The newest president for life?

I guess this is how you go from what his supporters would call a maverick reformer to a dictator. If Chavez has the support of congress, why not just let them rubber stamp his reforms? Just like Bush did for the six years prior to the last election; then you retain a nominal democracy.

In its latest draft, the law would allow Chavez to dictate measures for 18 months in 11 broad areas, from the "economic and social sphere" to the "transformation of state institutions."

Some may want to wait and see if he gives up his new power in 18 months, but this doesn’t look like a positive development.

To me, this move backs his critics in the US who will insist that the jury is in, and Chavez is just another dictator, now off his meds.

Can we really call ourselves a civilized society?

It’s stuff like this that makes me think that maybe there really isn’t any hope for this country. This isn’t just some whacked out Bush administration action that can be written off as one lunatic’s obsession; it’s a whole community--a government and its population apparently going along with it.

The city of Miami is planning an official celebration at the Orange Bowl whenever Cuban president Fidel Castro dies.

Discussions by a committee appointed earlier this month by the city commission to plan the event have even covered issues such as a theme to be printed on T-shirts, what musicians would perform, the cost and how long the celebration would last.

I along with probably every American was appalled by news reports of people “dancing in the streets” in places like Baghdad and Gaza after the 9/11 attacks, but as disturbing as these were, they were not government sponsored and in reality were later noted as more scattered incidents than mass demonstrations. So sure, if a few callous, obsessed individuals want to celebrate a national leader’s death, then who’s to stop them, but an organized, state-supported event?

Nixon was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Southeast Asia, and yet I don’t recall organized, state celebrations in Berlin, Paris, or Hanoi. And yet the media treats this as a natural and inevitable and even justified event. It’s truly shameful, for Miami, for the media, and for this country.

Terrorist haven?

So Pakistan says it isn’t harboring Taliban and Al Qaeda elements, but here’s a fact from USA Today that is a little hard to overlook:

But in a sign that insurgents are crossing from Pakistan to fight in Afghanistan, the bodies of 25 militants killed in a fierce battle with NATO were repatriated Friday to their tribal villages in Pakistan, where Taliban activists urged mass attendance at their funerals, residents said.

I’m not suggesting we should add Pakistan to the list of countries we are at war with, but the facts on the ground need to be recognized, and they need to be pressured diplomatically, and we shouldn’t just be blindly supporting Musharraf.

The truth is that we never had proof that bin Laden was in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. He may have been in Pakistan then and he may still be there now.

More on the escalation

Some interesting things have come up lately regarding the Iraq escalation and a likely alternate explanation for the escalation. Is the military simply forward positioning military resources for an attack against Iran? The NY Times has a piece with this quote:

“The administration does have Iran on the brain, and I think they are exaggerating the amount of Iranian activities in Iraq,” Kenneth M. Pollack, the director of research at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, said Sunday. “There’s a good chance that this is going to be counterproductive — that this is a way to get into a spiral with Iran that leads you into conflict. The likely response from the Iranians is that they are going to want to demonstrate to us that they are not going to be pushed around.”

. . .

Yet American officials have been careful not to rule out the possibility of American actions inside Iran. Pressed on the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday about excluding the option of going after Iranians inside Iran, Mr. Hadley said that for now, Iraq was “the best place” for the United States to take on the Iranians.

“So, you don’t believe you have the authority to go into Iran?” the host, George Stephanopoulos, asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Mr. Hadley responded. “This is another issue. Any time you have questions about crossing international borders, there are legal issues.”

And The Guardian had this from an interview with Robert Gates from a report on a NATO meeting:

The defence secretary, Robert Gates, told reporters that the decision to deploy a Patriot missile battalion and a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf in conjunction with a “surge” of troops in Iraq was designed to show Iran that the US was not “overcommitted” in Iraq.

So this could be interpreted as posturing or it could simply be preparation for an attack against Iran. And I might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, if I didn't know what this Administration was capable of.

Escalation

Obviously the Democrats should do everything they can to stop the escalation and redeploy our forces out of Iraq, and this is clearly what the vast majority of the American public wants. So why does the Washington Post insist on pushing the notion that this would be politically bad for the Democrats, when all of the evidence at hand points to the opposite: that the Democrats will pay the price if they don’t end the war?

The bold plans reflect the Democrats' belief that the public has abandoned Bush on the war and that the American people will have little patience for an escalation of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. But the moves carry clear risks for a party that suffered politically for pushing to end an unpopular war in Vietnam three decades ago, and Democratic leaders hope to avoid a similar fate over the conflict in Iraq.

What the fuck is the Post talking about? How exactly did the Democrats pay politically for opposing the Vietnam War? They didn’t. They won big in Congress in 1974, and they won the Presidency in 1976. But this is how the mainstream media operates.

