Rayne Today

House Armed Services Committee putting on magic show

2011-03-08T16:19:00.000-05:00

Just moments from now, the House Armed Services Committee will begin a press conference to discuss proposed legislation addressing "America’s Terrorist Detention and Prosecution Policies."

The announcement issued by the HASC's chair Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) says,

The comprehensive legislation, among other things, would affirm the use of military force against al-Qaeda, the Taliban and affiliated terrorist networks; create certain restrictions which would make it tougher for detainees to return to the battlefield or share information with other terrorists or malign actors; and would permanently block funding for the creation or renovation of any facility in the continental United States to house detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay.

That's three rather ugly things all bundled into one piece of legislation -- nasty little rabbits all stuffed together in a magician's hat. With a wave of his wand and a tap on the brim, Rep. McKeon will call them something else and insist we don't see a sleight of hand.

First, the affirmation of the use of military force is a reiteration of the original Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, under which the Defense Department has not only been chasing terrorists here and abroad but under which the U.S. continues its occupation of Afghanistan. Those who do not believe we should continue expending resources at the same pace in Afghanistan will not want to extend carte blanche without limitations.

Second, the "certain restrictions which would make it tougher for detainees to return to the battlefield or share information" means at least two things will be codified: indefinite detention including detention without charges, and continued expansion of the government's ability to intercept communications which may or may not be terrorism related in an effort to sort terrorist from not-terrorist communications.

Thirdly, the wording regarding blocking of funding only mentions those detainees currently at Guantanamo Bay; it does not mention detainees still held in any other location, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, other locations across north Africa and offshore on any vessel. It's been pointed out that several trial balloons have been launched regarding the funding of detention facilities within the U.S., but not for the purposes of housing any detainees at GTMO, and at least one of those targeted facilities is in Rep. Buck McKeon's backyard.

The Department of Justice has also been doing the Defense Department's dirty work proving that military facilities can be used for bulk detentions, making the line between DOJ and DOD very fuzzy. In other words, funding for detention facilities in the U.S. might not come from the DOD but the DOJ's budget -- and the DOJ and DOD would work together cooperatively, just as they did on the recent roundup and detention of 100-plus members of organized crime who have been held in the brig at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York.

It might be time to draft some fax missives to the Democratic members of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees to push back at this deceptive nonsense.

Graphic: Ecology of CDOs and CDSs

2010-04-05T12:29:00.002-04:00

The age thing

2010-02-09T23:43:00.002-05:00

One of my circle of acquaintances in the blogging world has been wrestling with the issue of age and ageism. Jon Lebkowsky said in an email to others, "I've learned that over 60 in the U.S., you're pretty much out to pasture. And the pasture is bare, up to you to turn the soil and plant the seeds."

While I find myself agreeing with Jon, I do so with reservations.

The age thing is based in cultural stickiness. Decade after decade of improvements to our health and safety, we are still basing our measurements of human productivity on the mortality of our antecedents. Women frequently died in childbirth, men died more frequently of heart disease and fatal work injuries acquired from physically demanding labor, yet these have now become much more infrequent factors and our life spans are increasing rapidly. But our cultural notions of age and productivity are still stuck in the past and haven't kept up with us.

(One example: how many employers still have concerns about women of childbearing age and how much work they will produce? It's bias based on a past which is long gone, and may never have been accurate in the first place.)

What has been personally liberating is the internet; it acts as a screen or filter which removes the judgment of my age and sometimes even my gender from the equation. As long as I'm productive, the recipient at the other end doesn't care if I'm a dog. Unless, of course, they're a cat or squirrel or they have a bias against dogs...but that's the point, a bias may be more obvious than it is in a face-to-face working environment.

At a certain age, we have to build the road ahead. There's only a few stray footprints to follow, but as our longevity increases, there must be something more and better for those behind us. I say, Build the road, Jon; the youngsters are watching you.

So are we really out to pasture? or are we liberated from expectations as we get older?

Are we really faced with a barren pasture to till, or are we offered a clean slate to start the next phase of our lives?

I guess since there is no guidebook, no rules, no groove worn for us to follow, what happens as we reach this open and new stretch of road is up to us.

[photo: CaptPiper via Flickr]

In a bit of a pickle

2009-09-27T00:30:00.013-04:00

As I came down the stairs I heard somebody moaning in the general vicinity of the kitchen.

Unnhh.

Mmmfff. Unh-huh.

Mmm-mmm-mmm-unh.

What the hell is going on, I wondered?

Standing over the kitchen island, eyes closed, murmuring to himself is my spouse.

With a half-eaten jar of pickles in his hand.

"Oh my God, these are so good."

"Good," he said, as if I didn't hear him the first time through the mouthful of pickles. "My mom would have loved these, these are soooo good. What are they?"

Just bread and butter pickles. Pickles and peppers from our garden, and some big sweet onions from the farmers' market, with some extra garlic.

That was a week ago. He's eaten another jar since then. I don't think I've made enough to make it through the winter, at this rate of consumption.

Try them yourself, they're easy to make. But you'd better do it soon if you live in northern climes as hard frosts will take out the rest of the pickle crop over the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and as for the pickle prep: I used my old Salad Shooter to slice the pickles. It made short work of the small pickles, although some of the larger diameter cukes had to be sliced in half lengthwise before I could put them through the machine. The same guy who'd glutted himself pickles was pretty skeptical about the thickness of the pickle slices; he thought they'd be too thin to be crisp. Obviously not a problem at all.

Bread and Butter Pickles

Ingredients:

25 pickling cucumbers, washed and sliced thin

2 large onions, peeled and sliced thin

2 sweet or bell peppers, sliced or chopped bite-sized or smaller

3 cloves garlic, minced finely

1/2 cup pickling salt

3 cups cider vinegar

5 cups white sugar

2 TBSP. mustard seed

1 1/2 tsp. celery seed

1/2 tsp. whole cloves

1 TBSP. ground turmeric

1 TBSP. red pepper flakes (OPTIONAL - add if you like sweet-and-spicy)

Instructions:

1. Place prepared vegetables into a large bowl. Sprinkle the salt over the vegetables and toss together gently until salt has been evenly incorporated. Let stand approximately 3 hours.

Wash and prep jars and lids for canning.

2. About 20 minutes before the vegetables have finished brining, pour the cider vinegar, white sugar, mustard seed, celery seed, whole cloves and turmeric into a large pot. The pot must big enough for all of the vegetables. Bring the vinegar-sugar-spice mixture to a boil, then turn down to a simmer.

Sterilize jars and lids in boiling water and have at the ready; prepare hot water bath canner.

3. Drain the salty liquid from the vegetables; rinse the vegetables with very cold water three times to remove excess salt, then drain the vegetables thorougly in a large colander. (The colder the water, the better as it will ensure the cuke slices retain their crispness. Add ice to the water if necessary.)

Gently stir drained vegetables into the boiling vinegar-sugar-spice mixture. Turn up heat, stirring gently; turn down heat to warm just before vegetables reach boiling point.

4. Ladle hot pickle mixture into sterilized jars, leaving 1/2 inch head room. Seal and process in hot water bath for 30 minutes.

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake's The Seminal.]

A pattern of behavior suggests less than full cooperation from the health care industry

2009-09-12T14:49:00.004-04:00

After a rather aggravating discussion this past week with rank-and-file members of the local Democratic Party as well as representatives for elected officials, it became clear that hold-outs in Congress who refuse to commit that they will do everything possible to obtain the public option are not on the same page as us.

They believe they need to make no commitments to anyone, including constituents, in order to have maximum negotiating power when bargaining with the health care industry.

We, on the other hand, believe they simply need to do their utmost to get the public option, which is not the same as bargaining away and settling for less.

I was pretty steamed about this situation. Perhaps if I knew less about the health care industry's performance over the last couple of decades I might be more amenable and understanding.

But I do know about these choice examples -– and they are only a very small number, a smattering of cases presented here in no particular order which exemplify a problem across the health care industry:

========================================
09/03/09 -- Justice Department Announces Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its History

http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/press-releases/justice-department-announces-largest-health-care-fraud-settlement-its-history#ixzz0QrvWqayw

"...American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc. (hereinafter together "Pfizer") have agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products, the Justice Department announced today.

Pharmacia & Upjohn Company has agreed to plead guilty to a felony violation of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for misbranding Bextra with the intent to defraud or mislead. Bextra is an anti-inflammatory drug that Pfizer pulled from the market in 2005."

========================================
04/23/08 -- Former Bristol-Myers Squibb Senior Vice President indicted for lying to the Federal Government about popular blood-thinning drug

http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2008/232525.htm

"The Department of Justice announced today that the former senior vice president of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (BMS), Andrew Bodnar, was indicted for his role in lying to the federal government about a patent deal involving the popular blood-thinning drug, Plavix, used by heart attack, stroke and other patients.

[snip]

On June 11, 2007, BMS agreed to plead guilty and pay a $1 million criminal fine for misleading the government about the Plavix patent deal. BMS paid the maximum fine permitted by statute for committing two violations under the federal False Statements Act."

========================================
08/23/05 -- Former Bristol-Myers Executives charged by SEC with Civil Fraud

http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr19343.htm

"The Complaint alleges that from the first quarter of 2000 through the fourth quarter of 2001, at Schiff and Lane's direction, Bristol-Myers stuffed its distribution channels with excessive amounts of its pharmaceutical products ahead of demand to meet the Company's internal earnings targets and the consensus estimate of Wall Street securities analysts, and improperly recognized revenue from $1.5 billion of such sales to its two largest wholesalers. According to the Commission's Complaint, when Bristol-Myers' results still fell short of its targets and the consensus estimate, at Schiff's direction, the Company used "cookie jar" reserves to further inflate its earnings. The Complaint also alleges that at Schiff's direction, and as a result of the channel-stuffing, Bristol-Myers also underaccrued for Medicaid and prime vendor rebate liabilities. As a result of its channel-stuffing and improper accounting measures, Bristol-Myers reported results that met or exceeded the consensus estimate every quarter during the scheme."

========================================
06/15/05 -- Bristol-Myers Squibb Charged with Conspiring to Commit Securities Fraud; Prosecution Deferred for Two Years

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nj/press/files/bms0615_r.htm

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nj/press/files/pdffiles/SchiffLaneIndictment.pdf

"Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (BMS) has agreed to pay an additional $300 million in restitution and undertake a series of corporate reforms as part of an agreement with the government to defer prosecution on a charge of conspiring to commit securities fraud for the company's failure to disclose its 'channel-stuffing' activities in 2000 and 2001"

========================================
September 2008 -- WellCare Health Plans Inc. has agreed to pay $35.2 million to the Financial Litigation Unit of the United States Attorney's Office

http://www.crowell.com/pdf/managedcare/Wellcare-Agreement.pdf

"WellCare Health Plans Inc. has agreed to pay $35.2 million to the Financial Litigation Unit of the United States Attorney's Office arising from understatements of anticipated premium refunds pursuant to its Florida Medicaid contract. This figure is based on WellCare's estimate of the maximum potential repayment owed to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration ("AHCA") under the state's disease management law from December 1, 2002 through December 31, 2006."

========================================
03/03/08 -- New York takes on United over tactics as industry arbiter of physician pay

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2008/03/03/bil10303.htm

"An investigation into how a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary determined reimbursement for out-of-network physicians across multiple insurers alleges to show a pattern of underpricing services to shift the payment burden from insurers to patients.

[snip]

Cuomo, speaking at a news conference in New York City, said Ingenix had manipulated UCR rates to keep them artificially low, resulting in additional profit for United and unnecessary costs for consumers.

[snip]

Cuomo's investigation is extending to other plans that use Ingenix. He said he is issuing subpoenas to 16 other health plans, including WellPoint's Empire BlueCross BlueShield, Cigna, Humana and Aetna. Humana has acknowledged receiving a subpoena."

========================================
02/09/04 -- HealthSouth fraud figures higher than thought

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2004/02/09/bisc0209.htm

"The embattled outpatient services giant HealthSouth now believes its accounting fraud could total as much as $4.6 billion, significantly more than previous estimates.

In a meeting with investors on Jan. 20, HealthSouth officials said an audit was expected to reveal between $3.8 billion and $4.6 billion in fraudulent accounting. In July 2003, the company estimated the fraud to total at least $2.5 billion."

========================================
12/22/08 -- SEC Files Settled Enforcement Actions Against UnitedHealth Group, Inc. and Former General Counsel in Stock Options Backdating Case

http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2008/2008-302.htm

“The Securities and Exchange Commission today filed a civil injunctive action against UnitedHealth Group Inc., a Minnetonka, Minn., health insurance company, alleging that it engaged in a scheme to backdate stock options. Without admitting or denying the allegations, UnitedHealth agreed to settle charges that it violated the reporting, books and records, and internal controls provisions of the federal securities laws.

In a separate complaint, the Commission charged former UnitedHealth General Counsel David J. Lubben with participating in the stock option backdating scheme. Without admitting or denying the allegations, Lubben consented to, among other things, an antifraud injunction, a $575,000 penalty, and a five-year officer and director bar.

The Commission alleges that between 1994 and 2005, UnitedHealth concealed more than $1 billion in stock option compensation by providing senior executives and other employees with “in-the-money” options while secretly backdating the grants to avoid reporting the expenses to investors.”

========================================
04/28/09 -- Federal court approves $350 million RICO case settlement

http://www.ricolawblog.com/2009/04/articles/rico-law/drug-companies/federal-court-approves-350-million-rico-case-settlement/

"A federal court in Massachusetts approved a $350 million settlement. The case alleged a drug wholesaler of inflating drug prices.

[snip]

The suit alleged that McKesson and FirstData violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”). The complaint alleged that the companies used interstate mail to fraudulently raise the average price of McKesson’s drugs."

========================================
07/29/02 -- Blue Cross of California and WellPoint Health Networks to pay U.S. $9.25M to settle allegations of Medicare Fraud

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2002/July/02_civ_435.htm

"Blue Cross of California (BCC) and its parent company, WellPoint Health Networks, have agreed to pay the United States $9,250,000 to resolve allegations that BCC defrauded Medicare, the Justice Department announced today. BCC, which was under contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to process Medicare claims in California until December 2000 (Medicare Part A fiscal intermediary) is alleged to have knowingly falsified data regarding its performance of cost report audits for Medicare."

========================================
06/29/06 -- Tenet Healthcare Corp. to pay U.S. more than $900 million to resolve False Claims Act allegations

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/cac/pressroom/pr2006/088.html

"Tenet Healthcare Corporation, operator of the nation's second-largest hospital chain, has agreed to pay the United States more than $900 million to resolve several "whistleblower" lawsuits and investigations alleging that Tenet and its hospitals knowingly submitted false claims to the Medicare program and other federal health insurance programs over the past decade.

The settlement is the largest single settlement in the nearly 150-year history of the False Claims Act. Previously, the Justice Department settled with HCA for $840 million, as part of a total recovery from HCA of $1.7 billion."

========================================

Again, let me reiterate that this list is a tiny number of cases culled from the last seven years alone. There are many, many more like them, and there's one hell of a lot of money involved.

So tell me exactly why it is we are negotiating at all with these organizations?

Would we tolerate this kind of widespread disregard for the law from any other industry, and still sit down to the table to negotiate with them, believing them to be working with us in good faith?

[Photo: Pharmaceuticals by Destinys_Agent via Flickr.com. Cross-posted to Firedoglake's The Seminal.]

An offended mother on President Obama’s speech to school kids

2009-09-07T15:10:00.004-04:00

The text of President Obama's speech scheduled for delivery tomorrow to public school children has been released today; I've read it.

And I asked my both of my kids read it.

With a bored, so-what shrug, the new sophomore said, "It's rather elementary, but I suppose it has to be since it's meant to reach elementary school kids. Like kindergartners."

The new middle-schooler was more forthcoming.

"Yeah, I read this part about Obama and his mom this past year," by which he referred to the portion of the speech in which Obama recalls how mother got him up at 4:30 a.m. to study. "I already knew about that. And the President is telling kids the same thing you already tell us, that we need to go to school and study and work hard."

I asked him about parents being afraid to let kids hear President Obama's speech -- what did he think about this?

"Profiling. They're profiling him."

You could have knocked me over with a feather; I wasn't expecting this for an answer. Really? Profiling? What did he mean?

"Yeah, the parents are like Maxwell Smart in the Get Smart movie. Max says, 'I'm not profiling, I'm not profiling...he looks EVIL! But I'm not profiling...'"

And off he went to go and enjoy the last day of summer vacation; I doubt this includes packing his backpack, though.

* * * * *

I wish I could summon more cogent thoughts in response.

But all I can think at this point in time is Get. The. Hell. Off. It.

You, the conservatives whining about the President's speech to children tomorrow: Get off it.

The smart kids can see right through you. The older kids won't be impacted by his speech because they are already firmly on the road or they are already lost.

The younger ones are more savvy than you give them credit; they already know you are acting out of pure bigotry.

And the youngest of school kids? Well, we can only hope that a message like "Go to school because you need education" isn't going to scar them unduly. Goodness knows what crazy-ass messages you'd rather they heard from the government. We already know you are personally teaching them fear and bigotry instead of critical thinking.

You do realize that in a capitalist, free market society, workers compete against each other, right?

Fear and bigotry are going to make your kids unemployable in an adult work world where they compete for jobs with the rest of the globe -- as if a lack of critical thinking and education won't do that, too.

Over the past week you've managed to label encouragement to be responsible and completely prepared to compete for future jobs as socialist. What are you telling children about capitalism?

You've had your chance for the last decade-plus, between your former majority in Congress and your two terms in the White House. You've bankrupted us by lying us into an illegal war, by allowing greed to eat away at solid legislative protections and eventually eat away our nation's personal savings, too. You've dumbed us down with your ownership stranglehold on media, so that blabber-mouth cry-babies like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are seen as the benchmark of media success.

And now you want kids to avoid hearing a speech encouraging their personal responsibility to obtain a good education?

Just stop.

And stay the hell away from my kids, you frightened, bigoted, crazy freaks.

[Photo: Crazy bus by bunchofpants, via Flickr.com. Cross-posted at FDL's The Seminal.]

The evidence under our noses: there was no ticking time bomb

2009-08-31T16:18:00.004-04:00

It's been the rational for using torture, a la Kiefer Sutherland's character on the television series "24" -- tick-tock-torture, to keep the time bomb at bay. But there never was a ticking time bomb, and they knew it. Their actions prove it.

The flight logs and the timeline of the rendition flights skipped helterskelter across the world to different locations and venues; some of the flight plans took days, especially when teams of personnel from other entities and countries were involved. They didn't land at the closest place, nor did they land someplace where they would be out in the open, clearly questioning their rendered prey about the tick-tock-time-bomb because the immediacy of a potential attack warranted immediate action.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

They even took their time to set up multiple black sites across the globe; imagine the hours-days-weeks-months of negotiations required to trade a missile defense system for a moldy old prison site, or HIV/AIDS money for a regional command post and another black site. Imagine the numbers of people involved in these negotiations.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

Nor was any of the legal groundwork done rapidly, collaboratively, cooperatively where information could be shared quickly in a commons, because the safety of the nation's citizens and infrastructure demanded all of the brightest and best work on this with great urgency to prevent the next "mass casualty attack" surely pending at any moment.

No, the work was done by one guy here, another guy there, on their own, without any clear trail that somebody at the uppermost echelons of governmental authority had asked for their work out of urgency. The sneaking around to acquire nebulous and shaky authority took time which a ticking time bomb scenario wouldn't offer. The legal pussy-footing and finessing the fuzzy legal authority for multiple intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies took years.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

And finally, there is the body of commentary and testimony from those involved, none of which takes our breath away because of the urgency under which they worked after 9/11. The word of detainees clearly indicates they gave up very little real intelligence and far more false information to stop the immediacy of torture alone. Could they be lying even now? Certainly, but why would they? What do they have to gain by lying at this point in time?

This guy, on the other hand, has far more too lose by telling the unvarnished truth. His words here again sound chill, calculating, without the impetus of any driving need to save the country from an immediate attack as much as he needs to cover his backside after the fact from what became a systemic administrative policy:

WALLACE: Let me ask you -- you say you're proud of what we did. The inspector general's report which was just released from 2004 details some specific interrogations -- mock executions, one of the detainees threatened with a handgun and with an electric drill, waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times.

First of all, did you know that was going on?

CHENEY: I knew about the waterboarding. Not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy that we had approved.

The fact of the matter is, the Justice Department reviewed all of those allegations several years ago. They looked at this question of whether or not somebody had an electric drill in an interrogation session. It was never used on the individual, or that they had brought in a weapon, never used on the individual. The judgment was made then that there wasn't anything there that was improper or illegal with respect to conduct in question...

[crosstalk]

WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you've heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?

CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States, and giving us the intelligence we needed to go find Al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. Those interrogations were involved in the arrest of nearly all the Al Qaeda members that we were able to bring to justice. I think they were directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States.

It was good policy. It was properly carried out. It worked very, very well.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?

CHENEY: I am.

Yeah, he's okay with the view that slow, plodding, methodical torture was necessary, that it was okay to send out plane after plane after plane, rendition after rendition after rendition, to gather up persons alleged to be al Qaeda and torture then detain them and for years on end, whether they were truly al Qaeda or not.

As a general policy, he says it was good and that he was okay with it.

Without one bit of hair-on-fire urgency conveyed in this testimony before the court of public opinion.

None.

Because there never was a ticking time bomb threatening Americans, and we're just realizing it now, years and years later.

[Excerpt above from interview of former VP Dick Cheney by Chris Wallace at Fox News (and no, I'm not linking to them). Photo: It's ticking, by Michael Tienzo via Flickr.com. Cross-posted at Firedoglake's The Seminal.]

Kitchen Garden: post-vacation review

2009-08-25T11:36:00.009-04:00

Oh my. What a little time, less water and benign neglect can do to a garden.

Compare this photo at right to the photos below at this post.

Wowzer.

These Early Girl tomatoes are just beginning to blush; I expect to pick them within the next 10 days.

But they aren't very early, should have picked the first ones a few weeks ago.

Another expectation shot in the keister: zucchinis are not yielding at all, only one has been harvested so far.

You can see they've developed a case of mildew already, and that the young zucchinis yellow and drop off before they become established mature fruits.

Going to hurt the double-chocolate zucchini bread forecast.

Cucumbers, however, have been plentiful to the point of obnoxiousness. My spouse kept them picked while I was en vacance; I came home to a peck of them on the counter and more than a peck in the garden waiting to be picked.

