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And We're Outta Here

2008-04-01T11:19:00.001-05:00

The Newshoggers have now moved onto bigger and better locales ---- find us at our new place

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We've Moved

2008-04-01T11:12:00.002-05:00

Hi there.

We've moved to newshoggers.com. You'll find all our new content there, from 1st April 2008 onwards. This site is being maintained simply as an archive for past posts.

Regards, The Newshoggers Partners

No More Fed Contracts For Big Blue

2008-03-31T19:15:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

The Homeland Security Department’s Office of Procurement Operations has barred IBM from receiving any new government contracts or new orders under existing contracts, effective 28th March. The order to stop dealing with IBM appears to be connected to EPA complaints that IBM improperly obtained information about a contract it was bidding on from EPA employees.

IBM's main federal customers in the past have been the Homeland Security Department, Army, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Defense Information Systems Agency. Those and other contracts were worth a total of $1.4 billion last year.

Which is great. Corrupt companies shouldn't be given a free pass to skim even more taxpayer's money.

Now...how come IBM gets a ban but Boeing didn't?

Could it be that in the 2006 and 2008 cycles IBM gave by an almsot three to one margin to Democratic campaigns whereas Boeing has always favored the Republicans (until this year, at least)?

Nah....

It must be that there aren't other huge aerospace companies just like Boeing that could have taken up the slack. Otherwise we'd have to go looking for ulterior motives in such un-evenhanded treatment.

(H/T BoingBoing)

We're Moving Tomorrow

2008-03-31T12:01:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

Just a reminder that, as from tomorrow, you'll find us at www.newshoggers.com.

We'll be keeping this blog as an archive of old posts but all our new content will be at our new home.

So reset your feedreaders, blogrolls and bookmarks.

The Primary Races In Graphics

2008-03-31T11:54:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

For Libby, who is depressed that the Unity Elephant in the room keeps getting ignored by the media.

Basra And Beyond

2008-03-31T10:33:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

There are a couple of worth-a-reads on the situation in Iraq today. I particularly recommend James Joyner:

The parallels between this action and the Israeli’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon to take on Hezbollah are striking. In both cases, the party that initiated the escalation into high level conflict inflicted substantial damage on their adversary and were able to claim military victory. At the same time, neither came anywhere close to achieving their political objectives. In assessing the 2006 action, I concluded that Israel therefore lost. Absent substantial new information, I’d have to conclude that Maliki was the loser here for the same reason.

While Kevin Drum, in two posts, draws attention to the Iranian connection. Following reports that senior Iraqi government negotiators were asking the Iranians to intercede with Sadr on Maliki's behalf even as Maliki was spouting his "never retreat, never surrender" rhetoric and claiming that the Sadrists were worse than Al Qaeda, Kevin writes:

the head of the Badr Organization sure does seem to have, um, remarkably speedy access to the head of Iran's Qods force, doesn't he? It's something to ponder the next time some Bush administration or U.S. Army spokesperson casually maligns Sadr as "Iranian backed" but maintains a discreet silence when it comes to the far deeper and longer-lived Iranian ties of Maliki's own Dawa/Badr alliance. Just sayin'.

and also gives his opinion on the winners and losers.

it was Maliki who went to Sadr, not the other way around, and that he did it several days ago. What's more, it was Sadr who laid down the conditions for an end to the violence, not Maliki. This is pretty plainly at odds with the theory that Sadr's statement was a show of weakness, a sign that he was taking more damage than he could stand and was desperate for a truce.

In urban warfare like this it's frequently hard to figure out who's "won" and who's "lost." Often both sides lose. In this case, though, it certainly looks as if Maliki has lost more than Sadr. Both sides have taken casualties, but Sadr doesn't appear to have lost any ground; he's forced Maliki to come to him to ask for terms; he's successfully projected a statesmanlike image throughout; and politically he seems to be in stronger shape than before. Maliki, conversely, appears by all accounts to have launched an ill-timed mission with inadequate troops and then been unable to close the deal. The Iraqi army and the redoubtable Gen. Mohan al-Furayji, the much lauded leader of the regular forces in Basra, are both looking pretty banged up in the bargain too.

This could all change tomorrow, but right now that's about where we stand. It's increasingly hard to see how the Basra offensive ends up being a plus for Maliki and his allies. Including us, unfortunately.

But looking beyond Basra today, it's Anthony Cordesman that provides the "must read".

Much of the reporting on this fighting in Basra and Baghdad — which was initiated by the Iraqi government — assumes that Mr. Sadr and his militia are the bad guys who are out to spoil the peace, and that the government forces are the legitimate side trying to bring order. This is a dangerous oversimplification, and one that the United States needs to be far more careful about endorsing.

There is no question that many elements of the Mahdi Army have been guilty of sectarian cleansing, that the Sadr movement is hostile to the United States, that some of its extremists have continued acts of violence in spite of the cease-fire Mr. Sadr declared last summer, and that some of these rogue elements have ties to Iran. No one should romanticize the Sadr movement, understate the risks it presents or ignore the violent radicals in the Mahdi Army.

But it is equally important not to romanticize Mr. Maliki, the Dawa Party or the Islamic Supreme Council. The current fighting, which the government portrays as a crackdown on criminality, is better seen as a power grab, an effort by Mr. Maliki and the most powerful Shiite political parties to establish their authority over Basra and the parts of Baghdad that have eluded their grasp.

Moreover, Mr. Maliki’s gamble has already dragged American forces part-way into the fight, including airstrikes in Basra. Striking at violent, rogue elements in the Mahdi Army is one thing, but engaging the entire Sadr movement is quite another. The official cease-fire that has kept the mainstream Mahdi Army from engaging government and United States forces may well be rescinded if the government’s assault continues.

This looming power struggle was all too clear when I was in Iraq last month. The Supreme Council was the power behind the Shiite governorates in the south and was steadily expanding its influence over the Iraqi police. It was clearly positioning itself to counter Mr. Sadr’s popular support and preparing for the provincial elections scheduled for Oct. 1.

American military and civilian officials were candid in telling me that the governors and other local officials installed by the central government in Basra and elsewhere in southern Iraq had no popular base. If open local and provincial elections were held, they said, Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council were likely to be routed because they were seen as having failed to bring development and government services.

He calls the situation "a civil war Iraq can't win" - and if the Iraqi people, as opposed to the power-players, won't be winners then you can be pretty certain that the US occupation isn't going to come out ahead either.

So far, it appears that the widespread open Shiite civil war that it looked like Maliki had begun is again on the backburner - for now - but Cordesman's analysis of the situation still provides the underlying warp and weft going forward into regional elections. That underlying power struggle will find its expression somehow, somewhere. My guess is that, having tried and failed to harness the power of the State to impose their own rule, the Dawa and SIIC parties will now turn to militias and ballot-rigging to try to salvage their positions before the regional elections. That in itself might well re-ignite violence on a larger scale but what is certain is that there's no defusing this slow-burn civil war.

Cordesman also notes the other two main currents in Iraq which could also flare into violence:

One is that the Sunni tribes and militias that have been cooperating with the Americans could turn against the central government. The second is that the struggle among Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and other ethnic groups to control territory in the north could lead to fighting in Kirkuk, Mosul or other areas.

and while everyone has had their attention on the South, it's worth noting Walter Pincus in the WaPo who has kept watching the Sunni "Awakening" and writes that the US is increasingly uncertain about the future of the "Sons of Iraq".

At a Pentagon briefing last Wednesday, the commander of the 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Diyala province, Col. Jon Lehr, told reporters via videoconference that the Sons of Iraq "are not a permanent security solution," although, he added, "they have been an integral part of our strategy."

...as Lehr put it last week, "not all Sons of Iraq are created equally." In Diyala, the local Sons of Iraq groups have split in two. "One is a tribally based," he said. "They tend to be associated with rural areas . . . [and] are there to protect their villages. " The other half, which he described as "the politically based ones," are in Baqubah, the province's main city of about 300,000, which less than a year ago was considered an al-Qaeda-driven battleground.

Baqubah's Sons of Iraq came from the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade, which earlier had been responsible not only for killing American soldiers but also for kidnapping a U.S. Marine. Others are from Hamas in Iraq, a Sunni insurgent faction that had broken away from the 1920s Brigade. And there are also some from mujaheddin made up of former Saddam Hussein loyalists.

That divide isn't getting much attention in op-ed columns - just as trhe Shiite divide didn't until it exploded in open conflict. And US officers seem divided on the future of the Awakening going forward too.

The question now is what happens to the Sons of Iraq in the long run. "They were a means to an end," Lehr said. "So what we're attempting to do right now is find employment for the men." He said some could be absorbed into Iraqi security forces -- primarily the police and some in the army.

But Gen. David H. Petraeus, interviewed on National Public Radio on March 19, the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, was more cautious. "There are understandable concerns on the part of a government that is majority Shiite that, what they [would be] doing was hiring former Sunni insurgents, giving them a new lease on life, and that when this is all said and done they may turn against the government or the Shiite population," he said.

Col. Michael Fuller, chief of staff of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, gave a different view during a Pentagon news conference Thursday. "Many of them are not qualified physically to join the Iraqi security forces because they're old, they're infirmed -- whatever the case may be." Nonetheless, he said he expects the Baghdad government to incorporate about 20 percent of them into the Iraqi security forces over time.

For the rest, said Fuller, whose job is to help the Iraq Defense and Interior ministries develop their forces, the government is "looking at programs much like our vo-tech schools, to get them trained . . . [so] they have a viable employment alternative that will keep them off the streets and out of criminal activities, if that's all they feel like they've got to fall back on."

"Conceptually," he added, the government of Iraq has agreed to begin picking up the costs associated with the Sons of Iraq. "We've just got to make sure that we have the conditions set to make sure they do it successfully and it doesn't become something that causes the Sons of Iraq to quit what they're doing," he said.

Petraeus, however, had the final word. In the end, he said, the Sons of Iraq would stay loyal to the course the United States has set "as long as it is in their interests."

Does anyone actually believe that the leaders of the "political" and "tribal" currents of the Awakening will regard having their forces cut to a fifth of their present strength, while the rest become street-sweepers and mechanics, will be in their own interests - especially given the evidence this last week that Maliki and his allies are quite willing to co-opt State military force to attempt to further theirs? Well, maybe some of the US cheerleading set do - but the rest of us should be looking for yet another explosive fracture at some stage in the future.

Clinton's internet ignorance

2008-03-30T15:04:00.003-05:00

By Libby

Frank Rich looks at the Bosnia debacle and ruminates on how the Clinton campaign shot themselves in the foot by ignoring the reality of the intertubes age.

That Mrs. Clinton’s campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton — though surely knowing her story was false — thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady’s foreign trip — as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night — and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.

I've been thinking about this myself for a while now. The campaign has done an incredibly poor job of employing the internet to further their narrative and seems to fail to recognize its power. I don't get why. As far as I know, Peter Daou is still their internet guru and surely he's one of the best. A really savvy player who understands the rules of the game well. Their internet outreach should be stellar. It's not.

All I can think is that Clinton and Penn and the rest of the 'leading' advisors of the campaign are ignoring his advice. There's really no other explanation.

The Texas two step bows to its partner

2008-03-30T10:53:00.003-05:00

By Libby

Burnt Orange Report seems to have the most comprehensive coverage and is reporting that Obama is winning the second step conventions with 56.05% to Clinton's 43.95% with 46.13% of the Texas conventions confirming their counts. This represents 72.31% of the total delegate count so it seems unlikely that the totals will change significantly.

Meanwhile, the party honchos are overwhelmed by the turnout.

A weary Mr. West conceded that the process had flaws. In his convention, a computer system went down, a woman fainted and it was discovered that the delegates from some precincts were never recorded into the system.

"It's a nightmare," he said at one point. "The system wasn't designed for all these people. The process is a nightmare."

What a sad statement on the state of our electoral system that it's not prepared to deal with actual participation by the voters. The system is geared to voter apathy and power-brokered nominations. Revamping the primary system should surely be high on the list of priorities on the DNC's agenda come mid-November so we don't have to live through this hellish chaos again.

And in another stray thought, didn't Bill Clinton say that unless Hillary won Texas with a big blowout victory, that her candidacy would end? I'm not suggesting she necessarily do so, just recalling the rhetoric.

Obama shows his class

2008-03-30T10:32:00.001-05:00

By Libby

I don't want to get into a electability argument but by any reasonable metric I've seen, Obama is leading in this race, even if only slightly, so I think this is really gracious.

“My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said at a news conference in a high school gymnasium here. “Her name is on the ballot. She is a fierce and formidable opponent, and she obviously believes she would make the best nominee and the best president.”

I hope the overheated partisans on both sides will take his lead and similarly take a hard left onto the high road in the days to come.

The neverending primary

2008-03-30T10:09:00.004-05:00

By Libby

When the WaPo editorializes in favor of an extended Democratic primary, my first instinct is to be against it. After all they're careful not to endorse anyone and hint that they might eventually endorse McCain, as one might expect considering their relentless cheerleading for Bush over the years. Nonetheless this is good point.

The list of issues to hash out is endless, and doing so in polite political combat could produce a stronger Democratic candidate for the fall and a better-informed electorate.

I'd be happy to see the race go on but only if the Democrats run by highlighting their differences with McCain instead of each other. The electorate needs to see how they will run against the Republican and an extended race under those circumstances would keep the attention on the issues and the Democrats but would leave both candidates strong for the general, no matter which one prevails. If they can't find a way to do that however, somebody has to find a way to end this quickly before we end up saluting President McCain in January.

Breaking - Sadr Plays "Good Guy" Card [Updated]

2008-03-30T08:38:00.007-05:00

By Cernig

There's breaking news that Muqtada has issued a nine point statement, the most immediately important of which is the one ordering his supporters to stop attacking government forces and clear the streets.

The BBC:

Mr Sadr's statement said: "Because of the religious responsibility, and to stop Iraqi blood being shed, and to maintain the unity of Iraq and to put an end to this sedition that the occupiers and their followers want to spread among the Iraqi people, we call for an end to armed appearances in Basra and all other provinces.

"Anyone carrying a weapon and targeting government institutions will not be one of us."

The cleric also demanded that the government apply the general amnesty law, release detainees, and stop what he called illegal raids. [Emphasis Mine - C]

I wonder if "cat herder" Sistani's managed to pull of the improbable again, or if this is entirely a manouver of Sadr's own making?

Some will claim this is a Sadr climb-down. I doubt he cares much what the American Right thinks, though. For others, following on from a reported snub of the guy Maliki sent to try to get Sadr to negotiate on Maliki's terms, and his statement to his followers not to hand over their weapons, this will be seen as Sadr trying to claim the moral high ground while still retaining the ability to start up hostilities again if needed. Obviously, the Mahdi Army's stand-down is conditional on Maliki standing down his own forces too. Since Sadr was always the one saying they should ceasefire and talk, while Maliki's been strong on the "never give up, never surrender" rhetoric the last five days, it's also obvious who Iraqis will think "won" if Maliki complies.

Update It looks like Maliki will indeed comply.

Spokesman for the Iraqi government Ali Al-Dabbag, in a press release, said the government welcomed this call which would serve to avoid bloodshed, adding that this reflected Al-Sadr's keenness for maintaining the safety of civilians. Security is the responsibility of the government, and the government does not target a certain movement or faction, he stressed, hoping that the Sadrist bloc would support the government.

The BBC report above is a little unclear on Sadr's terms too - what he's calling for is that the government stop arrest raids against his followers, release those in detention and grant them an amnesty.

What the Western media are less keen, seemingly, to report are Sadr's other demands. The Roads To Iraq website writes:

After the killing of Maliki’s security adviser “Hassan Al-Kadhmi” by Mahdi Army in Basra today and according to Wasat Online, the Iraqi government and the Sadrists reached an agreement of nine points...the newspaper says that among the points is the withdrawal of the Iraqi and American forces from Basra, stop the raids against the Sadrists, Maliki to return to Baghdad in 48 hour followed by the ministers [Defense and Interior]. [Emphasis Mine - C]

FOX News only notes that "The Iraqi government lauded al-Sadr's orders, saying 'This is a positive statement,' according to Reuters." If this is a positive statement then Maliki has indeed climbed all the way back down, with five out of nine points covering a humiliating withdrawal back to Baghdad with his tail between his legs.

Update 2 Via 'Axt113' in comments - Hazem al-Araji, an aide to Sadr, told reporters in Najaf that "We confirm that there were guarantees taken from the Iraqi government to fulfill all the points in this statement." Even the one about Maliki leaving Basra, trailed by his Ministers? Wow.

Maliki chased out of Basra by Mookie - who'd a thunk it?

Update 3 Oh look, the cheerleading US Right wants to try painting this as Sadr suing for peace rather than facing extinction. To them, it's Maliki's victory over criminal militias. Of course, they aren't mentioning the amnesty/release, the end of attacks by government and US forces even though the Mahdi militia retains its guns (and other militias weren't touched at all), or Maliki's ignominious banishment to Baghdad. "Imagine my surprise..."

Update 4 There are reports that the Iraqi government is promising to fight on in Basra:

IRAQI troops will continue their six-day-old military operation in Basra despite a call by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for his followers to stop fighting, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said overnight.

"The operation in Basra will continue and will not stop until it achieves its goals. It is not targeting the Sadrists but criminals," Mr Dabbagh said.

It remains to be seen whether they will actually do so, or whether they will observe the reported 48 hour withdrawal timeline after clobbering a couple of local minor gangs, or recalcitrant Sadrists who might defy Muqtada, to save face. Certainly, they expect there to be no more violence in Baghdad by Monday, as they've announced that they'll lift the capital's curfew then after just yesterday saying it would continue indefinitely. Let's be clear, though, if they attack the mainstream Mahdi Army again then Sadr's offered deal would be off and the fighting would flare up anew. That fighting would necessarily mean even heavier US involvement.

Steve Soto explains the dynamics of that part of Sadr's offer.

Having made his point that the Mahdi Army could fight the Iraqi security forces to a draw while encouraging a united front among Shiites and Sunnis against the American occupation, Muqtada al-Sadr pivoted today and asked his forces to suspend military operations in Basra and all other provinces in order to preserve Iraqi unity. His commanders are apparently still allowed to self-defend themselves and their forces, and the order comes after al-Sadr's forces drove the government from a TV station in Basra.

Al-Sadr knows that he and his forces cannot win a face-to-face battle with American forces and air power, and that attempting to engage in such a prolonged battle is a recipe for decimation and destruction of Iraqi cities. He's daring al-Maliki to still come after him, and to put an American face on that destruction.

I'm seeing a lot of talk about "victors don't make offers" on Rightwing blogs. But they do if they see a clear way to make a political and electoral killing thereby.

“With this statement, Sayyed Moktada al-Sadr proved that he is a good politician, working for the sake of Iraq,” said Mahmoud al-Mashadani, the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament and a senior Sunni politician.

War is simply an extension of politics, as Von Clauswitch explained. They might try turning it the other way. Victors don't accept a demand to quit the field of their victory within 48 hours, releasing their prisoners as they go.

Update 5 Badger at Missing Links has a translation of Sadr's statement and I've been too hasty in accepting Roads To Iraq's version by the looks of it.

Based upon our responsibilities in law [shariah] and for the sparing of Iraqi blood and for the protection of the reputation of the Iraqi people, and for their unity both in terms of people and in terms of land, and in preparation for its independence and liberation from the armies of oppression; and in order to put out the fires of fitna which the occupier and his followers wish to keep burning between Iraqi brothers, we call upon the beloved Iraqi people to measure up to their responsibility and their consciousness of law in sparing blood and preserving peace in Iraq, and its stability and its independence.

The following is resolved:

(1) Ending armed manifestations in the governate of Basra and all the other governates

(2) Ending of attacks and arbitrary illegal arrests

(3) Demand on the government to apply the law on general amnesty, and release all prisoners who had not had charges confirmed against them, and particularly prisoners belonging to the Sadrist trend

(4) We announce that we will renounce those who carry weapons and target the government and service agencies and institutions, or [political] party offices

(5) Cooperation with government agencies to bring about security and to charge those who commit crimes, according to legal [qanuniya] process

(6) We affirm that the Sadrist movement does not possess heavy weapons

(7) Efforts for the return to their residential areas of those who were forced out on account of security incidents

(8) We demand respect for human rights by the government in all of its security actions

(9) Working for the realization of development and services projects in all governates

I've made too much of the "out of Basra in 48 hours" claim by trusting Roads To Iraq, unless it's part of the understanding but not Sadr's statement. Still, the statement is clear that Sadr expects Maliki to stand down - an "Ending of attacks and arbitrary illegal arrests" - and grant amnesty to all Mahdi Army detainees, otherwise the deal is off. Badger, who is a Sadrist by admission, writes that "He gives up nothing: no weapons, no people, no territory. He's won an important round." Reports in the US press also have it that a team of senior Iraqi government types journeyed to Iran to meet Sadr to negotiate - not the actions of a government determined to wipe out a group which is a "greater threat than Al Qaeda". Badger appears to think Maliki may have come under pressure from the US to cut a deal for stability. That's certainly possible, despite Bush's rhetoric of backing Maliki 100%.

In The Midst Of His Army, Maliki Guarded By US Soldiers

2008-03-30T04:58:00.002-05:00

By Cernig

This will do for a metaphor of all that's gone wrong with Bush's Iraqi project:

The U.S. military raised its profile in Basra still further, providing protection for installations including the palace where al-Maliki is housed, Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said.

This, mind you, in the middle of his most trusted and battle-ready division of troops.

The paragraphs of this McClatchy report that go before this remarkable admission about a puppet ruler and his unreliable army are hardly less troublesome.

After failing to break the resistance of Shiite militias in the five-day siege of oil-rich Basra, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent a top general to hold talks with his Shiite rival, Muqtada al-Sadr, on Saturday night only to be rebuffed by the anti-American cleric, an Iraqi official close to the negotiations said.

Al-Maliki denounced Shiite militants in Basra as the equivalent of al-Qaida, and al-Sadr told his supporters not to hand over their arms to a puppet state of the United States.

The diplomatic initiative and the harsh rebuff further eroded expectations for a successful outcome to the offensive, which al-Maliki is personally directing from the presidential palace in Basra. It was not the only sign of problems.

Al-Maliki issued orders Friday to enlist volunteers for the battle against the Shiite militias, and his Dawa party sought to enlist fighters.

The Dawa party has never had a major militia of its own, relying instead upon the Badr Brigades of its SCIRI ally, who make up the bulk of recruits to the 14th Army Division Maliki led into Basra. That it has apparently decided it now needs one says as little about Maliki's stability in power as his sending a negotiating emmisary to the Sadrists at the same time as he's publicly claiming there will be no negotiation and no backing down.

The circumstances in which the negotiations with al-Sadr took place suggested the government is no longer able to dictate the terms of an agreement with al-Sadr but now must seek a deal. Gen. Hussein al-Assadi, a Baghdad-based commander, traveled to Najaf to call on the head of al-Sadr's political bureau there, Lewaa Smaisam.

From his office, the two men telephoned al-Sadr, who is believed to be in Iran. But they could not reach agreement, an official close to the negotiations said. He would not give his name due to the sensitivity of the subject.

Shortly after the talks broke down, the Iraqi government extended its curfew in Baghdad indefinitely. Earlier Saturday, al-Sadr directed his followers not to lay down their weapons, a snub of al-Maliki's offer to militias Friday to pay for arms if they would hand them over within 10 days.

So much for the Surge. Baghdad's curfew is extended until further notice. Much of Basra - where US special forces are also now involved directly in the fighting - remains in the hands of Sadr's Mahdi militiamen.

The United States confirmed on Sunday that US special forces units were operating alongside Iraqi government troops in Basra, where the government is battling militants loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

A US military statement described a joint raid by Iraqi and US special forces units which killed 22 suspected militants, including "16 criminal fighters" strafed in an air strike on three houses.

