I had a good time in Vegas, so I didn't spend a huge amount of time at NN, but I did spend enough time to take in the mood, and it was schizophrenic. About half the people there are some combination of angry, disappointed and bitter with Democrats in general and Obama in particular.

This group sees him as not a heck of a lot better than George Bush, and in fact the Democrat who extended some of Bush's worst policies, especially in civil liberties. This includes a lot of feminists (angry at what they see as betrayals on abortion), many Hispanics angry at the continued harsh enforcement of immigration laws, gays who feel Obama has betrayed clear promises on gay rights, anti-war activists saddened by escalation in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and a mishmash of folks who think health care reform was a dog's breakfast and that the general way the economy and financial reform has been handled is a disgrace.

Then there are the folks who would characterize themselves, in general, as hard-nosed pragmatists and "realists". These range from the "Obama is the greatest liberal president since FDR" types, who think that the Obama is just wonderful and those progressives and liberals who don't agree are simply delusional to those who feel that a lot of what he's done has been watered down pap in general but that it's certainly better than nothing and that those who are disappointed are unrealistic idealists who simply don't understand the constraints Obama and Congressional Democrats are working under.

As regular readers know, I tend to the first camp, but I'm not going to go into why, I simply want to note that this divide is very real. It's occasioning a lot of anger on both sides. The first sees the second as tribalistic sellouts, willing to excuse horrible things they would never excuse in Republicans so long as they are committed by Democrats and lacking an understanding of just how bad Democratic policy has been. These are folks who tend to sneer at the "wins" as either illusory or so underwhelming as to be a parody of the "lesser evil" argument. (Reminding one inevitably of the T-shirts which say "Why Vote for the lesser evil. Cthulhu 2008.") To many of these folks the other side are, crudely put, sell-outs.

The second side is angry at what they see as fairy-tale thinking and deeply unrealistic. "Obama couldn't fix everything immediately, but he's better than the Republicans will be if they get back in power" is their mantra, ranging from "really, he's wonderful and you're insane for thinking otherwise" to "well, yes he sucks but he sucks less than what the Republicans will do when they get in power." Either way, they see the attacks from what they consider the "purists" as deeply damaging. Democrats may or may not be a ton better than Republicans, but either way, they are better, and there is a moral case to be made for sucking it up one more time and working hard to elect, as the old progressive battle cry runs, "better Democrats". This is a two-party state, with those parties having an unbreakable oligopoly on power. Dissing Democrats just helps the even worse party win, at which point they will do even worse things. So get over your problems, whether they are with economic policy or Obama's continued shredding of fundamental civil liberties like Habeas Corpus, jump back into the trenches with your bowie knife or bayonet and fight for Democrats, not against them because by constantly bad mouthing Dems all you do is make it more likely that Republicans will win, and if they win, well, that will be baaaaddddd. Very, very baaaaaddddd.

To put it crudely and unfairly to both sides, it's the sell-outs without principles against the purists without realism.

Continue reading »

Suddenly Afghanistan is above the fold, front and center at the New York Times. Near-orgasmic tales of great wealth and riches sit adjacent to stories of slow progress, political chaos, and other tidbits designed to send one message: Leaving Afghanistan is a mistake, Mr. President. We'll be losers. Losers....

This little bomblet is a stellar example:

Six months after President Obama decided to send more forces to Afghanistan, the halting progress in the war has crystallized longstanding tensions within the government over the viability of his plan to turn around the country and begin pulling out by July 2011.

Within the administration, the troubles in clearing out the Taliban from a second-tier region and the elusive loyalties of the Afghan president have prompted anxious discussions about whether the policy can work on the timetable the president has set. Even before the recent setbacks, the military was highly skeptical of setting a date to start withdrawing, but Mr. Obama insisted on it as a way to bring to conclusion a war now in its ninth year.

Please note the careful parsing the Times reporter used. "Anxious discussions" do not necessarily include the President, the chief of staff, or the Vice President, who was against any escalation in Afghanistan during the first round of frenzied talks.

