I fought the law, but . . .

Under the impression that the American justice system treats all who come before it equally? You haven't been paying attention:

JERICHO, Ark. – It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn't hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.

The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.

According to the Associated Press, Mr. Payne was unarmed when one of the seven cops -- 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 -- in the courtroom shot him in the back, grazing the finger of another officer. Since this is America, after all, surely there will be some repercussions for this loose cannon unworthy of calling himself one of Jericho's finest . . . right?

Prosecutor Lindsey Fairley said Thursday that he didn't plan to file any felony charges against the officer or Payne. Fairley, reached at his home, said Payne could face a misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle, but that would be up to the city's judge. He said he didn't remember the name of the officer who fired the shot.

To recap: The prosecutor has no plans to file charges against the police officer that shot an unarmed man in the back, claiming he doesn't even remember the cop's name, so inconsequential were his actions. The guy complaining about unfair tickets, though? He faces a possible "misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle."

America has long had a multi-tiered justice system, with agents of the state and the wealthy and politically connected generally afforded leniency (think of the establishment outcry whenever there's even talk of holding political elites accountable for their actions), while those not fortunate enough to have the right friends, attorneys or occupation fill America's prisons -- which along with missiles seem to be the only thing this country makes anymore. In the past, though, declaring that the state was stabbing -- or shooting -- its citizens in the back with its policies was always intended more as a metaphor than a literal reference.

Elite journalists stick up for their friends

David Broder, a columnist for the Washington Post, has been a faithful defender of the ruling elite -- pardon the redundancy -- and criminal immunity for the powerful for the past four decades. Indeed, he boasts of his support for Gerald Ford’s “courageous” pardoning of disgraced war criminal Richard Nixon in his most recent column, and openly sides with former Vice President Dick Cheney (also a disgraced war criminal . . . noticing a pattern?) and his belief that it is “a dangerous precedent when a change in power in Washington leads a successor government not just to change the policies of its predecessors but to invoke the criminal justice system against them.” Expressions of extreme sycophancy like this are why Broder maintains his tremendous access to power, and helps explains why he’s considered “the most respected and influential political journalist in the country” -- by the groups and corporations that pay him thousands of dollars to hear him share his banal observations live.

But even a soon-to-be octogenarian like Broder doesn't know everything about life and still needs to ask questions. Here he is perplexed by what might happen should CIA torturers and murderers -- over 100 people died in U.S. custody -- be prosecuted for their crimes:

If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

Um, yes? And get Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush while you’re at. Somehow I doubt locking up a few powerful people who committed and/or authorized violent crimes -- notice Broder doesn’t spend much time challenging that latter fact -- will adversely impact the lives of 300 million Americans. Not prosecuting powerful people who commit crimes (“the Broder rule”), however, seems like a fine way of ensuring future members of the ruling establishment flaunt the law with impunity. You certainly can’t argue that Ford’s courageous pardon of Nixon, for whom Cheney once worked, did anything to make future crimes by the executive branch less likely.

Perplexingly, Broder and his fellow media stars are consistently more incensed over the prospect of the rich and powerful going to prison than the scandalous fact that the U.S. is home to the largest prison population in the history of the world. One in 100 Americans are incarcerated, or 2.2 million people, many for the non-violent drug offenses. Yet the tangible harm inflicted by the state via the prison-industrial-complex on millions of families torn apart because of punitive (and profitable!) laws criminalizing peaceful behavior is of much less concern to the Washington establishment than the hypothetical harm that may befall lovely people like Dick Cheney. That's probably because all their friends are the powerful, who as we know don't go to prison as easily as the rest of us -- the very idea that they might is shocking to the Washington power structure.

Broder and his ilk's willingness to defend those who have everything from the specter of accountability -- and the prospect of facing the same justice system that regularly tears apart those who have nothing -- is merely another way of saying thanks for last weekend's dinner party.

Capitalism: A Love Story

Whether you agree with every one of his policy prescriptions or not, one thing is for sure: Michael Moore consistently manages to enrage both wings of the respectable Washington political establishment, so he must be doing something right. His new film on the bailout of Wall Street and the state capitalist system, a favorite topic of discussion 'round these parts, comes out October 2nd. I have reason to believe it will be quite good.

Here's a preview of what to expect:

The AP vs. the AP

The Associated Press, like many old media outlets, is struggling to adapt to the Internet and a world where the public appears increasingly unwilling to pay for news content in general, much less bland and unremarkable wire reports. Like the recording industry, however, the AP's approach to this development has not been to reassess its business model, but to threaten legal action against those nefarious news aggregators like Google who send traffic to the AP without first paying them for the privilege.

Just this month, AP's general counsel, Srinandan Kasi, claimed that the news organization has no problem with people coming up with innovative ways of distributing its content -- so long as the AP pockets any money the innovator makes. “If this becomes a runaway success, I want to be part of this kind of business arrangement with you," Kasi said, addressing a hypothetical iPhone developer. "In the meantime, if you want to experiment, go at it.” That is, you do the hard work of figuring out how the AP can make more money from distributing its content electronically and, if you're successful, the AP will reward you by using the long arm of the state to confiscate whatever money you make, entering into a coerced “business arrangement” akin to the type of partnership the mafia might enter. If you fail? You're on your own, bud.

