Insult To Injury

By Cernig

This is called adding insult to injury - to the myth that the Surge has brought victory in Iraq around its last corner:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, designed to make the Iraqi capital safer, was kidnapped from his home by armed gunmen on Thursday, police said.

Armed men stormed the home of Tahseen al-Sheikhli in the al-Amin neighborhood of southwestern Baghdad, set the building on fire, disarmed his bodyguards and took him away, a police source said. No one was reported hurt in the raid.

Sheikhli, a university professor, is one of two main spokesmen for the security plan, launched by the government more than a year ago to reduce bombings and ethnic attacks by flooding the streets with U.S. and Iraqi troops.

The idea that Maliki's push against the Sadrists is because Iraq is so much safer after the Surge that he's decided to go after all the Shiite militias by beginning with the biggest (and most able to mount a political challenge) one is ludicrous, but it's the official Bush administration spin so it is being swallowed whole by the Lovelace's of the cheerleading Right. I know they have no gag reflex, but this one should stick in even their capacious throats.

McCain - Centrist Or Wingnut?

By Cernig

Think Progress has the text of John McCain's latest key speech - on foreign policy and to be delivered to the Los Angeles World Council.

He appears to be trying to span the divide between his wingnut base and the rest of America - and doing so badly.

The speech begins with an implicit appeal to genetic heritability of leadership quality.

When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house in New London, Connecticut, and a Navy officer rolled down the window, and shouted at my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. My father immediately left for the submarine base where he was stationed. I rarely saw him again for four years. My grandfather, who commanded the fast carrier task force under Admiral Halsey, came home from the war exhausted from the burdens he had borne, and died the next day.

And I suppose if you're one of those Religious Right wingnuts who don't believe in evolution (and thus genetics), you might think that such qualities can be inherited as the gift of the Sky Spook or achieved by osmosis. For the rest of us...nope.

But he then goes on to appeal to those Religious Right wingnuts and neoconservative wingnuts both with a bit about Manifest Destiny and Harry Truman.

President Harry Truman once said of America, “God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose.” In his time, that purpose was to contain Communism and build the structures of peace and prosperity that could provide safe passage through the Cold War. Now it is our turn.

Of course, now the reason "God has blah, blah" is to fight Islamofascism and Islam in general - the "transcendent challenge of our time". It's all pablum for the scared-of-brown-people base.

Then he gets into his policy prescriptions, and here he really wanders of the reservation. One wonders how those on the far Right who are holding their noses while marching in lockstep are going to (privately) react.

- A new League of Democracies which presumably will mean the U.S. can ignore the UN. But if the new League doesn't like a U.S. proposal then the U.S. "must be willing to be persuaded by them". So much for the go-it-alone neocon dream of superpowerdom.

- A new Kyoto deal that America will back first and try to get China and India onboard for later (but still sign even if they don’t).

- Encourage support for the EU and…wait for it…a transatlantic Common Market (the CM was the predecessor of the EU)!

- Removal of border barriers to trade between South, Latin and North America.

- Unilateral nuclear stockpile reductions.

- Kicking Russia - who is on course to be the world's largest energy exporter - out of the G8 (and generally giving the Cold Shoulder to Russia on all fronts - back to the Cold War) but letting India and Brazil in.

But unlike Russia, oddly, "China and the United States are not destined to be adversaries". Must be all those U.S. notes China is holding. Or maybe the Boeing factory.

- A total ban on enhanced interrogation techniques. (For "suspected" terrorists, is the quibble word.)

- But…no withdrawal from Iraq ever until Iraqis forget their sectarian and factional divides and become a "peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic" state" that poses "no threat to neighbors" and contributes "to the defeat of terrorists". That's the McCain definition of victory. At the same time he wants to throw the Saudis and Egypt under the bus and take on Iran face first (based yet again on faulty translations of the words of an Iranian President who will be gone by 2013 at the latest and spurious claims that Iran has said it wants a nuke).

- So the U.S. under McCain will stay in Iraq while simultaneously pissing of both the main Islamic powerbases in the region. Can anybody say "Proxy Wars"? McCain obviously can't. Not even while the Surge goes into meltdown.

- The same criteria for victory to be applied to Afghanistan, although no mention of how that's to be achieved while about half of promised U.S. aid to that forgotten front goes unspent and what does get spent gets spent on U.S. based contractors who bring most of the money back home again.

The two parts of the speech - the Manifest-Destiny, Cold-War-Redux hard-Right BS and the almost-progressive definitely-centrist policy prescriptions, simply don't go together. It's as if two different speeches were written, one by McCain's neocon advisors and one by his paleocon "realist" team - and then some poor slob had the job of spot-welding the two together.

Oh, and as Fifth Estate points out in TP's comments, Straight Talk McCain is flirting with plagiarism and recycling old speeches as new ones. Right where the spot-weld is.

McCain today:

I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us.”

a) Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, July 4 1996–Seawolf Assoc. speech :

“…to the Navy for sending us to war. At the same time, none of us feel that in Vietnam there is a romantic remembrance. War is awful and when nations seek to resolve their differences by fighting, a million tragedies ensue. Look at Bosnia today. The story line should be hatred and ignorance. War is wretched beyond description. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought, nor the cause with which it serves can glorify war. Neither do we share the exhilaration of combat ”

b) McCain, speech at the RNC in NY, 2004
War is an awful business. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer. Commerce is disrupted, economies are damaged. Strategic interests shielded by years of statecraft are endangered as the demands of war and diplomacy conflict. However just the cause, we should shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us. But there is no avoiding this war. We tried that, and our reluctance cost us dearly. And while this war has many components, we can’t make victory on the battlefield harder to achieve so that our diplomacy is easier to conduct. That is not just an expression of our strength. It’s a measure of our wisdom.”

All in all, a speech that tried to appeal to two very different constituencies at total odds with one another - the hard Right and the rest of America - and will end up satisfying neither.

Update It's a recycling of a recycling! The HuffPo points to almost the exact same wording again, in a 2001 WSJ op-ed McCain wrote to drum up support for the war-of-choice in Iraq he'd been wanting for a decade. It appears originality isn't "maverick" McCain's strongpoint. Just war and more war. The HuffPo's Stein writes:

What these two, nearly identical, remarks suggest is that McCain's view of combat -- and, perhaps more importantly, its human costs -- has not really changed throughout the course of war. That is, despite five years of military operations in Iraq and more than 4,000 troop deaths, he still sees the "lives lost" and the "merciless realities" as necessary sacrifices to make.

