Rock-star philosopher on our election

Bernard-Henri Levy is a French philosopher and writer. If we were French, apparently we would know of him. Here in the United States, we are only likely to perhaps have encountered his controversial book Who Killed Daniel Pearl? or his American Vertigo : Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, a journalistic encounter with contemporary U.S. democracy and society. In the last year, he's been lecturing on a phenomenon he calls "the new global anti-semitism."

Not too surprisingly given his current preoccupations, he's recently published his thoughts about the U.S. campaign in The New Republic. The article is thought provoking. There are assertions that immediately remind one that this is a remote observer -- he simply gets things wrong. McCain is absolutely not "surprising in his opposition to torture and Guantanamo..." When push came to shove, McCain came right around to supporting Bush's weakening of military prohibitions on torture. And no one really on top of the campaign would ask: "When will the below-the-belt stuff begin? On what Internet site will the first photomontages appear of Barack Obama tricked up as a radical Islamist?" That garbage has been out there for months.

Nonetheless, Levy makes a couple of assertions that seem to me worth thinking about.

Unlike, say, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or Condoleezza Rice, [Obama] does not carry with him the heritage of slavery or the memory of segregation because he was born of a Kenyan father. The difference is enormous, because the mirror he holds up to America is no longer one that reflects those dark times, no longer one of unbearable ancestral culpability. Barack Obama can win because he is the first African-American to take, by the grace of his birth, a step away from the two sides of a deep divide--and the first who may now play the card--not of condemnation or damnation--but of seduction, and--as he says over and over--of reconciliation.

However much Obama and his campaign may want us to put it aside, the U.S. history of racism -- our peculiar, particular structure of white supremacy -- will shape this campaign. The first Black man to get a serious shot at the Presidency necessarily navigates a minefield of fears and hopes. That we don't see him doing this doesn't mean the racial hazards aren't there -- it just means Obama has been, so far, supremely good at overcoming surface-level prejudices with inspiration. Levy may be onto something in pointing out that it is the immediateness of his African roots, having a father from a newly post-colonial, independent state, that allows him to leap past rather than confront directly the hurdle of historic white guilt. Of course he is a Black man in this United States, so he also knows, and is careful not to arouse, the deeper-level racial animus that could be let loose by a false move. We are seeing a virtuoso racial tightrope performance and cheering the guy while holding our breath at his boldness.

The other Levy tidbit that bears some consideration:

America has changed. ... one could also... see the shock and desperate mobilization of an America that knows it is dying but is trying nonetheless to delay the moment when it realizes it must surrender.

Levy doesn't explicate this further. He seems to be a man on a mission to develop a U.S. audience to go with his French one; perhaps he doesn't want to alienate the customers?

Here's what I think this means: the current campaign does show that there is a considerable mass of people in this country who know something has to give. The country isn't working for too many people. Ruling the empire by force isn't working. It looks as if pretty soon the planet will stop working. Obama says "change" and masses of us attach our sense of unease to the "hope" he offers. Levy and Obama have spotted a genuine cultural current and Obama may well ride it to the Presidency. Levy thinks he will.

Will this movement that Obama now rides, though it is not of his making nor will he necessarily be able to master it, carry us anywhere we want to go? That might be still up for grabs. Obama needn't be the only one grabbing the potential energy we feel on the knife edge between hope and terror. We live in interesting times.

Heart breaking lawlessness,Heart warming calls for justice

Finally, at long last, discussions are breaking out all over about how to bring to justice some of the people who instigated and abetted in the U.S. torture regime. Here's an "expert" opinion.

Human-rights organizations and foreign prosecutors are building databases on U.S. officials involved in activities considered violations under international law. It may be only a matter of time before indictments are drawn up for the arrests of targeted Americans when they travel abroad.

Milt Bearden,
The Washington Independent,
July 1, 2008

Milt Bearden served as senior manager for clandestine operations in the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

Patrick Noonan is a citizen who wrote a Letter to the Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. He cries out against torture.

Editor - As human beings, it's important to forgive President Bush for his policies which resulted in the abuse and torture of prisoners of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as citizens of a good and great country, it's important that we ask for some consequences for those responsible for breaking international law and American law and laws of just plain common decency. ...

Meanwhile, publication of British lawyer and international law professor Phillip Sands' Torture Team: Rumsfeld's memo and the betrayal of American values helped tease out this from Larry Wilkerson, a former army officer and chief of staff to Colin Powell:

"Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."

Guardian UK,
April 19, 2008

Yes -- the lawyers must be made accountable.

