from slate V

John Perkins re Obama

John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, discusses his disappointment in Obama. But I don't get how he (apparently) really believed that Obama was ever a liberal, as he suggests here.

The full-length conversation is here. Maybe it's a little more promising than this snippet.

who is Hindery? some guy...

Ted Danson on CNN

Rachel Maddow and George Bush snr

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

the link at MSNBC is entitled, "Maddow, Olbermann respond to Bush, Sr. name-calling"

Joe Biden and friend

Reuters

I'm tempted to have a caption contest, but nobody ever leaves any comments lately, so I don't think there's much point. Besides, you'd probably want some kind of prize if you won, like crackers or something.

an invisible failed coup?

NOTE: 6 Aug 09: please see additional comments at "an invisible coup, pt 2"

I gather that some Arabic language radio channels have been discussing a possible failed coup this past weekend in Saudi Arabia, possibly led by Prince Bandar.

Have you heard of E.I.R. Gmbh, aka Eirna.com? I know nothing about E.I.R. GmbH, so I'm not really in a good position to assess their veracity. I found this(dated July 16th) at their site in looking for info about the possible failed Saudi coup:

In the U.S., newly declassified documents from the files of the official investigatory Commission on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, give further evidence of the direct role of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services. One key document, a “Memorandum for the Record” dated April 23, 2004, confirms that a known Saudi intelligence officer, Omar al-Bayoumi, was working closely with two of the hijackers based on the West Coast, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.

This document summarizes an interview that Commission staffers Quinn John Tamm Jr. and Dietrich Snell had with an unnamed source, who was an FBI informant in the San Diego area, and who rented a room in his home to two hijackers during much of 2000. In the interview, the FBI informant confirmed the relationship between al-Bayoumi and the two hijackers.

However, the document omits one highly interesting piece of information, that is included in other 9/11 Commission documents, as well as in a 28-page synopsis suppressed by the Bush White House, on the role of al-Bayoumi and Osama Basnan (another identified Saudi intelligence officer) in funding the two West Coast hijackers. That is, that Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, then Saudi Ambassador to the United States, and his wife, Princess Haifa, paid between $50,000 and $72,000 to al-Bayoumi who, in turn, passed on some of the money to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, to finance their rent, and their flight school attendance, previous to the 9/11 attacks. Note that Princess Haifa is the sister of Prince Turki bin-Faisal, who was the head of Saudi Arabian intelligence at the time of the 9/11 attacks – and resigned, suddenly, shortly thereafter.

The article goes on to mention that former FBI director Louis Freeh is now Prince Bandar's attorney, representing him in the BAE bribery case.(2003 Guardian link) Meanwhile this is the only link I found discussing a possible failed coup in Saudi this past weekend:

Press TV, "In kingdom, Saudi prince's coup 'fails'"

see also
BBC, April 2008, "UK wrong to halt Saudi arms probe"


BBC, July 2008, "Lords says SFO Saudi move lawful"

Times of London, May 2008, "BAE accused of being uncooperative with US investigators"

6 Aug 09: please see additional comments at "an invisible coup, pt 2"

Saturday 25 July 09

Gawker's headline read:
"John Yoo Briefly Disturbed By Consequences of His Actions"

(via xymphora)

Salon commenter "mary_steyr" refers to that portal as
"the Parade Magazine of the Volvo and latte set"


not all lefty bloggers are bowled over by Obama's presumptive charm and agenda. Here's Avedon Carol:

people are starting to notice that Obama is just more of the same, only with better syntax. Maybe it's true that his ego made him think "bold" and decide to get a healthcare package this year, even if it's a crap package - but I doubt it. I think his desire to be seen as "respectable" by a bunch of right-wingers led him to shy away from presenting a plan that really works and making the case for it. He hasn't been bold at all - he's backed way off of single-payer, of ending the war, of transparency, of basically every promise he made or implied he was making. He knows perfectly well no one voted him in to give their money to Goldman Sachs and force them to buy crappy health insurance that still doesn't deliver healthcare. He's blown it because he didn't have the guts to do the business.

