Fox News Deserves Award For Tireless Work On Behalf Of African-Americans

Money quote: "I never thought I would see the day that an old white millionaire is viewed as having more in common with working folks than the black man. It's a proud day for America."

I love the Onion --


Portrayal Of Obama As Elitist Hailed As Step Forward For African Americans

Picking Palin fits a pattern

McCain is known to have an eye for young and attractive women. In 1980, he divorced his disabled first wife to marry Cindy Hensley (17 years his junior). There is no doubt that he was having an affair with Ms. Hensley while he was still married to his first wife.

Earlier this year, there were persistent rumors that the 71 year old McCain was cheating on Cindy with 40 year old Vicki Iseman (a young and attractive lobbyist).

Perhaps his preference for young and attractive women explains why McCain picked 44 year old Ms. Alaska beauty contestant and "Supermodel tour de force" Sarah Palin to be his running mate?







I know, I know, POW.

The "Maverick"

Piece on Huffington Post about McCain's selection of Sarah "One-Heartbeat-Away" Palin:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-bergthold/the-vp-choice-that-lost-t_b_122381.html

The piece, by Linda Bergthold, focuses on just how incredibly cynical this selection was.

McCain campaign (to the PUMAs): Oh, disillusioned and confused Hillary supporters, don't fret. Want a women on the ticket? No prob!! Coming up, one laughably inexperienced, rabidly anti-choice and otherwise hyper-conservative trophy VP candidate. That her policy positions resemble Clinton's, uh, not at all, shouldn't be an issue...should it?

I loved this dig at McCain's carefully cultivated maverick image (cuts both ways?) by a commenter named chinshihtang:

"For McCain, it is a crazy risk, and it totally undermines two areas where he had made substantial progress in recent weeks: 1) moderates of all stripes; and 2) national security voters. I have great respect for group 2)--it is the way people should evaluate Presidential candidates. This pick shows that McCain is a maverick, indeed, in the sense of the old TV show--a riverboat gambler..." (my emphasis).

Should be fun to watch this one play out over the next few days (although it's annoying how, predictbaly, 100% of media attention has been diverted from an overall succesful DNC).

Out with the old, in with the new!

Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

Hillary Clinton's terrific speech

Dutch "intelligence"

Dutch police commissioner Fup Goudswaard was recently placed on administrative leave because the Dutch intelligence services ("AIVD") refused to certify their approval of his appointment. According to the AIVD, Goudswaard had an affair during his first marriage years ago and he was therefore at risk of being blackmailed. It turns out he was cheating on his wife with a number of women, including his former boss and a woman who later became his second wife... I wonder how these affairs could have been used to blackmail him --

Extortionist: Ma'm, your husband cheated on his first wife.
Wife: Yes, that was with me.

If the implausibility of this scenario is not enough, I'd say that discussing the affair in the Dutch newspapers took care of any risk of Goudswaard being blackmailed. Nevertheless, the AIVD maintains that Goudswaard is a security risk and he will likely be terminated from the police on September 10.

Dunkin' Donuts Independents...

Latest Poll Reveals 430 New Demographics That Will Decide Election

The future of NATO

Yesterday, Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili was interviewed by the BBC about the current situation in Georgia. At one point, he said that the current situation is no longer about Georgia but rather about the future of NATO. I think he's right. Indeed, perhaps the situation in Georgia was always about the future of NATO.

NATO has been searching for a raison d'etre ever since the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Last month, NATO hired a former Coca Cola executive to retool its brand and revamp its image. The question is, of course, what the purpose of a military defense alliance is in a world in which there are no existential military threats.

Placed against this backdrop, the recent developments in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus suddenly take on a different light. Although not necessary and known to antagonize Russia, NATO insists on building a missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Although not necessary and known to antagonize Russia, Georgia launches a military attack on South Ossetia. Suddenly, we are told that the Ukraine and Georgia must be admitted to NATO to ward of imminent Russian military aggression. Implicitly and expressly, we are told that unless we act now, the Russians will dominate "us" in the near future.

Really? Thus far, Russia has acted quite predictably when it seized the opportunity presented by Saakashvili's reckless decision to launch a military attack on Ossetia, shooting down Russian military planes and killing Russian peacekeepers in the process. No rational leader of a small country would have decided to attack the Russian army unprovoked without some assurances that he would receive help. (Perhaps he and the Russians were played?). A simple thought experiment shows why the Russian response was utterly predictable. Imagine Iran launching a military attack to secure its control over the Shatt al-Arab waterway bordering Iraq, shooting down US military planes and killing US soldiers. Now imagine what the US would do...

This is not to say that Russia should not be held to its agreement to withdraw under the Georgian peace deal, and its intent to maintain a continued military presence inside Georgia must be rejected. In the meantime, Europeans should ask themselves what is to be gained by a new cold war with Russia. The purpose and future of NATO directly depend on the answer.

Meddling kids

Today, the New York Times gave its take on the limited policy options that are available to the US in responding to Russia's strategic victory in Georgia --"Friction with Russia may spell trouble for US."

Quoting Stanford University professor and Barack Obama's chief Russia advisor Michael McFaul, the New York Times asserts that Russia currently has more options available to thwart US strategic objectives than the other way around. At one point, professor McFaul apparently observed that:

Russia appeared intent on trying to “disrupt the international order” and had the capacity to succeed.