And this week, Jane Mayer's The Dark Side apparently will provide further documentation of crimes via the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"[T]he Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"

Glenn Greenwald

It's all torture all the time in Bush's neighborhood. Can those "highest officials" ever be brought to some kind of justice?

Friday cat bloggingIn which she looks contented

Really, that's how she looks when happy. It's wearing sometimes.

Panic receding

Apparently, despite the howls of restrictionists like Lou Dobbs, we're calming down about immigration. The Gallup organization reports a poll showing that the percentage of U.S. citizens favoring cutbacks in immigration has fallen from 58 percent immediately after 9/11, to 45 percent last year, and only 39 percent this year. Moreover, 64 percent of us think that immigration is a good thing for the country -- and only 27 percent expect that immigration issues will be "extremely important" in how they vote in November.


In fact, for all the screaming, broad opinion trends have pretty much reverted to where they stood in 2000 -- except the number wishing for more avenues for legal immigration seems to have risen from about 12 to 18 percent.

And despite the stuttering economy, fully 79 percent think immigrants "take low-paying jobs that Americans don't want," up from 74 percent two years ago. It doesn't look as if most people are clamoring for more I.C.E. raids, checkpoints on roads and in bus stations, and mass deportations. Somebody tell the Bush Administration.

One reason the aggregate numbers appear more friendly to immigrants than past polls is simply the growing size of the Latino segment of the U.S. population. While majorities of whites and blacks think immigrants "cost U.S. taxpayers too much," fully 65 percent of Latinos insist immigrants "pay their fair share."

Our lawless surveillance state

So our Senators have ripped up our Constitutional protections against being searched on some bureaucratic snooper's say-so. (And remember, the snooper's view of the world is too often closer to Dick Cheney's than yours or mine.) That's really what the new verion of the FISA law they just passed does with our phone and email communications.

And yes, our champion of hope and change, Senator Obama, didn't care enough to lift a finger to stop it. He just wants all the noisy defenders of civil liberty to shut up and walk precincts for him. And many of us will, a testament to the tyranny of the two party system.

The wholesale destruction of our presumption of individual privacy for our opinions, foibles, and habits is happening for two reasons.

• It has become extremely cheap and easy to snoop. Electronic data can be swept up in enormous volume and stored and analyzed at very little cost to the sweeper. Our phones report our whereabouts through their GPS function; visual records of us on thousands of surveillance cameras more and more can be studied electronically without human labor. And if all else fails, they can track us by satellite.

• We never had to devise legal protections from this level of grab bag surveillance because such measures used to be to be beyond the capacity of people who want to sell us things or government agencies. Our privacy relied on the difficulty of breaching it. No more.

If we don't like the emerging Lawless Surveillance State (in Glenn Greenwald's excellent formulation), we're in a for a prolonged struggle. I believe this struggle is vital to the survival of a quasi-democratic society.

First, we need to make it understandable what we are fighting for. This is not easy. Technological change has made forms of surveillance once literally unimaginably now easy and feasible. We have to help people understand what is going on, that something they never thought possible is happening.

As well, we have to cut through the fear -- "but there are terrorists under the bed." There might be terrorists somewhere (though probably not under the bed) but that can't be allowed to justify sweeping up everything about everybody. Might as well hand the country over to the terrorists if we're all to be treated as suspect until cleared by the spooks.

This set of tasks, those that involve defining the problem and cutting through the fear, are, mostly, tasks that relate to an older generation of folks. This isn't entirely about chronological age -- it's about folks stuck in mindsets that were once rational and have become dangerous to liberty. Both an awareness that everything about our lives can be an open book and that this country, so isolated by its oceans and history, could be subject to foreign-based terrorist attacks are wildly new and dissonant ideas to lots of us who've lived awhile. Something did change after 9/11 -- authoritarians won license to curtail our historic freedoms.

That goes, especially I think, for many of our lawmakers. On this subject, a Diane Feinstein (or even more a computer-illiterate John McCain) is simply stupid, utterly without relevant understanding of what's at stake when they gut civil liberties. (And yes, they might also be more than a little ready to do favors for the companies that pay for their campaigns.) Building a fight against the lawless surveillance state has an element that is analogous to what an old (chronologically) friend of mine once said about achieving gay marriage: "Some people are going to have to die off." There are people, heavily represented in Congress, who are never going to understand what is happening in this arena. We have to replace them. And we, and the passage of time, will replace them.