Unfortunately, the salad cucumbers outpaced the pickles on a 3-to-1 basis. May have to break down and pickle the salad cukes this week.

The biggest disappointment remains the pole beans, all three varieties. Only one species of the three I planted has begun to flower. I'll let you guess which one it is.

The loveliest thing so far this year has been the Gypsy peppers. They are also beginning to blush, having started as a pale ghostly green, becoming Hungarian yellow, and now an appetizing red. I'm going to continue to resist the urge to pick them until they are scarlet, head to toe.

Tonight, weather permitting, I'll take a photo of the garden at night. I should have done this all summer, but it will be even more lush with all the neglect of the last two weeks.

How's your garden doing? Do tell.

Carpe inceptum quam minimum credula postero

2009-08-18T09:35:00.003-04:00

This is an industry with rare consumer praise, even though consumers may want or need its services.

Although there are far more than 1000 competing firms in this market, prices do not go down across the industry, suggesting competitive pressures have failed.

It's a mature product, been around for most of our life times, yet the product has not earned more loyalty from consumers.

Consumers die every day because of the failure of this industry to safely and effectively meet consumers' needs.

It's been propped up by government through a number of different methods including market guarantees and supportive legislation.

What industry is this?

It's not the American auto industry and its supply chain, trying to reduce capacity and costs while taking government financing and benefitting from Cash for Clunkers.

It's not the banking industry and the fat cat banksters wallowing in their TARP-funded bonuses.

Give up guessing?

It's health insurance.

If health insurers don't catch a clue about their failed business model, we should do what we've done to other failed enterprises. It's a step not substantively different from preventing a massive loss of jobs and manufacturing capacity by stepping in on General Motors and Chrysler, or trying to prevent a market meltdown by salvaging what's left of the banks who are needed to fund business and provide services to citizens.

I say we rethink the public option and tell the industry it's time to quit screwing around and face up to the truth: their business model is bankrupting us, it's not delivering what we need, it's literally a threat to our health as a nation.

And then we tell them to start negotiating in good faith to deliver a public option or we're going to seize them because they have been cooking their numbers for years by dropping insureds at will off their rolls (and if you really think about it, you can think of numerous other ways they cook their books, like systematically denying claims unless forced to pay). At the end of the day, there may be a new industry with a smaller number of players who can provide coverage for all by way of economies of scale and by eliminating so many middlemen who don't add value while obstructing competition.

If it's good enough for one of our largest manufacturing industries and good enough for our banking industry, why not use the same approach with the health insurance industry?

Place no more trust in their intentions; they've proven they will not act in good faith.

Simply seize 'em.

[Graphic: Sign in MA restaurant window by Spatch via Flickr. Cross-posted to FDL's The Seminal.]

Squeeze play in progress? Sen. Carl Levin subpoenas Goldman Sachs

2009-07-30T11:21:00.004-04:00

Methinks I see a squeeze play in the making, that President Obama's "stern talking to" could have been a warning shot from a different direction while Congress works from another.

DailyKos diarist Badabing posted this morning that Sen. Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, has subpoenaed Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual and more financial industry firms with regards to the financial meltdown. Note this key graf from WSJ excerpted in the DKos diary:

According to people familiar with the matter, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations also has issued a subpoena to Washington Mutual Inc., a Seattle thrift that was seized by regulators in last year's financial crisis and is now largely owned by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. It appears likely that several other financial institutions also have received subpoenas. Subcommittee investigators declined to comment. A Goldman Sachs spokesman declined to comment on the subpoena. Deutsche Bank didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Huh. Isn't that interesting?

Especially when one considers that then Sen. Obama was a co-sponsor of legislation along with Sen. Levin on corporate transparency, also cited in the same DKos post.

Perhaps Levin is going to finally make some traction with the hope of getting a DOJ referral after other attempts to reveal the criminality of subprime lenders and their aides and abettors further upstream in the financial industry. He's got better political headwinds this time, and a former fellow senator in the White House.

Goodness knows CBS' 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft and Scott Pelley tried to explain the problems in clear terms over the last year, but nobody in Congress or law enforcement picked up on it. (See below the list of 60 Minutes' programs which featured all related stories on mortgage fraud and the financial instruments up the food chain which were based on the fraud.)

And Elliot Spitzer also tried his hand after ALL 50 states' attorneys general were quashed by the White House when they tried to go after subprime mortgage fraud. We all know how that turned out after Spitzer called out the White House and Wall Street in his fateful WaPo op-ed, "Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime", published only weeks before another fateful article in the NYT, and weeks before Bear Stearns crashed.

Let's hope Sen. Levin can get the dirt -- it's out there.

======================
House of Cards: how the U.S. sub-prime mortgage meltdown, in which risky loans drove a housing boom that went bust, is now roiling capital markets worldwide (Video, Feb. 26, 2009)

World Of Trouble: Three years before the housing market crash, Paul Bishop says he warned his superiors at World Savings that many of the mortgages they were granting were misleading and predatory. (Video, Feb. 19, 2009) [NOTE: This is the clearest statement of the amount of fraud involved. A must-watch.]

An Invitation To Fraud: Financial editor Jim Grant says that everyone got a cut in the subprime circle and many share the blame for the crisis. (Video, Feb. 9, 2009)

Credit Default Swaps: an examination of the complicated financial instruments known as credit default swaps and the central role they are playing in the unfolding economic crisis.(Video, Oct. 27, 2008)

Wall Street's Shadow Market: a look at some of the arcane Wall Street financial instruments that have magnified the economic crisis. (Video, Oct. 5, 2008)

The U.S. Mortgage Meltdown: report on the U.S. sub-prime mortgage meltdown, in which risky loans drove a housing boom that went bust, and how this crisis is now roiling capital markets worldwide.(Video, May 25, 2008)

[Cross-posted at The Seminal. Photo of a mortgage fraud victim's home by °Florian via Flickr.]

Something or nothing? You decide: Kuwaiti broker dies only days after SEC files suit

2009-07-26T14:35:00.002-04:00

Maybe this is something, maybe it’s nothing; maybe it's only a movie script waiting to happen.

There’s a rash of stories today about the “apparent” suicide of Kuwaiti broker Hazem Khalid al-Braikan, found shot to death in his home Sunday morning Kuwait time.

Seems al-Braikan had been involved in running up the price of stock(s) in fake takeover attempts; he bought up enough stock that it appeared someone was going to take controlling interest of a firm, then dumped the stock after the price had run up because other firms bought into the uptick.

The SEC had filed a lawsuit against al-Braikan’s firm and several others on Thursday this week, for alleged trading “around hoax bids for US companies.”

Textron, a firm which has historically had government contracts, was one of the firms in which al-Braikan had been trading earlier this year.

The most recent stock in which al-Braikan took an initial position on June 1 and sold out on July 20?

Harman International.

You may recognize the name Harman, of course; the firm was founded in 1978 by Rep. Jane Harman's (D-CA) spouse, Sidney Harman. Sidney stepped down as CEO of the firm in 2007, replaced as part of a turn-around plan in advance of a planned buyout by KKR and Goldman Sachs. KKR and Goldman backed out, however. The CEO stepped up to the chairmanship the following year, with Sidney retaining only an honorific position with the firm.

Rep. Harman's 2007 financial report reflected holdings including as much as $200 million in Harman International stock along with a half-million in the same firm's retirement plan.

Is this something or is it nothing, purely coincidental that a now-dead Kuwaiti broker picked on Harman International? Who knows...but SEC sure can hustle and take action when it wants to, can’t it? it was only 3 days between the time the accumulated positions were dumped and the SEC filed suit…

[Cross-posted at FDL's The Seminal]

Kitchen Garden: so far, so good

2009-07-23T22:54:00.011-04:00

The garden got off to a very slow start this year, between two and three weeks late due to cool and crappy weather.

As you can see, the plants look a little small and lost in my raised beds at the end of June.

The peppers in the middle bed were struggling, looking as if they might not even make it to July.

But what a difference a little time makes.

The peppers in the middle bed were still struggling through the first week of July, but they looked like they turned the corner.

The peppers in the bed closest to the deck (and closest to me in this photo) are going gang busters. There are peppers large enough to pick already, but I'm going to let them go and mature a while longer since they have not yet developed thicker walls and deeper color.

There are flowers on the cucumbers in the far bed and the middle bed as well as on the zucchini plants in the closest bed. Looks like they are now getting over the chill they experienced in June.

Everything has now come up, including the pole beans planted at the trellises. This was the second planting of beans; the first ones died, all three varieties, likely because they didn't care for the warmth of the "starter unit" I'd devised from recycled plastic containers. Oh well; as close as these are planted to the house, we'll be able to pick them well past first frost.

And we'll need to since beans will take 65-70 days to harvest.

There are Kentucky Blue, Roma and Scarlet Runner beans planted at foot of each of the trellises.

I've also planted pole beans in pots which I'll put on the deck and encourage them to grow up to form a screen to block the view of the neighbors' porch.

This week the cucumbers, zucchinis and tomatoes have really put out the blossoms; the zucchinis were ridiculously prolific, putting out six new tiny zukes inside 24 hours.

The lavender plants at the end of the bed are now at peak; I'll harvest some once the rain has dried off the bed and prepare it for refilling several potpourri items in the house. The chives have also started seeding, so I'll harvest the seed heads and put the seeds in envelopes to give to friends.

One unexpected bonus this year: "volunteer" snapdragons and petunias. The petunia plants which popped up unplanted, self-seeded by last year's plants, are in pots next to the deck. The snapdragons ended up next to the garden bed, curiously enough. When I pointed this mystery out to my daughter, she laughed guiltily.

Apparently my daughter and her brother had a "food fight" in the garden last year, throwing the last of the tomatoes at each other along with other debris from flower pots -- right over the vegetable beds.

Explains the dozens of small mystery tomato seedlings I found and gave away, along with these lovely white snapdragons which appeared at the foot of the raised beds. (I did keep a few of the "volunteer" tomato plants, which look suspiciously like a cross between Brandywines and Early Girl tomatoes...we'll see within the month what we get.)

What's in your garden? Do tell.

An offended mother on the topic of blowjobs

2009-07-13T21:02:00.002-04:00

Those of you who know me also know I have a couple of kids -- a teenager in high school, and a tweenager about to enter middle school.

Both of my kids have met the infamous blogger who used, you know, THAT word on MSNBC this afternoon. In fact, they were watching the video of the infamous blogger.

Neither batted an eye about the use of THAT word.

And I am so proud of them.

Because even my kids know the real obscenity isn't a euphemism for oral sex, or even that it happened on a cable show in the middle of the afternoon. My kids know that the real obscenities are these:

* Our country went to war based on lies told by elected and appointed officials;

* Their brother and the sons/daughters/brothers/sisters of many other families like ours served for this war, came back damaged or dead, for nothing but lies;

* Their president and vice president lied repeatedly about all manner of things while refusing to accept responsibility for any failures which happened on their watch;

* Their government was either obstructed during investigations into these lies or simply failed to make any effort to investigate these lies;

* Their government spent billions of dollars to make these lies, to support these lies, to pass these lies on, while killing hundreds of thousands of people in other countries, while making plans to kill more on a targeted basis in the form of assassinations;

* Their government tortured people, innocents among them, including children, to further their lies;

* Their fellow citizens are not better off for all of this, but are far worse off in terms of security, health and finances than before all the lies started;

* The corporate-owned media in their country makes money off ghoulishly beating a tattoo every day about dead entertainers and missing white girls while avoiding the work required of investigative journalism important to real democracy.

Even kids understand when adults are being stupid and unethical, and they know the truth when they see it.

As a mother I'm absolutely offended, but not about the word "blowjob."

I'm deeply offended that the corporate-owned mainstream media can turn a blind eye to the really offensive obscenities, thereby becoming complicit in the criminality -- and they've done this in front of my kids for more than eight years.

What am I supposed to tell these children?

[Cross-posted at The Seminal.]

OS Wars: what the tech pundits missed about Google Chrome OS

2009-07-09T11:38:00.001-04:00

It's hard to tell which generated more bullshit over the last 24-48 hours: Karl Rove's deposition before the House Judiciary Committee, or the tech industry media reaction to Google's Chrome OS announcement. Rove can pile it on high and deep, but tech media sure is doing its best to create more hot air than Michael Jackson's postmortem circus.

For those of you who aren't geeks, Google announced Wednesday that it was working on an operating system. It's going to be built upon open source software and target "people who spend most of their time on the web," with the intent to allow these users rapid access to the internet and be minimally invasive.

Since Google's announcement, nearly all analyses produced by tech media pundits have concentrated on whether the new OS is the beginning of a cage match to the death between Google and Microsoft, or a skirmish for smart phone dominance between Google and Apple, or whether Google is simply bent on taking over the world.

Bollocks. While indulging their obsessive need for competitive conflict, the pundits neglected three important issues which may drive the development of Google Chrome OS.

Africa and other third world markets

Cell phone use on the African continent has exploded over the last handful of years, from 62 million in 2004, to 152 million in 2006, to 250 million in late 2008. This kind of growth -- the world's highest rate of growth in cell phone use -- offers enormous opportunity for Google to deploy new search products, and for Africans to leapfrog past PC-based technology. Google recently announced programs on the continent of Africa including one which allows cell phone users to use SMS text messages to search for information without having to browse the internet. A smart phone is not required, meaning substantially lower costs to the user. This kind of service establishes a relationship with a market not familiar with the Google we know via the internet and our PCs; these users may adopt other Google products more readily as more services and connectivity become available to them.

Globally, the installed base of cell phones to PCs exceeded 1.5-to-1 three years ago, with more people accessing the internet by phone at that time than by PC; Africa's ratio is much higher, at 6-to-1. Given these facts and the size of the third world market, combined with the lack of infrastructure necessary for PC and broadband dispersion, it makes perfect sense for Google to target the market for both cell phones and small, low-cost wireless devices. Granted, the Googlers say the Chrome OS is currently targeted at web users on netbooks and PCs while Google's Android focuses on cell phones; at some point there will be a convergence between these products because users will expect comparable applications and performance on any communication device.

Google Wave

Speaking of communication, a sea change in communications technology is possible with the anticipated release later this year of Google Wave to a full production environment. For non-techie readers: it's difficult to explain how much of a change Google Wave may pose without resorting to a bunch of tech-speak. I highly recommend investing the time to watch Google's recent preview video to see what I mean, keeping in mind you'll be watching some very excited geeks who are passionate about the Google Wave product. If you don't have the time to invest, let me say that the platform will make communication a more fluid, participatory series of inter-connected events rather than static bundles of information we transfer back and forth to each other. A series of waves, as compared to collections of particles as it were, resorting to a still-geeky physics analogy.

My blogging confrère Dave Pollard says Google Wave is the wikification of communication; I can see his point, that communication will be bundled into related topics like a wiki while the chronological path to obtain information from communication can be readily followed. But for many of us who aren't geeks, we will see Google Wave as interactive and social; the sorting and locating of information contained in our communication will be a bonus rather than key to our use of this technology.

So what does this mean? More of us will be moving away from desktop applications like email clients, choosing to communicate from within a browser. Many of us are already doing it with Facebook and MySpace and other social media; we use them as portals to browse our friends' blogs and share our photos, videos and music, using the native chat and message features rather than separate email services or instant messaging applications. Google Wave will wrap all of that into a bundle along with real time sharing of content, having opened the application to developers who will likely build extensions for our favorite social media applications so they are seamlessly woven into our overall communications.

No, Google Chrome OS is not forgotten -- because this lightweight OS may let us access our waves of communication faster. What if getting to your email/chat/social media was as fast as it is to turn on your phone? How will that change your internet usage, your searches, your purchasing decisions?

Emerging technology

Here's another opportunity to confound the non-techie with geek speak; I'm going to spare you and ask that you watch yet another video, this one shorter and perhaps even more mindblowing than the Google Wave video. The video provides an overview of what I personally believe will be the next most disruptive technology after Google Wave -- a personal wireless device with the equivalent of a heads-up display. If you saw the movie Minority Report and remember Tom Cruise's character "surfing" through information on a transparent display with no surface hovering in air, you'll be close. Except this technology is not limited to an office environment; this technology follows you because it is your cell phone, your PDA, your network appliance.

Seriously, watch the video; it features MIT's Pattie Maes presenting the work researcher/developer Pranav Mistry led to develop this concept. You'll see at one point this so-called "Sixth Sense" technology allows the user to scan products on shelves for information in order to make purchasing decisions.

And Google is already there. Or rather, the technology which Google released for the purposes of scanning collections of books and finding a particular bit of information in or related to those books neatly fits at the point where the "Sixth Sense" leaves off. The same technology would need little to become a warehouse of information about any product, which may explain why Amazon.com's CEO Jeff Bezos is in a dither he won't discuss in detail. As uncomfortable as some of us feel about Walmart's business practices and their approach to radio-frequency identification (RFID), Walmart may have unwittingly aided and abetted the next steps to pervasive product information by demanding their suppliers move towards RFID tied to uniform product descriptions. Google's indexing and search might make short work of the product information in a new online store of content, perhaps integrating stores already established by others like Amazon.com.

Now imagine shopping in any store while wearing this new communications device, connected to home at the same time, accessing both people and information fluidly.

The concept is still nebulous, but it's right there if you connect the dots: a light OS which allows a rapid link to the internet, with a communications tool which is seamless and social, one that offers up all information we want on the fly without the encumbrance of anything larger than a cell phone-like device.

Perhaps a Chrome device, one which might be only 24 months away. Wonder what kind of hot air the pundits will generate then?

Munchhausen-syndrome-by-proxy, Alaskan variant

2009-06-22T15:35:00.002-04:00

Finally.

The uproar over CBS' David Letterman's joke has begun to fade away, although not without the usual stupid overreaction by a couple of corporate sponsors who were spooked by fundamentalists without any sense of humor or proportion.

And yet nobody has looked at the underlying cause of this brouhaha.

Ask yourself this: If Palin had been a better parent to her children, would David Letterman have had any material for his wicked joke?

Yeah. Sarah Palin is the real butt of the joke here, and she deserves it. The only problem with Letterman's joke is that he overshot, yielding collateral damage. Had he focused his aim at the appropriate target, there wouldn't have been any hubbub.

Palin's the kind of parent who screams too loudly at hockey games, thinking that her kid's loss is a reflection on her. The kind of parent who's more worried about appearances than about substance. The kind of parent who can easily excise a child from her life if they crease the facade around the family and the parent in question.

How could Palin send her first-born son out of state after some discipline problems at home? I couldn't do it; there's no way you could ask me to send my high schooler away when they are most vulnerable and at risk for more trouble.

How could Palin send away her second-born to live with other family members after getting pregnant? I can't think of a single healthy and well-adjusted parent who could do this to a teen girl, at a time when they are most confused and scared about what lies ahead.

How could Palin risk jumping on a plane to travel from Texas to Alaska, bypassing immediate health care after her water broke during her last pregnancy? Can you find me a health care professional who'd advocate such risky behavior.

And how could Palin use her children -- and in the case of her grandchild's teen father, somebody else's child -- as props for political gain?

I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I think we're looking at somebody who's so very narcissistic that even children are little more to them but tools for attracting attention. Hence the anger over Letterman's joke without any introspection whatsoever, anger pumped up and milked for the purposes of keeping the attention on herself in some sort of weird variation of Munchausen-syndrome-by-proxy.

As a parent with children in high school and grade school, I'm all too familiar with the challenges contemporary families face. It takes a real investment of time and effort every day to make sure that the kids are learning up to their individual potential, that they are safe from all sorts of new risks (like bullies on Facebook and in the classroom, or prepared for driver's ed), and that they know their own limits and those of our household while feeling loved and secure and comfortable living their values.

Doing this effectively means using a single, powerful word.

And it means using this powerful word not just on the kids, but on yourself.

It means saying NO.

No to too many evenings out too late away from the kids, no to events which interfere with naptime/bedtime/homework/school, no to excessive stimulation in the form of television and other electronic disruptions, no to too many toys whether for kids or adults, no to excessive spending on wants instead of needs, no to career moves that satisfy only an adult's sense of achievement and not the family's need for security and togetherness...the list goes on and on.

And no to running for office, if comics' wisecracks, politicos' personal attacks and paparazzi digging through the family's underwear drawer cannot be shuffled off with quiet grace.

Seriously, have you seen Sarah Palin say no to herself or her spouse or her children?

She didn't say no to excessive shopping with McCain campaign money; she didn't say no to dragging her children all over the place when they needed more stability, as infants and pregnant teenagers do; she didn't say no to sending her son and daughter away when they most needed more attention and a firm hand.

The problem wasn't that David Letterman shot too widely with his edgy joke; it's that Sarah Palin gave him too broad a target to begin with, being unable to discipline herself let alone her family, being unable to use her family as anything but a device to make it all about poor Sarah.

De-Froomkined WaPo: the numbers still don't make sense

2009-06-21T17:01:00.002-04:00

WaPo's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt claimed it was low traffic which did in Dan Froomkin's blog. The truth is still quite sketchy, but uglier and not about traffic. Jane wrote yesterday about the Washington Post's ugly practices which squelched Dan Froomkin's traffic; she's also looked at WaPo's flat traffic in comparison to the increasingly popular Huffington Post and newspaper competitor The New York Times.

And I've already looked at the performance of the op-ed team as well; we can rule out Hiatt's lame excuse about traffic as the reason for Froomkin's exit when half the team is doing badly or worse.

We might be tempted ignore WaPo's less-than-happy performance and cut the crusty old newspaper some slack as they adapt to the internet, but unfortunately, WaPo cannot claim a lack of institutional knowledge about internet-based media.

Most of us have forgotten that WaPo's parent The Washington Post Company owns Slate.com; in internet years Slate is older than Methuselah, neck-and-neck in age with competitor Salon.com. At the decrepit age of 13 years, Slate's editorial and management team has seen it all and managed to survive it -- and in theory, should be a deep resource for WaPo's transition to a future based solely on the internet.

At least you'd think a rational management team at WaPo or its parent would see it this way.

If anything, Slate has floundered for the last handful of years as new competitors entered the marketplace and began eating into marketshare.

What a remarkable coincidence: WaPo's parent bought Slate in 2004.

But here is another missed opportunity, besides the inability of WaPo to convert Slate into an effective launchpad for an internet-based future.

Why isn't Dan Froomkin transferring to Slate, bringing with him his own dedicated fan base? Was this an option? (Somebody want to ask Dan if WaPo's parent ever suggested this?)

Looking at the web analytics again, Salon has a more dedicated base of addicts and regulars than Slate, as well as 20% more traffic in spite of having a paid subscriber model -- a model which failed for Slate. Why isn't Slate and its owner looking at leveraging opportunities right under their noses to increase traffic and reader loyalty?