Jonathan Alter's book The Promise: President Obama, Year One has a detailed look at exactly how the military (Note: By military, I mean the top brass, not the troops in the field) uses the press to try to "jam" the President into their agenda, beginning with the intentional leak of the "McCrystal Report".

Continue reading »

A conservative-leaning friend of mine had to needle me when I was griping about current defense issues - he said, hey, be careful what you ask for, these are "your" progressives. I had to shoot back a response, in essence, saying no, these were not "my" progressives because I didn't see any progressives in the White House. I don't think I have to elaborate to anyone that the progressive movement is bitterly disappointed with the Obama administration and Congress.

"Progressives have grown ever more dissatisfied, and for good reason," Robert Borosage, the conference organizer, said at the start. "Our hopes or illusions were shattered: escalation in Afghanistan, retreat on Guantanamo, no movement on worker rights or comprehensive immigration reform, dithering on 'don't ask, don't tell,' reverses on choice, delay on climate change and new energy."

There's nothing so much as the Obama administration's willingness to retain former Bush administration officials that emphasizes this fact. Let's leave SecDef Bob Gates and FBI director Robert Mueller alone for now, and look at former Lt Gen James Clapper, nominated to be the next Director of National Intelligence. Now I don't really care that this administration keeps on pushing retired general/flag officers into public service, although others do (I think it's Obama's attempt to influence Republicans from blocking his nominations). I'm more disturbed by Clapper's former record on intelligence issues, notably when referencing Saddam's alleged WMD program in 2003.

The idea that Saddam hid his WMD stockpiles and programs by secretly shipping them to Syria has been popular for years among some of the most avid supporters of George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Nevertheless, lengthy and expensive investigations by the Iraq Survey Group, a special team set up by Bush to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, found only traces of them. The inquiry concluded that Saddam had largely destroyed his WMD stockpiles and production infrastructure years before the invasion, retaining only the ability to restart the program if it became possible. Experts affiliated with both the Republican and Democratic parties now say the Iraq Survey Group’s evidence shows overwhelmingly that Saddam’s WMD programs and stockpiles were eliminated well before the U.S. invasion. Claims that Iraqi WMDs might still be hidden in Syria are now regarded as no more than a fringe conspiracy theory.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials, requesting anonymity when discussing sensitive information, confirm to Declassified that Clapper supported the theory. One of the officials says Clapper was a fairly enthusiastic proponent of the idea, but three others say they don’t remember his being a bitter-end advocate of the notion; they suggest he probably abandoned it after the Iraq Survey Group reported its conclusions. One of the officials says Clapper was "not much of an ideologue."

Nevertheless, he apparently stuck with the theory for at least six months after the invasion. The Washington Times’s ace defense reporter, Bill Gertz, described Clapper in an Oct. 29, 2003, story as telling a group of defense journalists at a breakfast that spy-satellite images of vehicle traffic indicated that material and documents related to the WMD programs had been shipped to Syria. "Those below the senior leadership saw what was coming and I think they went to extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence," Clapper was quoted as saying.

I heard these rumors, never saw any evidence that supported movements of MWD materials and munitions to Syria. I'd like to think that Syria wouldn't be so stupid as to support this move, and if it had done so to benefit its own WMD program, well, that's just prudent politics. But the facts remain that Saddam's WMD program was not active at the time of the invasion, that he did not have a stockpile of munitions that he was preparing to give to terrorists, and that a preventive invasion was a really bad solution to that threat. So why keep Clapper in the administration? Has he repented? Does he accept the Iraq Survey Group's findings?

I'm quite enjoying Matt Yglesias's book Heads In the Sand, where he explains this inexplicable tendency of old-school Democrats to actually apply their energy and agenda in the same direction as right-wing conservatives, even though, time after time, we've seen this strategy backfire on them. This administration is showing the same tendencies that Yglesias points out, and it's damned frustrating. We deserve better than this. We campaigned for a progressive platform, and we didn't get the progressive positions that we wanted. We're nearly out of time to influence this administration to change for the better - if the Repubs win at the mid-terms, Obama will be forced to compromise even more to the right, and the progressive positions will just vanish in 2011-2012.