It is a position that undoubtedly remains popular with a great number of primarily conservative voters. But it is also a sign of an unbending, almost stubborn, nature on the war that McCain's critics will certainly hold over his head during the presidential campaign.

You betcha. Because "Shed a tear, and then get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can, and as ruthlessly as we must" just doesn't cut it when the enemies are ones of choice. It's illegal warmongering, plain and simple, and more than just a solitary tear should be shed to compensate for the blood on the hands of McCain and the other warmongers. A Nuremberg Trial is what is called for.

Update 2 It's a recycling of a recycling of a recycling! Think Progress now notes that the good Rear Admiral appears to have copied his words from an even earlier speech by McCain - back in the 90's, no less. Rinse and repeat.

Rush Abetts Multiple Felonies (Updated - Rush's Defense)

By Cernig

Remember Rush Limbaugh calling for Republicans to change sides for a day and vote for Clinton in Texas and Ohio just to keep the Dem primary bloodfest going a while longer?

He has a wee problem:

While this all makes for great talk radio and sounds like fun, there is one catch: What Limbaugh encouraged Republican voters to do in Ohio was a fifth-degree felony in that state, punishable with a $2,500 fine and six to 12 months in jail. That is because in order to change party affiliation in Ohio, voters have to fill out a form swearing allegiance to that party’s principles “under penalty of election falsification.”

I assume that encouraging others to commit a felony is itself illegal - aiding and abetting, isn't it?

Hat tip to Mike at CFLF)

Update Rush's defense? Even if you voted McCain, you'd be voting for Democratic principles.

CALLER: Hey, I just wanted to put your mind as ease as it pertains to the potential indictment that might come down against you and other Republican crossover voters who voted in the Democrat primary in Ohio and now potentially Texas. If the basis of the charges would be that the crossover voter has to attest that they'll vote with Democrat values in the fall, then if they vote for John McCain, aren't they still within the confines of the law?

RUSH: Well, you're giving away some secrets, should we have to go to court here. But a very, very, very insightful deduction on your part.

CALLER: Sorry about that, Rush.

RUSH: How in the world -- that's okay. (laughing)

CALLER: It appears to me that you can vote for Obama, Clinton, or McCain and you're pretty much voting within --

RUSH: Democrat Party principles.

CALLER: -- Democrat, correct.

RUSH: Exactly right. (laughing) Arthur, you're a very insightful man.

His other defense is that Obama and Clinton have also called for Republicans to re-register as Dems, although he conveniently forgets that the difference is they're asking for those moderate conservatives sick of the GOP's movement to the wingnut extreme Right to consider switching sides on a permamnent basis, not just for a day.

But after this one - - go on John, throw the bum under the bus. Call for his indictment.

More Conservative Id

By Cernig

That "conservative id" that Fester wrote about recently is in full flow now. Via Glenn Greenwald and Sadly No! comes this particularly revealing glimpse into the conservative cesspool:

I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. . . .

Here's the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE niggers. Black people know it. White people know it. And only black people are allowed to notice and pronounce the truth of it. Which would be fine. Except that black people are not a community but a political party. They can squabble with each other in caucus but they absolutely refuse to speak the truth in public. And this is the single biggest obstacle to healing the racial divide in this country.

...you've just given life to the suspicion that black people in America are, and have long been, a fifth column -- unanimously hating the very country that has afforded the highest standard of living ever achieved by black people in human history. We're teetering at the edge of believing that you're a secret society, a massive collection of sleeper cells just waiting for your chance to do serious harm to the rest of us. You've made it possible for us to believe that. Because you're never outraged by what the worst black people do. Because you continue to make excuses for what should be inexcusable to everyone.

So far, the best the Right can come up with in defense of this racist screed is that it's just one blogger and he isn't Instapundit's favorite writer on that blog. No, seriously. That's it.

Meanwhile, in closely related news, neo-Nazi and white supremacist Hal Turner says he and Sean Hannity are good pals despite Hannity's claims to the contrary.

In my opinion, based on my first hand experience, I believe Sean Hannity is, in fact, a Hal Turner sort of guy. It seems to me that a big difference between Sean and me is that I am willing to say publicly what I think about savage Black criminals, diseased, uneducated illegal aliens and the grotesque cultural destruction wrought by satanic jews while Sean and many others keep quiet to protect their paychecks.

And Steve Benen points out that Obama's pastor is big news but McCain actively courting the endorsement of a bigoted megachurch preacher who espouses the idea that US foreign policy should be focussed on bringing about the biblical apocalypse by bringing all the Jews to Israel to be nuked...isn't. It must be an example of that moral non-equivalence the Right loves so much.

Postscript: And yes, I find Wright's views utterly abhorrent in broad and in detail. I find that Obama's long-term relationship with him is likewise highly questionable. I'm entirely unsurprised that Obama's Blair-style "all things to all people" schtick doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Still, on balance, I'd rather have him leading the most powerful nation on Earth than someone who actively courts those who advocate Armageddon. Friend of racists or friend of racists who wants nuclear holocaust...that's a no-brainer. It'd be nice to have a choice that didn't involve being friends with racists, though, and Clinton doesn't deliver that either.

Hyping The Chinese Threat

By Cernig

It's the last great "communist menace", but China's threat to American global military superiority has been greatly exaggerated by Pentagon planners desperate to justify billions on big-ticket development of new warplanes, ships and weapon systems. Newsweek's Andrew Moravcsik breaks down the figures:

As always with China, the numbers look scary. So it wasn't surprising that, when Beijing announced its new military-spending figures earlier this month, the Pentagon reacted with alarm. China announced a 17.6 percent increase in its 2008 defense budget, up to $58.8 billion. This followed a 17.8 percent increase last year, for a country that already has a 2.3 million-person military—the world's largest.

