Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Smart Politics

by digby

I read that Jon Corzine signed the new civil unions bill in New Jersey yesterday as a result of the NJ supreme court ruling that the state had to create marriage equality for gay people. There is an interesting story about this that I think is instructive for progressives as we start to dig our way out of this conservative era.

First, I should say that I don’t have a big problem with civil unions in that I think they should be available everywhere for people who aren’t religious. I’m happily married, but I would have been very glad to have had a civil union if there had been such a thing available and it offered exactly the same legal benefits. The word “marriage” holds no particular significance for a godless, dirty hippy like me who believes in all kinds of non-traditional social arrangements.

Having said that, this country’s legal system and social traditions are all designed to benefit people who are “married” and there’s no sense in denying that. So I’m sympathetic to the notion that civil unions for gay people are a separate-but-equal concept that relegates gays to a different standard than straights for no good reason. Many are religious and would like the option of a legal religious ceremony, and basically they just want society to recognize that they have the same right to create a family as anyone else. I understand that, and if I were gay I might very well insist on the right to “marry” rather than accept a civil union compromise.

Unfortunately, the nation is slow to embrace that wholeheartedly, so a series of interim steps seem to be the most logical way for people to grapple with this. The question for progressives is how to keep the momentum going so that the idea of marriage is not foreclosed. I think what they did in New Jersey is a valuable primer on how these things are done.

First, it’s important to recognize that the court gave the legislature no choice but to come up with some sort of scheme that would allow gays the same legal benefits of marriage as straight couples. The question was whether the legislature would go full out and open the doors to marriage or create civil unions. But another question lingered as well — would they create civil unions and also foreclose the possibility of marriage, something the court did not preclude them from doing.

Some progressives and gay rights advocates in New Jersey made the decision to apply as much pressure as they could on the legislature to go for marriage, and in the process moved what was almost pre-ordained to be a civil union bill, to one that would cause some pain on any legislators who tried to mollify their right flank with an accompanying vote to take marriage completely off the table. It left the door open and that means that progressives won’t have to reinvent the wheel when the time comes around to revisit the issue. This is smart politics.

Speaking at the signing of the civil unions act in Trenton this morning, Senator Loretta Weinberg told the audience she looks forward to revisiting this issue. Weinberg also said she believes the state will achieve marriage equality by the end of her next term (January 2012).

Steven Goldstein of Garden State Equality had this to say:

Today we celebrate not a destination, but a journey.

Gay marriage wasn’t even on the radar 20 years ago and I expect in 20 more years it will be legal. This is social progress that cannot be held back. But it pays to be always thinking one step ahead with these things, paving the way for it to be easier on the next round —- moving the goal posts back our way with each move.

A lot of credit for redicovering how progressive politics are done can be given to young, smart activists like Juan Melli, the man behind Bluejersey.com, who has been named New Jersey politician of the year. He and his cohorts did amazing things during the election season in New Jersey — and they came up with a very effective series of web ads on the gay marriage legislation that were designed to appeal to the common sense and decency of people who are just now figuring out what they think about all this — including the legislators who voted on the issue.

This is progressive politics today. It’s happening all over the country. Give it up for the new kids.

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Where’s Rover?

by digby

One of he things I always wondered about the Rove-as-genius myth was why Bush’s adminstration was so lame if Rove was so great. It’s true that Junior was very popular for a while after 9/11, but any president would have been. He was good at pretending he had won a mandate, but he never actually did it. He’s a ruthless, slimy Republican operative, but no better than many other ruthless, slimy Republican operatives.

So what’s the “architect” of this failed Republican realignment doing now that he’s been shown to be a loser at the one thing he’s always supposedly been good at?

Since the November election, Rove has been promoting the contrarian idea that the Republicans lost their majorities in the House and Senate not because of Bush’s unpopularity or because voters turned against the Iraq war but because congressional Republicans didn’t sufficiently live up to their core ideals, such as a commitment to spending restraint, a muscular foreign policy, and strict ethics. In other words, associates say, Rove is arguing that the GOP lost control because congressional Republicans weren’t conservative enough.

