A quick question about Romney's taxes. What's stopping him from giving us false forms?

Years ago, back in the 80s, a guy who worked at a bank told me that if someone applying for a home loan hands in a tax form with false info, the bank had no way to double-check. Is there any way to verify Romney's data? Permalink

This is a political blog, not a Weird Shit blog. But the political realm -- and life in general -- has left me feeling awfully bleak and blue in recent weeks. So let's welcome some good news: The Apocalypse is nigh!

At least, such is the purport of a mysterious set of videos popping up all over YouTube. These clips document a worldwide phenomenon -- strange, loud, unearthly sounds that have been heard in various locations around the world. A flurry of "unidentified auditory phenomenon" reports came pouring in from all over the world on January 12, 2012, and again on January 17. Near as I can tell, the first wave of videos documenting these sounds showed up in March of 2011, with another outburst in August of 2011.

I know what you're thinking: How do we know that these videos do not constitute a massive con job? Faking up a presentation of this sort would be child's play. Perhaps we are witnessing a viral, global leg-pull.

My response: Dude, you're harshing my buzz. I prefer to think that the Apocalypse is nigh.

On occasion, teevee news has reported on the incidents -- for example, ITN. So has the Huffington Post. Also see here and here. And here. As you'll see, at least one sports broadcast has been interrupted by these audio events.

At this point, I can offer no explanation. Can't even provide you with one of my characteristically outre theories. (Some folks are talking HAARP. Boring! There are people who blame HAARP if a cat coughs up a fur ball.) All you can do is check out the vids and come to your own conclusions.

This one comes from the Czech Republic:



Here's Conklin, Alberta, Canada. This is, perhaps, the most popular of the videos, even though it is almost certainly fake:



Costa Rica coming up. This one is more musical, more David Lynchian...



More on the Costa Rica sitch. Translation, anyone?



Helsinki, Finland, January 17, 2012 (sounding a bit too Hollywood, alas):



Same date, Boulder, CO:



Same date, same sound, Nottingham, England:



Same date, Thunder Bay:



Same date, NYC. Subtle, but cute:



Same date, Philly. Alas, this one sounds quite dubious, like a music track slowed down:



Badajoz, Spain, January 18, 2012:



Belgium, January 19, 2012:



Apparently, something similar occurred worldwide in September of 2011. For some reason, this interesting compilation segues into a commercial for a truly hideous product:



Same damned thing occurred in the south of France (always an epicenter for weirdness) in March of 2011. Here, as elsewhere, the sound resembles the noise emitted by the tripods in the Spielberg version of War of the Worlds:



At the same time France got hit, this occurred in New Jersey:



Poland, August, 2011. This one sounds cool, but methinks I hear indications of Adobe Audition at work...



Take me out to the ball game...





Kiev, in the Ukraine. August, 2011. A news report, in a language I do not understand...



Same time period, St. Petersburg, Florida (this one is subtle)...



Moscow, also in August...



Sweden, again in August...



Unspecified date and locale. But the audio is, like, totally cool.



There are many more such videos on YouTube. Let me say it again: Yes, I know that such presentations are easy to fake. I could do a damned good job of it myself in little more than an hour. But right now, I prefer to ignore your bah-humbuggery, so pooh your poohs elsewhere. In my present mood, just about the only thing that could cheer me up is a really top notch Armageddon.

And popcorn. And beer.

(Wait a minute...! If the world does end in 2012, we'll never find out how Sherlock did what he did at the end of season 2!) Permalink

Needless to say, I support the effort to protest SOPA legislation. GO HERE NOW. Permalink

Personal issues. Not sure when I'll return. Permalink

Of course the car-bombings of Iranian nuke scientists are the work of Israel. Even the New York Times and Fox News point in that direction, which means that the artist wants a signature on his canvas. What's interesting is the methodology: There are quieter, subtler ways to kill people.

The Obama administration has strongly denied any involvement. However, the Jerusalem Post, citing a respected blogger named Richard Silverstein (who in turn cites an Israeli intelligence source), claims that Mossad trained terrorists from the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), and that the US was necessarily involved. Silverstein's blog post is here; come to your own assessment.

In a more recent post, Silverstein writes:

What’s disingenuous about this approach is that the U.S. and Israel are joined at the hip in this black ops war against Iran. They developed Stuxnet with Israel. The very same MEK terrorists sticking magnetic bombs to the car doors of Iranian scientists are the ones our government is considering giving a clean bill of health by removing them from the terror list.

