Month: December 2007

Pakistan Crisis For Dummies

by digby

For those of us who haven’t been following the storyline in Pakistan over the past year with more than slight attention to various events, Juan Cole has provided a nice concise primer to bring you up to speed. Here’s an excerpt:

Pakistan is important to US security. It is a nuclear power. Its military fostered, then partially turned on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which have bases in the lawless tribal areas of the northern part of the country. And Pakistan is key to the future of its neighbor, Afghanistan. Pakistan is also a key transit route for any energy pipelines built between Iran or Central Asia and India, and so central to the energy security of the United States.

The military government of Pervez Musharraf was shaken by two big crises in 2007, one urban and one rural. The urban crisis was his interference in the rule of law and his dismissal of the supreme court chief justice. The Pakistani middle class has greatly expanded in the last seven years, as others have noted, and educated white collar people need a rule of law to conduct their business. Last June 50,000 protesters came out to defend the supreme court, even thought the military had banned rallies. The rural crisis was the attempt of a Neo-Deobandi cult made up of Pushtuns and Baluch from the north to establish themselves in the heart of the capital, Islamabad, at the Red Mosque seminary. They then attempted to impose rural, puritan values on the cosmopolitan city dwellers. When they kidnapped Chinese acupuncturists, accusing them of prostitution, they went too far. Pakistan depends deeply on its alliance with China, and the Islamabad middle classes despise Talibanism. Musharraf ham-fistedly had the military mount a frontal assault on the Red Mosque and its seminary, leaving many dead and his legitimacy in shreds. Most Pakistanis did not rally in favor of the Neo-Deobandi cultists, but to see a military invasion of a mosque was not pleasant (the militants inside turned out to be heavily armed and quite sinister).

The NYT reported that US Secretary of State Condi Rice tried to fix Musharraf’s subsequent dwindling legitimacy by arranging for Benazir to return to Pakistan to run for prime minister, with Musharraf agreeing to resign from the military and become a civilian president. When the supreme court seemed likely to interfere with his remaining president, he arrested the justices, dismissed them, and replaced them with more pliant jurists. This move threatened to scuttle the Rice Plan, since Benazir now faced the prospect of serving a dictator as his grand vizier, rather than being a proper prime minister.

With Benazir’s assassination, the Rice Plan is in tatters and Bush administration policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan is tottering.

It’s worse than that. As with everything else in this miserable administration, they’ve purged all the people who actually understand Pakistan in favor of the group that brought you the Iraq war. I bookmarked this WaPo article from a few months back knowing it was going to be necessary at some point to provide some background on why everything went to hell in Pakistan:

The roots of the crisis go back to the blind bargain Washington made after 9/11 with the regime that had heretofore been the Taliban‘s main patron: ignoring Musharraf’s despotism in return for his promises to crack down on al-Qaeda and cut the Taliban loose. Today, despite $10 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 2001, that bargain is in tatters; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has set up another haven inside Pakistan’s chaotic border regions.The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State’s policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney‘s office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American “drugs and thugs”; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. “They know nothing of Pakistan,” a former senior U.S. diplomat said.Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney’s office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I’m told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney’s aides, rather than taken to the State Department.

Right. You wouldn’t want a bunch of pointy headed Pakistan experts interfering with Dick Cheney’s hallucinations.

The single greatest argument for not allowing the Republicans to run the executive branch is Dick Cheney. There’s just no way in hell any Democrat could screw things up as much as that man has.

Update: Emptywheel has been speculating about the extent of Deadeye Dick’s involvement in Pakistan for some time.

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Throwing Money At The Problem

by dday

You’re likely to see a lot of Republican commentators today saying that the death of Benazir Bhutto shows how radical Islam represents a dire threat, and how we must intervene in several more countries in an effort to stop this from spreading. An example:

No good answers to any of that yet. I have a very bad feeling about all of this. The potential for critically destablizing a flank that was difficult enough as it was, is huge. I’d feel slightly better if Rumsfeld had doubled the size of the Army, and wish Bush and Congress would crank that up. This war is far from over. This war is no artificial Bush creation or figment of anyone’s imagination, and should still be very much part of our own election, wishful thinking notwithstanding.

It’s critical to understand how this plays out in practice rather in the abstract theories of “promote democracy and kill the terrorists!”, which in the case of Pakistan at least the Cheney Administration has done the exact opposite. Here is a very important story of how “protecting freedom and democracy” actually works.