The raid showed US forces are being drawn deeper into the Iraqi-led crackdown, launched on Tuesday by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Basra, Iraq's second-biggest city.

The Iraqi special forces team killed four suspected militants in a house and two on a roof before calling in the air strike, the statement said.

Local Sadrist and Basra police (also likely Sadrist) sources are saying many of the casualties in this and other air strikes are civilians, of course. The US has played this game before, always claiming every dead body as a confirmed insurgent and every arrested one as a suspected insurgent. But the description for not having sufficient boots on the ground to take on a couple of hundred militiamen in a city of over two million, and thus relying on air power and artillery, is always going to be "collateral damage". Iraqi TV stations are describing dead civilians in this and other strikes as "martyrs".

Meanwhile, the British have confined themselves to a checkpoint outside the city and one artillery strike in supprt of Maliki's forces.

"We've had ground forces outside the wire assisting Iraqi forces. There are no British ground forces inside the city of Basra," spokesman Major Tom Holloway said by telephone. "As yet there is no intent to push British armour into the city."

The British military have worked out faster than the US that Maliki's politically-motivated offensive is designed to drag the occupying powers into providing continuing bodyguarding for his government and his own ass.

Will The Iraqi Army Please Stand Up?

2008-03-29T18:07:00.002-05:00

By Cernig

As Maliki's offensively political offensive bogs down in Basra, the Associated press looks at the long tale of the Iraqi Army's failure to stand up so that US forces can stand down - mostly due to dribbling and pissing resources against the wall on the part of the Bush administration.

Iraq's new army is "developing steadily," with "strong Iraqi leaders out front," the chief U.S. trainer assured the American people. That was three-plus years ago, the U.S. Army general was David H. Petraeus, and some of those Iraqi officials at the time were busy embezzling more than $1 billion allotted for the new army's weapons, according to investigators.

The 2004-05 Defense Ministry scandal was just one in an unending series of setbacks in the five-year struggle to "stand up" an Iraqi military and allow hard-pressed U.S. forces to "stand down" from Iraq.

The latest discouraging episode was unfolding this weekend in bloody Basra, the southern city where Iraqi government forces - in their toughest test yet - were still struggling to gain the upper hand in a five-day-old battle with Shiite Muslim militias.

Year by year, the goal of deploying a capable, freestanding Iraqi army has seemed always to slip further into the future. In the latest shift, with Petraeus now U.S. commander in Iraq, the Pentagon's new quarterly status report quietly drops any prediction of when homegrown units will take over security responsibility nationwide, after last year's reports had forecast a transition in 2008.

Earlier, in January last year, President Bush said Iraqi forces would take charge in all 18 Iraqi provinces by November 2007. Four months past that deadline, they control only half the 18.

Responsibility for these ever-unfulfilled goals lies in Washington, contends retired Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who preceded Petraeus as chief trainer in Iraq.

"We continue to fail to properly resource and build the very force that will enable a responsible drawdown of our forces," Eaton told The Associated Press.

Retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, a West Point professor and frequent Iraq visitor, also sees insufficient "energy" in the U.S. effort. "Even now, there is no Iraqi air force; there's no national military medical system; there's no maintenance system," he told a New York audience on March 13.

That failure is partly incompetence, part deliberate failure to provide Iraqi forces with the equipment they need to act independently of an American logistic and heavy firepower tail. Thus, in all major operations, the tail has been able to wag the dog.

By late 2005, the U.S. command had to acknowledge that only one of 86 Iraqi army battalions was ready to fight on its own.

The Iraqis still were not given artillery, big mortars or other heavy weapons. Iraq's political unpredictability and dangerous sectarian-political divides clearly made the Americans wary that heavy weapons might be turned against them, concludes Arab military analyst Nizar Adul Kader.

"This could have been one of the fears that Americans had to take into consideration," said Kader, a retired Lebanese major general.

...The Iraqi military's list of unmet needs remains long: artillery and modern armor; advanced communications and intelligence systems; a logistics network able to supply everything from food and fuel to transport and ammunition; combat hospitals; airpower.

"This is not a balanced fighting force," said al-Qassab, the retired Iraqi general. "It's only people armed with assault rifles and pickup trucks and they go and raid like a militia."

The Iraqis and Americans are working to make Iraqi logistics self-sufficient by mid-2009. But as for "fire support," training command spokesman Lt. Col. Dan Williams said, "heavier artillery is still a ways down the road."

Regarding Iraq's tiny air force, a handful of helicopters, old transports and light planes, "in my opinion, we were late to start on this," Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert R. Allardice told the AP last June, as he took over aviation training in Baghdad.

Today, as he leaves the command, Allardice confirms there are still no plans for modern jet fighters for the Iraqis, only small, propeller-driven attack planes.

Iraq has been thus rendered unsovereign, a mere Satrapy, unable to conduct its own defense against other nations. Now, we're seeing that it's unable to conduct it's own internal security - still - as well.

The 14th Division, the main formation in Maliki's attack on the Sadrists of Basra, was recruited from the Basra area itself and is mainly composed of Badr Brigade militia inducted wholesale into the Army. It has been preening itself in Diwaniyah, Kerbala and Najaf ever since, given the prestigious but job of guarding the main Basra-Baghdad rail corridor and the Holy Cities. It's being commanded by Maliki's own brother-in-law. But this Praetorian Guard has only the very lightest of Eastern European armored trucks as it's main personnel carriers, few tanks, and no heavy artillery.

This comparatively crack division, probably the only one Maliki could be so sure of mainly staying loyal, has proven utterly inadequate to the task given it. That's partly a problem of "balance of forces", as Fester so ably pointed out the other day, but it is also a legacy of American failures and deliberate policies which have left the Iraqi Army emasculated and little more than a well-equipped militia itself.

Unless the Bush administration and the Maliki government were deep in denial, believing their own PR on how wonderful the Iraqi Army now was, then they had to be at least somewhat aware of all this. So they must have known from the very first that Maliki's offensive would need American rescuing. That means, since it went ahead anyway, that they considered that rescuing a feature, not a bug.

Tribal values

2008-03-29T16:49:00.002-05:00

By Libby

Dan at Pruning Shears has an interesting post this week. He wonders why the big Second Amendment proponents aren't more concerned about domestic surveillance. That's a point I've been making as well to the occassional winger who drops into my own little blog to misdiagnose me with BDS. I ask them why they don't realize that if the government decided to disarm the populace, the massive database they now have accumulated would allow them to pinpoint what guns they own, down to how much ammunition they have on hand. None of them have answered that question yet.

But Dan goes on to ruminate on the current acrimony that inexplicably permeates Blogtopia(y!sctp). This strikes me as about right.

Maybe I have been oblivious to it all my life, but it seems that the razor-thin and contested election in 2000 and terrorist attack the following year either created or revealed tribal identities that had gone unnoticed for a long time. Many retreated into territories defined by politics and religion. In this historic primary season it has happened again, now along racial and gender lines. It isn’t absolute by any means, just much more clearly marked. All of it is driven by group identification, and in that sense it comes from a level too low to be reached by persuasion. It may be dressed up in formal clothes, sober tones, a big vocabulary and impressive rationalizations, but much of the time what passes for dialog seems to come from some of our most primitive instincts.

It seems to me what's happening falls short of a mob mentality certainly, but might rightly be called what used to be termed group think, meaning one becomes so involved in an organizational effort that it obliterates the logical filters that would ordinarily temper one's thinking.

The trial of Osama's driver

2008-03-29T15:32:00.002-05:00

By Libby

I suppose the law of averages would dictate that a tiny handful of the Gitmo detainees really are high value inmates, worthy of prosecution, but judging from the outcomes of the previous miltary hearings that pose as judicial review, I'd say not many of them really are players that deserved the draconian punishment they now suffer. Not that this will deter the administration from trying to make them so. Take for example, Osama's driver.

The Navy lawyer for Osama bin Laden's driver argues in a Guantánamo military commissions motion that senior Pentagon officials are orchestrating war crimes prosecutions for the 2008 campaign.

Notably, it describes a Sept. 29, 2006, meeting at the Pentagon in which Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a veteran White House appointee, asked lawyers to consider Sept. 11, 2001, prosecutions in light of the campaign.

''We need to think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election,'' England is quoted as saying.

You'll remember it was this particular political interference that led to the resignation of Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who served as former chief Pentagon prosecutor. But even leaving aside the untoward political machinations for a moment, it defies logic to cast the driver as a mastermind in any AQ plots. In any criminal enterprise, isn't the driver usually the one who's too out of the loop to be trusted with any part of the operation except driving the car? One doubts he was privy to any high level meetings. More likely he would be left waiting in the car.

I mean think about it. Isn't that like holding Hilter's limo driver responsible for the Holocaust? Maybe Hamdan was even a loyal and willing soldier in the AQ organization but the only thing high value about him is likely to be his political value to the GOP in timing his prosecution to influence the election cycle.

Life is funny

2008-03-29T12:46:00.002-05:00

By Libby

I'm fighting the effects of too much sleep this afternoon. I spent ten solid hours, catching up on lost REM time and dreaming heavily, mostly about politics, which left me more exhausted than refreshed. So I'm having a hard time warming up to the news today but this post at Buck Naked Politics amused me and provides the quote of the day.

"President Bush talked about having a road map to peace. It took him seven years to take it out of the glove compartment." ~Madeline Albright

Great line. I think Albright may be wasting her talents in academia. Maybe she should be writing monlogues for the late night comics.

Basra Blowback

2008-03-29T11:49:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

Well, just recently people on the Right were asking why Iraq was off the front pages "now that there's only good news". I bet they wish they'd not tempted fate. They didn't really listen to Petraeus and others who said that the lull in violence could so very easily be a transient one and that the transience was caused by various currents of non-reconciliation upon which the "window" was almost closed.

Now, with Nour al-Maliki playing Napoleon in Basra, alongside his brother-in-law general, stability in Iraq is unravelling with remarkable speed - a shock and awe attack on assumptive victory pronouncements. No-one could have anticipated this - other than those of us who did, frequently, and months ago.

Maliki's assault on the Sadrists, painted as a general assault on "criminal militias", but somehow managing to leave his SIIC/Badr Brigade allies well alone, is failing badly. Everywhere, the Mahdi Army are holding their own territories and even expanding the fight into new towns and neighbourhoods. Given the unreasonably small force with which Maliki launched his assault, and the estimated 60% penetration of the region's police by the Mahdi Army which has led to widespread desertions, Fester and I are convinced that Maliki had a good idea this would happen. His main purpose in mounting the assault was to ensnare US occupation forces into stepping into the lead, battling Sadr's forces for him and for his SIIC allies.

That leaves the US with no good options in the South, even if commanders had little choice but to get Maliki's back from the front.

"The key question now is what the United States is going to do," said Joost Hiltermann, of the International Crisis Group think tank. "If it allows (the crackdown) to go forward the ceasefire will unravel and the U.S. will face the Sadr movement in its full power."

"This will be bad for both sides. Sadr will lose men and the United States will lose the gains of the surge".

...Analysts say Maliki's decision to launch the Basra crackdown, instead of carrying through with a promised offensive against Sunni Islamist militants in the northern city of Mosul, lends weight to the Sadrist accusations of a political agenda.

Oh yeah, Mosul. While it's been getting almost no press in the States, there's been a major battle going on there too for months which has seen violence rise to a 2-year high with no end in sight and several reports suggest the fighting is against a wider-based insurgency than one composed just of the rump of AQI's presence. Let's not forget, too, that Turkey is still shelling and bombing Kurdish Iraq, and will be back over the border in force as soon as the Spring Thaw sets in. Between these and other prior commitments, the US will be lucky if it can shake loose three brigades to help Maliki's crackdown. They'll be going in essentially blind.

"This is a precarious situation," a senior official familiar with U.S. intelligence in southern Iraq said, with "a lot to be gained and a lot to lose." This official and others said that even as Maliki takes needed military action in Basra, he appears to be positioning himself and his Shiite political allies for dominance in provincial elections this fall.

Competition for power and resources in the oil-rich south has been ongoing for months among the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr; the Badr Corps militia of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the largest single party in the Iraqi parliament; and the breakaway Sadrist movement known as Fadhila. The Shiite groups are opposed and allied with each other in a tangle of national and local issues, with many divisions reflected in factions of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces.

Although the Bush administration has tried to monitor the growing conflict in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, "our intelligence in that area is far less than we would like. We don't have any forces there," the senior official said, adding that "we are operating with a good dose of opaqueness."

As outlined by several civilian and military officials, none of whom was authorized to speak on the record, a victory in Basra against what Bush described as "those who believe they are outside the law" could prove Maliki's mettle. "Basra's been a mess for a long time," said a U.S. official in Baghdad, "and everybody's said to Maliki, 'What are you doing about it?' "

But this official and others said that if the fighting in Basra leads to a breakdown in the cease-fire observed since August by the bulk of Sadr's forces elsewhere in the country, it could easily shatter the tenuous U.S. security gains of recent months.

Indeed, the Sadrist insurrection which has followed Maliki's assault now controls many towns athwart the main route of supply for US forces, up from Saudi Arabia - and insurgent troops can take potshots at supply trucks all day every day if needed.

Yet, despite all this, there are good reasons to be sceptical of leaks from the White House suggesting the administration had no idea Maliki was going to bring his offensive forwards three months and thus pre-empt any moves by Sadr (and perhaps Petreaus, who has been getting along well with "Seyyed" Muqtada of late) which might have made it unneccesary.

Nor should the US be looking to the UK to provide anything but base security at the Basra Airport, probable home of US forces sent to bail out Maliki's division of Badr Brigade militiamen in Iraqi Army uniforms. While British politicians are under intense pressure from the US to commit their three available battlegroups – each of about 650 men armed with Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior armoured vehicles – the British military is implaccably opposed to such intervention.

"It's ridiculous for Britain's position in Iraq that we've got this firepower down there and we're not willing to help the Iraqis out," the British official said. "The army won't even listen to suggestions it might be needed."

Maliki, too, is seeing political blowback froom his hasty move - and his governemnt is busy painting itself into a corner even as contrary voices mobilize. His foreign minister has told the Arab Council that there will be no walking back or negotiated settlement. Maliki himself has today gone as far as to call the Sadrists worse than Al Qaeda and promise no surrender or negotiation. But there are reports that Grand Ayatollah Sistani (or the "cat-herder", as Eric likes to call him) is backing calls for negotiations instead of Maliki's intransigence - a new development in Shiite inter-relations and one that seriously weakens Maliki's postion.

The scale of the outcry has forced Grand Ayattollah Sistani to call for a peaceful solution to the conflict, even though his various spokespeople initially supported the assault. By Friday, government officials were falling over themselves to get to TV stations to declare that the fighting was not against the Sadr movement at all. With an eye on the sentiment and reality on the streets, some officials even heaped praise on Sadr, insisting the conflict was with "ordinary criminals".

I saw a report earlier that even Iraqi President Talibani is saying there must be negotiations, but I've lost the link. A senior Iranian cleric, the leader of that country's Guardian Council, has also said that the opposing groups should negotiate an end to their clashes - which seems to put paid to the notion floated by the Saudi-controlled Arabic press that Iran had cut Muqtada loose and green-lighted SIIC and Dawa as their main allies and proxies in Iraq to take the Sadrists out. The Iraqi parliament tried to have a session calling for negotiation, one backed by Sunnis as well as Sadrists - but Dawa and SIIC representatives walked out en masse, leaving them quorumless. Perhaps calls from Sadrist MP's to try Maliki "like Saddam" had something to do with that, perhaps they simply wanted to forestall any notion that they didn't have a national mandate for their parties' self-serving actions.

Maliki is now in a position whereby he might - might - be able to win or stalemate the battle with American assistance, but there's no way he can win the political war he's started. He will either fall or be forced to painfully backtrack to negotiate a settlement which will favor Sadr more than it does himself. He's toast and Sadr, despite the many op-eds written over the last four years claiming the opposite, very much isn't. It remains to be seen how fast the Bush administration. always slow to see the blindingly obvious, catch on to this fact.

Mulligan called for in Basra

2008-03-29T05:44:00.006-05:00

The Iraqi Army is unable to accomplish its objective, and given the swirl of rumors of Ayatollah Sistani getting ready to step in on the side of a negoatiated settlement that strengthens Sadr and that the Parliament (the place where political reconciliation is supposed to occur) is frozen. Maliki's gamble is not going well as CNN reports the obvious:

A closely held U.S. military intelligence analysis of the fighting in Basra shows that Iraqi security forces control less than a quarter of the city, according to officials in both the United States and Iraq, and Basra's police units are deeply infiltrated by members of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army.
"This is going to go on for a while," one U.S. military official said....
The Basra analysis also shows that militia forces control a wide swath of cities in Iraq's southeast, including areas near the airport, where British forces are located, the officials said.
More than 100 Iraqis have been killed in the fighting, including at least 14 in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood.
The fighting has sparked fears that a seven-month cease-fire by al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, regarded as a key factor in a dramatic drop in attacks in recent months, could collapse or that the U.S. military will have to bail out the Iraqis.

Remember, the Mahdi Army has never controlled all of Basra. Most pre-fighting estimates placed their zones of control at a bit more than half of the city. So the areas that the government controls are the ISCI/Badr neighborhoods and potentially the Fadillah neighborhoods, and minimal new ground. Dr. Steven Taylor is looking at the extension of the arms surrender demand deadline and uses some of his prodigious talents to analyze the events going on:

For those keeping score at home, the deadline for fighting to cease was set at 72 hours earlier in the week.
Using my finally honed political science powers, I would come to conclusion that this maneuver likely means that the Maliki government has realized that it cannot enforce the original deadline. Of course if that is true, it likely can’t enforce the new deadline, either.

Given that the United States has continued to maintain that this is a fight against out of control extremists and not the entire Mahdi Army or the Sadrist support system, MNF-I seems to want to de-escalate the situation and call for a mulligan on the entire operation. Whoops his bad is the preferred strategic option instead of forcing the entire question onto the horns of a triceratops style dilemma.

But what is past is also the present and the bed can not be unshit, not can single iterations change into the best three of five scenarios. Unless a massive negotiated settlement that significantly weakens Maliki is hammered out within the next week, this summer is looking to be a wild ride.

Signs Of Turkish Front Heating Back Up

2008-03-28T14:35:00.002-05:00

By Cernig

As if US and Iraqi government forces didn't have enough troubles in Southern Iraq, there are signs that the Northern border may be heating up again.

After Turkish crackdowns on Kurdish protesters recently, the PKK have vowed to retaliate. And now there are signs that the Turkish military are gearing up to mount a major offensive after the Spring thaw, following up on their reconnaissance in force in February:

A convoy of 250 Turkish military trucks and civilian buses is headed toward the border with Iraq, nearly a month after a Turkish cross-border operation against Kurdish rebels, a news agency reported Thursday.

The vehicles approached the border village of Derecik in Hakkari province on Wednesday evening, Dogan news agency said. The vehicles traveled with their headlights off, according to a news agency reporter who saw the convoy.

Helicopters also ferried dozens of troops to the border from the town of Semdinli on Thursday morning, Dogan said.

It was the largest reported activity by the Turkish military near the Iraqi border since Turkey ended an eight-day incursion into Iraq on Feb. 29.

Protestors Will Be Tried Under Iraq Anti-Terror Laws

2008-03-28T13:12:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

The Iraqi government's spokesman Ali al-Dabagh has promised that anyone taking up Muqtada al-Sadr's call for civili disobedience will be tried under Iraqi laws that mandate a death sentence, as Iraqi officials continue to insist that the Sadrists are not the sole target of their offensive in Southern Iraq.

The Iraqi anti-terror laws passed in 2005 mandate capital punishment for "those who commit ... terror acts" as well as "those who provoke, plan, finance and all those who enable terrorists to commit these crimes." By defining even peaceful political protests as acts of terrorism, the Iraqi government is stepping towards a totalitarian regime masked by a veneer of democracy.

Earlier this week, Sadr urged Iraqis to conduct civil disobedience campaigns throughout country to protest the government’s military operations in Basra. On March 27, he called for a political solution to end the "shedding of Iraqi blood".

In Baghdad, thousands of angry protesters poured into streets of Shia majority neighbourhoods, demanding that Maliki resign and calling him “the new dictator”. The government imposed a three-day curfew in the capital which lasts until 5am on Sunday.

Spokesman for the Iraqi government Ali al-Dabagh denounced the call for disobedience, calling it “an act of terror”. “Anyone who commits it will be tried under the anti-terrorism law,” he said.

Other political parties said they were worried that the violence has dashed hopes of stabilising Iraq.

“The fighting in Basra might wipe out all of the efforts that were spent to bring about stability to the country,” said Saleem al-Juboori, a member of Iraqi National Accord, the main Sunni group in parliament.

Meanwhile, the Sadrist movement continues to claim that the current crackdown in the South is a case of Malki and his SIIC allies using military force to create electoral results they will be happy with.

Sadr representatives have accused the government of deliberately targeting its members ahead of the crucial October 2008 provincial elections and vowed to fight US and Iraqi forces. Shia parties have vied for political and economic control of Basra since 2003.

“We know that there are some factions who want to weaken us so that we will not be represented in the provincial elections,” said Harith al-Uzari, head of Sadr’s office in Basra.

“If the government continues with this policy we will defend ourselves,” vowed Mazin al-Sa’di, head of Sadr’s office in Baghdad’s al-Karikh neighbourhood. “We will take up arms and stand against the government and the Americans.”

But government officials deny the Sadrists are being targeted.

“This operation is not against the Sadr movement,” maintained Brigadier Abdul-Aziz Mohammad, head of military operations at the ministry of defence.

“It is against criminal gangs and militias who are acting under the name of religion.”

However, all reports from the region on the spreading violence, as well as posed PR photos, that mention militias by name mention only actions against Sadr's Mahdi Army, while it seems that Badr Brigade militias may be actually joining the Iraqi security forces in their attacks.

But the battle itself is very fluid right now, with successes for forces commanded by the majority Shiite bloc in government on the fringes of the operation but a far more difficult situation than they perhaps expected for them in Basra proper and other large towns.

Sauidi said the Mahdi army was well equipped for the fight ahead. "We have captured lots of their vehicles, machine guns and mortars. We have new RPGs we got from their supply trucks. Our fighters know how to use the side streets as their battle space."

As fighting between the Shia Mahdi army and Shia Iraqi soldiers continued, witnesses described the scenes in Basra.

A resident of the poor neighbourhood of Hayaniya said: "The situation is very difficult in Basra, all the side streets are controlled by the Mahdi army. Even if the army has lots of tanks, the Mahdi fighters are controlling the streets. The fighters are driving in captured Iraqi Humvees and waving new guns."

That same Sadrist makes very clear the stakes for both sides:

We are going through a battle of existence we will fight to the end. We either survive this or we are finished."

I think it's fair to call this civil war.

Surprising Casey Endorsement

2008-03-28T10:25:00.001-05:00

Senator Bob Casey endorsed Barrack Obama for President this morning and I am very surprised on a couple of fronts as I would have thought that he was a more natural fit for Hillary Clinton's base of support and agenda. Casey is the ultimate Blue Collar Democrat and the 2006 field was cleared for him on the theory that he could do very well (for a Democrat) in the mountainous regions of the state which is the base Republican areas. And he did that, but I still have the question of a counterfactual that any Democrat with a pulse and no necrophiliac tendencies could have done well in 2006 versus Santorum, but that is an argument for another day.

Mike Tedesco of Comments from Left Field, who did a lot of work for Chuck Pennachio (I did some policy writing for Chuck, but Mike worked his tail off), Casey's much more liberal primary challenger in 2006, has a great piece of analysis on the Casey endorsement and some history.