Is it because The Washington Post Company really doesn't understand the internet and new media, and simply wants to look like it does from a distance?

And why are shareholders like Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway putting up with the financial drain WaPo places on other earnings from more profitable ventures like Kaplan, Inc.? Why aren't they looking to spin off WaPo, Slate, and any other media components out from The Washington Post Company to another Berkshire Hathaway holding, like Walt Disney and its ABC network, or to GE and its NBC network? These firms do understand media and the internet, after all, and might be able to improve profitability through economies of scale.

Anyway you look at it, the problem with traffic at WaPo and its blogs has not been Dan Froomkin. There are a few other names we should be seeing announced as soon-to-be former employees of The Washington Post Company and its subsidiaries if the company was really in the business of increasing shareholder value.

[Cross-posted at Oxdown Gazette; graph courtesy of Quantcast.com.]

Dust bunnies and cobwebs

2009-06-11T19:47:00.004-04:00

Wow, has this place accumulated dust. Has it really been that long since I posted here?

I guess I can't deny it, there it is in black and white. I haven't posted since last November.

Conversely, you can see from my Twitter feed below at right that I've been posting at least a few times a week. Guess this means I can muster 140 characters easily, but not enough to post a full blog entry.

And yet this isn't true, either. I've posted content at Firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette at least a couple of times a month. But for some reason I can't seem to organize the energy to cross-post here at my own blog.

Ditto for the Facebook accounts -- plural. I exist as a pseudonym and as my real self, an account for each, and I've somehow choked out a few updates every so often at each account. (I draw the line at MySpace; you will never find me there since I'm not an entertainer.)

Perhaps it's time I looked at a tool which would allow one entry to update all my outlets. It seems kind of goofy that I'm typing so much content and yet my blog is so badly neglected.

On the other hand, it also seems like sheer craziness to hunt down, test and adopt yet another piece of technology to fix this problem. Don't even get me started on how many email accounts I have and how many clients I use to manage them -- but I touch at least 12 different applications a day to communicate with people, and it's simply getting to be too much even for a serious, die-hard geek girl like me.

If you don't see a new post here for a while, you know what I'm doing, juggling and shuffling applications. And by all means, if you can't wait, catch up with me on Twitter.

(Photo: Many handed goddess, via gak at Flickr.com)

Bush pardons his last turkey

2008-11-27T11:03:00.005-05:00

I doubt he'll pardon this particular turkey since he'd sing like a bird under oath without the protections of the Fifth Amendment.

But I suppose there's somebody dreaming of this somewhere today.

(photo: AFP)

The quality of mercy

2008-11-26T11:07:00.004-05:00

The long goodbye has been longer than we ever thought it would be; instead of days or weeks, it's now been over a year since my mother-in-law was admitted to a nursing home.

In hindsight it was naive to think that the suffering would be so short in duration. It was also not apparent at the time that the nursing home into which she'd first been admitted was integral to the condition she was in when I first wrote about her long goodbye.

It was the cost of the facility that changed our perspective about her condition; at $6000 a month for care, she could not stay there overlong. She was moved to a family facility, a setting that was less institutional and more home-like, and at half the cost. Her condition actually improved, buying more time for my father-in-law and mother-in-law to disentangle themselves from each other.

And yet the ultimate challenge remained, one that might have been forced sooner by the institutional facility that the home facility has delayed. At what point does one finally say, "Enough," and begin to reduce the life-prolonging care which only prolongs suffering as well?

For many the question will be asked of them abruptly; they may not fully understand the question at the time, hurting from loss and confused by the suddenness, and yet the question may be very easy to answer. But the question is so much more difficult when a loved one's decline is subtle, difficult to measure. What if organ failure has not started, but is very nearly begun? What if intravenous antibiotics will heal a minor injury, but trip organ failure? Do you refuse or pull antibiotics?

In this case, there will be no recovery. There will be no restoration to wholeness, there will be no guarantees that the antibiotics will even work.

We opt for mercy.

We opt not to turn this poor person, trapped inside a body that will no longer obey their will, trapped in a bed or a chair all day, unable to express their will, confused and no longer able to recognize loved ones or respond to stimulus consistently. We opt not to make this person a pin cushion poked with needles with no assurance but that there will be more opportunities for further poking in the near future.

And although it pains us greatly, we opt to make our final this long goodbye.

One of the biggest frustrations with the so-called pro-life adherents is their inability to deal with this question; everything must be done to prolong life, no matter the quality of that life. There is never a moral hazard perceived, that such protracted efforts might constitute nothing more than prolonged torture.

The quality of mercy never enters into this equation.

What is mercy but having the emotional and spiritual fortitude to end suffering? Is there any virtue in prolonging suffering if it's not yours but that of another who can no longer help themselves?

Is it not our moral obligation not to merely extend life, but to provide mercy, permitting the peace of death to descend rather than perpetuate the harassment of life by being harassment itself?

We all have to answer these questions on our own and with our families. We are giving our answer today. May you have the ability to make your own choices, and when choosing for others, the strength to choose mercy as you deem necessary.

[Cross-posted at Oxdown Gazette. Photo: Lake of the Clouds, Porcupine Mountains, Michigan's Upper Peninsula by wisconsinhiker via Flickr.com]

OMG I need this book. Really.

2008-11-08T21:31:00.003-05:00

The first fifteen pages of Zina Sanders' "The Party's Over" is available online to review.

And they make me laugh so hard I almost wet myself.

The art work is to die for, but the snark is searingly good.

I couldn't help think of our favorite FDL alumnus therapod, either, upon reading these last two pages in the review.

Damn. I think I need a cigarette, and I don't smoke. Remarkable for a political coffee table book. Santa is going to have to get me this book for Christmas.

The last gasps of the smartest guys in the room

2008-09-29T10:22:00.002-04:00

When Treasury Secretary Paulson announced work on a bailout plan, he made some comment about wanting to help responsible homeowners, implying that irresponsible homeowners were the ones to blame for this mess and needed no help. I felt like throwing something at the television when I heard him mouth such garbage.

Irresponsible homeowners -- the ones who'd been pushed to become a part of the "ownership society" to help our floundering post-9/11 economy, the ones who suffered a catastrophic illness that health insurance didn't cover, or lost their jobs due to market conditions over which they had no power.

It's infuriating to hear such hints of blame from Paulson to this effect, knowing that the real problems -- the really BIG problems -- had far more to do with the irresponsible and completely amoral pirahna that populated firms like Enron.

Specifically Enron, but including their corporate brothers-in-arms.

Once upon a time, I worked for a Fortune 100 company, in a department with overlaps between legal and financial departments, and with regular exposure to executives and hedge fund traders. I remember about 10 years ago the first time the division for which I worked explored using "swaps", derivatives that would help businesses share risk as well as share profit. (You can read a nice explanation of derivatives by Hugh here in Oxdown.) The executives of the organization sweated for days and weeks over how this worked, what the real exposure would be, whether they knew enough about these kinds of instruments to use them.

And by executives, I mean the kind of guys that made $200K to $1M or more annually, who were graduates of business schools from around the world. They fretted over this stuff more than they did a number of mergers and acquisitions, even with the SEC or DOJ involved in oversight.

Ultimately, they implemented these "swaps" anyhow.

Not long after the first swap derivative, I had a chat with the firm's top hedge fund traders. Again, brilliant guys with degrees from top notch schools, the kind of guys over which other Fortune 100 companies will fight. We got onto the topic of Enron, which was still in its fattest, headiest days as top dog of the market. I asked them what they thought of Enron, and if there was anything that Enron was doing that our firm should be doing.

They shook their heads and told me candidly that they had no idea how they were doing it, couldn't explain how they were succeeding. If they couldn't understand it, they couldn't duplicate it, even though management wanted to get a cut of the same kind of action since they had exposure to energy markets.

Some of the smartest guys at a Fortune 100 company couldn't understand this stuff and went ahead and did it anyhow; the executives duplicated with derivatives what Enron was doing to spread risk, stopping short only with moving these activities offshore and off-book because regulations and company charters kept them from doing so. Even though the guys who had to execute these transactions might be shaking their heads, the executives with big chunks of company stock and options and comfortable salaries went ahead and continued to do more of the same.

I can picture this happening at AIG at a much larger scale, and I'll even bet that a few transactions from the same firm at which I once worked also involved AIG.

Smart guys, all caught up in trying to outsmart those so-called "smartest guys" at Enron, and continuing their efforts for years, long after Enron had gone down in flames.

Irresponsible homeowners? Pshaw. These guys made the puny little mortgagees look like teeny little pikers when it came to irresponsibility.

And yet we are going to have to bail them out. I sure hope they remember to call us and ask us to go for a ride on their yachts sometime, or invite us to go skiing in Gstaad.

(By the way: where did all the Enron employees go, anyhow? not the poor folks who were frontline energy business folks, but the ones who helped execute off-the-books financial maneuvers but weren't prosecuted? Ever wonder where they got their next jobs after Enron imploded?)

[cross-posted at Oxdown Gazette; photo: gothick_matt via Flickr.com]

Palin, the manifestation of Kali

2008-09-03T18:45:00.009-04:00

George Lakoff wrote in TruthOut last week about progressives' response to Gov. Sarah Palin as John McCain's veep pick. While Lakoff tends to cling too tightly to a dualistic worldview framed in the strict father/nurturing mother model, he's quite right that progressives cannot use their over-thought realist perspective to address the problem of Palin.

Where Lakoff struggles is with the unconscious and subconscious that lies deep below our own relationships with parental figures. He does not have a solid grasp of Jungian archetypes -- and that's where we must go to find the tools we need.

After reading his take, I think I figured it out: she is a very primitive archetype for the authoritarians, a vengeful earth mother, a veritable goddess Kali, a bringer of death. They respect that in their guts, in their tissue, at atomic level; their heads cannot engage because her being communicates like a dog whistle to the very molecules of which they are made.

Our challenge is to appeal to another primal archetype that competes with and crowds out that other archetype. Progressives THINK too much, we don’t listen to the fiber of our being like conservatives do; we make mental software that overrides those primal messages. We’re going to have to get back in touch with that primacy in a hurry.

We need to address the different subsets within the conservatives’ ranks, and appealing to their different guts. I can sense in reading feedback from a number of conservative women — Dr. Laura, for example — some sort of resentment. How deep is that resentment? Is it down in the bone? What is the basis for that resentment if it is deep?

We’re looking for something that constitutes a threat to one’s being, a visceral threat, not one that we can deduce.

In the case of the Dr. Laura crowd I sense a feeling of resentment over being thrown aside, but I can’t be certain that’s what it is. Notice how many older white female conservatives have not run up to the microphone and shouted with glee for Palin as their veep…

Perhaps she’s the Queen Mother/Crone model (a la Clarissa Pinkola-Estes); her signature feature is fecundity.

She can display a beautiful face, but she’s a witch underneath.

Hawaiian goddess Pele is like this; she gives birth to the land, but she demands much, takes more, eating up homes in her path of creative destruction.

Think the queen stepmother in Snow White; obviously beautiful enough to capture the heart of father, even serves him (in ways that Disney will never discuss with children), but exacting, extracting, demanding utter and complete loyalty.

And the Christian fundamentalists -- the fundies -- know her. They recognize her even though they cannot say why, only that they are immediately taken with her and her shiny poisonous apple.

That’s why the people who will be most reticent about her on the right will be women; they will rival Queen Mother/Crones or simply Crones who can see her for what she is, but because they have lost access to this primal knowledge about the archetypes they cannot articulate simply and readily what it is that is so wrong about her.

My own inner Crone knows there is something very toxic about her, that nothing jibes at all in any of her stories, especially the ones where children enter the picture. The gut tells me more than the head can.

I'm comfortable with the Snow White wicked queen mother model; her stepdaughter is Snow White, a child who has been lost, possibly deliberately left to her own devices, who's being asked to eat the poison apple. "Here, you are going to get married and it will all be better." We know it's toxic from where we sit, and any hesitancy on the fundies' part about her getting married will suggest they get it, too, just not at a level of logic.

What we have to do is save King Daddy, even if it means a disgusting job to us; we have to paint him as being at risk of losing badly because of her bewitchment, and he'll save himself if he can disentangle himself from her. Of course by the time he does the damage is done to his dreams for the kingdom...bet you right now that's how the rightwingers who are unhappy with this will pull it off if they can. Or maybe they've already written befuddled King Daddy off and are merely sitting quietly on the sidelines waiting for the inevitable flame-out.

Meditating on this death goddess, a thought sprung unbidden into my head, scaring me to my core:

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Can you really imagine this l'horrible mère, this dreadful dark goddess, having access to nuclear weapons?

(Photo: Sarah Palin with caribou kill, via CynicsParty.com; graphic, goddess Kali, via ExoticIndiaArt.com)

Having abandoned us, fiction dies a bloody death

2008-08-02T02:47:00.004-04:00

So emptywheel dissects Chris Bowers' post on the rise of the non-fictional aesthetic among the political left, disagreeing with "his characterization of this aesthetic--non-fiction versus fiction," pointing out that fiction is an arbitrary construct.

Agreed.

If consciousness is defined as one's perception of reality -- and we all know that we can change our perceptions -- then we can change our state of awareness at will. What is fiction if it is defined by one's perception? It's all very fluid. Art -- a fiction and not the thing itself -- imitates the thing itself. Are there not points at which art is become that thing, transcended the divide between the object and the observation of the object?

Which leads me to think of that unnamed member of the administration that said they (the administration and/or the neo-cons) created reality and the rest of us would be left study it. Which side of that equation is fiction?

The change in our collective progressive consciousness over the last eight years has been one of resetting and reframing our perception; we are making conscious decisions as to what has really happened, and we hash them out in many forms. Some of us did so in non-fiction media, some of us did so in fiction (i.e. The Dark Knight, as one more recent pop culture example, or Pan's Labyrinth of a few years ago).

Many of us did so through blogging, trying to sort out truth from non-truth (and finding towards the end of this debacle that are the Bush years that there was little to sort, all swine and no pearls.)

We didn't abandon fiction; in some ways it abandoned us. We couldn't imagine this weird, that such monsters would not only steal elections but take over our government and commit such war crimes. As Hunter S. Thompson said, "When things get weird, the weird turn pro," and we've apparently struggled with maintaining our amateur status, writing tome after tome of non-fiction to retain a grasp on lucidity as reality fully merges with a fiction we couldn't cook up in our worst nightmares.

Perhaps that Chris had to write about this at all is a sign of regret over leaving behind the innocence one must have to appreciate fiction as something separate from nonfiction, innocence broken by the utter collapse of reality in fiction, into seeming insanity, now beyond the immunity from pain that cognitive dissonance once offered us. Fiction not only abandoned us, it got strung out on the meth and crack of neo-conservatism and died a gruesome violent bloody death, and now we are tasked with finding people who can not only help us navigate through these stages of grief and move on, but help us build a safer nonfiction world to follow. Only in a stable, happier, saner nonfiction world can we rebuild even happier fictions, where the nightmarish only happens in our dreams and on the screen and between the covers of books. In this respect, I think Chris is on the money.

(Photo: Falansh [RA] via Flickr.com)

The voodoo doll Secretary of State

2008-04-10T09:02:00.002-04:00

In re: Top Bush aids approved interrogation tactics: report –

Anybody have the feeling that somebody wanted to kill the chatter about Condi for Veep?

Or that the somebody might have been Ashcroft?

Insert some speculation here about Powell, since this sounds like him talking with Bob Woodward, and then some speculation about Andy Card since the leaker has access and a possible conscience.

So which of the likely suspects has a bone to pick with Condi?

Because they sure stuck the shiv in her -- multiple times, like pins in a voodoo doll.

Are they literally daring a foreign country to snag her the next time she travels overseas?

The rest of the principals aren’t as likely a rendition for war crimes as they’ll probably have more security (ex. DeadEye) or stay at home (ex. Rummy).

We have “a select group of senior officials or their deputies”, of which the principals were “Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft”. So who were the deputies?

Any of them got an axe to grind with Condi?

And are any of the likely suspects tight with McCain; could they have been asked to stick the shiv in her to keep her at arm’s length from McCain’s Veep shortlist?

So much to ponder.

I can't help but wonder, too, if somebody is beginning to worry about the context of these meetings wherein the principals of torture met to discuss how-to. It's not like this is a typical business meeting setting with administrative assistances fetching coffee and donuts and making sure the Dry Erase markers and notepads are all set for hours of prolonged business model evaluation and marketing projections. How, where, when does one conduct a meeting or meetings about the best practices of torture?

Do we never have to suffer the choice?

2007-12-29T21:00:00.000-05:00

Was just reading Jill Bialosky's essay at Bookslut, Writing a Suitable Woman: The End of the Novel of Female Despair, and wondering whether women in western culture no longer have to suffer the choice of responsibility or desire.

I think we do; I think that responsibility changes as do our desires, and that at any point in our life we may have to make an emotionally torturous choice between these things. Certainly we no longer find ourselves in the west left bereft of options for making the choice between duty and love, but many of us will suffer for the choice.

Can you think of an example in your life, from your own life or that of your peers, where one needed to choose to stay within a relationship out of obligation or mores, or where one made great sacrifice to choose passion over the predictable? I can think of a number of them -- and more often than not, they chose to suffer in silence and stay in their groove of responsibility.

But a Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina they were not, even if they didn't cleave to the staid and went instead to follow their hearts. It simply takes more than making the choice; it takes observation, introspection, something more to make a life story that is gripping, consuming.

I can't put my finger on it, but I feel there is simply something more to the question Bialosky asks, whether we no longer have to suffer as Bovary or Karenina. Some of us most certainly do suffer, but for what?

Was it for something worth the suffering? Has the subject of our choice somehow changed as well, as much as western women and their culture has changed this last century?

And are any of us worth suffering for, do we inspire the kind of pacing insomnia and sharp yearning that wrack heroes and heroines of literature past?

Are our choices worth writing about, passion spanning hundreds of pages or millions of bits?

Omigosh! a new treehouse!!

2007-12-04T11:12:00.000-05:00

And TRex scribed my name in the blogroll there, too!!

Groovy!

Congrats on the new digs, dear therapod!

Doesn't this sound familiar?

2007-11-09T12:52:00.000-05:00

I had a moment of deja vu when I read this bit at White Collar Crime Prof's blog:

Yet Another FCPA Case - Individual Pleads Guilty
On the heels of a Fifth Circuit Appellate decision affirming a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) conviction (here), the DOJ reports on a plea to a FCPA charge. The press release states that "[a] former executive of a subsidiary of Houston-based Willbros Group Inc. (WGI) has pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe officials of the government of Nigeria with more than $6 million in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)." The press release notes that this former executive admitted that "[t]hese payments were offered and made to officials of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (the Nigerian state-owned oil company) and its subsidiary, National Petroleum Investment Management Services, a Nigerian political party, and a senior official in the executive branch of the Nigerian federal government, in order to assist in securing a major gas pipeline construction contract in Nigeria." Willbros Group Inc. had announced the sale of its Nigerian Operations back in February of 2007 (see here).

Jeepers, where have I seen chatter about Nigeria and bribery and corrupt practices before?

Could it have been about Cheney and Halliburton?

Why didn't the DOJ make any formal announcement about the status of the investigation into Halliburton?

Wouldn't have anything to do with a corrupt and weakened DOJ, now, would it?

Can't wait to watch Mukasey ignore this, too, just like ~~Cheney's accessory~~, I mean, his predecessor at DOJ.

Massive dose of hypocrisy

2007-11-07T09:01:00.000-05:00

I got this from my brokerage firm this morning:

MarketWatch News
Google Inc GOOG:NASDAQ
Lawmakers want closer look at Google, DoubleClick merger
MarketWatch
4:22 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- A group of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives called Tuesday for a hearing on Google Inc.'s planned merger with DoubleClick, to extend a public inquiry that has included a related Senate committee hearing in September.

A dozen House members including Rep. Dennis Hastert, Rep. Charles Pickering and Rep. Cliff Stearns sent a letter to Bobby Rush, a Democrat and chairman of the subcommittee on commerce, trade and consumer protection, calling for a "rigorous examination" of privacy issues related to the planned merger, "as soon as practicable."

Rush had originally called for such a hearing in July.

The Republican House members said the hearing is needed to examine the "enormous privacy implications" related to combining Google's database of users' search queries with DoubleClick's "online user behavioral profile" database.

In a contentious Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights hearing a little more than one month ago, Google chief legal officer David Drummond defended the proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, arguing that the two companies are complementary, rather than direct comp etitors.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith, also testifying at the hearing, countered that the deal would unfairly grant Google a dominant position in the online advertising industry.

In their letter Tuesday, Republican lawmakers complained that "more questions arose than were answered" during the Senate subcommittee hearing regarding privacy issues.

Microsoft has vigorously campaigned against Google's acquisition of DoubleClick since the deal was first announced in April.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has sealed its own, related acquisition, paying $6 billion for online advertising specialist aQuantive.

[Bold mine.]

What sheer balls.

First, the very notion that Republicans -- the party that brought you domestic spying and the piking of FISA -- are worried about privacy.

Second, Microsoft, the company that has dominated desktops across this country for over a decade -- worried about market domination.

There aren't even words for this kind of chutzpah.

International Bloggers' Day for Burma on the 4th of October

2007-10-04T23:53:00.001-04:00

What can you do?

That's how I feel

2007-09-16T09:53:00.000-04:00

I read this quote from Junot Diaz at Bookslut:

...Any chance I get, I fucking talk about Rutgers. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, I will not lie. From the neighborhood I came from, I was literally intellectually starving. I was an incredibly bright kid outside of Perth Amboy, and going to Rutgers was sort of like someone who never had vitamin C their whole life. They're dying from fucking intellectual scurvy and rickets, and somebody gives them a fucking orange. It changed my life...

You know, if you removed the name "Rutgers" and inserted "blogging", that would describe exactly how I feel.

Blogging's this scurvy wench's orange.

BUI (broadcasting under the influence)

2007-08-05T10:18:00.000-04:00

After leaving the McCormick Center this morning following the YearlyKos Convention, I'm sitting in the O'Hare airport, trapped in waiting zone hell as my flight is delayed. Unfortunately I've got plenty of time to watch CNN.

And plenty of time for my blood pressure to be elevated. Amy Walters is covering the YearlyKos convention, and she somehow comes away thinking that Senator Clinton did well.

What the f---?

