Month: April 2008

Clever Gaffes

by digby

Glenn is on to a story about the Attorney General apparently making stuff up out of whole cloth and nearly crying about it. Mukasey said in a speech that FISA prevented the US from listening in on a specific phone call before 9/11:

He then tearfully claimed that FISA therefore caused the deaths of “three thousand people who went to work that day.”

As I’m sure you all know, if this is true, it’s big news since there’s never been any discussion of this before. As Rachel Maddow said on Countdown last night, we’d better hope the explanation is that he’s lying, because if it isn’t, it means that the 9/11 commission either hid relevant information about this or weren’t told.

Greenwald writes:

Critically, the 9/11 Commission Report — intended to be a comprehensive account of all relevant pre-9/11 activities — makes no mention whatsoever of the episode Mukasey described. What has been long publicly reported in great detail are multiple calls that were made between a global communications hub in Yemen and the U.S. — calls which the NSA did intercept without warrants (because, contrary to Mukasey’s lie, FISA does not and never did require a warrant for eavesdropping on foreign targets) but which, for some unknown reason, the NSA failed to share with the FBI and other agencies. But the critical pre-9/11 episode Mukasey described last week is nowhere to be found in the 9/11 Report or anywhere else. It just does not exist.

Here’s the thing. I keep hearing weird stuff like this lately. First, you have both McCain and Liebermann making similar “gaffes” about Iraq and Iran. Then we have Mukasey out there making a “gaffe” in a speech about FISA causing 9/11. Perhaps I’m being a conspiracy monger myself, but these alleged bloopers are all so self-serving it would be foolish to not at least consider it.

One of the things that the Bush administration proved conclusively (as if we already didn’t know) was that you can fool most of the people for quite some time with the clever use of language. They don’t technically lie, they just constantly juxtapose certain words and create associations where none previously existed until a whole bunch of people believe something they’ve never explicitly been told.

The conflating of Saddam and 9/11 was a master touch. Many people believed it for years — it was the fundamental underpinning for the war. I can’t help but wonder if the conclusion among the Straussians is that this is the best method for manufacturing consent. After all, it worked.

It would be hard to believe that Michael Mukasey would go this far into the rabbit hole if he hadn’t already demonstrated his total lack of intellectual integrity and principle with his tortured defense of … torture. But he’s obviously a complete company man, capable of anything. McCain and Liebermann are both Iran obsessives who will sell their own mothers to get the public on board for a grand old war with Tehran.

And then there’s Michael McConnell, who has always struck me as the kind of personality you expressly do not want with the power of a national intelligence Czar. He’s a little bit *touched*:

“We had a bill go into the Senate. It was debated vigorously,” said McConnell. “There were some who said we shouldn’t have an Intelligence Community. Some have that point of view. Some say the President of the United States violated the process, spied on Americans, should be impeached and should go to jail. I mean, this is democracy, you can say anything you want to say. That was the argument made. The vote was 68 to 29.”

Feingold notes, and as a review of the press coverage details, neither of the events McConnell refers to actually happened. The debate over FISA was spirited as Feingold and a minority of senators maneuvered to remove a provision granting telecommunications companies immunity for helping the government with warrentless wiretapping.

But as Feingold wrote in a letter to McConnell: “I am not aware of any Senator saying or suggesting that ‘we shouldn’t have an Intelligence Community’ or that President Bush ‘should be impeached and should go to jail.'”

Hyperbole is not a good trait for an intelligence chief, particularly in light of today’s revelation about spying on Americans:

For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn’t apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.

That view was expressed in a secret Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.

The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.

And that brings us back to the FISA fight, which the Attorney General is now characterizing in lurid, emotional terms, saying that the law prevented the government from stopping 9/11.

I don’t know whether all of this is planned or even conscious. But I can see a tried and true narrative reanimating itself before our eyes, one which will helpfully reintroduce some old themes about fifth columns and scary sleeper cells that haven’t been successful for a couple of years now. This should help:

This week, General Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, said in a television interview that al Qaeda had stepped up its activities along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border over the past 18 months and established new safe havens for training “operatives that…wouldn’t attract attention if they were going through the customs line at (Washington) Dulles airport.”

Beyond saying that such operatives would “look western,” Hayden did not elaborate.