If you are a long time reader of Comments you will recall that Bob Casey played the role of DSCC insider in the 2006 Pennsylvania Senate primary to choose a Democratic candidate to unseat Rick Santorum He was pitted against an unknown insurgent liberal party outsider (and my candidate) Chuck Pennacchio. At the time the struggle I faced was in convincing my party-insider friends that Chuck was a viable candidate. Sadly, it was not to be mainly because of the huge support Casey received from the Pennsylvania Democratic party establishment in the form of Governor Ed Rendell, Senator Chuck Schumer and all the hundreds of committee people spread across the state who vote their loyalties.

Today, that same party establishment is now split with Schumer and Rendell riding on Clinton's bandwagon and their golden boy, the man they called the future of the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania, Bob Casey coming out for Obama.

At minimum, this will allow some party insiders who may have wanted to support Obama but had no self-serving (self preserving) reason to do so in the form of party support to now take that leap of faith. It also says to to my old friends in PA, those folks that make up the PUMP Democrats, who are you going to support the old guard, or the new?

Casey's endorsement is a surprise and is very valuable to Obama because he can serve as a validator for conservative Democrats in the central part of the state that Obama is okay. If Casey appears at Obama's side and says he is a going to be a good president willing to listen to conservative Democrats, this is a very credible and valuable validation. It will not allow Obama to win central state congressional districts as Casey does not have much of an organization still on the ground, but it will help Obama keep the margins and thus the delegate counts close.

A small serving of justice for Siegelman

2008-03-28T09:32:00.003-05:00

By Libby

The attorney purge scandal largely dropped out of the media narrative once "Fredo" Gonzales finally resigned, and nobody has been indicted for the gross politicalization of our Justice system yet, but at least one small step towards justice was finally taken in Alabama.

MONTGOMERY -- A federal appellate court today ordered former Gov. Don Siegelman released from prison while he appeals his 2006 conviction, saying there are "substantial questions" about his case.

That's putting it mildly. The court effectively said the prosecution didn't make its case. As Steve Benen put it in an excellent overview post, "Of course he shouldn’t have been imprisoned; the charges against him have always been a bad joke." The entire justice system has become a criminally bad joke if you ask me.

It's not like Siegelman is the only victim. One can't fail to remember the unfortunate case of Georgia Thompson in Wisconsin. She was wrongly convicted by the same group of politically beholden thugs simply to provide oppo for a failed attempt by the GOP to defeat Gov. Jim Doyle. She also spent many months wrongfully incarcerated and suffered the ruination of her personal life.

I hope I live to see the day when the true criminality of this administration is finally fully exposed and every single perp is convicted and imprisoned for the grievous damage they have done to the rule of law of this land.

Offensive of the Weak

2008-03-28T06:12:00.001-05:00

The motivation for a major offensive in Basra that was almost certain to force the Sadrists to have a de facto end to their mostly unilateral ceasefire has been bugging me. It does not make a whole lot of sense, especially as the primary prize in Basra, the oil export revenue, is easily deniable by any group with some popular support and access to high explosives, AND the forces committed to the fight are a single light army division and three brigades of police. That force level is absurdly low, especially if there is any reason to believe that there is significant chance of defections.

I was able to bounce some ideas off of Cernig on Thursday night as we did some mutual head-scratching and what this looks to be is an offensive of desperation and some elegance, although it could be extremely ugly if anything slips. There are some massive assumptions in this analysis, and we'll be fleshing it out over the next couple of days. I'll start outlining some assumptions.

1 Sadr and his movement are significantly more popular on the street and in the Shi'ite electorate than Maliki, DAWA and ISCI/BADR
2 Throwing lots of money around has been a major driver of the decrease in violence
3 The great choke point in the money flows is Basra and its oil export infrastructure.
4 Sadr and most of his movement have developed a tacit working relationship with Petreaus and MNF-I --- harassment is tolerable in both directions but nothing too big too often. This has allowed Sadr et al to consolidate their positions.
5 The hold-up on the provincial election law approval was the Maliki factions being very concerned that they would be on the losing end of the stick if unfettered elections were to be held in the South given present trend lines.
6 The Cheney visit/pressure/promises to get this group to sign off on the election law included a promise of support on changing the political facts on the ground in the South via high explosives....

From assumptions 1 through 5, one concludes that Maliki's political position is weak. Given current trends he looks to get weaker over the next eight months going into the local elections. His allies and government are discredited for not being able to provide basic public goods and for being seen as too pro-Iranian and pro-American by too many interested actors. Furthermore, he is behaving as a good weak client by making sure as much money is out of the country in order to fund his potential exile.

One of his big problems is that the Sadrists will beat him politically and can go even with him on the corruption and distribution of spoils. So he has to take down Sadr or at least massively rejigger the political equation. And this offensive is his attempt to do so, and it has two interesting option trees. The first is that it actually works in defeating and seizing (intact) the Basra oil export profit center. This allows for a zero-sum transfer of spoils from Sadrists to Maliki's coalition while also embarrassing and weakening the Mahdi Army and enhancing the prestige and loyalty of Badr loyal units. This is very unlikely for multiple reasons. The other option tree is far more interesting.

Let us assume that this is a deliberate provocation exercise.

In this scenario the Iraqi Army attack into Basra's Mahdi neighborhoods does not go well, but it provokes a national Sadrist response which starts a strategic countdown clock. This count down clock includes increased Sadrist/JAM actions against Iraqi government and US Forces such as rocket/mortar attacks on the Green Zone, and attacks against the oil export infrastructure. It includes concerns over US logistics lines as the combination of Basra shutting down and general insecurity in the Shi'ite bridge cities increases.

It puts MNF-I in a very tough position as MNF-I is justifiably paranoid about its supply lines and the new routes coming in from Jordan to Anbar and terminating near Baghdad are insufficient to adequately supply the entire force. The supply lines are much harder to hit today than they were in 2004 but they are still the weak point of the American presence. Additionally the level of fighting increases significantly so SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE.

And that something could be the deployment of American combat troops to Basra, as reports indicate that Marines may be sent to Southern Iraq. The British could provide logistic base security as the Marines bail out the Iraqi Army and take over patrolling activities in Basra. And unless the live and let live arrangment that minimized conflict in Sadr City is quickly put into place, the Marines and the Sadrists will be knocking each others heads in. There will be a strong temptation on the Sadrists fighters to horizontally escalate and raise the level of their activities and attacks in other southern cities. This will be a good test to see how much control Sadr and other senior leadership really have over JAM activities or if they just provide strategic guidance.

If there is horizontal escalation of fighting to other southern cities, two things will happen. The first is that implicit working relationship that MNF-I has been building with elements of the Sadrist movement is scuttled. The second is that the South is now too unstable to have free and fear elections due to those 'thugs' and that elections are suspended until peace breaks out (and coincidentally Sadr and his followers are either killed or de-legitimized. )

This is pure speculation, but as Cernig points out in his post on this subject, everyone is looking for informed speculation as to motive.

Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials. With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that "we can't quite decipher" what is going on. It's a question, he said, of "who's got the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki decided to act now.

And this is not that outlandish of a conspiracy theory as there are few hard to reconcile with reality assumptions in it.

The Knight's Move

2008-03-27T23:17:00.006-05:00

By Cernig

Earlier today, Fester wondered why Maliki has gone charging into a city of 2.6 million after a numerous and entrenched Mahdi Army - armed only with a division of troops possessing no heavy firepower and only lightly armored trucks. He wrote:

why was this attacked launched with what looks to be massively insuffucient force levels on the part of the Iraqi Army? Was it pure staff stupidity/buying into your own propaganda that the JAM is a bunch of thugs with no popular support? Was it that the 14th Division was the only reliable division? Was it a hope that the introduction of a large force would destablize the local equilibriums of power and thus prompt local Badr and Fadillah militia attacks?

Fester called me this evening to discuss these questions and we settled on a combination of "the 14th Division was the only reliable division" - it's recruited in Basra, commanded by SIIC loyalists and has been based in Kerbala until now - and an option he hadn't listed earlier - that Maliki planned to draw the US into the fight on his side and move his own troops back into a PR/reserve position at the earliest opportunity.

Maliki christened his offensive the "Charge of the Knights" - and in chess, beloved game of all in the region, knight's move to come at the enemy from unexpected directions. By failing to commit enough forces to fight the Mahdi Army, his operation is certain to need rescuing if his government is not to fall in turn. The US cannot, with the best will in the world, commit more than a brigade or maybe three. That's way not enough to take on a force like the Mahdi Army in a city the size of basra through boots on the ground - and so firepower, bombs and shells will be pressed into service to do the work of the missing boots. Can we say "massive collateral damage?"

What better way not only to wreck the Sadrist's plans to reduce Maliki's SIIC allies to a minority power in the regional elections but also to drive a massive wedge between Sadr and Petreaus? The latter had been careful, of late, to refer to Sadr by the honorific "Seyed" and to credit his ceasefire with a large chunk of reductions in Iraqi violence. Maliki must have felt Mookie breathing down his neck from two directions.

Well, soon no longer. The Washington Post reports that US troops are already involved in combat with the JAM in east Baghdad.

U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting.

Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of American weapons, along with the Mahdi Army's AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead.

The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday.

And, according to the WaPo, the folks in the White House have been trying to figure out what Maliki's been up to as well.

Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials. With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that "we can't quite decipher" what is going on. It's a question, he said, of "who's got the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki decided to act now.

In Basra, three rival Shiite groups have been trying to position themselves, sometimes through force of arms, to dominate recently approved provincial elections.

The U.S. officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said that they believe Iran has provided assistance in the past to all three groups -- the Mahdi Army; the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Iraq's largest Shiite party; and forces loyal to the Fadhila Party, which holds the Basra governor's seat. But the officials see the current conflict as a purely internal Iraqi dispute.

Some officials have concluded that Maliki himself is firing "the first salvo in upcoming elections," the administration official said.

"His dog in that fight is that he is basically allied with the Badr Corps" against forces loyal to Sadr, the official said. "It's not a pretty picture."

As long as Maliki has the US to back him up, and power is more important to him than stability, this is a big gamble he cannot afford not to make. Sure, if he succeeds he gets a Sadrist insurrection. But that just means he can - delay the November elections in Sadrist areas indefinitely, citing the emergency and so prop up his SIIC allies and thus his own rule; count on US troops being around for a while as they won't be able to withdraw if there's more violence, rather than less, in coming months; put paid once and for all to any chance of reproachment between the US military and Sadr. On the minus side, there's a slim chance the Mahdi Army might mount a Hezboullah-style upset and a rather larger chance that the cat-herder, Sistani, might join with Iraqi parliamentarians who are already saying Maliki should heed Sadr's call for a negotiated settlement. If Sistani backs Sadr on this, Maliki is toast and so is his government, with Sadr garnering enough backing to become de-facto Iraqi leader almost overnight. But if he did nothing, that's going to happen anyway come November. Maliki doesn't have a choice if he wants to retain power.

For Sadr, the stakes are the destruction of his carefully built up social and political infrastructure, more than his militia. There's no way SIIC would stop at just defeating the Mahdi Army, they'd want Sadr's whole operation destroyed or disabled to the point where it's no longer a threat. Sadr knows the US military likely has the firepower, if not the troop numbers, to do the first and his Shiite enemies will do it the second as soon as the first step is out of the way. If he can negotiate a settlement, especially if Sistani backs it, he wins in the same way that Maliki, Dawa and SIIC lose above.

For the US, it's a bit of a lose-lose. If they use massive firepower instead of boots, they'll incur the wrath of much of the Shiite South well beyond the Sadrists. It will be Anbar at its worst, writ large, and this time lying athwart the main route of supply. If they lose in battle to a Hezboullah-style resistance, same again.

And over the US' shoulder, there are several other problems all looking to come to a head at once. There's the increasingly disaffected Sunni Awakening, threatening a general strike or even a return to their insurgent ways in the face of Maliki's refusal to accommodate them (ironically, Sadr would be far more likely to conduct the outreach that is needed). Then there's the Kurds and the brewing blood-feud over who owns Kirkuk. And finally, when the ground in the Northern mountains thaws in April and May, the Turks are looking to follow up their recent reconnaissance in force with a proper armored incursion on the hunt for PKK terrorists. There's a very real prospect here of chaotically and accidentally converging currents creating a perfect storm for the US occupation and for peace in Iraq.

Hillary and Obama respond to critics

2008-03-27T19:09:00.001-05:00

By Libby

The old and new media outcry over the latest round of negative politics in the Democratic primary seems to have had some effect. Hillary's latest remarks, in the miltary heart of North Carolina, were encouraging.

Clinton stressed that there are “significant” differences between her and Obama, but said “those differences pale to the differences between us and Sen. McCain.”

“I intend to do everything I can to make sure we have a unified Democratic party,” she said. “When this contest is over and we have a nominee, we’re going to close ranks, we’re going to be united.”

Meanwhile as Steven Benen sums up in his usual impeccable manner, Obama was even more responsive to the criticisms.

It looks like the Obama campaign got the message. The senator delivered a speech at Cooper Union in NYC this morning on the economy, specifically emphasizing “legal reforms needed to establish a 21st century regulatory system.”

From a purely political perspective, I’d just add that Obama did so a) while exposing the disaster of Bush’s economic policies; b) trashing McCain’s speech on the economy from Tuesday; and c) without mentioning Hillary Clinton, in any context, even once.

That's exactly what we need. I'm tired of hearing why one candidate or the other is going to run better against McCain. I want them to show us how they're going to do it by running against McCain now, instead of each other. I don't think I'm the only one.

Basra Force Ratios

2008-03-27T18:39:00.001-05:00

Reports suggest that the Iraqi Army in Basra is not advancing and is being stalemated by Mahdi Army fighters in their drive to take the city to advantage the Maliki central government. As James Joyner notes there are problems with the Iraqi Army that are very familiar to anyone who has paid attention to it when the Iraqi Army or National Guard or whatever it is called is asked to perform high intensity operations:

Reports on NPR this morning say the Iraqi Army is vastly outmanned and outgunned. Further, there have been cases — how many is unclear — of Iraqi soldiers taking off their uniforms and joining the enemy. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Besides desertions and defections, another significant problem is force ratios. During the Second Battle of Fallujah, the US attacking forces were composed of a composite division as six battalions led the main attack, another battalion as a diversion force, and two battalions as local reserves. Additionally an Iraqi Army brigade was present as a mop-up/press release force. The defending forces would have been the equivlant of two or three battalions of light infantry and local insurgents/neighborhood militias. Fallujah was a city of roughly 300,00 residents before the assault. And this assualt was supported by theatre level artillery and air support. And despite this large armored and heavy infantry force with excellent air support, plenty of helicopter mobility and firepower, superior logistics, the defending force was able to inflict heavy absolute and proportional casualties --- roughly 10% of the US force was wounded or killed, and many infantry companies saw 30% to 50% casualty levels.

The Iraqi Army force in Basra is a single division of lightly supported infantry with some US/UK locally controlled air support, minimal artillery, minimal aviation support. Basra is a city of 2.6 million people (2003) and it is overwhelmingly Shi'ite. If one assumes that one half of one percent of the male population are available to be called up for Mahdi Army fighting units, the defenders have numerical parity with the attacking force. That is never a good thing, especially when the defenders are on their own grounds, fighting from prepared positions in dense urban networks and have higher morale and more firepower than the attackers.

So again --- why was this attacked launched with what looks to be massively insuffucient force levels on the part of the Iraqi Army? Was it pure staff stupidity/buying into your own propaganda that the JAM is a bunch of thugs with no popular support? Was it that the 14th Division was the only reliable division? Was it a hope that the introduction of a large force would destablize the local equilibriums of power and thus prompt local Badr and Fadillah militia attacks?

Obama winning over North Carolina

2008-03-27T18:12:00.000-05:00

By Libby

I have never been a big believer in polls and I think in this election with its polls every three hours, or so it seems, they have been exceptionally useless. Nonetheless, I do track them to some extent and I was surprised to see earlier polling that had Hillary and Obama tied in my new home state of North Carolina. These last couple of polls showing Obama with a wide lead better support the anecdotal evidence I've seen on the streets. Judging from the bumper stickers alone, I've seen many for Obama and none for Hillary. I haven't seen any for McCain either but I live in the liberal pocket of Raleigh-Durham, so I don't think that says much.

Needless to say, we had a lot of Edwards supporters here and from what I see in the local newspapers, most of those switched to Obama almost immediately. The spread the pollsters are now reporting more reflects what I see.

What's the prize in Basra?

2008-03-27T17:42:00.001-05:00

What is the prize in Basra that is motivating the fight between units loyal to the Maliki government and SIIC/Badr and the Mahdi Army? What is prompting this fight? And what are the gains that the Maliki government believe that they can get at the end of the day if they are successful (which recent reports suggest that the Iraqi Army is 'stalled' and outgunned and out-trained by the Mahdi Army fighters they are attacking, is looking a little less likely) The theory that the DAWA-SIIC alliance is looking to knock down the more popular and credible Sadrist currents is plausible, while the Iranian super genius manipulation theories are having issues with Mr. Occam. But what is the net gain of this strategic approach?

Basra is valuable because it is a large population base and the only major oil export port in Iraq. Roughly 80% of Iraqi oil exports go through Basra, so that is about 1.7 to 1.8 million barrels per day. At world oil prices, this is roughly $166 million worth of exports per day (assume average price per barrel of $95.00) which means a massive amount of corruption, bribery, smuggling and other black/gray market money is available. Throw in other traditional smuggling activities and this is a massive spoil. And for the past five years, the Basra oil export systems have been maintained in fairly decent condition and has not been subject to systemic attack.

The Fadillah militia and group have the loyalty and control of the workers in the oil export sector. However oil export infrastructrure is fragile when plentiful Semtex or C-4 is available to people who know how to use it. The Sadrists have the working examine and the plausible premise that small motivated groups with social support can shut down oil export routes as the Sunni Arabs did that to the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline for years. So even if the Sadrists lose (which is not a sure thing at all) they can deny victory in terms of changing the allocation of spoils to advantage SIIC or Fadillah by their explosive veto, and we are seeing a possible precursor of that campaign this morning:

One of southern Iraq's two main oil export pipelines was also severely damaged in a bomb attack, officials said today.

The bombing of the pipeline, seven miles south of Basra, caused oil prices to rise yesterday to $107.70, though officials gave varying accounts of how supply would be affected.

"This morning, saboteurs blew up the pipeline transporting crude from [the] Zubair 1 [oil plant] by placing bombs beneath it," an oil company official said.

"Crude exports will be greatly affected because this is one of two main pipelines transporting crude to the southern terminals. We will lose about a third of crude exported through Basra."

Later reports suggested that up to 80% of Basra's export capacity has been shut down due to this attack.

And given that a good chunk of the Surge's limited tactical success has been the throwing around of massive amounts of money to all armed parties who had been shooting at US forces for the past five years, the viable threat of cutting off major oil exports routes and thus severely crimping the flow of cash that is about the only claim of legitimacy that the Maliki government can beg, borrow or buy, undermines the central government which is launching this attack to undermine its rival's ability to buy votes (at much lower prices due to stronger loyalty ties). Ahh --- negative sum prisoners dilemnas are so much fun to work with. Maliki is screwed if his forces take the city as his government will have significantly less access to non-US government cash as the oil infrastructure will come under seige and he further solidifies the perception that he is Bush's little bitch. Maliki is also screwed if a non-state military force defeats in a stand-up battle his army, as that tends to be a bad thing in the post-Westphalian world.

Surging For Shelter

2008-03-27T16:25:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

The Iraqi government has imposed a two-day curfew, with no unauthorised person allowed on the streets, over the weekend in Baghdad. US personnel in the Green Zone have been told they must not leave hardened shelters at any time - for work or to sleep - unless for "essential reasons".

And Bush is headed, between GOP fundraisers, for the old "the Dems are to blame" shelter from the consequences of his own policies.

"Some members of Congress decided the best way to encourage progress in Baghdad was to criticize and threaten Iraq's leaders while they're trying to work out their differences," Bush told a military audience at the cavernous U.S. Air Force museum.

"But hectoring was not what the Iraqi leaders needed," Bush said. "What they needed was security and that is what the `surge' has provided."

So secure, indeed, that US personnel are hunkered in shelters 24/7 and Iraqis cannot walk the streets of their own capital (again). Meanwhile, those Iraqi leaders are now taking the opportunity to "work out their differences" at gunpoint.

Honestly, why aren't people laughing in Bush's face by now?

Insult To Injury

2008-03-27T14:23:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

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

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

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

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

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

Is Sadr Dead THIS Time?

2008-03-27T13:55:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

Between Eric, Fester and myself, we've followed the various iterations of the "Sadr's a spent force" theory that's been floating around now since at least 2004 post-Najaf and noted that each time rumors of his demise have been exaggerated.

Today, Abu Aardvark reports on yet another iteration of that theory - this time, it says that Iran has decided to cut Sadr loose and bury him because it no longer needs an armed opposition group as a proxy now that it's other proxies actually control the government.

Muqtada al Sadr is a mighty but reckless force; he is not as intelligent as Hassan Nasrallah and does not speak the language of politics, however he was an important factor in enforcing the Iranian influence at the moment in which Saddam Hussein's regime fell. Today, it appears that Tehran no longer needs al Sadr – so long as it has control over Iraq within the political framework.

Nouri al Maliki's regime, with its political prowess as opposed to the Sunni political crudeness, has managed to win over Washington – or neutralize it – as well as bring about American-Iranian rapprochement over the Iraqi issue. This was achieved whilst taking advantage of the political situation in Washington in light of US President George W. Bush's weakness following the Democratic victory in Congress and at time when the US has entered into a state of political paralysis as a result of the upcoming elections.

Iran no longer needs Muqtada al Sadr but rather wants a sophisticated model that is even more progressive than Hezbollah's in order to take over Iraq. A government in control is much better than an opposition whose only possession and demands are the right to disrupt – such as the case in Lebanon.

The article he cites, from the very Sunni and very Saudi al-Sharq al-Awsat, goes on to suggest a link with Ahmadinejhad's recent visit to Baghdad, saying Tehran must have blessed Maliki's move.

Marc observes:

So you can add the "Iran is liquidating its no longer useful proxies" theory (which would fit this general line of speculation about Iran's doubts about Sadr and preference for the simultaneously-US backed ISCI) to the the generally most prevalent (in the Iraqi and Arab, not just Western, media) "Maliki and ISCI are liquidating their more popular rivals ahead of the provincial elections" theory; the optimistic "Sadr has lost power and now's the time to take him out" theory (thus far not borne out by the course of the fighting, but who knows - it's early); Maliki's own "it's time to establish state sovereignty over a 'lost' province" theory (which Bush, of course, has embraced; but then why isn't he taking on the other militias and warlords? and why would he start now, and in Basra?); and Reidar Visser's "Maliki is trying to build a power base in the Iraqi Army" theory.

I'm personally highly sceptical - mostly because of the source, which is about as under-the-thumb of the Saudi royals as it's possible to be and which has previously mainstreamed anti_Iranian agitprop which later turned out to be wildly false 9it's reporting on that defecting Iranian general springs immediately to mind). But also because Maliki's SCIRI/DAWA coalition have been the central government for some time now - if Iran wanted to cut a recalcitrant proxy loose and back the proxy-in-power against it then Iran's had plenty of opportunity to do so already. Why now, of all times?

The answer to "why now, of all times?" and "why the Mahdi, strongest of all the militias, first?" seems to me to be one and the same. I keep coming back to those provincial elections which, if the Sadrists were free to contest them, would essentially reduce SCIRI - the main Iran-backed grouping and Maliki's main ally - from a major political force to a minor one.

Jules Crittenden, following the narrative as ever, writes today:

The Sadrists are claiming it’s all political, to cut them out of provincial elections, and if al-Maliki’s that interested, there’s got to be a sleazy political angle to it.* On the other hand, if it in fact has the effect of ending Shiite infighting and lawlessness, and edges out Iran, then there is a distinctly unsleazy strategic angle to it.

