL BOSSISM TODAY

Despite the efforts of able men in many states opposing party bossism, we have seen much of it remain. Typical examples are Boss Crump of Tennessee, Boss Hague of New Jersey, Boss Pendergast of Missouri, Tammany Hall in New York, the Vare machine in Philadelphia and the Kelly-Nash machine in Illinois. Only in a state where party domination of candidates to the state legislature exists can party bosses gain control of political machines to the exclusion of the general public of a state.

REFORM LEADERS

By the early 1900's the great political reform movement of American History began to take shape. The reform leaders who today are best remembered are Senator Robert O. LaFollette of Wisconsin; President Theodore Roosevelt and somewhat later, William Allen White of Kansas.

There were two principal objectives to these reforms. The one was trust-busting, which doesn't concern this article, and the second was the breaking of the corrupting grip of party domination on government.

POLITICAL REFORMATION

Political reformation in other states has been the most successful as it has attacked party domination over the judiciary and to a lesser extent at the municipal and county levels. Many states have placed the election of these officials on a non-party basis; however, many states have not.

THE HISTORIC 1913 LEGISLATIVE SESSION

With the possible exception of Nebraska, political reform in Minnesota was carried further than in any other state. Minnesota's 1913 session was the most historic ever held. It enacted more laws of a fundamental nature than any other session during our one hundred year history. Included were the last reapportionment bill and our first Presidential Primary Law. No bill enacted by it, however, had greater political significance to Minnesotans than its Chapter 389 that gave Minnesota the distinction of being the first state to elect its legislature on a non-party basis.

The background of Chapter 389 of the 1913 session is interesting. It was at a special session called in 1912 that the election of the following was changed from party to non-party. There were: The Chief Justice and Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, District Court Judges, Probate Court Judges, Municipal Court Judges, and most significantly all county officers of all counties, and all municipal officers in cities of the first class.

It has been incorrectly said that during the 1913 session there was before the legislature a bill to place the judiciary on a non-party basis and that in an effort to defeat that bill, the election of legislators on a non-party basis was added by the Senate to a House bill, in the belief that the House would never re-pass such a bill. The story goes that support for the judiciary bill as thus amended came from legislators who did not believe in the principle of a non-party legislature with the result that passage of this art [sic] was a kind of legislative mistake.

OUR NON-PARTY LEGISLATURE WAS NO MISTAKE

An examination of the record, however, clearly establishes that the judiciary had already been placed on a non-party basis by the special session of 1912 and that the 1913 act that gave Minnesota our non-party legislature must necessarily have been drafted, considered, voted on, and signed by the Governor on its merits completely independent of the question of whether the judiciary should or should not be elected on a party basis.

WHO ARE ELECTED ON A PARTY TICKET IN MINNESOTA?

To what extent is Minnesota now committed to the non-party system of electing its public officials? What officials and how many are elected on a party basis and what officials and how many are not?

The following are elected on a party designated basis. They are the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State and State Treasurer and State Auditor, together with the three members of the Railroad and Warehouse Commission. Thus, Minnesota elects exactly nine of its public officials on a party basis.

The number of elective officials in Minnesota is difficult to determine, but the following figures have been supplied by the Information Service of the League of Minnesota Municipalities:

Kind of Unit Total Approximate Number of Elected Officials:
Counties 1,400
Towns 20,295
School Districts 12,300
Cities 1,075
Villages 7,845
District Court Judges 57
Legislators 198
===
Total 43,170

Minnesota is presently committed to the non-party system of election as against the party system by the astonishing ratio of approximately 43,170 to 9.

THE MINNESOTAN IS PROUD OF HIS POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE

The average Minnesotan is proud of his political independence, proud of his independence to vote for the man irrespective of party. He is accustomed to vote independently and he wants to continues that independence.

Party leaders through the enactment of this bill [?] will vest themselves with political power by gaining control of the legislature; yet, at the same time neither the Republican party nor the Democrat-Farm Labor party is the dominant party in Minnesota today. The dominant political party in Minnesota is the independent. As the independent votes, so goes elections in Minnesota, and you may be certain that the independent is not in support of this bill to turn control of the legislature over to political parties.

Just why those who advocate placing the legislature on a party basis do not also support the election of all officials on a party-designated ballot is difficult to understand, since their arguments, if valid, apply to all elective offices with the possible exception of the judiciary.