There's a further obstacle to fighting the lawless surveillance state: more informed people's resignation and cynicism. The more technically savvy among us, often younger people, take for granted that they give away a lot of privacy in order to play with their tech toys -- and either don't mind losing their privacy or don't think having the world know their innermost souls and habits can hurt them. I get this -- I live it and I like my toys. It's all too easy on this side of the digital divide to believe that "resistance is futile."

Those of us who live inside this new world of easy surveillance aren't going to really understand what has gone wrong until we see or experience abuses ourselves. It won't always be somebody over there -- some hapless foreigner, some powerless brown person, some drug trafficker -- on the wrong end of unregulated government snooping. True stories of abuse will leak out -- and those of us in the electronic arena will amplify those stories. The snoops will pick the wrong target. Or they'll just plain do something dumb as they did in the cases the telecoms got thrown out today; plaintiffs' lawyers were sent transcripts of illegal wiretaps for which no warrants existed.

Building a movement for civil liberties that fits the contemporary lawless surveillance state is not going to be the work of a few months or even years. Remedies need to be envisioned that take into account the new, enormous, and cheap capacity for privacy invasions that technology has brought us. Both Canada and the European Union have something like "privacy officials" whose mandate is prevent abusive surveillance. Maybe there is something in that approach, rather than trying to reinstate warrants. I don't know -- these are things we'll learn by political struggle and in the doing.

It's good to know that some semi-establishment voices are already denouncing the surveillance regime, for example this New York Times editorial.

The magnitude of the threat to individual autonomy is so great that the very terrain of the fight will of necessity change. What now appear unlikely coalitions will make sense because we are confronting something new. Specifically, I'm going to have to work in cooperation with libertarians, though as I said the other day, I think the way they understand a good society is crackpot.


The always excellent Glenn Greenwald has made a start on building a movement to bring the lawless surveillance state back under legal limits -- not surprisingly, it is called "Strange Bedfellows." Click on the graphic about to explore that project.

And even after betrayal on FISA, we have to keep kicking back -- that's what free people do.

Remember Europe?

Bush talks with Medvedev (AP Photo/Kimimasa Mayama, POOL)

Let's see -- the U.S. has two wars going on and is losing both of them. In addition, it looks as if India and Pakistan might be about to fight a low intensity battle in the middle of one of those wars. And in between these combatants, we're threatening a knockout blow we can't deliver against the country that has gained the most from these ill-advised adventures.

So what does our regime do? Open some more fronts, apparently. The arc of conflict running from Egypt through Afghanistan presents so many horrors, that here in the U.S. we've largely looked away from what the Bush Administration is doing in Europe. Bad idea -- those people need all the surveillance we can muster.

For starters, this week Bush met the recently installed new Russian President (who may just be a stooge for the previous President, Vladimir Putin.) Our boy is at it again, trying to get a read on the new Russian, Dmitry Medvedev. He's a little more cautious than he was when he first encountered Putin, "looked into his soul," and pronounced him trustworthy. But only a little more.

I'm not going to sit here and psychoanalyze the man, but I will tell you that he's very comfortable, he's confident, and that I believe that when he tells me something, he means it."

Detroit Free Press,
July 8, 2008

Uh oh -- Bush thinks he knows what's going on again, always very dangerous.

Meanwhile, Condoleeza Rice is in the Czech Republic signing an agreement to stick part of an anti-missile system there. Thing is, the Russians feel threatened by having a U.S. radar installation parked on their doorstep.

Russia has said it will be forced to react with military means if the US and Czech Republic go ahead with plans for a missile shield.

The statement came hours after the US signed an initial deal to base part of Washington's controversial missile defence system in the Czech Republic.

BBC,
July 8, 2008

It's hard not to get the impression that the Russians are seriously pissed off by this Bush move.

And they aren't the only ones. Most Czechs don't want to play the role of Washington's advance base against Russia.

"Do not make a target of us," proclaimed the banner at Letna hill overlooking the Czech capital ...

Polls regularly show around two-thirds of Czech opposed to hosting the US radar. A survey by the CVVM agency published this month showed 68 percent opposed to the US radar.

AFP,
July 8, 2008

Meanwhile, Bush reminded Medvedev that though he may have only six months left in office, he is "sprinting toward the finish." Uh oh.

FISA passage delayed

Jesse Helms finally did something for his country. Die.

The Senate will postpone until Wednesday votes on an overhaul of electronic surveillance law for lawmakers who want to attend Tuesday’s funeral of former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., said Monday.

Congressional Quarterly

Won't make any difference in the long run if passage of FISA shreds the Fourth Amendment a day later, but it's nice to know the old racist was good for something.

UPDATE: Jesse's still persecuting the principled.

