Left In Lowell

To even mention (or hedge a question) on the concept of shutting down government and defaulting on our debt as a political tactic to get what you want is going three bridges too far. Yet, that is exactly what Republican House leadership is saying. They will hold hostage our fragile but progressing recovery, in the name of scoring political points. Incredible:

Cantor Refuses To Take Government Shutdown Or Default On U.S. Debt Off The Table

In an interview with Fox News Sunday this morning, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the #2 Republican in the House, threatened to take the nation’s economy hostage if President Obama does not comply with House GOPers’ as yet undefined demands. When asked if he would take a government shutdown on forcing the United States to default on its debt off the table, Cantor responded that it would somehow be President Obama’s fault if House Republicans press this agenda:

QUESTION: Are you willing to say right now we’re not going to let the country go into default, and we won’t allow a government shutdown?

CANTOR: Chris, look at this now. The chief executive, the president, is as responsible as any in terms of running this government. The president has a responsibility, as much or more so than Congress, to make sure that we are continuing to function in a way that the people want.

The entire security of the world economy hinges on government-backed debt. The “Full Faith and Credit of the United States of America” is not just a term bandied about by elite economists. It is the backbone of our entire economy, and the economy, now, of an interconnected world. It was shocking back when Bush said that Social Security debt was “just IOUs” - they aren’t, they are the same debt bonds that China, or Europe, or businesses buy, backed by the Full Faith and Credit of the United States of America. That default would have caused severe crisis with our debtors - just as defaulting on our debt to other nations and businesses would destroy our economy now. Imagine calling up your mortgage company and telling them you intend not to pay anything back. Now, imagine the value of your entire existence plunging right after you do this. This is essentially what Cantor is threatening to do.

To even hint at default in the offering as a political tactic is to jeopardize our entire national interest. It is treasonous. This is who you elected, America. Let’s hope this doesn’t come to pass, or you can kiss the jobs recovery goodbye.

Addendum - remember, Reagan said he doesn’t negotiate with terrorists and hostage takers. So, what is this, then??

Addendum II - Also recall, Congress appropriates funds. By saying “the president has a responsibility, as much or more so than Congress, to make sure that we are continuing to function in a way that the people want” is to state that you abdicate getting the funds appropriated to cover the debt at your convenience - the President has no say on enacting the budget except to sign. This is obviously a threat for him to capitulate to what they demand, or else.

Not so good when the shoe’s on the other foot, I imagine? But that’s exactly what’s going on this weekend - only, with Korans, not Bibles. It would be fitting if us atheists decided to host a Bible burning on the same day, don’t you think? No?

Universal condemnation of the Koran-burning assholes in Gainsville, FL (why, why is it always Florida?) isn’t stopping the tiny, bassackwards church and its leadership from hosting a Koran burning on 9/11. Even the fact that this will harm our troops overseas, and pleas from General Petraeus to not inflame hatred in the Muslim world with this act - not phasing them.

Here are some things that I think would be great counter-protests for the 99% of us that are still sane. Gainsville residents who don’t want to look like your entire town is filled with redneck hillbillies - you can use any of my suggestions and I don’t even need credit!

1. Hundreds of people showing up with a Koran in hand, but only to trick their way to the fire - where they throw a water bottle full of water on the flames, over and over til it’s out.

2. Hire a plane that fights fires and fill it with water, dump it over the site. Soak the lot of these bastards along with their pyre.

3. Get a fire hose (local hydrant?) and spray it into the air above the area so it falls like heavy rain, hitting the crowd and fire.

4. A few hundred people (with earplugs in place) show up to use the most annoying loud sound makers available - vuvuzelas if they can get them, air horns if not - and stand right nearby to drive the assholes away. Since they’re obviously already deaf to the pleas of the entire world, it can’t do much harm.

5. Host a book burning of the pastor’s “Islam Is of the Devil” - every copy you can get your hands on. This is a last resort, though, since it would likely require buying them up in the first place.

Your suggestions? I don’t advocate violence or vandalism, but I wouldn’t be that upset if some enterprising young person sneaked in the night before and plastered the place with obscene phallic symbols. That’s how angry this makes me. If you just can’t contain your hatred and bigotry, at least don’t do something that will endanger our troops and American civilians abroad with your actions. People are going to die because of this.

Here’s living proof that its demise was prematurely declared.

Here’s what we have learned about the interrogation of detainees, torture, and the big reason, why.

• The government got some detainees from its war in Afghanistan (fought reluctantly by an administration hell-bent on a war in Iraq). They got some information from them through traditional, non-torturous means.
• None of that information tied Iraq in any way, shape or form with terrorism or Al Quada. That just wouldn’t do. They needed to find a reason to go into Iraq, dammitall.
• So they tortured a reason out of people. Brushing aside the CIA and its normal practices, according to a CIA interrogator who testified to Congress and other news reports, the contractors came in and allegedly violated our longstanding laws and treaties against torture, it appears, on behalf of one Mr. Dick Cheney.
  

