The pardon

Amid all the revisionism, it is good to see one mainstream news source still critical of Ford pardoning Nixon.

Ford will be remembered most for one act: his pardon of Nixon, just one month after the resignation. Ford wanted to govern as the president who led his nation out of the long shadow of Watergate. Yet his ill-timed and ill-considered pardon actually drew the shadow of Watergate over Ford's own presidency, destroying the Republican Party's chances in midterm elections that year and perhaps contributing to Ford's reelection loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

The pardon was a mistake, inconsistent with the fundamental principle that everyone, including the president, is equal before the law. Nixon tried hard to defy that principle and, coming so soon after his resignation, the pardon did the same. Some of those who once criticized Ford's pardon have softened their views over time, arguing that we needed healing and forgiveness. In 1974, however, after so much Nixonian stonewalling and evasiveness, our system of government would have been better served by letting the legal process take its course, no matter how uncertain.

What I’ll always remember about Ford is the supposed sports hero who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time, and the repeated images of him tripping over his own feet.

I will say that he was historical proof that sometimes politicians do in fact pay for their transgressions at the ballot box.

Is Iraq now a regional war?

So apparently the US is sticking by its story on the Iranian military officials arrested in Iraq last week.

The NY Times reported on this Monday; and today in another article, a US military spokesman insisted there was evidence linking them to attacks on coalition forces.

Does this mean that a larger regional war has already started? Or is this an attempt to minimize the possible benefits of direct negotiations with Iran on Iraq? Or perhaps this is part of a larger crackdown on the militas:

The predawn raid on Mr. Hakim’s compound, on the east side of the Tigris, was perhaps the most startling part of the American operation. The arrests were made inside the house of Hadi al-Ameri, the chairman of the Iraqi Parliament’s security committee and leader of the Badr Organization, the armed wing of Mr. Hakim’s political party.

Censor the critics

Here’s an article on how the Bush administration censored an Op-Ed in the NY Times that was critical of the administration’s approach to Iran, on the grounds that it contained classified material.

“There is no plausible claim that this is confidential stuff,” Mr. Leverett said in an interview. “There’s no detail in these paragraphs that has not already been written about by me and other officials.”

They said the draft article called for a new diplomatic approach to relations with Iran and pointed out that the United States had worked fruitfully with Iran after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and in the Afghanistan conflict in 2002.

The authors said the administration did not want that history emphasized when it is resisting pressure to renew contacts with Iran.

. . .

“They don’t want us to say how many opportunities this administration has missed to put relations with Iran on a better track,” Mr. Leverett said.

It’s interesting to see this glimpse of how the Bush administration deals with its critics. No doubt this isn’t unique, but more likely just one small example in a long pattern of behavior.

From Gates, more of the same

Gates is from the same school as those who had us invade Iraq in the first place, so this kind of bullshit should come as no surprise.

As Gates said Monday, “we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for decades to come.”

How much more of a calamity will getting out of Iraq be than it already is? We have already failed. It’s not that there is now a possibility of a future failure or calamity; it already is a calamity. 650,000 dead Iraqis and 25,000 American casualties, including nearly 3,000 dead is a calamity, now we just need to end the ongoing calamity as soon as possible.

Yes we should help work for a political solution in Iraq, but we need to begin a phased withdrawal now.

Conservative attack on government

Here’s a link to an article I liked on The American Prospect online. It’s a good summary on the state of our government now, after six years of our government under GOP control. The Democrats have their work cut out for them.

It is crucial to understand that it’s not merely Republicans’ incompetence or political pandering that has left the government in shambles. Rather, many of their acts of sabotage were premeditated, often hatched in right-wing think tanks. The central if unstated mission of those idea factories, and their leading funders, is to weaken the public sector in order to minimize its capacity to tax and regulate the private sector. But because the general public doesn't actually share conservatism's deep hostility toward government, their most effective tactics rely on subterfuge and operate in ways that can't be easily detected.

. . .

In the case of the tax cuts, the same bogus justifications that failed to come to pass during the Reagan era -- supply-side shibboleths, purported financial benefits for average Americans, a supposed streamlined budget -- were trotted out again to provide cover for the right's actual agenda: paying off wealthy contributors while burying the war-preoccupied government under heaps of debt.

This is the bigger picture of why the American public voted the GOP out of office last November. They are tired of government incompetence like FEMA’s inability to respond to Katrina, Congress’ rubberstamping torture, and being manipulated into a pointless war turned into a fiasco through incompetence.

Will Bush increase troops in Iraq?

Increasing the number of troops in Iraq is a terrible idea, but it would put an end to John McCain’s presidential bid, since it would only be bad for the US in Iraq, would show him wrong once again wrong on Iraq, and then he’d have to flip flop on his Iraq strategy.