Silverstein goes on to ask the right question:

If Iran were assassinating Israeli scientists or the Soviet Union assassinated Edward Teller or J. Robert Oppenheimer does anyone in their right mind believe it wouldn’t arouse a fierce backlash against the perpetrators?

Conclusion: The Israelis hope to provoke a reaction. The car bombings cannot seriously slow the Iranian nuke program, but they can prod Iran to retaliate. In doing so, Iran would give the U.S. the casus belli which the neocons seek.

Israel wants war.

Why would Obama go along with this dangerous game? Well, I haven't seen much "Obama hates Israel" propaganda this election season. And Obama has raised money at an impressive clip.

As Gary Sick writes...

A war with Iran would not be surgical, brief, or one-sided. As memorably noted by Gen. Anthony Zinni, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you will love Iran. It is a huge country, well-defended, with a fierce sense of nationalism. No air campaign, even if prolonged, will end the problem. Regardless of how a conflict begins, it is most likely to end with lots of boots on the ground. A squad of special forces will not do the job.

Paradoxically, the quickest way to insure that the Iranians decide to go for a bomb may be to bomb them. The most predictable result of a military strike would be Iran's withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the ejection of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and cameras that watch every step of the Iranian enrichment process.

On the domestic political front: Mitt Romney has given clear signals that he supports the war conspiracy.

Obama? Despite the words written above, he seems to be more of a mixed bag. Although he may be as oily as Romney -- well, almost as oily -- the two men represent differing constituencies. The Democratic party leadership does not want war with Iran. The Demcoratic rank-and-filers, who have put up with an infinitude of crap from this president, will not tolerate that level of military adventurism.

Corrupt Obama may be, but I've never called him a neocon, and I don't think he wants to repeat Dubya's disaster on a larger scale.

On the other hand, it is likely that his administration allowed Israel and MEK to carry out these bombings. My guess is that he intends to play along with the war conspirators until re-election is secured. Until that point, he hopes to keep the pot bubbling without boiling over. Permalink

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour was once considered a possible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, despite his strong resemblance to a spoiled squash. At the end of his term of office, Barbour pardoned or gave clemency to more than 200 criminals, including people convicted of murder and other very serious crimes. His predecessor had issued just one pardon.

The Mississippi Attorney General (who happens to be a Democrat) has issued a temporary injunction blocking further prisoner releases, because the state's constitution requires that prisoner requests for pardons be published 30 days beforehand.

The pardon/clemency list includes the brother of New York Jets quarterback Brett Favre. (The brother accidentally killed a friend while driving drunk.) Also pardoned were David Gatlin (recently denied parole), who shot his wife while she held their small son; Anthony McCray, who also shot his wife; socialite Karen Irby, convicted of manslaughter; and Joseph Ozment, who, while committing a robbery, shot a wounded man point blank in the head.

NRA fundamentalists should rejoice: Pardoned individuals are allowed to carry firearms under federal law.

Barbour has issued a statement defending his pardons. You can read it -- festooned with suitably captious commentary -- on a Mississippi-based blog called Cottonmouth.

Barbour's strange activities made me flash on another famous Republican -- Fred Thompson. Although you may know him best as an actor, he was a lawyer before going Hollywood. He played himself in Marie, a fine 1985 film starring Sissy Spacek. The movie tells the story of Marie Ragghianti, who courageously exposed a scandal centering on certain key cronies of Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton, who ran the state from 1975 to 1979. From Wikipedia:

His administration seemed rife with "cronyism", and this became more apparent when Roger Humphreys, a convicted double murderer, was pardoned for his crimes and it became public knowledge that his father was a county chairman for Blanton. It was later discovered that members of Blanton's staff were involved in the apparent sale of pardons.

In January 1979, with his term expiring, the State's Pardon Board began to make a series of pardons that seemed to be either the product of sheer politics or open bribery.

Blanton had fired Marie Ragghianti for exposing the pay-for-pardons scandal. This site has more:

Blanton was never charged in the clemency scandal, but made the ill-advised decision on January 15, 1979 to pardon three prisoners and reduce the sentences of 49 others, including 24 convicted murderers. Receiving the most attention was Roger Humphreys, who had murdered his ex-wife and her lover in 1973 and was not up for parole until 1984. Blanton commuted his sentence to time served. Humphreys, the son of a Blanton campaign manager, had already been subject to cushy treatment, including working as a photographer for the state.