White House insiders say Bush is counting on Rove, who is the president’s main political adviser and deputy chief of staff, to define “common ground” in dealing with the Democrats who now control Congress. In Rove’s view, that means the White House shouldn’t stray too far from the conservative base and should continue making policy from the political right–and not give too much ground to the Democrats. Rove argues privately that the Dems should also reach out to the White House and that Bush shouldn’t do most of the compromising. One of Rove’s theories is that the Democrats can be maneuvered into a series of difficult choices next year as they try to enact their legislative agenda and pass the federal budget.

The central choice, according to Rove, will be to cut spending or raise taxes. If congressional Democrats cut spending, their liberal base will be alienated. If they raise taxes, rank-and-file voters will be unhappy. GOP insiders suspect that Rove also had a big hand in distancing Bush from the Iraq Study Group because he believed the bipartisan panel was too critical of current Iraq policy. Rove, insiders say, believes that victory is still achievable and that Bush should pursue it as vigorously as he can. The president made those points at his news conference today.

It’s typical of Rove to project Bush’s weakness on to others and then attack it. Here he’s blaming the congress for not being “conservative” enough, which is the standard rap on Junior. I doubt that the Republicans are buying it. The Bush family will not ever be given another chance after two failed presidencies.(“I have no future,” says Jeb Bush) Rove is a member of the Bush clan and he won’t be forgiven. All that self-serving mythology he created about his power and his genius is coming back to bite him.

I won’t even address his plans to corner the Democrats. If they are stupid enough to let this happen then they deserve what they get. Bush is the most wounded president since Richard Nixon; there’s nothing to fear from him. (And Rove’s talent has never been this kind of politics. He’s an election strategist and a smear artist, period.)

I have no idea if he believes that the US can still achieve victory in Iraq and is pushing Bush to escalate. It could very easily be some sniping among insiders. But it’s also possible that he’s pushing it because he’s still convinced that the problem is that Americans are just unhappy because they don’t think we are “winning.” It’s all about how people “feel” with him, never about what they see or think or know. The administration has never understood that when the people found out there were no WMD after the endless repetition of “with a coalition of the willing we will disarm Saddam Hussein” — “winning” lost all meaning.

It would be like Rove to marshal all the wingnuts and persuade Junior that a show of strength will impress all the screaming GOP fangirls if he just acts like a winner. Governance by PR campaign is his specialty. Whatever the case, Rove is now in the process of saving his own reputation and legacy along with Bush’s and his advice is political in ways that are far different than the electoral experience he’s known for. Escalating the war is the smart move for him. He’s got to shoot the moon or he’s finished.

The man should have been fired as Bush promised he would do if it turned out any of his staff had leaked the Plame information. But he’s still there, being paid by you and me to keep this country on its nightmare trajectory to perdition.

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A Christmas Blogger

by digby

Thank you, everyone, for all your generosity. It’s an indescribably wonderful feeling to know that so many people value the work you do. I am very, very grateful.

I must particularly thank all of my friends in the blogosphere who passed the Christmas stocking on my behalf. Thanks very much to my pals:

John Amato
Jane Hamsher
Atrios
Avedon at The Sideshow
Peter Daou
Glenn Greenwald
Steve Gilliard
The General
GOTV
Attaturk
Jeralyn at Talk Left
A Tiny Revolution
Dave Niewert
Lean Left
The American Street
Taylor Marsh
Mia Culpa
Colorado Bob
Middle Earth Journal
Blog Revolution
D-Day
Trekie Net Nerds
A Spork In The Drawer
James Wolcott
Unfutz
Driftglass (who also shared a heartwarming Christmas moment. I’m all that keeps Santa going…)
My Supreme Overlord Kos

Plus:

Street Prophets
The Broad View
Leftword
Norwegianity
SW’s Energy Gap
The ITT List
Après tout…
EZ Smirkzz 3.0
Sadly No!
Michael Berube

TBOGG!

Also thanks to the hardest working man in the blogosphere, Matt Stoller, who insisted that people want me to keep writing about politics (and perhaps finally getting around to penning the long awaited Rise and Fall of the Codpiece) and Rick Perlstein who granted me the great privilege of posting excerpts throughout the year of his upcoming blockbuster Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972.

If there are any other bloggers I left out, please let me know. My good friend Santa is making a list and he’s checkin’ it twice.