Have you ever had a friend or relative who was a junkie? You know what it's like, watching them go steadily downhill. You've heard the speeches about how they're going to move, get a new job and start over so many times, you can repeat it in your sleep. But eventually you understand that you're dealing with an addict, and you just have to detach and let the horrors play out - because there's not a damned thing you can do to stop it.

That's how I feel about this war. War is the needle in the arm of our national leadership:

KABUL -- Days after President Obama outlines his new war strategy in a speech Tuesday, as many as 9,000 Marines will begin final preparations to deploy to southern Afghanistan and renew an assault on a Taliban stronghold that slowed this year amid a troop shortage and political pressure from the Afghan government, senior U.S. officials said.

The extra Marines will be the first to move into the country as part of Obama's escalation of the eight-year-old war. They will double the size of the U.S. force in the southern province of Helmand and will provide a critical test for Afghan President Hamid Karzai's struggling government and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy.

"The first troops out of the door are going to be Marines," Gen. James T. Conway, the Corps' top officer, told fellow Marines in Afghanistan on Saturday. "We've been leaning forward in anticipation of a decision. And we've got some pretty stiff fighting coming."

The Marines will be quickly followed by about 1,000 U.S. Army trainers. They will deploy as early as February to speed the growth of the Afghan army and police force, military officials said.

The new forces will not start moving until Obama outlines his new strategy in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. The revised plan, which faces a war-weary and increasingly skeptical American public, is expected to call for 30,000 to 35,000 new troops in a phased deployment over the next 12 to 18 months.

The parceling-out of reinforcements is driven in part by Afghanistan's lack of infrastructure, which cannot immediately support a larger U.S. force. The phased approach will also allow the president to cancel some of the additional reinforcements if the counterinsurgency strategy advocated by McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, does not show results or if the Karzai government does not meet goals for stamping out corruption and providing for the Afghan people, White House officials said.

Now, what do you suppose the odds are of that happening?

According to a report in the Financial Times, Microsoft has approached News Corp. about de-listing their sites from Google, which would be an apparent escalation in the search engine wars.

It appears that Microsoft isn’t limiting this to just News Corp either. It’s reported that they are approaching numerous online publishers and offering to pay them for content if they delist from Google. One publisher approached by Microsoft said this is all about “Microsoft hurting Google’s margin”.

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is their latest attempt to give Google a run for the money. Here are the October search engine market shares, and as you can see Microsoft has a long way to go to beat out Google:

Bing has increased at the same rate that Google has, but what is interesting is that it appears their shares are coming from Yahoo. In July of this year Microsoft and Yahoo entered a deal for Yahoo to use the Bing search engine on their sites in exchange for a split on advertising revenue, so Yahoo’s decrease in the market share also directly effects Microsoft.

Of course the whole basis of this plan depends upon the belief that Google is actually “stealing” content, something that is in serious debate in both the tech and legal worlds. If this war does escalate and end up in the courts then we could finally see a ruling come out on exactly what the “fair use doctrine” covers – something we have been running blind on for years. Given the fact that Google only reproduces the headline and first few words of an article and that this use is both for research and archival purposes, it appears that Google would have a very strong case in the courts. To really solidify their case and put the final nail in the coffin of this war, Google could remove advertising from the news section of their search engine, which is the only questionable part of “fair use” when it comes to their service. Even better would be for Google to spin off the news part of their search engine and make it a non-profit partnered with Google. Google can surely afford it, and this would destroy any battle Microsoft or News Corp may be planning.

Whatever happens with this, it is clear that Murdoch still isn’t set on removing his sites from Google. I just checked again and what I reported a couple of weeks ago still stands – News Corp sites have explicit directions asking Google to index them. This could also be used against the Murdoch/Microsoft plan. What would happen if Google showed that News Corp sites saw a large percentage of their visits originate from Google? I know that they have records of those kind of metrics, and it would be interesting to hear News Corp argue that they didn’t mind Google increasing their online visibility all these years for free.