RALEIGH - L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours' delay, one of Eason's employees hung the flags at half-staff. ...

Eason, who had worked for the Agriculture Department since graduating from college, was paid $65,235 a year as the laboratory manager.

The News and Observer

Let's poll ourselves

Let's play here. Let's poll ourselves. Today the AP released their summation of what people answered when asked for their off-the-top, one-word description of the Presidential candidates.

...one in five say "change" or "outsider" for Barack Obama and "old" for John McCain

Okay, what do you say?

I think "slick" for Obama and "phony" for McCain. Drop your quick reactions in comments if you wish.
***

I'm not surprised that my immediate reaction to both these guys is skeptical. According to The Political Compass quiz, I'm close to off the charts on both economic leftism and attachment to liberty. Actually, I'm so far off their charts that I think their axes are crackpot: I believe individual freedom is only possible in the context of relative economic equity. Anything less is just self-serving bullshit. But like I said, I'm off the charts.

You can see where our Presidential candidates rank on this scale here.

Obama as a scary Muslim

Obama preaching at Apostolic Church of God, Chicago. June 15, 2008. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP

Lately I've noticed one of the most popular search threads that draws people to this blog is "why not to vote for Obama". People who go to the link find a snark post about the phony story that the Democratic candidate is a Muslim.

A diary at Dailykos gave me a more nuanced idea of how the "Obama is a Muslim" rumor works. DeanDemocrat describes a tiresome coworker he was stuck with for several years. The guy was a rightwinger and a completely unimaginative bore. But DeanDemocrat worked on the guy. And he made some progress in 2004:

The Democrats were getting some serious press coverage with their many many debates and at one point for some reason Al Sharpton was in the news. I think it was because he criticized a speech Bill Cosby gave about Blacks and more specifically inner city youth. And if I am remembering correctly Sharpton was pissed. Ed of course agreed with Bill Cosby, and made a racist remark about Al Sharpton. I countered with something about how electing a black President might help knock down some of the barriers young blacks see standing between them and being successful.

It was then Ed said something interesting. He said and I quote "I would vote for someone like Bill Cosby in a heart beat. But never Al Sharpton." that made me think Ed wasn't racist he was just really really conservative and Sharpton rubbed him the wrong way.

Not too long after, Ed quit and DeanDemocrat didn’t have to think about him until he ran into him recently. Curious, he raised the topic of Obama's Father's Day speech in which he held up the responsibility African America adults should take for young Blacks in the inner city, much as Bill Cosby had. Ed agreed that Obama had said something he could agree with.

Called Obama "A classy guy, smart, charming, a once in a lifetime candidate." He said he'd never seen a politician who so plainly stood out as an obvious leader. He even said he'd make a good President. Reminded him of Bill Cosby.

... So I asked if he was going to vote for Obama. He said no. I asked why. He said 'I heard he's a Muslim.'

... And thats when I realized Ed isn't simply a moron. He is a racist. And a cowardly one at that. Fully aware that racial discrimination is no longer acceptable in polite society he's instead clinging to the Muslim rumors as nothing more than an excuse. He could find no reason not to vote for the Black guy so he invented one. As if not voting for someone because they're Muslim is somehow more acceptable than not voting for someone because they're Black.

This story made me wonder about the people who search for "why not to vote for Obama." Are they people who can't say, to others or even to themselves, that they won't vote for the scary Black man, who are looking for cover? I suspect some of them are.

Think where that leaves U.S. Muslims.

FISA sidelight

It's an ugly business, the determination of an apparent majority of Democrats in the Senate to legalize grab bag electronic snooping permanently and to immunize telecommunications companies that did it on GWB's say-so. Even uglier, is Senator Obama's retreat from his strong assertions last fall and winter that he wouldn't be a party to trashing our Constitutional protections against being searched without a court process.

But the FISA fight has thrown up one unexpectedly creditable actor, Federal District Judge Vaughan R. Walker in whose court the lawsuits are being heard that would force the telecoms to reveal what they did. In the course of these lawsuits, Walker has ruled 1) that the companies could not reasonably have believed that what they were doing didn't violate FISA as it then existed and that 2) the Government can't claim on unsupported assertion that allowing the suits to proceed will violate a "state secrets" privilege. Those are actually quite radical repudiations of the Bushie's power grabs. Glenn Greenwald explains the intricacies here.