But one of his predecessors, James Woolsey, said after the German arrests that al Qaeda and affiliated groups were making efforts to attract “even blond-haired, blue-eyed” recruits. “We are going to see more and more of this.”

I’m surprised he didn’t mention “black Muslims.” Perhaps he just misspoke.

Is there any doubt that the Republicans are ginning up the Fear Talk Express for President McCain?

Update: Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution quoted IF Stone’s perfect description of the technique:

Now, governments lie. But they don’t like to lie literally, because a literal, flat, obvious lie tends to be caught.

So what they do is, they become masters of the disingenuous statement, of phrasing something in such a way that the honest, normal, unwary reader gets one impression, what he’s supposed to get.

Then three months later he discovers it’s not true and goes back to complain. And they say, well, that’s not what we said — look at it carefully. And you look at it carefully and sure enough, it was really doubletalk and didn’t say exactly what they said.

plus ça change and all that rot…

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Glory Be

by digby

In case anyone still doubts that John McCain is trying to become the King Cavalier of the Republican party, check this out.

I don’t know about you, but I just got the inexplicable urge to invade Poland.

Update: It pains me to have to do this, but apparently I do. The Poland line is a riff on an old Woody Allen joke. (“Whenever I hear Wagner, I get the urge to invade Poland.”) Ay yay yay…

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Oinkers

by dday

Oh great, the geniuses at Citizens Against Government Waste have rolled out their latest Congressional Pig Book, and they had a big press conference in DC, complete with actual pigs (har!), humiliating and shaming all those Congresscritters who feed themselves at the trough (get it?) with these wasteful pork-barrel projects that blow a hole in the federal budget. $17 billion dollars worth of pork in those 12 appropriations bills. $17 billion!

Ahem.

Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon’s biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages.

Auditors said the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began issuing its annual assessments of selected weapons systems six years ago. “It’s not getting any better by any means,” said Michael Sullivan, director of the GAO’s acquisition and sourcing team. “It’s taking longer and costing more.”

The CGAW designation of what is “porkbarrel” spending is not qualitative, based entirely on the technical method in which spending requests are inserted into appropriations bills. They could be money for museums or research and development, all the way up to infrastructure improvements (next time someone goes on and on about “pork” say something like “Yeah, I know, I hate fixing bridges so they don’t collapse with people on them…”). The GAO designation of these overruns in the weapons projects reflect the discrepancy between the original budget and the final cost. Which is kind of the definition of, you know, waste. $295 billion in waste versus $17 billion, some of which is waste. Sounds like Citizens Against Government Waste has the right target, don’t you think?

This is actually one of the more important things we have to fix. The Congressional Pig Book is a made-for-TV event, particularly local TV, and it saps trust in government completely out of proportion to the military contractors who are routinely holding up the treasury at a rate 20 times higher than any earmark request. The fact that conservatives lead in earmark requests is immaterial. Citizens Against Government Waste is a cog in the conservative machine, promoting a myth of “runaway spending” without relating it to where the spending actually comes from. The real black hole in the budget is unaccountable military spending, and our side needs to do a better job of exposing this. I remember the “ten thousand dollar hammer” from the 80s, but a year ago the Pentagon paid a million dollars to ship two 19-cent washers and it barely caused a ripple. Obama is running on temporarily increasing the military budget so we’re kind of screwed here. The goal needs to be about defining the Pentagon’s contracting system as unnecessarily and intentionally wasteful, to shame the Congress into getting serious about waste, fraud and abuse in contracting, and to eliminate it completely. It’s a long-term project but it starts with the kind of mockery revealed in something turnkey like the “Pig Book.”