The U.S. Defense Department, in its annual report to Congress on China's military power on March 3, cast the news in the darkest of ways. The Pentagon painted a portrait of a secretive society seeking to become a superpower by the "acquisition of advanced foreign weapons," "high rates of investment in defense, science and technology," "improved nuclear and missile technologies" and rapid "military transformation"—Pentagon speak for the adoption of U.S.-style high-tech warfare. The report described Chinese cyberterrorism and Beijing blowing satellites out of the sky. And it warned ominously that, while China is needlessly, perhaps deliberately, ambiguous about its strategic goals, its growing capabilities "have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region."

But hold on. Look more closely at the numbers, and China—while hardly benign—starts to look a lot less sinister. The fact is that China's military modernization is not accelerating; it's been slowing for decades. China's military means are not excessive; they're appropriate to its geopolitical situation. And Beijing's intentions are relatively clear.

Start with its total defense budget. Beijing's new tally, $58.8 billion, is high—but it pales in comparison with the U.S. total, which is $515 billion, or about half of the world's military spending. Even if, as many experts think, China (like the United States) actually spends more than its official stats indicate, it's still far behind America. And Washington has been spending like this for generations—which is why the U.S. aircraft carriers and submarines can sail right up to the Chinese coast, while the Chinese can't come close to the United States. At best, China is generations away from catching up with America—if it ever can.

As for Beijing's intentions, the best way to gauge them is to measure China's military spending as a percentage of national income. This year's increase may look high, but with China's economy growing at about 10 percent and inflation at close to 8 percent, the 17.7 percent hike is barely enough to keep the share of defense spending constant. And this share has fallen over the years, from more than 6 percent during the Cultural Revolution to 2.3 percent during the 1980s, to 1.4 percent in the 1990s, to near 1 percent at the beginning of this decade. It's since gone up a few tenths of a percent, yet even if China's true budget is twice what it says, Beijing's expenditures are still well below the 4 percent of GDP spent by the United States.

Nor is the quality of China's military impressive or threatening. The DoD report speaks of the "accelerating" quality of Chinese weapons systems, pointing to high-tech purchases from abroad. But Singapore-based defense analyst Richard Bitzinger argues that China's acquisitions are actually mundane: "Forget transformation or leap-frogging," he writes; "the Chinese are simply engaged in a frantic game of 'catch-up'." According to the DoD's own stats, 70 percent of China's Army vehicles, 60 percent of its submarines and 80 percent of its fighters are old. There is little evidence it has a pre-emptive strike capability based on aircraft carriers and advanced fighters (despite past DoD predictions that China was acquiring one). Arms purchases from Russia have actually declined tenfold over the past few years, and large naval acquisitions seem to have stalled.

China also has legitimate reasons for spending what it does—a judgment shared by no less an authority than Mike McConnell, the U.S. director of National Intelligence, who recently told Congress that China's military buildup is appropriate to its circumstances (he also reportedly tried to block publication of the Pentagon's alarmist summary). To the dismay of conservatives, McConnell said that "any Chinese regime, even a democratic one, would have similar goals."

Admitted, China has done some amazingly reprehesible stuff - such as the recent crackdown in Tibet - but it's all part of a mainly domestic and entirely regional focus on preserving its own status as the biggest fish in the local pond rather than a threat to American national security. Hyping the threat is partly about a "need to justify R&D and procurement" and thus just yet another example of propaganda in support of corporate welfare schemes. Of course, it's also about a conservative need to keep fearmongering, both for political purposes and to assuage their own psychologically disturbed sense of "threatened tribalism".

What matters is that there be some scary, malicious group about to harm them and America. The identity of the particular scary group at any given moment is really secondary.

"So?" - So This

By Cernig

Mickey Edwards, 16-year Republican Congressman from Oklahoma, founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation and Princeton scholar, has found his contrary voice to the Bush?Cheney GOP late in life - but, oh boy, is it a clear one.

The decision to go to war...to send young Americans off to battle, knowing that some will die -- is the single most difficult choice any public official can be called upon to make. That is precisely why the nation's Founders, aware of the deadly wars of Europe, deliberately withheld from the executive branch the power to engage in war unless such action was expressly approved by the people themselves, through their representatives in Congress.

Cheney told Raddatz that American war policy should not be affected by the views of the people. But that is precisely whose views should matter: It is the people who should decide whether the nation shall go to war. That is not a radical, or liberal, or unpatriotic idea. It is the very heart of America's constitutional system.

In Europe, before America's founding, there were rulers and their subjects. The Founders decided that in the United States there would be not subjects but citizens. Rulers tell their subjects what to do, but citizens tell their government what to do.

If Dick Cheney believes, as he obviously does, that the war in Iraq is vital to American interests, it is his job, and that of President Bush, to make the case with sufficient proof to win the necessary public support.

That is the difference between a strong president (one who leads) and a strong presidency (one in which ultimate power resides in the hands of a single person). Bush is officially America's "head of state," but he is not the head of government; he is the head of one branch of our government, and it's not the branch that decides on war and peace.

When the vice president dismisses public opposition to war with a simple "So?" he violates the single most important element in the American system of government: Here, the people rule.

It's been obvious to many of us for a very long time that the GOP had been taken over by people who would prefer that the people not rule. I'm glad to see more and more conservatives figuring that out for themselves in the last year of the Bush presidency. It might just help prevent a McSame presidency continuing Bush and Cheney's work.

Certainly McCain should be seen as going into the elections with all of his policies, along with his candidacy, already the lamest kind of ducks.

"Help, We're Being Repressed!"

By Cernig

The UK Sunday Herald's veteran political reporter Iain MacWhirter absolutely nails the hypocrisy inherent in the system - where bankers can demand state "socialist" welfare and no-one calls them on it.

COME BACK Karl Marx, all is forgiven. Just when everyone thought that the German philosopher's critique of capitalism had been buried with the Soviet Union, suddenly capitalism reverts to type. It has laid a colossal, global egg and plunged the world economy into precisely the kind of crisis he forecast.

The irony, though, is that this time it isn't the working classes who are demanding that the state should take over, but the banks. The capitalists are throwing themselves on the mercy of government, demanding subsidies and protection from the capitalist market - it's socialism for the banks. Hedge fund managers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your bonuses.

On Friday, the heads of the big five British banks demanded - and got - another £5 billion in "emergency liquidity" from the Bank of England to add to the £5bn they received earlier in the week. But like militant shop stewards they complained it wasn't enough. "Look how much the banks are getting in Europe and America," they whinged. Hundreds of billions of dollars and euros are being thrown at banks in an attempt to save them from themselves.