THE FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR PARTY DESIGNATION

Let us axamine [sic] the four reasons that are customarily advanced in favor of placing Minnesota's legislature under party domination. They are:

1. A PARTY DESIGNATED LEGISLATURE WILL PROMOTE AND STRENGTHEN POLITICAL PARTIES.

2. A LEGISLATOR SHOULD BE RESPONSIBLE TO A POLITICAL PARTY FOR HIS PUBLIC ACTS.

3. ELECTIONS ON A NON-PARTY BASIS IS ONLY A POPULARITY CONTEST.

4. CANDIDATES SHOULD BE PLEDGED TO A PARTY PLATFORM AND SHOULD STAND FOR ELECTION ON THAT PLATFORM.
---
1.A PARTY DESIGNATED LEGISLATURE WILL PROMOTE AND STRENGTHEN POLITICAL PARTIES

The purpose of the legislature is not to build political parties. Reduced to simplicity, the function of the legislature is to enact such laws as will fairly and justly treat with state problems; that is, to enact such laws within the framework of the constitution as necessary if we are to enjoy an orderly functioning of the state government and its lesser political subdivisions, and also to levy such taxes and appropriate such amounts of money as are required to adequately perform the primary functions of the State. The legislature has no other purpose or duty. It follows that it is not and should not be the responsibility of any public official or group of public officials such as legislators to build or strengthen political parties.

2. A LEGISLATOR SHOULD BE RESPONSIBLE TO A POLITICAL PARTY FOR HIS PUBLIC ACTS

It is argued that a person elected to public office should be accountable for his public acts to a political party, and that one of the beneficial results that will flow from a party designated legislature will be what is called party discipline.

A writer in comparing politics in Minnesota with politics in Pennsylvania, a party dominated state, recently wrote as follows:
----

"One must realize that Pennsylvania is a disciplined, party organization state where politics operate on a basis startling to Minnesotans, used to fiercely independent political behavior.

Pennsylvania is ruled by county leaders. . . party chieftains who win power by political brains and who remain in power by an ingenious system of rewards and penalties for their supporters and opponents.

Under their control are disciplined party organizations which can produce votes in massive quantities, like turning a spigot on and off. For all practical purposes, the select party candidates, establish governmental policy, fix tax rates and reward or penalize their followers.

They're a tough, intensely practical crew."

----
It is understandable why party leaders desire to increase their power by gaining control of the Minnesota legislature, but the view of the independent voter is different, he does not want his legislator, alderman or school board member, to be subject to party responsibility. He does not want a political climate to develop where there might be brought back to Minnesota's scene the paid political hack, the ward healer or the ward boss. The independent wants Minnesota to remain as it is -- the cleanest political state in the nation and the independent wants his public official, be he legislator or alderman, to be responsible to the voters not to some party boss.

3. ELECTIONS ON A NON-PARTY BASIS IS ONLY A POPULARITY CONTEST

If this argument is valid as applied to the election of legislators, then it is also valid as applied to election of every one of the 43,000 public officials elected on a non-party basis in Minnesota today. But how sound is this popularity contest argument? Why should not the voters have the right of voting for the man they want rather than a hand-picked candidate who has, through some means or another, honorable or otherwise, secured the favor of the party boss? Most candidates stand for re-election and when they do, it is not a popularity contest. The candidate for re-election puts his every public act at issue at each such election. If he has not been responsive to the will of the electorate, he is not returned to office.

4. CANDIDATES SHOULD BE PLEDGED TO A PARTY PLATFORM AND STAND FOR ELECTION ON THAT PLATFORM

An examination of the platforms of political parties leads to the conclusion that platforms are drafted not necessarily in the interest of the people but rather they are designed for the purpose of attracting votes. The two devices most frequently used in the writing of party platforms are to grant concessions to every special interest group the party leaders believe will be of significance in the voting and the second is to garnish it with platitudes and generalities such as being for the old people, the youth, the farmer and the working man. What useful purpose would be served if legislators were to be pledged to such broad generalities or to the sops offered the spcial [sic] interest groups? Better legislation will inevitably result if legislators arrive to take up their duties at the Capital unpledged to any person or any issue, except pledged to honestly, fairly and to the best of their abilities represent their constituents and the people of the State. That they take up their duties with an inquiring mind determined to make no decision until they have had an opportunity of hearing in the committees and on the floor of the House and Senate all views on each controversial issue.