Let's get back to Barbour.

One of the best reviews of the Barbour pardon scandal comes from this site, run by R.S. Ruckman, who specializes in the politics of pardons.

15 of Barbour's recipients had multiple convictions, in multiple years. Almost 30 were found guilty of murder, manslaughter, accessory to murder or the like. One third of them were originally sentenced to life in prison. It appears three literally walked right out of prison (Harper, Kambule and Irby).

Yes, it was a classic example of just about every thing the pardon power should not be. The only thing that seems to be missing, for now, is some hint of "politics" (donors, supporters, friends, relatives, inside influence and the like). But, give it time. Barbour clearly could have spread these decisions over a period of months, if not years, making each one a little more well-considered, a little less suspicious looking and - for those who really were deserving - something barely worth public celebration. But, no, a Republican governor, in the South, and potential presidential nominee has to keep up appearances.

Haley Barbour and his chief of staff will now join the law firm of Butler, Snow, O'Mara, Stevens and Canada.

The firm will rely on Barbour and Hurst’s expertise in economic development, strategic planning and government relations. Barbour also will be working for the BGR Group, a Washington lobbying firm he helped establish before he became governor

You can learn more about BGR in this Talking Points Memo story. These lobbyists are tied in with union-busting, a Milwaulkee energy utility called WE Energies, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. TPM neglects to mention that Walker sold WE Energies to the Koch brothers for "pennies on the dollar."

The Blanton scandal revisited: If the reader will forgive a small side-jaunt into assassination lore, the Ray Blanton scandal of the late 1970s had a strange connection to the murder of Martin Luther King. This site gives part of the story:

Undercover agents, testing how far the administration would go, met with a bodyguard and asked how much it would take to secure the release of James Earl Ray, who had murdered civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. The bodyguard responded that Ray was too high-profile a prisoner for clemency, but it was possible that he could be allowed to escape for the right price (incidentally, Ray did escape in 1977 along with a handful of other inmates; it was unlikely to be a Blanton administration plot, however, since Blanton promptly called in the troops and Ray and his fellow fugitives were recaptured within days).

I have heard -- but cannot now confirm -- that one of the recipients of an otherwise-inexplicable Blanton pardon was a prisoner who helped James Earl Ray to escape. The fact that Blanton called in the troops is neither surprising nor reassuring: Claiming that a prisoner was "shot while trying to escape" is one of the oldest tricks in the book. (There had been several attempts on Ray's life.)

The escape occurred during the House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings. During a little-noticed 1999 civil case brought by Coretta Scott King, it was established that, immediately after Ray's escape, an FBI SWAT team swarmed the woods surrounding Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. Lewis Stokes, Chairman of the HSCA, called Blanton and pressured him to make sure that the FBI did not kill Ray.

I don't know what Stokes said, but he must have found the right words. Permalink

Everyone paid so much attention to the New Hampshire Republican primary that the Democratic contest -- if we may call it that -- has been ignored. Turns out Hillary won ten percent, which is pretty good when you consider that all of those votes were write-ins, and she has explicitly said that she does not want the nomination.

Don't jump to conclusions about Obama's vulnerability. Since the winner of the "contest" was a foregone conclusion, only 60,000 people showed up to vote for Obama. Thus, a write-in campaign engineered by die-hard Clinton fans scared up 6000 ballots. That sounds reasonable.

Too bad she didn't get, say, 30% of the vote. Things would really start to get fun. Permalink

Consider this post a follow-up to the one below.

The message reproduced to the right comes from Zero Hedge. One can, of course, find many similarly inane comments scattered throughout blogland.

This particular example of inanity stands out because the outrageous contradiction on display here illustrates a much larger problem. This fellow considers himself a "Born Patriot" yet identifies himself with an image of the Confederate flag.

Ron Paul has, at times, spoken in favor of secession. If ever he were to provide "aid and comfort" to any serious attempt to bring about secession, he should be tried and executed under Article Three, section 3 of the United States Constitution. Yet his supporters label themselves patriots.

At this writing, Paul will probably win second place in the New Hampshire primary. I don't expect much from the Republicans -- but is it really too much to ask the party of Lincoln to favor the concept of maintaining the union under any and all circumstances? Apparently so. (As we shall see, some alleged "liberals" also have no problem rationalizing Paul's treasonous instincts.)