The quaint idea that loss-making companies should fail, to ensure the health and vitality of the capitalist system, has quietly been discarded. The banks, we are told, are "too big to fail", which means that they have to be taken into public ownership - like Northern Rock - or have their debts underwritten by government, like Bear Stearns, which comes to much the same thing. The central banks are also cutting interest rates to try to boost banking profits, and this is making currencies such as the dollar increasingly unstable.

Which takes us back to Marx. The crisis that is rocking the world is a classic example of the kind of shocks and dislocations that Marx said were an essential feature of a competitive capitalist economy.

...So what happens now? Or as Lenin said, What Is To Be Done? Well, not Communism for a start. Central control and outright state ownership along Soviet lines is no longer a viable political option - an undemocratic public monopoly is almost as bad as a private one. The fact that the banks are currently in league with western governments to create a kind of financial communism is doubly disturbing.

Instead of just propping up bankrupt banks, the governments should be democratising them - mobilising their assets to stimulate the productive economy, repairing infrastructure, researching and developing new markets, and refitting western economies to combat climate change. It needs a kind of green New Deal - an update on Roosevelt's imaginative policies of the 1930s fought tooth and nail by the banks.

They want unlimited access to public money to save themselves from the consequences of their own actions; welfare for the wealthy. This is above all a political, not an economic problem. There needs to be a political mobilisation of public opinion to force the banks and the government to bring the people into the equation.

MacWhirter laments the fact that in the UK the party that used to be the source of such calls, the Labour party, has been bought out by the banks. I can only agree. Unfortunately, here in the U.S., you've never really had such a party in the first place. And you're "supreme executive power" doesn't even have the excuse of some watery tart throwing a sword at him for his belief that he is King.

Iraq, aims and evaluation

I am an evaluator and analyst by training and profession. When I have an initial meeting with the stakeholders who want me to do an interim or a post-facto outcome evaluation of a big project I ask three initial questions.

1) Is it okay to park where I parked?
2) Where's the coffee?
3) What were the reasons/objectives that this project/program was started and what are the desired end-states?

The third question allows me to start building an analytical framework to see whether or not the project was able to achieve desirable outcomes. Any action has to be fitted into a matrix of past history, surrounding environment, capabilities, constraints, worldviews, resources, and value based outcomes. Actions should be taken that further goals, and these goals should fit into a comprehensible and coherent strategy of change. Benchmarks, way points, quick-look dashboards, indicators of some sort should be built into every phase of a project so that the basic question of 'does this action make sense in relationship to a larger goal' and ' is this doing what needs to be done' can be asked and quickly answered.

A good indicator of a program in trouble is one in which the benchmarks frequently and randomly change, low accountability is rampant, individual actors are engaged in activities that are mutually contradictory to any strategic outcome and evaluation does not occur or is a farce. This basic policy analysis framework can and should be applied to most public policy problems and programs, including an analysis of the war in Iraq.

Tigerhawk, a proud 24%-er is kicking the goal posts so far that soon American football will be played on a cricket pitch as he engages in both objective re-setting and evaluatory punting

other than to say that the many contemporaneous objections to OIF -- including fatuous assertions by presidential candidates and their surrogates that it was the greatest foreign policy mistake in American history -- will shrink into nothingness upon the full rendering of the verdict of history. That will depend on one result and one only -- whether the Persian Gulf and the Arab world are much changed in the time elapsing before the writing of that history and whether that change has a salutary impact on the many in competencies of that region, or not. And who will write that history? A young scholar who was born too late to have experienced the passionate arguments and sharp politics of the last five years.

He is arguing that we can not evaluate properly for at least another ten to fifteen years (figure a 10 year old in 2003 will be finishing up his dissertation when he is between 27 and 30) and only if we assess against one, often unstated, metric of success that was not central except to a bunch of fringe bureaucratic infighters. And also while we ignore any concept of opportunity cost. Wow, Tigerhawk had a reputation a couple of years ago as a 'smart' warhawk.

Let's go back to the tape and see what the stated war aims were. Let's see what case Congress thought it was authorizing, what President Bush stated in his biggest address to the country concerning Iraq, and what was stated the night the war started. I think this is a fair collection of documents to read to discern the stated intentions of the United States government.


From the March 19, 2003 pre-war speech by President Bush ---

My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the
early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to
defend the world from grave danger....
The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.

Okay, so we got the precursor of 'fight them over there so they don't come here' as well as fear mongering on WMDs. We also get a hint of liberating the Iraqi people, although as soon as they wanted early local elections in the summer of 2003, we quashed that notion of local autonomy. But the primary stated purpose of this war was disarm Iraq. Iraq was already effectively disarmed years ago and the UN was able to verify that this process was nearing completion. Whoopsie!

From the 2002 Joint Authorization to Use Military Force (CSPAN PDF)

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized to use the
Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary
and appropriate in order to—
(1) defend the national security of the United States against
the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council
resolutions regarding Iraq.

The pre-amble full of Whereas... is not legally binding but it mostly contained statements on disarming Iraq, enforcing UN sanctions or allegations (cleverly worded of course) on the connections between Iraq and Al-Queada. Again, this is being framed as a war of self-defense against a terrifying threat of a secretly re-armed Iraq.

Let's move to the next selection to see what the stated war aims are.
2003 State of the Union

America is making a broad and determined effort to confront these dangers. We have called on the United Nations to fulfill its charter and stand by its demand that Iraq disarm. We're strongly supporting the International Atomic Energy Agency in its mission to track and control nuclear materials around the world.....
The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.
Iraq is blocking U-2 surveillance flights requested by the United Nations. Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say. Intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families....
If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him....
And as we and our coalition partners are doing in Afghanistan, we will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies -- and freedom.

Again, the war aims here are disarming Iraq and assisting the United Nations in enforcing its resolutions and sanctions. Nothing is written in the official war aims as promogulated by both Congress and President Bush in his two biggest speeches about the war concerning the creation of a cascade of positive externalities (which btw we aren't seeing) in the entire region.

Furthermore his analytical framework excludes both opportunity cost and the closely related concept of the counterfactual which are some of the core tenets of anything that vaguely wants to be called high quality policy analysis. As an whimper of begging for intellectual mercy, Tigerhawk and the sentiment he expresses of neglecting the next twenty years so that it can be properly analyzed while continuing on the same path is a joke, and not even a particularly funny one at that.