Thank you all again and Happy Hollandaise everyone.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled hatefilled screeds against Rudolph and carols and puppies on Christmas morning. This is a secular progressive blog, after all and everyone knows that we hate Christmas. Bah Humbug.

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Update: New posts below

(hopefully) and you can get your necessary Atrios fix at http://eschaton08.blogspot.com/ temporarily because blogger is, unsurprisingly, bloggered. Fixed!

Dear Santa

by digby

Last year I asked my readers to put a little change in the kitty if they had it to spare and many of you did. It was a wonderful affirmation of what I do and I’m still basking in its glow. Well, it’s that time of the year again, and while we are all counting our blessings and fighting the war on Christmas and freedom, I’m here once again, stocking in hand, to ask that if you have your credit card out and it isn’t maxed, you might send a little Christmas cheer my way once again.

I wish the blog was a self sustaining commercial enterprise, but sadly, there are only a handful of them that can claim such success and they are much, much bigger than this one. So, I’m going directly to you, my readers, in the hopes that you’ll help me keep this little site rolling for another year.

I spent much of the last year working on deals to move the blog to various MSM-style projects that never materialized. As with so many things in life, big blog talk usually equals zilch when all is said and done. So we still creak along here on blogspot with respectable traffic and lots of great friends who often link here and give the blog good mojo. (But I hereby put out the call once again to designers who have ideas for Hullabaloo and we’ll try to get those going this year without the “help” of the legit media. Who needs ’em, I sez?)

However, I’m hopeful that I will be able to explore some very exciting opportunities to write a book, the details of which have not been worked out but which I may now have the time to do — with your help. With the Big Election coming up, this may be the right moment to write my magnum opus on the history of the codpiece.(Just kidding.)

And as we are entering into some very new and exciting territory for liberals everywhere, I want to keep blogging in any case. We have some power to do good and even more importantly — stop the insanity. It’s going to get a little bit crazy here in the blogosphere, what with the primary season soon upon us, but it’s all to the good. I want to stay in the game and see if we can continue to make the impact that I truly believe we are already making.

Many of my fellow bloggers will be raising money for candidates and doing many creative and exciting new forms of online activism. I have never done a lot of that sort of activity although I will certainly keep all my readers informed about the action and point them in the right direction. (I don’t raise money because, frankly, I suck at it, as you can tell by this post.)

What I may not suck so much at is observing and analyzing what’s going on in the press and in Washington from an outsider’s perspective. The mainstream media is reluctantly learning that they cannot get away with their lazy reporting and DC insider provincialism without incurring a rapid and energetic response. During the run-up to the next election, like all my lefty blogger brethren, this blog will deconstruct these cheap narratives and phony character attacks and we will alert millions of people all over the country. We are watching them and they know it.

We will also be watching the new Democratic majority. We will be here to praise them and spread the good word whenever we can. And we will also be here to hold their feet to the fire if they lose their nerve. The blogosphere and the netroots represent a vanguard of well-informed, highly engaged citizens who are not easily fooled. We are keeping score. The new technology allows us to research speeches and votes in an instant and we can track contributors and expenditures and travel — all that good stuff that starts to corrupt around the edges. We are sophisticated people who understand how the world works and we aren’t expecting “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” idealism. But this political culture that’s been awash in corporate money is ruining this country and we expect our representatives to honor their commitments to honest, clean government.

And finally, in the run-up to the next election, this blog will continue to discuss many other things, from politics in popular culture to political history to, hopefully, a bit more wonkery as we start to delve into issues for the first time in six years. I’m going to be extremely engaged, as always, in issues of civil rights and civil liberties and I will continue to write about the under-the-radar attempts to subvert them, whether it’s through religion or government or corporate hegemony.

And we will all try our best to entertain you and stimulate you and make you feel, as I do, that by learning and reading we are arming ourselves to be informed, engaged and active political citizens. I have no patience with people who think it is a waste of time to read blogs when people could be stuffing envelopes. Many of us will do both, I have no doubt, and god love those who do. But I want us all to be able to sit at that Christmas dinner table, around the water cooler or on the stump, armed with the arguments and information that can engage the apathetic and the young and fight back the stale political conventional wisdom that has brought us to the brink these last six years. It sounds corny, but if we can do that, we can change the world.