But AP's hubris regarding its “intellectual property” doesn't end there. If the copyright disclaimer at the end of many of its stories is to be believed, the wire service also claims that none of its material may "be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed" without prior consent. Since many of its stories merely restate facts one can find elsewhere, AP's claim that one cannot rewrite their material has provoked an understandable mix of ridicule and outrage. Given the company's own method of news gathering, it's also rather hypocritical.

Consider this AP account of the story this week of the head of an anti-animal cruelty organization in Virginia accidentally leaving her dog locked in a hot car, causing it to die. At the bottom of the 150-word article is this line: Information from: Richmond Times-Dispatch, http://www.timesdispatch.com

If you go to the Times-Dispatch website it's clear the AP based its entire story on this article, "Dog of Richmond SPCA CEO dies after being left in car for 4 hours". While I have no problem with this – no one should be able to claim ownership over information and the AP did credit the Richmond paper – this is just the sort of activity to which those running the company and other major news organizations have so vociferously objected. Remember: the AP's piece contained no actual new reporting and merely leeched off the work of others. If anything, the AP merely acted as an aggregator of information, taking a news item from an obscure publication and dispersing it to a wider audience.

There is nothing wrong with what the AP did, of course. It allowed a broader audience to discover a news story they probably otherwise would have missed (even if it wasn't the most newsworthy), and it undoubtedly drove some traffic to the Times-Dispatch's website. Since AP journalists see the benefit of building on -- and sometimes just taking -- information reported by others without any apparent prior consent, perhaps they should explain their reasons for doing so with those running the company. Rather than using the state to enforce their revenue stream by threatening lawsuits over a legal fiction -- "intellectual property" -- maybe they can begin to shift their focus to building a business model appropriate for the 21st century.

War: just another policy option

Matt Yglesias, the Center for American Progress blogger we last saw offering a damning (albeit unintentional) indictment of the unshakable liberal faith in electing Democrats to improve America’s “quality of governance”, has uncovered a problem. And it's a big one.

You see, if one holds the U.S. government to the same standards it applies to other, less powerful countries, and if in the grips of some far-left ideology you go so far as to say wars should only be fought as an absolute last resort – and only in self-defense – then one soon discovers there are very few instances where American military action has been justified. One might even conclude that many of the wars fought by the U.S. have been unjust given that, as Yglesias notes, “For the United States, which is conveniently located on the North American continent adjacent to two friendly and relatively weak countries, it’s going to be very hard for anything to meet a strict necessity test.”

As a serious member of the Washington punditocracy, this fact concerns Yglesias -- not because it eviscerates the moral case for the American empire and an obscenely bloated military budget, but rather because applying such a strict criteria to U.S. actions would preclude the righteous humanitarian interventions left-leaning hawks like himself imagine their government engaging in. And like any good establishment liberal, Ygelsias cites disgraced war criminal Harry “Hiroshima” Truman to boost his case, “happily” granting the war in Korea “as a great example of a 'good war'” that may never have been – perish the thought – had the intrepid Truman abided by the “just war” theory popularized by that sissy theologian, St. Augustine.

“You have a country friendly to the United States becoming the victim of unprovoked aggression from an unfriendly country,” Yglesias writes. “Pretty much everyone believes that South Korea has a right to fight back in its own defense. And it’s only a very small leap from a belief in self-defense to a belief in the idea of 'collective self-defense' whereby countries who are friendly to South Korea should help it out in its hour of need. That’s how Harry Truman saw it and that’s how I see it decades later.”

What I find interesting about this paragraph is not only Yglesias' laughable stance that it's but “a very small leap” from a belief in legitimate self-defense to a belief in the U.S. as policeman of the world, but what he lays out as one of his chief criteria justifying American intervention: that South Korea's government was “friendly to the United States,” which was sort of a given at the time considering it was installed by the American government. This was of course exactly the criteria Truman used to justify U.S. involvement in the Korean civil war, rather than any concern about civilian life. “Unprovoked aggression” is only a concern to U.S. political leaders if aimed at an American proxy state, and the killing of innocents but a propaganda point if committed by an unfriendly power.

South Korea's “U.S.-backed regime,” after all, killed “untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in the summer of terror in 1950,” often under the watch of American military advisers, as the Associated Press reported last year. According to South Korea's government-sponsored Truth and Reconciliation Committee, a “very conservative” estimate would place the number of civilians executed by the South Korean regime at 100,000, and likely at least double that. And that’s on top of the thousands of civilians who died at the hands of the South Korean military on Jeju island well before the war started.

But these facts aren’t mentioned by Ygelsias since they don’t seem be relevant to his mode of thinking on foreign policy, much as civilian deaths weren't relevant to Harry Truman, who considered dropping nuclear weapons on North Korea -- after destroying its dams, cities and industrial infrastructure, killing one out of nine North Koreans. All that does matter is the fact that the U.S.-backed regime was friendly to the U.S. and was invaded, which is a neat little rationalization to justify a war that killed three million people all so South Korea could be ruled by a nationalistic capitalist dictator friendly to America rather than a nationalistic communist dictator who wasn’t.

Also, seemingly left unconsidered by humanitarian interventionists like Yglesias -- who seems intent on proving that his backing for the Iraq war was no one-time error in judgment -- is what to do with, or how to restrain, the massive military-industrial complex a policy of global intervention requires. So Korea was justified (it wasn’t), what about Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia? Or Iraq? What about U.S.-backed coups in Chile or Iran? Not mere aberrations, these unnecessary interventions are the inevitable consequences of anointing the United States government the defender of the world and establishing a permanent class of mercenaries and munitions makers whose interest it is in to agitate for conflicts and cold wars.