  The truth is that when the CIA didn’t give Cheney the info he wanted about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, he marginalized the agency:

  In the initial stages of the war on terror, Tenet’s CIA was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with the president that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the agency and Tenet. Through interviews with DoD staffers who sifted through mountains of raw intelligence, FRONTLINE details how questionable intelligence was “stovepiped” to the vice president and presented to the public.

• The CIA and the Bush administration “briefs” Congressional leaders on “both” sides.
• The Bush administration consistently lied, lied, lied to everyone about everything they did while in power.

So who thinks Pelosi isn’t telling the truth? Most people should believe she is in this her-versus-them moronic debate. Occam’s razor demands it, given everything that we know about the situation, don’t you think?

And yet, the media sheeples have once again, with rare exception, given in to the right wing bitch and moan brigade and now we have a slipping of the approval rates for the leader of the Democratic party in the US House.

Constant vigilance, people, these liars and cheaters are not done with this country yet.

(Cross-posted at BlueMassGroup)

So the elections are in and it looks like the hard-liner Israelis (as well as hard-line Palestinians) have sucessfully reaped benefits from the current rounds of conflict. This, in all likelyhood, means more lip-service to a two-state solution at the same time as settlements continue to expand. It seems to me that incentives for Palestinians to negotiate at this point are dwindling by the day. At some point they will come to the conclusion that any two-state option that Israel is willing to give isn’t one worth having. What then?

More below the fold. (more…)

A few days ago, I wrote about the EU response to the “Buy American” clause of the stimulus. And though I understand the impulse (”we’re spending American taxpayer money so it ought to be on American goods”) I’m not sure we’re ready for the consequences. A friend of mine in Canada sent these thoughts to me (via email). And yes, Canadians don’t put z’s in ize’d words.

I don’t think people realise the extent to which economies are intertwined today.

Take Plug Power for example … a company in upstate NY that supplies clean power solutions. They are the one bright light in a fairly depressed area of the state. They could play a huge rule in the various investments … particularly in mobile power sources. But if the Buy American clause passes they will be excluded from it and probably go bankrupt as a result. Why the exclusion? Although the delivery systems are built and assembled in NYC, the actual power pack is a hydrogen fuel cell designed and manufactured in BC by Ballard Power.

If you want to know the disastrous potential impacts look at the Smoot Hawley Tariff bill of 1930. It was brought into force to try and protect American jobs. Other nations slammed their own tariff barriers into place in retaliation and the value of world trade dropped by two thirds … that’s right … two thirds in the space of two years.

This whole buy American thing is a knee jerk reaction that doesn’t address the real problem of productivity. I mean the reason so many of your South East wood mills are unproductive is because they were protected by punitive tariffs on Canadian wood for so long that they didn’t need to upgrade … we had to upgrade just to compete … and the longer the tariff stayed in place the worse it got.

Anyway … instead of looking at the job losses I would like every American who works in an export related field to get a little note on their paycheck that shows just what portion of that comes from exports.

This is too simple a reaction to too complex a problem.

Now, my friend’s viewpoints are what are considered relatively conservative, at least in the pro-business sense, for Canada and British Columbia, specifically. But he knows a lot about these trade issues and he makes a very compelling point. It appears the Buy American clause did not get taken out of the Senate version of the stimulus in the latest round, so this is a very relevant discussion.

The wheels are coming off in rapid pace now…

First for some background: McCain stated very clearly that he under no circumstances would violate the border of Pakistan in order to take out al Quada. However, this Saturday night, weak veep choice Sarah Palin (in a rare encounter with actual questions from a real American at a cheesesteak stop in Philly) said:

Sarah Palin told a customer at a Philadelphia restaurant on Saturday that the United States should “absolutely” launch cross-border attacks from Afghanistan into Pakistan in the event that it becomes necessary to “stop the terrorists from coming any further in,” a comment similar to the one John McCain condemned Barack Obama for making during last night’s presidential debate.

During Friday’s debate, Obama criticized the Bush administration for sending billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan without ridding the border region of terrorists.

“If the United States has al Qaeda, bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then we should take them out,” Obama added.

McCain fired back hard, arguing that newly elected Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari has had his “hands full” and suggesting that Obama’s tough talk was naïve.

“You don’t say that out loud,” McCain said. “If you have to do things, you have to do things, and you work with the Pakistani government.”