Walker should be a familiar name to progressive San Franciscans. When Daddy Bush appointed him in 1988, civil rights advocates were up in arms and we did our feeble best to prevent his confirmation. In too recent memory, as a partner in the corporate law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, Walker had carried, and won, the copyright infringement case the United States Olympic Committee brought against the "Gay Olympics." No matter that the USOC had never moved against the Nebraska Rat Olympics or the Police Olympics. Queers were not to sully the good name of the sporting event.

And Walker wasn't just a dispassionate advocate for his client. We were particularly distressed when the USOC sought a damage lien against the house of Dr. Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Olympics and a U.S. decathlete in the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Waddell died of AIDS in 1987. The "Gay Games" has since served to humanize LGBT people in five more quadrennial versions. It's now a fine international party.

Back then, lots of us loathed Walker.

''I think his lack of compassion and inhumanity and coerciveness certainly disqualify him from consideration for the Federal judiciary,'' said Mary Dunlap, a San Francisco lawyer who opposed Mr. Walker in the Olympics case.

New York Times,
January 14, 1988

Nobody paid much attention to outraged queers and friends in those days.

And Walker has gone on to become an interesting judge with an independent streak. Would that more judicial appointees showed his fiber.

It's a great country

Michelangelo meets Dr. Seuss for the glorious Fourth. Spotted in Vineyard Haven, Mass.

Is ad too true to life?

This is kind of fun. Marc Ambinder suggests

Unless I'm mistaken, the woman whose hand McCain shakes is wearing an Obama tee-shirt.

Maybe. You do have to wonder what she is carrying that obscures the shirt.

But what gets me is the expression on the face of the guy watching her shake that pasty old guy's hand. What you doing with him? he seems to be thinking.

You can see the entire McCain ad here.

Sanctuary panic sells

Really, I'm sympathetic to the San Francisco Chronicle's need to sell newspapers. And all I have to do is pick one up to know the familiar birdcage liner is in trouble. It's shrunk to a sliver of its former self.

But I could sure do without its periodic campaigns to demonize someone or something in order to attract attention. Last summer it took aim at the 200 or so of San Francisco's homeless people who take refuge in Golden Gate Park. Day after day, a columnist bashed the campers and the authorities who didn't remove them.

This week, the Chron found a juicy target in the city's sanctuary ordinance and the slightly dopey measures city officials have taken to comply with it.

What's a "Sanctuary" law? It's a promise to undocumented immigrants that local authorities won't turn them over to immigration police unless absolutely required to do so by law. As recently as April, San Francisco pols were proud of how San Francisco enforced its ordinance. From the mayor's website:

In 1989, San Francisco passed the "City of Refuge" Ordinance (Sanctuary Ordinance) which prohibits City employees from helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with immigration investigations or arrests unless such help is required by federal or state law or a warrant. The Ordinance is rooted in the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980’s, when churches across the country provided refuge to Central Americans fleeing civil wars in their countries.

In February 2007, Mayor Newsom reaffirmed San Francisco’s commitment to immigrant communities by issuing an Executive Order that called on City departments to develop protocol and training on the Sanctuary Ordinance.

The Sanctuary Ordinance helps to maintain the stability of San Francisco communities. It keeps communities safe by making sure all residents feel comfortable calling the Police and Fire Departments during emergencies. It keeps families and workforce healthy by providing safe access to schools, clinics and other City services.

"As a Sanctuary City, San Francisco has and will continue to provide compassionate services to all immigrants, regardless of status," said Supervisor Ammiano. "When certain people are targeted and denied access to vital social services, the health and safety of the entire city is compromised."

That all sounds pretty sensible and probably most of us here agreed -- until the Chron broke the news that the city was dealing with undocumented Honduran juveniles picked up for dealing crack by flying them home at city expense. Hmmm. That does seem a little wacky. And now mayors, and juvie bureaucrats, and the U.S. Attorney, and judges are all throwing around this hot potato in a desperate attempt to leave someone holding responsibility for the (now ended) policy. It's hard to blame the Chron for having some fun with this.

However, as is often the case, our elected Public Defender Jeff Adachi made one the few sensible responses to the revelation:

"We see these children as children. The law states that we must act in the best interest of the child. These are not cookie-cutter situations. Most come from very poor families, in some cases very repressive countries."

Wouldn't want to take context into account when we're in a panic, now would we? ***


Meanwhile, out in the 'hood, tenacious folks from Brigada Contra Las Redadas (Brigades Against the Ice Raids) were holding a sign outside the Police Station at 17th and Valencia yesterday afternoon. They live in another reality. Out here, according to their flyer:

Swarms of police suddenly appear to attack street vendors, youth on street corners...arresting people because they "look like" they are criminals or don't move quickly enough.