Encourage the Conservative ID

Kevin Drum is looking at the National Review's Corner reaction to the Obama speech this morning, and is making a political error of grievious magnitude:

See? Barack Obama's just another race hustler. I suspect that the "official" conservative reaction in columns and op-eds will be more restrained, but the longer that race stays front and center in the campaign, the more time the real conservative id will have to ooze into the forefront. Obama can't be looking forward to that. [my emphasis]

In the past couple of years, one of the most reliable indicators of a winning Democratic issue is when the conservative movement ID is at the forefront of the public debate. It is ugly, repulsive and oozing with pus, and it alienates marginally attached Republican voters and winnable for the GOP Independent and Democratic voters. We want more of the conservative Id in the forefront of the conversation.

It is the same analysis that would have led one to conclude that caving in on Schiavo was a good idea. Instead the American public reacted harshly against this massive federal inteferernce into a painful and personal decision process.

It is the same analysis that would have led one to cower as the economic Id of the GOP was on full display during the privatize and destroy Social Security debate. Contrasting this Hobbesian vision with a collective security provided by the common effort led to a rapid squandering of any political capital that Bush may have thought he possessed for overt actions.

It is the same analysis that has made anti-immigration rhetoric the tough new thing from both the GOP and the DLC wing of the Democratic Party despite knowing that this rhetoric will piss off a massive and growing swing voting bloc. And also despite significant evidence that this rhetoric is not moving exisiting voters effectively into the anti-immigrants' camp.

It is the same analysis that has encouraged Democrats to cave on any national security fight until recently. It is the analysis that has given rise to massive liberal, progressive and activist disenchantment with our nominal politcal leadership. The conservative Id will try to insist that the boogey man hides under every bed and will robocall and attack ad alive any Democrat who opposes them but give a pass to collaborators.

The conservative Id is ineffective and counterproductive to advancing the GOP's political fortunes, and it is not something that should inspire fear in Democrats. Instead it should be welcomed as a golden opportunity to create a sharp and sustained politics of contrast that works.

"Paranoid Impulses"

By Cernig

Oklahoma state legislator Sally Kern thinks Teh Gay is a bigger threat than terrorism:

"The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation, OK, it's just a fact," Rep. Sally Kern said recently to a gathering of fellow Republicans outside the Capitol.

"Studies show no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted, you know, more than a few decades. So it's the death knell in this country.

"I honestly think it's the biggest threat that our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat," she said.

The former school teacher has been a magnet for coast-to-coast condemnation, including a jab from comedian Ellen Degeneres, ever since someone posted her comments on the Internet last week. State police said they are investigating death threats against her.

Back home in the Bible Belt, though, the response has been mixed. Kern has gotten support from her fellow Republicans.

"I would submit to you that the vast majority of the folks in our caucus, particularly those who consider themselves conservative, stand with and support Sally," said state Rep. Randy Terrill.

...Kern, who is finishing her second term, has tried unsuccessfully to pass bills to rid libraries' children's sections of books that have homosexual themes. She told the group that school children are being indoctrinated by gay activists.

"We're not teaching facts and knowledge any more, folks," she said. "We're teaching indoctrination, OK, and they are going after our young children, as young as 2 years of age, to try to teach them a homosexual lifestyle is an acceptable lifestyle."

In the same speech, she said gays are "infiltrating city councils" across the country.

"It spreads, OK, and this stuff is deadly and it's spreading and it will destroy our young people," she said. "It will destroy this nation."

Kern has refused to back down from her statements but says she's not gay-bashing. I suppose she means in the actual, literal, clubbing-people-to-death sense.

Kudos to Captain Ed Morrisey for refusing to condone this kind of hate speech, writing in his new venue at Hot Air that Republicans "at some point have to distance themselves from those whose paranoid impulses lead them to these extremes." I admire Ed's writing a lot and even when I don't agree with him (often) I commend his general integrity. We can all be guilty of emotionally playing to the peanut gallery now and again, but Ed tends to do it less frequently than most.

So far, at least, his Hot Air commenters are broadly in agreement with him. I suspect he'd have had more disagreement if he had called out those who believe that liberals or immigrants or Islam (not just the extreme terrorist's version) would like to "destroy this nation" as having just as much a case of "paranoid impulses". But, thankfully, bashing gays, Jews or blacks simply isn't as acceptable as it used to be even in conservative circles. Some progress, at least. One day, the GOP will be dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat.

Update Oh dear. Five hours later and Ed's comments thread has gone rapidly downhill as the AirBags weigh in. For instance:

Over the millennia, history has not been kind to homosexuals, but they keep trying hoping to come up with a different result.

It is said by psychiatrist that people who do that are in the throes of insanity.

I can agree with the statement that “homosexuality is a greater threat to America than terrorism.”

Today, terrorists are not invading the social fabric of our society such as our legal system, political system, and school system, just to name a few.

As in every past society that was plagued by homosexuality, a day of reckoning will come and it will not be a pretty sight. Just ask IRAN.

and:

It doesn’t matter if you believe that now or not…the point is you know when you sin and you know that it is wrong.

Yes I do think the teachings of God should be a dominant force in politics if only to prevent us from instituting sin as our law.

I do not believe that there will be a perfect government until Christ returns after the Great Tribulation.

I wonder if Ed's regretting his move yet? Maybe not - after all, these are the kind of mouthbreathers who run the GOP down here in Texas.

Issues have divided Americans into Republicans and Democrats; my cousins, after decades as ardent churchgoers, have segregated humanity into those who have accepted Jesus and those who have not. In their view, President George W. Bush has been born again in Christ, Senator Obama hasn't, and, as Trudy Hester, my father's brother's daughter, tells me in her beautiful new home on her immaculate, multi-racial street, "It's people like us who know the difference."

Their faith is infinite and inflexible; an election year adds the dimension of patriotic duty and temporal influence. Trudy's husband, Frank Hester, is the Treasurer of the Republican Party here in Fort Bend County and a Precinct Chairman in Missouri City, population 60,000. Trudy and Frank serve as Election Officials on voting day. (Back in Maryland, so do I.) Frank is likely to be a delegate to the Texas Republican convention in June. They are the Religious Right personified, with a two-car garage and a one-way view of candidates and candor.