Consider how the U.S. military describes the aftermath of the national security state brought about by its involvement in Korea:

While Eisenhower did reduce military spending after the war, the U.S. armed forces remained much larger than they had been in 1950, possessed many more and increasingly powerful nuclear weapons, and were ensured a steady supply of manpower through the retention of conscription. The American military, after the humiliating and bloody defeats of the war’s first six months, shifted its focus from preparing for a World War II–type mobilization to maintaining forces ready for immediate use. This larger military, eager to put the frustrations of the Korean War behind it, now was widely dispersed around the world, including Indochina, where American advisers assisted the new Republic of Vietnam.

Advocates of humanitarian intervention can't live in a fantasy world where a massive U.S. military can be restrained and limited to intervening in places like Rwanda and Darfur for pure, good reasons. Even if such interventions were desirable or likely to succeed, they would be the exceptions to a long record of U.S. military actions since World War II motivated by much less wholesome desires. And sometimes those in charge of the military won't be progressive saints subscribing to the RSS feeds of their favorite liberal bloggers, which shouldn't be too hard to imagine even for partisan Democrats given the fact this country did elect George W. Bush -- twice (well, kind of . . .).

If the U.S. government is not going to abide by the "necessity" standard for war it holds other countries to, one shouldn't be surprised when said government fights a number of wars that are unnecessary and unjust. And given the record of human history, it would appear liberal interventionists of even the most earnest sort have not figured out a way to prevent that.

A curiosity

Compare the relative ease with which a Democratic Congress and a Republican president passed a $700 billion bailout for failed Wall Street investment firms with how difficult it appears to be for a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president to pass a healthcare proposal many Democrats campaigned on.

What does that tell you about the interests the government serves? Discuss.

If Chris Matthews only had a brain

Chris Matthews is paid around $5 million a year by the kind folks at General Electric/MSNBC to pontificate on politics and to essentially act as a guardian of the establishment. So it makes sense that he would be not only stunningly, offensively ignorant of American history, but that his ignorance would be displayed in such a way as to flatter the ruling elite. In that respect, Matthews is typical of the DC commentariat -- he makes up in blind worship of power what he lacks in actual knowledge -- as he displayed during his most recent appearance on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, where he claimed that not only had the Kennedy clan saved us from nuclear war (after bringing the world to the brink of it due in part to the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion), but that they actually "created the civil rights movement." Sorry Rosa Parks!

Though the stupidity starts at the beginning of the clip, the mind-numbing, make-your-brain-hurt ignorant adulation of the political class begins about three minutes in:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Chris Matthews
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

The problem with folks like Matthews, and the very thing that makes him so attractive to politicians and his corporate paymasters, is that they envision all social progress as something bequeathed to us mere peons by the state and our betters in the halls of Congress and the White House. Our benevolent political leaders -- presidents and senators, kings and queens -- in the view of the these courtiers are the drivers of history, with we serfs merely along for the ride.

That it was the people, through protests, boycotts and open defiance of state-backed discrimination that forced the government to grant concessions to basic human decency if only to head off the prospect of an actual revolution (and to counter anti-American Soviet propaganda) is apparently lost to this class of professional flatterers. To claim the civil rights movement was “started” by a bunch of white aristocrats from New England reveals an incredible historical ignorance and bias in favor of the powerful, and ignores the fact that watershed events like the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Greensboro sit-ins, all aimed at protesting government-backed segregation, occurred while John F. Kennedy was busy hanging out at country clubs enjoying the favored pastime of the idle rich and years before he became president.

That history is comprised of little more than the actions of elites is a view held not merely by U.S. officials and media sycophants, mind you. For instance, a few months ago I attended a luncheon here in DC where an aide to a Canadian premier remarked to those around him that Lyndon Baines Johnson had gotten a bad rap from ungrateful Americans given all he had done for minorities in this country, evidenced by the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Since it is rude to eavesdrop -- and ruder still to call someone a f_cking idiot from across the table at these sorts of functions -- I held my tongue, but couldn’t help but wonder if this official had ever considered the civil rights of those tens of thousands of African-Americans and other minorities drafted and sent off to kill and be killed in the jungles of Vietnam, much less the millions of Vietnamese who suffered the liberatory aftermath of the U.S. munitions dropped on their homes and schools.

Pondering these sorts of questions is probably why I’m just some small-time reporter with a blog, though, rather than a highly paid celebrity commentator. That said, here’s what a I propose: that from here on out, the term “Chris Matthews” become synonymous with “pompous, historically ignorant windbag” -- if it isn't already. Come on folks, through the power of the people we can make this happen.

The Matt Yglesias Comedy Hour

Matt Yglesias, a blogger for the liberal Center for American Progress, is one of most well-known and prolific writers on the left (or what passes for it) out there. On any given day you can find him opining on any number of topics, from the NBA draft to urban land-use policy to the war in Afghanistan. But did you know that he’s also a comedian?

The fact of the matter is that the outcome of the 2006 elections improved the quality of governance in the United States. And so did the outcome of the 2008 elections. Governance improved because politicians were replaced by other, better politicians. The same method—replace existing politicians with new, better politicians—can continue to reap improvements in the future.