Finally, I cannot say enough about the writers who contribute to the blog — tristero, poputonian and Dennis. They will not share in the proceeds of this little fund raiser — I asked and they refused, so their contribution to my well being is enormous and I thank them. They are all first rate friends, writers and supporters.

So if you can and if you want, you can hit the little buttons to the left or use my post box address to send along a little stocking stuffer to keep the Hullabaloo homefires burning for another year. (I added a subscription feature at a couple of readers’ request, if you like to use it. You can cancel at any time, of course.) To those of you who have sent in donations during the year, thank you again. It’s like Christmas all over again when I get one.

And to those who cannot contribute, perhaps you would agree to comment once in a while. This little community has one of the smartest political dialogs around on any given day and I’d love to see more of you participate. It’s where I get some of my best ideas.

So, there you have it. (whew.) Have a great holiday everyone.

cheers — digby

*I’ll be posting as usual, but this post will stay at the top for a little while. (That’s what the pros say to do and who am I to argue?) So scroll down for new stuff.

** I’m not at home and my email address has been behaving strangely for weeks, due to a changeover to a new cable system, so please forgive me if you don’t hear from me immediately.

The Gulag Comes Home

by digby

The government is “keeping families together” in camps down in Texas while they await hearings or deportations. You can read all about it here .

The whole thing is an extrajudicial, privatized boondoggle (what else is new?) in which a bunch of people are basically jailed with little or no due process (what else is new?)

But can someone please tell me how this can be necessary?

Jeans and t-shirts have been replaced with jail uniforms; children are issued uniforms as soon as they can fit into them ? and everyone must wear name tags, even the babies.

Name tags, sure. Jail uniforms? Purely dehumanizing.

Keep in mind that these are all people from countries other than Mexico. It’s a result of the ending of the “catch and release” program that allowed these migrants, many of whom were seeking asylum, to be released on humanitarian grounds. The kids used to be sent to a residential facility where they went to school. Here they gt one hour of instruction (English) a day and are allowed on hour of indoor recreation.

Nobody knows how long these children will be kept behind bars. From an editorial in the Austin Statesman:

The backlog is so strained that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, noted: “The department and the federal courts are straining under the weight of an immigration litigation system that is broken. Under the current system, criminal aliens generally receive more opportunities for judicial review of their removal orders than noncriminal aliens.”

In short, illegal immigrants who commit crimes get speedier legal attention than these children, who have done nothing wrong other than follow their parents.

Nothing will change until reforms are initiated, and Congress has done little to fix a broken immigration policy and the machinery to enforce it. The result is the private prison facility in Taylor and a smaller one in Pennsylvania.

According to those familiar with the families in the private prison, children of those apprehended are dressed in prison jumpsuits and receive only one hour of schooling and one hour of recreation a day. The trade-off is that they get to remain with their families.

Hard information on the program and the private prison is difficult to come by. The company running the prison refers questions to the immigration office, and the immigration office has had little to say about the situation.

News of the 400 people — 200 of them children — being held in the T. Don Hutto unit in Taylor has sparked protests from several groups interested in immigrant issues. They are concerned about everything from care and feeding of those being held to the psychological effect of incarceration on children and families.

Federal authorities began detaining all unauthorized immigrants last summer. The reason for the detention was that so many who were charged with unauthorized entry into the United States never appeared for their court dates. They melted back into the population.

It is understandable in this age of terrorism that authorities want to keep tabs on illegal immigrants and ensure their appearances in courts. But there should be a way to see that they have their day in court without imprisoning their children.

Keeping families intact would appear to be a humane policy, as well. But the result of the new detention policy has been to jail children, and that is not acceptable. Those who have visited the detainees, some of whom are seeking political asylum, say the detention is damaging.

Little kids in prison jumpsuits and nametags presents a sad picture.

It’s more than sad. It’s sick.

Michael Chertoff and Julie Myers believe this is a great step forward and plan to build more of these for-profit facilities.