Clinton dodged at least 3 questions during the Presidential forum, and was hissed at once about one of those dodges. She did not receive the kind of applause that the other candidates received for her efforts.

Walters also claimed that Edwards was out of the first tier -- clearly not true based on the resounding approval of the YKos audience during the event. Granted, Edwards dodged at least once, or perhaps I should say that he finessed a question; he also threw the audience red meat that they ate up.

But Clinton tried to redirect attention from one of her dodges by throwing what she thought was red meat (net neutrality) while evading the question of excessive media consolidation, thereby blowing off her compromised position as a recipient of Rupert Murdoch's largesse.

What are these people smoking? And why are they allowed to be piped into our homes while under the influence?

Lovely evening from the Great White North

2007-07-30T00:50:00.000-04:00

Sometimes words simply won't do.

Nope, not at all.

The garden before vacation

2007-07-29T12:06:00.000-04:00

I'm just now getting around to catching up on things that I had to set aside in order to get the family packed up and out of town for a couple of weeks. Since I'm going to YearlyKos, the kids are going to stay with their grandparents; we're spending quality time together here in the Great White North before I go to the convention, and I'll decompress with them here after the convention and before we head back home.

But that means the garden has been left untended, or left in the care of my husband who will be traveling quite a bit during these two weeks. The kids took these snaps just before we left town; we are very curious about the changes we will see when we arrive back home. Besides an avalanche of zucchini and tomatoes, what else do you think will happen?

This is the first zucchini, now much larger than a nine-year-old's hand, ready for picking. But the kids forgot it; hubby says he picked them and tossed them because he didn't know what to do with them. [sigh] The kids are NOT happy about this.

You can almost see the first cucumber in the shade of the cucumber leaves, a little larger than a thirteen-year-old's thumb. (I think a lesson on photographic lighting and flash might be in order, but this is a good first attempt.)

Looks like I will be making a lot of tomato sauce when I return; the Roma plants are beginning to put out a lot of fruits. Some plants, like the Brandywines, are getting a few yellowed and speckled leaves at the bottom; it may be time to give them some magnesium in the form of a little epsom salts mixed in water.

And this shot worries me. Not only do we have a cartload of Thai hot peppers coming in, looking rather like monstrous hands with long, green, plentiful fingers rising from the bed, but my daughter was too close to her brother at the time this photo was taken. I don't know how the camera didn't get wet while my son was watering the bed. (Perhaps a lesson in camera care is also warranted...)

Finally -- toes in the sand

2007-07-27T23:40:00.000-04:00

Been too busy for the last week, couldn't think straight. So busy that it even interrupted my sleep; I'd wake up, realizing that I'd been thinking about my "To Do" list in my dreams, adding items and scratching off others. At least twice I had to write things down in the middle of the night after waking up thinking about them.

But now the travel is behind me, most of my "To Do" list has been done (save for a few niggling chores that followed me).

And I've actually had my toes in the sand.

Hope wherever you are, that you are also able to park yourself in a reclining position with a beverage of your choice and unwind for the weekend. I think we could all use one right about now.

Birth of an activist: So you want to be a grassroots activist...

2007-07-21T18:24:00.000-04:00

Yeah, me too, I wanted to become something more than an angry American, nauseated every day by what I read and saw at work in government. I'd recently started blogging, but it wasn't enough. I needed results, something more than yelling into the void every day over a hot keyboard. As days went by I felt more and more isolated, alone, freakish, and horribly frustrated by the perception my country was sliding rapidly down a slippery, ugly slope towards something I couldn't label.

I'd read about a campaign that intrigued me, some guy out east that had a straightforward and pragmatic way of looking at matters and addressing them, a guy who actually had some chops at doing what needed to be done. He'd balanced a budget for more than a decade, while providing healthcare to all senior citizens and children in his state – and he did not believe we had solid intelligence to go to war in Iraq. Damn, I thought, I want some of THAT. Where do I sign up?

Mind you, I'd never been politically active in my life. The internet made it easier to express opinions, but it wasn't the same as actually hitting the pavement or pressing the flesh; it was still remote from making things really happen. I needed something more than sending emails that never seemed to get answered. After hearing about this groovy new tool called Meetup.com, I decided I'd poke around and see if I could not only find some progressive folks in my area, but look for that particular campaign.

And voilà, there it was: Dean for America, on Meetup.com. Scary...there were people signed up from the town in which I lived. What would happen if I went? Would they bite? What happened at these shindigs – did they roast babies? Would I be asked to do something unnatural to join? Would I be able to retain some anonymity? But seriously, all sorts of goofy thoughts ran through my mind. Not only had I not been politically active, but I'd never been a joiner outside of the corporate world. Never belonged to a civic organization. What should I expect?? Wow, was this uncomfortably different...

I sucked it up and I reserved for the next Meetup. They met in a common area in the local mall; that seemed safe enough, in case I ended up with a bunch of loony stark-raving leftists (don't ask me why I had it in my head I should expect foaming-at-the-mouth dirty f*cking hippies; too many years exposed to and mistreated by Kool-Aid drinkers, I guess). When I got to the mall, I actually walked by them, missed the group entirely. There were a couple handfuls of very ordinary people sitting in an informal cluster, introducing themselves. A couple of retirees, a teenager with her mother, some working folks...all very innocuous, very, well, normal.

It dawned on me that I was looking in the mirror; they were people just like me, Americans who chose to do something, and in most cases for the first time in their lives they were taking action to change the status quo, just like me. What a relief...I was hooked, immediately. It felt so damned good, freaky good, to be able to talk out loud with people who felt the same way I did, to not be ridiculed or pooh-poohed for thinking the country was going to the dogs, for thinking that we could do better, had to do better.

And the rest was history. Because of taking that simple step, taking a personal risk by stepping outside of my comfort zone, I have made many new friends that I absolutely adore and for whom I would walk through fire (and I may have to do that next year, but that's another story). I think of the folks I now know personally who've become role models, leaders by example and not by rhetoric. Two persons in particular stand out in my mind; they drove more than an hour each way to make our Meetups, so determined they were to make real change happen. What commitment they showed, what passion; I still think of Frank and Susie every month when we have Meetups, even though they no longer have to drive all this way to join us and can stay closer to home. I found I was rewarded many times over for whatever I did, which was a completely unexpected gift. Who knew that becoming a grassroots activist would be so good for me directly?

The other unexpected gift I found was a new social network; I have resources now that I never had in the past, simply because I became engaged in real process. Need a lawyer? Boy, can I tap some now. Need a local public official to talk with? No problem, they may be at the next Meetup or meeting. The distance between things and people completely collapsed.

One conversation stands out, talking with Frank after a campaign event in early 2004 called The Perfect Storm; Frank filled me in on what happened, how fun it was, what Iowa was like, the whole nine yards in that run-up to the last Iowa caucus. He mentioned to me that he met a really cool activist that I should meet some time, a Deaniac like the two of us were, somebody extremely smart, very funny and equally passionate about the cause. “I'll have to introduce you to Marcy the next chance we get,” he said, and he did at the state party convention. Frank was absolutely right; she's all that and a bag of chips, isn't she, Jane?

The points between us all are that narrow when you become active. Who knows but you might meet me in person at the next event – assuming you're going to be there.

Will you? If you have never been involved before in grassroots activism but would like to, what steps will you take this week and this month to get engaged? Do you need help getting started? And is there anybody here who might be willing to help others get going?

Do tell – I'm all ears.

[Picture credit: the fascinating folks at Wicked Sunshine]

Garden update: Zukelear threat

2007-07-14T11:31:00.000-04:00

The garden is damp this morning; I won't have to water it today with the rain we are getting. But I'm not certain if it's a good thing. Look at how full everything has gotten over the last couple of weeks, tomatoes ready to burst out of the bed and beans looking in the garage window.

The next batch of radishes -- two separate plantings -- are already up and beginning to fill in the place where the previous crop had been pulled.

Oops, crabgrass in the bed...I guess I'd better weed again when the rain stops.

A sign of things to come: Hungarian peppers are already coming in, these about 6 inches long and nearly ready to pick. There are about a dozen of them in the pepper bed. My daughter is pleading to pick a lilac pepper, but I won't let her; it still has green shoulders.

And oops again, more crabgrass. More weeding.

But look here, the zukelear threat. The first tiny zucchini with its blossom attached, about an inch and a half long. There are more coming along, this one being the first salvo in the coming zucchini war.

I think I detect chocolate zucchini bread in the near future...

Nobody warned me about this

2007-07-10T22:38:00.000-04:00

I wish I'd taken pictures throughout the day of the electronic detritus spread across my kitchen table and family room floor, bits and pieces of a PlayStation 2 spread between multiple cell phones in various states of operation, more phone handsets and a desktop and laptop in operation.

What an irradiating, irritating mess. Nobody warned me about this when I became a mom.

My son's little buddy who came and stayed overnight last night managed to trip on the PS2 remote cable, pulling the PS2 onto the floor. My son and his buddy didn't fess up right away, telling me only that the buddy's game DVD was stuck in the PS2. I figured it was not a big deal, that we'd handle it when I got around to it.

Unfortunately, the PS2 is community property, a joint present from "Santa" to both my son and his older sister. And the older sister was PISSED OFF. She showed me the damage after the friend left this morning, explained that the machine might be shot because it landed face forward on the disk drive...and then proceeded to take it apart. When she got frustrated from time to time, I encouraged her to look on the internet for sites where others discussed similar accidents with PS2 equipment, and found her other tools when her dad's tools proved to be too large.

There were a few bumps in the road; I had to step in and do some coaching and consolation at a few points in the dissection process when she got too aggravated by the challenge. I was in the middle of nursing a few phone calls and trying to deal with annoying customer service reps about a couple of failed cell phones at the same time, juggling SIM cards and handsets. Good thing we weren't hormonally challenged today or a few pieces of equipment would have been jettisoned off the deck between us.

We ran into problems with two screws that we couldn't get back into the system; they weren't mission critical since the system powered up on test without them (we'd been worried they may not have completed a circuit per se, but might have been required for other components to make contact). On last pass before the last screws were replaced, everything seemed to run fine -- the problematic disk tray popped out smoothly and returned to its position. My daughter took it to the television to hook it up and test its playability.

It wouldn't power up; something changed or broke in the space and time between the last power up test on the kitchen table and the twelve-foot distance to the television. She tried every possible arrangement to rule out the power cord, the outlet, the television. She was close to tears.

We took it apart again, me unscrewing everything we just screwed back together while she combed the internet for someone else's experience with systems that wouldn't power up.

Did you know that there are FIFTEEN "fuses" on the motherboard? That's far more information than we bargained for, and far more frustration than we were willing to entertain. Some sage on the internet suggested taking the PS2 to RadioShack for this kind of repair, which seemed puzzling since I didn't they actually did repairs in their retail facility. Another veteran of PS2 repairs more helpfully said that the fuses could be bought at RadioShack, which made more sense. However, some of the fuses were extremely small -- and I drew the line at what might be required to test and unseat and reseat fuses on a board.

She began to shop eBay for another older PS2 like this one now torn asunder, at my request; there was no point in bothering with trying to replace systematically 15 fuses at an expense that would surely exceed 50 dollars, if we could simply buy a previously owned system for that much or less.

We'd now spent 5 hours working on this electronic debris field, with only a tantalizing tease to show for it, and were beginning to consider the terms of our defeat.

My daughter was still stewing, extremely angry about the loss of her PS2 to damage caused by careless younger boys, and now angrier for the investment of time and effort for naught. It drove her; while waiting for several of the earmarked eBay auctions to end in order to determine the likely price we would have to pay for a replacement, she went and reconsidered the gutted PS2 for the likely cause of this newest failure.

It was right there, the most likely suspect: a rather tender bit of ribbon cable that looked like it was unplugged from its seat. Even though we had no idea whether we could reseat it, we had nothing to lose by stripping the system down even further than before to plug in the cable. She held the upper and lower portions of the casing in place while I picked apart the innards, tugging gently on this or that until I found and unscrewed the last screws holding the controller ports in place and the DVD player to the inner frame. There it was, the ribbon cable loose, and then pushed into place with a tiny slot-head screw driver that I use on my sewing machines. It appeared to be reseated; we partially reassembled the system, now old hands after stripping it down four times during the course of our investigation and repair. Like a transplant surgeon, my daughter applied the power cord as if paddles on a new heart; she stood back and held her breath as the heart of the system powered up again.

Ah, success!

We carefully and hastily put the last of the carcass back into place, rescrewed everything yet again. She carried it tenderly back to the television to give it another go, hoping for much better results than last time. And it worked, even a game DVD responded properly this time.

She owns it, it's now completely hers, this bit of electronics. My daughter no longer feels intimidated at all by its once forbidding black enclosure; she said afterwards that she should invent a new and better gaming system, now that she'd seen how the entire guts of the PS2 worked or didn't work. And her brother now thinks she's a rock star-heroine.

Before she angrily broke down the PS2 today, I wouldn't have bothered with it; my own kid re-taught me to use anger righteously directed to achieve an end. And I pushed the envelope a little further because of it, knowing that if she'd come this far she should have encouragement to go a bit further even if I had no clue what I was doing. We wouldn't have been defeated by this box of parts even if it didn't start again.

What would it cost us, anyhow, I said to her; we already had a dead PS2, it wouldn't get any deader if we took it apart one last time to plug in the ribbon cable. We'd only learn more and that certainly couldn't hurt us if we were going to buy a replacement. And it paid off.

Nobody told me that being a mother would require electronics repair courses. I guess I should have read the manual more closely. But on-the-job training has additional perks; know anybody who needs their PS2 fixed? I bet we can do it -- or find a nice replacement machine for them if we can't.

The long goodbye

2007-07-09T18:15:00.000-04:00

My mother-in-law is slipping away from us. We spent time visiting with her in a nursing home this weekend; she was discharged from the hospital the weekend before last but could not go home because her needs for care exceeded anything my father-in-law could provide.

It's a Parkinson's-like condition with continuing deterioration, although the rate of decline exceeds what might be expected in most Parkinson's patients. In the course of a year she has gone from being able to provide most of her own care to being immobile from time to time, from speaking small sentences to virtually not at all, from recognizing everyone and being able to participate in small ways in conversations to being withdrawn, disinterested and unable to recognize even her own children.

It's very hard to watch, and it's caused a few heated discussions between my spouse and me. And between my parents, too; having shared some of the details with them, they've discussed the situation and found themselves arguing over how life should end, just as my spouse has been arguing with me.

We've been saying goodbye for at least five years, slowly escalating the departure, and yet we still cannot do so without argument.

My parents are adamantly against intubation of any kind; if they cannot be assured of return to a condition they possessed before they needed the tube, they don't want it. This is what their Do Not Resuscitate orders reflect. But my in-laws are already over that line, with my mother-in-law now on oxygen and quite possibly on a feeding tube very soon. My folks would rather have none of it, would rather be doped up on pain meds and allowed to slip away altogether.

My father thinks I'm misunderstanding what DNR means; my mom doesn't think so, and they butt heads over this. But it's not about me, nor about my parents. It's between my spouse and his parents, and this is what they've chosen, a very long goodbye. All I can do is try to ask questions if I think it sheds more light on decision-making, and prepare my kids for the departure ahead.

The most difficult part of this situation is that from time to time, my mother-in-law seems better. My sister-in-law caught her at one of those points yesterday, and doesn't believe what I saw the day before. My mother-in-law couldn't sit up, couldn't lift her arms up, couldn't adjust her oxygen tube, could only lay in bed. She couldn't say any of our names. She slipped in and out of sleep even though late in the morning. But she could recite names to my sistern-in-law, even told her she wanted to go home during a visit later in the day.

I wish I could believe this; I don't think at all that my sister-in-law saw something other than what she reported, but I don't believe she saw something that is long-lasting.

It might only have been a short respite to allow her to say goodbye.

First harvest this week: radishes

2007-07-07T06:59:00.000-04:00

~~(Bloody Blogger won't let me put in a title, sorry, will have to come back and fix this later.)~~ [Fixed!] Quality of seeds show here in produce; this was a cheap pack, and the fruits are all over the map in size and color. We've planted a new batch this week with a higher quality seed and a new variety. Just wait until you see them!

The Brandywine tomatoes are blooming like crazy; I love that the blossoms telegraph the fruit to come with the complexity of their doubled blooms.

And look, little tiny blossoms beginning to form on the zucchini plants. Fair warning to the neighbors, it won't be long before you find zukes on your stoops.

Another passage

2007-07-06T19:47:00.000-04:00

I never would have thought I'd feel this way; I thought I'd be glad to be shet of it, especially since I've been in this new house for two years last month.

But I'm mourning the sale of my old house; I left it only minutes before I had to go sign off the title.

It was the first real estate my spouse and I bought together; we moved in the day after our wedding. Both my babies came home from the hospital to this house. I've scrubbed and painted every inch of this place. I've canned vegetables from its garden, run through the sprinkler with my kids over its lawn, sat in the dark shade of its trees at night listening to crickets, laughed at the squirrels that scampered in its trees, lain in bed listening to blizzard winds whipping snow over the roof and chimney deep in winter.

But I think that is the reason it's so hard to say goodbye. I'm thoroughly enmeshed and entwined in this place, every plant put there by my will or left by my choice, the carpet my colors, the paint my colors even if chosen for neutrality.

This was supposed to be a "five year house"; we were only supposed to be here 5 years and then move on to a bigger home. We were here just shy of 17 years, all but two lived here. Time had its way with us, as did this house. I suppose we learned to go with the flow here in this house, rather than try to force it. We learned to live with its ebb of its own cycle.

Perhaps the problem isn't this house, though; perhaps the problem is that there will be a void that will be filled by something else now that I no longer have to think or worry about this house. What will that something be? Will it be something I can shape and mold as much as I did this house? Or will that something shape me?

Only time will tell.

Pondering our so-called independence today

2007-07-04T10:20:00.000-04:00

From Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation:

An anecdote that Benjamin rush, the Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, liked to tell in his old age makes the point memorably. On July 4, 1776, just after the Continental Congress had finished making its revisions of the Declaration and sent it off to the printer for publication, Rush overheard a conversation between Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts: "I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry," said Harrison, "when we are alll hung for what we are doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead." Rush recalled the comment "procured a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the solemnity with which the whole business was conducted."

On this day we celebrate truly great Americans who with a stroke of their quill pens signed their own death warrants in order to secure real democratic freedoms. We cannot but compare the occupants of the White House today and wonder why we have settled for so little when the founding brothers were willing to sacrifice so much.

[Image: Wikipedia, United States Declaration of Independence]

The table is set, Madame Speaker

2007-07-03T19:39:00.000-04:00

The table is set -- and impeachment is very much on it. We are ready and waiting.

Your turn to serve, please.

Thank you,

~Rayne

Bush: Disrespecting the law and our American social contract

2007-07-02T22:21:00.000-04:00

Quite simply, this is what happened today:

Bush displayed his contempt for the law by throwing over a jury's verdict.

In the face of these facts:

-- A jury of peers found Scooter Libby guilty;
-- A Republican judge issued Libby a sentence within the guidelines range;
-- Three more judges affirmed that sentence;

President Bush decided to toss it all and commute Libby's sentence.

I hope there's more outrage about this than about Paris Hilton's excursion home for cupcakes after a couple days in jail before she returned to complete her sentence.

I hope the American public sees the injustice in Hilton serving more time than a man who lied under oath and made false statements to both a grand jury and FBI agents multiple times.

And I hope the American people realize the commutation of Libby's sentence was likely a crime in itself, further obstructing justice that Libby already obstructed mightily himself; I hope they realize that the criminal launch of the Iraq War lies beneath this obstruction.

(Thanks to looseheadprop in comments at FireDogLake for making this so easy to understand.)

A smaller garden = just as much fun

2007-07-01T09:10:00.000-04:00

I used to have a 40 foot by 20 foot garden plot at my old house. There was never a time that I lacked for room, could grow almost anything I wanted. But the lot at our newer home is configured in such a way that it would be difficult to have a garden that size. I elected instead to have a smaller kitchen garden in an area that is not only convenient to the kitchen, but using a narrow strip of land only 20 feet long by 6 feet wide. The soil is almost all clay, too, like rock as soon as it dries; I had to think of a way to amend the soil at reasonable cost and reduce the need for rototilling since the plot is so small and next to the house.

So raised beds it was, three of them measuring 4 foot wide by 6 foot deep. It made the overall amount of planted area smaller, but far easier to maintain. the only real work was putting in the beds, which going forward can be tilled by hand. I wish I'd done a better job of photographing the progress; you are missing what a weed patch this was, or the hassle of rototilling in a small space using a Troybilt, or the fun of getting a half yard of top soil and trying to get it in the beds before a torrential downpour, or the muddy, sloppy mess afterwards.

And then the hassle of running back and forth to multiple greenhouses...I have vowed never to go to one of them ever again, as the flowers for which I spent $30 promptly died the next day. (No return policy, either.) Around here it was already late by a couple of weeks for getting plants, so choice was slim at some of the greenhouses. Hungarian peppers, for example, typically found at all the greenhouses that sell vegetables, were only found at the last greenhouse I visited (it figures). I did have to restrain myself on tomatoes, though; I would have liked one more pack of another heirloom variety.

Two weeks after putting in the beds, there are pole beans sprouted along with radishes. It's hot and dry, which the tomatoes and peppers enjoy as long as they are watered heavily.

Weeding is relatively easy with these raised beds; I only need to spend about 15 minutes picking out the tiny crabgrass and ragweed sprouts after watering each day. But it is still hot and dry; I am watering twice a day at this point. The bush cucumbers and zucchini appear to be struggling, taking 30% longer than expected to sprout and produce first leaves. I have given them a dose of organic fertilizer early this week as well.

A heavy rain and cooler weather has a dramatic impact on the garden, although it may not be quite as evident in this picture. The tomatoes have all put on many new blossoms, the radishes are now coming in, and the beans decided to throw up their first climbing tendrils. My daughter worries the beans won't go where they are supposed to; I tell her not to worry, they always figure it out on their own and only occasionally need a little poke to stay on their own tuteur.

This week we have planted a new row of radish seeds since we will harvest most of the first batch this week. I am thinking about adding a row of onions next to the leeks. And I think I need to put in a few more new pole bean seeds since something has eaten a few plants. Another dose of fertilizer is warranted now, too. What will next week bring?

YASNSD (Yet Another Social Network Schism Discussion)

2007-06-29T00:41:00.000-04:00

FireDogLake's siun pointed this evening to danah boyd’s paper on the potential social schism between Facebook and MySpace. danah is one sharp cookie. I'd caught the paper earlier in the week via SmartMobs.