PARTY LEADERS IN MINNESOTA TODAY

No discussion of this subject would be complete without mention of political parties as the operate in Minnesota today. Present leadership of both the Republican and Democratic-Farmer-Labor parties is obviously drawn from our most able and public spirited citizens. They function in the manner you would expect from conscientious responsible leaders but without paid political hangers-on and all the rest of the tawdry, clap trap that has disgraced the name of politics in so many of the states that have party designated legislatures.

THE MINNESOTA LEGISLATURE HAS BEEN PROGRESSIVE AND LIBERAL

The laws enacted, the appropriations made and the record of our non-party legislature over the past forty-four years have been such that every citizen of our State can take pride in.

Scores of examples could be cited to establish the fact that during the forty odd years Minnesota has operated on a non-party basis, it has been a leader in progressive and liberal legislation. In the interest of brevity, I wlll [sic] cite only a few examples. It was the independent Minnesota senate that during the depts [sic] of the depression in the early 1930's conceived the idea and then drafted and passed the first state mortgage moratorium law. Later almost every state in the union adopted some form of this humanitarian law which was first produced by our non-party legislature. Another example that can be cited is Minnesota's labor relations law which, although patterned to some extent after Scandinavian laws, actually was an original piece of legislation. This act also has proved itself in operation and has been copied by many states. Other examples of how excellently the non-party legislature functions might well include our mental health program, our fine schools, outstanding University, and our Presidential Primary Law that has had such a profound effect on the national political scene.

WHO IS ELECTED TO THE LEGISLATURE?

One of the unusual results of our non-party system is that it favors the election of the legislature of outstanding citizens without regard for politics. This has been particularly true of elections held in rural areas. Often these candidates from rural areas have distinguished themselves in community service and are elected to the legislature as a reward by the community they have served and there is little or no political significance in their election. They are apt to be persons of proven character, experience and judgment and they make excellent law makers.

EXPERIENCE IN A LEGISLATOR IS AN ASSET

The non-party election of legislators also has had the beneficial result of giving Minnesota a more experienced legislature that her sister states. Non-party legislators are not as vulnerable to defeat on each occasion when voters change the political party in control of the state offices or the national administration. Those who work with legislatures will agree that experience is just as valuable as an asset to a legislator as it is to any other person who receives a responsible assignment in the professions, business or industry.

People who work with several legislatures including Minnesota have frequently said that the caliber of the Minnesota legislators, both in the House and Senate, and including members of the independent and liberal groups, is exceptionally high in comparison with party-dominated states. There is good reason for this. Scores of Minnesota legislators would find no challenge in serving as members of the legislature if their only function was to rubber stamp the decisions of a party boss. They stay with their work as legislators because the decisions they make are theirs alone and not those of some party politician whose only responsibility is to the party rather than to the people. The responsibility of the Minnesota legislator is to his constituents before whom he must stand for re-election.

LOBBYING EASIER IN PARTY LEGISLATURES

Legislative representatives, association executives and lobbiest [sic] who appear for their groups in Minnesota and also party-designated state legislatures say that in working in other legislatures, they have only to convince the majority party leader of their views since it is only he, and not the individual legislator, who makes the decision for all party members.

THE MINNESOTA SYSTEM IS NON-BOSS

This is not true of the Minnesota legislature where every measure is weighed by the individual legislator both in committee and on the floor of the House or Senate. Minnesota has the opposite of the party boss system; it has its own system -- a non-boss system, in which every legislator is free to decide what is in the best interest for his constituents and what is in the best interest of the state on each issue. The Minnesota system, in my judgment, is infinitely more in the interest of the public.

POLITICS IN MINNESOTA IS CLEANER & BETTER

We who have taken an active part in Minnesota legislature have been taking for granted the benefits of the Minnesota non-party system; yet, at the same time we have also been somewhat remiss in failing to adequately explain to those not actively working with the legislature how superior the Minnesota system is in operation. Many persons do not realize that in Minnesota we enjoy cleaner and better politics and, at the same time, give to our people a more economical, effective and responsive government.