A Retraction

by digby

I have been roundly chastized for suggesting that Christopher Hitchens is open to the idea that the Holocaust is a hoax. I admit that I was being hyperbolic and I regret writing it. I extrapolated that he was open to the idea it was a hoax from the fact that he is so intimate with a range of Holocaust deniers, whom he insists on calling “revisionists” and whose shoddy scholarship he defends for inexplicable reasons.

Max Blumenthal called him out on Huffington Post last year:

You [Hitchens] then wrote your Minority Report column for the Nation on October 3,1994 about a dialogue between you and Faurisson. “It is widely alleged that gas chambers– ‘chemical slaughterhouses’ — were used to destroy European Jewry,” you reported Faurisson telling you. “Very well, where is there a surviving authentic model, or photograph, or model of the operation of one such?”

You replied, parrotting Faurisson’s own words to Berenbaum:

“My own first answer must be that I have never seen such a relic of an operating gas chamber (though I have seen small-scale crematoria in camp museums in Germany).”

Faurisson then asked you whether you “understood that much anti-Nazi propaganda is just that? That there was no soap made from human fat? That the confession of Rudolph Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz was extorted by coercion and in any case mentioned a total death at Auschwitz that not even the Israel experts at Yad Vashem credit?”

Your unbelievable reply: “Here, my answers are yes and yes, because I know that the story in the first case, and Hoss in the second, have been debunked.”

And who “debunked” these stories other than Faurisson himself? Who?

Charles Taylor’s review of Deborah Lipstadt’s book about Irving’s trial (in which he was found to be a holocaust denier)points out, however, that Hitchens has been very clear that his dinner companion, David Irving, does not say the holocaust was a hoax:

Giving Hitchens the benefit of the doubt about the lies of [Irving’s] Goebbels book still does not excuse this claim from his 1996 Vanity Fair article: “And, incidentally, [Irving] has never and not once described the Holocaust as a ‘hoax’.”

Restricting ourselves just to what Hitchens could have known before writing that, we find that, testifying at the 1988 trial of a Canadian Holocaust denier, Irving said, “No documents whatever show that a Holocaust had ever happened.” What’s the defense of this? That Irving doesn’t use the word “hoax”? OK then. How about these?

In a 1991 speech, Irving said, “Until 1988, I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust … but [in] 1988 … I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that story was just a legend.”

In 1990: “The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention.”

And, again, in 1991: “More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”

Hitchens does not defend these people only on the basis of free speech. If that were so I would not have written anything at all. As repugnant as what these people write is, I do not support (although I understand) the European laws against such things.

What I also do not support, any more than I support balderdash like creationism or Charles Murray’s “Bell Curve”, is an agenda masquerading as scholarship. And that obviously is what these holocaust “revisionists” are selling. Hitchens is not a stupid man and while his defense of them may have began as reflexive contrariness, he has subsequently sold his own credibility in defending them.

So it is true that I have no proof that Hitchens is open to the idea that the holocaust was a “hoax” and it was a mistake to say that unequivocally. The only proof I have is that he is a great defender of the shoddy scholarship of “revisionists” who believe that the Holocaust is a “legend.”

My intention in the post below was to show that Hitchens’ contrary iconoclasm was on a collision course with itself. I did it badly, in a hurry and I regret it.

mea culpa.

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Hitching A Ride To Hell

by digby

A friend sent me this interesting little tid-bit which reminds me that Christoher Hitchens must be face deep in the egg-nog right about now:

David Irving, the historian jailed for three years in Austria for denying the Holocaust, is free after a court reduced his prison sentence on appeal.

Irving, who was sentenced in February, was released after Vienna’s highest court ruled today that he should serve one year in prison and the remainder of his sentence on probation.

You’ll recall that old Hitchens was quite the staunch defender of Irving — and not just on free speech principle, mind you. He defended many of his conclusions as well:

It is best not to mince words…. What of your precious free speech, they say, when the Holocaust is immune from criticism on your own soil?…. Now may I mince a word or two? I have been writing in defense of Mr. Irving for several years. When St. Martin’s Press canceled its contract to print his edition of the Goebbels diaries, which it did out of fear of reprisal, I complained loudly and was rewarded by an honest statement from the relevant editor — Thomas Mallon — that his decision had been a “profile in prudence.” I will not take refuge in the claim that I was only defending Mr. Irving’s right to free speech. I was also defending his right to free inquiry. You may have to spend time on some grim and Gothic Web sites to find this out, but he is in fact not a “denier,” but a revisionist, and much-hated by the full-dress “denial” faction. The pages on Goebbels, as in his books on Dresden, Churchill and Hitler, contain some highly important and damning findings from his work in the archives of the Third Reich.