However I disagree with her premise that there is a socio-economic bifurcation between the two technologies.

Facebook was originally launched by students at Harvard to allow students to keep in touch with one another as well as do self-promotion. It caught on and has rapidly caught up with and in many cases outpaced other “YASNS” (Yet Another Social Network Software) programs.

Because it was designed as something more like a hybrid communication tool-cum-yearbook, it doesn’t serve the same purposes that a blog fulfills, although it’s possible to syndicate (cross-publish) one’s blog content to their own Facebook page. MySpace, on the other hand, was designed as a YASNS with more blog-like capability including customization of HTML, while serving as a social communication tool.

Having used multiple YASNS, including Multiply, Orkut, MySpace and Facebook, I have to say that MySpace is the biggest f*cking pain in the ass to use. It’s doggy-slow, has a crap user interface, highly limited in terms of customization. (Take note of the discussion regarding MySpace's application and coding at Wikipedia for more details – it's not just me making this observation.) The folks who use it most often are folks who generally avoid blogging because they see it as more demanding than MySpace. Facebook, by contrast, is stripped down just as danah says, but the folks who use it do not perceive it as a substitute for blogging, rather a tool for augmenting blogging (just as the FireDogLake community is using it). They prefer the leaner and effective interface that users find at Facebook; is it possible that the real schism is that the folks using Facebook are generally more technologically adept and less tolerant of crap interfaces and applications? That’s a question danah didn’t explore.

Another rebuttal I offer to the question of schism: Multiply and Brazilians. I have virtually abandoned my Multiply page for nearly two years, and yet I still get messages every damned week from Brazilians. They LOVE Multiply. Why? Is the real issue the interface yet again, in relation to the local culture and not economic or educational strata? Yet another question danah didn’t explore.

We're observing technologies that are moving targets; in the short period of time I've been on Facebook (about one month), new widgets and applications have been added or upgraded. Certainly competing programs are doing the same tweaking. Perhaps in another year there will be far less of a gap between the communities of these different applications – or there will be another entirely different YASNS that we'll be watching and comparing.

Angler leaving no tracks -- but a rather large wake behind him

2007-06-27T01:46:00.000-04:00

The fourth part in a series by Washington Post's Barton Gellman and Jo Becker discusses Dick Cheney's impact on the environment through his direct intervention in agency decision making. In particular, Cheney's push for increased irrigation access for farmers in Oregon's Klamath River Basin led to a major fish kill over the short term and a long term impact on fish stocks

But why did Cheney even bother with an issue like irrigation when there were more pressing matters at hand? Certainly the loss of Oregon by Bush/Cheney in 2000 by a very narrow margin, as cited in the article, was a likely motivator. Farmers and ranchers are more likely to be conservative voters, and ensuring their success through access to irrigation waters would improve the chances of taking Oregon in a subsequent bid for re-election.

Were there other factors in play, though?

Charles Swindells, a Bush Pioneer and frequent donor to the Republican Party and candidates, hails from Portland Oregon; at the time of his appointment by Bush to an ambassadorship to New Zealand, Swindells was the chair of U.S. Trust Corporation. U.S. Trust specializes in wealth management for the wealthy and ultra-wealthy, according to their website. Did Swindells have any influence on Cheney's efforts, perhaps to the benefit of Swindells' friends and clients in Oregon?

Or perhaps this was a squeeze play on donor Frank Dulcich? Dulcich's Pacific ocean fishing business was likely impacted by damage inflicted inland on the Klamath River Basin, although at the time federal scientists had not found a solid explanation for the decrease in key fish stocks along the Oregon coast. Dulcich increased his donations to the Republican Party and Republican candidates dramatically during 2000 and forward, eventually receiving assistance from President Bush to the tune of nearly one million dollars in federal assistance to treat wastewater on the Oregon coast.

Funny how the "Angler", who is not known for his fishing prowress, has such a way with fish, hmm?

Edit: I just had a passing thought after hitting Publish Post. This is small fry for the Angler, these few votes and these few dollars in donations.

What if the real ploy here had little to do with fish, and more to do with energy? We've suspected for some time now that there was a much larger effort to manipulate the entire energy market, beginning with whatever was schemed up during Cheney's Energy Task Force meetings, and not the least of which was reducing the likelihood of certain criminal investigations and prosecutions related to Enron's scams across the country, by way of inserting loyal Bushies in the U.S. Attorneys' offices.

But what if there were many other opportunities to mess with like reducing energy production to drive up prices? The Klamath River is home to several dams owned and operated by PacifCorp; without doing the legwork at this late (early?) hour, I'll presume that the energy these dams produced was sold into the western grid that served California. At the time that Cheney was making his phone calls to the Department of Interior's lower levels, ostensibly to help out farmers needing irrigation water, Enron was manipulating the availability of electricity into California. If there is not enough water in the Klamath River basin for fish, was there also a correspondingly lower amount of electricity generated? Was PacifiCorp put on the block and sold because of the anticipated cost to improve fish ladders after the fish kill -- and who else bid on Pacificorp besides Warren Buffet's MidAmerican Energy Holdings?

There is so much more here to investigate than dead fish and a lousy fisherman.

Schroedinger's Dick

2007-06-26T16:40:00.000-04:00

He's able to claim executive privilege over Vice Presidential documents as if he were a member of the Executive Branch.

He's able to claim that he is immune to oversight by the Legislature as part of the Legislative Branch.

He's both at the same time!

I say we open the box and find out exactly what he is, just like Schroedinger's proverbial cat. Granted, the outcome is likely messy, but we'd have a solid answer besides this lame and twisted thought experiment we know as the Cheney Vice Presidency.

The Energy Bill and the auto industry: Rock, meet Hard Place

2007-06-22T08:49:00.000-04:00

Scarecrow's covered the Energy Bill twice this week at Firedoglake; he notes the Senate version passed making a lot of people unhappy.

Let's face it: this is splitting the baby. NOBODY is going to be happy, and the people of the state of Michigan who've borne the brunt of the automotive industry woes are not going to be better off no matter how this bill was written or passed.

I'm going to explain how we got to this point, and I'm going to say some things that will truly piss off some people. But until they get past the pissed off part and start looking hard at the past and present, there will be no future for the automotive industry in America.

In the past, the automotive industry was like a fall back safety school. If you went to one of several colleges in the United States and got 3.0 or better average grades, you were reasonably assured a job in the auto industry if you had a degree in mechanical, plant or industrial engineering. This is NOT how you create a world class competitive corporation. Ditto for the business degrees; they were not as esteemed at the Big Three, either. Business folks were just paper pushers and bean counters, got far less respect than the engineering folks. Again, not the way to run a highly competitive company or industry. The preference for engineering cred at the expense of business chops was reflected even in the highest of jobs in the industry, but the shareholders failed to make the connection when it came time to vote for CEO's and presidents and other members of the board.

The auto industry was a catch-all for blue collar folks, too. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, if you weren't planning to go to college, you could reasonably assume you could get a line job at the Big Three. Again, not the way to build a lean, mean, fearsome employee base that will produce the best quality products in the world. But unions protected their own to the death. By death, I mean the death of their union. People who could not read were protected tooth and nail by the union, and there were a LOT of these people among the rank and file in the Big Three. If a worker can't read, how can they be trained to do a quality job in a reasonable period of time? How can they be relied upon to read instructions when they run into a problem with a tool or a production process? How much does it cost to keep training and retraining people like this on the most basic of skills?

And this wasn't the only problem with the workforce. There was rampant alcohol and drug abuse in the heyday; it's gotten better, but only after decades and millions and millions of dollars and many lost man hours of production. There was sexual harassment for the longest time, which also cause many problems with integrating better trained workers if they were female. And there was the chronic tension of race. Perhaps in the last decade these issues are finally to a manageable minimum, but the legacy costs of these issues remain with the industry.

These same workers also didn't look ahead to the future; when the 1980's leaned on them, forcing Chrysler into bankruptcy, they didn't see that the future would demand something different of them personally. No, they doubled-down and held the line on wages, becoming an enviable middle class in the eyes of the rest of the world. But they grew so comfortable that they began to vote on single issues. Inflamed by fear-mongering of interest groups, they voted for gun rights and anti-abortion/anti-gay legislators, who in turn were the least friendly to unionization and the protections that workers won over the previous decades. Workers' rights were gradually rolled back against them – and then their wages, and then their benefits, and then their jobs. And without the investment in additional education, they found themselves redundant and forced into retirement, bought out and moved out of state.

The auto industry tried to cut costs through a number of different approaches during the 1980's and 1990's, from introduction of total quality management (TQM), to preferred vendor programs. The first was a step in the right direction, but the unions fought changes tooth and nail as they were seen as a threat to the workers' jobs. What if TQM systems discovered that a union members was simply unfit for a job? They resisted the possibility of discovery.

The vendor programs were implemented and remained, but they were in many ways flawed and often unethical, as unethical as the man who encouraged their introduction into the industry. Jose Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua, at one point considered god-like within General Motors as its purchasing leader, moved beyond the early programs requiring vendors to implement documented, audit-proof quality systems. “Inaki” (as Lopez was nicknamed) demanded vendors bid for work, not merely quote; once a lowest bidder was identified and awarded the job, payments might be made on terms that were highly questionable. Because of Inaki's influence, it became practice in the industry to pay late and later, then demand a rebate before final payment would be made. This required many small vendors to carry too much of the financing of parts and component production on their own backs, and many of these vendors eventually went out of business or were forced to sell out to larger firms. Many of the firms that survived cut corners on quality, as price became more sensitive than quality at this point in time. And many of the firms were purchased by foreign companies, with production consolidated to overseas facilities where labor or materials were cheaper. One additional cross often too burdensome to bear was that refusing to bid often meant that the vendor was permanently blacklisted in the industry. (These practices continue years later even though Lopez left for Volkswagen and was prosecuted for stealing proprietary secrets from GM.) Letting Lopez have his way, though, and realizing short-term savings that made shareholders ecstatic, was easier than putting the screws to the unions and asking them to become competitive both in wages and abilities, though; the long-term, systemic problems that Lopez created were simply ignored or seen as less challenging than similarly long-term and systemic problems posed by the unions.

Other corners that the Big Three cut were in their own operations, much of it now outsourced to other companies. It's hard to find the actual client at one such Big Three facility, once an R&D facility; it now houses thousands of consultant-drones providing services like telephone and computing and accounting that were once done in house, with each of the consultancies required to re-bid their contracts to obtain ever increasing cost reductions.

The one burden that all of the industry shared that could not be controlled in any way by the Big Three was health care. In the last handful of years the cost of health care for workers exceeded the cost of steel used in any car made in America, in spite of double-digit increases in steel prices inside that period of time. The unions did not help with encouraging better health among their workers, instead resisting any cuts to benefits if demanded by the auto industry. Every one of the American firms to which production or services were outsourced faced the same annual double-digit increase in health care costs as well, which both strapped them and forced them to pass on some of the costs at the risk of losing contracts.

From the outside, government did the industry no favors. Standards for miles per gallon were weakened or ignored when gas prices were low, and ramped up too quickly when gas prices rose – none of which happened inside the window of time necessary to turn around new car designs, which at best in the industry today is about 3 years from concept to full production. The tax system also failed to respond in the same time frame, generally operating in two to four year windows from inception of a policy to implementation and reversal. And tax policy often didn't match what would be in the nation's best interests. At one point in the late 1990's-early 2000's farm vehicles could obtain a credit of almost 50% if the vehicle was driven for work purposes; Humvees took off for this reason, with demand outstripping production for years until the tax credit was changed and gas prices had risen dramatically.

And the public did itself no favors being incredibly fickle. What is fashionable changes in less than the three year window as well; if gas prices are high low one year and demand for larger vehicles reflects the change, the car makers cannot change their production fast enough. And all the vendors and the fungibles on the line at either the auto makers or their vendors must be just as willing to cut their jobs or hours or benefits to flex with demand. As most of us who majored in business know, wages are sticky – so jobs get cut first.

The increasing role of risk management in the corporate decision making process also took a toll on the automotive industry; many choices have been made to play it safe rather than risk falling even more behind financially because of the risk of losses. It's not unreasonable to expect a company to sell products that are reasonably safe for their intended used, but with the market demanding even tighter cycle times from concept to production, it is increasingly easy for an auto maker to find itself in serious problems, particularly when there is little capital “seed corn” left.

What does all of this have to do with the current Energy Bill? Think about it. Think deeply about how all of this enters into play with the CAFE standards formulation. There are a lot of voters outside the state of Michigan, home to the Big Three, grumbling about the positions of Senators Stabenow (reelected in 2006) and Levin (up for re-election in 2008). They represent all of the voters under the spectrum described: automotive managers and engineers and business people, union workers actively employed and retired, vendor companies from top to bottom, the businesses in the communities in which the automotive plants are based, the health care industry that in turn supports all of these people. For these Senators to tell these millions of people who voted them into office that they are and have been stupid and screwed themselves and to suck it up would be political suicide, particularly when this state is still in the throes of a budget crisis caused by twelve years of crappy Republican leadership in the governor's office and majorities in both houses of state legislature.

And the 17 electoral votes that this state desperately clings to might well shift another direction if Levin and Stabenow didn't carefully walk the line between doing their constituents' bidding and doing what the future demands of them.

It's so easy to say that the Senators must side with greenest responses first – when you don't live in the state of Michigan, and when there are no easy solutions to any legacy problems let alone the problems the future poses.

Evil wears a bad pr0n beard

2007-06-15T17:01:00.000-04:00

Oh. My. God. I just read the anonymous complaints from the USDOJ Civil Rights Division that TPMMuckraker posted . I want to barf. I want to tell Bradley Schlozman to f*ck off to his face, tell him that he is evil incarnate. Any man who willfully persecutes expectant and new mothers for their gender and their impending parenthood is just that. EVIL.

"Good Americans". Yes, just like "Good Germans," or "Good Nazis". That's what Schlozman wanted to put in the slots of every position of the Civil Rights Division at the USDOJ, white male Christians.

Might as well have said "Aryan."

Just last night I had an argument with a Democrat who told me there's no need to worry about discrimination against women and gays, that it wasn't an issue.

What a naive fool. Schlozman makes it all too clear that gender, race, politics and pregnancy are all things for which one will still be discriminated against by people like Schlozman, by people that support and promote Schlozman.

And who knew that evil sounded like Alvin the Chipmunk? Or wears a bad pr0n beard?

Diving in another document dump

2007-06-13T00:46:00.000-04:00

I wish I could pull an all-nighter, to comb through all 46 pages of emails and attachments dumped by the Department of Justice. There are so many interesting tidbits surfacing with just a cursory pass.

1. Ken Lee of EOP refers to Lam as “one of the USAs under the replacement plan” in an email to Sampson sent the week after the Pearl Harbor dismissals; Lee further asks “if there were any issues/problems when se was (presumably) notified of this plan last week?”

Where’s the plan, Sampson?? It wasn’t just a chicken scratched list on a discarded piece of paper floating in your left hand drawer; it was a PLAN, as in conspiracy.

2. I’m also fond of the chick-to-chick email that Goodling sent to Paulose, pointing out that Tim Griffin is getting hassled about his interim appointment even though he is an experienced prosecutor with an Oxford education.

Hah. Even Goodling must know her RegentU education is a piece of crap if she groks the imprimatur Oxford can convey.

I'll bet emptywheel is having a field day parsing through all this stuff, though; tomorrow should be a huge day at The Next Hurrah.

A recollection of crackers past

2007-06-12T09:40:00.001-04:00

I was just chatting at FireDogLake about hillbillies and crackers when I had a flashback from a cross-country trip I took with my folks the summer I was sixteen. Imagine being cooped up in a VW microbus from Michigan to California with three siblings, my folks and my grandfather. We stopped somewhere in northern Texas for lunch at a diner decked out with knotty pine paneling and the requisite red-naugahyde-chrome chairs and de rigeur red-and-white gingham curtains.

The middle-aged gum-cracking waitress took my then-13-year-old sister's order, then asked her in the fastest possible Texas twang, "Whutchewannawetyercudwit?" Sis's eyebrows rose up into her hairline as she glanced around and then looked at me for an interpretation. I said, "She asked you what you want to drink." "Milk, please," choked out Sis.

I've never heard that phrase since, nearly thirty years later.

Good Daddy Libby, my left arse cheek

2007-06-11T10:51:00.000-04:00

Emptywheel read and listed the entire inventory of letters sent to Judge Reggie Walton, some pleading for leniency and some asking for stiff punitive action. Those asking for leniency often mentioned what a great father Libby is.

As a parent I call bullhockey. No, in fact, my kids have heard me use the term bullshit, and they understand the meaning of the word.

So there. Bullshit.

As parents we spend a lot of time and energy teaching morals and ethics to our children. Telling the truth is one of those ethics about which we invest a lot of time, including the parable about George Washington and the cherry tree when they are in early grade school, to more complex lessons like Watergate and deception when they are in high school. The truth underpins our democracy; we cannot make informed decisions as individuals and people without it.

No good and decent father lies to the FBI and makes false statements in regards to the outing of a CIA operative under deepest cover. It goes against everything parents teach their children about the nature and value of truth.

I have to wonder about the parenting skills of those who wrote and asked for leniency for such a "good father", too. Amazing how many of them are practicing or licensed attorneys, too; they make lawyer jokes reasonable.

Not-so-Goodling

2007-06-07T13:05:00.000-04:00

As I commented at FireDogLake about Monica Goodling in light of the DOJ's document dump last night:

Oh. Man.

I hope the testosterone-enriched members of the community didn’t buy that “stupid little good girl” act that Goodling sent up.

This bit in particular is going to get her spanked:

“We had given her two options - one formal w/order number, one with informal - no number — they decided to go with informal unnumbered. She said the cover memo needs to go thru OLC - not DAG or OASG.”

[source: email from Mari Santangelo to Robert Marshall, dd. 22-FEB-06 4:44p]

She deliberately avoided the DAG’s and OASG’s office; in the background, on the date of this particular email, the PatActII is being debated and is not approved until the end of the month, with the Delegation of Authority signed on 01-MAR-06 (need to double-check the date) almost immediately after the PatActII passed.

Within weeks of this time, Thomas Heffelfinger will announce he is leaving USA-MN position.

Our “stupid little good girl” was quite deliberate and very busy; she’s on the hook for a lot more than Hatch Act violations.

Oh, and one more bit that has been stuck in my craw and may yet add up to something. During the course of the emails about the delegation and in the cover letter of the delegation there is a reference to a memo — Memorandum for Jennifer G. Newstead, General Counsel, Office of Management and Budget, “Assignment of Functions Related to Certain Military Appointments, at 3-4(July 28, 2005)”.

As far as I can tell, Newstead is no longer in OMB; what the hell was this about?

Remember Iglesias comment to the effect that every thing was documented at DOJ in memos?

Yeah. That.

And I think we now have concerns about OMB.

It's all about Dick

2007-06-03T01:19:00.001-04:00

A single entry that Josh Marshall posted this past week really got under my skin, in a number of different ways.

First, I think we've reached a point where so damn much corruption has passed under the bridge that we can't hang onto the sheer volume of facts that are rushing by us in a torrent.

Secondly, I'm so angry that this has happened, that we've let these bastards bury us under so much bullsh*t that people who should be making connections between dots simply can't. Aren't we brighter than these criminals? Aren't there more of us than them? Can't we put this altogether and see it for what it is?

The post in question dd. May 31, 2007 -- 02:12 PM EST cites an email by a reader JR:

Re your argument that the quest for oil is a parsimonious explanation for the Iraq war. I have long doubted this proposition. Big Oil may be venal in its pursuit of profit, but it has an intimate knowledge of non-western political structures, and it's far from stupid. These interests would have known from the start that a cobbled together, post-colonial state like Iraq couldn't be invaded without catstrophic consequences. This set me wondering, though. I never did come across any substantial report on what Big Oil actually thought as this loony-tunes adventure popped up in the night. I don't mean the paid mouth-pieces but the power managers within the companies - those advised by anthropologists, political scientists, and other experts who actually have a clue about the workings of the real world.

The missing piece is the Energy Task Force documentation. It laid out in the first quarter of 2001 what DeadEye Dick Cheney in the OVP and Big Oil understood to be the priorities in the Middle East in regards to oil production.

The "substantial report" to which reader JR refers, believing them to be missing, were distilled into those high-level maps and plans that Cheney deliberated over with Big Oil and its facilitators like Enron executive Ken Lay. This is exactly why Cheney fought tooth and nail from allowing the public to see them. The little glimpse made available to the public already suggests that from its inception (and possibly before) the Bush Administration planned to divvy up oil in the middle east.

It's right there, under our noses, yet we are blind to it because of the plethora of corruption. They had the entire Middle East parceled out for its energy resources from the earliest days of the Bush Administration; groups like Judicial Watch and Sierra Club had strong suspicions of it. We can trace the outline of what the OVP and Big Oil were trying to do by what they didn't do -- doesn't it seem incredibly odd that a "substantial report" hasn't been produced in the last six years, in spite of all the data suggesting we are on the downside of oil production, after all?

I could send this to Josh, but I won't; I've sent him emails over the last several years and I've never heard a peep of acknowledgement back from him. Maybe he's buried under mounds of emails with more pointers like this, detailing this avalanche of corruption in little bits and pieces. I wouldn't be surprised.

Transcript of Senator Chris Dodd's live vlog event at FireDogLake.com 30-MAY-07

2007-05-31T09:54:00.000-04:00

(courtesy of commenter 'egregious')

Dodd: “We hold the Bush administration accountable during the redeployment period by requiring the Secretary of Defense to regularly report to Congress on the draw-down of forces during that period; we institute measures that would make funding within the redeployment period contingent on the progress of the phrased redeployment; we restore the readiness of our military, we use additional funds that come in, the Reserves, National Guard, by transferring portions of the moneys that would have otherwise been available for combat activities. That’s the outline of the amendment. It hasn’t been drawn up as an amendment yet but those are the major provisions we would include in the bill. Again, we abbreviate the period between the enactment date and the beginning of redeployment, we maintain the same date at the end of March of 2008; we utilize the resources that come in to support Reserves, National Guard, military readiness. We have benchmarks in there to require reporting out of the Secretary of Defense office as to how that redeployment is working over that period of 8 or 9 months. Again, I invite your comments on this and thoughts. I thank you for what you did a week or so ago in building up support for the effort to oppose the supplemental but this time now with more than a month on our hands, I think we can lay this out in very clear terms here. This is not a time for us to be waiting around for the next president. We’ve gotta have the courage of our convictions to stand up to this one before we find even greater problems here to deal with in Iraq and elsewhere. So again I invite your comments and thoughts on it. Again I thank FireDogLake for hosting me today to give me a chance to lay this out a little bit for you and then to respond to some questions that have come in already about this proposal as well as comments that have come in about these ideas. Again thanks for listening, I look forward to your questions.”