More outrageous tales from the State Department car dealership: it turns out that contractor DynCorp didn’t have to even prove that it in fact purchased dozens of SUVs for which it charged the government. Try to follow the money on this one.

[O]ne Civilian Police task order [on which DynCorp is the contractor] included a requirement for 68 armored Ford Excursions at a fixed price of $113,064. The [State] Department was billed for 68 “armored vehicles” at a unit cost of $123,327. The property list contained 61 Ford Excursions, of which some were described as armored, others uparmored, and others had no notation of armoring. The costs shown on the property list for these 61 Ford Excursions ranged from $43,990 to $150,000 with nine at $122,190, seven with higher costs, and the remaining 45 with costs of $77,000 and below. Thus, OIG could not conclude that the 68 “armored vehicles” in the vouchers were the 68 armored Ford Excursions specified in the task order.

Let’s just assume for a minute that they are. To do the math: 68 Excursions at the State Department contract’s fixed unit price works out to $7,688,352. But 68 Excursions at the price DynCorp billed the department is $8,386,236. So that’s an overcharge of almost $698,000. Nice.

But what the report’s saying is that it has no way of knowing if DynCorp really spent the $8,386,236.

This is part of a series of reports obtained by Spencer Ackerman as part of an FOIA request. The sad truth is that our government continues to use the spectre of terrorism to throw enormous amounts of money at defense contractors and corrupt foreign entities in a completely unaccountable way, indirectly profiting major benefactors to campaigns across the country. This is how Iraq has been “won” in 2007 (actually, as Juan Cole will tell you, it hasn’t) – by paying off Sunni tribal leaders and former insurgents to form these Awakening groups. The war on terror is the stamp on top of which a giant war machine slush fund operates.

There are certainly ways to get serious about terrorism, like declining to support dictators who work in a practical alliance with radical Islamists, for example, that don’t involve blindly filling the coffers of defense contractors. But that isn’t the American way, I guess.

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9 Seconds

by dday

Whatever you want to say about Harry Reid and his, er, uneven stewardship of Senate Democrats, he sure got this right.

A nine-second session gaveled in and out by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., prevented Bush from appointing as an assistant attorney general a nominee roundly rejected by majority Democrats. Without the pro forma session, the Senate would be technically adjourned, allowing the president to install officials without Senate confirmation.

The business of blocking Bush’s recess appointments was serious. It represents an institutional standoff between Congress and the president that could repeat itself during Congress’ vacations for the remainder of Bush’s presidency.

In such situations, pro forma sessions also could give Bush some political cover on popular legislation he doesn’t want to sign. When Congress is holding pro forma sessions and is not formally adjourned, a bill sent to a president automatically becomes law 10 days after he receives it – excluding Sundays – unless he vetoes it.

That could be the fate of two bills Congress passed last week. One growing out of the Virginia Tech massacre makes it harder for people with mental illness records to buy guns. The other makes it easier for journalists and others to obtain government documents through the Freedom of Information Act. The FOIA bill, for example, would become law on New Year’s Eve if not vetoed before then, according to Senate Judiciary Committee officials.

What goes unsaid is that this doesn’t just give Bush political cover, but it prevents the possibility of a pocket veto of that legislation.

The recess appointment was instituted in a time when the fastest modes of transportation were sailing ship and horseback, in case Congress couldn’t get back to the capital to respond to an emergency. Every President, Democratic or Republican, has abused the privilege, and if you can’t eliminate it through Constitutional amendment, then I completely support making it irrelevant through pro forma sessions. In addition, this is the kind of “block Bush” strategy progressives would like to see on a whole host of other issues.

Reid’s getting a lot of goodwill out of 9 seconds. Would that he would do something constructive with the other 31,556,917.

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The Double Bind

by dday

Were it not for the Bhutto assassination, I think this hit piece on Mike Huckabee would have been a pretty big story, and it still might be. The fact that the Huck is still giving paid speeches for up to $25,000 while running for President is at the least unseemly. What’s more, his reply that “unlike people who are independently wealthy, if I don’t work, I don’t eat,” when he’s getting $25 grand per speech, and after a litany of stories about loads of gifts and perks he took while Governor of Arkansas, is just out of touch.

Huckabee is clearly getting a mess of oppo research thrown his way by those who control the money strings in the Republican Party and who fear his populist rhetoric. He’s so short on cash that he had to leave Iowa a week before the caucuses to raise money in Florida. And now Novakula is spreading that the insiders have drifted to John McCain as the “last man standing” to challenge the Huckabee campaign.