But if Maliki's bloc wins, edging Iran out is exactly what isn't going to happen. In that much at least al-Sharq al-Awsat has it right. And if Maliki wins, the SCIRI, with its Badr Brigades, will be far and away the largest Shiite party and militia, with total penetration of the Iraqi security forces. At that point they may just begin to wonder why they need Maliki's DAWA as frontmen at all.

Killing The UN

2008-03-27T13:10:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

I wrote yesterday that McCain's proposed League of Democracies was a way of doing an end run around the UN by creating a new US-led body to provide a facade of international approval to new interventions and "preventative" wars.

Today, Krauthammer confirmed that this part of McCain's foreign policy plan is right out of the neocon playbook.

Well, I like the idea of the league of democracies, and only in part because I and others had proposed it about six years ago. What I like about it, it’s got a hidden agenda. It looks as if it’s all about listening and joining with allies, all the kind of stuff you’d hear a John Kerry say, except that the idea here, which McCain can’t say, but I can, is to essentially kill the U.N.

Think Progress has the video - and also notes that Krauthammer first proposed this League six years ago, so he would know its true purpose.

The UN comes in for a lot of criticism from Americans, but other than the lost 20-something percenters I think they'd mostly agree that it perhaps needs some reform but should still be kept around as the primary international forum. If voting for McCain was clearly labelled as a vote for disbanding the UN, a lot of people would balk. That's why McCain has to pretend that he'd just be adding another body to international diplomacy.

And if McCain dares to invoke Churchill, the greatest defender of a strong UN, anytime in the future I may just puke.

Update Kevin Sullivan, the most right-leaning "liberal" in the blogosphere, wouldn't attend the UN's funeral and James Joyner seems to think a different, democratic, alternative would be better for U.S. interests than the UN is, writing that "Attempting to get that business done through a smaller coalition of more like-minded states only makes sense, and it’s a far sight better than either going it alone or waiting on the UN to achieve consensus."

But here's the rub - what happens when the League of Democracies tries to impose its authority on a non-democracy and the latter says it doesn’t recognise the authority of a body it hasn’t been invited to send representatives to and has no voice at?

We bomb them?

A masters degree in marijuana

2008-03-27T07:53:00.003-05:00

By Libby

Well, the political news is so toxic today that I need a break for a moment and this new higher ed program is just the remedy.

Welcome to Oaksterdam University, a new trade school where "higher" education takes on a whole new meaning.

The school prepares people for jobs in California's thriving medical marijuana industry. For $200 and the cost of two required textbooks, students learn how to cultivate and cook with cannabis, study which strains of pot are best for certain ailments, and are instructed in the legalities of a business that is against the law in the eyes of the federal government.

''My basic idea is to try to professionalize the industry and have it taken seriously as a real industry, just like beer and distilling hard alcohol,'' said Richard Lee, 45, an activist and pot-dispensary owner who founded the school in a downtown storefront last fall.

This is how legalized marijuana could jumpstart an ailing economy. All sorts of new enterprises would develop, almost overnight. They would be hiring Americans -- you can't outsource agriculture -- and there's room for advancement. The article notes entry level jobs paye little more than minimum wage but a master trimmer can make fifty grand a year.

On a related note, regular commenter Rainbow Demon unearthed this study -- U.S. Hemp Ban Hurts Environment, Economy

Los Angeles (March 13, 2008) - With oil hitting $110 a barrel and gas prices creeping towards $4 a gallon, the federal government continues to prohibit U.S. farmers from growing hemp, which could be used to efficiently produce biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol.

Hemp is also a cost-effective, environmentally-friendly substitute for polyester, cotton, fiberglass and concrete, according to a new Reason Foundation study that examines hemp's potential uses and the ways other countries are benefitting from it. Industrial hemp production is banned in the U.S. as an archaic consequence of the war on drugs.

Hemp, even more so than marijuana could provide employment and badly needed tax revenue and there are at least hundreds of small farmers just waiting for our government to come to its senses and legalize this non-narcotic industrial crop so they can jump into the industry. We're the last major country in the world that maintains a ban on its cultivation simply to protect the interests of the prohibitionists and corporate interests that would face competition for their inferior products in a truly free market.

Small distant problems before big immediate ones

2008-03-27T05:44:00.004-05:00

At least that is the elite political consensus on dealing with the fiscal balance sheet of the United States government. We saw in 2005 a party run itself off a political and electoral cliff campaigning against Social Security as a social insurance program. And this attempt to privatize and destroy it near the top of a bubble (amazing how that is always the case) was supported by a massive amount of elite media support. The Pain Caucus was alive and well; convinced that we could not afford as a society to guarantee our retirees roughly 32% (under current law and intermediate projections) to 40% (current law, low cost projections)replacement rate incomes. We had to destroy the system to resolve an anticipated problem in either fifteen years as the elite was seeking to renege on their promises from 1983 or thirty five years. Social Security was in trouble and non-sustainable in its current form for any length of time.

But never mind any of the other fiscal proposals that had/have larger ongoing projected costs than OASDI --- those are either critical penis enhancement projects where we must stay for 100 years to show resolve, or critical changes in the tax code that encourage dead people to be more productive.

Yet when we look at the evidence today, Social Security is not that big of a problem. Over the 75 year projection range, the Social Security Administration projects the entire program deficit to be 0.6% of GDP. In the grand scheme of things that will produce a large number but it is fundamentally a rounding error. Let us take a look at a couple of other major policy initiatives --

a) John McCain's tax proposals would result in a permanent loss of roughly net $400 billion dollars a year in revenue. That is slightly more than 3.0% GDP, or roughly five times the size of the projected long run Social Security deficit. Yet he is a 'credible' individual on economic policies.

b) The supplemental appropriation for Iraq this year was roughly $200 billion dollars this year. That is roughly 1.5% GDP

c) The economic stimulas package/bi-partisan ass covering rebate check plans this year is roughly $130 billion dollars or about 1% of GDP.

A and B are long run changes in revenue/expenditure slopes for the United States while C is a one-off policy change, but in the past year 'serious' new proposals for expenditures and revenue losses make up roughly 5.5% of GDP, or about 9 times the size of the long run deficit for OASDI. Just keep that in mind when told that Social Security is in trouble.

Iran's Shrinking Chemical Weapons Stockpile

2008-03-26T18:13:00.006-05:00

By Cernig

Or rather, the shrinking assessments of the size of Iran's chemical weapons stockpile.

It appears the last NIE on Iran's nuclear program isn't the only intelligence community assessment to have dialed down the hype and rhetoric over Iran's Weapons of Mass Destruction ability. Successive assessments on Iran's chemical weapons have done the same.

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the Arms Control Wonk explains.

What next - the possibility that the U.S. intelligence community will admit that the "EFP's from Iran" narrative is flimsier than a Colin Powell presentation to the UN?

And if so would the Bush administration's Weapons of Mass Distraction - the mainstream media - even notice?

Update Meanwhile...

Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed that the Saudi Shura Council -- the elite group that implements the decisions of the autocratic inner circle -- is preparing "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors," one of the kingdom's leading newspapers, Okaz, reports. The German-based dpa news service relayed the paper's story.

Simple prudence -- or ominous timing?

Western PA Newspaper Circulation and Clinton

2008-03-26T17:48:00.001-05:00

As Libby pointed out, Hillary Clinton went to a local Pittsburgh newspaper and started to refan the Wright controversy in order to get attention off of her Tuzla statement. The newspaper was the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, which is the house rag of Richard Mellon Scaife. Josh Marshall has a good summary of the paper's political agenda:

It was the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the money-losing, vanity, fringe sheet of Richard Mellon Scaife, funder of the Arkansas Project, the American Spectator during its prime Clinton-hunting years and virtually every right-wing operation of note at one point or another over the last twenty years or more.

And this is a good paper for her to hit despite/because of the fact that Richard Mellon Scaife owns it. She knows that her comments will get play and front page treatment, but that would have happened at almost any paper. Instead, it is a circulation and location targetting decision that makes this an effective forum for her to get her message out.

Pittsburgh has two major newspapers, the Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review. The Post-Gazette has about twice the circulation of the Tribune Review. However the locations and target audience of the two papers differ significantly. The P-G is the 'respectable' paper in town, and it is the dominant city paper. The Tribune Review is a bit flashier, less substantial, and is more of an outlying paper. Within city limits, the P-G dominates the Trib.

The Tribune Review is part of a six paper chain in Western Pennsylvania, and once one leaves the city, it has much better proportional circulation against the P-G. This is especially true fifteen or more miles from Downtown Pittsburgh. At that point the Trib family of papers is at least first among equals in its competition with the P-G and local newspapers.

This region lies in PA-4, PA-12 and PA-18 where the Democrats are significantly more conservative and Clinton friendly then the Democrats in PA-14 which is the Pittsburgh city district. Her attack will be headlined in her base voters where she needs to run up 65% and 70% levels of support to gain significant net delegate edges. Dumb attack strategically but a good attack tactically.

Hold McCain accountable

2008-03-26T17:21:00.001-05:00

By Libby

Here's your 30 second point and click activism of the week. This just in off the transom.

Dear Libby ,

John McCain is breaking the law.

When McCain's presidential campaign was in trouble, he opted-in to public financing through the primary, limiting him to a $54 million spending cap.

But laws aren't for "mavericks"...

McCain's latest spending report, filed by his own campaign, shows he has spent in excess of $58 million so far -- a public admission by his own hand that he has broken the law.

We filed a formal complaint to Federal Election Commission yesterday, and we want you to sign-on for a second delivery of signatures later this week.

Please read and co-sign the letter to the FEC right now.

This one is so simple to sign onto that it won't take ten seconds unless you're a really slow typist. McCain is gaming the system using taxpayer dollars. He needs to be held accountable for ignoring the rule of law. Sign the letter and pass the link on. Let's generate some steam for this issue. Maybe our lamebrained professional media will cover it more fully if we make enough noise.

Keane - "The security situation is worsening,"

2008-03-26T14:17:00.002-05:00

By Cernig

"The security situation is worsening." Well, if retired General Jack Keane, one of the architects and chief propagandists for the Surge, says it's so, then it must be.

Meanwhile, Sadr has responded to Maliki's ultimatum to the Mahdi Army that it must lay down its arms within 72 hours by demnading Maliki go home to Baghdad and send in a parliamentary team to negotiate their way back to the ceasefire.

And the US keeps on supporting the least-popular option - and the one that Iran supports too. Divide and conquer, not support for democracy, is always the colonialist way.

Anyone remember who said this about Iraq back in January 2007?

This political culture is not ready for representative government

That's right - General Jack Keane.

'Nuff said.

Those poor Creationists

2008-03-26T14:11:00.002-05:00

By Cernig

Those poor Creationists. Someone up there keeps playing practical jokes on them and their young-Earth theories.

Early humans may have roamed Europe as much as 1.2 million years ago, far earlier than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday, based on fossils they found in northern Spain.

Researchers excavated a jaw bone, teeth and simple tools in a cave near the city of Burgos dated around 400,000 years older than the previously oldest-known remains found at a nearby site 14 years ago, a paper published in the journal Nature said.

The remains are accurately dated and lay to rest doubts about when early humans first lived in Europe, said Andreu Olle, who has worked at the Atapuerca site since 1990.

"These are the oldest human remains in Europe. With this fossil, we can say it (Europe) was populated earlier than was thought," he told Reuters.

The bones are similar to fossils thought to be 800,000 years old found at the same site in 1994, suggesting a continuous human presence in Western Europe.

Maybe God just likes laughing at them as much as the rest of us.

McCain - Centrist Or Wingnut?

2008-03-26T12:21:00.006-05:00

By Cernig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Unilateral nuclear stockpile reductions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McCain today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Betting on the Wrong Horse?

2008-03-26T10:53:00.002-05:00

As predicted on this site repeatedly over the past couple of months, the aggressive anti-Sadrist actions of the ISCI/Dawa factions - in tandem with the US military - has led to the scuttling of the cease fire by Sadr. The US military, and its Iraqi allies (who are also Iran's primary allies) are playing a dangerous game, however, as a resumption of violence by the Sadrists could have widespread reverberations.

The purposes behind the continued targeting of the Sadrists are manifold. First, there has been an ongoing competition between the Sadrist current and the ISCI/Dawa factions for wealth, power and control of the Shiite political sphere. Against that backdrop, the looming October 1 regional elections have provided ISCI with an added sense of urgency: the Sadrist current is considerably more popular and stands to make a serious dent in ISCI's local political clout (ISCI is somewhat overrepresented locally due to the fact that the Sadrists boycotted the last round of regional elections in 2005).

That is why ISCI vetoed the most recent iteration of the regional elections law. It is likely that Cheney, on his most recent visit, promised US support for anti-Sadrist activities in return for ISCI's withdrawal of its objections. Along these lines, it is no accident that the strategically vital southern city of Basra is currently the site of the most concerted effort to purge the Sadrists. If ISCI can push the Sadrists out of Basra (the main port city, and transit hub of oil and other goods), losing ground in other Shiite localities would be less painful.

For the Bush administration, backing ISCI/Dawa is appealing for a few reasons. First, ISCI/Dawa are amenable to the US presence, whereas the Sadrist current is strongly opposed. So ensuring that ISCI maintains its political power is essential to the goals of maintaining permanent military bases and gaining preferential access to oil residing in the Shiite-dominated south. Ensuring the legitimacy of democratic process is, apparently, not quite as important.

Second, the US could be attempting to drive a wedge between Iran and its strongest allies in Iraq (ISCI/Dawa) by providing robust support against those factions' main rival (the Sadrists). I remain highly dubious as to the prospects of such a gambit, however, and find it quite plausible that ISCI/Dawa would view us as friends of convenience - useful on a limited, contingent basis - without completely abandoning their Iranian allies. For the Bush administration, even preserving the chance to secure permanent bases and access to oil might take the sting out of failing to cut Iran out of the picture completely, though.

Regardless of the stated objectives, the question of execution remains. Trying to weaken the Sadrist current is a lot easier said than done. For one, it is a movement made up of over 2 million Iraqis - represented by a fairly sizable bloc in the parliament and with a large base of support in Baghdad. Sadr's network delivers necessary social services to large segments of Iraq's society, and that ability, as well as his religious lineage and nationalist, anti-occupation rhetoric make him and his movement extremely popular.

The Mahdi Army militia, while rough around the edges and lightly armed, are highly motivated and determined. The early results of the most recent clashes vary depending on the source. While Maliki took to the airwaves today to issue an ultimatum to the Sadrists, it is unclear which faction is in a position to dictate terms. First Maliki:

Iraq's prime minister on Wednesday gave gunmen in the southern oil port of Basra three days to surrender their weapons and renounce violence as clashes between security forces and Shiite militia fighters erupted for a second day.
Sadiq al-Rikabi, a chief adviser to al-Maliki, said gunmen who fail to turn over their weapons to police stations in Basra by Friday will be targeted for arrest. He said they also must sign a pledge renouncing violence.

Juan Cole translates some pieces that suggest that Maliki's bargaining power is not quite strong enough to make such demands:

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that members of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, formerly SCIRI, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim); the Da'wa Party led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; and the Badr Corps paramilitary of ISCI have fled their HQs in Basra and Kut, because of the threat that they will be stormed by Mahdi Army militiamen [seeking revenge for the current offensive], In fact, some such buildings already have been attacked. [...]
Al-Zaman says its sources in the Sadr Movement confirmed that the Mahdi Army has gained control of the main road between Amara and Basra, allowing it to cut the government troops off from military supplies.

Badger translates a piece that says US soldiers were employed to protect the ISCI's offices in Baghdad as well. Events such as these should make US policymakers wonder whether, yet again, we are backing the less popular local elements simply because they tell us what we want to hear.

Speaking of which, Sadr has another card to play, and so let me make another prediction: If the US and its putative Iraqi allies do not back off, the Sadrists will attempt to bring down the Maliki government by coordinating a no-confidence vote. While Sistani and others have fought to maintain a united Shiite political bloc for some time, alas, not even the cat herder can prevent this rift unless there is a let up in violence.

The question remains: can the Sadrists pull in enough Shiite and Sunni lawmakers to back this play? I'd say the odds are better than 50/50.

Breaking my own plea for unity

2008-03-26T08:40:00.002-05:00

By Libby

It would be a lot easier to keep my vow to focus on McCain instead of the Democrats' bickering if the Clinton campaign could please stop doing this sort of thing. Yesterday, nearly everybody was up in arms about Hillary reigniting the Wright controversy just as it was beginning to die. I held back, willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

Neither was I willing to throw myself on the fainting couch just because Hillary spoke with Scaife. I mean it's a odd picture, but it makes sense to talk to a major newspaper in an upcoming primary state of importance. What is she supposed to do, boycott them just because they trashed her for years during Bill's presidency? I was willing to wait and see if it was just an unguarded moment and chalk it up to the fatigue of a prolonged contest.

But this morning, it appears she really is deliberately reigniting the Wright thing, apparently to take the heat off her misstatements on Bosnia. She repeated the remarks at a press conference and then there's this latest rumor. If it's true that "the Clinton campaign is distributing an article in the American Spectator (!) about Obama foreign policy adviser Merrill McPeak" and suggesting that Obama is an anti-Semite then the meeting with Scaife takes on a different color in my mind and it's not rosy.

Interestingly, I just posted yesterday on an endorsement Obama received from Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, who has led the synagogue across the street from Obama's home for 27 years. He knows Obama well and had this to say.

Obama is no anti-Semite. He is not anti-Israel. He is one of our own, the one figure on the political scene who remembers our past, and has a real vision for repairing our present.

I realize that politics can get ugly and candidates will do what ever they deem necessary to win, but again, this is just the nomination and I would think someone with a "lifetime of experience" in the game could come up a strategy that keeps the long range goal in mind. As far as I can see, this sort of politicking helps McCain, not the Democrats and I don't see that McCain is returning the favor. Smelling blood, he has no compunction about exploiting our divisions and jumped on Hillary. I guess he's not that grateful for Hillary's kind remarks about him.

Steve Benen has a good dispassionate summation, so I'll let him speak for me. All I have to add is I'm really tired of dirty politics and I want it to please, please stop.

US Ship Shoots At Small Boat In Suez Canal

2008-03-25T15:22:00.002-05:00

By Cernig

The US Fifth Fleet is co-operating in the Egyptian investigation of an incident in the Suez canal after dark on Monday. The Egyptian authorities say that one man was killed by fire from the US-flagged Global Patriot, under contract to the US military, but the American embassy in Cairo says that "Initial reports from the “Global Patriot” indicate that no casualties were sustained on either vessel." The embassy's website describes the encounter:

The “Global Patriot,” a ship on short term charter to the US Navy’s Military Sealift Command, fired warning shots at a small boat approaching the ship as it was preparing to transit the Suez Canal Monday evening. Initial reports from the “Global Patriot” indicate that no casualties were sustained on either vessel.

The “Global Patriot” was approached by several boats while preparing to transit the Suez Canal. The boats were hailed and warned by a native Arabic speaker using a bullhorn to warn them to turn away. A warning flare was then fired. One small boat continued to approach the ship and received two sets of warning shots 20-30 yards in front of the bow. All shots were accounted for as they entered the water.

The incident is under investigation. The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet Command is cooperating fully with Egyptian authorities, including the Suez Canal Authority and other local authorities, as well as the national authorities through the US Embassy in Cairo.

But the BBC reports:

Egyptian officials and witnesses say a man aboard the boat, Mohammed Fouad, was killed as his boat approached the ship in order to offer goods for sale. Two other men were injured, they say.

This is also the version of events reported by the official Egyptian news agency, citing preliminary reports.

Egyptian sources say Fouad's body was taken to a hospital morgue and then a mosque to await burial on Tuesday.

"We are praying over his body right now," Abbas al-Amrikani, the head of the union of seamen in Suez, told AP news agency, over audible sounds of prayer.

"I saw the body. The bullet entered his heart and went out the other side."

There's certainly a difference in accounts there.

The roll-on-roll-off Global Patriot and its owners, Global Container Lines, have done several charters for the U.S. military and other U.S. governmental bodies, including USAID food relief and transporting a Patriot missile battery. This time, they were carrying US military equipment (i.e. vehicles, given the vessel type) back to the States for repair or disposal. As such, it seems likely to me they'd have some form of security on board rather than just relying on armed crewmen.

So here's the question not being asked - were the shooters crewmen, US military servicemen or security contractors? These early reports (denial even in the face of a body and eyewitness accounts) are reminiscent to me of Blackwater's infamous shoot-up in Baghdad which caused so much controversy and occasioned a US State Dept. attempt at a cover-up.

It's time to disown Joe

2008-03-25T14:59:00.001-05:00

By Libby

I meant to blog earlier about this Connecticut newspaper's apology for endorsing Joe Lieberman during his last reelection campaign. I didn't think on the whole it was that good. They excused a lot of his anti-democratic positions, but the closing grafs were right on target.

Meanwhile, the junior Connecticut senator is not only backing the Republican nominee for the presidency, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, but appears to be making a contest of trying to get into every photo and TV news video with him. Perhaps Sen. Lieberman is taking delight in needling the chairman of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, his 2004 opponent for the presidency, whose leadership he once dismissed as a “ticket to nowhere.”

Rather than building the bridges The Day expected when it endorsed Sen. Lieberman, he appears busy burning bridges with the party of which he is allegedly still a member. Perhaps the senator is positioning himself for a top cabinet post in a McCain presidency. But if the Democrats prevail, and enlarge their control of the Senate, it is hard to imagine this Connecticut senator being welcomed back with open arms.

This raised a question in my mind that I haven't seen asked and would love to see answered by our Democratic leadership. It's clear that Lieberman is now repaying the GOP for their support that was key in his successful bid. He's long ceased to have any resemblence to a Democrat. So why is he still the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee?

If he wants to run with the GOP, surely he doesn't deserve to be rewarded for his betrayal with such a plum assignment.

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

2008-03-25T13:43:00.006-05:00

By Cernig

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

He has a wee problem:

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

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

Hat tip to Mike at CFLF)

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

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

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

CALLER: Sorry about that, Rush.

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

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

RUSH: Democrat Party principles.

CALLER: -- Democrat, correct.

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

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

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

The Fallujah success story

2008-03-25T13:00:00.002-05:00

By Libby

The Pentagon often points to Fallujah as a sign of the success of a long term occupation and a justification to remain there for the foreseeable future. We're told we can't jeopardize these sort of gains after we spent all that blood and treasure -- twice -- with major assaults to 'secure' the city. So just what does a secure Fallujah look like?

Fallujah today is sealed off with blast walls and checkpoints. Residents are given permits to enter the city. All visitors and their weapons are registered. Police check every car. The U.S. military has divided the city into nine gated communities.

Sounds charming doesn't it? Maybe we could use this model of success to bring security to some of our own troubled inner cities. Heck, we even have a head start. The administration's new national ID scheme, which is about to go into effect, is tailor made for entry by permit only. But let's not forget, we're doing this to nuture the young democracy in Iraq. Just ask Fallujah's police chief, Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie, a former member of Hussein's elite Republican Guard, who is our strongman in the city.

What al-Zobaie wants is for the U.S. military to hand over full control of Fallujah. He believes Iraq's current leaders aren't strong enough. Asked whether democracy could ever bloom here, he replied: "No democracy in Iraq. Ever."

Well, that's certainly worth 4,000 reported dead, tens of thousand permanently injured troops and $3 trillion tax dollars, isn't it? [via BuzzFlash]

Air Force Mistakenly Sent Nuke Triggers To Taiwan

2008-03-25T12:51:00.002-05:00

By Cernig

Back in 2006 the Air Force mistakenly shipped "four electrical fuses for nose cone assemblies for ICBMs" intended for Minuteman missiles to Taiwan thinking they were helicopter batteries. They had originally been mis-labelled in 2005 during a transfer between two USAF bases, then sent on to Taiwan the following year. The items have now been returned to the U.S. but the breach of nuclear security and threat to non-proliferation was deemed serious enough that SecDef Gate's number two - Ryan Henry - described it as "intolerable" and said Bush had been personally briefed. The Pentagon are stressing that no nuclear materials were involved rather than that top-secret technology was sent to another nation and that the U.S. still wouldn't have known if the Taiwanese hadn't sent the damn things back!