Palin’s apparent disagreement with McCain’s position on Pakistan came as the Alaska governor was picking up a couple of cheesesteaks at Tony Luke’s in South Philadelphia. She was approached by a man wearing a Temple University t-shirt, who later identified himself as Michael Rovito.

So today, this from McCain:

Sen. John McCain retracted Sarah Palin’s stance on Pakistan Sunday morning, after the Alaska governor appeared to back Sen. Barack Obama’s support for unilateral strikes inside Pakistan against terrorists

“She would not…she understands and has stated repeatedly that we’re not going to do anything except in America’s national security interest,” McCain told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos of Palin. “In all due respect, people going around and… sticking a microphone while conversations are being held, and then all of a sudden that’s—that’s a person’s position… This is a free country, but I don’t think most Americans think that that’s a definitve policy statement made by Governor Palin.”

Can this get any, well, easier for us? My. God.

(Both items via AMERICAblog.)

I recommend reading this article (hat tip: Mr. Lynne) if you want to understand the context of the Georgian-Russian conflict. The short version: no one is the good guy in this, up to and including the United States, which has consistently embarrassed or ignored Russia by doing things such as violating the ABM treaty.

Things in the Georgia-South Ossetia region worsen, even as the Georgian president calls for a cease-fire. And Russia didn’t stop on the border between Georgia and South Ossetia…

Russia has asked for a high-level meeting with NATO to explain its actions in the separatist Georgian province of South Ossetia, Moscow’s ambassador to the alliance said Monday, even as Russian forces moved into Georgia proper, seizing a military base in western Georgia near Abkhazia, a second breakaway region.

The new forays into Georgia — even as Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili signed a cease-fire pledge — appeared to show Russian determination to subdue the small, U.S.-backed country, which has been pressing for NATO membership.

As far as I can gleam, this is about two things for Russia - one, it does not want a NATO ally on its border (it thinks it should have a say? *sigh*), and Georgia is very pro-West. And two, as I understand it, there’s oil and oil pipelines in that region.

This is very bad news. If Russia is getting expansionist again, there’s no stopping them. Are we still able to use MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) to maintain some balance? Are we too overburdened (and showing it) in Iraq and Afghanistan to even muster a show of might that could give Russia pause? They likely will just laugh at us, and know that there isn’t much we can or are willing to do, between the threat of nuclear war, our conventional forces bogged down (and our military worn down), and our economic future uncertain. Russia on the other hand is making oil money hand over fist.

Georgia went into South Ossetia militarily a decade after it broke off - they are not necessarily lily-white in this episode. I’m sure they’d be happy to control any oil in the area too. But the more troubling crisis is Russia and its actions.

Thanks, George. Thanks a lot. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass when you leave. Or maybe you should - at least it could be good for a laugh. We could use one right now.

Ron Suskind is known for being a heavy-hitting journalist. It’s he who was told by a Bush administration official that he was part of “what we call the reality-based community” and “while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Which is, of course, why the words “reality-based community” is proudly displayed on progressive blog sites the internet over (including this blog).

Suskind has a new book, and it’s a bombshell:

Author Ron Suskind appeared on the Today show and said that Bush ordered the CIA to forge a letter after the invasion linking Saddam Husein and al-Qaeda, in an effort to justify the invasion after the fact. His new book is “The Way of the World.”

President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to to manufacture a false pretense for the Iraq war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, an explosive new book claims.

Suskind’s sources are named and from the intelligence community who claim to have actually seen the letter and witnessed key discussions.

ThinkProgress; Today; Crooks and Liars has some excerpts and details.

These three videos by a native Iraqi showcase a much different point of view of Iraq today than the one espoused by Republicans and Senator McCain. Rather than seeing that the surge has worked, he sees walls - walls which now keep monoethnic neighborhoods trapped and segregated. It makes sense that the violence has gone down, with the ethnic cleansing of the last few years resulting in the uprooting of once-peaceful mixed neighborhoods.

“”Baghdad is a city where one street is at war with the next … it has been transformed into a city of walls.”

“There are 20 miles of walls slicing up the city into Sunni and Shia ghettos…each wall over 12 feet high. They are the main reason why the causualties have fallen…”

In part two, he talks about the ethnic killings themselves…and the chilling, desolate field of shallow graves of the unknown victims of militias.

In this last part, the reporter talks to children forced to grow up far too soon. And makes a statement about the next generation, uneducated due to lack of schools or indoctrinated at the orphanages run by the militias.

If you watch these videos and do not cringe at what our policies have done to these people, then there is no hope for your soul. The fear and anguish displayed in these interviews should rend your heart. We cannot help by leaving our military in place in Iraq, not one iota. The future must be in Iraqi hands now. We caused and are in the middle of a civil war - of our making, but for which there is no foreign solution. They want us out. And who can blame them?

(Via dkos.)