Open Thread

Intelligence overload. The US has over 10,000 intelligence locations throughout the country - which is almost as many locations as Starbucks.

And as Richard Clarke says, in this case, more is definitely not better and sure as heck won't keep us safer. But sure it keeps the DC area richer than the rest of the country.

Time to help

Enough with the posturing and the fake outrage about the Cordoba House. It's time to live up to our better selves.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell frames this issue really well:

It's really ugly. And I've got to say, I think it's really ugly in part because of the timing.

I know it's a midterm election, so, yes, I think part of this is some GOP leaders trying to pull the last little bit of political capital out of 9/11.

But it is Ramadan. It is a holy time for Muslims.

And on top of that, in the Muslim world right now, there is an enormous tragedy.

15 million people in Pakistan are suffering and the one thing that we could do as Americans is to say, okay, rather than being exclusionary, rather than fighting over a piece of ground that as sacred and hallowed it might be in our national understanding, that instead we reach out to the millions of Muslims that are currently suffering through no fault of their own as a result of this horrifying natural disaster during a high holy moment. What that might say about us as Americans instead of having this fight over this parcel of land.

Some reports put the numbers affected as 20 million people. In order to put that into perspective, you have to imagine having most of Southern California being displaced from their homes because of torrential rains. How can we not see that we are being asked to reach beyond anger and fear and the pettiness of these fake scandals, and challenged to live up the great commandment: do onto others as you would have them do unto you?

Here are a couple of organizations that are helping on the ground: Mercy Corp, Doctors without Borders. Please do something to help.

Open Thread

Pretty astonishing picture on how counties will be effected by water going forward:

What's so astonishing about this view is the states with the fastest growth in the Sun Belt are the states with the greatest water challenges in the future (California, Texas, Florida). It would be nice to hope that this new challenge can be met with better answers and less demagoguery, but so far we shouldn't be sanguine that we learned much yet.

Article here.

We Ask For So Much, Don’t We?

I have been furious with my Party and Government over the years on various levels, as we all know quite well, often bewildered at the obliviousness to howling human pain and lost opportunity of incredible scale, but lately I’ve had this sharp question to consciousness if our political leadership is even on the same reality and planet I’m on. Base elements and policy are so humanly wrong and grossly politically stupid either the Party leadership is completely lost in space on quaaludes or I am.

Please excuse me, Mr. Robert Gates, I was ill last week with a vomiting syndrome and will now fail the Adult White House Asshole drug test because I desperately need my health to be a good worker. It can be grossly disorienting but after nine years of it I snap back very quickly now with the right medication, I am quite sure the Pluto politics examined this morning will reveal a political frame of reference quite healthy on my part, for I wasn’t the one who so stupidly maligned and inflamed his own people right before an election.

Open Thread

Site has been migrated to new hardware, but I'm still working out all the kinks. Let me know if you see any problems.

Dull, Predictable & In Servitude

In the relentless summer maelstrom of American political news and events a tiny, very significant fact flitted out from our government 11 days ago, almost instantly tossed to oblivion in the blizzard of elements surrounding oil caps, gay marriage, the Catfood commission, unemployment and Teabaggers but still deserving the utmost laser attention, no matter now seemingly innocuous the news: full body scan images are being saved of ordinary Americans at airport security machines.

A trifling, small event that affects a tiny percentage of Americans only deserving attention from civil libertarian junkies. Not so, some patient exploration of underlying elements of this privacy loss reveals profound importance to the daily lives of all Americans.

Open Thread

Thought for the day.

During the Great Depression which afflicted the United States and much of the world economy, the US and Canada were stricken by the dust bowl which made the misery of that period so much worse.

Today, it seems cruelly ironic that while the world struggles to extricate itself from the economic malaise brought by the Financial collapse, the extreme weather events seem designed to make the situation so much worse.