I wish I knew how to embed this very brief and very droll animation by Ann Telnaes.


Humana has an animation up as well, designed to explain health care reform, or to avoid explaining while seeming to, depending on your point of view. To be fair it's no worse than what various pols like Obama or Charles Grasley have been saying by way of explanations. It includes that by now familiar insinuation about how people who don't have insurance are primarily healthy people who just don't want to get insurance until they need it. The greedy uninsured, driving costs up for everyone. How many people actually believe this?

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

losing coverage

via Christy Hardin Smith, and Avedon Carol, who writes:

It's not just the uninsured; it's the outrageous fraud that people who think they have health insurance are faced with: companies that take your money knowing they will do their damnedest not to give you what you think you are paying for.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Bad For Democracy- Dana D. Nelson

Dana Nelson is a professor at Vanderbilt, and I believe Bad for democracy is her second book. Her publisher sent me a copy some time back, and unfortunately I've been busy with other matters, so I've just started on it. It does look promising, discussing the history of popular representations of the role of the president in US society, which she regards as generally anti-republican, in the classical sense, and far more often geared towards representing the president as the prime mover of government upon whose shoulders all power and responsibility lie, a phenomenon she terms presidentialism.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Does the US Spend Too Much on Foreign Aid? - Peter Singer

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

from "Russia Today" Saturday's antiwar protest in D.C.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Jim Rogers, "helping your friends"

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

22 Feb 2009

photo:David Sutton, mptv.net

Some odds and ends:
UNT's CyberCemetery to preserve Internet sites from Bush administration. The UNT Libraries will preserve all federal government agencies' web sites that were created during the Bush administration.


Allison Kilkenny : "Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas"

from Mark Kleiman's "Same Facts" blog: Jonathan Zasloff,
The Politics of Child Poverty

Admittedly this is from some three months ago, but I've been meaning to mention it.
(And it hasn't suddenly lost relevance in our post-GWB era of goodness and light.)

Happy Birthday Ronald Reagan (Thanks for Ruining America)By William Kleinknecht,AlterNet.

The Onion:"Nation's blacks creeped out by all the white people smiling at them"

from The Motley Fool:
"This bailout is great" and

"This bailout is terrible", both by Richard Gibbons.

Why this photo? The Oscars were on tonight but I didn't watch them. I generally did watch in my teens and twenties when I still thought they were relevant, but that was then. The girls are still pretty, of course, and I imagine they still do the luminaries-who-died-last year bit, so I thought that apropos of that I'd include this b&w image of Charlton Heston, who passed away in '07, seen here in his snazzy Jaguar E-type. I didn't care for most of his politics but it's hard to criticize his choice of wheels. Cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Cécile Manorohanta

afp-Getty


BBC,"Madagascar defense minister quits":

Cécile Manorohanta said her conscience could not endure the bloodshed. She was replaced by the chief of military staff, Mamy Ranaivoniarivo. It comes amid a bitter power struggle between President Marc Ravalomanana and opposition leader Andry Rajoelina.

VOA News,"Madagascar Defense Minister Resigns After Bloodshed":

Opposition leader Andry Rajoelina has vowed to continue demonstrations that began last month. Rajoelina accuses President Marc Ravalomanana of being too authoritarian.

Over the weekend, police killed at least 28 demonstrators in Madagascar's capitol and Ms. Manorohanta resigned in protest, citing, besides her conscience, her role as a mother. I'll admit that before this weekend I didn't even know about the recent political unrest in Madagascar, let alone had I heard of Manorohanta.

But when I came across this news today, I couldn't help but think of Donald Rumsfeld, our last defense minister, er, secretary, to resign prematurely, and how different his reasons were: because he served "at the pleasure of the president", and the president was embarrassed by the outcome of the 2006 mid-terms. I also thought that I could never see anybody in the Bush II OR the Obama administration resigning over something like that. Condoleeza Rice? Hillary Clinton? Robert Gates?