I ask them about the African-American Democrat who is likely to be on the November ballot, and the patently false yet prevalent rumour that he is an adherent of Islam.

"I believe he could be a Muslim," cousin Trudy says.

"You hear and you read things," Frank nods.

You certainly do.

Enlisting Opinions

By Cernig

Back in August 2007, seven enlisted men wrote an op-ed for the New York Times entitled "The War as We Saw It" which was highly critical of conduct of the Iraqi occupation up until that point and of the prospects for the "Surge" to initiate real reconciliation and reconstruction in Iraq. At the time, Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard wrote that, as simple enlisted men and not generals, their "perspective is too limited for their opinions to have any value regarding the progress of the war." It was a view widely agreed to by the pro-occupation and pro-Surge right.

Yet today we have another op-ed, in the Washington Post by a sergeant - and this time conservatives want to listen because they say it is proof that the Surge is working, that "we have turned the corner and will succeed in this mission if we don’t quit on it first."

Double standard? I think so.

On the other hand, I linked to the op-ed by Sergeants Omar Mora, Yancy Gray and others by way of agreeing that their comments should be taken as a valuable part of the debate about Iraq and argued that their information had meaning. I can do no less for Sergeant Anthony Diaz today. He arrived in Iraq at about the time the first op-ed was being written, and so unlike those authors cannot compare current levels of violence to those of 2004-05, when similar levels were enough to cause the breakdown of Iraqi civil society. He writes that he is struck by "financial commitment we have made to reconstruction" without noting that the actual reconstruction return on those invested billions has been comparatively paltry. And he cites his own eyewitness account to show what he feels are "the inklings of representative government; and the small yet significant progress in communal relations between the mostly Shiite Iraqi army and the predominantly Sunni residents of this area.

Late last year, I witnessed something inspirational in a rather unlikely setting: an ordinary neighborhood advisory council meeting. Attendance was the highest I had yet seen, with about 40 prominent locals present. The coalition was represented by our squadron commander, a few colonels from the embedded provincial reconstruction team and a political officer from the U.S. Embassy. Discussions ranged from the persistent lack of electricity to sewage problems to economic development. What struck me were the comments of some Sunni workers from the district's power station, who came to complain that the (mostly Shiite) Iraqi army had mistreated them and accused them of distorting the distribution of electric power, something over which these workers have little control. The men said they would strike until they received better treatment and pleaded with the council chairman, a Sunni, for help. That was an unlikely outcome, given the entrenched animosity between Shiites and Sunnis and the lack of substantive political reconciliation even at the highest levels of government here. But these men did something many Americans would take for granted: They voiced grievances and sought assistance. These are the seeds of representative government, citizens coming forth and demanding change from their representatives. Much work remains to be done, but we have clearly made a start. [Emphasis mine - C]

I would argue that this anecdote shows precisely the opposite of Diaz' interpretation. The local Sunni council is undoubtedly controlled by local Sunni tribal leaders - this is no seed of representative government, just the workings as usual of tribal politics and the Sunni/Shiite divide which has become the governing factor of all Iraqi affairs.

Back in August last year, those seven other enlisted men wrote:

Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

They also wrote that "the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably" and specifically mentioned electricity services. I see nothing in Sgt Diaz' account to contradict them.

But let us turn to a general, as Goldfarb suggested back in August. General Petraeus told the Washington Post just the other day that:

"no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

And, while admitting that ceasefires by Sunnis of the Awakening and Shiites of Sadr's Mahdi Army are greatly responsible for reduced violence (more than the US troop surge, I wonder?) he also admitted that:

some elements of both the Awakening movement and the Mahdi Army may be standing down in order to prepare for the day when the U.S. presence is diminished. "Some of them may be keeping their powder dry," Petraeus said of Mahdi Army members. "Obviously you would expect some of that to happen.

Which again accord with the opinions of those seven enlisted men from August last year. So no, not a "last corner" after all.

But as Petraeus says it, despite saying those enlisted men last August knew nothing beyond their own noses, conservative pundits who have heavily invested in both the Surge and its guiding general must offer up a startling about face. My colleague Eric Martin explains:

Now that Petraeus is saying it, those that were previously bashing war critics for making this exact point...will now act as if this was the case all along, that it was obvious, and only those naive war critics - who just don't "understand war" - have ignored this reality. Better still, this dynamic will be cited as the reason that we must continue the occupation for 100-Years-to-Infinity as John McCain promises repeatedly.

The tar baby conundrum goes something like this: If things in Iraq are chaotic and violent, well, we just can't leave can we - I mean, what about the oil (which was so totally not a reason for this invasion at all, in any way, whatsoever, I mean, who even knew Iraq had the second largest reserve oil supply in the world)? On the other hand, if things in Iraq are quieting down, we can't leave lest we disturb the peace. Especially because once we leave, the various factions will have at it. Even Petraeus said so.

Which is how they play their heads we win, tails you lose game to justify perpetual occupation.

I stick by my assessment that the US Surge is preordained to fail - that internal Iraqi dynamics dictate that as soon as the various factions have cause to fight instead of hold fire, they will do so and that none are invested in finding cause not to fight while the U.S. acts as buffer and protector to all. Which means that, eventually, there will be a fight in which the US can either take sides, be shot at by all sides or withdraw. Better to withdraw first.

It Goes Up To Eleven!

By Cernig

Much hilarity today at Michael O'Hanlon's continued quest to destroy the reputation of the Brookings Institution.

To track progress, we have established “Brookings benchmarks” — a set of goals on the political front similar to the broader benchmarks set for Baghdad by Congress last year. Our 11 benchmarks include establishing provincial election laws, reaching an oil-revenue sharing accord, enacting pension and amnesty laws, passing annual federal budgets, hiring Sunni volunteers into the security forces, holding a fair referendum on the disputed northern oil city of Kirkuk, and purging extremists from government ministries and security forces.

At the moment, we give the Iraqis a score of 5 out of 11 (our system allows a score of 0, 0.5, or 1 for each category, and is dynamic, meaning we can subtract points for backsliding). It is far too soon to predict that Iraq is headed for stability or sectarian reconciliation. But it is also clear that those who assert that its politics are totally broken have not kept up with the news.

