Month: December 2009

The Lieberman Front

by digby

… in the great GWOT has been going on for quite some time:

The United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against the Al-Qaeda terror network in Yemen, The New York Times reported.

Citing an unnamed former top CIA official, the newspaper said that a year ago the Central Intelligence Agency sent many field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country.

At the same time, some of the most secretive special operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics, the report said.

The Pentagon will be spending more than 70 million dollars over the next 18 months, and using teams of special forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels, the paper noted.

Maybe I wasn’t so far off about opening a front in Britain. Seems we’re everywhere.

.

Individual Calculator

by digby

For those of you who aren’t covered by your employer for health insurance, here’s a handy tool to figure out what you’d owe under health care reform under the two plans. (Be sure to put in your age in 2014.)

I’m in the individual market and my insurance will go up to the point where it may be unaffordable. But I suppose it would have anyway. (I’m ancient, but won’t be ancient enough for Medicare for some time yet.) For younger people with kids it looks like the subsidies will be a big help, however. How will you do?

Update: Here’s a story in USA Today on how the bill will affect various people with different employment status’ and income.

.

Terrorism In Their Pants

by digby

So things are getting stressful aboard airplanes these days. Terrorists are everywhere:

Earlier in the afternoon, Delta Airlines, which acquired Northwest last year, said in a statement that the crew had requested police assistance on the ground because a passenger was “verbally disruptive.” The Transportation Safety Administration said in a statement that it had been alerted to a “disruptive passenger on board” Flight 253. The T.S.A. said that the flight landed safely at Detroit International Airport at approximately 12:35 p.m. Eastern “without incident.”“The aircraft has been moved to a remote location for additional screening,” the agency had said then. “T.S.A. and law enforcement met the aircraft upon arrival, the passenger is now in custody.”

There’s more here:

Donald Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana, was forcefully removed from a New York City-bound Delta Airlines flight…after causing a scene and screaming at crew members.

According to the Associated Press, Trump’s 60-year-old former wife became angered by a group of children running in the aisle of her first class cabin while the flight was waiting to depart Palm Beach International Airport en route to New York.

Flight attendants were unable to calm the socialite down and the pilot taxied the plane back to the gate where law enforcement tried to convince Trump to voluntarily exit the aircraft.

When she refused and continued to hurl obscenities at crew members and fellow passengers, deputies “physically escorted her off the aircraft,” a department spokesman told RadarOnline.com.

Ooops. Wrong passenger. This wasn’t considered a terrorism incident at all. Turns out the alleged terrorist in question was a Nigerian on a different plane who was sick and spent some time in the bathroom. My bad. Terrorists come in many different guises.

.

Tomorrow’s War Today

by digby

It looks like Lieberman wants to take pre-emptive action against any country that a potential enemy emails. It’s going to be quite a war. No wonder we can’t afford real universal health care.

This doctrine is based the Afghanistan model I guess: occupy any country that has people within it who have ties to terrorism. I think I’ll volunteer for the British campaign. I’m fond of Guinness.

.

Raise Hell

by digby

Today’s NY Times Book Review features a new book about Molly Ivins, called A Rebel Life which sounds like a very good read and welcome tonic for our times. I miss her wit and wisdom.

One of the highlights of my blogging life was being quoted by Ivins in her column and I very much regret that I never got a chance to meet her. At Netroot Nations in Austin a couple of years ago we dedicated a panel to her and I quoted the last paragraph of the last column she published. It was during the fiery debate about the Iraq surge and related directly to that but I think the spirit of her words apply equally today:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on January 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now!”

Banging pots and pans may be what we have to work with but it can make an ungodly noise if enough join in. And from what we are seeing with civil liberties and the Afghanistan surge especially, it’s going to be necessary.

David Atkins pens an impassioned cris de coeur over at Daily Kos along these lines today that’s worth reading if you’re feeling low. There’s plenty of fight left in us and god knows there’s plenty to fight for.

.