Am I being unfair? I don't know. Although I think in many ways our government is probably just as corrupt as Marc Ravalomanana's seems to be, nobody's shooting Americans in the streets. And although it would be nice if Americans cared about their own government's many failings the way Madagascar's protestors do, obviously we shouldn't wish for a leader as (openly)thuggish as Ravalomanana.

But I also wonder: do people here make the connection, when we occasionally hear about stories like this one, why is it that Americans sometimes say that other countries need to be "taught" about democracy? I don't know what the level of formal education of the anti-government protesters who died this weekend might be, but I seriously doubt they wanted or needed any lessons from Americans about democracy.

one last snippet(it might be helpful to ignore writer Jonny Hogg's Thatcherist attitude, but I thought I'd include it anyway, for perspective):

BBC, "Deadly power struggle lays Madagascar low":

The damage to Madagascar's international reputation could be equally harmful. Under President Ravalomanana the country had been taking its first tentative steps into the global market after decades of socialist stagnation. Multinational corporations including Rio Tinto and Exxon Mobil have arrived, pouring millions of dollars into government coffers. The president himself has seen his own business interests - anything from dairy products to cooking oil - rise and rise.

However, in appealing to foreign investors the government alienated many Malagasy people. Food and fuel have become more expensive whilst the foreign funds have not improved the quality of life for most people. President Ravalomanana's reputation in the eyes of his critics has not been helped by his aggressive business approach and the fact that as his wealth continued to grow, the population was becoming poorer.

Equally harmful?

cross-posted at Dead Horse

Joe Bageant, Obama, and the days and years ahead

I hadn't visited Joe Bageant's digs in a while, and I was curious to see if he had any thoughts about the Obama inauguration. Joe's new essay is here:
"North Toward Home: from here in Central America, you can't see America's "shining city on the hill," but you can smell the dead in Gaza."

Also, I chanced upon an earlier, really exceptional, essay I hadn't seen before, from April of 2008, "The Audacity of Depression." Written in the midst of the HRC-Obama scrap, Joe makes it pretty clear that he sees Obama's appeals to hope for what they are, without therefore suggesting Hillary is a better alternative. I've saved it to my del.icio.us account under "the fall", which is the name I give for this category of writings, not quite a genre, which I see more and more of, discussing forebodings of US decline. From the 2008 essay:

Lately though, I don't hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called "rage fatigue." Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it's true.

I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I'm no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing.
[...]
like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course -- that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition -- will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

the infernal return

I've been thinking of changing the direction of Hugo Zoom a bit, but am presently undecided-- at first I meant to make it a just a place to host ephemera that entertains me, while using Dead Horse strictly for political opining. I may still do that, but I realize that there's ephemera, and there's ephemera. So I may post thusly:

Dead Horse: political stuff

Hugo Zoom: some political stuff, and some ephemera, and

Versen(my mostly inactive 2002 blog): more ephemeral ephemera.

I was also thinking of renaming Versen(my 2002 blog) weh weh weh.

I haven't decided yet.

Election 1960-- more from the internet archive

The original link is here.

Sarah, the witch-hunter, and you

I don't give a damn who "won" tonight's debate between Biden and Palin. It's hard enough giving a damn who wins the presidency. I used to think that at the very least, federal court appointees still mattered, even if everything else a President Obama might do was likely to be GOP-lite. I still think Roe-v.-Wade matters, but it disgusts me to think the democrats are dangling this before us as a sort of blackmail, as in "what else are you gonna do? vote for the speaking-in-tongues party?"

To be honest, I had no stomach for watching the whole debate. Even though the mind-numbingly irrelevant conversation they had about tax cuts certainly suggested, at least to me, that they didn't really take the apparent pending implosion of the economy seriously, maybe they gave this some lip service at another point, either before or after I was tuned in.