"Pale Rider" and Blue Girl" at the Blue Girl, Red State blog have done a great job tracking down this story and have all the details. Blue Girl writes:

Without saying anything that I shouldn't - my husband spent his career working on electronics systems of ICBMs, so please believe me when I tell you this...it isn't about the nuclear material, and stressing that fissibles were not compromised, move along, nothing to see here...is a headfake.

These fuses are not what civilians think of when they hear the word "fuse." They are top-secret components in the electrical systems of ICBMs. The warhead is the easy part of a missile system. The hard part is the delivery vehicle - you don't deliver a nuclear payload by oxcart, you know. Compromising the electronics is possibly providing the final piece of information to a rogue state like North Korea that is openly developing missile technology to allow them to finally have a weapon that will reach the west coast. This is a big god-damned deal, and careers need to end over it.

So which careers are ending? None, so far, although the Pentagon are investigating. Congress might be too, after Blue Girl spoke to Senator Levin's staff on the Armed Services committee and got them to understand the seriousness of this security breach - especially after revelations a few months back about the Air Force blithely flying nuclear weapons around the country without knowing it. The SASC staffer said "I can assure you something will come of this."

We're Moving - 7 Days To Go

2008-03-25T12:35:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

In seven days - 1st April - we're moving to our new home at newshoggers.com, with a spiffy new look designed by our own Shamanic. We're finishing up the new site now and content will be mirrored there for the next week. After that, this blogger site will become simply an archive for our past posts and we'll put up a post redirecting readers to our new home.

We're really looking forward to this move, as it will radically improve the things we can do with Newshoggers going forward.

So get ready to update your readers, bookmarks and blogrolls. Newshoggers is on the move.

Good Job North Carolina

2008-03-25T08:58:00.001-05:00

Credible signals are costly signals.

North Carolina just sent a credible signal that they do not want to be tarred nor tolerate the appearance of massive corruption by overwhelmingly voting to expel a member of the state House of Representatives who is being investigated for allegedly engaging in fraud and embezzlement of up to $340,000.

the North Carolina General Assembly has voted to expel one of its own members. Representative Thomas Wright was expelled today after a vote of 109-5 in the NC House of Representatives, citing "unethical conduct" in regards to allegations of taking money fraudulently from donations.

Although he has not been convicted of any crimes at this time, Representative Wright has been charged with fraud and obstruction of justice and has been accused of mishandling both campaign money and funds donated to a non-profit. The trials for the six charges that involve around $340,000 in alleged mishandled funds and loans have not taken place yet.

This is good government, good sense and good politics as almost everyone involved can point out a concrete action that they took against self-dealing. It also serves as a deterrent to anyone who is interested in self-dealing. Good job North Carolina, and I wish Congress would take similiar actions against multiple members (from each party) as that would help restore some public trust in the institution.

Sadrists Stirring

2008-03-25T08:23:00.002-05:00

My colleague Eric has been raising an area of concern in that the Sadrist ceasefire is a tentative one that is conditional on the Sadrists not being targetting by the SIIC/Badr Brigades... whoops I meant the legitimate armed forces of Iraq, and the US military. As long as it is a live, and let live situation, the Sadrists were happy to reconsolidate their power and ride their popularity for being anti-American Shi'ite nationalists who support the poor with social services. However the situation looks like it could be changing.

Unfortunately, the attacks and targeting of members of the Sadrist current have continued - actually, they've heated up in recent weeks with informed speculation pointing to a coordinated attempt to weaken the Sadrist current ahead of regional elections (more on this below).

McClatchey is reporting on wide spread preperations for armed conflict between the JAM/Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades/SIIC/Iraqi military in multiple locations. The JAM appears to be on the defensive as they have won control of East Baghdad, and significant elements of riverside West Baghdad, as well as control of Basra, in conjunction with the Fadillah Party, an off-shoot Sadrist faction which is not loyal to Moqtada Sadr but follows another follower of Sadr's father.

A cease-fire critical to the improved security situation in Iraq appeared to unravel Monday when a militia loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr began shutting down neighborhoods in west Baghdad and issuing demands of the central government.

Simultaneously, in the strategic southern port city of Basra, where Sadr's Mahdi militia is in control, the Iraqi government launched a crackdown in the face of warnings by Sadr's followers that they'll fight government forces if any Sadrists are detained. By 1 a.m. Arab satellite news channels reported clashes between the Mahdi Army and police in Basra.

Last week, I noted that in Kut and other southern cities Sadrist groups were fighting against official government formations that are fighting for the interests of the SIIC. This could be the start of interesting times again after an intermediate pause as the dual pressures of internal urge to fight and external operations agaisnt Sadrist supporters may lead to increased combat intensity from Sadrists aligned fighters.

Update By Cernig The BBC reports that the fighting is spreading to other Iraqi cities and that the Sadrist ceasefire is very definitely over.

Heavy fighting has been raging in Basra as thousands of Iraqi troops battle Shia militias in the southern city.
At least 30 people have died in the operation, which is being overseen in Basra by Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki, a day after he vowed to "re-impose law".

Oil-rich Basra is in the grip of a bitter turf war between armed groups, including the Mehdi Army, analysts say.

Clashes have spread to other parts of Iraq, including Baghdad's Sadr City, where the Mehdi Army fought rival Shia.

The Mehdi Army - which supports radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr - has threatened a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience.

The powerful militia declared a truce last August which had been credited with helping restore stability to parts of Iraq.

...The BBC's Adam Brookes says three Iraqi army brigades were deployed from Baghdad to Basra as back-up for the offensive, and that up to 15,000 troops could be involved.

...Routes into Basra have been sealed off, according to reports.

One resident of the city told the BBC: "The streets are very dangerous, there's continuous exchange of fire in areas very close to my house, even though my neighbourhood is relatively safer than others."

The BBC's Paul Wood says the fighting in Basra can be seen as the government trying to impose law and order but also as part of the power struggle within the Shia community.

He says such intra-Shia violence could be just as dangerous to hopes of peace as sectarian hatreds or the insurgency.

The offensive comes a day after the authorities in Basra imposed an indefinite night-time curfew.

Police have now also imposed curfews in the cities of Kut, Samawa, Nasiriyah, Hilla and Diwaniyah.

Moqtada Sadr called for "general civil disobedience in Baghdad and the Iraqi provinces" if the attacks did not end.

In Sadr City, Mehdi Army fighters reportedly ordered Iraqi police and soldiers out of the district and there have been clashes between rival militias.

Hundreds of protesters marched in the Iraqi capital, calling on shops to shut.

The Mehdi Army also took control of several areas in Kut, 175km (110 miles) south-east of Baghdad.

Some, blinded by their own opinion of their intellect rather than applying themselves to serious thinking, have said that the Iran-backed nature of the SIIC and their Badr Brigade is irrelevant to all this, since the Iranians have proven themselves adept at bi-partisan backing of militia and terror groups elsewhere. That ignores entirely that the SIIC is also the largest part of the US-backed Iraqi central government and that the Badr Brigade has utterly penetrated the Iraqi security forces with central government comnnivance. What we have here is a faction-fight where one side has cloaked itself in the mantle of central authority and where both Iran and the US are backing that faction. That, surely, is noteworthy.

Be that as it may, the Sadrist ceasefire is surely over - something that may have accounted for a third or more of the drop in violence in Iraq. With Sunni Awakening members also calling for civil disobedience and national strikes in protest at their sidelining by the very same Shiite faction operating under the mask of central government authority, it looks very like that Shiite faction will respond against any such actions in the same way. They've already said they won't countenance the Awakening becoming a serious threat to their power, after all. The chances of any political reconciliation and continued drops in violence look very slim indeed. The wiondow has closed.

Political home building --- politics of structure

2008-03-25T05:50:00.005-05:00

I think the most powerful explanation of Hillary Clinton's actions is that she is engaged in a winner take all competition with a thin but plausible hope of victory and is working towards that goal. I reject the hypothesis that she is setting herself up for a 2012 run against President McCain after sabotaging Obama's chances. The internal political logic is too convoluted as her base is demographically maxed out in providing her net margins and it will worsen over time for her.

If each campaign was a home construction firm, most campaigns would have built houses suitable for Dennis Kucinich on Jupiter, very low floors of initial bedrock support and fairly low ceilings. The home would be good for gnomes. John Edwards built a home good for the Artic circle with strong walls and a steep slope roof to allow the snow and support to rapidly fall off. Barrack Obama's campaign has built a home suitable for Manute Bol or Yao Ming --- low floors and very high ceilings.

The Clinton campaign has built a very different house as her structural advantages and disadvantages going into the campaign were very different. She had very high floors, but fairly low ceilings, she it was built for dwarfs in a low gravity environment. She knew that she had a solid 30% to 40% of the Democratic primary electorate attached to her hip, but gaining the remaining ten to twenty points to assemble either a majority or a sufficient plurality would be very difficult. She has had little room to grow, as this chart depicting the non-Gore opinion polling trends from Pollster.com shows.

Over eighteen months of campaigning she has added roughly 20% of her initial support to her coalition. And she has not picked up too many supporters from her opponents who dropped out. Obama on the other hand has more than doubled his initial support levels. This dynamic played out as Clinton was running as a quasi-incumbent with significant institutional, name recognition and organizational support. She did a good job of consolidating that support into a real and viable coalition unlike Joe Lieberman in 2004, but she has not been able to grow her base significantly.

In the counterfactual of an Obama nomination and an Obama loss in the general election, even if it is seen that Hillary Clinton was an excellent surrogate and supporter for Obama, she is weaker in June 2010 than she was in June 2006 as the Clinton nostalgia is a bit weaker, the demographics of the Democratic primary electorate are less favorable, the activists will be looking for something different and her fundamental problem remains. She can attract a significant coalition within the Democratic Party but that coalition will almost certainly be matched by an equal or greater anti-Clinton coalition. She knew that going into this cycle that would be the case, and her counter-plan to it was to run against multiple anti-Clintons, have them split the vote, win Iowa and New Hampshire to set up an information cascade in her favor and close out on Super Tuesday against one or more weakened opponents. Not a bad plan but reality intervened.

2012 is an absurd theory when the structure of the Democratic primary universe is less favorable than 2008 for Hillary Clinton.

I was not planning to write more on this subject, but 3,000 hits later, it is evident that people wanted to read some more.

Pennsylvania Delegate Spreads by District

2008-03-25T05:13:00.002-05:00

As Pennsylvania's primary creeps closer, more and more people will be making delegate predictions. I would like us to focus on what the key values are for the different districts. Using GreenPapers as my starting point, I calculated the following cut-off points for Candidate X to receive Y net pledged delegates by district in Pennsylvania. I am also using the 85% rule so that if a candidate wins 85% of the popular vote in a Congressional District, they win all the available pledged delegates even if using the formula of the larger remainder, their opponent would have been entitled to one pledged delegate. Any errors of calculation are mine and mine alone.

Barney Frank will push to legalize marijuana

2008-03-24T18:58:00.002-05:00

By Libby

I've been meaning to get to this one all weekend. Nicole Bell flags a story on Barney Frank's excellent intentions.

“I’m going to file a bill as soon as we go back to remove all federal penalties for the possession or use of small amounts of marijuana,” Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, told Maher.

“I finally got to the point where I think I can get away with it,” he said.

Frank said he thinks “its time for the politicians in this one to catch up to the public. The notion that you lock people up for smoking marijuana is pretty silly.”

Nicole thinks it won't go anywhere.

I am totally for legalization of marijuana, but I have to differ with Frank on this: to think that at this time with this administration that you could get away with a bill legalizing pot actually is what sounds silly.

I'd agree with her that the chances are slim to none of such a bill getting to the floor, much less passing in an election year, but in terms of Frank's personal strategy, it makes complete sense.

Barney is a long time advocate for marijuana policy reform and there is a large constituency in MA that supports legalization, or at least decrim. Further, marijuana reform is a hot issue in the Commonwealth this year. He has nothing to lose by bringing it forward and he will only endear himself further to an active and growing reform movement in the Commonwealth.

I don't know if he's facing any serious competition in a reelection bid, but he's smart to position himself to be able to tap into a well organized community of activists who will surely support his campaign. Besides, he's right. It is silly to be jailing tens of thousands of Americans for ingesting a natural herb.

Why defeating McCain matters

2008-03-24T17:56:00.003-05:00

By Libby

I can sum it up in the six words represented by the acronym SCOTUS. The impact of these appointments span generations, not just terms of office. Does anyone really want to take a chance on tilting the court any further to the right than this?

When the U.S. Supreme Court two years ago limited the First Amendment protections available to public employees, faculty groups thought that they had dodged a bullet. While the decision didn’t go the way professors hoped, it specifically indicated that additional issues might limit its application in cases involving public college professors.[...]

The Supreme Court case that has set off this concern has nothing to do with higher education. Rather, in Garcetti v. Ceballos, the court ruled 5 to 4 that normal First Amendment protections did not protect Richard Ceballos, a Los Angeles deputy district attorney who was demoted and transferred after criticizing a local sheriff’s conduct to his supervisors. In his decision, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote: “We hold that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.”

Employer discipline? For whistleblowing? I can't imagine a greater need for First Amendment protection than in exposing wrongdoing. Especially in our justice system. But now this ill-advised precedent is being applied more broadly.

In the current case, Juan Hong, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California at Irvine, maintains that he was unfairly denied a merit raise because comments he made in faculty meetings offended superiors. Some of those comments concerned personnel decisions. More generally, Hong said that his department was relying too much on part-time instructors to teach lower-division courses, and that students were entitled to full-time professors.

The district court dismissed the suit, saying that these discussions were part of the “official duties” of professors, and thus under the Garcetti decision were not entitled to First Amendment protection. The court did not determine whether the lost merit raise was related to the comments, and the faculty groups’ brief focuses on the legal principles, not the specific cases.

I don't get the logic of that decision either. How is criticizing the administration part of the 'official duties?' Is it in the job description? The plaintiff's brief argues that "[t]he speech of university professors merits a special degree of protection...". I'd argue that every citizen deserves an unfettered degree of protection for dissent. But as the article notes, this isn't entirely unexpected.

While the brief expresses shock that the Garcetti decision would apply in higher education, the dissent in the 2006 ruling suggested just that possibility. Justice David Souter wrote that the majority decision “is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today’s majority does not mean to imperil the First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write ‘pursuant to official duties.’ ”

I don't think it's all that much of a stretch to imagine a day when this decision is ultimately used to squelch all criticism of the government by any citizen. If we allow a Republican nominee to fill the next vacancy, and there will almost surely be one in the next term, I'd say it's more than just a little possible.

Cheney On 4,000 Dead - Bush "Carries Biggest Burden"

2008-03-24T17:39:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

Dick Cheney, what a wanker.

I want to start with the milestone today of 4,000 dead in Iraq. Americans. And just what effect do you think it has on the country?" asked ABC News' White House correspondent, Martha Raddatz...

"It obviously brings home I think for a lot of people the cost that's involved in the global war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan," Cheney said in the interview, conducted in Turkey. "It places a special burden obviously on the families, and we recognize, I think — it's a reminder of the extent to which we are blessed with families who've sacrificed as they have."

"The president carries the biggest burden, obviously," Cheney said. "He's the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans, but we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm's way for the rest of us."

Hat tip to Noah Shachtman at Danger Room, who who is just as outraged that Cheney thinks Dubya's burden is greater than those of the families of 4,000 dead. Noah also has a link to ABC's video and no, the above isn't taken out of context.

What a great way to show you support the troops and their families, Dick. Tell them that they volunteered so if their families should suffer..."so?"

Hey, Dubya volunteered too. He didn't have to run for Decider and he didn't have to invade Iraq - he chose to do both. Nor has he ever been anywhere near harms way as a consequence of those decisions. Excuse me while I don't join in your warmonger's group hug, Dick.

Hey, can someone in the press ask John McCain if he thinks the President carries the biggest burden on this one? Pretty please?

More than words

2008-03-24T15:50:00.002-05:00

By Libby [Updated]

Well my colleagues have been burning up the blog with their hot posts today so I'm just going to direct to you Spencer Ackerman's article based on interviews with Obama's foreign policy team. I found it through Media Matt, whom I think was impressed. Spencer was clearly impressed and it raised my respect for Obama, and even, dare I say, raised my hope that maybe he really means all that inspiring rhetoric about change and has the courage to follow through on it.

Of course, there's no sure way to predict what any candidate will do once they win, but I think it's the must read of the day for anybody who thinks Obama lacks substance.

Update: To be clear, but I wasn't so much impressed with his team. They actually scare me a bit. But then so does everybody's team. Too many old school conventional wisdom types for me.

I do like that his team at least seems to be somewhat diversified but that isn't what impressed me either. What impressed me was that he assembled a smart team but rejected their political counsel to back off from the "ending the mindset" messaging as being too politically dangerous.

I think his instincts on this are good and I'm almost believing that he's sincere about trying to do it after reading this piece.

If You Kill My Dog, I'ma Slay Your Cat

2008-03-24T14:24:00.002-05:00

Over the past couple of months, I have been sounding the alarm that the US military and its allies in the Iraqi government are pushing too hard against Moqtada al-Sadr, such that he might be forced to lift the cease fire in place since last Spring/Summer. Thankfully, in late February, Sadr extended that cease-fire as its expiration date approached. Still, at the time I warned:

While this is a positive development (both for US forces and, consequently, Mahdi Army forces), it is important to remember that this declaration of truce is not exactly a binding contract. It is entirely contingent on developments on the ground, namely the extent to which raids on Sadr's cadres (even non-militia members) persist.

Unfortunately, the attacks and targeting of members of the Sadrist current have continued - actually, they've heated up in recent weeks with informed speculation pointing to a coordinated attempt to weaken the Sadrist current ahead of regional elections (more on this below). A couple of weeks back, Sadr hinted at an adjustment in the parameters of the cease-fire that would carve out a pretty substantial loophole:

The normally reclusive Sheikh Sadr released his second statement in three days responding to a list of questions from followers...
"If a military war is conducted against us by the occupiers we will defend ourselves," Sheikh Sadr said in the four-page statement bearing his personal seal.
"Self-defence against the occupiers is beyond discussion."

Sure enough, yesterday, the AP reported:

[R]ockets pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad and a wave of attacks left at least 61 Iraqis dead nationwide. [...]
The attacks followed a series of clashes last week between U.S. and Iraqi forces and factions of the Mahdi Army, the biggest Shiite militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

A telling, if somewhat understated, paragraph from the AP article:

Al-Sadr's followers have accused the Shiite-dominated government of exploiting the cease-fire to target the cleric's supporters in advance of provincial elections expected this fall and demanded the release of supporters rounded up in recent weeks. [emphasis added]

It is no secret that America's main ally in Iraq (and Iran's), the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), is likely to lose ground to the more popular Sadrist current in the upcoming provincial elections (the Sadrist current boycotted the 2005 round). Absent some extracurricular activities to level the playing field that is. As Cernig noted, quoting an AP article on Friday, ISCI, whose Iran-trained militia (the Badr Corp.) has heavily infiltrated Iraqi Security Forces, has been moving aggressively (in tandem with US forces) to help overcome what it lacks in popular appeal:

A Sadrist member of parliament alleged that the crackdown in Kut and elsewhere in the south was part of a move by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa party and [ISCI] to prevent al-Sadr's followers from winning control of key southern provinces in provincial elections expected this fall.
"They have no supporters in the central and southern provinces, but we do," Ahmed al-Massoudi told the AP. "If the crackdown against the Sadrists continues, we will begin consultations with other parliamentary blocs to bring down the government and replace it with a genuinely national one."

The maneuvering continues today (from the first AP article cited above):

Also Monday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki relieved the top two security officials in Basra, Iraq's second largest city, officials said. The move is a sign of growing concern about security in the nation's oil capital since British forces handed over control of the city last year.
Two Iraqi officials said the police chief of Basra, Maj. Gen. Abdul-Jalil Khalaf, and the commander of the city's joint military-police operation, Lt. Gen. Mohan al-Fireji, have been replaced.

The timing is not the product of mere happenstance - nor should Basra's importance in the Shiite political game be underestimated. Also, as translated from Al Hayat by Badger:

As the level of tension rises between the Iraqi government and the American forces on the one side, and the Mahdi Army on the other, the British Defence Minister went back on a previous plan to reduce their forces in Basra from 4100 to 2500, given the preparations that the Iraqi army is making for a broad operation against Shiite militias in that city.

I wonder if this "progress" is part of what Cheney promised his allies in ISCI in order to get them to withdraw their veto of the law which contained provisions for regional elections. Regardless, Brandon Friedman is right to be concerned with the recent spike in US casualties. If we continue to side with ISCI in its efforts to cripple Sadr through massive purges, arrests and violent confrontations ahead of the October elections (in support of the democratization of Iraq, natch), our forces will begin to sustain higher casualties as the Sadrists fight back.

Sadr might be making alternative plans himself - finally forging one of those long sought after cross-sectarian alliances. This one would be centered around one of the more popular platforms going in terms of cross-sect appeal: putting US forces on a firm schedule for withdrawal.

Democratic Coalition Analysis

2008-03-24T14:12:00.001-05:00

Jerome Armstrong at MyDD is misreading my argument that Clinton's demographic base is about maxed out. I wrote:

Clinton's demographic base within the Democratic Party is facing a much weaker version of the shrinking core demographic problem that the Republicans are facing. With the exception of her strong support among Hispanic voters, her coalition is maxed-out. [emphasis added for this post]

Jerome argues something that I am not quite sure as to what he is responding to as I am arguing that there is not a whole lot space for the Clinton coalition to grow and he is arguing that it is a large base. Two very different points.

calling Clinton's base "shrinking" while she's energized the biggest bloc of growing voters in Latinos, and increased the turnout of women to about 60 percent on average of the total vote, seems very odd

Clinton's base is older, more female, more white, more Hispanic, less black, less 'Creative Class' and more likely to self-identify as Democrats than the entire Democratic primary electorate. Hillary Clinton currently has support of roughly 45% of the party, Barrack Obama has the support of 45% of the party and 10% don't know or are floating between candidates.

So what are the trends moving forward and where is there room for Clinton's coalition to expand to fifty percent of the party in 2012? That is the question that I am asking and not the one that Jerome is responding to. We both agree that Hillary Clinton has done an excellent job of mobilizing her core support demographics. The question is where are those demographics in four years. The data will be pulled from the Open Left composite primary exit poll.

The Democratic Party is getting less white every year. This means for Clinton to expand upon the net margin provided by her winning the white vote 50:42 she would need to add several additional points just to stay even as the white slice of the Democratic pie has gotten smaller. She may be able to reduce the net margin in 2012 within the African American vote but given the premise of the scenario is a murder-suicide pact to take down Obama, or at least the perception thereof, this would be difficult. She is winning the Latino vote by large margins, so it would be difficult for her to increase her margins here. However if she holds her margin steady, she picks up a net point or two due to changes in Democratic Party composition.

Women make up 58% of the Democratic primary electorate. Hillary Clinton is doing very well here, but again where is the space for net margin growth if she has already effectively maxed out her support here? What is the probability that women will make up 61%, 62%, 63% of the Democratic electorate in 2012?

The Baby Boomer age cohorts are not a particularly friendly age cohort for Democrats while the Millenial cohort (of which I am an old borderline member) is a very Democratic friendly cohort. The oldest members of the Millenial cohort are just beginning to enter their prime voting years, and in 2012 will make up a proportionally larger share of the Democratic Party electorate. And right now they are voting for candidates other than Hillary Clinton. This will probably produce a net negative of a point or two in this analysis for Hillary Clinton in 2012. The same applies to people who identify as Creative Class individuals --- urban, highly educated, white collar workers; this is a growing sphere that Clinton has been losing.