From the use of the cliched “the fact of the matter” to the embrace of electing more and better rulers as the chief means of affecting social change -- and the conspicuous lack of examples illustrating how exactly the “quality of governance” has improved since the Democrats took over all three branches of the U.S. government -- Yglesias has penned a truly scathing sendup of technocratic liberalism and its proponents. I tip my hat to you sir!

Trust-busting in Afghanistan

In March, President Obama’s top antitrust official announced that “that the administration would restore an aggressive enforcement policy against corporations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or to keep them from gaining market share,” according to The New York Times.

At the time, I remember wondering how this stated new policy was consistent with Obama’s support for the bailout of insolvent Wall Street financial institutions -- the greatest single transfer of wealth in U.S. history -- considering that letting companies like AIG fail would actually have been a step toward a more competitive financial services industry that rewarded firms based on performance, not political influence. But alas, it’s now clear the likes of Goldman Sachs, Obama’s top corporate campaign contributor, were never to be the target of the new trust-busting administration.

Rather, as Scott Horton at the Huffington Post reports, the U.S. government is focusing its attention on the true threat to America’s market system: “Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education.” According to Horton:

Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by "at least eight" heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company's U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe . . . .

According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a "body cavity search."

On a ride to the infamous Bagram air base in Afghanistan -- site of the torture-homicides involving U.S. interrogators exposed in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side -- Azar contends that a federal agent pulled a photograph of Azar's wife and four children from his wallet. Confess that you were bribing the contract officer, the agent allegedly said, or you may "never see them again." Azar told his lawyers he interpreted that as a threat to do physical harm to his family.

You will be relieved to know that Azar -- who “has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch” -- remains in federal custody.

(via Brian Doherty)

When is a coup a coup?

The Center for International Policy's Adam Isacson, who has been chronicling the Obama administration's efforts to station U.S. troops on bases throughout Colombia, highlights this revealing exchange from earlier this month between a reporter and State Department spokesman Robert Wood regarding the U.S. government's conspicuous refusal to declare the overthrow of Honduras' democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya a "military coup":

MR. WOOD: [W]e’re going to continue to try to convince both parties and go from there. But a coup took place in the country, and –

QUESTION: Well, you haven’t officially legally declared it a coup yet.

MR. WOOD: We have called it a coup. What we have said is that we legally can’t determine it to be a military coup. That review is still ongoing.

QUESTION: Why does it take so long to review whether there’s a military coup or not?

MR. WOOD: Well, look, there are a lot of legal issues here that have to be carefully examined before we can make that determination, and it requires information being shared amongst a number of parties. We need to be able to take a look at that information and make our best legal judgment as to whether or not –

QUESTION: It seems to be taking a very long time.

MR. WOOD: Well, things take time when you’re dealing with these kinds of very sensitive legal issues.

Having majored in English in college, I am ill-prepared for deciphering the language of government and State Department flacks. Indeed, my lack of education in bureaucratic legalese does not permit me to fully comprehend how Robert Wood can concede Zelaya was overthrown in a coup -- defined as "the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group" -- but at the same time claim it an unresolved question whether said overthrow was a military coup. My confusion is compounded by the widely reported and undisputed fact that it was the (U.S. School of the Americas-trained) Honduran military brass which forced Zelaya into exile.

In other news, a spokesman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the department has concluded that the sun rises in the East, but that officials are still "carefully examining" whether it sets in the West.

How liberals learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

A long, long time ago liberals pretended to care about the deaths of foreigners at the hands of the U.S. military, with chants of “Bush lied, people died” dominating protests -- since hilariously appropriated by right-wing reactionaries -- and Daily Kos diarists penning morally righteous denunciations of the American empire. Then something changed: Barack Obama was elected.

Since that fateful day, while the Democratic rank-and-file say they oppose Obama’s wars, it doesn’t appear to be a pressing concern to the quasi-professional online activist set, which spends more time documenting the antics of (and shouting fascism! in response to) Sarah Palin and her painfully ignorant groupies than opposing the president’s escalation in Afghanistan or his undeclared war in Pakistan. In this respect, donkey partisans are merely following the example of their erstwhile anti-war leaders, who seamlessly segued from campaign promises to bring the troops home in 2006 to appropriating ever more funds for the imperial adventures they once claimed to have vehemently opposed.

Proving that partisans on both ends of the spectrum are incapable of being parodied, progressive activists attending “Netroots Nation” this weekend -- a conference where upper-middle class liberal bloggers come to learn how to become “a media star” by following the “tools and techniques used by professional actors to create star presence” (taught by a “media trainer to performers and successful progressive candidates”, which sounds a tad redundant) and to be flattered by Democratic politicians hungry for campaign donations -- gave Obama’s presidency a 95% approval rating, according to a poll (pdf) conducted there.

This comes despite Obama's apparent disavowal of a single-payer healthcare system, a top priority of the Democratic base, his aforementioned imperial escalations, and his denial of habeas corpus to those accused of acts of terrorism. Obama does, however, typically speak in complete, coherent sentences, which to the average liberal is more than enough to “restore America’s standing in the world."

Digging deeper into the poll of Netroots conference attendees, one sees that but one brave soul just 1 percent (which comes out to about two people) declared ending the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan their top priority (who let Cindy Sheehan in?). This lagged behind other liberal priorities, such as: “Working to elect progressive candidates in the 2010 elections”; “Working to enact President Obama's agenda generally”; and of course, “Countering right-wing attacks on Obama and his agenda.”