Oh Jesus

by digby

Boy I hope he’s wrong about this:

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman said he thinks there’s a “reasonably high chance” the economy will contract in the second half of next year. On the “This Week” Roundtable, Krugman said he agreed with the assessment of fellow Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz that there is a significant chance the economy will shrink in 2010. “I would go with Joseph Stiglitz,” Krugman added, “I’m really worried about the second half.”

Atrios agrees.
Tim Geithner, on the other hand, is confident that everything’s coming up roses. Take your pick.

.

Nothing Worth Fighting For

by digby

On the heels of Greg Craig and Philip Carter resigning, this news that the Dawn Johnson nomination is dead can’t help but make you wonder if there isn’t a reason why all these high profile critics of the Bush administration’s torture and detention policies are being systematically dropped. I don’t understand why that would be unless there is a reason to believe they would object to current practices. After all, none of them had or would have the authority to launch investigations of the past.

On the politics, one hates to jump to conclusions but it is very curious that in virtually every single issue area, the administration goes out of its way to reject the people and items that are at the top of the liberal agenda. It’s hard to believe that it’s an accident.

It would be great for Obama to renominate her and fight publicly for her confirmation. He could even provoke a fight over the filibuster as part of the bargain. It would also be great if I woke up tomorrow morning and was 25 years old again. Somehow I think it’s a long shot.

h/t to KG

Update: I didn’t realize that it sounded like I was saying that Obama had ordered torture. I meant that they may have been worried about the military and the CIA going off the reservation and didn’t want to risk having people on board who were going to make a big stink about it. There is no doubt in my mind that Obama has ordered that the torture be stopped. What I’m not so sure about is his commitment to holding people responsible for doing it against his orders. The administration has, after all, capitulated to the military and CIA’s rationale that we can’t even show pictures of abuse lest it inflame the Muslim world. Combined with their other hedging on civil liberties, I think it’s fair to speculate about why some of the most vociferous critics of the Bush administration’s practices are being excluded.

But no, I don’t think Obama is ordering torture. I apologize for being unclear.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Tales from topographic oceans

By Dennis Hartley

It looks way cooler with the glasses…and a bong hit. Trust me.

If I was restricted to writing one-line movie reviews (which undoubtedly would make a lot of readers jubilant) I would summarize James Cameron’s super-hyped, epic fantasy-adventure Avatar as: “A three-dimensional masterpiece with a one-dimensional script.” Then again, Mr. Cameron has never lost any money underestimating the attention span of your typical American filmgoer. Sure, his movies tend to go on longer than the Old Testament, but there’s usually an easy-to-follow 90 minute narrative buried somewhere within those 2 ½ to 3 hour running times (padded out by the protracted action set-pieces).

I will say this-if you are going to go for it, you might as well go all the way (you know-get your $300 million worth). This film is like the Baskin-Robbins of movie events-you may be confronted with 31 different choices of viewing experiences before you even buy your ticket. For example, at the particular multiplex I saw it at, they were showing it in 3 auditoriums and as many formats: 2-D, 3-D and 3-D IMAX. No one warned me that there would be a quiz, so I suffered a few moments of embarrassing vacillation (I visualized the people in line behind me rolling their eyes and miming a garroting to amuse their friends). To save face, I muttered “Imax” and sheepishly pushed my check card under the window. I even suppressed the urge to exclaim “Fifteen fucking fifty? For a matinee?!?!”

OK, I hear you. “There IS a 90-word movie review, buried somewhere within this 2000 word rant about the cost of an IMAX screening, right, Dennis?” I just wanted to clarify from the outset that prior to this, I was a 3-D virgin (always seemed too gimmicky to me; if I’m really itching to experience the sensation that the actors are in the same room with me, I could go see one of those newfangled-oh, what are they called again-“stage plays”?