The I.C.E.-MIGRA police are allowed twice a week to arrest undocumented immigrants in SF. Then they can be deported.... because San Francisco is not really a "Sanctuary City".

Somehow, I bet real life is a little more like this for most of our undocumented workforce than it is like the Chron's picture of a foolish, "illegal"-coddling paradise.

But I don't have to sell papers.

A Republican ask

What the caller wanted ...

My mother got a call from the national Republican Campaign Committee this evening, seeking a contribution to help John McCain prevent the Democrats from doing all those terrible things Democrats do. The call didn't do the Reps much good, since mother has been dead for nine years.

But it had interesting aspects. Curious, I chatted with the caller, neglecting to disabuse him of the idea that he was talking with Mother.

• He referred to Obama's party as "Democratic." I was surprised. I thought the proper usage was "Democrat."

• He sounded old. Really old. Now perhaps that was appropriate targeting, given that my mother would have been 99 if she were still living. But I had to wonder, are they dragging old men in off the street to make fundraising calls? Is our economy that bad, that elderly gents need to work in call centers?

• Nothing in his accent or diction suggested he was anything but a white bread sort of guy. Most polling calls I get these days, the interviewers sound African American or perhaps foreign born. I guess that wouldn't work for Republican cash calls.
  

• Most surprisingly, this caller was not a professional. He could barely get through the script. He was so inept, I wondered if he was a raw volunteer. I'd be surprised if the national Republican Party was using volunteers for fundraising calls. That means they really do need the money.

He didn't sound unduly surprised when I told him I'd be voting for Senator Obama. Must be a tough job.

Mr Weathervane feels a breeze Wants to blow it at Obama

"...acknowledging changed ideas in response to changed facts is considered a failing by the political class."

George Packer,
July 2008

I guess Packer is making his claim for full membership in the political class here. Packer needs approval for his changing ideas -- after all, he's been an Olympian weathervane on the war since it was just a gleam in Dick Cheney's evil eye. At first, Packer liked the idea of Iraq invasion. Then it got ugly and he got cold feet. Now things are a little quieter, at least momentarily for those Iraqis who are still around. No use talking about the one million dead ones and the 4-5 million forced from their homes. So he likes it again. He's telling Obama to weasel out of his promise to end the war, to be a good little boy who serves the U.S. imperial purpose.

Oh, Packer was nuanced about the war way back then. He didn't trust the Bushies and the neocons, but he sure liked the idea of the United States laying down the law in other people's countries.

To invade Iraq without immediate provocation is wrong and dangerous; to allow Saddam to threaten his own people, his neighbors, and us is wrong and dangerous; to lift sanctions strengthens him; to leave them in place hurts Iraqis; to disarm him through inspections perpetuates his people's suffering. There is a case to be made for removing a tyrant with a demonstrated willingness to use chemical weapons and a single-minded desire to acquire nuclear weapons, when there's a decent chance of a democratic opening. But the wrong people are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. The Bush administration's motives are not democratic and internationalist, and so the consequences of a war are unlikely to be, either.

January, 2003

When it became obvious to anyone with eyes that Iraq was both wrong and FUBAR, he equivocated.

Before the war, I was ready to accept these possibilities as one argument for war, but about this my view has changed: The time I spent in Iraq was an education in the limits of war as an instrument of political transformation and the limits of America as its standard-bearer. Liberal democracy requires participation and consent, and as long as American military power is the prime tool for building it, Muslims around the world are unlikely to change their ideas. We need to decouple America and the promotion of democracy; the Iraq war did the opposite. The fact that tens of millions of Muslims around the world harbor increasingly hateful feelings toward America might not be rational, but it is a serious problem if this is a war for liberalism (as I think it is), though it isn't a reason not to fight worldwide Islamism.

January 2004

A little later he went looking for an escape route -- an escape route from his own previous opinions.

Q: You were "just barely" pro-war when it started.

A: There were compelling arguments -- the nature of Saddam's regime; our obligations to the Iraqis because we left him there (after the first Gulf War) and imposed sanctions, which were destroying the country; his serial aggressions in the region; his manifest desire to arm himself, whether or not he had done it; and the fact that sooner or later Iraq would implode or explode. All of that to me, and most especially the human rights argument, weighed pretty heavily. Obviously there were very good reasons on the other side, notably the regime in this country and my grave misgivings about their ability to conduct the war. I can't say that it was a rational deduction. It was just hope winning out, by a whisker, over fear.