So in this relatively static analysis, Hillary Clinton has assembled a large coalition within the Demcoratic primary electorate that is roughly 45% of the party in 2008. Her opponent has done the same thing. The difference is that the Clinton coalition, all else being equal, has much less demographic space to grow, with the exception fo the Latino vote, while the Obama coalition should grow in relative size within the Democratic primary electorate in 2012.

Yes, of course, we can assume that political operatives can read demographics as well or better than I can, so campaigns will change their pitches and priorities, but the Clinton coalition is more vulnerable to shrinkage than the Obama coalition over the next couple of cycles.

The Uncommitted Republican

2008-03-24T13:36:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

Chuck Hagel is almost the model of a sane and moderate Republican, the kind we Lefties wish more of those across the political divide were like. He's also a decorated Vietnam veteran and a widely-respected moderately-conservative voice on American foreign policy. Which makes it interesting indeed that he won't endorse John McCain, citing fundamental foreign policy disagreements. ABC yesterday:

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R - Neb., said this morning he is not ready to endorse Sen. John McCain, R - Ariz., for president.

"I think endorsements, at least when I endorse someone, or when I work for someone, or commit to someone, I want to be behind that person in every way I can," Hagel said in an exclusive "This Week" interview.

Hagel pointed to their differing views over foreign policy in explaining his hesitation. "I've obviously got some differences with John on the Iraq war. That's no secret. I want to understand a little more about foreign policy, where he'd want to go. Certainly doesn't put me in Obama or Clinton's camp. But John and I have some pretty fundamental disagreements on the future of foreign policy," he said.

Like Hagel counts the Iraq occupation as one of the five biggest blunders in American history while McCain would be happy if it continued for another 100 years. Hagel thinks Bush's policy in Iraq is "ping pong game with American lives" while McCain wants more of the same. And despite the crowing of the pro-Surge crowd, who have ignored all Petraeus' warnings in their rush to cry "mission accomplished" once again, it looks like the window of opportunity is nearly closed and Hagel will be proven right.

Tensions are simmering again in once bloody Anbar province, Washington's prize good news story for security in Iraq.

Along the main road through Anbar's second city of Falluja, a former insurgent stronghold and scene of fierce battles with U.S. forces in 2004, markets and car workshops are re-opening for business.

But many say that growing anger at a lack of jobs, basic services and political progress threatens to shatter peace in the western province, which makes up about a third of Iraq.

"The situation till now is still not certain in Anbar, and the peace is only relative to before. Calm always comes before a storm," Sunni tribal leader Sheikh Yaseen al-Badrani said.

The U.S. military said in January it could transfer security responsibility for Anbar to Iraqi forces as early as this month, but now it is more cautious.

In an interview with Reuters, Major-General John Kelly, commander of U.S. forces in Anbar, would give no time-frame, saying only that the handover would take place soon.

Sunni tribal leaders, credited with cutting violence in Anbar by ordering their men to turn on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, are growing increasingly impatient with politicians.

"We thought that when security was established in Anbar, then the situation would turn to development and reconstruction, but we're surprised to see neglect from the government," said Kamal Nouri, a member of Anbar's tribal council.

Sawhar councilmen are already calling for a national strike of Awakening members - something the central government will either ignore or see as a threat to its authority. The first will see a slow return to insurgency of non-cooperative Sunni militias, the second will see that happen swiftly and explosively. At just the same time, Muqtada al-Sadr's feud with the central coalition of Dawa and SIIC parties has become impossible for Ayatollah Sistani to continually manage and defuse. There's a storm coming in.

I'm going to be called a doom-monger and defeatist by the pro-occupation Right for this, I know. They said the same when their belief that US troops would be greeted as liberators was questioned, when they were told that the insurgency was more complex than just Al Qaeda foreign fighters, when people wrote that the glaring gaps in the Iraqi constitution would lead to sectarian violence, when we said Mookie wasn't dead yet (repeatedly), when we said that the Sunni Awakening was an aliance of convenience...

McCain's Lobbyist Hypocrisy

2008-03-24T12:21:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

McCain says he wants lobbyists out of politics while employing a whole bunch of them in key campaign positions. Whodathunkit?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has condemned the influence of "special interest lobbyists," yet dozens of lobbyists have political and financial ties to his presidential campaign — particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate.

Of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for the Arizona senator or raising money for his presidential campaign, 23 have lobbied for telecommunications companies in the past decade, Senate lobbying disclosures show.

McCain has netted about $765,000 in political donations from those telecom lobbyists, their spouses, colleagues at their firms and their telecom clients during the past decade, a USA TODAY analysis of campaign-finance records shows.

It's unclear how much more money those lobbyists have raised for McCain. Eighteen of them are listed by the campaign as "bundlers," which are major fundraisers. McCain doesn't disclose how much each bundler has raised — unlike Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who categorize their bundlers by the amount they raise.

McCain is the top recipient of campaign donations from telecom companies in this election cycle with $165,000 and received another $400,000 from internet companies and $453,000 from lobbyists so far.

McCain's been a vocal supporter of telecoms and internet companies in his position as a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the telecom industry and the Federal Communications Commission.

He has repeatedly pushed industry-backed legislation since 2000, particularly during a second stint as committee chairman from 2003 through 2005. His efforts to eliminate taxes and regulations on telecommunications services won him praise from industry executives.

And there certainly seems to be a link between his support for the industry and his campaign team:

People who lobbied for telecom companies on those issues include McCain's campaign manager, his deputy manager, his finance chief, his top unpaid political adviser and his Senate chief of staff. Telecom companies have paid the lobbying firms that employed those top five McCain advisersmore than $4.4 million since 1999, lobbying records show.

The McCain campaign, of course, denies that he does favors in return for campaign back-scratching. But given those facts that denial looks very slim. It appears to be a case of "do what I say, not what I do".

I know it won't get as much attention, but it could be argued that the revelation of these lobbyist connections should be even more damaging than the recent uproar over "Obama's pastor". After all, what can Obama do even if he secretly agrees with Wright ( a highly doubtful proposition to begin with) - pack his cabinet with white-hating zealots? But if McCain packs his cabinet and the White House with revolving-door lobbyists it actually could (and probably would) affect government policy. Closing the revolving door being lobbying and government, which has led to so much corruption and mutual back-scratching, is one of the things McCain is supposed to stand for - but his choice of campaign team says otherwise.

Stop it already

2008-03-24T11:22:00.002-05:00

by shamanic

I will vote for the Democratic nominee, but this kind of stuff is an admission of defeat and tells me that the candidate in question should bow out now. I don't know how else to read it. "If we substitute some other metric for the actual way we do things, clearly my candidate would win!"

Quit it. If your campaign has now conceded there's no way to win, it's time to drop out.

And again: I will vote for the eventual nominee, so if that isn't what the campaign is saying, feel free. But if there's no way for Candidate A to win at this late date, Candidate A should withdraw.

Keeping the Garbage in the Public OODA Loop

2008-03-24T10:40:00.003-05:00

Barry Ritzholtz at the Big Picture raised an interesting question this weekend that I think it vital --- why do we tolerate or even encourage a Garbage In-Garbage Out OODA loop. He raised it in the context of investing, but I think this goes beyond the economy:

Why have we as a nation been increasingly reluctant to confront objective reality? What is it about the present social mood, political leadership, and economic envrionment that has so totally led us to a world of denial. Up is down, black is white, good is bad --- its all very Orwellian..

There are multiple reasons here, and I just want to look at two. The first is a structural economic argument that our society has become more of a jackpot society than a steady-gainer society. The second is we have a series of perverse incentives set up to encourage bad decision making and discourage good decision making.

Earlier today I analyzed why the Clinton campaign is engaging in a very low probability bid to win the Democratic nomination as I rejected the set-up for 2012 option. I zeroed in on structure of the contest and the lack of viable agreement enforcement mechanisms.

We live in a jackpot society where the winner takes all and the loser has very little recourse. The nomination process is the ultimate jackpot.....

the traditional response to a single iteration jackpot, single winner, complete losers game is to go all in for as long as one has the resources to play in the hopes that something shakes the right way for you just as the jackpot is declared. The odds suck, but bad odds are better than zero odds. So I don't think Clinton is playing for 2012 as that scenario does not make a whole lot of sense, she is playing for now with a good strategy given a horrendous prospect of success

We are a jackpot society today in which a single big score is all one needs to be set for life. Marginal differences in initial endowment of skills, combined with luck, combined with much higher levels of intergenerational income correlation means that two very similiar people will have very different income paths. Furthermore, the jackpots (unless you can hit a curve) keep changing locations, encouraging chasing behavior. We saw this with the tech bubble as Pets.com got funded, and then we saw it again in 2004-2006 with speculative flippers entering the market with the hope that if they could just flip two or three projects, they would be good for the next five years.

And if the leap for a big score fails, there is always a bail-out of some sorts. The question is who gets the bail-out and who pays for it....

Robert Reich argues that moral hazard for large players has been expanding and accelerating with a string of large scale bail-outs that have occurred because XYZ was too systemically important to be allowed to fail. And to avoid these failures, the risk was nationalized and the rewards privatized. One way sure thing bets are a great way for the house to lose money.

When it comes to risky behavior in the market, America has a double standard. We're told that economic risk-taking as the key to entrepreneurial success, but when big entrepreneurs take big risks that fail it's amazing how often they get bailed out. Indeed, the history of modern American business is littered with federal bailouts, loan guarantees, and no-questions-asked reorganizations. Some are well known, such as the Chrylser bailout of 1979, the savings and loan bailout of 1989, and the airline bailout of 2001. Most occur in the relative dark, such as the 1998 bailout of giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (courtesy of former Fed chair Alan Greenspan), the not infrequent bailouts of under-funded corporate pension plans by the government's Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, price supports for big agribusinesses facing market downturns, or the current bailout of Wall Street being engineered by Ben Bernanke's Fed. Behind every one of these bailouts are CEOs or financial executives who were rescued from their bad bets.

Nouriel Roubini argues that the Federal Reserve's recent actions to backstop JP Morgan's buy-out/bail out of Bear Stearns is a continuation in this trend of encouraging moral hazard and thus excerbating bad decision making:

In the Bear Stearns case it has been argued that there was no bailout as the shareholders of Bear have been effectively wiped out. This argument is incorrect in many dimensions. First, since Bear was insolvent shareholders should have been wiped out 100%; the residual value of their equity – however little at $200m - means that they still fully own the firm and that they would benefit from increases in the market value of the firm that may derive from the liquidity support that the Fed provided if the JPMorgan deal does not go through.

since Bear was insolvent closing it down without the Fed loan would have implied that not only shareholders would have been wiped out 100% but also that other creditors of Bear – who lent without properly considering the significant risks that they were undertaking – would have suffered significant losses. Instead the Fed bailout made such creditors of Bear whole, a most disturbing and moral hazard laden outcome.....

Third, not only Bear shareholders were not fully wiped out as they would have been if Bear had been allowed to go bankrupt; but all the senior management of Bear has been kept in place – starting with that reckless golf and bridge-AWOL Jimmy Cayne – when a proper solutions would have been to fire them all without any golden parachute or rich severance package.

So we have a jackpot society where being massively wrong is not neccessarily a bad thing as the costs of being wrong have systemically been passed along to others. And this leads to the second area of delusion, as the incentives are not properly lined up to encourage people to be good decision makers. I'll work with the run-up to the Iraq war and the housing bubble as my example.

Being right has not been a good career move. The social conventions and the political calculation argue against good judgment if that judgment results in emotionally unsatisfying actions. In 2002, Bill Clinton argued that the Democrats lost the mid-term elections because too much of the party was concerned about being right instead of appearing strong:

When people are feeling insecure, they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.

Jim Henley got the basic take on the invasion and occupation right, it was going to be a cluster f*ck and a fiasco for multiple reasons and the incompetence dodge is an invalid dodge. However, he is writing his retrospective on his decision process at his personal blog of a few thousand hits per day while the people who have systemically been wrong on one of the major foreign policy questions of the day are still being held up as serious thinkers in major, elite opinion validating forums. Dave at the Glittering Eye has the taxonomy of judgement analysis, and it is a brutal in the dodges people have used to explain their reasoning. As Thersites at Eschaton notes, quite a bit of support for the war among elite decision makers was on the basis of opposition to the people opposing the war --- the DFHs had to be proven wrong.

Furthermore, the entrenched bureaucracies and mindsets know that admitting that they are wrong will have severe personal impacts within their social networks. For instance, John Robb of Global Guerrillas is passing along a tidbit that one of the Army's premiere think tanks rejects the entire concept of 4th Generation Warfare and other unconventional, alternative paradigm thinking despite the fact that the 4GWers have been much closer to reality in their verifiable predictions than traditional defense thinkers.

So being right is a good way to be marginalized for being right. And this does not apply only to Iraq and defense analysis. Paul Krugman was dismissed as being 'shrill' when he correctly noted that the numbers in the Bush campaigns did not add up, and that there was a pattern of deceitful behavior. Nouriel Roubini and Brad Setser have been noted as 'perma-bears' and gloomsters for noting that what can not go on forever will not go on forever. And now some of their earlier pessimistic estimates are now looking to be a bit too rosy. Being right is not a good career move.

But why are these incentives that encourage bad decision making and discourages good decision making so common --- that is the question Barry raised, and one I have skirted around as I have discussed some of the mechanisms instead of the root causes of tolerating or encouraging a corrupted OODA loop.

I don't have too many good answers beyond the fact that we as a society have been rich enough for long enough to be able to afford to be flattered by fantasy instead of working towards reality. Furthermore, I imagine that the greater concentrations of wealth allows for a greater concentration of messaging in support of a version of fantasy that is profitable to the funders of fantasy than a counterfactual of lower societal influence and wealth Gini coeffciecients. But at this point I am speculating instead of analyzing.

Clinton, odds and 2012

2008-03-24T08:08:00.002-05:00

My good buddy Kyle at Comments from Left Field is raising and smashing a line of argument about Hillary Clinton's motives for continuing in the Democratic primary despite having a minimal chance of actually achieiving her goals. And this line of speculation I think is wrong once you step back from the immediate primary fight and look at the surrounding reality. I just want to add a bit on Kyle's work.

If you missed it, all the 2012 theorem really means is that Hillary Clinton is trying to destroy Barack Obama's chances of beating John McCain this fall so that Clinton can challenge him in four years.

I don't think that anyone really expects Clinton to wait her turn through a two term presidency and try and make another run at it when she's sixty-eight. And even if she did, it is not likely that she would be the Vice Presidential pick for Obama meaning that she would have to face an uphill battle against someone who would be the presumptive nominee following an eight year Obama administration.

So, on the surface, there seems to be some plausibility to the idea that she may be setting herself up for another shot at the White House in four years. But upon further scrutiny, one finds failed logic with this idea as well.

If the Clinton campaign is setting up a 2012 strategy now, it is failing for much the same reason her 2008 strategy is failing; negativity. Indeed, the fatal flaw in executing a strategy that gives Obama the nomination but makes him unelectable is that it requires burning too many bridges.

Clinton's demographic base within the Democratic Party is facing a much weaker version of the shrinking core demographic problem that the Republicans are facing. With the exception of her strong support among Hispanic voters, her coalition is maxed-out. She does well with seniors who already participate at very high rates, she does well among whites who also participate at high rates, and she does well with the middle aged who participate at decent rates and are getting older. She has not demonstrated a capacity to expand her very large base in any meaningful demographic. And in 2012 if McCain is President, she will have minimal good will in the portions of the Democratic coalition that are rapidly growing in either numbers or participation rates. And her competitors will know that they can raise dollar for dollar against her so the intimidation factor would be minimized in this scenario.

Finally, there are two more reasons to doubt the 2012 strategy. The first is that Al Gore is about the only losing Democratic nominee who has had the long term respect and influence within the party. Running and losing in either the primary or the general election in order to gain experience for the next run is a viable strategy within the Democratic Party for the House, but it has not been the case for the White House. Secondly, she will be 61 on Election Day 2008, and thus would be 65 on Election Day 2012, and I think the optics and acceptance of the American people voting for a senior citizen female for President is not there.

So what is driving the Clinton campaign, especially as some insiders are giving it a 10% chance of winning the nomination?

We live in a jackpot society where the winner takes all and the loser has very little recourse. The nomination process is the ultimate jackpot. The winner takes control of the party machinery for the next cycle, and the loser(s) have minimal agreement enforcement mechanisms at their disposal. And if the winner takes the White House in November, the losers have no real enforcement mechanisms that are particulary viable, especially if one projects the Democrats increasing their hold on the House and Senate. Defection does not work.

So the traditional response to a single iteration jackpot, single winner, complete losers game is to go all in for as long as one has the resources to play in the hopes that something shakes the right way for you just as the jackpot is declared. The odds suck, but bad odds are better than zero odds. So I don't think Clinton is playing for 2012 as that scenario does not make a whole lot of sense, she is playing for now with a good strategy given a horrendous prospect of success.

3/24 Pennsylvania Primary Observations

2008-03-24T07:40:00.001-05:00

For a couple of enjoyable but meaningless reasons, this weekend turned into a very lazy weekend for me. Not a problem, I needed one of those, especially as I know during the next ten weeks I'll be working straight through with maybe one or two days off. Thankfully the weekend work is diametrically opposite of my week-day work so it still serves as a change of pace. But I was unable to do as much digging as I wanted to do this weekend on the Pennsylvania campaigns of Obama and Clinton.

Obama in the city is winning the yard sign war
I have heard at least a couple of Obama TV ads (I was making a sandwhich and feeding the cats) but I have not seen them yet.
I have not seen any paid Clinton media
Both campaigns have until end of business today to finish their pre-primary registration drives. Registrations or changes in affiliation need to be postmarked by today to qualify a Democrat as eligible to vote in the primary.
I am seeing a lot of buttons/stickers for both candidates. They are being worn by whom you would expect (white 20 somethings and all ages African Americans for Obama, older white women for Clinton)
Both campaigns or their supporters. independently, are targetting the bus routes for voter registration. Since last Thursday, I have taken 7 bus trips and on 5 of them, someone is asking people seat by seat if they want to registrer to vote. Whomever put this together is smart.
On the issue of this being too divise of a primary season and the supporters of the losing candidate sitting out or defecting to McCain in November, I don't put a whole lot of credence into that pattern of behavior for November. I respect the intensity of emotions and depth of committment BUT I've been through nasty primaries before and usually what happens is the vast majority of the other candidates' supporters spend a couple of days/weeks drinking heavily and then re-engage with the nominee. I know a good chunk of Southwest PA for Kerry in the 2004 cycle was the Dean volunteers who took a little bit of time to mourn their losses and then got off their asses.
Early spring primaries are so much nicer to canvas for then mid fall general elections as it looks like the weather will turn out to be pretty good for this weekend.

An ephipany on the primaries

2008-03-23T17:10:00.002-05:00

By Libby

I realized what is really bothering me about progressive bloggers who have gone partisan in the primary battle. Obama supporters seem to spend more time talking about Clinton and vice versa for Clinton supporters, than their own preferred candidates. Meanwhile, it's like the disaster otherwise known as conservative politics and the GOP has ceased to exist.

Checking the buzz today I see my plea for unity has had a negligible effect. Skippy noticed it too and has this to say.

but to mark's question: yes, you did miss the memo, mark. the left side of blogtopia (and yes, we coined that phrase) did agree a few months ago to abandon principled debate in favor of duplicitiousness, invective and logical fallacies in lieu of actual points and structured argument.

we're sorry, we didn't keep the memo, so we can't really tell you exactly when this was decided, but we're pretty sure it was sometime early in the primary season.

that's when lefty's decided it was not only all right to utulize the same unprincipled screaming tactics to pollute public discourse as the righties, but it was also quite acceptable to use them against fellow progressives.

My unity plea engendered a private email exchange among a few bloggers and the critical response surprised me. So let me add to skippy's observation, an abbreviated summary of what I told that group in one last attempt to find some comity.

I don't love either Democratic candidate but despite my own protestations to the contrary from last year, I'm going to vote for the Democrat no matter who it is because another four years of Republican administration, especially under McCain, would destroy anything remaining that is good about this country.

Presuming we can prevent that, no matter who is elected, we are not going to get the progressive agenda we want. Politicians lie, all of them. They tell you what you want to hear, but they don't deliver much. Did we get what we thought we would out of 06? What makes anybody think that's going to be different in 08? Whoever gets in, we're still going to have to fight for our agenda every step of the way. With a Democrat, any Democrat, at least we have a better chance of succeeding. I would think that would be more important than which Democrat it ends up being.

I'm not suggesting self-censorship so much as I'm saying to choose our battles well, and deploy our ammunition wisely in furtherance of the long term goal. Nobody can blog about everything. We consciously choose our topics on any given day, so why not choose to spend our energy targeting the final opponent, the Republican, instead of sniping at the guys on our side, one of whom will ultimately carry our banner into the deciding contest?

Ask yourselves if any of these points of disagreement that we now have with each other are going to feel all that important if McCain ends up appointing the next Supreme Court justice and comes on teevee to announce he just had to bomb Iran because the AQ are there. As far as I can see, as long as we're sniping at our own candidates, we're doing the wingnuts' oppo work for them.

If you believe in your candidate so much that you want to vehemently support them, fine, but how hard is it to promote them by highlighting their superiority to the GOP candidate, instead of why they're superior to the other Democrat? The contest is so close either one could end up pulling this out. We have a named GOP opponent who is running to beat all of us, and whose transgressions are being ignored and excused by his free booze addled, barbecue bribed press corps.

As far as I can see, when someone makes their case by tearing down another Democrat instead of targeting the Republican, they're building a frame for the GOP, not advancing progressive values. For myself, I'm going to choose to let the primary play out as it will on our side and start building a narrative for the contest that really matters in November. I see the next three months as an opportunity to defeat McCain before he gets out of the gate. I'm going for it.

This isn't about Democratic loyalty. I have none and come mid-November I'm happy to bash the Democrats when they fail to advance progressive values. But it's clear to me that McCain has sold his soul to the same neo-cons who have propped up our present administration for the last seven years. We can fight against McCain, or we can fight with each other. I'm sure I don't need to point out which choice advances the progressive values I thought we all shared.

Death sentence for stealing two Hot Pockets

2008-03-23T15:43:00.002-05:00

By Libby

Before police departments starting using tasers as a replacement for cool headed conversation and common sense, this tragic death would not have happened. Instead, we have some local cops effectively instantly sentencing a teenager to death by misuse of taser.

A 17-year-old died at Carolinas Medical Center Thursday after a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer shocked him with a Taser during a confrontation at a grocery store in northeast Charlotte.

An autopsy will determine how Darryl Wayne Turner died.

Turner had worked as a cashier and bagged groceries at the Food Lion at 3024 Prosperity Church Road, where the incident happened.

Darryl Turner was a high school grad who wanted to go on to college. He had no criminal record. His family says he was mouthy but he wasn't a violent person. He told his mom when he went home for lunch that he had stolen a box of Hot Pockets and was afraid he was going to get in trouble with the regional management over it. His mother wisely counseled him to go back to work and face the penalty. I'm sure she regrets that now.

When the police arrived, Turner was in a heated argument with the manager. The police claim they saw him throw some unidenified object at the man. I'll be surprised if eyewitness accounts bear that out but even if he did, there's no indication that manager was harmed. The kid didn't instantly calm down so the first thing they do is taser him. Pam Spaudling has more on this case and on several other recent deaths and unneccessary taserings that occured in just the last week or so.

Tasers were supposed to be used only as a last resort to deadly force. If the police didn't have tasers, it seems certain they would not have used deadly force in this case. Further, one would guess there were at least two officers against one 17 year old kid. When did our cops become such cowards that they can't even talk down a teenager without electrocuting him first? These incidents are occuring on a daily basis across this country. It's really time to take the tasers out of law enforcement. They clearly have become a liability rather than an asset to police/community relations.