As historian David Beito writes of the would-be power brokers of the liberal blogosphere, “If the antiwar movement ever makes a comeback, it won't be because of them.”

The top priority of the Netroots crowd? “Passing comprehensive health care reform”, which -- while I understand the status quo is a catastrophic mess -- seems a tad curious in light of the president’s promise to cut health care costs by but a meager 2 percent and his refusal to back what many progressive activists believe to be the answer to our corrupt corporatist system. It also strikes me as indefensibly nationalistic since -- and hear me out -- putting healthcare reform ahead of dismantling the warfare state implicitly signals that one values cutting their health care bill by a few percentage points more than stopping their government from using their tax dollars to kill and maim poor foreigners. Call me crazy, but I say any professed liberal humanitarian should abide by the rule, “first, do no harm” -- meaning, at the very least, stop killing people.

I’d also suggest dismantling the domestic police state should take precedence, still I suppose America’s record number of incarcerated do get some form of free government healthcare.

Meanwhile, though liberal activists may no longer be all that concerned about taxpayer-funded murder in far-off lands, CNN reports an almost poetic coincidence: “President Obama will take a brief hiatus from his health care push on Monday and turn his focus to the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan.”

On the road

I'll be driving cross-country over the next week, beginning in Albuquerque and -- barring any life changing incidents in the desert -- ending up back here in DC. That means you shouldn't expect any long-winded pieces about U.S. policy toward Iran or why you should read Lysander Spooner.

You can, however, follow my exploits on Twitter.

Eric Cantor blasts U.S. interventionism

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) is a hawkish conservative lawmaker who strongly supported the Bush administration's militaristic foreign policy and has blasted President Obama for being insufficiently imperialistic. That's why it was so surprising when, during a trip this week overseas, Cantor sounded off on the U.S.'s interventionist policies abroad, noting that "I don't think we, in America, would want another country telling us how to implement and execute our laws."

Of course there's the obvious catch: Cantor "objected to U.S. criticism of Israel's eviction of two Arab families from housing in eastern Jerusalem earlier this week."

When it comes to Israel clearing Arabs out of East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers, Cantor empathizes with those who defy American foreign policy. When it comes to other countries' internal affairs, umm . . .

"The Administration’s silence in the face of Iran’s brutal suppression of democratic rights represents a step backwards for homegrown democracy in the Middle East," Cantor said. "President Obama must take a strong public position in the face of violence and human rights abuses. We have a moral responsibility to lead the world in opposition to Iran’s extreme response to peaceful protests."

It's almost as if Cantor's views on foreign policy are -- and get ready for this folks -- a tad . . . inconsistent, almost as if he doesn't mind human rights abuses committed by U.S. allies, expressing moral indignation to such abuses when it serves the interests of American hegemony. Shocking, I know.

Paging Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is a funny and intelligent guy, but ever since his weepy America-has-finally-fulfilled-its-promise performance upon the election of Barack Obama, he hasn’t been quite the same -- epitomized by his disappointingly pathetic apology for the perfectly sensible (thus politically unpopular) statement that President Harry “Hiroshima” Truman was a war criminal.

While interviewing Newsmax.com writer Ronald Kessler earlier this week, Stewart -- though brilliant and scathing when he’s on -- had another cringe-worthy outing, apparently forgetting that Barack Obama is not the nice guy with a great smile he once interviewed, but the commander-in-chief, the head of a global empire -- a guy who okayed the deaths-sans-trials for over a dozen Pakistanis within days of taking office.

Responding to Kessler’s comment that “Obama [smokes] on a regular basis, despite his claims that he gave it up,” Stewart appeared to forget these uncomfortable facts (a shockingly prevalent phenomenon among Obama boosters), telling Kessler:

Stewart: Now that seems okay with me. I’ll take that.

Kessler: You’re a smoker?

Stewart: I was a smoker for 20 years. And I prefer that to... bombing countries. I’ll take a smoker.

Well Jon, with Barack Obama you get both a president that smokes and a president that bombs sovereign countries without so much as a declaration of war. Since taking office, Obama has overseen hundreds of Pakistani deaths from attacks that he's signed off on, in addition to the hundreds of Afghan civilians who have died to further the U.S. goal of -- wait, we’re still waiting for a blue ribbon commission to get back to us on what that is.

To refresh your memory, here’s a woefully incomplete list of just some of our peace president’s overseas contingency operations:

January 23, 2009:

Barack Obama gave the go-ahead for his first military action yesterday, missile strikes against suspected militants in Pakistan which killed at least 18 people.

May 6, 2009:

US-led air strikes have killed dozens of Afghan people, the Red Cross said today as the Pentagon launched a joint investigation into what appeared one of the deadliest incidents and heaviest civilian losses so far at the hands of coalition forces.

Rohul Amin, the governor of Farah province in west Afghanistan, where the bombing took place during a battle on Monday and Tuesday, said he feared 100 civilians had been killed.

June 23, 2009:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said.

August 1, 2009:

The widening war in Afghanistan between Taliban militants and American-allied Afghan forces is taking an increasingly heavy toll on civilians, with 1,013 killed in the first six months of 2009, up from 818 during the same period in 2008, according to a United Nations report released Friday.