And this of course shows what a bind the GOP is in with this nomination. Either the torrent of negative ads and information stops Huckabee, at which point his social conservative base, which is already none too happy with getting nothing but lip service from the party all these years, gets so depressed that they either stay home in November or back a Judge Roy Moore-type third-party candidate; or, Huckabee prevails, and the GOP winds up with a candidate completely at odds with major portions of the rest of its base, particularly the econocons and neocons.

We’ve been expecting this train wreck for some time, and Huckabee became the match that lit the tinderbox proverbial penny on the tracks that causes the derailment. We even see these “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenarios within the Huckabee campaign itself.

Hispanic activists who viewed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as a voice of moderation on illegal immigration say they’ve been taken aback by the hard-line stance he’s adopted as a presidential candidate.

While governor, Huckabee gained favor with Hispanic leaders by denouncing a high-profile federal immigration raid and suggesting some anti-illegal immigration measures were driven by racism. He advocated making children of illegal immigrants eligible for college scholarships.

Huckabee’s Republican presidential rivals have tried to make an issue of the scholarship plan, portraying him as soft on illegal immigration, an important issue for many GOP voters.

Huckabee responded this month by unveiling a plan to seal the Mexican border, hire more agents to patrol it and make illegal immigrants go home before they could apply to return to this country.

He’s also touted the support for his candidacy of the founder of the Minuteman Project, an anti-illegal immigration group whose volunteers watch the Mexican border.

Though he still defends the scholarship provision, Huckabee’s new tone bothers Hispanic leaders like Carlos Cervantes, the Arkansas director of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

“He’s trying to be tougher on immigration than we’ve ever seen him before,” Cervantes said. “That’s kind of worrisome now. He was willing to work with the communities. I don’t see that he’s willing to work with us now.”

The Republican coalition isn’t likely to survive this Presidential election. I’ve seen more “I’ll never vote for x” stories on the right than ever before. In a sense, Mike Huckabee might be the greatest gift progressives have received in a generation.

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Better For Republicans

by dday

It always is. And now they’re getting specific. Apparently the death of Pakistan’s opposition leader is good news for Rudy Giuliani.

Let’s start by remarking how pathetic it is to veer from an international incident into the horse race. Joe Scarborough probably can’t locate Pakistan on a map, yet he knows implicitly which Presidential candidate chaos there would reward. And why Giuliani? Because he happened to be coincidentally in the city of record on 9/11, while he proved himself a fool in emergency management by placing the command center in the same building hit by terrorists eight years earlier and providing faulty radios to firefighters?

I think it’d take about a minute and a half to come up with a reasonable (for cable news) argument for any candidate to benefit from the assassination of Bhutto. “It’ll help McCain because of his foreign policy experience!” “It’ll help Ron Paul because he wants to isolate us from a dangerous world!” “It’ll help Mitt Romney because of his managerial steady hand in a time of crisis!” “It’ll help Mike Huckabee because he can appeal to a higher power in these dangerous times!” “It’ll help Fred Thompson because he’ll sleep through it!”

None of these statements have much basis in fact. That’s why they are reasonable cable news opinions.

P.S. Just in case you think this kind of instantly insipid analysis is confined to cable news, Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post wrote pretty much the same thing.

UPDATE: It should be noted that Giuliani sent a press release out to this effect before the palace courtiers started reporting on it as if it were fact. So this wasn’t only a stupid thought, it was an UNORIGINAL stupid thought.

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RIP Benazir Bhutto

by dday

I actually write quite a bit about Pakistan, usually with the headline “Most Dangerous Trouble Spot In The World Update.” This is why.

Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide attack at a campaign rally that also killed at least 20 others, aides said.

Bhutto’s supporters erupted in anger and grief after her death, attacking police and burning tires and election campaign posters in several cities. At the hospital where she died, some smashed glass and wailed, chanting slogans against President Pervez Musharraf.

The death of the charismatic 54-year-old former prime minister threw the campaign for the Jan. 8 parliamentary elections into chaos and created fears of mass protests and violence across the nuclear-armed nation, an important U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.

I literally just woke up and don’t know what the speculation is about who pulled off this attack, but just like in this country, the fallout will certainly tend toward autocracy. I don’t expect there will be parliamentary elections now, or a return to normalcy with restoring independent media or the judiciary. I just heard a Pakistani professor on NPR say “there are people who support the dictatorship and don’t like her, and (Pervez) Musharraf will not be able to escape complicity,” and I’m really glad that was said. Let’s remember that Musharraf instituted the state of emergency to stop just this type of violence, and lifted it because he thought there was relative safety. Musharraf has a long history of standing by idly while politicians are killed, including at least a few by his own security forces. After the assassination attempt on Bhutto earlier this year, Musharraf claimed that he would take control of the security detail.

Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif are seen in this country as popular opposition leaders more than in Pakistan, where their corruption problems were well-known. But clearly, somebody perceived her as a threat. And now a real democracy movement may rise to break the dictatorship.

There are riots throughout the country and the police is out in force. This is very bad.

UPDATE: Submitted without comment:

U.S. Troops to Head to Pakistan
Beginning early next year, U.S. Special Forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan, as part of an effort to train and support indigenous counter-insurgency forces and clandestine counterterrorism units, according to defense officials involved with the planning.

These Pakistan-centric operations will mark a shift for the U.S. military and for U.S. Pakistan relations. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the U.S. used Pakistani bases to stage movements into Afghanistan. Yet once the U.S. deposed the Taliban government and established its main operating base at Bagram, north of Kabul, U.S. forces left Pakistan almost entirely. Since then, Pakistan has restricted U.S. involvement in cross-border military operations as well as paramilitary operations on its soil.

But the Pentagon has been frustrated by the inability of Pakistani national forces to control the borders or the frontier area. And Pakistan’s political instability has heightened U.S. concern about Islamic extremists there.

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Ron Paul and the Foreign Policy Disconnect

by dday

At the risk of inciting a riot in the comments and eliciting a lot of responses with multiple exclamation points in them, I’m going to write a post about Ron Paul. For some reason, you have to take up sides on Ron Paul to remain a member in good standing in the liberal blogosphere. You either stress only the good side, and love what he brings to the national debate, touching on subjects like imperialism and civil liberties and executive power which ought to get a wider hearing in public, or you stress only the bad side, rightly pointing out his overt racism and anti-Semitism, and believing it was Abe Lincoln’s fault that Southern states started seceding from the Union and firing on federal garrisons, etc. Josh Marshall gave a rare balanced take today, which was more concerned with trying to understand the phenomenon.

A while back I was peppered for a few days by emailers pointing me toward an article detailing Paul’s alleged history of anti-Israel politics and slurs and goading me to ‘disavow’ him. I told these good souls that I found it hard to disavow him since I hadn’t avowed him in the first place. And the response I got was that it was a matter of all the liberals and Democrats who were on the Ron Paul bandwagon.

But who are these people? The Democrats and liberals who are on the Ron Paul bandwagon?

And this is what I mean: the alternative Ron Paul universe, supporters and critics, all living in a some sort of bubble, alternative reality, in which Paul is a key driver in our national politics, notwithstanding the fact that he barely registers in the polls and does not seem to have moved the needle one notch the GOP nomination contest in terms of shifting the terms of the debate toward his views on foreign policy.

I think it’s pretty clear, actually. We’re involved in a war with no end in sight, which both parties have had the opportunity to end and have failed. Nobody on either side of the political aisle is speaking with any kind of clarity about ending the Iraq war other than Ron Paul, and about the Washington consensus on foreign policy in general. Dennis Kucinich is to a certain extent, but his effort to ape the Paul money-bomb ended up with maybe a hundred grand or so. Ron Paul has a clear message that is a part of American history, one of isolationism. And he critiques American foreign policy in a way that is never done in public discussion.

That’s why his Meet The Press appearance is almost a cultural artifact, an example of how wedded to the institutional narratives and consensus opinions the modern Beltway media has become, and how baffled they are by any differing opinion. Tim Russert was attacking Paul, sometimes giving up all pretense of neutrality, but he did so in his same narrow fashion, and when the subject turned to Paul challenging the core arguments of foreign policy and imperialism, Russert had to ignore them for a lack of knowing what else to do.

MR. RUSSERT: Let’s talk about some of the ways you recommend. “I’d start bringing our troops home, not only from the Middle East but from Korea, Japan and Europe and save enough money to slash the deficit.”

How much money would that save?

REP. PAUL: To operate our total foreign policy, when you add up everything, there’s been a good study on this, it’s nearly a trillion dollars a year. So I would think if you brought our troops home, you could save hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s, you know, it’s six months or one year or two year, but you can start saving immediately by changing the foreign policy and not be the policeman over the world. We should have the foreign policy that George Bush ran on. You know, no nation building, no policing of the world, a humble foreign policy. We don’t need to be starting wars. That’s my argument.