Irving’s so hated by the Holocaust deniers that he’s featured as an expert, along with Hitchens, on the Stormfront website.

One wonders what Hitchens feels about the Iranian Dark Lord, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s, little Holocaust denial confab the other day — the same Hitchens who called Juan Cole an apologist for the Iranian president simply because he correctly translated a speech. (Of course, Hitchens’ main beef with Ahmadinejad seems to be that he’s an “uncultured jerk” so perhaps it’s not a problem.)

But that’s got to be nothing compared to the this. (Hitchens, you’ll all recall, wrote a book claiming (rightfully, in this case) that Kissinger is a war criminal.):

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, one of the Republican Party’s most respected senior statesmen, says that the Bush administration may have to give up on democracy in Iraq to salvage the goal of stabilising the country.

Kissinger — who has frequently advised US President George Bush in the three years since the US invaded Iraq — told the Los Angeles Times that he believed democracy for now was out of reach for Iraq.

His comments, coming after the US electorate earlier this month dealt ruling Republicans a resounding defeat in congress, largely over the lack of progress in the war in Iraq, sharpened the criticism aimed at the White House even from within Bush’s own ranks.

Kissinger’s analysis also broadens the options being proposed for the war.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, a US senator who as a Navy pilot spent several years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, told ABC News US soldiers were “fighting and dying for a failed policy”.

He repeated his longstanding call for more US troops in Iraq, saying on Sunday that the 145000 soldiers already there needed reinforcements to ensure military victory.

McCain is exploring making a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

Kissinger, who supported the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, said it would have been better for the US to postpone democratic development and instead install a strong Iraqi leader.

“If we had done that right away, that might have been the best way to proceed.”

Yesterday it was revealed that Republican front runner and avowed Islamofascist fighter St John McCain just hired Kissinger for his campaign.

Hitchens is a man who must no longer have any bearings. He is open to the idea that the holocaust is a hoax, just like all those nasty islamofascists he believes are just like Hitler. And now the war criminal who Hitchens devoted a good portion of his life to bringing down has joined the anti-Islamofascist cause — and he’s bringing his old Pinochet tactics to the war. The war that Hitchens declared “A War To Be Proud Of.”

(For a thorough dismantling of that article see this post by Cave Shadows who writes: “Hitchens has coalesced his defense of the Iraq invasion almost entirely to the premise that the US needs to be conducting this occupation as a dry run for invasions to come.”)

Today Islamofascists and Holocaust deniers and war criminals are all mixed up in one big Hitchens stew of cross purposes. The cognitive dissonance must be getting dizzying.

Hide the cough syrup.

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Ponies Full Of Money

by digby

I have a little suggestion. Before anybody signs another blank check for Bush to expand the military, escalate the war or add more than 70 billion to the “emergency” supplemental, how about we make the Pentagon account for this:

The Pentagon is still struggling to get a handle on the unprecedented number of contractors now helping run the nation’s wars, losing millions of dollars because it is unable to monitor industry workers stationed in far-flung locations, according to a congressional report.

The investigation by the Government Accountability Office, which released the report Tuesday, found that the Defense Department’s inability to manage contractors effectively has hurt military operations and unit morale and cost the Pentagon money.

“With limited visibility over contractors, military commanders and other senior leaders cannot develop a complete picture of the extent to which they rely on contractors as an asset to support their operations,” said the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

According to the report, some 60,000 contractors are supporting the Army in Southwest Asia, a region that includes Iraq. That figure is compared to the 9,200 contractors used to support the military in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

This unprecedented number of contractors on the battlefield means loss of visibility, GAO reports.

Commanders are often unsure how many contractors use their bases and require food, housing and protection, according to the report. One Army official said the service estimates losing about $43 million each year on free meals provided to contractors who also receive a food allowance.