Cameron’s story is simple enough; thematically it is an inverse re-imagining of his 1986 sci-fi adventure Aliens (with more than a few suspicious similarities to Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke). Set sometime in the future, the story centers on a lushly verdant planet called Pandora, which has been targeted for deforestation and mining by an Earth-based corporation. This doesn’t set well with the planet’s inhabitants, a relatively peaceful race of aboriginal forest dwellers called the Na’vi (The Emerald Forest, anyone?). A sizable contingent of Marines has been deployed to help “convince” the locals that it would be in their best interest to cooperate. This doesn’t set well with a small team of research scientists who have been studying and interacting with the Na’vi, via an experimental assimilation method using avatars that take on the actual physiology of the aliens. Deadlines have been set, and tensions mount. However, faster than you can say FernGully: The Last Rainforest, we are presented with The One Human who could save the day, in the person of a brave young wheelchair-bound Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). Sully is assigned by the gung-ho Marine commander (a hammy Stephen Lang, getting his Col. Kilgore on) to be the military liaison with the tribe. Sully soon becomes the political football between his C.O., the head researcher (Sigourney Weaver, recycling Dian Fossey) and the corporate weasel from the mining company (Giovanni Ribisi). Yes, I was thinking “Halliburton reference”, too. Oops-can’t forget the rote love story-Sully hooks up with a Na’vi babe (a 10 ft. tall and very blue Zoe Saldana).

This is all academic, really. How many people are flocking to see this for the “plot”? Don’t get me wrong, there were elements of the story that did appeal to me. I liked the idea of a paraplegic hero; the scene where Sully first “finds his legs” in his avatar body is actually quite moving, empowering and well played. Aside from that one brief moment, I didn’t find myself getting emotionally invested in this film or its characters in any significant way. The “save the forest” theme performed its requisite tug at my big ol’ softie lib’rul tree-hugging heart and all, but it’s become such a hoary movie cliché anymore. By the time the final third disappeared into interminable mayhem, they lost me.

However, in pure visual terms, the film does live up to its hype, and then some. There are some real knockout scenes, particularly in the film’s first half (before the novelty starts to wear off a bit and it just becomes shit blowing up). Cameron’s inventiveness and flair for mind-blowing production design is the real star here. Pandora’s otherworldly creatures, topography, and stridently colorful flora and fauna recall Disney’s Fantasia or Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet at times. In the film’s best “through the looking glass” moments, I felt like I had been transported inside the world of a Roger Dean album cover.

When all was said and done, the question I was left pondering was this: At what point does a film cease being a “film” and transmogrify into an “event”-or (if I may turn the cynicism up to “11”) a glorified 2 ½ hour infomercial for a video game? Yes, Cameron has perhaps “changed” the game, regarding the purely technical aspects of filmmaking and movie presentation. But is this ultimately for the good of the art form? When I think of my all-time favorite films, there are two things that they all seem to have in common: heart and soul. And you do not a need a pair of 3-D glasses and IMAX to experience that.

Previous posts with related themes:
Top 10 Eco-flicks

.

Promises and Paradigms

by digby

Amidst the fallout of the Senate vote, Politico put out a handy primer on just what industry got out of HCR:

A POLITICO look at the deals shows the liberals have it right, at least in regard to key reform proposals. Several cherished Democratic goals — including a government-run insurance plan, bringing in cheaper drugs from other countries and expanding Medicare — faced steeper, and ultimately insurmountable, odds of passage after the hospitals and drug companies said they would oppose any bill that included them. This was no idle threat, but instead a serious challenge to Obama’s goal of winning reform — and pocketing a major achievement in his presidency’s first year. But the liberal attacks glide past a hard reality. By bringing industry players inside the room, Obama and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) holstered some of the very guns that defeated reform in 1994. PhRMA, for instance, will spend nearly $200 million on reform this year — and clearly it could spend it endorsing or opposing the bill. Cutting deals to neutralize would-be antagonists was one of the Democrats’ key takeaways from the failed “Hillarycare” effort. And the Obama White House followed a basic tenet of negotiating: first in, best deal. PhRMA agreed to give up $80 billion over 10 years to pay for reform — a figure that infuriated some House members who thought it was too light and who tried to negate the agreement. Conversely, tardy negotiators risked getting clobbered. Exhibit A: the medical device lobby, which misplayed its early hand and nearly got slammed with a big tax. Ken Thorpe, a former Clinton administration health care adviser who has participated in this year’s drive, said Obama’s critics are missing a larger truth: With so many powerful interests poised to attack to protect the plan, some deal making was inevitable. “It’s a balancing act,” Thorpe said. “Could we have gotten more out of the drug industry? Perhaps. On the other hand, keeping them positively engaged allowed momentum to continue. Had they not engaged them early on, and didn’t bring them to the table, who knows how this would have turned out?”