Matt: Welcome everyone, this is Matt Browner-Hamlin, campaign blogger for the Dodd campaign. You’re gonna hear my voice off-screen as I relay questions from you to Senator Dodd. Before we start with that, Senator, could you clarify for us what the defense authorization bill is and why this is the best legislation to add your amendment to.

Dodd: Theoretically before you can appropriate any money for anything the programs have to be authorized by Congress. This is not always adhered to as I’m sure all of you know and we have continuing resolutions or supplemental appropriations that include items that have never been authorized. But theoretically you’re supposed to authorize something before you appropriate. Historically we’ve done that in the defense area. So the authorization numbers can be a lot of times much higher than the appropriation numbers. But nonetheless they give you the authority to then appropriate the funds. The reason that we’re gonna try to attach it in the authorization bill is one, this is legislative language. You’re not allowed to put legislative language theoretically on an appropriations bill. That happens from time to time depending on how you draft it. But the best place to put legislative language is on an authorization bill. That’s the number one reason for including this language on the defense authorization bill next month but also it’s our next bite out of the apple if you will. After the defense authorization bill there will be a defense appropriations bill and then they’ll have to come back to the supplemental again sometime in the early fall. And I thought it made some sense since this is the next game in town so to speak that we ought to be ready to make the case. I was telling folks in NH last weekend that I intend to continue fighting on this. I didn’t just go through this last week to drop the ball after this but rather to continue to make the case. And so over Memorial Day weekend as I read about more of our servicemen losing their lives, more Iraqi losing their lives, this hole getting deeper and deeper for us, that it seemed to me we ought to come back with something much more quickly than we did the last time and to make our case early on to build some support. So the defense authorization bill is really the right vehicle in many many ways for us to address this issue.

Matt: Thank you Senator. We’re now going to go to commenters who are asking questions in today’s thread.

The commenter named HotFlash asks, can you explain what redeployment of US combat troops means in the context of your proposed bill.

Dodd: My redeployment would be that they be redeployed at least over the next 9 or 10 months within Iraq itself. I’m not opposed to the idea of some training functions, some border security issues, some counter-terrorism activities. I understand that as well even some of that may go on afterwards. But the idea is to get our troops out of Iraq, to redeploy them either into Afghanistan where there are clearly some needs, the re-emergence of the Taliban is occurring in the country to redeploy them to bases that may exist in the region but out of Iraq or redeploy for many of our soldiers there back to the United States. So redeployment’s pretty comprehensive. Lemme just maybe anticipate a question some of you may have. I’m opposed to the idea of permanent US bases in Iraq. I don’t think there’s any need for that. And I know that many have been concerned about whether or not redeployment would mean keeping these bases in operation in Iraq itself. I think that would be a mistake.

Matt: The next question comes from the blogger Swopa. Can you provide us with some background in why the effort to include a timeline in the supplemental failed. Why were there not enough votes in the Senate to pass this bill.

Dodd: I’d have to ask each one of the people who voted for it for their rationale. But I think part of it was that time was running out in their minds and they thought they had to agree to a compromise early on. Look, I respect what leaders have to go through here to some degree. I understand they try to look at these things. I say respectfully to them and I have prior to the vote that my view is we should keep the pressure on here. We’re already seeing Republican members of the Congress having strong second thoughts about this military involvement in the Iraq civil war. They’d like to see us get out of it. They’re talking about benchmarks. They’re already moving not as fast as I am but moving in a direction that would limit our continued military presence in Iraq and so I think there was some of that. Also I think people were operating under the false assumption here that we’re gonna somehow immediately cut off funding for the troops in Iraq. That’s not the case at all. We’re talking about probably something close to 80B$ that would be spent. If we’re spending at 2B$ a week 8B$ a month we’re talking about redeployment which is gonna have some additional costs to it. That’s a lot of money to be spending over the next year in Iraq itself. We’re not gonna leave our soldiers sailors marines and airmen vulnerable. That’s a bogus argument. Has no validity. In fact the soldiers and sailors airmen and marines know that. They understand that better in fact than people out there using that argument. So I think some people were confused, that somehow we’re gonna abandon our troops. I hear it all. None of us want to be part of that at all. We realize that to make this message clear we have to end this policy. This is a failed policy. We’re more vulnerable less secure more isolated we’re weaker today in many many ways because of this president’s policy in Iraq.

Matt: Senator, the next question comes from commenter Massaccio, who asks, If we leave Iraq now there’s a significant chance that there will be enormous death and destruction as well as serious consequences for the oil reserves located throughout the country what do you propose to do with the misery that will follow our departure?

Dodd: Well let me say to you how much more misery 75,000 Iraqis I’m told have lost their lives in Iraq 100 more yesterday 10 more of our soldiers yesterday 5 today by the way have lost their lives 2 million people have left Iraq for Iran Syria or Jordan, a million in the country more displaced I don’t know how much more chaotic it can get And look I don’t have any absolute certainty when we leave the country the certainty of this A continued status quo without any decision to move our military out will only make the matters worse. I hereby defining very clearly our the time frame here in many ways will force the Iraqis to make some very difficult decisions if they want one at all. I think in the absence of that continued delay or procrastination when it comes to those issues So I think the time certainty here works to our advantage and by the way once we’ve done that I believe once we’ve done that surge in diplomacy politics economic resources We’ve got an awful lot in our arsenal available to us to encourage neighboring Arab states to become more involved in securing or helping Iraq some stability So this debate is not just redeployment but the other things engaging other nations to play an active role I think it’s harder for us to do that quite candidly with a continued unending presence in Iraq civil war Once we make it clear we’re terminating our military involvement in Iraq there’s a greater likelihood greater participation greater support for the non military actions if Iraq is to remain a nation-state and to bring some stability to the region.The oil resouces belong to the Iraqi people. The idea we’re going to stay to guarantee contracts to a handful of oil companies no rationale continuing chaos that in that country.

Matt: Senator, the next question comes from Oklahoma Kiddo, who asks: Would President Dodd advocate a reassessment of policy and place diplomacy front and center

Dodd: This has been stunning to me in a way the first administration Republican or Democratic treats diplomacy as a gift to your enemy a sign of weakness. This administration’s ideas use military force first, if that doesn’t work try diplomacy. Historically you try diplomacy and politics. The failure of that draws you to military action. This administration treats military action as the first arrow you draw out of your quiver last one I want to see us get back to the very successful efforts of the previous administration try and bring some reconciliation restore our credibility our legitimacy honest broker in these areas, it’s gonna be almost impossible to do by perpetuating the current policy in Iraq.

Matt: Senator, the next question comes from my good friend TRex, who wants to know if the resolution we are talking about today, the Dodd amendment, is binding on President Bush.

Dodd: Well it would be. It’s an authorization number. Now as I say you also have to deal with the appropriation because would be very powerful Could not appropriate funds that have not been authorized. So it would make it very very difficult for the administration to move in a different direction. I know they’d probably try. They would try have to watch the appropriations process as well. This president is determined I think to continue funding this operation regardless of the opposition he faces. But I think this is a very important first step to clarify what we think needs to be done and to invite people to participate support this effort.

Matt: Senator, there is a process question here, Sparkles the Iguana wants to know who is reading the questions, I will shout-out here Matt Browner-Hamlin, I work for the Dodd campaign as a blogger and I’m happy to be here facilitating this conversation.

Next question from dakine01 Are you going to introduce a stand alone bill to fully re-institute habeas corpus and all the other rights taken away by the Patriot Act.

Dodd: Well I already have, I invite your attention, you can look at my website chrisdodd.com, I hope it is anyway, introduced a number of weeks ago to do exactly what you’re talking about to restore habeas corpus. By the way you should know in drawing up the legislation By the way my strongest supporters are senior military commanders judges advocate general at the Pentagon. This is not some idea that came out of left field if you will. People who are serious about military justice believe this was a huge mistake for us to do what the Military Commissions Act did last fall. I consider people serious military justice one of the most serious negative votes Congress has taken in a long long time it was a major retreat from the rule of law and something we have prided ourselves on over the years So I will do everything possible to try and build support for this legislation and if not will use the powers of the presidency, executive order, to change as much of that as I can regarding habeas corpus.

Matt: Senator, the next question comes from two Ohio University students who say they have lost faith in our elected representatives due to the invasion of Iraq. How would you encourage two 19 year old students to get involved in the democratic process?

Dodd: Look this a major issue, there’s no question about it. But if you don’t speak up and participate people will assume that the country is overwhelmingly in favor of it. I believe that people don’t realize not that this ought to be the deciding factor. and The first job of a president is to keep our country secure and safe I believe that our policy in Iraq has done just the opposite. less secure, lot more vulnerable we’ve got some serious issues our strength as a nation what it’s done to our military capacity on almost every single level this policy is doing us great damage. losing our moral authority. Those of the words of Colin Powell not my words, back almost a year go So we need your involvement here. I’m running for president because I care about issues like this. I wanna see our country get back on track again both at home and abroad. I wanna see values and ideals most of us stand for in this country so that once again we become the positive force in the world to make a difference gives a sense of hope and carry that message to people in these respective caucus and primary states to involved in the electoral process of our country Those who don’t get involved, who sit on the sidelines give the opposition more power, more influence if you will. If you’re not involved someone else gets your vote and their vote when it comes to being involved in these issues. I understand why you can be down about the outcomes here and certainly I would have liked a better outcome last week. But I’m not a quitter and I suspect you’re not either, and so quitters don’t pack up and leave. The vote last week just fires me up to be more serious about it and more determined about it than ever before. That’s why I’m offering this idea to day asking for your comments, what you think about it. Let’s try to finalize it in the coming days then let’s make it something we ask more members of Congress We need to stand up to this administration before we lose more lives and the credibility of our country suffers even more. When I was there finishing up college back well let’s call it a couple of years ago I went off and joined the Peace Corps. Many people have asked me over the years why did I do that. And a very simple answer I’ve given for many years :An American president asked me to. A generation of us got very excited about that Some joined the Justice department Vista, Civil rights movement, military, Peace Corps. We all thought we were part of something good happening. Making a contribution, Make this world a better place. Become in something larger than ourselves. I hope you’ll feel that same thing. We invite you to get involved with our campaign, get involved in someone else’s campaign. I’d love to have you help us, the the most important to get involved and make a difference. If you do I think you’ll find the same kind of rewards We won’t win every battle I think the country turning in our direction they want a different mission, a different change in policy. If you get involved I think you can help us get there.

Matt: question comes from commenter Woodhall Hollow, who writes: Senator Dodd, thank you so very much for speaking truth to power. The invasion of Iraq as Al Gore and others have pointed out was a catastrophic mistake, yet we are there. I am interested in the role that other Arab countries can play in helping us to see that the Iraqi people have an opportunity to move forward. Specifically how would you use diplomacy to encourage these countries, most especially Saudi Arabia to play a more constructive role in these efforts.

Dodd: Well it’s a great question one that too often we’ve left out of our discussion. The focusing on military presence in the Iraq civil war but obviously it’s not a question of waiting for that to end and then picking up the political, diplomatic approach. I think that ought to be going on simultaneously. Now let me just say I was pleased to see that the administration had conversation with the Iranians a few days ago. I’ve been calling for that for months. I think a similar conversation ought to occur with Syria. Not because we like them or we want to sit down and have dinner with them, but because great nations understand that if you’re going to make a difference in the world, you end up negotiating with people you disagree with. That’s certainly been true of almost every administration over the last 50 or 60 years. And the idea that we don’t engage these countries, asking them to become involved, I think has been a huge mistake. So we need to energize Saudi Arabia. Jordan has been helpful. Egypt needs to become more involved in it. To inquire whether there isn’t some common ground with Syria, I hear they share such a huge border with Iraq and has a vested interest in the outcome of policies in Iraq. So we need to utilize the good offices of our country to find ways in which these countries can become more involved politically, diplomatically, economically in stabilizing Iraq and offer some real answers here. I think one of the reasons that we are reluctant to do that today is because of our military involvement in the civil war. It’s very difficult to find the space where Saudi Arabia and these other countries can be helpful, other than welcoming refugees who are coming out of the country or some training facilities here and there. I think, frankly, as we make it clear that after four and a half, going on five years, longer than WWII, that our military presence in Iraq is coming to an end. I think if we use the kind of influence I believe we have, that decision, that time frame will open the door for these other countries to step up and assume a greater responsibility. I believe that will happen. And under the right kind of national leadership, I’d make that happen.

Matt: Senator Dodd, next to last question, there have been few questions in the comments about this. Specifically Badwater asks Condolezza Rice’s threat about defying troop withdrawal legislation seems to involve the use of signing statements by the President. What is your position on the use of signing statements?

Dodd: Signing statements have been used on legislation where the president makes up his own mind what he thinks the legislation is all about. It’s rather remarkable. It’s so antithetical to our Constitution. about the idea that a president’s thoughts about the bill where he had little or nothing to do except to offer ideas. He has no vote in Congress, the coequal branch of government. So signing statements I think are very dangerous and a bad precedent for disrupting what legislative history is. Legislative history is never perfect, I’m not suggesting it is. But if you’re going to have a president decide what legislation means, and disregard what the Congressional intent was, then it seems to me you make it more difficult for the Supreme Court which ultimately is asked to decide what the intent of Congress is. Signing statements by the president I think can be interesting, I don’t have any objection to a president offering ideas, but the idea they would have any legislative weight, or judicial weight, is something that I think is totally wrong.

Matt: The last question comes from commenter egregious: Is there more the federal government can do to help New Orleans?

Dodd: Well there ought to be. The first one is the kind of leadership that’s been absent here. We’ve seen some steps made recently but an awful lot more needs to be done. We need some real support behind the efforts to make sure people can get insurance in New Orleans and these other Gulf states where the insurance has basically left. Without insurance you cant get mortgages, it’s difficult to rebuild down there. There needs to be far more of an effort. This has been a disgrace, a national disgrace, that a major American city hit by a natural disaster has had to find itself this many months and years after the fact, still scrambling to get back on its feet again. That’s been disgraceful in my view. We’ve just recently passed legislation that Mary Landrieu, my colleague from Louisiana, authored, that enjoyed broad based support in the Congress, provides some assistance and support. Now I’ll tell you, it was part of this supplemental, which I disagreed with. I would like those kinds of issues to be separate, rather than confusing the support for the continued military presence in Iraq tied up with things like Katrina support. That should have been separated out in my view. I shouldn’t be forced to be put in position to have to oppose efforts to do something about Katrina, while simultaneously supporting the conflict in Iraq. I didn’t like that but I had to make a choice. I made the choice to be opposed to the supplemental. You can come back again with another supplemental. I’d be delighted to help out on these domestic issues. But Iraq is the major issue of the issue of the day: 2 billion dollars a week, 8 billion dollars a month, day after day people losing their lives, and destroying our ability to be a far greater influence in the world. I think it’s terribly dangerous for our country.

Matt: Thank you very much, Senator, I think that concludes our chat.

Dodd: Thanks very much I appreciate again FireDogLake for providing the forum here, the venue for me to speak to people about this. We’ll keep the lines open obviously. We’re very interested in your comments and thoughts about our proposal. Thanks.

-end-

[Note: to watch the recorded video of the live vlog event hosted at FireDogLake, click on this link.]

Dear Congress

2007-05-24T11:42:00.000-04:00

Grow a spine.

Vote NO on the Supplemental.

Support our troops by ending this war now.

Sincerely,

Rayne

What are you going to do about it?

2007-05-18T07:25:00.000-04:00

So Washington Post says in an op-ed yesterday:

"And so we will put in place programs to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people, and programs that we constantly brief to Congress," Mr. Bush assured the country yesterday, as he brushed off requests for a more detailed account. But this is exactly the point of contention. The administration, it appears from Mr. Comey's testimony, was willing to go forward, against legal advice, with a program that the Justice Department had concluded did not "honor the civil liberties of our people." Nor is it clear that Congress was adequately informed. The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain. That cannot be allowed to happen.

(emphasis mine)

Yup. Many citizens have been angry about the NSA warrantless wiretapping controversy, in addition to a growing cascade of other equally disturbing and unacceptable controversies. We've been blogging, writing letters to the editors of many papers across the country, screaming our protests, and yet we've been unable to permeate the consciousness of a critical mass of the public to sit up and take notice -- simply because they do not hear much at all from the corporate-owned media in this country about this and other controversies.

The question to the Washington Post's editorial staff, management and ownership is this: What are YOU going to do about it?

The really BIG picture

2007-05-02T21:41:00.000-04:00

Over at The Next Hurrah, Emptywheel has been cranking away at the U.S. Attorneys scandal. Between her, "mbw" of Wampum and myself, we've been looking more deeply into the relationship between the U.S. Attorneys dismissed as the Gonzales Eight, Abramoff and Cheney's Energy Task Force. The point of intersection is the U.S. Attorney General's Native American Issues Subcommittee (NAIS), of which many of the dismissed U.S. Attorneys were members. The rational behind dismissal of these particular U.S. Attorneys is multi-fold; Native Americans were targets of suppression masked as "voter fraud" prosecution, were manipulated out of money by Abramoff while seeking better representation from a neglectful federal government, and manipulated into giving up energy-rich lands or rights to them.

One of the other critical issues at play behind the manipulation of Native Americans by Cheney Co and Abramoff is the global transition from petroleum-centric hegemony to a wider fossil fuels-hegemony, with specific attention to natural gas. In tandem with Cheney Co/Abramoff machinations, the Russians have been locking down all source and supply contracts across Eurasia and Europe. The reach is very broad, from the UK throughout the 'stans. Many of the upheavals we have seen in leadership have been in no small part related to the undertow of natural gas markets -- the Orange Revolution and the poisoning of Yuschenko may be just one example.

In other words, we are picking away at the veneer laid over not a continuing pursuit of oil, but a new Cold War of global scale in which all fossil fuels are equally commodified and every bit as important as petroleum. While Russia wheedled with some "partners" and hammers on others in order to lock down the largest supplies and sales of natural gas, Cheney Co and Abramoff put a squeeze play on Native Americans in order to lock down all energy-rich lands, particularly those most important to natural gas production and transshipment.

If we are seeing this level of deep politik chasing natural gas, does this mean that peak oil has already come and gone?

If we are engaged in a Cold War for energy, what would precipitate a full-blown traditional war for the same -- and how far away is this in the future?

Dear Timmy "Pumpkinhead" Russert

2007-04-26T16:58:00.000-04:00

Just in case you really don't know how to use one of these things and you're too embarrassed to ask, I thought I'd pass along a basic "how-to" for telephone use. It sure looked like you didn't know the business end of one of these devices after your appearance on Bill Moyer's program last evening.

Calling a U.S. Telephone Number: (000) 000-0000

All telephone numbers have ten digits. The first three digits (the area code) indicate the geographical area where the phone is located. For example, 212 area code is for Washington D.C. The next seven numbers are the specific line to the business or private phone you are calling. If you have any trouble finding a phone number, call 1 + area code + 555-1212 and ask the operator to find the number of the business or person you are trying to reach. (This means press the little buttons on your phone set, one at a time, in sequence matching the phone number you wish to call. And no, you don't have to dial the hyphen, it only separates the area code and exchange number from the local number.)

If you are calling from your office at NBC, you may have to dial another number like 9 to get an outside line. Ask your boss or your all-knowing secretary. (In a pinch, ask Cathie Martin at OVP -- but you might have to call her to ask her. Send her an email if you have to, I think it's cathie.martin@gwb43.com.)

Dialing Long Distance
You MUST dial 1 before the ten digit number you are calling for long distance (anything outside of the area code from which you are calling). Keep in mind that Washington D.C. is NOT long distance from your office in Washington D.C. You may also want to check with your boss about your long distance phone expense budget; maybe they haven't let you make long distance calls to keep costs down. We, the viewing public, certainly can't tell from out here.

Calling Other Countries
To call other countries, dial 011 for an international line, then dial the country code, area code and phone number. You can find a list of country and city codes in the first few pages of any U.S. telephone book. You do know what a telephone book is, don't you?

No?

Oh, crikey.

[photo: University of Alberta]

Family discussions

2007-03-22T14:45:00.000-04:00

I have to go pick up my son from school...it just dawned on me how much I am going to have to explain to him today, about why we will see so much of the Edwards family on television this evening.

You see, in 2004, after waiting in line and in the hot summer sun, I held my son up piggyback in a crowd less than 30 feet from where John Edwards spoke as a presidential candidate, so that my son could see him and hear him. He made an enormous impact on my son, who still talks about that speech every time he sees John Edwards on television, including this morning, before he left for school.

Bless the Edwards, both John and Elizabeth, who've had to have important discussions of their own with their children. I thank them for the grace they've shown as an American family and wish them well.

Pearl Harbor Massacre: the White House link to the dismissal of U.S. Attorneys

2007-03-13T08:16:00.000-04:00

Late last evening two stories were released covering the Gonzales Eight and the White House's role in the dismissals. The New York Times and the Washington Post both covered the document dump by the U.S. Department of Justice in advance of further testimony by DOJ staff.

From the WaPo article:

The Gonzales aide in charge of the dismissals — his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson — resigned yesterday, officials said, after acknowledging that he did not tell Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress.

Doesn’t that smell of firewalling and plausible deniability to you?

Kyle Sampson was named U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff in September of 2005, three months before the dismissals of the U.S. Attorneys (USA's)

Sampson had been named Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to the Attorney General in February 2005; is this part of normal transition post-election?

D. Kyle Sampson has served at the Department of Justice as a Counselor to the Attorney General since 2003, and he currently serves as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. Prior to joining the Department, Sampson served in the White House as Associate Counsel to the President and as Special Assistant to the President and Associate Director for Presidential Personnel. From 1999 to 2001, Sampson served as Counsel to Senator Orrin G. Hatch on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he taught as an Adjunct Professor at George Mason University Law School during the 2000-2001 school year. Before entering public service, Sampson practiced law at the Salt Lake City law firm of Parr Waddoups Brown Gee & Loveless and clerked for Judge Karen J. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Sampson earned his law degree, with honors, from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as Articles Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. He earned his undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University.

Bold mine — sure looks to me like cross-pollination from the White House pool to the DOJ. Was Sampson the DOJ’s “political officer”?

Good God, there is so much smoke here, must be a fire.