And the headline for this article in the NY Times should be “Democrats and Republicans plan to fight expansion of troops,” since it quotes three Republican senators who appear to be aligning themselves with the Democratic position.

Minimum Wage

Thanks to Media Matters for debunking some popular minimum wage myths.

“Claims that an increase to the minimum wage will help few people and hurt the overall economy aren't supported by fact,” said Karl Frisch, spokesman for Media Matters for America. “Hopefully members of the media will think twice before reporting on or using these bogus arguments without noting just how questionable, misleading and false they truly are.”

Read the article. It's short, but has a lot of good numbers.

Um . . . how many wars are we going to start?

The Associated Press reports that the US has conducted air strikes against Somalia.

U.S. helicopter gunships launched new attacks Tuesday against suspected al-Qaida members, a Somali official said, a day after American forces launched airstrikes in the first offensive in the African country since 18 U.S. troops were killed there in 1993.

The latest attacks killed at least 27 civilians in the town of Afmadow in southern Somalia, lawmaker Abdiqadir Daqane told The Associated Press.

And we are moving forces away from Afghanistan, where we already don’t have enough to support the war we started there.

The U.S. Central Command reassigned the [aircraft carrier] Eisenhower to Somalia last week from its mission supporting NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, said U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown in Bahrain, where the Navy's Fifth Fleet is based.

Tax cuts

The NY Times has a good article on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the effects of the Bush and GOP’s tax cuts.

Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study.

The study, by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, also shows that tax rates for middle-income earners edged up in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available, while rates for people at the very top continued to decline.

Based on an exhaustive analysis of tax records and census data, the study reinforced the sense that while Mr. Bush’s tax cuts reduced rates for people at every income level, they offered the biggest benefits by far to people at the very top — especially the top 1 percent of income earners.

. . .

Tax cuts were much deeper, and affected far more money, for families in the highest income categories. Households in the top 1 percent of earnings, which had an average income of $1.25 million, saw their effective individual tax rates drop to 19.6 percent in 2004 from 24.2 percent in 2000. The rate cut was twice as deep as for middle-income families, and it translated to an average tax cut of almost $58,000.

. . .

The report shows that a comparatively small number of very wealthy households account for a very big share of total tax payments, and their share increased in the first four years after Mr. Bush’s tax cuts.

In other words, for the middle class, it is bad and getting worse. Also, this study didn’t take into account payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, which would have made things look much worse.

Iraqi oil contracts

This article was in The Independent on Sunday. Talk of this has been going on for some time, but apparently the Iraqi parliament is ready to pass a law

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals.

This is what the war is all about.

More on Ford

Here are a couple of articles on Ford from Slate.com.

First are some more reasons why Ford shouldn’t have pardoned Nixon:

No new information has emerged during the past 32 years that makes Ford's pardon to Nixon look any more justifiable; indeed, what facts have dribbled forth make it seem less so.

. . .

The pardon may have had the long-term effect of tamping down partisan warfare between Democrats and Republicans over a possible criminal trial (obstruction of justice would have been the likeliest charge), but when a Republican short-circuits prosecution of a fellow Republican, you can't call that bipartisanship.

. . .

Why was Ford wrong to pardon Nixon? Mainly because it set a bad precedent. Nixon had not yet been indicted, let alone convicted, of any crime. It's never a good idea to pardon somebody without at least finding out first what you're pardoning him for. How can you possibly weigh the quality of mercy against considerations of justice? Yet it would happen again in December 1992, when departing President George H.W. Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger, former defense secretary, 12 days before Weinberger was set to go to trial for perjury. As I've noted before, this was almost certainly done to prevent evidence concerning Bush's own involvement in Iran-contra (when he was vice-president) from becoming public. The final report from Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh called it "the first time a President ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness," but in fact it was the second. Ford's motive was less self-protective, but, as Slate's Christopher Hitchens notes here, it had the same effect of shutting down further investigation into illegal activities.

Christopher Hitchens, whom I am no great fan of, catalogues some of the mistakes and attrocities he was able to accomplish in two short years. For example:

In December 1975, Ford was actually in the same room as Gen. Suharto of Indonesia when the latter asked for American permission to impose Indonesian military occupation on East Timor. Despite many denials and evasions, we now possess the conclusive evidence that Ford (and his deputy Kissinger) did more than simply nod assent to this outrageous proposition. They also undertook to defend it from criticism in the United States Congress and elsewhere. From that time forward, the Indonesian dictatorship knew that it would not lack for armaments or excuses, both of these lavishly supplied from Washington. The figures for civilian deaths in this shameful business have never been properly calculated, but may well amount to several hundred thousand and thus more than a quarter of East Timor's population.