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Courting The Cavaliers

by digby

Ed Kilgore thinks John McCain dwelling on his forbears military past is the story of the Prodigal Son

I’ve just read the Meridian, Mississippi speech with which John McCain launched his “biography tour,” and found it more interesting and troubling than I expected. Most obviously, I can’t recall any major speech by a president or presidential candidate that was devoted so thoroughly to the subject of the speaker’s own family background–not just the immediate family (which, for example, was the background theme in Richard Nixon’s famous “Checkers” speech, and in Bill Clinton’s “Place Called Hope” speech, and is obviously important to Barack Obama’s “story”), but the Family Heritage. McCain goes into considerable detail to establish himself as the scion of a very old (by American standards) and very distinguished warrior tribe, whose traditions he first spurned and then half-heartedly embraced, before rediscovering them in the crucible of his imprisonment at the Hanoi Hilton.[…]Maybe this is all emphemeral, and at some point John McCain will abandon the biographical message to focus on policy issues. But Democrats need to understand what he’s trying to do in presenting himself as the embodiment of the Prodigal Son seeking to lead the Prodigal Nation back to its heritage of greatness, and react accordingly. …Exposing him will not just be a matter of deriding media credulity or hammering his voting record in the Senate. It will require an unwavering spotlight on his basic message and its troubling implications.

Matt Yglesias thinks he’s just trying to appeal to a bunch of racist and sexist old people by selling a form of old white guy identity politics. Kevin Drum thinks he’s just in love with war and the military.

I think it’s something quite different. The Republican southern base doesn’t trust him. He doesn’t have a southern accent, he isn’t a cowboy (even a Connecticut/Hollywood phony one) and his military history is heroic, but as a survivor, not a killer. In my view, this comes back to Michael Lind’s interesting theory of the red and the blue from 2001 called America’s Tribes.

In the aftermath of the US election, the pattern of Democratic blue and Republican red on the electoral map is baffling, unless you know how to read it. Ideology does not help much. “Left” and “right” are irrelevant terms from 19th and 20th-century Europe. Geographic dichotomies–big states versus small states, interior versus coasts–merely supply questions, not answers.

The clue to the US electoral map lies in ethnography. As the historian David Hackett Fischer and the commentator Kevin Phillips (among others) have demonstrated, ideology and region are surrogates for race and ethnicity in the US. American politics is, and always has been, a struggle for power between two coalitions of tribes. Two coalitions, instead of three or four, because the US inherited the “plurality” or first-past-the-post voting system from early modern Britain. Plurality systems ensure that third-party votes are wasted and so give countries relatively stable two-party democracy.

In most periods from 1789 to the present, the US has had two dominant national parties competing to control government: Federalists vs Republicans (1790s-1810s), National Republicans vs Democratic Republicans (1810s-1830s), Whigs vs Democrats (1830s-1850s), Republicans vs Democrats (1850s-present). Despite the changing names, the underlying coalitions have been remarkably stable. In effect, there have been only two main parties in American history: the northern party and the southern party.

The core of the northern party (originally Federalists, Whigs and Republicans, and now Democrats) has been citizens of New England and the “greater New England” region settled by the descendants of colonial-era New Englanders, an enormous area which includes the great lakes, the upper prairie and the Pacific north-west. The culture of these “Yankees” originated in 17th-century English Puritanism. Its legacy remains in a distinct New England Yankee culture which values moral rectitude and social reform.

The historic rivals to the greater New England Yankees in US politics have been the coastal southerners of Virginia, South Carolina, and the Gulf coast region, which they settled from the Florida panhandle to east Texas. Royalist refugees from Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship–the so-called “Cavaliers”–created a hierarchical, traditional, aristocratic society based on a plantation economy. They have always dominated the southern party (originally Jeffersonian Republicans, then Jacksonian and Rooseveltian Democrats, and now Republicans).

On opposite sides in the English civil war, and then in the US civil war, the Yankees and Cavaliers have always been on opposite sides in US politics.

[…]

What does all this mean for the policies pursued by the two coalitions? When it comes to foreign policy, the divisions between the northern party and the southern party are dramatic, enduring, and somewhat contrary to received wisdom. For two centuries, the northern party (yesterday’s Republicans, today’s Democrats) has been the more protectionist and isolationist of the two coalitions, while the southern party (yesterday’s Democrats, today’s Republicans) has traditionally supported free trade, a strong military and an assertive grand strategy.

The differences between the two coalitions in trade policy reflect the old division between the industrial north and midwest and the agrarian south and mountain west. During the period of northern hegemony, 1861-1933, high tariffs protected northern American factories from British and European competition, while forcing southern and western farmers to pay more for industrial goods. The post-1945 global trading system was inspired by the free-trade ideology of conservative southern Democrats such as Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of State and a former Tennessee Senator–an ideology inherited by today’s southern Republicans. Support for protectionism remains concentrated in the northern manufacturing states where Democrats have succeeded Republicans as the dominant party.