We tried increasing the troop levels in Baghdad by 7,000-8,000, which did nothing but increase US casualties; so really 20,000-30,000 more troops would be futile and only serve to prolong the fiasco and the loss of life on both sides. Now by adding 200,000 more troops we might be able to effectively fight the insurgency and start a war with the Mookster and his Mahdi army, but where do we get even 100,000 troops, and how do we justify the added cost even if we could?

A recent poll says that only about 10 percent of the country wants to increase troop levels, and the prevailing view in the military and other experts is that we should get, so why are we even talking about this. Besides, Congress isn’t going to go for it, and they shouldn’t approve increasing the permanent size of the Army and Marines either.

A modern ‘big lie’

This article in Sunday’s Washington Post is really insulting. It begins thus:

Demoralized Republicans adjourned the 109th Congress at 5 a.m. yesterday with a near-empty Capitol, closing the door on a dozen years of nearly unbroken GOP control by spending more time in the final days lamenting their failures -- to rein in government, tame the deficit and temper their own lust for power -- than reliving their successes.

These so-called failures can only be called failures if in fact the GOP was trying to accomplish a goal. Many of the things in this article were never goals of the GOP.

They never wanted to reduce the size of government. The GOP has controlled every branch of our government for the last six years, and they have overseen the largest increase in government bureaucracy since World War II. They don’t want to reduce the size of government, they just wanted to change what it does, and they did that.

It is the same way with government spending. They didn’t want to reduce spending; they wanted to vastly increase it, which they did. They just changed what government was spending money on and where tax revenues were coming from.

And as for tempering their “lust for power” To this class of Republicans, power was and still is an end in itself. There was never any desire to reduce it, so there was no failure. The only failure was in maintaining it permanently as they had envisioned.

And there is no mention of the big Republican triumphs, like bankruptcy reform -- a credit card industry giveaway, and the oil industry giveaways. Really there were too many corporate welfare giveaways to list them all.

But it isn’t all bad:

“You know, the American people took the reins of government away from the Republican Party . . . in this last election. They did so, I think, in large part because they were tired of our hypocrisy,” fumed Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) from the Senate floor.

To me, the hypocrisy is the important point. And here’s another memorable anecdote from Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.):

Wamp had his specific moment, June 27, 2003, when emissaries from the GOP leadership woke him in the middle of the night, pleading with him to change his vote against the Medicare prescription drug bill, the largest entitlement expansion since the creation of Medicare. House leaders kept the vote open more than an hour, setting a record as they twisted arms, threatened and even told one member that political support for his son was at stake.

“It looked like we were in the back pockets of the prescription drug companies, and some of us were,” Wamp said, concluding that Republican leaders had forgotten about conservative principals and cared only for the preservation of power.

But again, he’s lying about what the real “conservative principles” are in order to maintain the paradigm.

The author states that the Republican Congress “expanded the powers of the government to combat terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks” but these powers, like the domestic, warrantless wiretapping and suspension of habeas corpus, are aimed at law-abiding US citizens, not the terrorists in Afghanistan.

It takes reading halfway through the propaganda to finally come to this:

Democrats were harsher -- but only by degrees. Former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) pointed with disdain to former president Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Iraq war, the yawning federal debt, “a complete breakdown on oversight as well as civility,” corruption and a “willingness to cede most of their authority as an equal branch of government” to the Bush administration.

“One would have to search long and hard through history to find a dozen years more disastrous than that,” Daschle said.

And the biggest achievements the author points to, like turning around the Reagan deficits and beginning to reduce the debt, were accomplished under President Clinton, and then reversed under Bush to create the massive debt our children and their children will be paying off for years to come. Could the GOP really have done anything decent on its own?

But even in dealing a blow to the current class of Republicans, the article seeks to maintain the paradigm of what the “real” conservative agenda is; and it’s a lie.

Why not go further?

These remarks from Kofi Annan, the outgoing United Nations Secretary-General, excerpted in the Washington Post from a speech he gave today, are so weak that they really are meaningless.

Why doesn’t he do more to outline a program to reform international institutions to enable them to oppose the US.

His call for a more equitable distribution of Security Council seats is good, but it doesn’t go far enough. How about along with this comes an end to the veto, or a way for a super majority to override a veto? That would be a good start, and Bush would shit his pants.

Sure the American people need to rein in their government’s abuses, but the world community also needs to unite against American hegemony. When its citizens fail to stop their government, then the rest of the world needs to act the way the US would and treat it as what it is, a rogue state, and isolate it and stop it.

How good is this news really?

So is inflation-adjusted income really increasing as the NY Times claims, in this article's lede:

After four years in which pay failed to keep pace with price increases, wages for most American workers have begun rising significantly faster than inflation.