Explosions and suicide attacks carried out by anti-government forces, including the Taliban, caused a majority of the civilian deaths, killing 595 during the period, the report said. Of the 310 deaths attributed to pro-government forces, about two-thirds were caused by American airstrikes.

August 5, 2009:

A US air strike has killed a wife of the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, delivering a message to the notorious militant commander that western and Pakistani pursuers are closing in on him.

Two missiles from an unmanned drone plane struck a house near Makeen in South Waziristan, a Mehsud stronghold near the Afghan border, last night, killing at least two people and wounding several others.

Unfortunately, like many of his fellow American liberals, it would appear Jon Stewart values soothing rhetoric about human rights (and torture bad!) over actual policy.

Obama weighs economic warfare against Iran

One reason Iran has been unwilling to agree to any deal over its nuclear program that would outsource its uranium enrichment to other countries is the fact that it fears its energy supplies being threatened by unfriendly powers, much as U.S. politicians speak glowingly of "energy independence" as a means of promoting national security. It also helps that for decades Iran was exploited by imperial powers such as Russia and Britain, the latter which for a time held a de facto monopoly over Iran's domestic oil production.

So if you're a U.S. policymaker seeking to allay Iran's concern that giving up its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium will leave its energy production at the mercy of unfriendly foreign powers, what do you do? Well if you're the Obama administration, according to the New York Times, you threaten to blockade Iran's importation of refined gasoline, upon which it is dependent:

The Obama administration is talking with allies and Congress about the possibility of imposing an extreme economic sanction against Iran if it fails to respond to President Obama’s offer to negotiate on its nuclear program: cutting off the country’s imports of gasoline and other refined oil products.

The option of acting against companies around the world that supply Iran with 40 percent of its gasoline has been broached with European allies and Israel, officials from those countries said. Legislation that would give Mr. Obama that authority already has 71 sponsors in the Senate and similar legislation is expected to sail through the House.

One wonders (not for long, mind you) whether your typical American lawmaker has ever pondered how the average American would respond were another country proposing a similar act of aggression against the U.S. That Venezuela's Hugo Chavez subsidizes oil for the poor in the the United States (in between often hyperbolic denunciations of U.S. policy) and is still seen as a poster-child for the merits of reducing this country's dependence on foreign oil should offer some insight on the matter.

However, the Obama administration appears to be endorsing National Security Council member Dennis Ross' strategy of pursuing diplomacy as a means of making acts of war more palatable to the so-called international community, in this case exploring ways of blocking importations of refined gasoline into Iran -- which Newshoggers' Steve Hynd notes would necessitate a naval blockade and "would be an unequivocal act of aggressive and illegal warfare under international law" -- a form of economic warfare that produced misery in Iraq, but little in the way of regime change. (For some odd reason, whether they're being bombed or embargoed, people tend to side with the those claiming to defend them -- however poorly -- rather than the people conducting the bombing raids and blocking the importation of basic goods.

Unfortunately, as Hynd observes, Obama's reported consideration of an act of war against Iran over a nuclear weapons program international inspectors and his own intelligence agencies say does not exist doesn't appear to be eliciting the same sort of outraged reaction from Democratic politicians and partisans that might have been expected in the past, with coverage of the silly-things-right-wingers-say dominating much of the conversation.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports:

The U.S. Defense Department wants to accelerate by three years the deployment of a 30,000-pound bunker-buster bomb, a request that reflects growing unease over nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea.

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Accelerating the program “is intended to, at the very least, give the president the option of conducting a strike to knock out Iran’s main uranium enrichment capabilities,” said Ken Katzman, Middle East military expert for the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.

Combined with Obama's actions on everything from gays in the military to drone attacks in Pakistan, one could be forgiven for believing the Republicans still control all three branches of government.

Our pathetic press corps

With wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, what questions did our esteemed White House press corps choose to ask at today's briefing with Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs? Hint: it had something to do with a guy named "Gates", and not the one who heads up the Defense Department. Though in my great mercy I have deleted the answers -- as well as a few questions about something called "health care" (don't worry, I have no idea what that's referring to either) -- here's a list of the hard-hitting questions the profoundly silly, self-styled "journalists" who attend these sorts of briefings asked about the most pressing news item of the day:

Q Polls, two of them. One on health care showing 46 percent disapproving of the president's handling of health care. And then on the Gates issue, with 41 percent disapproving. Different poll, but 41 percent disapproving of how the president is handling -- handled that incident.
Is this something that --

Q Forty one disapproving of how the president handled the Gates --

Q Is this something that you all are worried about? They're coming at the same time. The Gates incident is pulling away from attention on health care. Even the president said that.

Q Actually he said it, I believe it was, yesterday, didn't he, that people aren't talking about health care as much?
Maybe I'm wrong.

Q Well, it's pulling down his approval ratings, particularly among working class --

Q Among working class, right, his --

Q I'm just telling you what the polls said. So I'm wondering if you're worried about it and what you guys can do about it.

Q Two questions, Robert, first one having to do with the Gates-Crowley meeting today. If we're not going to be able to listen to the conversation and the three men are not going to talk to the press afterwards --

Q Well, but you're not going to orchestrate it here at the White House is all I meant. But --

Q Okay. But the -- I guess the question is, the president said he wanted --

Q -- the president said he wants this to be a teachable moment.