What have we come to? What would Honest Abe think about Paul's popularity?

Modern conservatives are a contradictory bunch: They continually threaten to upend the very ideals they claim to cherish.

A few days ago, we looked at the ultra-conservative wing of the Catholic church. We noted that the people who bray loudest about their loyalty to the papacy are also the ones who, if they don't get their way, are the likeliest to join a schismatic movement. Similarly, the tea partiers proclaim their loyalty to the founding fathers even as they continually threaten to take up arms against an elected government, should that government do things unapproved by the libertarians. Sometimes the baggers make that threat in a sly and subtle fashion; sometimes (as in the case of Sharron Angle), they can be overt. But the threat remains, always there, lingering in the air.

Let's give this threat its proper name: Fascism.

The Confederacy -- revered by the Paulites -- was the first attempt at a fascist government: A one-party plutocracy founded on slavery and fueled by appeals to the most irrational aspects of the human psyche. The libertarians who molded Ron Paul's thinking admired fascists like Mussolini and Pinochet. These ideologues also tend to admire Joe McCarthy, who came to prominence by defending the Nazi perpetrators of the Malmedy massacre, and whose political mentors had pre-war records as fascist sympathizers.

Yet libertarian propagandists try to convince naive youngsters that FDR was pro-fascist...!

On the left side of the aisle, the situation is almost as bad. I loathe and decry the recent attempts by Glenn Greenwald, Matt Stoller and others to make Ron Paul palatable to liberals. Stoller is a particularly vile revisionist historian:

As the New Deal era model sheds the last trappings of anything resembling social justice or equity for what used to be called the middle class (a process which Tom Ferguson has been relentlessly documenting since the early 1980s), the breakdown will become impossible to ignore.

My god. What an absurdity. What indefensible and ludicrous propaganda.

FDR, following in the footsteps of the preceding generation's progressive movement, created the middle class. You can't hold the New Deal responsible for the attacks on the middle class that began only after Reaganites did everything they could to dismantle the New Deal. That's like blaming Sharon Tate for the Manson family murders.

Stoller claims that the New Deal was based on "warmongering." Back in FDR's day, that idea would have made sense only to someone like Robert McCormack. Or to William Randolph Hearst. Or to the Bund. Or to the fascist sympathizers who later went on to found the John Birch Society. Yes, Naked Capitalism is flirting with Birchism, and there's no point in pretending otherwise. Even as he extols the virtues of Paul, the young and ambitious Stoller (who was, of course, a fervent Obot just three short years ago) trashes the memories of Lincoln, FDR and Woodrow Wilson in terms that would make sense only to a Glenn Beck aficionado.

Stoller blames World War II on Roosevelt and the Civil War on Lincoln. Not so long ago, one would have encountered these sentiments only in pro-fascist fringe periodicals. How much distance separates Stoller from, say, William Dudley Pelley? Or George Lincoln Rockwell? Or Eustace Mullins (who also wanted to end the Fed)? Or the folks who gave us The Thunderbolt and Angriff Press? Stoller may not be a racist, but his penchant for fascist-friendly historical revisionism places him in evil company.

Hell, even The Spotlight played it more coy. Perhaps I should revise my "flirting with Birchism" remark: Comparisons to the JBS are too soft to describe what Stoller is up to. I've read some back issues of American Opinion. Absurd as they were, they weren't this absurd.

Yet this guy gets published in The Nation...!

It is true that one wing of the fractured libertarian movement denounced Bush's atrocious war in Iraq. That factor explains why so many lefties have come to sympathize with Paul. But even in 2004 and 2005, I warned anti-war liberals against making common cause with the libertarians. What the followers of Ludwig von Mises want to do to the U.S. (and to the rest of the world) would make Dubya's attack on Baghdad seem comparatively gentle and kind.

Too many alleged leftists claim to be "too liberal for Obama" while simultaneously attacking the New Deal or offering rationalizations for libertarianism (which is just another word for plutocracy). Just like our friend "Born Patriot," these people have twisted themselves into living contradictions. Permalink

These days, saddled as we are with a lousy president who calls himself a Democrat, I find it hard to come up with reasons to call myself a Democrat.