Once the consideration of the proposed repeal of the non-party status of the legislature is focused on something other than the repetitious conclusions which we have heard over the years from proponents of the bill, such as "party responsibility" and the other well known arguments, and our people come to understand that the real issue is whether we are determined to retain better government in Minnesota, they not only will stand with us in demanding that we retain our non-party system, but, in my judgment, a movement might well take form whereby other states will be encouraged to adopt the Minnesota system.

EXPERIENCE SHOWS THE MINNESOTA SYSTEM IS BEST

Above all, we who have the experience of actually working under the Minnesota non-party system should be determined that we retain what we know to be in the best interests of good government in Minnesota and determined to resist all efforts, regardless of how well intentioned they may be to turn our legislature over to political party control.

Use Google to hail a cab

This is too damn cool. The geniuses at Google have rigged up a way to show vehicle fleets on their service, so that you may now see a map of available cabs in a given city. What the hell can I say?

If you're like me, you use a mix of recommendations from friends, the phone book, or standing on the corner with your hand in the air (and hoping it isn't raining) when you need to find a taxi, limousine or shuttle service. With Google Ride Finder, you can tell us where you want to find a ride and we'll show you the actual positions of participating vehicles in that area, along with a phone number you can use to contact the fleet operator (e.g., Chicago).

We're just getting started, so forgive us if we don't have your city or ride provider yet; we'll be adding more as they become available. If you're a fleet owner/operator, get in touch with us; we'd love to include your vehicle.

Look at Chicago. Information Age meets cab dispatching... Also you can have Google provide a whole library of definitions for a given term, for example, define:iran-contra or eschatology. These bits come via the official GoogleBlog.

"Thompson's ashes to be shot from cannon"

CNN: 'He loved explosions'

Tuesday, April 5, 2005 Posted: 5:28 PM EDT (2128 GMT)

DENVER, Colorado (AP) -- Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon mounted inside a 53-foot-high (16.15 meter-high) sculpture of the journalist's "gonzo fist" emblem, his wife said Tuesday.

The cannon shot, planned sometime in August on the grounds of his Aspen-area home, will fulfill the writer's long-cherished wish.

"It's expensive, but worth every penny," Anita Thompson said. "I'd like to have several explosions. He loved explosions."

Thompson, 67, shot himself in the head on February 20 after a long and flamboyant career that produced such new journalism classics as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and cast his image as a hard-charging, drug-crazed daredevil.

The cannon shot will be part of a larger public celebration of Thompson's life. Some details remain to be worked out, including the exact date, what kind of cannon will be used and the specifics of the gonzo fist, his wife said.

She said the gonzo fist will be mounted on a 100-foot pillar, making the monument 153 feet (46.63 meters) high. It will resemble Thompson's personal symbol, a fist on an upthrust forearm, sometimes with "Gonzo" emblazoned across it.

Anita Thompson has said the monument will be a permanent fixture on the writer's 100-acre property.

Thx to Judge Deason for telling me...

A Real Technical Error

Sorry readers,

Sometimes Dan becomes so involved in his tech-speak that he forgets that you neither know what he's talking about, nor care. From now on, we'll try to trim these bits and bobs out of this august journal.

Thanks for understanding,

The Management

[a followup from Dan: That is precisely the genius of Linux. I myself had no idea what the effect of those errors really was, inducing uncertainty and a drive to pick things apart until it was fixed. Totally inscrutable, and yet so satisfying when it's finally solved!]

A bug is fix0red

This didn't have any effect on the front end that I could see (except for when the site was off because I rebooted and forgot to reset the HTTP forwarding), but there was a weird problem that was causing HongPong.com's all-important Gentoo Linux server box to emit ugly messages whenever it did something called "caching service dependencies, like so:

Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache...
Caching service dependencies...
/var/lib/init.d/depcache: line 16: overwritten!!: command not found

This has been a pain for quite a while but I did some looking around in the Gentoo linux forums and their bugzilla bugtracker. Read what happened here (the forums weren't terribly useful) or ignore this message. Hopefully some googler in the future will find the info helpful. The trick was to empty out a config directory, /etc/conf.d/, and then run 'emerge baselayout' to replace the config files. It took quite a while to determine this. A special thanks to Borja Pacheco on Gentoo Bugzilla entry #74404 for his useful solution to a similar problem.

Missed opportunity or war defeat?

According to AlertNet, as much as 70% of the standing residential structures in the city of Falluja have been razed in Coalition attacks, displacing as many as 210,000 households.