Always fighting the last war. Clinton ran as a DLC New Democrat and probably could have made deals with industry and it would have been politically consistent to do so. (Whether or not it would have made a difference is debatable.) But the fact is that Obama isn’t Clinton, this isn’t 1994 and the lesson was the wrong one.

As I wrote earlier, aside from the political and moral question of making such “deals” in the first place, what this really reveals is the source of liberals’ frustrations at the moment. The president may not have campaigned on the public option or even been much of a crusader for health care reform. But what he did campaign on explicitly and without reservation was clean government and the end of business as usual. Indeed, the word “change” was predicated on that simple promise alone. This is where the problem lies with the left and a fair number in the middle. The technocrats in Washington see health care reform as a triumph of pragmatic manipulation of the various levers of power. The media is celebrating that Obama Plays by Washington’s Rules. But for a good many people, that very fact violates the central rationale for his presidency. That’s what’s causing this cognitive dissonance and giving life to a new right wing anti-liberal argument.

Jeffrey Feldman approaches this issue from another direction today, citing Glenn Greenwald’s recent post about a possible new left right alliance against corporatism and asking what sort of government one might want from such an alliance. It’s a good question and one that I expect people will be asking for some time to come. But keep in mind that this is not exactly new on the left and it has been answered in some detail. Perhaps the best leftwing anti-corporate screed is summed up in a speech that filled Madison Square Garden ten years ago:

That speech has five more parts if you want to hear the whole thing.

There has long been a strong left libertarian anti-corporate critique. (Noam Chomsky was there long before anybody.) But while there has been a sporadic history of making common cause with liberals on civil liberties, this alleged conversion of certain conservative movement luminaries to the anti-corporate cause is less than believable considering that just a few short years ago, these very people were orchestrating the greatest strategic alliance between government and corporate America in its history. Let’s say I’m a bit skeptical about what “principle” they have recently unearthed in this regard. After all, they invented corporatism — the Democrats have just learned to stop worrying and love the money.

Right wing “populism” is of a completely different form than that of the left, although it’s fed by similar feelings of disenfranchisement and suspicion of elites. At the very least, lefties are not in the pockets of corporate America while they rail against the system that benefits it. I can’t say the same for the right. I realize that this new populist alliance relies on the belief that left and right are now an outdated political paradigm. I just don’t believe it. You can call it whatever you like, but the lines will divide up pretty much as they always have in America and liberals will have to decide who they’re going to sacrifice to the cause if they want to change that. Believe me, sacrificing corporate donations won’t get the job done.

The left is already philosophically consistent on the issue of big money in politics, and if they made the case straightforwardly and gained popular support, it could change the way politics are done. The populist right is incoherent. They operate on a whole other set of impulses, which almost always involve scapegoating of the other. I don’t see a meaningful alliance there, although I do see how right wing populism will be very useful to the wealthy. It always has been in the past.

.

Fergawdsake

by digby

This’ll fix it:

According to a statement posted Saturday morning on Air Canada’s Web site, the Transportation Security Administration will severely limit the behavior of both passengers and crew during flights in United States airspace — restricting movement in the final hour of flight. Late Saturday morning, the T.S.A. had not yet included this new information on its own Web site.

“Among other things,” the statement in Air Canada’s Web site read, “during the final hour of flight customers must remain seated, will not be allowed to access carry-on baggage, or have personal belongings or other items on their laps.”

The suspect, identified as Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, tried to light his explosives while the plane was descending into Detroit on Friday.

The suspect was wearing a white t-shirt and drank two diet cokes, so the TSA will be banning those on all flights as well.

.