Partisan divisions over the military reflect much deeper cultural factors. “From the quasi-war with France [1798-1800] to the Vietnam war,” writes historian David Hackett Fischer, “the two southern cultures strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against. Southern ideas of honour and the warrior ethic combined to create regional war fevers of great intensity in 1798, 1812, 1846, 1861, 1898, 1941, 1950 and 1965.” At the same time, the greater New England region has been home to the most intense opposition to American foreign wars–including the second world war. For 50 years, liberal American historians have spoken of “right-wing isolationists” but the fact is that most isolationists in the 1930s were liberals or leftists. Ironically, Roosevelt found the strongest supporters for his anti-Hitler foreign policy among racist Southern conservatives, who hated New Deal liberalism but were eager to save Britain and defeat Germany. The isolationist America First committee was a miserable failure in the south.

[…]

What explains the deeply-ingrained military ethic of southerners–and the equally intense anti-military sentiments of greater New Englanders? Again, culture is the answer. The New England Puritans frowned on violence as a way of resolving social conflicts. The southern cavalier code, however, endorsed violence when personal or national honour was being “disrespected” or “dissed”…

There is much more to this thesis than what I’ve excerpted and it’s all quite interesting. I doubt that it fully explains the ongoing divide between the two parties but I think there’s something to it. Through many influxes of different immigrants, westward expansion and even globalization, this divide has stayed with us. Political power shifts from one tribe to the other, sometimes for long periods. Catastrophe and war will expand or contract them. But the two always exist in one form or another. It’s America.

It makes perfect sense to me for McCain to take this Southern Comfort tour right now in the lull before the storm. Despite his status as a POW, McCain is known to the Republican base as a rebel, someone who isn’t fully a member of the tribe. But many of them don’t know that McCain is from a long line of highly decorated naval officers, which among the southern Cavaliers is an automatic tribal identifier as a full fledged member of the warrior class. He’s telling that story and it’s as good as a secret handshake.

For one of the tribes in America being a military adventurer, particularly when they perceive the nation’s honor to be at stake, is a requirement for leadership. The question for us is whether there are more “Yankees” than “Cavaliers” in 2008. I suspect so; the Bush administration has made a hash of things. But we should keep in mind that the Cavaliers’ battle to regain the nation’s “honor” will begin the day one of the Yankees wins the election.

So perhaps we “Yankees” —and by that I include all my liberal southern brethren — (sorry about the name, I didn’t pick it) should talk explicitly in different terms about what national honor really means. I would say that we could begin with the notion that any nation that legalizes torture has lost its honor and the only way to get it back it to hold those responsible for doing it accountable.

Unfortunately for Cavalier McCain, the prodigal son, — he’s one of them.

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The GOP Fires Up The Attack Machine

by dday

Karl Rove kicks off the opening salvo in the quadrennial “Question The Democrat’s Patriotism” derby:

Are you surprised at how Obama exploded?
You know, I want to be careful—I think we need to be careful about not getting carried away with a narrative that doesn’t truly exist. Like the story this morning in The New York Times about “the Obamacans”—the Republicans who support Obama.

You don’t buy that?
No. Do I buy that there are Republicans who support Obama? Sure, I do. But take a look at the last four polls on which there are cross tabs available. There are twice as many Democrats defecting to McCain as there are Republicans defecting to Obama. In the Fox poll, Obama takes 74 percent of Democrats and loses 18 to McCain. And McCain keeps 80 percent of Republicans and loses 10 to Obama. And in every one of the polls, it’s nearly twice as many Democrats defect to McCain as Republicans defect to Obama. And against Clinton, it’s three times as many. Know why? Well, there are a lot of different reasons why. There are Democrats, particularly blue-collar Democrats, who defect to McCain because they see McCain as a patriotic figure and they see Obama as an elitist who’s looking down his nose at ’em. Which he is. That comment where he said, you know, “After 9/11, I didn’t wear a flag lapel pin because true patriotism consists of speaking out on the issues, not wearing a flag lapel pin”? Well, to a lot of ordinary people, putting that flag lapel pin on is true patriotism. It’s a statement of their patriotic love of the country. And for him to sit there and dismiss it as he did—

I think we all know what’s coming next… all together now…

You’re not wearing a flag pin, Karl.
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But I respect those who consciously get up in the morning and put a flag lapel pin on.