December 2005

Now this weathervane wants to tell the U.S. people who are sick, tired and repulsed by the war that a President Obama should renege on his promise to end it? Obama may eventually violate his promise -- but I think even this candidate so vigorously currently moving to the center has shown he is smart enough to ignore this sanctimonious blitherer. ***Thanks to Spencer Ackerman's reporting, we have access to this graph of violent incidents in Iraq since last October. The private contractor Gardaworld advises entrepreneurs interested in doing business in Iraq. It created this image to show prospective clients what they are up against. These guys need to be right, or they are dead.


Get the picture? No real change in the frequency of violent events since last October. Maybe a slight up tick. Would Mr. Weathervane want to live with this?

Stories from work ...

Mohammad at KABOBfest reports on his friend Salah's first day at a new job.

Today was my first day at Jiffy Lube. Being a trainee, they still have not gotten around to making me a shirt with my name on it. I go in to find I only have 2 options of which shirt i wear, the two names being Raul and Juan David. Being a fan of hyphenated and multiple word first names, i said "sure, i can pull off a Juan David." its almost perfect, the combination of a common spanish name and a common white name. It turned out to be the best decision of my life.

Some notes/quotes throughout the day:

Me: Hi. Im sal... Juan David welcome to Jiffy Lube. can i take your car in for signature service?
Customer: As long as it doesn't smell like spic when i come back

***
Me: hi welcome to jiffy lube. are you here today for our signature service?
Customer (extremely surprised): Why yes i am...
Me: well then if you'll just pull the hood latch, ill drive your car in and get started.
Customer: you can speak english... and drive stick??!?***

Go read the rest to find out why Salah thinks he made a great choice of shirts.

Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran...

Sy Hersh on what our regime is doing now...

It does make it damn hard to believe in any of this democracy stuff. Who told any of these guys (and a few gals, Ms. Pelosi) that we wanted another war? Who? Not we the people, last I noticed.

New England fisheries and the democratic process

Last week Andrew Rosenberg who teaches marine sciences at the University of New Hampshire delivered a chilling message: good democratic processes are working, not only to prevent some socialistic regulator from destroying the fishing industry, but also to ensure that fish stocks cannot be preserved under the related pressures of overfishing and climate change. Democracy is working; sustainability is suffering. Local fishing communities are going to experience undesired changes and there is not much that can be done to stop the process.

At least that's what I made of Rosenberg's talk in Chilmark, Mass., sponsored by the Menemsha Fisheries Development Fund. Since he's a very smart guy with a background the pulling and hauling that is resource management at the National Marine Fisheries Service, he used much more cautious language. He avoided the word "regulate" with great care and effort, focusing on the benefits of various policies rather than the constraints they create. But this hard summation seems to have been the nub of it.

I took a few notes on his conclusions which I'll share here, amplified with direct quotations from an article in Nature [.pdf] to which he referred during his talk.

• It's time to stop engaging with arguments about whether fishery declines (to as low as 5 percent of 19th century populations in some species) have happened because of overfishing or global warming. The decline in fish stocks is real. The unwillingness of scientists to overspeculate about causation impedes remedial action: "Uncertainty undermines political will in environmental decision making. ... Emphasizing what we don't know often drowns out what we do know."

• Both fish populations and the fishing industry will react to regulation rapidly; we can help the fish recover their numbers by measures such as limiting days fishing and closing some areas, but the fishing industry and recreational anglers will adapt to regulation to maximize what they can take.

• Rigid, complex regulations merely create incentives for fishermen to develop ways to observe letter of the law while skirting its intent. And aroused fishermen will excel at using the democratic process to protect themselves.

  Political decision making inevitably leans towards minimizing the impacts of policies on those constituents who are most affected. The public cares about the general outcome, such as saving whales, but individuals are unlikely to change their political view or support a public official because of local issues such as catch quotas or protected areas; fishermen will because the issue is immediate and vital to them.

• The flush days when fish off New England and Georges Bank seemed unlimited are never going to return. Whether because of decimation of fish populations or because of regulation to make catches of fish sustainable, fishing operations and the communities that have lived around fishing will contract and consolidate.

That last point is the sad reality for the good people of the little port of Menemsha whose concern for their fishing economy prompted the lecture series. See this article, for a cogent account of their fears that Menemsha will succumb to "the tide that has transformed working harbors along the East Coast into upscale marinas." ***
So why in the world am I writing about fish and fishing here? I don't know from fish! But I do know that the problems caused by the ability of constituencies with very particular needs to overwhelm the general welfare are going to be the challenge of representative democracy as the globe faces climate change. And if we don't want authoritarian answers -- like, for example, China's one child policy -- we are going to have to come up with solutions that somehow hear all, yet satisfy many. If we don’t, we'll live with outcomes that satisfy no one.