Similarly, the article quotes Georgetown University professor Angela Stent as saying:

Ironically, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there’s always been the concern about Russia becoming a spoiler, and now we could see the realization of that.

I wonder what international order Russia is disrupting or spoiling by opportunistically defending its interests in Ossetia and Abkhazia? Would that be the international order in which everyone bows to a US hegemon that opportunistically pursues its own interests unconstrained by the rule of law or the interests of its allies? In that case, a little disrupting and spoiling may not be such a bad idea. Perhaps it will cause the US to retreat from its imperial ambitions and to return to being the world's staunchest defender of universal values like human dignity. However, given that some of the comments quoted above are from an Obama adviser, I won't hold my breath.

Why Bacevich would make an excellent addition to the next administration

On Friday, PBS broadcast an interview with Andrew Bacevich about the current state of US foreign policy. Bacevich's explanations are cogent and show why he would be an excellent vice president, secretary of state, or national security adviser in the next administration (hint: one of the reasons is that he does not have the ambition to be the next vice president, secretary of state or national security adviser).

unfortunate offspring

Paris Hilton v. John McCain

McCain is trying to paint Barack Obama as a vapid celebrity by comparing him to Paris Hilton. For reasons discussed here, this does not appear to be a convincing strategy. In response to McCain's ads, Hilton has just put out the following video announcing that she will be running for president:

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Funny thing is, Hilton is more coherent than the actual candidate. Check it out:

the Hamdan farce

The headline of the London Times says it all: "Bin Laden driver gets 66 months - but will never be released." Scott Horton does a good job explaining the difference between the Nuremberg trials and the Guantanamo farce -- here.

Hamdan was convicted of "material support for terrorism" because he was Bin Laden's driver and bodyguard from 1998 until 2001. As Marty Lederman explains:

The government's argument is that any attempt, like this one, to aid in the killing of U.S. forces on a battlefield is a violation of the laws of armed conflict if it is committed by an unprivileged combatant, i.e., a nonuniformed person.

This is a fairly radical theory -- that any belligerency by nonprivileged persons is itself a war crime. If I'm not mistaken, it would mean that CIA officials and many U.S. Special Forces are not only regularly violating the domestic laws of the nations where they operate, but are committing war crimes. Can that be right?

Oops. Time to amend the arrest warrants.

time for some campaigning!

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bread crumbs

This morning Ron Suskind was interviewed on National Public Radio. Suskind is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and a former national correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. Based on numerous interviews within the administration and the CIA, Suskind just wrote a book detailing how the highest echelons of the Bush Administration, including Bush and Cheney, knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction long before the invasion and later instructed the CIA to fabricate "evidence" of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks on 9/11. You can hear the interview here.

On a related note, Greenwald has been relentlessly following the circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of Bruce Ivins. Ivins was an army scientist in a biological research lab at Fort Detrick who was suspected of involvement with the anthrax attacks on prominent Americans shortly after 9/11. Starting September 18, 2001, someone sent letters with anthrax to 2 US senators and a number of news anchors, killing 5 people. As Greenwald notes:

It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

Moreover, based on anonymous sources, ABC News reported during this time that the anthrax that was used had a unique composition showing that it came from Iraq. The timing shortly after 9/11 and the content of this reporting provided support for the Bush administration's (false) narrative that Iraq was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center, thereby increasing support for the subsequent invasion. In response to Greenwald's efforts, two prominent journalism professors have started a campaign to force ABC to disclose it's anonymous sources for the anthrax story. Based on their knowledge of journalistic ethics, they have formulated the following three questions that ABC should answer:

1. Sources who are granted confidentiality give up their rights when they lie or mislead the reporter. Were you lied to or misled by your sources when you reported several times in 2001 that anthrax found in domestic attacks came from Iraq or showed signs of Iraqi involvement?

2. It now appears that the attacks were of domestic origin and the anthrax came from within U.S. government facilities. This leads us to ask you: who were the “four well-placed and separate sources” who falsely told ABC News that tests conducted at Fort Detrick showed bentonite in the anthrax sent to Sen. Tom Daschle, causing ABC News to connect the attacks to Iraq in multiple reports over a five day period in October, 2001?

3. A substantially false story that helps make the case for war by raising fears about enemies abroad attacking the United States is released into public debate because of faulty reporting by ABC News. How that happened and who was responsible is itself a major story of public interest. What is ABC News doing to re-report these events, to figure out what went wrong and to correct the record for the American people who were misled?

On yet another related note, yesterday government and defense counsel started their closing arguments before a military commission in Guantanamo that is deciding whether Salim Hamdan is guilty of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. From 1998 until 2001, Hamdan was one of Osama Bin Laden's chauffeurs. Here's the amazing thing: even if Hamdan were to be acquitted from all charges (a small likelihood when the "impartial" jury consists of military officers), the U.S. will continue to detain him until the Global War on Terror is declared over. That's right, regardless of the outcome of these proceedings, Hamdan will not be released. In the words of Hamdan to the military judge at an earlier stage:

If you ask me what is the color of this paper, I say white. You say black. I say white. You say black. I say, okay, it's black -- and you say white. This is the American government.