I’d be thrilled if the Republicans decided to fight a War On People Who Don’t Wear Lapel Pins fought by people who aren’t wearing lapel pins themselves. Ionesco couldn’t have come up with such an absurd scenario.

But let’s look at this larger point, this depiction of Obama as an effete, out-of-touch elitist. Here’s some more from Turdblossom’s interview:

Do you see the elitist thing in other ways?
Obama is coolly detached and very arrogant. I think he’s very smart and knows he’s smart, but as a result doesn’t do his homework.

Arrogant, ay? Well yes, if there’s one thing that divides Democrats and Republicans, particularly Barack Obama and Karl Rove, it’s arrogance.

Example #1:

After midterm election interviewer Robert Siegel stated that “many might consider you on the optimistic end of realism” regarding Republican hopes to retain both Houses in November, Rove suggested that the NPR host was biased.

“Not that you would be exhibiting a bias or anything like that,” Rove said. “You’re just making a comment.”

“I’m looking at all the same polls that you’re looking at every day,” Seigel responded

“No you’re not!” Rove exclaimed.

Rove said that he was reviewing 68 polls a week, and that “unlike the general public, I’m allowed to see the polls on the individual races,” as opposed to public polls reported in the media.

“You may be looking at four or five public polls a week that talk about attitudes nationally, but that do not impact the outcome,” Rove said.

Rove claimed that the polls “add up to a Republican Senate and a Republican House.”

“You may end up with a different math, but you’re entitled to your math,” Rove said. “I’m entitled to ‘the’ math.”

Example #2:

We asked Mr. Rove if he would consider taking a fresh look at the science of global warming. Much to our dismay, he immediately got combative. And it went downhill from there.

We reminded the senior White House advisor that the US leads the world in global warming pollution and we are doing the least about it. Anger flaring, Mr. Rove immediately regurgitated the official Administration position on global warming which is that the US spends more on researching the causes than any other country […]

In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, “Don’t touch me.” How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unfazed, Sheryl abruptly responded, “You can’t speak to us like that, you work for us.” Karl then quipped, “I don’t work for you, I work for the American people.” To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, “We are the American people.”

Yes, it’s OBAMA that’s the arrogant one.

It’s really like watching a Greek tragedy watching the Republicans. They ALWAYS project onto others the deficiencies in themselves. But the other thing they do is thrive on constant repetition. There is nothing different in this critique of Obama that we haven’t heard in critiques of Al Gore and John Kerry. They reinforce back on themselves because they aren’t critiques of individuals but Democrats generally. Rove is trying to get you to paint a picture of all Democrats as latte-sipping Volvo-drivers who aren’t real Americans. In fact there isn’t anyone less American than a political hack who views his President as a king who is unanswerable to his lowly subjects. Honestly I don’t think these attacks on patriotism work anymore when the guy supposed to be the ultimate patriot has deceived us into an intractable war, ruined our international standing and emptied our Treasury.

But where this interview got fun is when Rove was asked about his role in the Siegelman railroading:

Let’s talk about the last couple of scandals you’ve been involved in. Don Siegelman in Alabama [the Democratic governor whom Rove was recently accused of trying to sabotage by forcing U.S. attorneys to bring corruption charges against him prior to an election]. What happened?
[rolls his eyes] Will you do me a favor and go on Power Line (hilarious -ed.) and Google “Dana Jill Simpson” [the Republican lawyer who told 60 Minutes that Rove asked her to take a picture of Governor Siegelman cheating on his wife]? She’s a complete lunatic. I’ve never met this woman. This woman was not involved in any campaign in which I was involved. I have yet to find anybody who knows her. And what the media has done on this… No one has read the 143-page deposition that she gave congressional investigators—143 pages. When she shows up to give her explanation of all this, do you know how many times my name appears? Zero times. Nobody checked!