(cross posted at IntoxiNation)

BBC:

A panel probing fraud claims in the Afghan election has found Hamid Karzai did not gain enough valid votes for an outright win, the BBC understands.

Preliminary results from August's first round had placed Mr Karzai comfortably over the 50% plus one vote threshold needed to avoid a run-off.

But the BBC understands Mr Karzai's vote share has fallen below half, after a number of votes were ruled invalid.

Under poll rules, Mr Karzai now faces a runoff against rival Abdullah Abdullah.

The panel said it had found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" at the polling stations, which were across the country.

It was not clear how Mr Karzai would respond to the ECC findings, amid reports of a possible legal challenge.

Initial results released last month had given him nearly 55% of votes, with former foreign minister Mr Abdullah on 28%.

The Afghan president has insisted he won the election outright, but EU observers have said as many as one in four votes cast were suspicious.

Sources have told the BBC that Mr Karzai is furious over the prospect of a second round.

It makes Rahm Emanuel's comment that we must know if we have a partner in Afghanistan before making a decision on troop escalation that much more pointed and the Republicans pressuring Pres. Obama to make a quicker decision regarding Afghanistan that much more ridiculous and reactionary.

I had hoped to go to a party for Rep. Barbara Lee on Sunday, but it turned out to be too early in the day for me and we have those pesky Sunday Bobblehead shows to cover. Still, I heard it was a great event. I wanted to thank her because she was the only member of Congress who voted against Bush's war resolution back in 2002. And she explained it this way:

BARBARA LEE: First, our nation is in grieving, we're all mourning, we're angry; there are a range of emotions taking place. Myself personally, I am also grieving and I believe fully and firmly that the Congress of the United States is the only legislative body that can say, "Let's pause for a moment...and let's look at using some restraint before we rush to action." Because military action can lead to an escalation and spiral out of control. So, why I voted no, was one, the president already has the authority to execute a military action. He doesn't need Congress; under the War Powers Act he has that authority. But Congress is the people's house, and the Congress is responsible for providing checks and balances, and you cannot just allow the administration to run ahead with a strategy without reporting back and without having some oversight.

Too bad the rest of Congress didn't see the situation as clearly as she did.

Howie Klein was there and he has some interesting news about her bill to stop the Afghanistan war and how we're supposed to pay for it:

And Thursday, as a member of the Appropriations Committee, she introduced HR 3699, a bill that will prohibit funding any increase in the number of members of the United States Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

Bush funded his wars with supplemental budgets which meant he just printed money-- trillions of dollars-- to pay for them without having to worry about raising taxes (on current voters) or about cutting services directly. One result has been the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Obama campaigned on a promise not use supplemental budgets but to ask Congress for money through established budgetary procedures. That would kick in pay-go and a member of Congress voting for funds to escalate expensive occupations of other countries would have to agree to either raise taxes on his or her constituents-- what do you think Boehner, Cantor, Pence, Ryan and other leading GOP warmongers will think of that?-- or cut back on social programs, a prospect none too attractive to many of the conservative and moderate Democrats who have gone along with Bush's outrageous supplemental budgeting and are thereby complicit in the economic disaster that has ensued.

I really thought "pay-go" was our ace-in-the-hole to stop the war in Afghanistan. Not even a political thug like Rahm Emanuel could bully and bribe enough Democrats and Republicans to go for this, especially not at a point when the war is as increasingly unpopular as it is. If the Senate doesn't kill the legislation that the House passed, it is, in effect, a vote for a war that will last until Obama is voted out of office. Please help Blue America build and strengthen a coalition of anti-war Democrats in Congress by contributing to No Means No.

(Everyone who donates today has their name entered in a drawing to win two items autographed by Al Franken, a copy of the book The Truth... With Jokes and a copy of a rare advance screener for his DVD God Spoke.

Way to go, Rep. Lee.