The Elites' Best Friend

I've frequently complained about Obama's lack of spine in dealing with his political opponents, and his failure to hit the ground running after the election as a populist reformer, to take advantage of the public appetite for reform and real change. Frequently, I get pushback from some of you who think my criticism is nothing more than sour grapes from a Hillary supporter, and then I am told that Obama's problems are all Bush's fault.

A far better writer than me has penned the best summary so far of Obama's failings. John Judis, a senior editor of the The New Republic posted a piece for the magazine on Thursday (subscription required) that makes the same points, and reinforces my criticism of Obama's role in the failed stimulus package. But Judis goes farther and points out that Obama "has a strange aversion to confrontational politics", and has avoided hammering the GOP, Bush, Wall Street, and the bankers for their role in the near-depression Obama inherited. Worse yet, as I've commented before, Judis points out that Obama and his advisors feel he is above party politics, which leads to him being seen as detached from the real world and the need for political accountability.

Judis points out that the White House political operation saw the need early for Obama to pursue a populist tone while he had the political capital to push major financial reform and a strong stimulus package. Yet the pro-business cabal inside the White House argued that Obama couldn't antagonize Wall Street and that he needed them and the bankers.

The White House and cabinet officials he appointed have reinforced his aversion to populism. As Jonathan Alter recounts in "The Promise: President Obama, Year One," Geithner and Summers repeatedly blocked attempts to get tough on Wall Street on the grounds that doing so would threaten the recovery itself by upsetting the bankers. For most of his first year, Alter writes, “Obama bought the Geithner-Summers argument that the banks were fragile and couldn’t be confronted while they remained in peril.” Its reluctance to come down on the bankers crippled the administration politically, making it far more difficult for it to get its way with Congress on a second stimulus program that would have boosted the recovery and Democrats’ political prospects.

Bad politics can trump good policy.

The optics of such a capitulation to the same thieves who brought down the economy while bailout money was leading to more and more bonuses was fatal, especially when the stimulus critics like Krugman and Stiglitz have been proven correct about the package's timidity and ineffectiveness.

In January, when the White House debated how large a stimulus to propose, Christina Romer, the head of the Council of Economic Advisors, proposed a $1.2 trillion Keynesian jolt. David Obey, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, told The Fiscal Times that Obama’s Treasury Department asked initially for a $1.4 trillion bill.

But the administration finally proposed a stimulus between $700 and $800 billion that included large tax cuts that were more likely to stimulate saving than consumption–and spending that would be unlikely to produce many jobs until the end of Obama’s first term. In the stimulus’s first year, the administration spent only $17 billion of the $139 billion allocated for infrastructure spending.

Prominent economists, including Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, made the case that a much larger stimulus was necessary to reverse (rather than merely reduce) the rise in unemployment, and that, if a modest stimulus failed to reduce unemployment, Republicans would convince the public that the stimulus was toxic medication and would block additional Keynesian measures. That argument has been proven sadly correct. Some White House advisers appear to have underestimated the depth of the Great Recession. Others seem to have doubted the administration had the political clout to get more from Congress.

But the White House might have gotten more if Obama had proclaimed a national economic emergency (which it was); framed the issue in terms of rescuing the middle class from damage done by Wall Street speculators, short-sighted CEOs, and Chinese mercantilism; and directly attacked Republicans as heartless obstructionists. When Obama belatedly made this sort of case on the eve of the financial reform vote this year, he got a much stronger bill than anyone had anticipated. So it’s not clear that the failure to get a larger stimulus–which has ended up hurting the administration politically– wasn’t itself a result of political timidity.

Open Thread

According to this analysis, the heat wave that smothered Russia this summer wasn't just a once in every 1000 years, it was once in every 15,788 years. Climate scientists say this event could not have happened without global warming forcing the change.

[Housekeeping note: Sorry for the late open thread. I've been preparing for a server migration for the site. If all goes well, we'll be using a shiny new server tomorrow.]