Or is this just more economic propaganda? To me, this is the more important part of the recently-reported wage increases:

If wages rise for only a few months, the current expansion, on the verge of entering its sixth year of growth, would still stand out as an unusually bad one for workers — indeed, the only one since World War II without a sustained pay increase.

In the third quarter, which included the early weeks of the recent pay increases, the share of the nation’s economic output going to workers’ pay and benefits fell to its lowest level in 40 years, according to the Commerce Department.

Further, the average hourly wage for a worker in a nonmanagerial position, $16.91 an hour in October, was about the same as it was in 2003 when inflation is taken into account.

What this article actually says is that the recent temporary decrease in the price of oil is what has caused inflation-adjusted wages to increase, since it’s really just that inflation has decreased, not that there has been a major increase in wages.

The article also tells us that that “income inequality” is decreasing but the statistics it cites actually say the opposite; that income of those “workers near the bottom of the wage scale” (note these aren’t the “poorest” workers) rose 0.1 percent, but that income of the top 10 percent rose at 0.4 percent. That sounds like increasing inequality to me, though apparently not as quickly as it has been increasing. And what about those poorest 10 percent of workers? They don't matter? Or do they just not fit into the Times’ nice equation, and they really haven't seen any increase? There’s no mention of them:

After years of sharply rising income inequality, the recent rise in wages also appears to be increasing pay for both rich and poor. From July through September, the inflation-adjusted hourly pay of workers near the bottom of the wage scale — those making less than 90 percent of all workers but more than the worst-off 10 percent — rose 0.1 percent.

That compares with 0.4 percent wage growth for those close to the top, those making more than 9 out of 10 other workers, according to an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute. Wage growth for both groups is likely to pick up in the final quarter of the year.

It’s also interesting that apparently the head of the Federal Reserve considers even this small increase in real wages a bad thing that should be halted through an increase in interest rates, so that American workers really can never get ahead.

Wages have risen so swiftly that some economists worry that they could push inflation up on their own, by forcing companies to raise prices. Last week, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, warned that the central bank might have to raise interest rates again. “One factor that we are watching carefully is labor costs,” he said.

So in this formulation American workers are never intended to get ahead. Apparently only the ultra rich can get ahead in today’s America as we have seen.

Group releases its much-hyped report

Of course the Iraq Study Group is about providing political cover for the Bush administration and Congress, who dragged this country to war and so screwed it up. So it is no surprise that there are no radical recommendations here.

My favorite parts of the Iraq Study Group Report are Recommendations 22 and 23.

RECOMMENDATION 22: The President should state that the United States does not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. If the Iraqi government were to request a temporary base or bases, then the U.S. government could consider that request as it would in the case of any other government.

RECOMMENDATION 23: The President should restate that the United States does not seek to control Iraq’s oil.

More than a mere statement on Recommendation 23, the President, this country and its corporations should be forbidden from taking any part in Iraq’s oil economy.

I know, these recommendations are kind of obvious, but this is what the Iraq war is about: Iraq’s oil, and controlling it with permanent US military bases. Once it is clear that there will be no permanent bases and no oil, then from Bush’s perspective there is no national interest or military objective, and “stay the course” and “indefinite” US military presence are no longer relevant policy options; and we will be free to begin withdrawing and redeploying our forces. When we remove the Bush Administration’s interests from the Iraq equation, then maybe we can start looking at the Iraqi’s interests, the region’s interests and the world’s interests.

RECOMMENDATION 72: Costs for the war in Iraq should be included in the President’s annual budget request, starting in FY 2008: the war is in its fourth year, and the normal budget process should not be circumvented. Funding requests for the war in Iraq should be presented clearly to Congress and the American people. Congress must carry out its constitutional responsibility to review budget requests for the war in Iraq carefully and to conduct oversight.

This is another no-brainer. The next time our government wants to go to start a war and invade another country, they should fund it the same way a local government pays for a new school: a bond measure should be put before the voters that says, “Do you want to raise your income tax by 3 percent for the next 20 years in order to pay for our country’s war and imperial aspirations in Iran?”

What are your favorite parts of the report?

Ghost from Gates’ past

Slate had a good article and linked to some interesting documents (scroll down to Documents 6 a-c) from the Iran-Contra affair.

Because of his involvement in Iran-Contra, and his position in favor of US air strikes against Nicaragua, Gates should not be confirmed as the Secretary of Defense. Although he was never indicted, he should have been for breaking a law Congress specifically passed to stop the funding of the Contra rebels.

The Senate needs to use any means necessary to make Bush reach beyond his small group of loyal cronies and appoint someone who is acceptable to the people of this country to be their Secretary of Defense. The people spoke resoundingly in this past election, and they want a change of policy and a change of direction from their government, and Gates can’t be trusted to give them that.