Then how did this happen?
Because CBS is a shoddy operation. They said, “Hey, if we can say ‘Karl Rove,’ ‘Siegelman,’ that’ll be good for ratings. Let’s hype it. We’ll put out a news release on Thursday and then promo the hell out of it on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.” And Scott Pelley—the question is, Did [60 Minutes correspondent] Scott Pelley say to this woman, “You say you met with him. Where? And you say that he gave you other assignments earlier. When did he begin giving you assignments, and what campaigns did you work with him in? What evidence? I mean, this woman, she said she met with him: Okay, you met with him—where? Did you fly to Washington?” Now she says that she talked to me on the phone and she’s got phone records. Of calls to Washington and Virginia. But what’s Virginia? I don’t live in Virginia. And it’s 2001. What is in Virginia? It’s not the Bush headquarters; that was in Austin, Texas. What is in Virginia? So—but look, she’s a loon.

Touchy, touchy. As you would expect from someone whose fingerprints are smeared all over the case. By the way 60 Minutes initially caved to pressure to kill the story and then reluctantly aired it on the same night as the Oscars, so I’m not sure it was a ratings bonanza they were after.

Rove is trying a classic Chewbacca defense, going personal on Dana Jill Simpson to muddy the waters. It’s what he does – personal attacks are the only ones that interest him. But in 2006 he should have recognized that his political moment was over. I’m hardly afraid of a guy who attacks Obama for not wearing a flag lapel pin when he isn’t wearing one himself. If that’s the best he’s got he ought to go back to superior court judge campaigns in Alabama.

UPDATE: More from those reg’lar folks in the GOP and not those arrogant Dems:

“This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

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Major World Hunger Crisis

by dday

We get tunnel vision on superdelegates and stump speeches and credentials committees, all of which have their own level of importance. When I see a headline that millions are in danger of starvation I stop thinking about all that and pay attention.

Meteoric food and fuel prices, a slumping dollar, the demand for biofuels and a string of poor harvests have combined to abruptly multiply WFP’s (the UN’s World Food Program) operating costs, even as needs increase. In other words, if the number of needy people stayed constant, it would take much more money to feed them. But the number of people needing help is surging dramatically. It is what WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran calls “a perfect storm” hitting the world’s hungry.

The agency last month issued an emergency appeal for money to cover a shortfall tallied at more than half a billion dollars and growing. It said it might have to reduce food rations or cut people off altogether.

The most vulnerable are people like those in Sudan, whom Joannes is struggling to feed and who rely heavily, perhaps exclusively, on the aid. But at least as alarming, WFP officials say, is the emerging community of newly needy.

There are weather-related reasons: flooding in Australia and Indonesia which lowered rice harvests, and a loss of arable land generally from a warming planet. There are problems of increasing demand as the population increases. There are of course problems with rising fuel prices, which impact food production and distribution. Increases in demand for biofuels raise prices for staples like corn, as well. And there are war zones like Afghanistan, where Hamid Karzai has asked the WFP to help feed 7.5 million people, up from 5 million, a consequences of wheat prices rising 2/3 in the last year. Add this all up and you have 40 nations at risk of serious hunger out of the 121 that the WFP monitors.

The ability of individuals to feed themselves simply affects everything else. You cannot improve health care, establish a working education system, or increase economic output without food security. This is a far more urgent problem than the American financial crisis, although the plunging dollar contributes to it. And we can apportion blame but in the immediate future it’s a waste of time.

The Financial Times has more.

Governments across the developing world are scrambling to boost farm imports and restrict exports in an attempt to forestall rising food prices and social unrest […]

Saudi Arabia cut import taxes across a range of food products on Tuesday, slashing its wheat tariff from 25 per cent to zero and reducing tariffs on poultry, dairy produce and vegetable oils.

On Monday, India scrapped tariffs on edible oil and maize and banned exports of all rice except the high-value basmati variety, while Vietnam, the world’s third biggest rice exporter, said it would cut rice exports by 11 per cent this year.

The moves mark a rapid shift away from protecting farmers, who are generally the beneficiaries of food import tariffs, towards cushioning consumers from food shortages and rising prices.

The social unrest potential is great. We have already seen “tortilla riots” in Mexico and “pasta riots” in Italy. Restricting exports is going to decimate countries in the developing world as the richer nations try to cushion the blow in their own countries. Food stocks are as low as at any time in recent memory.

This goes well beyond any political issue. Over the past week we’ve all received urgent calls for money from candidates for state and federal office. Poor people worldwide don’t have a flashy email they can send you. Yet they need your support more than ever.