WaPo's John Solomon is one of the two bylines on this WaPo (Dan Eggen being the other) — can you say “partisan hack”? If it looks this bad posted by a shill, imagine how REALLY BAD it is in actuality. Can only guess at what will come at the end of the week in the Friday news dump…

Another article from early 2005 reads like a cast of our future overlords, I know I got gooseflesh seeing Tasia Scolinos’ name in there. Gack!! Everything about Gonzales’ team was political; the DOJ under his leadership has NEVER been about crime, only the appearance of fighting it, a Potemkin village of polizei.

Dan Eggen was the sole byline on that previous piece from 2005; it leads me to wonder if Solomon was assigned to him on this latest piece as his “minder”?

Here’s another WaPo piece from 2005 that frightens the hell out of me. Scroll down, when you see Rove, you’ll find the article. Holy crap; Sampson truly is Karl Rove's "Mini-me," not just the heir apparent to Rove's role as political hit man.

Both stories in the NYT and WaPo hich 2004 Congressional races were still in question by the end of January/early February?

That might give us a few clues as to which ones were targeted…haven’t yet looked at that.

The whole right-wing talking point about Clinton getting rid of ALL 93 prosecutors is a load of bullsh*t too; Black in the Marianas was a BushI appointee. I suspect now after reading this latest WaPo article that the “Clinton Did It” spin was innoculation.

Fellow FDL commenter TeddySanFran said in response, "That inoculation came from Rove at the Clinton Center last weekend; he reeled off numbers of USAs in that tone of his that brooks no questions."

That’s a wrap on that, you can mark me as having ID’d this. I didn’t know it was Rover who launched that talking point in the flesh.

He handled the innoculation himself, in public; that can only be a sign of utter desperation that he can't trust this to be handed off to someone else, or that he had to drop the innoculant immediately before the tidal wave of bad news hit. Rove has lost his prescience, lost his ability to get a serious lead on the news at this point; it's moving must faster than can his whisper campaigns and faxed talking points.

The continuing document dump is going to contain some nasty bits, but THEY knew what was in there, planned for it. I suspect that’s why we see virtually the same coverage from NYT and WaPO on the USA’s right now.

Note this bit from the NYT:

“We would like to execute this on Thursday, Dec. 7,” Mr. Sampson wrote. Because some United States attorneys were still in Washington attending a conference, he planned to postpone telling them they were being fired. He wrote, “We want to wait until they are back home and dispersed to reduce chatter.”

Mr. Sampson predicted that dismissals might stir debate. “Prepare to Withstand Political Upheaval,” he wrote in describing what to expect as a result of the firings. “U.S Attorneys desiring to save their jobs aided by their allies in the political arena as well as the Justice Department community, likely will make efforts to preserve themselves in office. You should expect these efforts to be strenuous.”

Bold mine. Sampson was prepared in December to go down with the ship for these people. He just bought their undying appreciation and a tenure position in their welfare pool. Welcome to the private sector and the consultantocracy, Mr. Sampson.

This is not the first time that Kyle Sampson has directly impacted USA’s appointments; he did it in the White House in 2002. I refuse to link to the source article, won’t drive traffic to that RICO outfit, especially since the Dark Lord Novakula wrote this piece — but note this excerpt from first week of January 2002, regarding a USA in San Diego:

Kyle Sampson, a former Hatch aide who now works in the White House, along with Berenson has kept the LaBella nomination from getting to the president’s desk.

After reading Josh Marshall’s “it’s the end of the world as we know it” post, I’d have put $5 on Miers as the author of the inserted clause that modified the PatAct to allow this debacle.

Somebody got the name of that staffer in Specter’s office? Is there a link to Miers, I asked last night. TeddySanFran says Orrin Hatch is the connection; how did that work?

Bottom line: Sampson was a willing partner here, not a blind cut-out. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew it might come to this, went ahead and did it anyhow. Demonstrated intent, one might say. As a lawyer, I'm sure Mr. Sampson would understand the implication.

Wish you were here

2007-02-24T15:55:00.000-05:00

If you're in Michigan and you're reading this on Saturday afternoon, you are NOT here. Why? You're missing one helluva gig! Senator Carl Levin gets us fired up and ready to take on the war machine in the Sentate.

At the Blogger Caucus, Emptywheel demonstrates her ability to talk as rapidly with her hands as she live blogs from the Libby trial media room at Prettyman Courthouse.

And look who else made it to Michigan -- Brian Keeler, a.k.a. NYBri, here to talke about Blue Tiger Dems and The Albany Project. Wow, two DailyKos rockstars here in one room!

(Um, Emptywheel is still talking with her smokin' live blogging technique.)

And Senator Stabenow launches this bash with a collection of some of the finest Democrats this country has taking the stage with her, including Rep. Sander Levin, Rep. John Conyers, and Rep. John Dingell. Wow. Critical mass of progressive brain power here.

Libby Trial: Closing Arguments

2007-02-20T09:42:00.000-05:00

A shout out to folks popping in from the FireDogLake live blogging coverage of the U.S. v. Libby trial!

For the link to primer including glossary of terms, see link at the left, conveniently located under the shameless plug for FDL's live blogger Marcy Wheeler's book, Anatomy of Deceipt. Sales through that link support FDL.

May justice be served and the good guys win, for once.

EDIT: Some of the FDL regulars (or irregulars, as the case may be) have been chatting about placing bets on the outcome. Go ahead, lay your bets in comments. Is Libby guilty or not guilty? How many counts and which counts, if guilty?

I'll start: I think guilty on all five counts of perjury, false statements and obstruction.

Any male senior administration official who remembers more about a Miami Dolphins game than an attractive, blonde, deepest cover CIA agent with two babies at home needs a good whack along side the chops anyhow, at the very least.

Saving our heritage - saving the wild UP

2007-02-15T21:06:00.000-05:00

This is part of the watershed above Big Bay, on the way to Marquette, only a handful of miles as the crow flies from the Yellow Dog Plains. The area has a diverse range of environments, from moist freshwater creek beds in deciduous forests to dry, sandy near-alpine-like conditions in higher elevations with older conifer growth and younger brushy areas developing into new jack pine stands.

And this is what I used to do as a kid, here in the same stream beds, looking for salamanders and tiny brook trout and crawfish and bugs as if they were gold nuggets. It's rare to run into somebody out here, and when you do, they are fishing, hunting, berry picking, logging, or heading back to town with whatever they caught, picked or logged.

I think this is Eagle Rock, only a stone's throw from the area where Kennecott Mines wants to mine for nickel sulfide. Not clear in this picture taken on a hazy afternoon is a large outcrop of bluestone and granite on which perch some conifers, reaching over a brushy patch covered with wild blueberry and ferns.

Noted with a "Drift Area" sign, this is one of the many logging roads that wind through the Yellow Dog Plains, the same kind of road that the Kennecott Mines trucks will use to remove the nickel sulfide.

These roads rut and wash out easily as they are nothing but soft sand and small sandstones; they are like washboards after a little rain and a little more traffic. During the summer they are extremely dusty; the trees adjoining the road become pink from dust hanging in the air. The dust could be kept down with calcium chloride, but what will that do to the environment?

This area is simply too fragile for mining; it hasn't fully recovered from the logging done over the last hundred years as it is. How long would it take to recover from a nickel mine with an extremely finite lifespan?

Breaching the barrier: Christy Hardin Smith on reporters' privilege

2007-02-01T22:34:00.000-05:00

FireDogLake's Christy Hardin Smith had an excellent and highly educational post up this past Tuesday tackling Judy Miller, former journalist for The New York Times. You'll recall that Miller wrote a number of pieces that fueled the run-up to the Iraq War, based on information that was inadequate; if you don't recall Miller, you'll be reminded by this evening's news as she will take the stand today in the U.S. vs. Libby trial. Christy's post serves as an excellent backgrounder on Miller prior to her testimony today.

The concept of reporters' privilege has been discussed extensively because of Miller's jailing for refusing to testify to the federal Grand Jury investigating the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Miller claimed reporters' privilege – a subset of the First Amendment protections of free speech – as well as a lack of release by her source, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. (Libby has been a target of of umbrella investigation, and is being prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of the investigation (5 counts of perjury, false statements and obstruction). Miller met with Libby several times prior to the discovery of Plame's outing, during which Libby disclosed Plame's identity and employment to Miller. While Miller never wrote about Plame, she maintained she had reporters' privilege and refused to testify about Libby's disclosures, ultimately going to jail for contempt of court until she received a release from Libby to testify.

My personal concern about Miller is that Miller claims a martyrhood for the cause of reporters' privilege. Miller conveniently ignored in her drama queen pleas for reporters’ privilege these important points:

There was no privilege found by the DC Circuit Court for testifying in front of a Grand Jury investigating an underlying crime; this should be distinguished from testifying in front of a regular jury;
There was no privilege found by the U.S. Supreme Court in Branzburg v. Hayes, that allows reporters who witness a crime to report on the crime but not testify about it. Reporters are beneficiaries of the reporting at the public’s expense, where they refuse to testify about a crime committed in their presence; this should be clearly distinguished from whistle blowing.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals took great pains to explore this matter after Miller was jailed, to the tune of an 83-page decision. It’s clear that the court saw something that was clearly a crime in the course of its review [note the number of redacted pages in the decision, to conceal classified content that the court assessed], and nothing to support Miller’s claim of privilege.

Miller tries so hard to justify her work, which in turn justified a fraudulent war; this cannot be seen in the same light as any journalist/editor to whom Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. One furthered a crime and might have done so for Libby et al, the other worked to stop a war prosecuted illegally. Apples, oranges.

Having read Miller’s apologetics in the NYT (actually rushed out and bought a hardcopy, can't believe I spent hard earned money on it), I can’t help but wonder what the hell is wrong with Miller’s head. She wrote most of her explainer as if she wasn’t there, as if she was a detached observer watching a Miller-like clone interacting with Libby. Would love to have FireDogLake co-contributor and psychologist Pachacutec give her a thorough review for this reason while he is on site at Prettyman and in followup after her testimony.

Ultimately, Miller caused serious damage to the NYT, her coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War was so flawed, her persistent lack of discipline making it clear that the editorial staff had lost control -- and this, on the heels of the Jason Blair scandal as well. As a professional who must rely on media for research, I personally cannot use the NYT as a source; I cannot trust that their content is adequately vetted or that the editorial staff has pushed back at its journalists firmly for accurate and detailed reporting. It is for reasons like these, the failure of traditional media to be an effective, honest broker, and the persistent abuse of the public's trust, that citizen journalism realized in blogging – including the piece by Christy Hardin Smith on Judy Miller, and Marcy Wheeler's live blogging of the U.S. v. Libby trial – becomes a credible alternative to traditional media.

Liveblogged: U.S. vs. Libby -- A primer

2007-01-25T00:41:00.000-05:00

As FireDogLake's liveblogging of Libby's trial continues, I note a number of abbreviations, acronyms, slang, shorthand popping up on the fly that most of us Plame-maniacs already know but newbies may not grasp. I'm going to try to document them here, a kind of not-so-secret decoder ring. If there's something you'd like to see added, leave me a comment and I'll cover it here. NOTE: in the event of a server crash at FireDogLake.com, check Windcatpond for announcements, as well as DailyKos for alternative live blogging posts.

Complete list of FireDogLake's Libby trial live blog and related posts her e.

Acronyms and Abbreviations:

"ADD"	From notes introduced during testimony by David Addington; abbreviation referred to Addington himself.
ADDOPS	? -- Believe to be “Asst. Deputy Director Operations”-CIA (if you can confirm this one, leave me a comment, tks!)
CIPA	Classified Information Protection Act (see Resources below)
CPD	Counter Proliferation Division (CIA)
DCI	Director, Central Intel
DDCI	Deputy Director, Central Intel
EO	Executive Office (Executive Branch, President's Office or White House)
IIPA	Intelligence Identities Protection Act (definition at Wikipedia)
“K”	From notes introduced during testimony by David Addington, who maintained this indicated a "contract.” (This may be a typo in quasi-transcription and may actually represent “contact”.)
MIB	Morning Intel Briefing
OVP	Office of the Vice President
SF-312	Non-Disclosure Agreement required of government employees and contractors if they handle classified materials.
TOC	Table of Contents, specifically in regards to brief prepared for OVP's office
TS	Top Secret classification
TS/SCI	Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information
WINPAC	Weapons Intelligence Nonproliferation and Arms Control Division (CIA)
Whitmore	Erroneous reference to a reference text, referred to as "Wigmore Rules of Evidence"; the actual title is Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law, written in 1904 by American jurist John Henry Wigmore.
1x2x6	Early theory outlining the genesis of smear campaign against Joe Wilson while outing Valerie Plame. “1x2x6” theory, so-named by blogger Swopa of Needlenose.com, originated from a Washington Post article written by Mike Allen and Dana Priest, arising from this key graf: “Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife.”
302	Refers to Rule 302, Applicability of State Law in Civil Actions and Proceedings.
403	Refers to Rule 403, Exclusion of Relevant Evidence on Grounds of Prejudice, Confusion, or Waste of Time
5A	Pending
5K1.1	Refers to Section 5K1.1 of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines; a prosecutor requesting a lesser sentence will write what is referred to as a "5K letter". A 5K letter is not expected in this trial, but has been the subject of speculation during the course of the trial.
801	Rule 801 of Federal Rules of Evidence

Definitions:

(NOTE: IANAL, please correct me if this interpretation or definition needs tweaking, thanks!)

Term	Definition
Brady	From Wikipedia: “Brady material consists of exculpatory or impeaching information that is material to the guilt or punishment of the defendant. The term comes from the U.S. Supreme Court case, Brady v. Maryland,[1] in which the Supreme Court ruled that suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to a defendant who has requested it violates due process.”
Giglio	The government must disclose any material evidence favorable to the defendant; the government is obligated to comply even if the defendant doesn't ask for this evidence. Documents or evidence that fit this description are supposed to be supplied in advance of the trial, and are referred to as "Giglio filings". (See U.S. Supreme Court case GIGLIO v. UNITED STATES, 405 U.S. 150 (1972))
Jencks	From Questia Online Library: "Discovery is also governed by the Jencks Act(57) and Rule 26.2 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.(58) Under the Jencks Act, statements or reports in the possession of the United States made by a potential government witness are not subject to discovery until after that witness has testified on direct examination.(59) After a witness has testified, at defendant's request, the government must turn over documents relevant to the witness' testimony.(60) If the government does not turn over requested documents the testimony of the witness will be stricken and the trial will continue, or the court will declare a mistrial if required by the interests of justice.(61) Rule 26.2 incorporates the substance of the Jencks Act, and further applies to defense witnesses other than the defendant.(62)" (See U.S. Supreme Court case JENCKS v. UNITED STATES, 353 U.S. 657 (1957))
Memory defense	Defense strategy to be deployed by Scooter Libby against charges of perjury, false statements and obstruction, by which defendant will claim he was so very, very busy with so many very, very important things that he just plain forgot that he was leaking classified information about a deepest cover operative. (Theory of this expected defense strategy outlined by blogger emptywheel at FireDogLake).
Proffer	An offer of evidence in the course of a trial to support an argument. (See Proffer at Wikipedia.)

Witnesses [date of testimony in brackets]:

Witness	Profile	Date sworn in
Grossman, Marc	Former Under Secretary for Political Affairs	[24-JAN-07]
Grenier, Robert	Chief of the Iraq Issues Group in 2003, former CIA top counter-terrorism official	[24-JAN-07]
Schmall, Craig	CIA briefer	[24-JAN-07]
Martin, Cathie	Former Press Aid to the Vice President	[25-JAN-07, 29-JAN-07]
Fleischer, Ari	Former Press Secretary to the President	[29-JAN-07]
Addington, David	Chief of Staff to Vice President, Libby's successor in this role	[29-JAN-07, 30-JAN-07]
Miller, Judith	Former journalist for The New York Times	[30-JAN-07, 31-JAN-07]
Cooper, Matthew	Journalist, Times magazine	[31-JAN-07]
Bond, Debra	FBI Agent assigned to investigate leak case	[01-FEB-07, 02-FEB-07]
Mystery Witness	Pending	Est. [05-FEB-07]
Russert, Tim	Pending	Est. [05-FEB-07]

Defendant, Attorneys and other supporting characters:

Name	Role	Team
Bonamici, Debra	Attorney	Team Fitz/Prosecution
Bond, Debbie	Unspecified	Team Fitz/Prosecution
Brady, Harry	Unspecified	Team Fitz/Prosecution
Cline, John	Attorney (memory defense expert)	Team Libby/Defense
Comstock, Barbara	Unspecified (former lobbyist and strategist for RNC, former director of the Office of Public Affairs for the U.S. Department of Justice, current advisor to 2008 Presidential candidate Mitt Romney)	Team Libby/Defense
Fitzgerald, Patrick	Attorney, U.S. Special Counsel (lead for prosecution)	Team Fitz/Prosecution
Francisco, Gerard	Unspecified	Team Fitz/Prosecution
Hance, Katie	Unspecified	Team Fitz/Prosecution
Hansen, Bonnie	Unspecified	Team Fitz/Prosecution
Jeffress, William Jr.	Attorney	Team Libby/Defense
Kedian, Kathleen	Unspecified	Team Fitz/Prosecution
Richards, Jared	Unspecified	Team Fitz/Prosecution
Wells, Ted	Attorney (lead for defense)	Team Libby/Defense
Zeidenberg, Peter	Attorney	Team Fitz/Prosecution

Cast of key characters:

Name	Role
Wilson, Joseph	Former ambassador to Gabon, sent by CIA after inquiry by Vice President Cheney into possible sales of yellowcake uranium by Niger to Iraq. Last American official to speak directly to Saddam Hussein before beginning of Gulf War I. Married to the former Valerie Plame
Wilson, Valerie, nee Plame	Former non-official cover operative for CIA that worked in counterproliferation of WMD. “Outed” by person(s) within the Bush administration, ostensibly as a punishment or threat to her spouse, Joe Wilson for Wilson's outspoken op-ed, “What I didn't Find in Africa.”
Libby, I. Lewis “Scooter”	Former Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, indicted for five counts of perjury, false statements and obstruction in relation to the investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame.
Hamsher, Jane	Blogger who created popular progressive blog, FireDogLake. The blog has hosted salons for discussions between readers and guests, including former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Smith, Christy Hardin	A co-blogger at FireDogLake, Christy is a former assistant prosecutor and an attorney.
Emptywheel	Pen name adopted by Marcy T. Wheeler, author of Anatomy of Deceit, and blogger at her own site, The Next Hurrah. Marcy “live blogged” the first weeks of testimony during the U.S. v. Libby trial from Prettyman District Courthouse, a first in blogging. She is also the undisputed expert on the Plame leak case.
Swopa	Pen name adopted by creator of popular progressive blog, Needlenose.com. Swopa is one of the blogosphere's key experts in the Plame leak case as well as the progenitor of the “1x2x6” theory.
Merrit, Jeralyn	Blogger for popular progressive website TalkLeft.com; Jeralyn is a defense attorney providing analysis of court room proceedings on the U.S. v. Libby trial from Prettyman District Courthouse.
Pachacutec	A co-blogger at FireDogLake, Pachacutec writes under this pen name. As a psychologist and consultant specializing in organizational management, Pachacutec provides analysis of key persons from his perspective from U.S. v. Libby trial from Prettyman District Courthouse
Looseheadprop	Co-contributor at FireDogLake writing pseudonymously, looseheadprop is an attorney providing fundamental primers in U.S. Law pertinent to the U.S. v. Libby trial from Prettyman District Courthouse.
TRex	A co-blogger at FireDogLake, TRex's pen name pays homage to his intrinsic therapodian nature. His live blogging from Prettyman District Courthouse will provide additional color on otherwise banal trial participants.

Other References and Resources:

Subject and link where applicable	Source / Author where applicable
U.S. vs. Libby	Filings, USDOJ-USOSC Patrick F. Fitzgerald (website of Special Counsel)
List of Potential Witnesses	Source: Next Hurrah
List of Documents Produced	Source: AP
WMDGate: Fixing Intelligence Around Policy	Source: eriposte at The Left Coaster - link to Introduction of a series of related posts
Anatomy of the WH's Smear Defense	Source: emptywheel at Next Hurrah - Plame primer #1
Anatomy of a White House Smear, Redux	Source: emptywheel at Next Hurrah - Plame primer #2
Plame Affair	Source: Dkosopedia
Plame Affair timeline	Source: Dkosopedia
Classified Information Protection Act (CIPA)	Copy of act at FAS.org

Commonly used terms and slang:

Acronym	Definition
BTW	By the way
EPU, EPU'd	Acronym for “Evil Parallel Universe”, name of a long-time, popular commenter at FireDogLake; acronym “EPU'd” used to describe condition in which a commenter posts at the end of a comment thread as a new thread begins, often without realizing the new thread has started. Evil Parallel Universe often EPU'd himself because his comments were thoughtful and dense in content; by the time he'd completed and submitted his comment in response to a comment mid-thread, he would wind up at the end of a thread with many users having moved on to the new thread.
IANAL	I am not a lawyer – frequently used caveat qualifying a comment as an opinion from someone without a Juris Doctor.
IIRC	If I recall correctly
MSM	Mainstream Media, referring to traditional, corporate-owned media outlets in both print and broadcast.
OMG	Oh my God. Variant OMFG also frequently used.
WRT	With regard to

Breaching the barrier: blogging in the face of traditional media

2007-01-19T00:36:00.000-05:00

We are witnessing history in the prosecution of the U.S. v. Libby trial.

But not because this case presents the hologram in which the strategy to launch a unilateral war was prepared and promoted; it is because bloggers are covering this trial within a federal courthouse, side by side with traditional media journalists.

What this means to the futures of blogging and journalism is not clear. There is a wariness and a grudging respect, like that between professional and amateur athletes. They appreciate each others' skills and occasionally play on the same fields, but the money gets in the way by creating a line of demarcation between them.

In theory, traditional media shares the same objectives with most bloggers; to discover the truth and to write cogently about it. But something happened to traditional media; it lost its way, believing that its customers were advertisers and shareholders, forgetting that readers were the core of their business. Writing to sell product is a completely different matter from writing to disclose a researched truth. Many bloggers have taken up writing because they could no longer find the truth in traditional media; they had to self-publish in order to disclose the truth. Traditional media has struggled with understanding why this would become so popular, frequently dismissing blogging as nothing more than idle chit-chat or vulgarity from the unwashed masses. In doing so, they've missed that their own business model is terminal.