More Conservative Id

2008-03-23T14:03:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McSame-onomics: Like Bush, Only Crazier

2008-03-23T13:50:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

McCain's tax plan would almost double the tax giveaway to the richest one per cent of society compared with simply extending Bush's tax policies.

Kevin Drum has the details.

I can just see the McCain "Straight Talk" campaign ad: "Because giving all those bankers and hedge-funders so much has worked out so well for common Americans already."

McCain Cast As Uniter, Not Divider

2008-03-23T11:43:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

There are two puff-pieces touting McCain's "centrist" character today. One from the NY Times on McCain's press-the-flesh abroad (where he's been all things to all people and called for America to sign a new Kyoto deal) and another from The Politico which touts McCain's friendship with Joe Lieberman as proving his bi-partisan credentials (they seem to have forgotten Lieberman isn't a Dem anymore, having left the party over his support for Bush's policies).

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog is all over both stories, especially the second one, but notes:

John McCain plans to worry less about shoring up right-wing support and concentrate more on selling himself as only kinda-sorta Republican and really really really not like George W. Bush at all.

...McCain clearly thinks GOP voters will be with him no mattter what, and his best strategy is to persuade centrists that he's not really a Republican. I wish I thought it wouldn't work.

I've the same worry that Steve does, especially with the mainstream media pushing the meme just as hard as they can - but c'mon, how gullible can the American public be? Even the underlying rhetoric is the same.

Remember this? "I'm a uniter not a divider".

The man should be a lame duck before he's started, based entirely on his embracing of Bush.

Hyping The Chinese Threat

2008-03-23T10:39:00.002-05:00

By Cernig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where do you hide your eggs?

2008-03-22T22:50:00.003-05:00

by shamanic

So WaPo has a little section on its main page for something called "The List" and the topic is "Where do you hide your eggs?"

What does it say about me that as I glanced across the page, I instantly thought, "My ovaries" as that sentence hit my brain?

"So?" - So This

2008-03-22T22:05:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Help, We're Being Repressed!"

2008-03-22T17:17:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John McCain's Forgotten Helping Hand

2008-03-22T17:06:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

The UK's ultra-conservative Mail On Sunday picks up on the strange ommission of the guy who saved McCain's life after he crashed in Vietnam from McCain's autobiography.

On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, tangled in his parachute cord after ejecting when his Skyhawk bomber was hit by a missile.

In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled a barely conscious McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbour, dragged him towards the shore.

...Nearly three decades later, a Vietnamese government commission confirmed he was indeed the rescuer and, in a 1996 meeting in Hanoi, McCain embraced and thanked Mr On and presented him with a Senate memento.

From that brief encounter to his death at the age of 88 two years ago, Mr On never heard from the senator again, and three years after their meeting, McCain published an autobiography that makes no mention of his apparent debt to Mr On.

...In his 1999 autobiography, Faith Of My Fathers, which laid the ground for his first, unsuccessful run for president in 2000, McCain wrote a Boy's Own-style narrative of his rescue: “When I came to, I was being hauled ashore on two bamboo poles.

“A crowd of several hundred Vietnamese gathered around me as I lay dazed before them, shouting wildly at me, stripping my clothes off, spitting on me, kicking and striking me repeatedly.”

What followed, according to McCain, was five-and-a-half years of torture and brutal beatings as a prisoner of war - an account that has given a steely edge to his candidacy by establishing him as a true American war hero.

But the story is at odds with the version uncovered by Vietnam veteran Chuck Searcy, who lives in Hanoi and is in charge of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund.

Searcy first became aware of Mai On when the Vietnamese hero wrote a letter to him. Searcy passed it to McCain's office and received a response from a McCain assistant saying, 'Mr McCain isn't interested in these fanciful stories.' It was only later that Searchy managed to convince McCain, who met On and gave him a souvenir copy of the Congressional Seal as thanks.

“It was the kind of thing you buy in the souvenir shop in the Senate basement.

“But Mr On, to the day he died, treated it as if it were a Congressional Medal of Honour.”

But although McCain appeared to believe the story, it was one he would later seem to ignore in his autobiography and there was no more contact between the two men.

When Mr On died in 2006, an email was apparently sent to McCain's office requesting a message of condolence for the family. There was no response.

Whether or not McCain believed Mr On is unclear.

The punchline?

But [McCain's] refusal to acknowledge [On's] heroism is likely to fuel other, more damaging allegations that McCain exaggerated elements of his PoW ordeal in Hoa Lo prison.

Phung Van Chung, 70, who was a Communist Party official at the time, claims McCain was quickly singled out for softer treatment, adding: “I found out he was the son of an American admiral, so the top people wanted to keep him as a live witness so they could use him for negotiations.”

Nice.

A Special Relationship

2008-03-22T16:58:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

Quote of the day via the UK's Channel Four News:

Mr Cheney, speaking to reporters after arriving in Jerusalem for a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said: "America's commitment to Israel's security is enduring and unshakeable.

"The United States will never pressure Israel to take steps that threaten its security.".

What, not ever, over anything no matter how small or how remote the threat?

The tail wags the dog, and the prospect of Middle East compromise gets shaken off like an unwanted flea.

Update The BBC and Associated Press follow up. Both think Cheney's more interested in bolstering Israel's campaign to have it's proxy superpower attack Iran on its behalf. The AP has some expert thoughts on ramifications for the peace process.

Edward Abbington, a former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem and now an adviser to Abbas, said the mood among the Palestinians in Ramallah was grim. Neither the Israelis or Palestinians are convinced that Cheney is an integral player in the peace process, he said.

"They told me when I was in Ramallah they had no idea why Cheney was even coming to see them," Abbington said. "The Israelis are more interested in what Cheney has to say about Iran and blessing their continued strikes against Gaza than anything he has to say about the peace process."

There are three other diplomatic initiatives aimed at achieving a peace deal that the United States has been tightlipped about. Russia has floated the idea of a Moscow conference as a follow-up to Annapolis. The Egyptians are playing middleman in a pair of negotiations between Israel and Hamas and between Hamas and Abbas' moderate Fatah party. Yemen also is working to mediate talks between Hamas and Fatah.

"I would not expect Cheney to have a lot to say about any of these, simply because while the U.S. attitude ranges between sharp suspicion and quiet acquiescence to these initiatives, they appear to be dying on their own," said Nathan Brown, an expert on Arab politics at George Washington University in Washington.

Life: The Musical

2008-03-22T15:53:00.003-05:00

By Libby [Link Repaired]

I've loved musicals all my life. I mean, even as child I would stand in front of my parent's big bureau mirror and belt out a few tunes from Oklahoma, or State Fair or Carousel. I've always wished that people would bust into song like that in real life. Once, when I was bartending at a VFW post, I had about 25 drunks sitting around the bar one Sunday afternoon singing, but they broke up into three groups singing competing Beatles songs simultaneously. It wasn't quite what I had in mind. It was an awful din actually, but this is exactly what I've always dreamed of witnessing.

"For our latest mission, 16 agents staged a spontaneous musical in the food court of a Los Angeles shopping mall. We used wireless microphones to amplify the vocal performances and mix them together with the music through the mall's PA system. We filmed the mission with hidden cameras, mostly behind two-way mirrors. Apart from our performers, no one in the food court was aware of what was happening."

Just priceless. I wish I had been there. It would have made me really happy.

Is the media really revolting?

2008-03-22T15:08:00.002-05:00

By Libby

I've certainly done my share and more of media bashing but I'm hoping I see a new trend here. Court TV's Catherine Crier posting at HuffPo, joins in what seems to be an incipient Greek chorus of professional journalists who are openly expressing disgust with their less savory colleagues.

I could harp on the trivial or tabloid character of the material that passes for news, but that beef is for another day. Instead, it is time for serious revolt by the many journalists who cringe at the current product they are selling. I applauded yesterday as Brian Kilmeade walked off set when his companions on Fox and Friends blathered on insanely about Wright and again when Chris Wallace chastised them for their diarrheic oratory on the subject. This response should be repeated on the other outlets as well.

Amen to that and long overdue. I've been wondering for a very long time how the more ethical members of legacy media were able to look at themselves in the mirror every morning in the full knowledge that they were contributing to a failure to inform, even if only by their silence over the alarming malfeasance of their colleagues.

Oh btw, we accidentally tossed those hard drives into the ocean

2008-03-22T14:23:00.003-05:00

By Libby

It's not exactly suprising news, but it's now confirmed that the White House will not be turning over any of those thousands of damning emails. Why? Oh, just a twist on the classic excuse, the dog ate my homework.

WASHINGTON - Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.

"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction," the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola.

I read this and immediately remembered the day I discovered the true meaning of the word punkd. It was over an alleged April Fool joke, except that it was pulled in March and wasn't disclosed until April 4th, but perhaps some of you remember the photoshopped graphic of Rove holding a Coptix folder in Chatanooga.

As I said in comments to that post at the time, I saw an item in a local newspaper about it and the photo was real. Rove was in Chatanooga and so apparently was Bush. What were they doing there? It's hardly a customary whistle stop on a PR tour but it is coincidentally the home of the company that housed the offsite servers that stored the disputed emails. I noted at the time that Congress should have subpoenaed the hard drives before they were destroyed. Too bad they didn't take my advice.

Five Years After

2008-03-22T13:03:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

John Cole issues the kind of mea culpa you won't be seeing from highly-paid Very Serious Pundits who need to parse their wrongness so that they remain highly-paid Very Serious Pundits.

And Jim Henley lives in an alternate universe where those same highly-paid VSP's get their just desserts.

Go read both.

The real truth about Gitmo

2008-03-22T12:20:00.001-05:00

By Libby

With a deceitful administration and and a dysfunctional media, it's sometimes difficult to know who or what to believe about Guantanamo but I just ran across this article from my old hometown paper that laid to rest any doubt about the conditions there. It's subscription only, so I won't even bother to give you the link to the article itself, but here's the material quotes.

There is torture at Guantanamo Bay, said Eisenberg. He claims to have seen the results - a crippled hand, men walking with permanent limps, others with physical disfigurements and mental scars. There is little access to doctors for detainees, said Eisenberg.

One of his clients has a skin disease. Eisenberg suspects it is pellagra, a disease often associated with a lack of niacin or protein in a person's diet. The man's skin flakes off into small piles on the desk as Eisenberg talks with him.

There is no human contact for detainees beyond orders from soldiers, said Eisenberg. Detainees are kept in isolated cells almost 24 hours a day. Captives' cells are staggered so men are not within speaking distance of someone who would understand their language.

There is no rest at Guantanamo, said Eisenberg. The buzzing bulbs that light detainee cells and prison halls are never turned off.

This is hell's waiting room, as Eisenberg sees it, and he wants it shut down for good.

I've known Buz Eisenberg for over 20 years. He's a relentless civil libertarian, a great lawyer who has donated countless hours of free time to civil rights cases and a thoroughly honest man. If he says the inmates at Gitmo are being tortured, then they are being tortured. I surely hope our next president will make shutting down that hellhole a priority.

The Source Of Bush's Delusion

2008-03-22T11:39:00.005-05:00

By Cernig

Both the WaPo and McClatchy have noticed that Dubya erroneously claimed that Iran had said that it wants "to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people” (Dubya's words).

The claim came in an interview with Radio Farda in which Bush also acknowledged Iran's right to have a peaceful nuclear program, but said he wanted Iran to entirely outsource its enrichment to Russia. Iran has rejected this approach mainly because of Russia's track record in using energy supplies to hold customer nations hostage on political matters.

Bush cited his "belief that the Iranians should have a civilian nuclear-power program. It's in their right to have it." But he added: "The problem is that the [Iranian] government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because, one, they've hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now -- who knows? And secondly, they've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people -- some -- in the Middle East."

Iran has consistently said that its uranium-enrichment program is aimed only at producing energy, but the United States and some allies fear Iran is seeking the capability to develop nuclear weapons.

"There's a chance that the U.S. and Iran can reconcile their differences, but the government is going to have to make different choices," Bush said. "And one [such choice] is to verifiably suspend the enrichment of uranium, at which time there is a way forward."

The UN Security Council has passed three rounds of sanctions against Iran in an effort to pressure Tehran to halt its enrichment activities.

"What is acceptable to me is to work with a nation like Russia to provide the fuel so that the plant can go forward, which therefore shows that the Iranian government doesn't need to learn to enrich [uranium]," Bush said.

So where is Bush getting this delusion that Iran has said it wants a nuke? Look no further than the influential neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, which has constantly banged the drum for war with Iran. Over at National Review's "Corner" blog today, Michael Rubin - a resident scholar in foreign and defense policy studies at AEI - cites....Michael Rubin...as a source for such claims.

On examination, too, one of Rubin's key sources in his self-referenced article for the AIE turns out to be an Iranian Hezboullah hardliner arguing against then-President Rafsanjani, telling him what he should be doing but isn't. Another is by the Daily Telegraph's neocon serial fabulist Phil Sherwell and although Rubin says the cleric involved later "backtracked", what actually happened is that the cleric said he'd been outrageously misquoted and denied ever making the statement Sherwell claimed.

Self-reference and the misuse of sources can be bad blogging - but coming from a highly influential warmonger like Rubin who's scholarship has been questioned in the past - for not revealing his involvement in Bush administration propaganda efforts in Iraq - they are positively dangerous. With such organisations as the AIE and the Heritage Foundation feeding him their highly-spun version of events and issues, Bush is living in a reality of their making. Thus comes the source of his delusion.

Obama Off Public Financing Hook

2008-03-21T17:59:00.004-05:00

By Cernig

TPM notes that McCain has just blown past the public financing cap set by the FEC, by over $4 million.

So it turns out that those that said Obama should just call McCain's bluff and wait him out, in full and certain knowledge that the Straight Talk Express was just the Little Engine Who Wouldn't, were correct. My apologies for doubting them.

And the game continues to be played the old-fashioned way, despite the maverick and the changer. But wouldn't it perhaps have been nice to see a fully public-financed and clean campaign in which both parties also pledged to eschew 527 attack ads? Ah well, in a different dimension perhaps.

Playing Patience With Iraq

2008-03-21T14:27:00.000-05:00

By Cernig

As Eric points out, Mookie al-Sadr isn't politically dead yet despite the many obituaries for his career written with Friedmanlike consistency by rightwing cheerleaders of the Iraqi misadventure. That isn't to say that his main Shiite rivals, who are even more closely allied to Iran than the Sadrists, aren't trying to retroactively make all those cheerleaders' pronouncements come true.

Iraqi security forces battled Shiite gunmen south of Baghdad on Friday, raising tensions among rival factions of the country's majority religious community and straining a seven-month cease-fire proclaimed by the biggest Shiite militia.

The fighting in Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, broke out Thursday night when factions of the Mahdi Army, led by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, attacked checkpoints throughout the city, officials and witnesses said.

...Al-Sadr's supporters have complained that the Shiite-led government has used the cease-fire to accelerate a crackdown against their movement in Baghdad and the Shiite heartland south of the capital.

Iraqi security forces are heavily influenced by a rival Shiite group, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which wields considerable power in the central government and in provincial administrations throughout the south.

Rival Shiite groups have been battling for control of the oil-rich south with an eye toward the eventual withdrawal of U.S.-led forces. Shiites form an estimated 60 percent of Iraq's 27 million people.

A Sadrist member of parliament alleged that the crackdown in Kut and elsewhere in the south was part of a move by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa party and the supreme council to prevent al-Sadr's followers from winning control of key southern provinces in provincial elections expected this fall.

"They have no supporters in the central and southern provinces, but we do," Ahmed al-Massoudi told The Associated Press. "If the crackdown against the Sadrists continues, we will begin consultations with other parliamentary blocs to bring down the government and replace it with a genuinely national one."

On this, the Sadrists are actually in the right. Whatever else they may have done, their SIIC (formerly SCIRI) rivals are definitely using their own Badr Brigade militia's utter penetration and co-opting of the Iraqi police in the South to go after the Sadrists. So much for democratic means, eh?

Which brings me neatly to the new regional elections bill just passed by the Iraqi government. The cheerleaders want it to be an important step in the reconcilliation process but it just isn't. It's been held up for ages by - you guessed it - the Shiite vice president and SIIC member, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who refused to sign the bill until Cheney leaned on him. Now it has been ratified and the mainstream media's poodles are obligingly looking the other way on those devilish details.

Last month, Iraq's parliament passed the bill calling for provincial elections by Oct. 1. But the presidential council blocked implementation after the Shiite vice president, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, raised objections to some of the provisions.

That outraged followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who are eager for elections to take power away from Abdul-Mahdi's party in the vast, oil-rich Shiite heartland of southern Iraq. Al-Sadr's supporters believed their Shiite rivals were trying to delay the vote to hold on to power.

Although many details must still be worked out before a vote can be scheduled, the council's decision Wednesday makes it likely that a vote can take place later this year.

That last sentence is a gem, the only mention of problems in implementing the bill. Yet among the tiny "details" still to be decided that are too inconsequential to mention are things like: when the regional elections will actually be held as that may still change in negotiations no matter what the bill says, whether there will be a rolling set of elections pushing the completion date of the process out into the never-never, and whether it will be possible for ruling parties like the SIIC to actually block the holding of regional elections in areas where they don't want them happening at all.

That's quite a set of details going unmentioned by the cheerleaders, but the bill is signed and that's going to be enough for the pro-occupation faction in American politics to dangle it as a carrot for at least another couple of Friedman's worth of occupational "patience".

The One Hand Tied Dodge

2008-03-21T14:25:00.001-05:00

Abu Mook reminds me that it's about time to check in, again, on our Horn of Africa Champion du jour, the brutal Zenawi regime in Ethiopia. For those unfamiliar with the background story, in December of 2006, a bevy of conservative pundits were singing the praises of the Ethiopian approach to warfare during its US-backed invasion of neighboring Somalia. This armchair Clausewitz set was asserting, emphatically, that Ethiopia's unchecked brutality, disregard for human rights and contempt for critical media coverage would lead to the swift eradication of any insurgency that might erupt in vanquished Somalia.

In fact, many of these self-styled military strategists went as far as to suggest that our officers could learn a thing or two from their Ethiopian counterparts. Alas, it was acknowledged by our would-be adivsors with a wistful sorrow, our society has lost its stomach for such brutality due to liberal indoctrination, and thus the lessons would likely go unlearned. The sighs were audible.

So how are our putative mentors doing some 15 months on in their campaign?

Islamist insurgents cut off the heads of three Somali soldiers south of the capital on Thursday and the U.N. special envoy said he would try to set up peace talks between the opposition and government.
It was the first case of beheadings since the government and its Ethiopian military allies ousted the Islamists from power in late 2006, sparking a bloody insurgency characterized by roadside bombs and hit-and-run attacks.
"This morning the mujahideen attacked the so-called government troops guarding the roads for the Ethiopian forces. We killed three of them," said Muktar Ali Robow, a senior commander of the Islamists' Shabab youth wing.
"We did what we promised to them. People traveling in that road can be asked how we killed them," he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location. [...]
At least 7,000 people have died, and hundreds of thousands been displaced in the 15-month insurgency, creating what aid workers call one of the world's worst yet most ignored humanitarian crises.

And if it wasn't for those meddling do-gooders, we too could be enjoying a counterinsurgency operation every bit as successful. When will we learn.

Rumors of His Demise are Greatly Exaggerated, Again

2008-03-21T14:08:00.000-05:00

According to Dan Senor, Moqtada al-Sadr is dead...again. Rumors of Moqtada al-Sadr's political demise seem to crop up every couple of months in certain circles (some recent examples were documented on this site here and here). Senor himself suggested after the Sadrist uprising in Najaf in 2004 that Sadr and his Mahdi militia had been neutralized and contained. But this time, Senor assures the reader, Sadr is really done for. Maybe. Sort of?

See, even Senor - sensing the tenuous nature of his thesis - retreats from the boldness and braggadocio with which he opens the piece, to the safety of caveats, qualifications and nuance at the end. So what began audaciously with the title, "Whatever Happened to Moqtada?", chronicling Sadr's "fall," ends not with a bang, but a whimper:

To be sure, Sadr's diminished capacity to stir up trouble may not last forever...[H]e still has his family name and a base of support among the Shiite underclass, particularly in Baghdad. He may be biding his time, hoping a U.S. withdrawal will leave him with a weaker opponent in the fledgling Iraqi security services. And as this week's deadly suicide bombing of a Shiite shrine in Karbala indicates, the security threats that enabled the Mahdi Army's rise to power have not yet been fully defeated.

So while the progress made against Sadr has been remarkable, it may also be fragile. Sustaining it means recognizing that political progress depends fundamentally on security.

It's not that Senor is all wrong: Sadr's movement has encountered some challenges and setbacks, and something of a loss of purpose for some. Early on in the conflict, Sadr's militia was one of the only effective providers of security for embattled Shiite residents of Baghdad. Senor argues that, thanks to the surge of troops, the relative calm has lessened the appeal of the Mahdi Army militia amongst the populace. Further, the quiet along the sectarian battle fronts (previously a source of income via the seizure of property from the vanquished) has left some Mahdi Army members without a revenue source, and so some have turned to crime to compensate.

While some of the symptoms described by Senor are likely accurate, his attribution of the cause is incomplete and his diagnosis of the patient imprecise. The surge alone did not bring calm to the sectarian battles plaguing Baghdad. Perhaps more important, many of the neighborhoods have been cleansed (or were finished off early in the surge), reducing the sectarian flashpoints. Not to mention the remaining communities have been walled off, sealed up and fortified making intra-neighborhood battles more problematic.

Further, Sadr himself has been trying to purify the movement of the radicals and criminals so as to consolidate control, maintain discipline and pursue his religious/ideological objectives (which don't fit hand in glove with an out of control militia engaging in criminal enterprises). As there has been less need for militia soldiers, Sadr has been trying to phase in more social service provision (which has always been the bread and butter of his guns and butter approach).

In leaping at any indication of trouble to declare victory, Senor, and the other proponents of the recurring narrative of Sadr's demise, greatly overstate the case. If and when the violence erupts again, the foul weather supporters will be back, and a more disciplined core of Mahdi Army fighters will do less to alienate the population generally speaking. His network of social services still deliver where the Green Zone government cannot - and that is a potent source of appeal. Further, his ideological commitment to nationalism, and opposition to the occupation, are still more popular than the alternatives.

Sadr is not in a state of defeat, but adjustment. His popularity has not been decimated, just dented. That's why Petraeus goes out of his way to bestow honorifics on Sadr, and why his main Shiite rivals, ISCI, are afraid to face him in regional elections come October.

That's an awful lot of deference to show a dead man.

Pentagon Won't Let Fallon Testify

2008-03-21T13:58:00.003-05:00

By Cernig

Despite requests from several members of Congress, the Pentagon has decided not to send retiring CentCom commander Admiral Fallon to the Hill to testify alongside Petraeus and Crocker in April.

Asked if the Pentagon was concerned that lawmakers would use Fallon's appearance to ask questions about Iran, [Pentagon Press Secretary] Morrell said, no.

And if you believe that, I've a bridge to sell you.

Playing, Or Being Played?

2008-03-21T13:07:00.002-05:00

By Cernig

Via Rising Hegemon, from whom I've stolen my post title, comes a fascinating and deeply disturbing tale of conservative manipulation of the Democratic nomination race, switching sides and feeding smears against both Clinton and Obama to keep the Dem circular firing squad going.

Wayne Barrat of the Village Voice dots his i's and crosses all the t's as he systematically and comprehensively documents how the Republican noise machine is trying to ensure it's chosen McSame faces a fatally weakened Dem oponent come November. They started with attacks on Clinton, switched to Obama when he showed signs of growing too strong, and are now ready to pitch in and undermine whichever candidate shows any signs whatsoever of winning a plurality of popular support.