WFP’s Fill the Cup program has for small amounts that can feed the hungry for a week or more. That’s probably the best way to get resources into the hands of those who need them.

Global Giving has programs that feed children in Niger and India, for example.

World Hunger Year tackles community-based solutions to hunger and poverty.

CARE has a World Hunger Campaign.

Do the research, see which organization fits with your comfort level, and give. Millions of people are at risk and our financial mess has at least a little to do with it. The other thing you can do is DEMAND that your Congresscritter raise US donations to the World Food Program. Global poverty is an economic and national security issue. It’s also, as John Edwards called it, the moral test of our generation.

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I See Regular People

by digby

A month or so ago Chris Matthews gave an interview to the NY Observer and he said this:

The galloping campaign, in Mr. Matthews’ estimation, was that of Senator Barack Obama. He had the momentum, was in the saddle, was holding the reigns. But had Mr. Obama become the avant-garde candidate? If so, he was in trouble. The middle-class workers would pull back in suspicion. Who was this Ivy League guy on his, um, high horse? They wouldn’t get on board. The galloping horse of history might pass them by

I predicted this would become one of the themes of the campaign, part of the “cult” meme taking shape under conservative message massagers.

Sure enough, the bowling thing seems to have brought old Chris back to his “thesis:”

MATTHEWS: OK. Let me ask you about how he — how’s he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community and from the people who have college or advanced degrees?

Remember back in the dark days of 2004, when it was assumed that anyone who didn’t live in a small town in Nebraska or Alabama was automatically not a Real American? When we were all told to take our latte sipping, New York Times reading asses back to where we done come from? Yep, here we are again. (African Americans, of course, have never been considered “regular people” by conservatives. Nothing new there.)

I mentioned in my previous post that the right was going to play this up as part of their “Barack ain’t quite right” theme. Matthews will be there to help them along just as he always does. He is, after all, a multimillionaire celebrity who plays a blue collar working man on TV. Like Tim Russert. And George W. Bush. And many other Republican fat cats. Nothing new here.

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Searching For God In Fish Entrails

by tristero

It truly is hard to find a better example of what is wrong with “intelligent design” creationism than a paper from a creationist website PZ discusses here:

It’s titled “COMPLEX LIFE CYCLES IN HETEROPHYID TREMATODES: STRUCTURAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL DESIGN IN THE ASCOCOTYLE COMPLEX OF SPECIES”, by Mark Armitage. Oooh. Sounds so sciencey. And then you read further, and you see that it almost follows the correct form.

It has the difficult title. It has a list of keywords. It has an abstract. There’s an introduction: it contains a brief summary of the complex life history of these trematode parasites, which are small invertebrates that live in the internal organs of fish, and it promises something…

Then the paper has a materials and methods section, just like the big boys — the author extracted parasites from fish and used light and scanning electron microscopy to look at them. Finally, there’s a discussion and conclusion.

Notice anything missing? Right, no results.

Well, actually, there are results. Sort of. The result is, “it’s much too complicated to have arisen by chance” which is another way of saying, “I’m too fucking lazy to bother to figure this out. God done it.”

But let’s play a thought experiment and simply accept the conclusion that it is “irreducibly complex” and God did indeed design a life history of trematode parasites. It isn’t and it evolved, but you know, let’s just say, for the sake of argument.

So what?

What a far cry that concept of God is from the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, smiting enemies hither and yon, making the sun stand still! Gone is the God of the Gospels with a redemptive message of forgiveness uttered from the mouth of a crucified man betrayed and abandoned by his closest followers. This God, the God of creationism, is a dorky obsessive compulsive preoccupied with minutiae – I expect this God to wash His hands every five minutes and to check the locks.

In short, creationists provide a trivializing notion of what is meant by God, an illustration that “God of the Gaps” is not only non-science but crummy theology. Sure, the life history of trematode parasites will be explainable by natural causes should anyone care enough to study it closely (or, strictly speaking if you insist, it’s far too early to throw up one’s hands and say, “I dunno, whatever”). More importantly, no non-scientist searching for the meaning of God cares one way or the other whether the development of trematode parasites are “irreducibly complex.” No one will ever start a prayer, “O God, without whom trematode parasites would not now live their parasitic lives in fish guts…”

What a bleak, sad universe these people live in. Bad enough their view of reality is thoroughly out of focus. They have a stunted imagination to boot.