Some of the working fishing fleet in Menemsha harbor.

Obama: a dyke's eye view

In honor of Gay Pride weekend, I'm going to try to convey how Senator Obama comes off to this older dyke. I do not expect this post to be popular.

This is not a substantive policy post. Obama is as good on gay rights as we can (yet) expect any national candidate to be. It is not on his other policy stances either -- he's good on lots of issues like making college more accessible to all, full of shit on FISA and the Fourth Amendment, and elusive on the war. But he's a 1000 percent better than the alternative. I'll be working to get him elected.

No, this is about how he feels to me in the realm where we queers are popularly supposed to reside -- the realm of sexual energy, animal magnetism. And on that level I find Obama troubling. Let's see if I can explain why.

No President in my lifetime has struck me as having any great allure. Ike was granddaddy. Kennedy lost me when the Boston accent popped out of his mouth (my pure prejudice). Nixon looked like he had a rod up his butt and didn't like it. Ford and Carter were blurs. Reagan was a phony B movie actor -- I actually saw him up close in 1966 wearing stage makeup while playing Governor among student protestors. Daddy Bush was what preppy guys grow up to be. Clinton always reminded me of Leisure Suit Larry; turned out I wasn't far wrong. Bush Junior is a type I've seen a lot when running road races: talented enough to make it to the front of the middle of the older men's rankings; dumb enough to think that moderate prowess justifies strutting like a little peacock. (There are lots of running guys, talented and not so, who enjoy encouraging the less talented runners, unlike these turds.)



Obama's something else again. He reeks charisma, sexual energy. The Bag posted the image above from the Obama-Clinton rally at/for Unity. Click on it to see the picture full size. (Use your brower's "Back" button to finish reading this post.) The Bag comments:

What it well captures is exactly what's going on now, which is a courtship process.

Well, yes, that is Obama's style. He romances his supporters, and the merely curious, and uses his charm which is at root sexual, to sweep us off our feet.

The energy is wonderful, vital, enveloping. There's an element of dominance in it, as there is in most (all?) sexual coupling. He's courteous; this is not bullying, it is sheer energy. It is strong, beautiful -- and I don't trust it.

Perhaps that's partly because I'm a dyke -- I don't want that energy projected at me from a man, even one I like. Perhaps it is because I'm old (older at least) -- I've seen too many instances of people doing dumb things in pursuit of passion.

But also, I wonder -- does he think he can turn on the Obama charm and bring his detractors to his side? I'm sure he has more than once. But how real is that for a President? What will he do when it doesn't work? How will he govern? Will he be a deflated balloon when charm fails? Or will he find other ways of being in the world that don't depend on personal charismatic salesmanship?

We hope we get to find out.

Adjusting to changes

(My most recent "Gay and Gray" column is up at Time Goes By. Here's how it begins. Drop by over there to participate in the experiment I propose in conclusion.)

It's a strange and wonderful time to be gay. And it can seem a particularly strange time if you're an elder. Most of us who are over 60 lived at least some part of our lives in semi-voluntary invisibility or, if we chose to allow our sexual orientation to show, feared rejection and stigma.

Yes, there has been an LGBT civil rights movement since the 1950s, a movement that gained momentum in the 1960s and never looked back. Lots of us "came out." But it wasn't easy. As recently as 2004, eleven states voted to ban same sex marriages -- and in 2006, seven more followed. Then this spring the California Supreme Court ruled that forbidding same sex marriages was illegal discrimination within that state.

And all of a sudden, popular opinion seems to have taken a discontinuous leap. A Gallup-USAToday poll published June 3 reports that nationally 63 percent of us believe that "government should not regulate whether gays and lesbians can marry the people they choose, a survey finds." As far as a majority is concerned, gay marriage (and presumably a responsible gay life) is on its way to being seen as a self-evident individual privacy right.

There are still holdouts of course -- and for an elder, the Gallup-USAToday picture is uncomfortable: approval of same sex marriage wins "among all ages except 65 and older: [among younger groups, the results are] 18 to 29 (79%), 30 to 49 (65%), 50 to 64% (62%) and 65 and older (44%)." Our age peers are finding change harder than the younger set. The social attitudes of our generation are being pushed aside. Anna Quindlen writes in Newsweek:

The opposition is aging out.

Is this really because, as a group, older people have a harder time dealing with the unfamiliar? Perhaps. But I am sure the answer is more nuanced than just that we are bunch of stick-in-the-muds.

Continued here...