Perhaps my motivation for continuing to use that label comes down to this: Most Democrats still feel comfortable in the real world. If you talk to a Democrat about an Obama policy you find detestable -- the refusal to renegotiate NAFTA, the continuation of a hopeless war in Afghanistan -- your verbal sparring partner will probably accept your premise, even if he or she does not agree with you. The two of you will share a foundational reality.

Moreover, your verbal sparring partner probably will not attempt to distract you with myths, anti-issues and hallucinated pseudo-problems. A blinkered Obama supporter (yes, there are a few left) may make you grit your teeth and clench your fist, but at least he won't start talking about a war on Christmas.

By contrast, consider these words from Skydancing:

Yes, it’s that time of year when Republicans try to convince us that everything old, disproved, and thrown out is shiny, patriotic and new again. Angry sky gods, debunked scientific hypotheses, and myth trump rule of law, science, and reason.

The Economist must feel that we are so confused about the role of religion in the founding of our country, that they must to show us and the rest of the world that our founding fathers weren’t fundamentalist crusaders. They have a special Religion in America section up about how the founders were trying to avoid having Rick Santorum moments.

Modern fundamentalists are rewriting history in the same way they like rewriting science. They place dinosaurs and modern people in their garden of Eden panoramas. Some now argue that the founders didn’t like “Darwinism” which wasn’t even around at that time Of course, that doesn’t stop Texas putting that kind’ve nonsense in textbooks. This also explains Michelle Bachmann’s odd notion that the founding fathers fought against slavery.

Well put. (Except for that "kind've.")

Another example of reheated nonsense popping up in the current Republican primaries is Ron Paul’s obsession This is a completely debunked set of economic philosophies and musings roughly associated with Fredich Hayek who had a few good ideas about the pricing mechanisms of the market that were completely contorted by some fascists. If you ever hear any one say anything about Mises, cover your ears. It’s basically akin to learning astrophysics from a flat earther who denies the theory of gravity. No amount of historical data deters these people.

...in all my years of education, I would never believe that so much debunked tripe would form the central arguments of so many people running for president.

Since we're on tripe alert, take a look at the video I embedded at the top of this post. What we have here is a 2007 Romney commercial with a laugh track added. The guffaws help us to understand that the Mittster was lying out of his ass when he warned us about the great plot to install a "caliphate" that would rule the entire globe. The claim flies in the face of all evidence, and he knew it.

Although Bin Laden was an evil bastard, you can't point to a single authentic text, audio or video in which Bin Laden says: "Here's what we're fighting for: The establishment of a caliphate in the United States." Bin Laden's goals were always pretty clear. He didn't like Israel, he didn't like the American bases in Saudi Arabia, he considered the Saudis and other Arab potentates to be corrupt lackeys of the west, and he wanted to turn existing Islamic nations into salafist nightmares (just as Christian dominionists want to establish a fundamentalist nightmare in the U.S.). But to the best of my knowledge, Bin Laden never talked about establishing a caliphate in the U.S. or in any other non-Islamic country. If Bin Laden had said such a thing, the quote would have been repeated endlessly.

Alas, the "caliphate" myth has established a hammerlock on the right-wing imagination. Millions of people believe it to this day.

That 2007 campaign commercial isn't the point of this post, because even Republicans know by now that Mitt is an insincere opportunist who will say pretty much anything to get elected. (He's the Mormon Obama.) The ad is, however, symptomatic of a larger problem. Democracy can't work if half the country insists on battling ghosts and leprechauns. Democracy can't work if the facts of history, science and economics must do continual battle with fairy tales and fakelore. Permalink

The "Bush bulge" controversy/mystery/national running gag of 2004 began on this very blog. Although I never took the matter very seriously, this site spent an enormous amount of time talking about the whatzit on Bush's back. How could I resist? The whole thing was just too much fun.

Times have changed, and the world situation keeps finding new ways to become dire. In 2012, focusing attention on such an issue seems downright silly and irresponsible.

But...what the hell. In times like these, we need some fun.

I've embedded a TPM-produced video of the Republican debate in 100 seconds. It offers a couple of telling Mitt Romney moments. In particular:

"I understand that President Obama and people of his political persuasion would like to take more money. From the American people."

Mitt delivers the line in exactly that fashion: He inserts a period into the sentence prematurely, then opens it up again for the remaining bit. (Dubya used to do that sort of thing all the. Time.) A similar oddity crops up when Romney recounts his father's advice.