MR. RUSSERT: How many troops do we have overseas right now?

REP. PAUL: I don’t know the exact number, but more than we need. We don’t need any.

MR. RUSSERT: It’s 572,000. And you’d bring them all home?

REP. PAUL: As quickly as possible. We–they will not serve our interests to be overseas. They get us into trouble. And we can defend this country without troops in Germany, troops in Japan. How do they help our national defense? Doesn’t make any sense to me. Troops in Korea since I’ve been in high school?

He tried to “nail” Paul because he didn’t know that exact number of American troops overseas (and by the way, neither would Russert if it wasn’t on the TelePrompTer), but by saying it out loud, he almost made Paul’s argument for him. What reason is there for over a half-million Americans to patrol the rest of the world, in 140-plus countries? Shouldn’t the public have the ability to question the wisdom of that policy? Shouldn’t at least someone with the Presidential platform give a dissenting viewpoint?

Matt Stoller had a great post about these “untouchable symptoms” that ought to be up for mainstream debate. Here are two of them that relate to the nexus of the excitement Ron Paul has been generating:

Subject: End American empire
Factoid: As of 1998, America had troops stationed in 144 countries around the world.

There are any number of ways to talk about this issue, from disparities of foreign aid to complaints about the IMF to the war in Iraq to the CIA and blowback. The bottom line is that America has troops everywhere in the world, it’s expensive, the way it is done now is a bad idea, and we need to bring them home and return to being a republic. That or we need to figure out how to be a responsible international power again and get rid of the Blackwater-style military we are building and the gunrunning vigilante CIA-style Cold War and post-Cold War nonsense.

Subject: End the war economy:
Factoid: Money for Iraq keeps passing in ’emergency’ legislation to avoid being subject to budget rules.

For some reason, Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans argue that they are fiscally responsible while ignoring their votes to spend 700-800B a year on war. Libertarian charlatans like energy expert Amory Lovins think that the corporate sector and the military sector are legitimate parts of the state, but that other spending is wasteful. The whole notion of the military not being a part of the overall government is crazy, and reflective of a huge, corrupt, and Soviet-style misallocation of capital through secret budgets and fear.

Until some progressive takes to a big platform and makes these same arguments in a coherent way, there will always be room for an isolationist paleocon like Ron Paul to make it for them. Yet it can certainly be folded into a progressive foreign policy critique, one that recognizes the virtue of diplomatic relations, one that understands how comforting the afflicted and surging against global poverty is far more effective than sitting men with guns all over the world. Edwards and Obama have done this to an extent, but Ron Paul has opened the Overton Window on this enough for them to be much bolder.

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Don’t Mess With Texas

by dday

The death penalty statistics cited in this article are skewed because of a de facto moratorium while everyone waits for a Supreme Court ruling on the Constitutionality of lethal injections. Still, this is a telling statistic:

This year’s death penalty bombshells — a de facto national moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade — have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.

Over the past three decades, the proportion of executions nationwide performed in Texas has held relatively steady, averaging 37 percent. Only once before, in 1986, has the state accounted for even a slight majority of the executions, and that was in a year with 18 executions nationwide.

But enthusiasm for executions outside of Texas has dropped sharply. Of the 42 executions in the last year, 26 were in Texas. The remaining 16 were spread across nine other states, none of which executed more than three people. Many legal experts say the trend will probably continue.

Indeed, said David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston who has represented death-row inmates, the day is not far off when essentially all executions in the United States will take place in Texas.

“The reason that Texas will end up monopolizing executions,” he said, “is because every other state will eliminate it de jure, as New Jersey did, or de facto, as other states have.”

I don’t know about that; all it takes is one trigger-happy governor who mocks inmates by saying “Please, don’t kill me,” and that doesn’t necessarily have to confine itself to one state (Brother Jeb did his share of killing in Florida). In addition, Texas has followed the nationwide trend of far fewer death sentences, suggesting that people may approve of the death penalty in polls but not when they have to face it up close. But what does come through in this article is the swift and brutal prosecution of the practice in the Lone Star State.

The rate at which Texas sentences people to death is not especially high given its murder rate. But once a death sentence is imposed there, said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, prosecutors, state and federal courts, the pardon board and the governor are united in moving the process along. “There’s almost an aggressiveness about carrying out executions,” said Mr. Dieter, whose organization opposes capital punishment […]

“Execution dates here, uniquely, are set by individual district attorneys,” Professor Dow said. “In no other state would the fact that a district attorney strongly supports the death penalty immediately translate into more executions.”