Though the occupational authorities (because I feel like calling a spade a spade today) have set aside $100 million for the reimbursement of affected families, real relief has been slow coming:

Muhammad Abdul al-A'ani, deputy minister for industry, told IRIN that of the total number of houses damaged in the city, only 90 families had received compensation of around US $1,500 each so far[...]

According to Ahmed Salah, a senior officer from the public works ministry, two electricity substations, three water purification plants and two train stations were badly damaged, along with the sewage and surface water drainage subsystems throughout the city[...]

Sewage running in the streets, hundreds of thousands displaced, 90,000 still waiting to return to the city, this is beginning to smell of, dare I say it? Failure.

There's been little formal discussion of complete mission failure, as even the harsher critics of the war seem intent on playing "how do we make the best of it now that we're here" in the face of ever more certain defeat.

Cracks may be showing, however, as some early war proponents have begun to balk at the expense and conduct of the Mess O' Potamia. The premiere example of this burgeoning mutiny is the break from the party line of the Orange County Register in a recently-published editorial in which they called for a complete pullout of the Iraq conflict.

The kicker here, of course, is the Register's position as the editorial voice of the most Republican district in the United States. Could this be the start of trend? Hell if I know...

This post was an incomplete thought, but it's late and I'm tired, so goodnight.

Kung Fu in Kyrgyzstan

Tonight's entry is dedicated to my favorite Roman god, Non Sequitur. We have many things to note.

The Montana House resoundingly confirmed a resolution disparaging the Patriot Act as Fascist Horse Manure. (via Eschaton)

Prince Charles is an ill tempered hemorrhoid of a heir.

Misc links: Did anyone notice that the famous The Blogging of the President bopnews.com needs to update all this '2004' crap they have written all over. HongPong.com started going in 2001 but I'm not still obsessed with high school... Taegan Goddard's PoliticalWire.com, interesting stuff... American Constitution Society has a fancy lookin blog with all sorts of ongoing legal news, and in particular some good thoughts about the Schiavo case and federalism:

...the Schiavo case reveals the true priorities of the right: they are happy to abandon the principles of federalism if the issue is related to questions of "life." But if they are willing to cast aside federalism in the Schiavo case, won't they be willing to do the same in the context of abortion? And if they are, won't that inevitably lead to attempts to pass federal legislation banning abortion?

There is a big deal going on regarding how political contributions via websites should fit into the FEC regulations. Info @ redstate.org. Behold pretentious blog of rightwing Robert Kaplan supporters. This is why Kaplan and his pagan ways make him a bastard.(Hey, they use WordPress, which probably works better than this system).

Gonna have to get me a gravatar. In here is the very best picture to come out of the Terri Schiavo circus (this one). A more moderate Republican dared asked for sanity, then they cut off his fingers. The Pope pleaded for world peace.

C-SPAN provides platform for Holocaust denier to badger author??

MOONIES! John Gorenfeld takes it upon himself to look out for the good Reverend Moon and his Unification Church's ongoing efforts to destroy America and bring that special blend of Korean Neo-Jonestown Messianism to us all... Scrap Democracy! The Evil Elliot Abrams will speak at your functions! I believe Gorenfeld was the one who found out about that crazy crowning ceremony when good ol Moon told us he was the Messiah. That's Washington for ya!

These links should have been in the last post: A little more about the White Supremacists getting ignored by the Department of Homeland Security, as I mentioned earlier. And a little More about Team B in the late 1970s using fake information to support hawkishness...

Kyrgyzstan revolution: it seems like another mess on Afghanistan's doorstep, rather than one of these glossy color coded revolutions intended to provide a jolly narrative for the Folks Back Home. Most of these are sugarcoated, like Ukraine's Yuschenko, for example, is portrayed as a Hero of Democracy rather than someone who embezzled vast sums from the IMF.

In Kyrgyzstan, a poor country that lacks even a spellcheck entry on my computer, is one of these rather authoritarian (post-Stalinist?) Central Asian republics, overrun with heroin smuggling operations and the Russian mob. This article from March 1 describes the local "managed democracy" (ie rigged systems) that the former president, Akayev, couldn't quite rig enough to Inspire Confidence. Oddly enough, some people say that Kung Fu was responsible for this turn of events:

KARA SUU, Kyrgyzstan (AFP) - Many say people power brought down the regime in Kyrgyzstan last week. But Bayaman Erkinbayev, a lawmaker, martial arts champ and one of the Central Asian nation's richest men, says it was his small army of Kung Fu-style fighters.