"Palin's appeal to the average American voter should NOT be under-estimated. Most American voters + non voters alike, are either uninformed or mis-informed when it comes to their own interests, let alone foreign policy issues. Most people make their choices based on emotional appeals alone, with logic or reason playing a very minor role. Last minute appeals to the emotions are thus extremely effective as campaign strategies. All politicians employ lies and obfuscation, it is a pre-requisite of sorts. But some lies turn out be bigger than others. The McCain/Palin ticket is NOT good for the people or the world. Our other choices are not much better, but this ticket MUST [be] defeated. Palin is pro-corporate on the domestic front, ALL THE WAY. Her religious views, for 22 years, are extreme and completely nuts. She NOT pro-average American. She lives in a mansion, tax free, while spouting off 'anti- elite' sentiments, when it is politically convenient for her. She does not believe in science (only when it comes to oil), and she believes the earth is 6000 years old. Do you want this woman to have the nuclear launch codes someday? Bringing about Armageddon, which her religion FAVORS?"- ella2007k

cross-posted at Dead Horse

Dead Horse Pt 2: or, are you a domesticated goat?

From wikisource, "The Goatherd and the wild goats"

A Goatherd, driving his flock from their pasture at eventide, found some Wild Goats mingled among them, and shut them up together with his own for the night. The next day it snowed very hard, so that he could not take the herd to their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd. One of them, turning about, said to him: "That is the very reason why we are so cautious; for if you yesterday treated us better than the Goats you have had so long, it is plain also that if others came after us, you would in the same manner prefer them to ourselves."

Given that I've decided to call the new blog "Dead Horse", I probably should be careful about mixing my animal metaphors. Nevertheless I come back, time and again, to this story whenever I listen to practically anything that comes out of Obama's mouth, he of the silver tongue that makes lefty swooners swoon. I'm not so impressed with Obama myself, and I'm inclined to think his reluctance to define his politics will ultimately hurt him, even if he has more charisma than Kerry or Gore. (Of course most warm-blooded organisms have more charisma than Kerry or Gore, but that's another matter.)

All the same, even if Obama doesn't do anything for me, I recognize that millions of people do respond to him. And yet, he seems doggedly determined to squander his opportunity to help remake American politics at a time when we, the otherwise very conservative public, are more ready for meaningful liberalism and activist government, and yes, change, than we have been in a very long time. The economy appears to be teetering, government corruption and scandal, mostly republican, has soured people on incumbents and the "establishment" and we are mired in (at least one) costly and highly questionable war.

But we have Nancy Pelosi, the supposedly far left-wing democratic speaker of the house, loudly telling everybody who'll listen about her table, the one that will not allow impeachment of the most blatantly crooked president since Richard Nixon(who was pardoned 34 years ago tomorrow, on September 8th, 1974), and Obama and his running mate Joe Biden eagerly praising their opponents on Fox News and assuring anybody who'll still listen that they needn't be concerned about criminal charges being leveled against George Bush, jr.

What's wrong with this picture? Where do you even start?

This is why I'm starting "Dead Horse", which is meant to be a conversation about

1.the dysfunctional democratic party, and whether or not it can (or should) be saved.

2. our post 9-11, post-constitutional republic, a screwed up simulacrum where things are rarely as they seem, at least as far as I can see-- because

2b. It's not just the democrats "suddenly" having become dysfunctional, but a process of unraveling which seems to have been going on for a long time.

Or maybe I'm wrong(not 2b. Sorry, I can't resist...) That's why I want, from the get-go, for DH to be a group blog, for which I'm sending several invitations, both to bloggers who I feel are in approximately the same "camp" as I am, as well as a couple of others who might feel somewhat sunnier about the prospects for our future. I want to try to create the conditions and a venue for a useful conversation, not just an echo chamber. More soon, and hopefully not just from me.


cross-posted at "Dead Horse"