(Added note: Is it permissible to address the substance of Romney's hilariously fractured statement? Obama's much-misunderstood stimulus package cut taxes for 95 percent. Of the American people. Since tax cuts were the largest item in that package, those who say that the stimulus didn't work are also saying that tax cuts don't work. I'd like Romney to name the occasion when Obama has taken money. From the American people.)

Back in 2008, various writers accused Romney of using an earpiece. I didn't pay much attention to the brouhaha because the Mittster clearly wasn't going anywhere and my attention was on Obama. Nevertheless, the stories floating around at that time were intriguing.

Everything hinges on how you interpret this video clip. Somehow, a debate mic picked up the whispered words "He raised taxes" just before Mitt said something similar. NBC later explained that their microphone actually caught someone in the audience. That excuse is ridiculous: You never hear such whispers when game shows and sitcoms are taped in front of a live audience.

Armchair investigators posited a number of alternative theories, summarized here.

(The person who uploaded the above-linked YouTube video says that Mitt was protected by a communist conspiracy. If people consider Mitt Romney a bolshie, then this nation really has gone loony.)

Directly after that 2008, this appeared:

A blogger at Red State says that on another occasion Romney's staff said to him that Romney wears an earpiece that his staff uses to talk to him...

During Gov. Romney’s speech, one of his handlers mentioned to one of our staff people that any time Gov. Romney needed to wrap things up, he would be happy to let Gov. Romney know through the ear-piece that he wore.

The quote links to a bygone Redstate post which has disappeared from the net. Fortunately, what I presume to be the bulk of that post is preserved here. The person making the claim was Jerry Zandstra, chair of Americans for Prosperity of Michigan. Zandstra goes on to say:

Being unfamiliar with whether or not presidential candidates wear Jack Bauer-like ear pieces, I simply assumed this was common practice.

Zandstra seems sincere enough. I don't know if he had any affiliation with a competing campaign.

We can't have a post on such a topic without a good, old-fashioned "back bulge" shot for everyone to examine and squabble over. Oddly, it is not easy to find dorsal images of Mitt Romney via Google images. However, we do have this, from which I have extracted the accompanying enlargement. I have not adjusted or sharpened the picture. Is that a rectangular something on his back? You be the judge. It's very subtle -- but to my eyes, something seems amiss.

The possibility of a Romney earpiece places this story from a few days ago in a new perspective:

Mitt Romney aides made a sudden decision to remove teleprompters from the hall at his Des Moines victory party because the candidate wanted to "speak from his heart," said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior Romney official.

We even know the brand of teleprompter Romney prefers. When he doesn't use one, he tends to look like a slightly mis-programmed version of a Disneyland robot pirate.

It's pretty clear that Obama uses an earpiece as well. The following clip puts that claim in cement:



As this writer puts it:

Actually, both candidates' hesitancy and quick changes of topic, often within the same sentence, are consistent with their being whispered to. I challenge you to sound coherent when someone's talking to you and you have to not repeat what they say but reformulate it into something that sounds good, while they're still talking.

Permalink

The neocons are resurgent, and they're going after Iran. Right now, the weapons are economic. Alas, that weapon could just as easily destroy us. This brilliant article explains how a needless confrontation with Iran could destroy our delicate recovery.

A key amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act signed by United States President Barack Obama on the last day of 2011 - when no one was paying attention - imposes sanctions on any countries or companies that buy Iranian oil and pay for it through Iran's central bank. Starting this summer, anybody who does it is prevented from doing business with the US.

Once again displaying a matchless capacity to shoot themselves in their Ferragamo-clad feet, governments in the European Union (EU) are debating whether or not to buy oil from Iran anymore. The existential doubt is should we start now or wait for a few months. Inevitably, like death and taxes, the result has been - what else - oil prices soaring. Brent crude is now hovering around $114, and the only way is up.

Add to it Tehran's threat to block the Strait of Hormuz, thus preventing one-sixth of the world's oil and 70% of OPEC's exports from reaching the market; no wonder oil traders are falling over themselves to lock up as much crude as they can.

Forget about oil at an accessible $50 or even $75 a barrel. The price of oil may be destined to soon reach $120 a barrel and even $150 a barrel by summer, just as in crisis-hit 2008. OPEC, by the way, is pumping more oil than at any time since late 2008.