Texas courts, moreover, speed the process along, said Jordan M. Steiker, a law professor at the University of Texas who has represented death-row inmates.

“It’s not coincidental that the debate over lethal injections had traction in other jurisdictions but not in Texas,” Professor Steiker said. “The courts in Texas have generally not been very solicitous of constitutional claims.”

Maybe the wheels of justice in Texas are greased so nobody will notice the brutal inequities in the system, which include defense attorneys falling asleep during trials, elected judges with an interest in appearing tough on crime ignoring the law to ensure quick executions, the lack of a public defender system (the judges appoint the defense lawyers, and most of them are incompetent), and a spectacularly failed appeals process.

The prison crisis and how it cuts against the poor is one of the great untold stories in America right now. But in Texas, people are being killed to pump up judges’ political track records. That’s out of step with the prevailing trend of the nation.

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Those Goddamned Dirty Hippies

by dday

With their brand completely trashed, the Republicans have finally found their platform for the 2008 elections: the GOP is the party that doesn’t spend $1 million dollars on cultural museums! “The Republicans: Proudly Defending Your Kids From Social Studies…”

When Republican U.S. Senate candidate Anne Evans Estabrook wanted to make a point about wasteful government spending, she reached for an example that has popped up in several other races: a museum in Woodstock, N.Y.

Estabrook is running a primary campaign aimed at convincing Republican voters she is the best person to beat the incumbent, Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.).

This month, she asked: “Who would spend $70 million dollars for peanut storage, $20 million for cricket eradication, and voted to use our tax dollars on a hippie museum in Woodstock? This Congress and Frank Lautenberg just did.”

Lautenberg did vote to give $1 million to the Museum at Bethel Woods, N.Y., the location of the August 1969 Woodstock Music Festival and Art Fair, as well as cricket eradication. A Lautenberg staffer noted the cricket bill also included aid to New Jersey farmers and the Women, Infants and Children food program. He did not vote on peanut storage; it died before it got to the Senate.

A million dollars out of a trillion-dollar budget. This is all they’ve got. Seriously.

Let’s take a look at an amount roughly 5,000 times that much that appears to have been completely wasted.

After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money. The strategy to improve the Pakistani military, they said, needs to be completely revamped.

In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs […]

Civilian opponents of President Pervez Musharraf say he used the reimbursements to prop up his government. One European diplomat in Islamabad said the United States should have been more cautious with its aid.

“I wonder if the Americans have not been taken for a ride,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The amount of funding for Pakistan since 2001 in military aid totals up to almost the entire amount of earmarks in the 2007 budget bill. And you can choose which is more pernicious.

But of course, this has nothing to do with federal spending or earmarks or anything; of course not, since the Woodstock museum actually never got the money. It has everything to do with demonizing those dirty hippies, and painting the Democrats as just the type who would build a monument to them. This is the same identity politics we’ve seen for the last 40 years.

In the summer of 1969, Estabrook was 25, married, and working in her family’s commercial development business. Lautenberg was 45 and making his fortune as a cofounder of Automatic Data Processing Inc., the payroll company. Republican Assemblyman Joseph Pennacchio was 14 and “working my butt off” in a Brooklyn pizza parlor for $1 an hour, he said.

“Going to Woodstock or being a flower child wasn’t on my radar,” Estabrook said.

“Republicans: killing the hippies dead for once and for all!”

I know this may work for the baby boomers in the media who think America is still obsessed by these battles. But about 35-40% of the country weren’t alive for Woodstock. It’s just not a part of their world. And yes, young people do vote. Mostly I think that the only ones still concerned about Woodstock are those buttoned-up Republicans who are angry that they missed out on all the fun. I guess that’s why they’re so into free love these days.

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Mixed

by dday

President Bush’s legacy.

Sitting in the front row for Bush’s final press conference of 2007 on Thursday, I was struck by how it’s a mixed bag for the president on three key issues — his relationship with the Democratic Congress, the state of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the health of the U.S. economy.

How true. On the one hand, his results on the issues suck.

On the other hand, they SUUUUUUCCCKKK.

(apologies to Jon Stewart)

P.S. Memo to CNN, political victories – especially those against a pliant Democratic leadership – have nothing to do with legacy. Legacy is the long-lasting impact of policy decisions. And the record on those, with a disastrous war, global terrorism on the rise, soaring health care and energy costs, and a looming recession, is not “mixed.” Try to keep your eye on the ball.

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