The military does not have enough personnel devoted to overseeing the implementation of contracts, GAO found. In one case, a single person was assigned to monitor compliance of a contract at 27 different installations throughout Iraq in just a six-month tour.

Jane wrote about this the other day over at Firedoglake, noting that the Iraq study Group said “there are roughly 5,000 civilian contractors in the country.” Wise old mandarins indeed.

There is some good news:

Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he plans to establish a subcommittee to conduct thorough investigations, including one on contractor abuse.

The war profiteering that’s gone on for the last six years is an extremely important issue and I hope the new congress gets to the bottom of it. Not only are they bankrupting the nation, every taxpayer dollar they spend on Bush cronies and graft and corruption in the military industrial comples is a dollar not spent on the actual troops. This should offend every right thinking person in the nation, no matter what their partisan persuasion.

Update: Maha has a very intriguing post up that adds much to this discussion of what this war is costing us.

The January 2007 issue of Harper’s (the cover art is a photograph of a rubber duckie) has an article by Chalmers Johnson titled “Republic or Empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States.” It’s not online and won’t be for awhile (once again, Harper’s policy about not putting articles online until they’re a couple of months old makes me crazy), but reading the article in light of Baker’s news story is guaranteed to scare the living bleep out of you.

In the article, Chalmers discusses “military Keynesianism,” in which “the flow of the nation’s wealth — from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers.” As a result, “the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.” Then, he ties military Keynesianism to the “unitary executive” theory and Bush’s increasingly unchecked power. Meanwhile, citizens and media dutifully “abet their government in maintaining a facade of constitutional democracy until the nation drifts into bankruptcy.”

I haven’t read the article but I will look forward to doing so. Read Maha’s post in the meantime. This is a subject which is long overdue for discussion in my opinion.

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Merry Kitzmas!

by tristero

Merry Kitzmas! What? You don’t know about Kitzmas???!!!? It’s the one year anniversary of the happy resolution of Kitzmiller v. Dover, which dealt a major blow to the purveyors of “intelligent design” creationism. If you have an hour or two over the holidays, this is a perfect time to settle into a nice, intelligently designed (by humans, of course) chair or sofa and read Judge Jones brilliant decision.

Kitzmiller is, along with the fall ’06 elections, one of the few major victories for the side of reason and science during the Bush infestation. Its importance for the future of science education cannot be overestimated. Let’s not forget that Scopes lost (and for those of you who only know about Scopes through Inherit the Wind, go thou and read Summer for the Gods) for the real story, which is far more interesting.

I’m off again ’til the New Year. Happy Holidays and New Year to all!

Comedy Is Tragedy Plus Time

by digby

Matt Yglesias wonders why Tom Friedman is speaking in stupid riddles. (If I had a nickel for every time I’ve asked myself that question…)

In this particular case he can’t figure out what Friedman means when he says:

“Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?”

If you answered “Yes,” you would not be allowed to work in Iraq. You could go to Korea, Japan or Germany – but not Iraq. Only those who understand that in the Middle East the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line should be allowed to carry out U.S. policy there. . . .

I have no idea. But when I read it a couple of years ago, I laughed out loud because it immediately reminded me of the Alan Alda character in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” whose line “if it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks it’s not funny,” evokes one of the most hilarious Woody Allen eye rolling reaction shots ever.

Truly, Tom Friedman is one of those utterly pompous, psuedo-intellectual Woody Allen characters who have nothing to say but who obscurely blather on as if their gibberish has some great significance. And because he’s been anointed as a “great thinker” everybody nods their head in agreement because they are afraid they’re missing something so profound it’s above their heads.

Take this one for instance:

So here’s how I feel: I feel as if the president is presenting us with a beautiful carved mahogany table — a big, bold, gutsy vision. But if you look underneath, you discover that this table has only one leg. His bold vision on Iraq is not supported by boldness in other areas. And so I am terribly worried that Mr. Bush has told us the right thing to do, but won’t be able to do it right

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Hookay. If people think the shortest distance to between two points is a table leg, they are bold and gutsy but they should go to Japan, which has very nice mahogany tables. Or something. Seriously, half the time I don’t know what the hell he’s going on about and I’m convinced he doesn’t either.

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