[UPDATE: “God of the Gaps,” for those who never heard the term, is the notion that God is where science has yet to find a natural explanation. The creationists keep on coming up with examples of “irreducible complexity” and science keeps on finding natural reasons for the complexity, not “intelligent design.” Thus God gets pushed out as science explains the natural world until the concept of Supreme Being is reduced to an entity that designed a bacteria’s tail. ]

Just Another Outpost

by digby

Responding to Obama’s frequent mocking of McCain’s suggestion that U.S. troops might remain in Iraq for 100 years, the Republican nominee-in-waiting said the Illinois senator failed to understand that America has kept forces in Korea, Japan, Germany and Kuwait long after wars in each country ended.

I get that this is ridiculous. There is a civil war in Iraq, for one thing, people are dying every day. But don’t underestimate the power of this line of reasoning. People know that we have had troops overseas for decades and they don’t think it’s weird or unusual. If McCain can succeed in convincing the public that Iraq is really becoming like Korea or Kuwait, this argument could work.

The problem is the press, which has insisted on talking about “the surge” as if it’s a massive success and helping drive down the urgency of war as an issue.

This is how McCain makes that pivot:

Americans continue to be divided on whether to keep troops in Iraq or bring them home. A slim plurality of Americans (49%) now supports bringing the troops home as soon as possible, while 47% favor maintaining troops in Iraq until the situation there is stabilized. A year ago, a narrow majority (52%) favored a troop withdrawal as soon as possible, compared with 43% who favored keeping the troops in Iraq. Public support for a troop pullout peaked at 56% in June 2007. The percentage favoring withdrawing the troops as soon as possible is at its lowest level since mid-January 2007 (48%).

Obviously, events on the ground in the last week may have brought some people up short. But this trend is real — people do not consider Iraq to be the number one issue anymore and the gap between those who want out right away and those who want to stay until it’s stabilized (like Korea!) is growing. And this is partly why that’s so: Awareness of Iraq War Fatalities Plummets. (I can’t imagine how that has happened.)

The economy has replaced Iraq as the number one issue:

A CNN/Opinion Research Poll released Monday found that 42 percent of Americans say that the economy is the most important issue facing the next president — nearly double the 22 percent who believed that in October. While most Americans say that the troop surge advocated by McCain has improved things in Iraq, the war is now the top priority of just 21 percent of voters, down from 28 percent in October when it was the campaign’s No. 1 issue.

But then there’s this:

– More than 7 out of 10 Americans think government spending on the war in Iraq is partly responsible for the economic troubles in the United States, according to results of a recent poll.

In the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted last weekend, 71 percent said they think U.S. spending in Iraq is a reason for the nation’s poor economy. Twenty-eight percent said they didn’t think so.

I have heard people say that this is a bogus argument and shouldn’t be used. I’m not so sure. It may be true that the war is not responsible for the bad economy, but it is certainly an incredible waste of blood and money for no return and it’s not irrational for people to think their money should be better spent, particularly when the economy is turbulent. I don’t think it’s wrong for Democrats to make that argument.

People are sick of this war and truly want it to be over. If McCain can convince them that it already is — that it’s on its way to being just another imperial outpost like Germany in the 1950s, where Elvis sang GI Blues, then he might succeed, particularly if the press continues to abdicate its duty to report what’s really happening. I hope the Dems don’t take this for granted.

Of course, one good way to push back on this is with the Responsible Plan.

Buy This Book

by digby

Our favorite blogger-author, Glenn Greenwald, has a new one coming out and it’s a doozy. He dissects the rightwing mythology of masculine, warrior values (and the ineffectual response of the Democrats) in detailed, ruthless fashion as only the Glennzilla can. I’m just about halfway through it right now and will have a much more thorough review soon. In the meantime, take my word for it, you need to read this book before we swing into the Flyboy Deification 24/7.

It would be very nice to push Glenn’s book to number one on Amazon, if possible. It shows publishers that the blogosphere has the audience and the reach to make bestsellers — and makes them want to publish the kind of books blog readers like.

Go hereto pre-order.

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