This is pretty big news. The big progressive groups hadn't yet spoken on the question of escalation in Afghanistan - their silence was pronounced. MoveOn finally broke that silence today, appealing to the President to commit to a clear exit strategy. It's a pretty big step.

U.S. policy in Afghanistan has reached a pivotal moment. President Obama is poised to make a critical decision about the Afghanistan war in the next few weeks. And there’s a big debate happening right now about what to do.

Pro-war advocates both inside and outside the administration—including John McCain and Joe Lieberman—are calling for a big escalation. The general in charge of Afghanistan is expected to request tens of thousands more troops, and that may just be the beginning. They’re cranking up the pressure for an immediate surge.

But other powerful voices are urging caution: Vice President Biden and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have raised real concerns about the idea of sending more troops to Afghanistan without a clear strategy, as have Democrats in Congress. And a majority of Americans oppose increasing troop levels.

Can you write to the White House and tell them we need a clear exit strategy—not tens of thousands more US troops stuck in a quagmire? You can send the President a message by clicking below:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51843&id=&t=1

Some administration officials are arguing for a smaller, nimbler approach with a narrow focus on the threat from al-Qaeda. But cheerleaders for the war refuse to acknowledge that there could be any viable strategy other than more and more troops. So they’re trotting out the same tired old lines and questioning the motives of those who disagree with them.

They figure they can cut off any debate about our ultimate goals in Afghanistan and the region. But President Obama has consistently shown a willingness to stand up for his more thoughtful approach to foreign policy, and that’s what he needs to do here, too.

The hawks are making their position heard. Now, the majority of Americans—those of us who are for as quick and as responsible an end to the war as possible—need to make our voices heard, too.

With Democrats opposing escalation by more than two to one, MoveOn is just reflecting the opinions of their membership. They're a bit late to the debate, but better than ducking it entirely.

I made a big deal a couple of months ago of not allowing the White House to frame the debate on Bush's "surge" and to refer to it as it plainly is: an escalation. Unfortunately, it's been pointed out to me that I need to follow my own advice and stop referring to our military action in Iraq as a "war," but what it truly is: an occupation. And that's absolutely right. To call it a war lends credibility that Bush's actions do not deserve.

Cunning Realist expands on the thought:

"War" is obviously a powerful word. It conjures up a lot of basic instincts like survival, patriotism and pride; no one wants to lose a war. It also acts as an off-switch for analysis and skepticism. As long as there's a "war" on, lots of people -- about 30% of this country, as the polls indicate -- will overlook just about anything. [..]

So, a question: when does a war become an occupation? We have a war that's manifestly unwinnable based on the current definition of victory. After four years, we have more troops than ever on the ground. We know the President will remain intransigent until he leaves office, and even if a Democrat wins in 2008, a meaningful withdrawal is far from certain. We can debate endlessly the meanings of war and occupation. But when public opinion polls of Iraqis consistently show that the majority opposes our presence and approves of attacks on U.S. troops (and even the Saudi royals start speaking in public of the "illegitimate foreign occupation of Iraq") parallels to historical examples of occupation become more pronounced.

Attywood: Ex-hippies write essays, and bloggers write essays about whether we're hippies. What are people afraid of? I read one hippie blogger say he's going to the March on Washington against the War on January 27 . Oh, sorry, that's Skippy, not hippie. What? Skippy's gonna be there? We HAFTA go.

Balls and Walnuts : Spocko roundup, with the latest news on disneyhatesyou.com, coming to your computer soon!

Bob Geiger: Ted Kennedy's stop the Iraq War escalation bill is written in plain English. So is MoveOn's anti-McCain ad.

HOLY CRAP: The Religious Right fibs on same-sex unions. Is there a gag order on candidates when it comes to "separation of church and state"?

AHOY 06: The A-hole of the year countdown has begun...

Guest Round-Up by Blue Gal , who never knew there were so many Nigerian Royals needing urgent banking help until she published her undisguised email here. From now on it's bluegalsblog AT gmail DOT com