Q How do you envision this being a teachable moment?

Q I guess I could just request, I'm sure on everybody's behalf, that we find out and have as thorough a debrief from you as possible, so that we can make it as much of a teachable moment as possible.

Q And back to the Gates event today at the White House, why not allow the press to get closer to the table, to be able to at least, you know, have some sort of conversation or something with the parties involved?

Q Right, but that's if they want to. But typically when you have events --

Q You know, I do want to follow up on that.
I mean, typically there are events that happen here at the White House. We're invited in. We get a chance to either ask questions of the parties there. And if they choose to come out, we can get additional information from them.
In this case, we won't have anything there and most likely won't get anything when they come out.

Q But what about on the earlier part?
What about the president? I mean, why is the president in a cone of silence on this? You're saying, those two can come out and talk, but he can't? (Off mike) -- teachable moment. Why -- what's the lesson that he wants to teach?

Q But why doesn't he see this as an opportunity, if he wants to make it a teachable moment, to come out and talk and teach what he learned, what he wants the nation to learn?

Q Well, just to stay on it for one second, I mean, not that I'm arguing against any coverage, but you are availing yourself of the picture. So presumably you want a photo but not any further content from the president.

Q If you could, provide us some more logistics of the event this evening. Apparently you've decided you don't want to splash beer on Malia and Sasha's picnic table, which is probably a good thing.
Can you talk about --

Q The picture we're going to get appears to be the three principals. But there are a number of people coming here, by my understanding. Are they all going to get together? What are you doing with the other guys?

Q You've got police-union officials coming as well.

Q Robert, going back to Sergeant Crowley and Professor Gates, what do you hope -- tomorrow morning when you wake up, what do you hope you will have accomplished?

Q Well, besides -- what do you hope you will look back --

Q -- what do you hope to -- what's your best-case scenario for looking back and saying, "We accomplished this last night. We were able to" --

Q Can it be a teachable moment if the American people do not hear something that several of them -- several sides have asked for, including Professor Gates, at least? And that's the word "apology" during the conversation today.

Q I had a question on the health care thing yesterday, but on the Gates thing, the president has said that he wants this to be a teachable moment, regardless of who --

Q So he said he wants this to be a teachable moment. Regardless of who first proposed it, he's, through his surrogates, called these guys from the White House. But is he the teacher in this teachable moment?

Q Dialogue about what?

Q But how is that teachable for everybody? How is that teachable for the nation, if it's just about an incident between two men?

Q Well, some people think it's an incident about racial profiling. Some people think it's an incident about disrespect for police. Some people think it's -- I mean, there are a million different things that it could be a teachable lesson about. And we're not getting --

Q You say it's a teachable moment. About what? Communication? I mean --

Q We wouldn't have imagined they'd be here and we wouldn't hear anything that was going to happen from the president. (Laughter.)

Q No I really -- he's not using this as an opportunity.

Q The only thing we're hearing -- is a teachable moment example is that we're going to get a photograph out of it, or some film. I don't understand. I mean --

Q Do you think the coverage has been good, that people have been covering this issue? You said there's been a lot of coverage. Is that a good thing?

Q (Off mike) -- how much more you could get if he came out and talked to us.

It's days like these that I'm not so much saddened by the fact that much of the establishment media appears to be dying off as I am by the fact that it hasn't already died.

Grand Old Hypocrisy

Sentient beings may find the claim that conservatives have no interest in using the force of government to shape people's behavior a bit amusing in light of their positions on the war on drugs, reproductive rights and a million other social issues. But just as Glenn Beck suddenly discovered the evils of centralized power when a black man became president, Republicans on the House Science & Technology Committee are claim to have rediscovered their long-dormant opposition to the government telling people what to do now that it's the Democrats doing the telling.

As a GOP press release informs us, a bill being considered by the science committee this week would establish a “social and behavioral sciences research program” aimed at coming up with ways to encourage Americans to use less energy. While a seemingly benign if perhaps questionable use of taxpayer money, “Many Republicans at the markup fundamentally disagreed with the notion that changing Americans' behavior is a role that the federal government should play.” Hold your laughter.

According to the press release, Florida Republican Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart engaged in a little philosophical musing at the hearing on “the nature of the relationship between Government and the people".

“Do we need the Federal Government to start dictating every aspect of our lives? Is there no limit to what the role of the Federal Government should be; even going to the extreme of trying to change our behavior, because the American people are not capable of turning on a light and turning it off?”

While I for one appreciate his sticking up for my god-given right to keep my incandescent bulbs on 24/7 and heat my house with open-air kitten fires, I find it odd Diaz-Balart's fear of the federal government was nowhere to be found when he voted to pass the Military Commissions Act -- granting the president the unilateral authority to strip those accused of terrorism of any right to protest their imprisonment -- to ban flag burning, to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act and to prohibit online gambling. Diaz-Balart has also vigorously opposed any effort to allow Americans to trade with the residents of Cuba or to travel to that country. And last I checked, he does not believe consenting adults should be allowed to imbibe in substances he disapproves of.

In other words, while he opposes the oppressive hand of big government encouraging Americans to reduce their energy use, Diaz-Balart has no problem with said government spying on its citizens without a warrant, instructing them on the morally correct ways to spend their money and free time, and dictating to them where they can and cannot travel (almost like a communist government).