The blogging of the Libby trial represents a new phase in the relationship (or lack thereof) between bloggers and the traditional media. They are literally looking over each others' shoulders in the same space, writing about the very same topics in sync, at the same time. But the output is quite different, with traditional media being far more sanitized; blogger output is not only frank, immediate and authentic, but covering the media as well as the subject trial at the same time. Given these differences in their coverage during the jury selection process, what will the actual trial bring?

There are a couple of candid comments shared this evening about the media by FireDogLake's live blogger Pachacutec. In response to a question as to the difference between blogging from live video of the courtroom versus experiencing the courtroom itself, he shared:

“...being around the other media folks helped be catch quotes better, since they are better quote catchers. The media room also makes for a group experience that at once clarifies errant impressions through live dialogue and also supports the creation of a consensus point of view of the proceedings, evening out the coverage because the creation of the understanding of the events develops as members of different news outlets influence each other, subtly.”

An observation like this is incredibly rare from traditional media journalists. Are the seeds of the groupthink we've seen in the media over the last dozen years right here in this perspective?

Equally telling, Pachacutec shares:

“"...My colleagues in the press room are under the impression we have no edito[r]s in the blogoverse.

That may be true of people like Glen Reynolds, who don’t allow comments, but we have all of you. We bloggers with commenters have lots of editors.

What we don’t have, though, are people telling us what to write about, assigning us to stories."

Yet another indication of traditional media journalists' lack of understanding about blogging and collaborative communities. Readers are editors; blogging collapses the wall between authorship and readership, effectively removing the editor since readers are generally able to discern problems with a post without prior editorial sanitizing.

Pachacutec and I don't agree, though on his last observation. Bloggers most certainly do have a lot of people telling them what stories to write or cover. Traffic is a gauge or measure that can tell bloggers they are on the right track. Comments also reflect disconnects between bloggers and readers.

Day Three of jury selection in the Libby trial has now come and gone, with another day of selection expected. This is one day longer than initially allotted. But if you were reading the live blogging, you'd know exactly how this came about. What will Day Four bring?

[Cross-posted to RadioFreeBlogistan]

Makes my blood boil: Concentration camps in America

2007-01-10T01:50:00.000-05:00

I received the most disgusting email today from people who should know better. It was little more than a rant against brown-skinned AMERICANS -- the students who protested this past year in Whittier and Pioneer CA against what was then pending immigration reform legislation. This email showed the students raising the Mexican national flag and an upside-down American flag and was meant to inflame the reader.

It was right-wing hate speech and racist propaganda. I cried reading it, cried more thinking about the people who forwarded it to me and the persons they received it from and those to whom they forwarded it again. Simply breaks my heart to think that persons very close to me are such bigoted and ignorant humans. I felt compelled to respond; I don't know that I could have looked myself in the mirror if I hadn't.

Here's my response to the email they sent me with the subject line, "This should make your blood boil":

Concentration camps on American soil.

That makes my blood boil.

One camp holds 400 brown-skinned persons, 200 of which are children, denied access to attorneys to help them navigate a legal path out of the camp.

The children at this camp are only given 1 hour of education a day -- English instruction -- and only 1 hour of play time. Even children in jail uniforms and babies wearing name tags, like the adults.

There was at least one woman put in a camp who had been nursing an infant; the infant was kept from the mother outside the camp, the mother denied access.

Because habeas corpus was suspended for persons detained in this manner, under the terms of the Torture Bill signed into law in December under the last Congress, some of these people are legal immigrants, some are citizens, some have visas -- but none of them can access people who can help them because they can be detained on suspicion alone, and can be denied due process.

Go on, Google it up: you can see that (6) Swift-brand meat processing plants were raided recently, and that persons were detained and put into custody. What a nice euphemism for concentrating them in a camp. What a nice, neat way to intern all those nasty brown-skinned people you don't care much for, sweep them up and get them out of sight. It's just like those 500 people in Guantanamo Bay you don't ever have to think about.

I'll even make it easy on you and give you links at the end of this missive for you to read. Wouldn't want you to have to trouble yourselves too much to learn what's going on in your name, with your tax dollars, because of your elected officials for who you voted.

So ask yourself: Why were these AMERICAN high school children in California protesting as they did this summer?

Because they knew this was coming, that persons of brown-skin would be treated this way. They already KNEW about the 385 million dollar contract awarded to Halliburton to build these "detention centers" -- another nice euphemism for concentration camp. There are more contracts and more camps under way or already in use; "privatized jails" is another nice euphemism for some of these places.

We've already seen what is tantamount to ethnic cleansing in New Orleans -- structurally safe homes being razed to make way for lower density housing that the original residents can't afford, with hefty contracts awarded to all kinds of political cronies for this effort. If ethnic cleansing of New Orleans to remove African-Americans from the city could happen, why not indefinite detention for other persons of brown-skin? These AMERICAN high school students of brown-skin, Hispanic-heritage understood this and knew it. Amazing, yes? They figured it out by reading the news, armed with only a public education that so many people disparage. They did the next best thing to throwing tea in Boston Harbor; they showed their pride in their ancestral heritage to push back at underlying racism, while protesting that their country is in distress.

If you're in Florida, take a drive around Lake Okechobee and watch for the little camps -- the places where slaves have been and are still being kept in this country, and where illegals who escaped horrible conditions in their home countries now live, to work for next to nothing for that tomato you had on your salad or the orange juice on your table. These are the same kind of people that ended up in that concentration camp in Texas or Utah or Minnesota; their only real sin is that it takes nearly 7 years to process immigration papers in this country, and in their home country of Honduras or some other comparable place they could only find work making a $1 a day. Should they simply let their children die? Is this part of the Culture of Life that we hear so much about?

Stop the demand for cheap labor by severely punishing employers, and by boycotting those corporations that hire illegals. Stop the need for immigrants to flee home countries by encouraging real economic growth there -- spend less on war, profiteers and more on foreign aid for economic development (it's a LOT cheaper and actually provides real national security). Stop the creation of future terrorists by treating families better, white or non-white alike, citizen, guest or illegal.

Most of the persons receiving this email will not have heard of or have forgotten the White Rose Society. German students organized dissent against the Nazis in the early 1940's, signing their works as the White Rose Society. Their motto was, "We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!" These students knew what the leadership of their country would do, they had their wits about them, could think for themselves. And these students ultimately paid with their lives, executed by the Nazis, beheaded in some cases. The AMERICAN high school students of Whittier and Pioneer are doing nothing different with their protest. What do you think will happen next? There's more of you reading this kind of anti-brown skin propaganda against these AMERICAN high school students than there are students or parents in Whittier and Pioneer. What would you have done in Germany in the 1940's? Turned in those students in a fit of anger over their "disrespect" for the government or their annoying support for those Jews? Would you do the same to brown-skinned AMERICAN students with legitimate concerns?

Those of you who are reading this who are not WHITE Americans -- you know who you are, the ones with the dark hair and brown skin, no matter your ethnic background -- you are already at risk. When are you going to wake up? You're next in line, and we won't even be able to help you if you disappear into a camp "accidentally".

Those of you who are reading this who are friends of those non-white Americans -- is it going to be okay with you when your friends get picked up and taken away after a routine traffic stop (for Driving While Brown), or if a raid happens at a local restaurant while your friends are dining, or at the airport when they board their next flight, or wherever, whenever? When are you going to realize you are part of the problem, that you voted for this, that your blissful ignorance and willingness to swallow propaganda fed this?

------

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists'
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

--- Pastor Martin Niemoller

I will not be silent. I am your bad conscience. I will not leave you in peace.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reference:

Hundreds support detained Swift workers -- WCCO Worthington MN, 08-JAN-07
http://wcco.com/local/local_story_007225020.html

Families try to find hope in community's generosity (Hyrum UT) -- Salt Lake Tribune, 25-DEC-06
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_4898085

Groups highlight plight of jailed immigrant families 15-DEC-06
http://www.statesman.com/search/content/shared/news/stories/2006/12/IMMIG_PRISON_1215_COX.html

Putting children behind bars in Taylor -- Op-Ed, Austin American Statesman, 19-DEC-06
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/12/19/19taylor_edit.html

Detention center set to begin taking immigrants (Willacy center, TX) 02-AUG-06
http://www.valleystar.com/articles/2006/08/02/local_news/local_news4.txt

Jail stops housing immigration detainees (Ramsey County, MN) 20-DEC-06
http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/news/local/16278295.htm

Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Camps (385 million dollars to Halliburton) 08-FEB-06
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=eed74d9d44c30493706fe03f4c9b3a77

Euphemisms, journalist/author Dave Neiwert; discussion of concentration camps in relation to detention centers 03-JAN-07
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/12/euphemisms.html

Thousands of New Orleans Public Housing Units to be Destroyed; 200,000+ Low-Income Residents Remain Displaced 20-JUN-06
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13703.htm

Internal memo raises concerns about DHS funds transfer; Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau may have violated federal funding regulations when it transferred employees and funds to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, its sister agency in the Homeland Security Department, for a detainee transportation program -- 18-DEC-06
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1206/121806j1.htm

Wikipedia: White Rose Society
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose

Fight to the death: Net Neutrality

2006-12-19T16:40:00.000-05:00

Bring up the topic of Net Neutrality and it's not unlikely that an audience will roll their eyes and sigh. It's a complicated topic, in part because it's technical, in part because it's untrod legal turf. It's also because FUD is being applied in heavy measure by many parties with a vested interest in the outcome.

For those folks who don't know what FUD is, it's fear, uncertainty and doubt, now used as a term of art in the software and hardware industry.

It is this FUD that makes it very difficult for us to get to the bottom of this situation readily. If consumers and internet users feel frustrated and begin carping at each other, the FUD has done its work.

This overview is written for folks who are not working in technology (including communications, internet, software, hardware industries), in order to get past the FUD. If there's something erroneous or omitted, please point it out constructively, collaboratively and as simply as possible in comments for the benefit of others who may want more information on this topic.

Net Neutrality is a death match

The telephone industry (telcos) is currently in its death throes, or at least it is trying very hard to defend an aging business model struggling with profitability and therefore no longer viable.

Changing business models is accelerating in technology companies; unlike many traditional brick-and-mortar firms, the products offered can change in days and hours rather than years or decades. A breakthrough on chip size and speed today can force computer manufacturers to change their entire product line-up overnight. The schism between proprietary software companies and free/open source software provides another example of businesses whose models are being challenged; a simple change in licensing, like Sun Microsystem's recent release of Java to open source, can fundamentally change that for which a software company charges. Are they now a software maker or a software service provider if they don't own the software technology? This is a fundamental and generational shift in technology and business.

Google is an example of a business that is riding this shift in technology to profitability and future opportunity. It uses open source software and capitalizes on users' desire to collaborate over a network, instead of using proprietary software in a closed network or with no network at all. This is why we see telcos on one side of the equation, and Google on the other: their business models manifest different generations in technology.

Telcos cling to their old business model with a death grip, hoping that increasing the charges for some of the data ported over their lines will somehow save them. It's rather like stepping back in time to the 1800's, watching a cartage company using horse team-drawn wagons demanding more money for some of its freight when the same freight could get to its destination faster over those new-fangled iron horse railways.

That's a very dead business model.

Telcos' oligopoly is dying

Telephone companies had an oligopolistic position after the break up of AT&T, for reasons that are both physical and historic. There used to be only one physical network attached to a home or business; because of the investment and security issues involved, our laws evolved to both protect citizens from abuse by a monopoly and at the same time continue to encourage the telephone company (telco) to improve (i.e., Bell Labs).

The AT&T monopoly was broken in order to encourage lower pricing through competition while punishing unfair marketing practices (in exchange for AT&T's entry into computer services), but the breakup resulted in an oligopoly – few suppliers for the same products that don't fully compete, primarily due to the limitations of local physical networks.

With the emergence of cellular phones, this oligopoly has been threatened; cellular service represents a second network that can reach households without the same sunk costs to hardwire to each location. The network is moderately portable, too, meaning that the physical lock-in that reinforced oligopolistic conditions are also threatened.

Hence the acquisition of cell phone companies by telcos; not only did telcos buy marketshare and offer increased shareholder value through economies of scale, but they could continue to salvage the physical lock-in. Notice how some cell phone networks haven't been available except in defined areas, and often in tandem with the local telco that bought them.

Cable: the third network

Until recently, cable television (CATV) was not a threat to telcos. It offered entirely different services, even though it, too, required a physical network installed to premises. With improvements to Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) and network technologies, CATV has become a threat to telcos as well, offering not only video but voice communications services.

This poses an even bigger threat to the telcos, who still rely on voice transmission for their bread-and-butter. Why would anyone who could get cable select plain old telephone service (POTS) if CATV could offer both video and voice?

Hence the battle here in the state of Michigan, between CATV providers and telcos; they are duking it out for what is the telcos' lifeblood, the consumer who uses POTS and video. Telcos figure they can keep this consumer if they can offer the same services as CATV providers – but for telcos this is a matter of life-or-death, since so many of their traditional POTS customers have already migrated to cell phones.

Pervasive WiFi – the death knell

The silver bullet that could kill telcos' business model is pervasive wireless access. Indeed, the telcos have already worked very hard behind the scenes to kill off technologies that could offer such service. Unlike today's spotty wireless network availability, a pervasive wireless network could offer all consumers internet access, video on demand, as well as voice communications, from virtually anywhere, and is not limited to individual access points defined by highly local equipment on an owner's premise. This technology threatens not only telcos, but CATV providers as well, since CATV business model is built around physically limited networks and contracts currently defined by existing legislation; CATV no longer has to worry about telcos busting into the video business, but the highly disruptive wireless network.

While we see telcos and CATV duking it out for each other's marketshare, they are working cooperatively in the halls of Congress to thwart this fourth invisible network. Northpoint's “Broadwave” brand technology exemplifies pervasive WiFi technology that was killed in the cradle; it sought approval in Congress, but its efforts were suffocated after telco and CATV lobbyists went after it a couple of years ago. Had it survived, Northpoint would have licensed all the unused north-facing bandwidth; the technology used bandwidth for WiFi transmission not currently used by south-facing satellite dish technology. Any location that could receive satellite transmission could technically have transmitted wireless in the opposite direction – and both CATV and telcos would have been forced to drop their prices even further or buy up this technology, since the estimated price for combined video-voice-internet service was $20 per month per consumer. They saved their shareholders a lot of money by simply buying lobbyists and access in Congress.

Another telco-threatening technology sought listing offshore in Europe, avoiding potentially deadly U.S. competition for capitalization. Based on 900 Mhz frequency like cordless phones of last decade, XG Technology of Sarasota, Florida offers the ability to provide wireless networks within a two-mile range in a frequency that does not require licensing approval. Technically, any location that can support a 900 Mhz phone could become a wireless internet service provider. It seems a shame that American technology must go abroad to obtain financing in order to go head to head with an American oligopoly.

Telcos' other monster-sized nightmare

Google's proposed community wireless project in San Francisco is being monitored closely by telcos and CATV; it represents the kind of scenario that telcos and CATV dread, yet another player in the marketplace that is not confined by physical limitations of network or regulated to cradle-death by FCC and Congress. Although only one of six proposals submitted to San Francisco, the joint offering by Google and Earthlink relies upon advertising sales for funding, as well as fees for services above baseline broadband access. This is a potentially profitable income stream that telcos and CATV entities cannot realize due to limitations in their models. Google's recently announced discussions with Orange in Europe provides a hint of what's ahead for wired-and-wireless communities like San Francisco; imagine using a cell phone to look for the closest Thai restaurant, in a city with thousands of Thai restaurants, and having the cell phone automatically point to the closest restaurant, the most recommended restaurant, and the one that paid for higher indexing all in a matter of seconds, after choosing nothing more than Google Local, then entering “thai food” in a query.

Why would anyone bother using a POTS telephone instead of a competitively priced cell phone if this additional service was available for free, or even the Yellow Pages?

Why would a Thai restaurant pay as much as they have for a traditional Yellow Page, if they got more business from Google Local via cell phone rather than traditional telephone service?

One can see that this new model is highly disruptive; it will affect not only telcos providing POTS. Would telcos try to obstruct or capitalize on this disruption, by charging additional fees for packet transport of graphics, or video data instead of voice?

Next steps

Obviously, there are technologies in the pipeline that are going to continue to threaten telcos and CATV along with other peripheral businesses. Affected businesses are going to fight tooth and nail to maintain status quo, until a tipping point at which the fight is more expensive than the benefit of changing their models. How do citizens ensure that telcos and CATV get to that tipping point?

In Michigan, one method would be to develop a comprehensive, statewide strategy for rolling out community-based wireless broadband, perhaps using San Francisco as a model upon which to develop. Telcos and CATV are either going to have to be part of the solution or gradually phased out to a level reducing them to a default service provider of last resort.

But are there other options we haven't yet discussed? Or are the benefits of pervasive community-based wireless broadband access so compelling to education and economic development in this state that worrying about telcos and CATV isn't worth our time?

Ethics, schmethics

2006-12-08T17:52:00.000-05:00

The 109th Congress sails off into the sunset, leaving behind all its cares as it becomes history.

I'd like to say it enters history as a bastion of ethics, but that would be a complete and utter joke, beyond sarcasm's broad reach.

As its parting gift, the 109th indulged its last Republican Document Dump Friday. They jettisoned a particularly nasty bit of work, the Foley Report, flopping a complete piece of crap onto the public like a rotting fish as they filled their shredders, cleared their offices, and fled the District.

This mother of two struggles to find swear words adequate to voice the rage and frustration felt over this last bit of trash foisted on us, knowing now with certainty that Republican representatives have failed abjectly to protect young people from a known predator in their midst.

Disgusting, revolting, immoral. I hope they did not let the door hit them in their pompous, overfed, pampered and excessively soft backsides.

Still mourning heroes

2006-11-28T19:15:00.000-05:00

Watching the American Experience RFK bio on PBS last night, I heard so many of the same kinds of comments and decisions made by President Johnson about Vietnam that the current administration made about Iraq. History revisited and nothing learned.

Cried my eyes out, too.

It struck me hard that there is and has been an enormous difference between the expectations of Americans of the two major parties, borne in part of the men who were our Democratic leaders before us. These Kennedys, both John and Bobby, were larger than life, remain larger than life; in spite of their humanity, the public looked to and expected more of them than the average pol.

This legacy remains to this day, and is in no small part why every damned thing Dems are and do is picked apart and pecked to death by the right.

They — the right-wing and the average American — expect Democratic leaders to be heroes.

They expect us to be larger than life in order to lead, truly heroic on a scale of ancient legend, where as the heroes of the right-wing only have to be ruthless, take apart goverment and cut taxes to be their leaders.

Unfortunately, because of the mess we are left after they are done wreaking havoc on the government and the nation, we have no choice but to seek a larger-than-life hero from amongst us to rectify the wrongs. Larger-than-life means larger target, in so many ways.

Late in the program, Bobby Kennedy, in an old tape from a debate, questions the morality of killing innocents in Vietnam, fighting them there so we don’t fight them here…painful echoes reverberating.

At the end of American Experience on PBS, bio of RFK…Bobby is laid to rest, in a tomb upon which is enscribed a quote by Aeschylus that Bobby could recite from heart:

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Good God, what I would give for a president that would read, recite Aeschylus and apply what he learned from the same. We are going to need someone of that caliber to lead us in the difficult time ahead.

[Photo source: George Silk/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images]

Meditations on B-School debris...

2006-11-27T15:09:00.000-05:00

My body had just reached that state one notch above sleep last night; I was relaxed and warm under the comforter and my husband's arm, when my mind slapped me awake.

Christ, they have completely abandoned everything we've been taught in business school.

I bolted upright, startling my equally drowsy spouse, and began to scrabble for a pen and paper. I didn't want to blow this off as a dream. I scrawled a note in scant light, reminding myself that this was a nightmare and not a dream.

Everything I've been taught they've thrown out the door. They, being this presidential administration. Everything, being the basics we are taught in our earliest days of business school.

My mind must have continued to churn after last evening's Book Salon at FireDogLake; Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell and author Jacob Hacker dropped in to chat about Hacker's book, The Great Risk Shift. I've not yet read it, it's on my list (I'm afraid that I'm still backlogged on reading, too many piled up on the nightstand). Their book has elevated in priority in my reading queue now after last night's discussion. The premise of the book is that a sea change has occurred, affecting many aspects of our lives; in the process of acquiring and integrating right-wing ideology, businesses have transferred substantive amounts of risk to the consumer, to the population at large, instead of carrying it themselves either directly as expenses or indirectly as taxes that fund public services. The average American is exposed to so much more volatility, worrying about health care coverage and job security, while businesses look only at the numbers and ratchet down their risk by dialing up the exposure to their workers and their stakeholders.

How is this different from what we learned in business school? We're taught how to mitigate financial exposure by manipulating cash positions into higher yields or invest in capital improvements if the rate of financial return is higher than investments in stocks or bonds. We're taught to spread assets to minimize exposure, and how to insure business operations, as well as how to look for cost reductions.

But the first thing most business students learn is that entrepreneurs are risk takers, who are rewarded with profits for taking risk.

Day One lesson in General Business 101. Maybe Day Two. I'm certain if I go and dig out my class notes I will be able to confirm this.

And not one school, but three schools, and a Entrepreneurship Program taught me this. My junior college, my first college wherein I suffered through an unhappy start in engineering, and my final college, all of them said the same thing in their curriculums. Risk taking was MINE as a business owner, and for that I would be entitled to profits.

What the hell happened that it became so commonplace to push risk off on everybody else, to take the profits and run like wind?

Yet another point made early in my career as a business student was the nature of the free market economy. A free market was better and more efficient than all other economic forms, we were instructed in Econ I, Econ II, International Econ, and I'm sure in several other business classes; we were also told that a free market was most efficient when information was perfect. Perfect, meaning information was widely available to all players, and deep enough for businesses to be able to make highly informed decisions. While certain information is proprietary and confidential, most information should be as broadly accessible in a free market economy; even consumers needed this information to make informed purchasing decisions while communicating to vendors what products were successful or not.

But that's patently untrue today; information is bottlenecked and stifled. Were this not the case, Enron would never have succeeded in duping the public, nor would businesses see the remedies stipulated in Sarbanes-Oxley regulations as cumbersome. We'd also see all risks disclosed, including the loss of health care to production workers, as line items in our risk exposure analysis both internally and externally. And our government wouldn't be hiding M3 and real unemployment figures.

What the hell happened? How did these fundamental points become detritus to be discarded? Is there some new set of rules to which I'm supposed to manage my small business?

Why didn't I get the memo?

And how the hell am I going to sleep tonight?