In southern Kyrgyzstan, where the protests that brought down the Askar Akayev's 15-year regime first flared, the name of 37-year-old Erkinbayev seems to be on everyone's lips. Erkinbayev is the wealthy playboy head of the Palvan Corporation, who led 2,000 fighters trained in Alysh, Kyrgyzstan's answer to Kung Fu, to protests launched after the first round of a parliamentary election on February 27.

A hero in his hometown Osh, he is generally considered to have financed the protests and sent his martial arts trainees to the front lines of the demonstrations, including in the capital Bishkek.

"When our old men were beaten and thrown out of the regional administration building, my fighters were on the front line. And during the siege in Bishkek, my fighters went in first," Erkinbayev told AFP in his gymnasium in Osh.

Iraq still rockin: The Fallujah brigades might be comin back again. Keep reading Juan Cole. Hey, who remembers how Ahmed Chalabi provided all that fake information about weapons of mass destruction in a successful effort to trick the American public into supporting an invasion? Ahh, the good old days... For that honed sense of outrage about the recent panel report on the WMD lies, consider Raimondo:

If and when the [Larry] Franklin [AIPAC-related] case finally comes to trial, the courtroom deliberations could shed new light on the question of how and why we were lied into war. It will prove in a court of law what I have long contended: that the only way to understand this shameful episode in the history of American wars is to look at the series of "mistakes" and "miscalculations" as a covert operation carried out by agents of a foreign power. Contra the WMD report, it wasn't "tunnel vision" that led to a monumental "intelligence failure" – it was treason.

Ray McGovern on the need for Honest Intelligence, regarding National Intelligence Estimates (such as those previously spoofed) etc., and of course our spotty intel on Iran. Scott Ritter says that Bush has a plan to get ready for war with Iran by June this year of our lord 2005.

Lebanon: something written in an unorthodox fashion by William Lind against the U.S. meddling about in Lebanon, and how it plays into al-Qaeda's interests if we go after Authoritarian Syria.

Israel: The Planned Chaos Of Illegal Settlements. This is very important.

Israel/Russia: Funny story about a corrupt financier named Vladimir Gusinsky and his Russian and Israeli schemes. Apparently he has some sympathy from characters like Benjamin Netanyahu... The Agonist is doing some serious reporting of its own now, kudos to them.

The Local Front for Fatal Hubris: Any criticisms of Tom DeLay and the cockroaches oozing from his mouth will be Taken Personally and Reinserted Rectally.

Cont... and postcards from hell...

In the same vein as Dan's discussion of rhetoric, here is a copy of George Orwell's seminal "Politics and the English Language", written in 1946 and discussing the manner in which issues are framed by language...

Good and bad news for 2008 today from US News. Check out the italics (mine).

Is Anybody Not Running in '08? We've got more names to add to the growing list of 2008 presidential hopefuls. On the Democratic side, pen in Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. Allies say his trip south last week was the first of many to red states where he hopes to push his progressive agenda. On the GOP side, add rookie South Dakota Sen. John Thune, who took down former Democratic leader Tom Daschle . Senior Republicans say he's being groomed for a veep or even presidential run. Include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty . Insiders love his record of balancing the budget, boosting education, and protecting the environment. Finally: ousted Environmental Protection Agency chief Christie Whitman , the former moderate New Jersey guv.

Whitman would be an interesting Dem-friendly choice, but perhaps a little on the forced PC side- she hardly showed her fangs when facing off against the White House but, as an "ousted" cabinet member, she would serve as a anti-neocon candidate, a definite plus for the Republicans in light of their cratering poll numbers.

Feingold has been an obvious candidate for some time now, but he's probably a little too much of a winging lefty to get picked, and the John McCain connection is going to do him less and less good as McCain becomes an ever-greater sellout. Count Joe Biden, Evan Bayh, Bill Richardson (my personal fave) and John Kerry (boo) in for the Dems, too.

Before anyone gets too worked up about the Pawlenty matter, remember the history of our state and the Presidency in the last fifty years- two veeps (Humphrey, Mondale) and three unsuccessful Presidential candidates (Humphrey, McCarthy, Mondale). Add Pawlenty's Republicanism to the mix and we can consider him a strong candidate for the losing side of the next Presidential tilt.