Even if you manage to get a job, will you be able to afford transportation to the workplace?

Welcome to the new economy. Cars are now for living in, not for driving. Permalink

As many of you know, this blog ran a series a few years back on Obama's possible family connections to the CIA. Wayne Madsen -- a writer untrusted by many -- took up my research leads (without crediting me) and came up with new material. Some of his finds are genuinely intriguing, while other parts...well, I don't know what to make of it all. That's Madsen for you.

Yesterday, a friend to this blog directed my attention to this review of two new books: Sally Jacobs' biography of our president's father, titled The Other Barack, and A Singular Woman, Janny Scott's biography of Stanley Ann Dunham. As it happens, I have both books. (Well, sort of: Library card + scanner = free pdfs. Is a poor person allowed to do this?)

Neither book addresses the CIA allegations directly, but both are worth reading. So is the afore-linked piece from the London Review of Books, which offers a good summary of both volumes.

Sally Jacobs' work left me with a genuine admiration for Barack Obama Sr. -- in fact, I probably like him better than Jacobs does. True, Obama had serious problems with alcohol, and he mistreated the women in his life. Many readers will, on those grounds, consider the man beyond redemption.

I disagree.

The elder Obama simultaneously justified and ruined his life when he took a principled stand. To be specific: He wrote an influential article which called for African economic independence. In that piece, Obama clearly hoped to set the economic course for all of post-colonial Africa, not just for Kenya.

Alas, his recipe was NOT what the Americans wanted to hear. His insistence on Africa-for-the-Africans helped to insure that the CIA would eventually choose the autocratic and corrupt Jomo Kenyatta over Tom Mboya, Obama's patron. Up until 1968 (or thereabouts), the Agency preferred Mboya, who was more stable and more popular; Kenyatta was considered erratic.

After that fateful article came out, BO Sr. was -- not to put too fine a point on it -- fucked. He lost his huge-paying job, his big car and his impressive home. In short: He made a headlong plunge into schlub-hood. He always remained an arrogant schlub, to be sure, but he became a schlub nonetheless. Although he had started drinking heavily in college, the problem became much worse as his prospects dimmed.

The above-linked reviewer does not see fit to mention that Barack Obama Sr. witnessed the assassination of Mboya. Had Obama identified the killer, he probably would have been killed himself. The man was brave but not stupid.

There are still those in Kenya who insist that the elder Obama was murdered. True, he had previously established a record of drunk driving incidents, a couple of which which had put him in the hospital. Not long before that final, fatal one-car accident -- a collision with a tree -- he gave his wife a rather morbid harangue on how best to raise the children in the event of his death. Make of that what you will.

We can interpret the elder Obama's life as a lesson in what happens when you play along versus what happens when you rock the boat. I think that our president learned this lesson pretty well.

Did the CIA ever directly approach Barack Obama Sr.? Probably not -- at least, not in any noticeable way. I don't think there was ever an occasion when someone in a crisp dark suit sidled up to the barstool next to Obama and said: "Hi, I represent Certain Interested Americans. We want to pay you X amount of money to perform the following services..."

Nevertheless, there are plenty of indications that, early on, the Company kept tabs on him. They would have been idiots not to. Obama was, arguably, the most brilliant economist in post-colonial Africa, and he came very close to charting a course for the entire continent. Though not a communist, he had a degree of guarded sympathy for the USSR; he even studied Russian. Of course the CIA would have opened a file on a guy like that; that's what the taxpayers paid the Agency to do.

Although Obama gave himself the title "Doctor" on his return to Africa, the State Department had (unfairly) kicked him out just before he could complete his PhD. Harvard never allowed him to acquire that degree. There's an argument to be made that The Powers That Be gave him the bum's rush when they realized that this impulsive, brash and domineering young man had an independent streak beyond their ability to tame.

Janny Scott's book about Stanley Ann Dunham is more difficult to assess. To be candid, a small part of me suspects that it was written in bad faith, or at least with one eye blind. The allegations that the CIA recruited our president's mother have, by this point, received sufficient publicity to justify at least some sort of response, if only a sneering one. Yet Scott never mentions those allegations.

A later post will offer a fuller reaction to A Singular Woman. For now, let me simply state that nothing in this volume has quelled my suspicions that Stanley Ann Dunham was spookier than Caspar.