Since few Democratic voters—theoretically—should be affected by anything this cabal has to say, its impact on the nominating process has been, at best, indirect. But the right's talkers have helped to shape the way the election is covered. And even if they've only affected the margins, it's precisely those margins—in states like Missouri, or in district delegate fights, or in the narrowing popular-vote contest—that matter. Perhaps the more important point for Democrats is why these drum beaters have been so universally on the same beat.

In every case, these rightwing mouthpieces have ignored their own previous overt race-baiting to accuse the Clintons of being closet racists, have ignored their own open misogyny to accuse Obamites of sexism and generally muddied the waters every way they could.

Limbaugh, Novak, Kristol, Bennet, York, Hannity, George Will - all have their gamesmanship exposed by this must-read column. They're all on the same page of the GOP playbook. It's the page headed "Divide and Conquer".

Read it, then think again about what Libby wrote the other day.

Precursors for an upswing in violence?

2008-03-21T12:39:00.002-05:00

There have been a couple of reports in the past couple of days that suggest violence in Iraq could ramp up from the roughly 60 attacks per day (2005 levels) that was reported in January 2008, to higher levels again. The first is from the Guardian and they offer a summary set of explanations as to why violence declined in the past eight months:

Improved security in Iraq in recent months has been attributed to a combination of the surge, the truce observed by Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, and the effectiveness and commitment of the councils, which are drawn from Sunni Arabs and probably the most significant factor, according to most analysts.

The 'Concerned Local Citizens' are groups of Sunni Arab insrugents who the US military has bought off to fight against the other group of culturally insentive foreign fighters --- AQI. Now buying out significant elements of an insurgency is not a bad idea, especially if that group has been seeking to retain autonomy and collect economic and security rent. However if you plan on buying out your enemies, remember that you really are renting them and loyalty is only as good as the last payment received....

Leading members of the 80,000-strong Sahwa, or awakening, councils have said they will stop fighting unless payment of their $10 a day (£5) wage is resumed. The fighters are accusing the US military of using them to clear al-Qaida militants from dangerous areas and then abandoning them.

A telephone survey by GuardianFilms for Channel 4 News reveals that out of 49 Sahwa councils four with more than 1,400 men have already quit, 38 are threatening to go on strike and two already have.....

In Dora, a southern suburb of Baghdad, the leaders of a Sahwa group of 2,400 men said they were considering strike action because none of the 2,000 applicants they had put forward for jobs with the police and military had been accepted.

The Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki has found jobs for only a handful of the Sahwa fighters.

These groups can allow a significant escalation of violence by doing nothing and taking no risks other than that of losing their patience playing cards. If the CLCs do nothing and allow for other insurgency groups to operate unfettered and officially unobserved, violence will increase on the first order and then the second order as retaliation attacks will occur. Violence could further spike if the CLCs re-engage in active combat operations with their improved social cohesion, larger group sizes and better equipped fighters.

The other major potentially sustainable factor of a decraese in violence has been the Mahdi Army (JAM) ceasefire. During the first six months of the ceasefire, a partial purge was conducted by the Sadrists aganist less reliable/loyal units who were still sticking their heads up when they should have been consolidating their gains. JAM groups and fighters were and are being targetted by SIIC and US forces and had been told not to aggressively fight back. Even with the extension of the ceasefire, self-defense against raids has become more tolerated. Large scale JAM v. Iraqi Army/SIIC formations are occurring as reported by the AP:

The fighting in the city of Kut broke out after factions of the Mahdi Army militia attacked checkpoints around the city amid a crackdown by Iraqi troops.

A joint U.S.-Iraqi operation also targeted a Shiite militia stronghold in the volatile city of Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, and at least 12 suspected fighters were detained, local police said. The U.S. military had no immediate comment.

Furthermore, fighting is escalating in Basra as 17 border guards were killed in the past couple of days. It could be an indication of economic crimes (smuggling makes up a decent chunk of Basra's economy), or a power struggle between the dominant Fadillah-Sadrist alliance and SIIC...

These are trends to keep an eye on.

The Positives of a Long Campaign

2008-03-21T11:36:00.001-05:00

I greatly respect and fundamentally agree with Libby's plea for unity or at least introspection before launching blue on blue political attacks of outstanding dumbness. I also think that the primary season is soon to wind down as the current delegate counts, remaining delegate counts and the numbers needed to move either the delegate counts or cause super-delegate reconsideration to chance the order of finish from Obama-Clinton to Clinton-Obama are most likely not there. Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama last night is an illustration of the basic dynamic, as that is one more high profile vote that the Clinton campaign was hoping to swing their way on the argument that she is the better general election candidate.

We have two very good candidates and while it is getting nasty, there are several positive externalities being generated. Pennsylvania is a lean blue swing state where John McCain has a real, but low probability of winning in the general election. However the state is becoming more blue today than it was six months ago, and the campaign infrastructure will be in place to sustain the momentum several months earlier than it was in either the 2006 off-year or the 2004 Presidential election. The Pittsburgh Tribune Review is carrying two stories on this front today.

First, Democratic voter registration numbers are increasing massively while Republicans are losing net voters. This may partially be due to the closed primary and tactical voting, but I don't think this is a powerful explanation. There is also some shifting of independent/non-affiliated voters who are re-registering as Democrats as there is at least one candidate who inspires them to become more involved. For instance, a person with whom I am very close with is a reliable liberal voter but was registered unaffiliated. This person likes Clinton and re-registered as a Democrat and due to inertia will most likely remain a registered Democrat which means a more likely GOTV target. A lot of new voters are coming into the party:

The ranks of registered Democrats in Pennsylvania swelled by more than 111,000 since the fall, according to state figures, showing that voters are scrambling to take part in the state's most important presidential primary in decades, political observers say.

Campaigns for Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama promised to send thousands of organizers and volunteers across the state this weekend in a final push to register voters. To participate in the April 22 Democratic primary, voters must register with the party by Monday.
The number of registered Republicans fell more than 13,000 during the same time period, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State....

During the first week of heavy campaigning in Pennsylvania, which began March 10 with appearances by both candidates and former President Clinton, more than 22,000 registered voters switched to the Democratic Party, according to the state department.

So the state registrered Democratic edge increased by a net of 124,000 individuals. And it should increase by a bit more this weekend. Both the Clinton and Obama campaigns are promising very aggressive canvassing, registration and change-over drives this weekend to get as many new Democratic voters registered by Monday afternoon which is the last day of eligbility for anyone who wants to vote in the April primary.

Secondly, the field offices are opening up early and often. For instance the Tribune-Review is reporting on a Greensburg field office for Obama ---

Dappenbrook of Beaver County and dozens of others gathered Thursday afternoon at the newly opened downtown Greensburg office of the Obama campaign.
Obama's staffers, who arrived in town last week, formally inaugurated campaign activities yesterday and in the next few days will intensify efforts to register voters before Monday's deadline for the April 22 primary....Westmoreland County, with its more than 130,000 registered Democrats, is considered a key area in the race between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.

The Clinton campaign has numerous field offices in Southwestern PA, the Obama campaign has numerous offices out here, and they are organizing areas that typically don't get touched until the last couple of weeks before a general election. The energy is real, and it is producing a surge in interest and activism. This is a good thing, and as long as the campaigns keep on the current path, there will be bruises and a couple of bloody noses, but no long lasting internal bleeding or organ damage.

Devil with a blue dress

2008-03-21T09:20:00.002-05:00

By Libby

I didn't get around to blogging this earlier but I'm still fuming over this ABC story. It's not like we're lacking for examples of the failures of the major media, but this one is surely hits the gold standard of tabloid journalism. After agitating endlessly for Hillary Clinton to release her White House schedules, the most important story in the tiny depraved mind of Brian Ross is where Hillary was when Monica and Bill were fooling around? If this is material to her ability to be president, then I think Mr. Ross should be equally diligent in tracking down where John McCain's wife was while he was cheating on her. That actually would hold some relevancy, since John is the one running for president and it would speak to his lack of character.

Meanwhile, my anger about this has rendered me practically incoherent so I'm going to outsource my outrage to Susie Madrak who posted an articulate rant along with the information on how to contact Mr. Ross directly to let him know what you think of his journalistic skills and ethics.

Wingers unite while Democrats fight

2008-03-21T08:40:00.005-05:00

By Libby

The GOP faithful have their man. They don't like him much, but they've figured out the best course of action to get what they want in November. Patrick Ruffini gives away their game plan.

I'm not going to argue that Soren was right in posting the link. But I do agree with Matt Lewis that there was some overreaction here. If they go further with this civility routine, they risk alienating conservatives in talk radio and the blogosphere who are doing the necessary work of defining Obama and rendering him just as radioactive with the base as Hillary.

A month ago, McCain-Obama looked like a bad matchup for us: a Republican nominee who didn't do much to galvanize the base against a Democrat who didn't either.

The New York Times kerfuffle and now the Wright story is slowly changing that. With an assist from Hillary Clinton's overtures to the right-wing of the Democratic Party, Obama is now a more polarizing figure in key swing states than she is. It is now clear that conservative media will do to Obama what they did to Kerry, Gore, and Clinton. This can be an unalloyed boon to the McCain campaign, as it pretty much takes care of his conservative problem and frees him to go after swing voters.

This is not about "Barack Hussein Obama" or Muslim smear emails, which need to be repudiated. It is about a Presidential candidate's literary muse going all Susan Sontag on us on the Sunday after 9/11. It is connecting the dots on the post-patriotic milieu that surrounds Obama seemingly everywhere he goes. These are legitimate issues for public discussion, if not by McCain himself, then certainly by talk radio and the blogs. If McCain doesn't want to be part of that, that's understandable. But he should get out of the way and let talk radio do its thing.

Of course, this is not at legitimate issue for public discussion. It's typical GOP hatemongering. The right wing slime machine is hoping to hoping to pull the same trick they used so successfully in the past. Ruffini helpfully describes the preferred tactics for us.

The challenge in modern Presidential campaign is not simply to paint your opponent as wrong on the issues, and to prevail in a civil debate. It is to render the opponent unacceptable to 48% of the electorate, and merely less preferable to 3%. Despite McCain's troubles with the base, conservative media (and Hillary) are doing the heavy lifting on the unacceptable part. McCain should get out of the way, and jump in ONLY when someone crosses an overtly racial and/or religious line.

I think Ruffini is being too clever by half in chiding McCain. Firing the staffer allows McCain to disown the clumsily rendered hatemongering, while effectively giving the video more exposure. I think the best way to counter that is to make more and better videos targeting McCain. I don't have the skills or the equipment to do it myself, but I hope some of the infinitely more creative liberals on our side will do so, quickly and repeatedly.

Surely we can beat them at this game. All they have is hate. We have facts on our side. The trick is to render them visually into easily digested soundbites that can morph into viral emails that help our candidate.

Pastor Gate

2008-03-21T08:27:00.003-05:00

by shamanic

Look, without wading into the intraparty and apparently intrablogospheric war that's happening right now, I just want to tell you how bizarre I find the whole Jeremiah Wright flap. I live in the south where, let's face it, the pastors make their living by demonizing me for being gay. Black and white. There are certainly liberal churches and liberal churchgoers, but there's an incredibly ugly strain of Christianity that lives alongside me, and I don't think you can be a queer southerner without learning to tune the jackasses out.

So I have to wonder what would happen if some of these white, conservative preachers got their sermons from before Georgia's anti-gay marriage amendment passed up on YouTube. Would it shock America to learn how much hatred of gays flows out of Christian pulpits?

Probably not, but as long as it's a white person saying it we can marginalize him as a religious wacko and go about our business. Only when it's a black pastor is the issue one of "hatred of America." A lot of these people want the Constitution replaced with some Biblical document.

By definition, a lot of these people, black and white, hate America because they hate the freedoms that let people live lives of which they don't approve. That's the simple fact of the matter, black and white, and as a freedom loving American, I think they're entitled to their opinion, but don't make this something it isn't. Preachers say all kinds of screwed up things in their pulpits, just like the rest of us do in our day to day lives. Black and white, there's a lot of animosity toward what most of us think of as living. Black and white, there's a lot of hatred pouring from the church doors.

Glad we live here and not some banana republic....

2008-03-21T06:03:00.003-05:00

Otherwise I would have to be concerned that government collected information and resources could be used for political purposes. But since we live here, I don't care if the President can authorize on his say so wiretaps, or have investigators look at my e-mail, or low level contractors take a look at my passport files (how uninteresting that one is, except for the picture as it was taken during my Amish beard look-alike period). Nahhh... no need to worry, we can just trust them.

So I'll accept it as an honest mistake and imprudent personal curiousity when Barack Obama's passport files were repeatedly opened by unauthorized indviduals just as the campaign season was heating up.

Two State Department employees were fired and a third has been disciplined for improperly accessing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's passport file, the State Department announced Thursday night.

Senior Department officials said they learned of the incidents only when a reporter made an inquiry Thursday afternoon. They said an initial investigation indicated the employees - all of whom worked on contract - were motivated by "imprudent curiosity."....

After seven years of being a paradigm of ethics and virtue, I trust everything that comes out of a Federal official's mouth. When have they failed to utter the complete truth in a comprehensive context... never... and when I see that passport records have been opened by unauthorized personnel in the past, it must have been an honest mistake...

The computer monitoring system, which focuses on politicians and celebrities, was put in place in recent years after the State Department became embroiled in a scandal involving the access of the passport records of Bill Clinton in 1992, when he was the Democratic presidential candidate.

Can't be a pattern here as that would require me to believe that government power is used politically, and we know that the Bush Administration never does that. It is just random luck that two charismatic, young, successful Democratic politicians have seen the State Department screw up on their own internal security procedures by having unauthorized individuals access their files in the midst of their presidential bids... just blind luck....

Tourney Pool Update 2

2008-03-20T18:06:00.002-05:00

This is primarily a test post as I want to make sure that my post by e-mail capacity is still working. I'm in the Lawyers, Guns and Money and the Econbrowser NCAA pools, and I am sucking big time so far. I have two teams out that I had going 1:1 and am trailing at the back of the pack in both groups. Oh well. Now let's see if the html works....

UPDATE: Actually not that bad of a first day; got 13 out 16 through and the picks that went wrong were in the 6-11, 7:10 type when I was picking mild upsets and then seeing the winner get bounced in the next round. Not giving up a lot of potential points there (yet)

The Deep End Of The Republican Cesspool

2008-03-20T13:08:00.001-05:00

By Cernig

Time for a dip in the Republican cesspool, as typified by B-list conservative website MitchNews. There you will find such gems of black helicopter crowd wisdom as this:

At the risk of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist”, it is plausible to me that the NAFTA Superhighway is only one link in the chain to draw Canada, Mexico and the United States together. If that is the intention, imagine what it will mean to have one entity that includes the corruption and poverty of Mexico and the socialist-inclined Canada. If you disagree with this description of Canada, consider that Canada has:

Banned the death penalty,
Imposed draconian restrictions on gun rights,
Adopted a national socialized medicine program,
Received military deserters and provided a safe haven for them, and
Legalized homosexual marriage.

If the Security and Prosperity Partnership program (SPP) and the NAFTA Superhighway come to pass, we will see multi-national corporations with government support seize large portions of American property, adversely affect our national security and damage our environment, all for the purpose of making their businesses more efficient and to enhance profits.

Do you wonder as I do why the president and so many members of congress, the media and business seem to be unconcerned about this unpublicized effort toward harmonization of infrastructure, laws and regulations of Canada, Mexico and the United States? Is the failure to protect our borders by the administration and members of congress a reflection of the expectation that one day we won’t have either borders or “illegal immigration” because anyone crossing our borders will be authorized to do so and borders will become unnecessary?

and this:

Barack Obama wants to be President of the World, starting with Africa, his home territory.

That also is where Kenyan cousin just lost his bid for that nation’s presidency. However, in the process, cousin had Obama’s cheerleading support from America.

That is so even though cousin was promising Kenya the wipe out of Christianity for Islam. It was the strict, legalistic Muslim version abiding by sharia.

Yes, Obama still has a warm spot in his black heart for Africa, then the entire world—poor nations bowing before his throne.

And who will pay The Boy’s bill for aiding the globe’s poor? Why American taxpayers, naturally.

Obama then yearns for his black groupies and white-know-nothing-about-issues whites to vote him to the Big House.

This really is the deep end of the conservative cesspit - the part where folk like Hagee hang out. Hate filled and conspiracy-minded, they're the ultimate representation of the Republican base, the very models of the 20-something-per-centers, the ultimate expression of the conservative id. And John McCain, like other conservative power-seekers before him, is actively courting them. Ugh.

As Apocalypse Tom at Liberal Radio says of this conservative id: "it is damn well not going to skulk in the shadows in this campaign. Make the genie – the fetid rot at the heart of today’s GOP – stand front and center and put on its show."

Compression, Distance and Gas Prices

2008-03-20T12:53:00.001-05:00

Transportation and distance can be translated in economics in several different forms. The most common is to draw iso-time and iso-cost lines so that all points on the line are equally costly or equally time consuming to traverse from that point to a common central point. Decreasing costs or increasing velocity allows for regions that were previously marginally unattractive for certain economic activity to now become attractive and feasible for a given economic activity.

For instance, reliable overnight air transport has made the proliferation of high end seafood restaurants in Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Chicago feasible as fresh supplies can cheaply be brought in while fifty years ago, the radius of fresh delivery off the docks was limited to a half day worth of driving, or maybe three hundred miles. Anything else had to be frozen and then shipped. Now the fresh off the docks time is still half a day, but that means that all metro areas served by large airports are now within the economically feasible radius.

Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser is looking at the increasing price of transportation and is advancing the idea that international trade flows will slow down or potentially decrease as the iso-cost lines are shrinking.

Several implications flow from these musings. First, more goods will now be "nontraded". This would lend more "home bias" to US consumption (and more home bias to each other countries' consumption, as well). Second, one might think that as transport costs rise, foreign and domestic goods would become less substitutable, holding all else constant...

To the extent that the development of cross border supply chains relied upon low trade costs and rapid transport, higher oil prices should be expected to retard this process.

I think we can expand this analysis to intra-national, regional analysis. The most common distance as cost trade-off people make is where they live within a metropolitan area. Shorter commutes tend to lead to location premiums/higher property prices, while living on the periphery leads to lower property prices, but higher commuting costs (both on a cash and implicit time basis). The dominant trend in the United States over the past fifty years has been to sprawl towards cheaper lands on the periphery and accepting the higher commute times and costs, partially mitigated by a trend decrease in automobile usage costs. That trade-off may be breaking down.

CNN Money is running a series of vignettes on the middle class squeeze, and the first one features a couple from my hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell is an old cotton mill town whose mills left in the 1960s, and it has become a combination of high tech manufacturing, high tech software support, skilled craftsmen, comparatively cheap housing for people leaving the inner Boston suburbs but want to stay within the Boston city region, and a massive immigrant community with great food. It is an interesting place, and it is still comparatively 'cheap' compared to any place ten miles closer to Boston.

I work in Belmont, MA, which is in the Cambridge area. I am in LOVE with what I do....'

Sadly, my husband and I were priced out of this community when we decided to buy our first home almost two years ago. We decided to move to Lowell, about 10 minutes shy of the New Hampshire border....

I will most likely need to leave my wonderful job as program coordinator due to the rising cost of gas. It costs me about $250 a month to commute to work,

As transportation within regions gets more expensive, less movement will occur. The trade-offs are becoming more pronounced, and the value of savings on property versus the direct and indirect commuting costs may have been worth it when annual commuting costs for this individual was only $1,500/year but the trade-off reverses itself when cash commuting costs come out at $3,000/year. Depending on one's assumptions, the increase in gas costs has led to a devaluation of the Lowell property to this family of $20,000 (interest rate and amortization schedule sensisitive of course).

If we continue to see higher gas prices, which I think is likely, the peripheral and outer ring suburbs (which Lowell is one within the Boston economic region) will see a further acceleration of home price declines as people will try to move closer to their jobs and closer to the center of their economic regions (assuming job density is higher towards the center). Shorter trips and better substitution of trip modes will occur as the alternatives to driving increase in higher density places.

Problems with analogies

2008-03-20T12:51:00.000-05:00

Analytical analogies can be very useful things as they convey a great deal of information in an understandable and memorable manner. The 'pushing on a string' analogy of ineffective central bank monetary policy when the problem is not a liquidity problem but a solvency problem, is one of those very useful analogies. Behind it lies a mass of very important technical work and analytical assumptions as to how the economy behaves. However these assumptions correlate fairly well to a reality picture described by pushing on string.

However analogies and comparisons need to be grounded in reality to be useful. And to be valuable, they need to be grounded in multiple facets of reality. Michael Goldfarb at the neo-con house organ of the Weekly Standard (intentionally) makes this mistake to argue for the McCain plan to stay in Iraq for 100 years on the basis of the boogey man charge that AQI is all powerful and will take over in ten seconds after the US pulls out X number of combat brigades.

The Israeli experience of the last few years offers a real lesson here. They pulled out of Lebanon--unilaterally and not out of military necessity--and Hezbollah claimed victory. More than that, Hezbollah became the vanguard of global jihad. Likewise in Gaza. The Israelis withdrew--unilaterally and not out of military necessity--and Hamas claimed victory. More than that, they overthrew Fatah and radicalized the Palestinian population (really, they are more radical).

If we pull out of Iraq, al Qaeda will claim victory

For an analogy to work, it has to mesh on relevant points. It does not.

He is analogizing the experiences of two nationalistic groups who are in the terms of Al-Qaeda grand strategy focuesed on fighting the 'near' enemy of Isreal above all else while also investing in significant social services by building parrellel or tapping into existing social support networks to a group that everyone who has been paying attention for years contends is composed of 'useful idiots, with emphasis on idiots' from the POV of their primary support base, is comparatively small (5% to 10% of the 2003 to 2007 active shooters) and are primarily motivated by the war itself. AQI is a 'near enemy' unit in the terminology and stragetic perspective of Bin Laden et al.

Conflating nationalist/tribalist groups whose area of operations and scope of activities are measured in miles and not continents with a group whose strategy dictates 'deep strikes' and intercontintal reach is one hell of a stretch, and if he was an honest analyst, he would know it. But we are looking at propaganda to support a policy regime that has failed in its goals.

Gottle Of Geer

2008-03-20T11:56:00.005-05:00

By Cernig

Via Jill from Brilliant at Breakfast (and I've stolen her graphic too), I see John McCain still has Joe Lieberman's hand up his ass and wood in his head.

When McCain made a foreign policy gaffe in Jordan on Tuesday, it was Sen. Joe Lieberman who quietly pointed out the mistake, giving McCain an opportunity to correct himself in front of the international press corps. In Israel yesterday, NBC’s Lauren Appelbaum reports, Lieberman once again intervened when McCain made an incorrect reference about the Jewish holiday Purim -- by calling the holiday "their version of Halloween here."

...Purim is not the equivalent of an Israeli Halloween, Appelbaum notes. The holiday -- although a joyous one -- commemorates a time when the Jewish people living in Persia were saved from mass execution. When Sen. Lieberman had a chance to speak at the press conference, he placed the blame of the mistake on himself. "I had a brief exchange with one of the mothers whose children was in there in a costume for Purim," Lieberman, who is Jewish and celebrates the holiday, said. "And it's my fault that I said to Senator McCain that this is the Israeli version of Halloween. It is in the sense because the kids dress up and it's a very happy holiday and actually it is in the sense that the sweets are very important of both holidays."

Jill notes:

It doesn't matter if Lieberman is trying to be a good little Sancho Panza here for McCain's Don Quixote, not when McCain seems to NEED Lieberman to do his thinking for him.

That was Tuesday. By Thursday, McCain was in London pressing flesh with socialists and anti-war conservatives. Oh, and promising to hold India and China to a global warming deal. I presume that means he intends holding the U.S. to one too. Are the rightwingers simply looking the other way in unison or is it that they're ignorant of McCain's plan? Or maybe they just know that McCain will say or do anything to try to look less like Bush (while abroad) and more like he has a functioning braincell (at any time), but they shouldn't take it seriously.