Shifting the brackets

Our hazy theme today is how rhetoric and threat language are used to shift around the perceived morality of Acting Against The Evil Ones.

Sometimes we should reflect on how the government views internal enemies. The inclusion or exclusion of various groups from heightened law enforcement scrutiny tells us a lot about how that government perceives its own identity.

So I have some stuff about Natan Sharansky, whose supposed ideology about the spread of freedom has totally infatuated Bush, but is itself the slanted product of a hardcore Likud supporter, shifting the definition of Arabs to suit his own purposes, influencing both Israeli and American government identities.

First thing is a report of a leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security which indicates DHS will institutionally become more fixated on left-wing groups, those Real Dangerous Earth Liberation Front types, apparently placing less emphasis on right-wing militia and white supremacist groups. Great:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not list right-wing domestic terrorists and terrorist groups on a document that appears to be an internal list of threats to the nation’s security.

According to the list — part of a draft planning document obtained by CQ Homeland Security — between now and 2011 DHS expects to contend primarily with adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups.

It also lists left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans. Recent attacks on cars, businesses and property in Virginia, Oregon and California have been attributed to ELF.

On the flip side is Bush's Democratic Revolution Loverboy, Israeli Minister of Jerusalem Affairs/Olde Time Soviet Dissident Natan Sharansky. Sharansky wrote some book about the global democracy movement, but this all seems to be slick packaging within which lies a typical Likud hawk. Perhaps I'm not being fair; he did truly spend the better part of a decade in the Soviet gulag. However, as a piece in the American Conservative, a paleo-con periodical put it...

The one-time Soviet prisoner, now an Israeli cabinet minister, became the personal embodiment of the link that neoconservative intellectuals had long asserted in print between the Cold War and “World War IV”—a long twilight struggle against totalitarianism morphing seamlessly into the War on Terror. Sharansky could claim authoritatively that the battles against Soviet despotism and Islamic terrorists were essentially part of the same fight, the free against the unfree. As a result of his personal struggle, Sharansky embodied, to use a favorite catchword of the administration’s ideologists, “moral clarity.”

But in real political life, moral clarity between liberty and despotism is not so easy to come by—and perhaps nowhere is that clearer than in Sharansky’s own path since he entered Israeli politics. For there his career has been marked not by moral clarity but rather by moral ambiguity and inconsistency in his advocacy of democracy and human rights, particularly in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [....]Over the course of Sharansky’s political career, he has steadily morphed from avatar of universal human rights into a pillar of Israel’s nationalist camp.

Soon after Sharansky’s arrival on Israel’s political scene, international human rights advocates and members of the Israeli peace movement began to suspect that he adopted a double standard in dealing with the Palestinians. After a long and exasperating exchange with Sharansky in 1997, an Arab reporter for Al-Sharq al-Awsat threw up his hands and exclaimed, “What you are in effect saying is that everything that the Israeli Government does today is right, that the whole world is wrong to criticize Israel, and that there is no possibility of making any changes in Israel’s policies?” Sharansky blithely responded, “I would not put it quite so strongly.”
[....]
In a particularly cynical move, Sharansky and Sharon’s other opponents sought to twist Israel’s democratic process to hobble even this very tentative step toward peace [the Gaza withdrawal]. As a recent Ha’aretz editorial characterizes this ploy: “The referendum campaign being waged by Sharon’s ministers, his buddies in the Likud, the settlers and fanatics of every stripe, is a threat to the democratic-parliamentary structure of the state, no matter how you look at it.” In a recent cabinet vote on Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal plan, Sharansky cast one of five nays.
[...]
....the nature of Sharansky’s political constituency in Israel drove him to the nationalist extreme. His original party started out narrowly focused on advancing the ethnic interests of Russian Jews and was fairly moderate on most other issues. But Avigdor Lieberman, another Russian Jew, saw the potential for a political party based on the growing Russian Jewish community and better understood that this community was very hawkish, particularly on the issues of Islam (which for Russians was clearly identified with the Chechen War) and the Arabs. Subsequently, Sharansky and Lieberman formed the National Unity Block, which came to represent the most nationalistic edge of the Israeli political spectrum. Like their former countrymen back in the old motherland, Russian Jews in Israel are, in the words of Eduard Kuznetsov, editor of the Israeli Russian-language paper Vesti, “the descendants of an imperial attitude. Land is sacred. And though only 1 percent of them live in the occupied territories, they have an instinctive hatred of Arabs and see no reason to make any concessions.”