Further, the idea that Republicans don't believe in using the force of government to change Americans' behavior is hilariously unfounded -- witness the GOP's (and the Democrats') penchant for using the tax code as a vehicle for bribing people into choosing one particular, socially acceptable form of relationship -- heterosexual marriage -- and for economically discriminating against those who choose one of the scores of possible alternatives.

Hypocrisy may know no bounds in politics, but politicians could stand to be a little less brazen about it.

Clinton breaks with Kerry on Iran

Earlier this summer Senator John Kerry (D-MA) hinted at a possible change in U.S. policy when the Massachusetts Democrat -- chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a lawmaker more likely to echo administration talking points than openly challenge them -- told the Financial Times that Iran has a right to enrich uranium for peaceful energy purposes, calling the Bush administration’s stance against such enrichment “ridiculous”.

While many reasonably believed Kerry’s position signaled a new stance from the Obama administration, with the FT having earlier reported that such a change in policy was indeed under consideration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put the notion to rest in an interview over the weekend on Meet The Press.

“My view is you hope for the best, you plan for the worst,” Clinton told host David Gregory, continuing:

“Our hope is -- that's why we're engaged in the president's policy of engagement toward Iran -- is that Iran will understand why it is in their interest to go along with the consensus of the international community, which very clearly says you have rights and responsibilities. You have a right to pursue the peaceful use of civil nuclear power. You do not have a right to obtain a nuclear weapon. You do not have the right to have the full enrichment and reprocessing cycle under your control.

David Gregory might have noted that international inspectors and the U.S. intelligence community do not believe Iran has an active nuclear weapons program, but he didn’t.

The sanctimony about the “international consensus” from an administration that continues to assert the right to hold terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge, meanwhile, is a bit rich, if to be expected. Perhaps the most newsworthy aspect of the interview, however, was Clinton’s declaration that Iran has no right to have the “full enrichment” of uranium under its control -- a position Kerry vehemently denounced in the interview with the FT as just more “bombastic diplomacy” and “wasted energy,” adding that Iran has “a right to peaceful nuclear power and to enrichment in that purpose.” Though Kerry was referring to the Bush administration at the time, his remarks drive home the fact that the Obama administration is electing to continue some of the most-criticized policies of his predecessor, with Clinton outdoing even Condoleeza Rice in terms of her "altogether steelier and more terrifyingly hawkish persona."

Worth noting is that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the U.S. government is actively undermining by providing nuclear fuel to non-signatory and known proliferator India, states that parties to the agreement (like Iran) have an “inalienable right . . . to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination”. With that in mind, Clinton's statement that Iran has no right to enrich uranium indicates the Obama administration believes it can reinterpret an international treaty to its liking, the actual text of the agreement be damned.

David Gregory might have noted that rather salient fact, but he didn't.

Hey buddy, need a car?

"Go out and buy a car! CARS.com! We're -- it's on! Let's do it."

-- Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, speaking at a July 27th event to kick off the government's so-called "cash-for-clunkers" rebate program aimed at encouraging debt-ridden Americans to purchase new automobiles.

"You can drive off the lot in a new car today, no money down," LaHood said. "We'd be crazy to offer these amazing deals for long."

He declined to characterize the new government incentives as a going-out-of-business sale, telling reporters he preferred to see them as a great opportunity for consumers who don't need "costly add-ons" like extended warranties.

A Department of Transportation spokesman told reporters later that the public should take advantage of "this fantastic limited-time offer," adding he was "pretty sure" he could get you a free undercoating for "little to no charge."

New administration, same disinformation

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago on July 16th, declared that Iran's "determination, apparently, to seek nuclear weapons" is the most worrisome situation in the world, becoming the latest Obama administration official to fearmonger about a nuke program the U.S. government's own intelligence agencies say doesn't exist:

I would say that the one [situation] that I think is the most difficult -- and it was difficult in the Bush administration, and it's difficult in this administration -- is the problem of Iran. And it is Iran's determination, apparently, to seek nuclear weapons, the inability of the international community to affect their determination to do that, and how you deal with that -- and where all of the outcomes are negative. If they achieve one, the possibility of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East is very, very real. And if some action is taken to prevent them from getting one, the consequences of that are completely unpredictable, and likely very bad.

So if we -- we, the international community -- it's not just the United States that faces this problem. After all, Iran is going to have missiles that can deliver nuclear weapons to people in their region a lot sooner than they're going to have the capability to deliver one to us. And this is one of the messages that I've delivered to the Russians over the last two or three years, is that -- is that they're a lot closer than we are.

While Gates' suggestion that the fallout of military action to stop Iran's nuclear program would be "likely very bad" is welcome, he should feel reassured by the fact that the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says he has not seen "any evidence" Iran is developing nukes.

And though Gates implicitly connects Iran's missile development program with a presumed nuclear weapons program, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair struck down such a suggestion in congressional testimony earlier this year when asked by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) whether "Iran will be developing a nuclear weapon to go along with these . . . delivery vehicles".

"I don't think those missile developments, Senator McCain, prejudice the nuclear weapons decision one way or another," Blair said, continuing:

"I believe those are separate decisions. The same missiles can launch vehicles into space, they can launch warheads, either conventional or nuclear, onto land targets. And Iran is pursuing those for those multiple purposes. Whether they develop a nuclear weapon, which could then be put in that warhead, I believe, is a separate decision which Iran has not made yet."