All this without a shred of information on how O'Hanlon calculated his actual scores. We're just supposed to trust him because he's a VSP.

Spencer Ackerman responds:

Am I supposed to say, "Wow, guess I haven't kept up with all the good news from Iraq" because Michael O'Hanlon has decided to cash the intellectual check for the war in Monopoly money? Not even Calvin would be willing to play Calvinball this egregiously.

And John Cole provides the requisite You-Tube clip for my headline.

Update James Joyner points to the Brookings Institute's latest Iraq Index (PDF) as the basis for O'Hanlon's scale - but there's not a single thing in that Index that equates to this "It goes to Eleven!" scale nor is there any methodology for such a scale. Without that methodology, O'Hanlon's op-ed is just so much wasted ink.

Bush Dogs innoculation votes fail

There are 39 Bush Dogs --- Democrats in Congress who, on big, partisan issues, vote to trust George W. Bush and his judgment against the rest of the Democratic caucus and 80%+ of the Democratic electorate. The Bush Dogs make up 16.8% of the Democratic House caucus. On national security issues, this group allows for conservative control of the process as Speaker Pelosi is operating under a majority of the whole instead of a majority of the majority rule set.

Most Bush Dogs are either Blue Dogs or New Dems, and they have formal internal party caucuses. The first purpose of a caucus is to have members help each other out. This often means electoral assistance with the goal of winning re-election. I have no problem with this, as the CBC, the Hispanic Caucus and the Progressive Caucus attempt to do the same thing with varying levels of effectiveness. People join caucuses on the basis of common identity and goals. So these two groups that vote against Dems believe that this is useful behavior to their own goals.

Why do they vote this way? It can be either that they personally believe in George W. Bush's judgment and vision for a cowering America, which is a harsh indictment of their own judgment. Or they believe that they are in districts which demand these reactionary votes, either from the point of view of voters, or more likely from their probable donor base. In this projected political calculation, a Bush Dog calculates that voting with the rest of the Democratic Party is very dangerous to their future political careers, so voting for Bush is a political innoculation to prevent a strong reactionary Republican challenge.

Yet this strategy is not working. One would expect that if Bush Dogs are voting their districts in voting for George W. Bush's policies and contortions of the Constitution, they would be on average, no more vulnerable to a challenge than most non-packed and stacked district Democrats. The National Republican Congressional Committee has released its initial target list of twenty four Democratically held seats it wants to field first string challengers against.

If the innoculation strategy works, one would expect roughly four Bush Dogs to be challenged, as that is the proportion of the Democratic Caucus that they compose. Instead a third of all of these 'first tier' challengers will be against Bush Dogs, for a relative risk of 2.0 for a Bush Dog compared to a generic House Democrat. That is a signifcant increase in risk if we assume that first tier challengers have a substantially higher probability of knocking off an incumbent than non-first tier challengers.

For the innoculation strategy to still be a viable strategy, one must assume that there are more Bush Dogs who the NRCC looked at and said 'Hmm, he is an entrenched incumbent with great constituent support, amazing fundraising and if only he had voted against telecom immunity we could beat him this year instead of the past eight attempts in a very favorable district....'

I don't think there are that many marginal Bush Dogs where one or two votes matter. So either the political calculation for innoculation is wrong, or their judgement is wrong as exhibited by supporting George W. Bush on a couple of crucial partisan matters.

Why I loved William F. Buckley, Jr.

By Libby

It may seem strange to those who know how politically left I lean, but I loved William F. Buckley and I'm truly saddened by his death. Of the the three conservatives that caught my youthful fancy, the other two being George Will and James J. Kilpatrick, Buckley was the only one that held my admiration and affection to his last day. As I matured, neither Will's devotion to my bowtie fetish nor Kilpatrick's grandfatherly demeanor held my interest or respect. I came to see them both as somewhat devious and exceedingly pompous prigs, but Buckley, he was a warrior to the end.

NEW YORK - William F. Buckley Jr. died at work, in his study. The Cold War had ended long before. A Republican was in the White House. The word "liberal" had been shunned like an ill-mannered guest.

I think they could have ended his eulogy right there. In a way it says everything that needs to be said. He died, as he lived, believing so passionately in his own vision that he spent his last breath trying to change the world to conform to it. I was surprised to see him described as some kind of debonair figure though.

Yet on the platform, he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent's discomfort with wide-eyed glee.

Ugh. I found him physically repellent and the rolling tongue thing made me queasy. Reptilian is certainly the right word to describe it but despite that, I found him fascinating. He struck me as an oddly classy jerk. Much as I hated what he said, I loved the way he said it. I've always had a weakness for a good linguist and I found it impossible not to be impressed with his command of language. I have to admit I haven't paid a lot of attention to him in the last decade or so, but nonetheless, I'm going to miss him. May he rest in peace.

When Matt Outed Harry

By Cernig

Being a Brit, I suppose I should write a few words about the cross-pond scandal of Matt Drudge outing Prince Harry's deployment to Afghanistan.

I'm a wee tad conflicted on the Harry end - I'm no great fan of the concept of having royals in general and would rather think of Harry Windsor as just another second lieutenant from a privileged background who will either turn out to be one of the good guys or one of the banes of the squaddies lives, depending on whether he has sh*t for brains or not. He gets no slack from me just for being a Windsor - but that said, kudos for going within a million miles of the shooting when he could've used his birthrate to stay safe in the UK. His uncle Andrew got the same kudos in the Falklands.

Still, I understand why he has now been withdrawn. As the BBC's Jon Williams explains, and 2nd Lt. Windor's nickname "Bullet Magnet" suggests, it's not just about him.

this was never just about Prince Harry's safety, it was also about the security of the soldiers serving with him. No editor wants to be responsible for increasing the risk they already face from the Taleban. Nor do I think our audiences would have thanked us for doing so.

On Matt Drudge, I'm not in the least conflicted. What a low, unprincipled, headline-chasing slimeball.

Try a thought experiment. Replace "Harry Windsor" with, say "James McCain" and imagine his dad is president. Now imagine Drudge had leaked the location and unit of said presidential son on deployment in Iraq. Can you imagine the outrage? Drudge would be finished, if not in jail.