Both of the men she married turned out to be people whom the CIA would have wanted watched and, if at all possible, brought on board. Happenstance? Well...maybe. But how often does such a thing happen in your family?

Dunham took lessons in Russian at a time and in a school where intelligence recruits often studied that language. She worked for AID and the Ford Foundation, both notorious for offering CIA cover. She became an anthropologist and a world traveler, always visiting political hot spots. No one can deny that the CIA made a special effort to enlist the aid of anthropologists. (Google the words CIA and anthropology. All sorts of interesting stuff will turn up.)

Some researchers (Madsen in particular) have even linked Ann Dunham's parents to the intelligence services. Of particular interest is the photo above, which shows Barack Obama Sr. receiving the traditional lei upon his entry into Hawaii. Also in the photo: Stanley Ann's father, Stanley Armour Dunham -- very recognizable from other images. He allegedly served in an intelligence capacity during his military service, which, I admit, does not mean a whole lot. At the time this photo was taken, he was supposed to be on the mainland, selling furniture. Yet here he is in Hawaii, standing next to his future son-in-law, well before Stanley Ann met the young African up-and-comer.

Yeah, that is intriguing. Don't pretend otherwise.

Madsen and others have alleged that our president's grandmother -- the woman who actually raised our president -- had some connection to the Rewald scandal. If you don't know about Rewald -- well, it's a very long story which I once knew in detail but now can recall only hazily. Short version: It was a CIA money thing. Alas, the allegations tying Madelyn Dunham to Rewald are iffy and vague. If Madsen has evidence, he has been very coy about making it public.

Unfortunately, most of the websites discussing CIA ties to the Dunham clan are wacky right-wing "birther" joints. Not for the first or last time, conspiracy-crazed sickos have worked hard to decredibilize legitimate research into the intelligence community.

These reactionary pseudoresearchers seem convinced that the elder Obama was brought into the United States by a cabal of Marxist fifth columnists masterminded by -- get this! -- the Unitarian Church. And how do they know that the Unitarians were in league with Moscow? Because the Unitarian Church decried racism in the 1950s and '60s. (That's why the Birchers never liked the Unitarians.) Yes, folks, we're dealing with the dreaded Unitarian conspiracy!

I'm not kidding: That's their argument.

They also think that Barack Obama's mother is still alive.

And there you have it. Whenever someone tries to look into what the intelligence agencies may or may not be up to, the audience soon divides into two camps:

1. The nothing-to-see-here camp. These are the insufferably arrogant and dull conformists who insist that you must never bring up such topics, lest they regale you with ever-so-clever references to tin foil chapeaus.

2. The raving loony camp. These are the frothing-at-the-mouth paranoids who never shut up about birth certificates, controlled demolitions, flying saucers at Roswell, the third secret of Fatima, the Illuminati, and god-knows-what-else.

I think that -- on occasion -- the truth lies in a no-man's land situated between those two camps. Only a few dare to explore that territory.

Wanna come with...? Permalink

Although he probably won't be able to overtake Romney, Rick Santorum is making headlines again by pushing the gay marriage button. He did this in front of ninth graders. I don't have kids, but if I did, I'm not sure I would want a political candidate to come to my child's school and encourage a discussion of gay sex. Guess that makes me a fuddy-duddy.

Speaking at a college, Santorum conjured up the image of a marriage involving five people. I'm trying to imagine what the bedroom must look like: Do they push together two king-sized beds? Who sleeps in the middle? Thank you, Rick Santorum, for giving us that visual.

Quite a few denizens of blogland have been debating the question: Did Rick Santorum's wife Karen abort a doomed child to save the life of the mother? I am persuaded by this view, offered by Blue Lyon, a sometime friend to this blog, and no admirer of Santorum's politics. She argues that one cannot apply the term "abortion" to what happened on that occasion.

Bostonboomer, at Skydancing, offers a somewhat different take. I guess the controversy all comes down to the Pitocin injection. Does the administration of this drug to speed labor constitute "abortion" in any meaningful sense of the term? I don't believe so.

I think part of the squeamishness that I feel -- and I’m probably not alone -- is that the Santorums chose to share their experience with the public.

The squeamishness is understandable. Call me old school, but I prefer to keep certain very personal matters outside the realm of public discussion. The only decision made by Karen Santorum which I would -- very tentatively -- call into question was her decision to write a book about her sad experience. Permalink