Well, "instinctive hatred" is more of a blanket term than I really like, but then again this is a Russian newspaper editor talking. The following interview in Mother Jones illustrates the Likud-nationalist ideology behind the flowery democracy talk:

MJ: Another criticism of you is that as Housing Minister in Ariel Sharon's first government, you participated in the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. And many people say: "Well, how can one promote a democratic Palestinian state while at the same time supporting settlements which Palestinians see as an impediment to that state?"

NS: Well, look, Palestinians see the strengthening of Jewish settlements as an impediment, and some Israelis see the strengthening of the Palestinian Authority as an impediment. But the truth is that if you really want to live in peace, with two democratic societies—Palestinian and Israeli—these must be societies where people can live without fear. And here's something that's strange. The whole world expects that Arabs should be able to live peacefully in Israeli territory—and as you know 17 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabs. At the same time, the world also expects that Jews should leave the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority, because those Jews will be killed there. That, from the beginning, shows that the world expects very different things from these two types of societies.

I never saw the legitimate strengthening of the Jewish community in the territories under discussion as an obstacle to peace. Israel has showed many times that, as soon as there is any hope for peace, we will make all sorts of concessions. The last example of this was Ehud Barak. But if we're making these concessions, I want to make sure that we have a reliable partner first, a partner who is also ready to take those concessions, for the sake of peace.

MJ: Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, which have held, even though neither state is a democracy, why wouldn't the same be true for an undemocratic Palestinian state?

NS: First of all, we want to have peace with everybody, whether they are a democracy or not. But the difference is that with democracy you can have peace that you can rely on. For leaders of democratic states, war is always the last option, but when you have peace with a non-democracy, you have to rely on the strength of your military to enforce it. So we have peace with Egypt backed by a treaty, but also peace with Syria without a treaty. In both cases, it's because we can rely on the strength of our army. Peace with the Palestinians, however, will not come with their state safely behind the Sinai. The new state will be in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In this case, it's much more difficult for Israel to rely on the strength of its army to enforce peace, so we need a partner we can trust and rely on, a democratic partner.

One more word about Egypt. What's interesting about our agreement with Egypt is that Egypt got a lot out of it: the territories, financial support, weapons from Americans, and so on. But it lost something very important to the government: It lost Israel as enemy. And for a dictatorial regime, an outside enemy is something that helps the regime survive. So they lost us as a political enemy, but then in the last twenty years they emerged as the new anti-Semitic center in the world. The country prints more anti-Semitic literature, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, than any other Arab country, and that's a direct result of the fact that Egypt is not a democracy. When they lost us as a political enemy, they still needed us as a national enemy, so now they're becoming the center of anti-Semitism.

A whole array here of Likud bits. The "rely on the strength of your military to enforce [peace]" option == Revisionist Zionism's Iron Wall philosophy. The "I never saw the legitimate strengthening of the Jewish community in the territories under discussion as an obstacle to peace" bit was pure Land Grabbery and Hegemonic Discourse, and lazy hegemonifying at that. Of course it's legitimate, that's why it wasn't an obstacle to peace! Now that is a tautology worth putting clusters of zealots on the West Bank for. And we can see the ideological continuity with the Clean Break neocon folks as well.

On the other hand, he is right that the outside enemy helps the regime survive. USSR and the Capitalist Cigar smokers, Nazi Germany and International Jewry, the New Pentagon and Shibboleth O Evil Zarqawi, these are handy things. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. To hate at least rhetorically delays the pressures of reform, but doubly so in a democracy where vast sections of the population have been brainwashed.

To make the American people intolerant of imaginary WMDs held by an inflated enemy image, that was the genius of Wolfowitz, and his Cold War predecessors like Wohlstetter. To run intelligence puffing-up using totally fake Empirical Evidence, like the old Team B venture, was recognized as the best political strategy to making doves look foolhardy. in those days, it was the nukes, whereas nowadays it was the Curveball-based intel, Yellowcake Uranium and Aluminum Tubes.

I have to go to bed now. More later. Augh, I always say that.