Castro Quits

By Cernig

Fidel Casto has announced his resignation as president of Cuba and commander-in-chief of Cuba's military in a late-night letter to a Cuban state newspaper. That's a good thing to me, as it will be to all modern socialists - both democratic socialists and social democrats. (I'm the latter flavour, by the way.)

I've never been utterly sure of why Fidel Castro inspired such an overabundance of hate in America when other, rightwing, dictators attracted so little. To me, it's the dictatorship that's the problem, not the ideology used to excuse it. Obviously, the Spanish socialist government feels the same way, and is hoping for peaceful change.

Spain's governing Socialist Party on Tuesday described the resignation of Cuban leader Fidel Castro as "great news" if it led to a "democratic opening.""From Spain, we will work for that to happen," said Jose Blanco, organizational secretary of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist Party.

Trinidad Jimenez, secretary of state for Ibero-American affairs, said Castro's resignation might help acting president Raul Castro to carry out the reforms he has announced.

One of the ways in which Castro was useful to the American Right - as people like Chavez are now - is in enabling them to muddy the waters of American debate by pretending that modern socialism and dicatorial communism are identical - a meme that has widespread currency in the U.S. How often do you hear rightwingers complain about Tony Blair being a socialist, for instance? Yet the Labour Party which he was head of has always been avowedly a socialist party. Gordon Brown is the current party leader and British PM. How often does his socialism come up in US mainstream reporting? Reforms in Cuba would certainly help to head off that meme, but it won't dissolve it altogether. It's a deep-rooted factor in the American political debate even if it does belong to a bygone era as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

I'll hold my breath until you're sorry!

Conservative leaning groups are forming a nice little circular firing squad. This time a decent size sector trade and lobbying group, the National Association of Home Builders, is threatening to withhold its political donations because the federal government has not handed them enough goodies in the past couple of years. Besides ensuring the only long bonds available were mortgages, keeping the regulatory barn door open after the horses were hitched, trotted out of the gate, ridden hard, rubbed down, put away, fed and taken out again the next morning, and getting the IRS residual value interest deduction that they lobbied for, they got absolutely nothing in the past couple of years.

The National Association of Home Builders said Tuesday its political action committee has decided to stop making contributions to candidates for Congress "until further notice."

Since 1990, the trade group has given nearly $20 million to federal candidates, with 35 percent going to Democrats and 65 percent to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

As a progressive I love this action. It marginally weakens Republican fundraising, although I have to ask how much disposable cash the NAHB has due to their entire market segment's current implosion. Even the money that the NAHB gave to Democrats went to conservative suburban/exurban expansion Democrats. This was money that is against my interests within the Democratic Party. A little less corporate suburban expansion cash marginally weakens the Mark Penns and Rahm Emmanuals of the party who argue that the Democrats must blur as many policy distinctions as possible in order to have any chance of running any decently funded candidates against slightly to signifcantly worse Republicans. Cutting the cash flow of the DLC/Bush Dog Democrats improves progressive interests and power in Congress by a marginal amount.

Please let their be a corporate donor strike this cycle; it would be great for my interests

LGF Accuses OTB Of False Flag Blogging

By Cernig

Our good buddy the Leading Lizard, who kindly sends us weekend traffic to keep our advertising revenue up, has today accused moderate conservative James Joyner of being a closet Democrat carrying out "damage control for Barack Obama" by "blaming the meesenger".

The tell-tale giveaway is apparently that James has the temerity to balk at joining the baying Right's stampede over a Che flag in a lowly Obama volunteer's office.

John Cole has a similiar problem with Captain Ed Morrisey.

I wonder if James has considered it? I'm sure the Dems be delighted to have a man of his intelligence and integrity and John can attest that he won't go blind or impotent.

James and John, I'm sorry Johnston and Morrisey are being such idiots - but when you "actively pander to and encourage" the radical rightist elements of your party (e.g. LGF), as the Republicans have been determinedly doing for the past twenty years, you’re going to end up with embarrassing scenes like this.

Categorization Error

We here at the Newshoggers are many things, but it is a bit of a stretch to call any of us political conservatives, and even more ridiculous to call any of us members of the 'conservative blog community.' That just is not who we are, and it looks like Red America has a glitch in their sorting heuristic as Cernig's post on MEK is the #1 post within their categorization of the conservative blog community. Whoops :)

This is not the first time this month that we have landed in their top fifteen conservative blog posts of the day.

Bush Does Earmarks Too

By Cernig

The NY Times reports that, after complaining about Congressional earmarks long and hard, the White House has requested money for thousands of similar projects in the recent budget - often more than Congress asked for the same projects. And Congresscritters are ready to bite back.

He asked for money to build fish hatcheries, eradicate agricultural pests, conduct research, pave highways, dredge harbors and perform many other specific local tasks.

...The projects, itemized in thousands of pages of budget documents submitted last week to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, show that the debate over earmarks is much more complex than the “all or nothing” choice usually presented to the public. The president and Congress both want to direct money to specific projects, but often disagree over the merits of particular items.

The White House contends that when the president requests money for a project, it has gone through a rigorous review — by the agency, the White House or both — using objective criteria.

Congressional leaders said they would focus more closely on items requested by the president this year. “The executive branch should be held accountable for its own earmark practices,” said the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said Democrats agreed that “the large number of presidential earmarks deserve the same scrutiny and restraint” as those that originated in Congress.

Just don't call the White House version "earmarks".

The White House defines “earmarks” in a way that applies only to projects designated by Congress, not to those requested by the administration.

“Earmarks,” as defined by the White House, “are funds provided by Congress for projects or programs where the Congressional direction (in bill or report language) circumvents the merit-based or competitive allocation process, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the executive branch to properly manage funds.”

...In his State of the Union address last year, Mr. Bush complained that 90 percent of Congressional earmarks were concealed in committee reports.

“You didn’t vote them into law,” Mr. Bush told Congress. “I didn’t sign them into law. Yet they’re treated as if they have the force of law.”

On Jan. 29, Mr. Bush ordered federal officials to “ignore any future earmark that is not voted on and included in a law approved by Congress.”

The president submits legislative language to Congress for every appropriations bill, but most of his project requests are not found there. They are buried in thick documents that carry titles like “Budget Estimates” or “Justification of Estimates for Appropriations Committees.”

Somebody ask John McCain, who recently pledged that he would veto any bill with any earmarks whatsoever, whether that included White House earmarks.