Pretty smart number crunchers

Agence France-Presse has the encouraging news:

Iraq's top army officer on Wednesday warned that a pullout of all US soldiers by the end of 2011 was premature, after eight of his troops were killed in a brazen attack that exposed shaky security here.

Lieutenant General Babakar Zebari's remarks, which run counter to those of his political leaders, coincide with the exit of thousands of American soldiers under a US declaration to end combat operations in Iraq at the end of August.

"At this point, the withdrawal (of US forces) is going well, because they are still here," Zebari told AFP on the sidelines of a defence ministry conference in Baghdad.

"But the problem will start after 2011 -- the politicians must find other ways to fill the void after 2011.

Other ways to fill the void. What could he possibly have in mind? Perhaps this Newsweek article has the answer:

As the U.S. military continues to draw down its forces in Iraq later this month and complete a full exit by the end of next year, analysts say the withdrawal will be a boon for the private security industry, whose employees will likely undertake more quasi-military functions such as defusing explosives and providing armed response teams. “They [private security contractors] are going to have to do everything that we expect soldiers to do without going out on patrols to engage the enemy,” says one former industry insider. “There are some pretty smart number crunchers in all the major contractors who are figuring out how much of this increasing pie we’re going to be able to get.”

What exactly that pie will consist of remains to be seen. During the first four years of the war—the most recent available estimate—the U.S. spent as much as $10 billion on private security contractors, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Yet this occurred at a time when the military employed far fewer than the roughly 11,000 private security contractors that it employs today. Just how many will remain in Iraq when the U.S. leaves will depend on the conditions on the ground. Yet analysts say the number of mercenaries will likely remain stable and could even increase slightly. And, as these contractors expand into new roles, “the price of them goes up,” says Stephanie Sanok, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Outsourcing. At whose expense? And as for those conditions on the ground, let's turn to The Guardian:

Al-Qaida is attempting to make a comeback in Iraq by enticing scores of former Sunni allies to rejoin the terrorist group by paying them more than the monthly salary they currently receive from the government, two key US-backed militia leaders have told the Guardian.

They said al-Qaida leaders were exploiting the imminent departure of US fighting troops to ramp up a membership drive, in an attempt to show that they are still a powerful force in the country after seven years of war.

Al-Qaida is also thought to be moving to take advantage of a power vacuum created by continuing political instability in Iraq, which remains without a functional government more than five months after a general election.

Of course, Al-Qaida never had much of a presence in Iraq, so the framing by even a usually responsible newspaper is interesting. But setting aside the whole scary-names-of-scary-terrorist-organizations thing, some facts remain obvious. Such as that the end of the Iraq War will not be the end of the Iraq War. And U.S. troops will still be there for some time. And mercenaries will still be there even longer. And there will continue to be other enormous costs. And someone will be footing the bill.

(h/t The Common Ills)

Open Thread

Even in light of the number of extreme weather events that have happened in 2010, some continue to deny this has anything to do with global warming (although the weather this year has started to persuade even some of the most adamant skeptics).

So what do the experts say? Well, here's what Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says about that.

I find it [the connection of these extreme events to global warming] systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.

A short list of events in 2010:

• Nashville experienced an 1000 year deluge
• the Northeast experienced severe floods
• the Southwest experienced the greatest low pressure system in 140 years of record-keeping
• Russia experienced a heat wave lasting more than a month, killing more than 300 people per day and setting off massive fires that sent ash across the world
• torrential rains from unseasonably wet monsoons in Pakistan have displaced millions of Pakistanis
• and in the same period, the Three Gorges Dam in China was almost overwhelmed from the floods.

Experts are connecting the extreme weather events in Russia, Pakistan and China to the same massive atmospheric storms that arise from the increased moisture in the atmosphere which is precisely what was predicted in the global warming models.

Evidently the hoax being perpetrated by the climate scientists to destroy the free market is now fooling Mother Nature. Oh NO!!!!!