Northman's Fury

Republican presidential front-runner Sen. John McCain on Thursday defended his statement that U.S. troops could spend "maybe 100" years in Iraq -- saying he was referring to a military presence similar to what the nation already has in places like Japan, Germany and South Korea.

Now, there is little question that his comment is being taken somewhat out of context to attack him. He did say he wouldn't mind them being there for a century so long as they weren't being killed or injured in attacks. On the other hand, he hasn't bothered to mention how long he'd keep them there while they are being attacked, injured, and killed. Other comments indicate "indefinitely", so 100 years as shorthand isn't entirely invalid.

But even if you take him at his word, that he meant he foresees a presence similar to the one's in South Korea or Germany, he doesn't actually come out that well.

The missions in those countries, like the one in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia until recently, were designed to help defend those countries against a conventional military threat from their neighbours. The only conventional military threat facing Iraq these days is from the Turks, who, thanks to their being NATO allies, are now getting assistance in their military campaign from the US itself. Anyone who thinks Iran is a conventional threat is just plain delusional. Not only does it spend only a fraction of what the other Gulf countries do on it's military, but it already has vast influence in Iraq thanks to it's connections to groups like ISCI and other Shiite powers. An actual military incursion would be counter-productive.

No, the threat, as McCain also mentioned, are non-state groups like al Qaeda and the instability they cause. Rather than being in Iraq to defend it form outside conventional threats, he wants US troops there to defend it against small, informal, and more often than not, internal, enemies. The last time the US tried that was in Vietnam, and you don't see too many US bases there anymore, now do you?

You can't claim to want to deal with a non-state force and then use missions based on state-on-state conflict as your model, unless you're not aware of the differences. And if you can't see the differences, you definitely shouldn't be Commander-in-Cheif.

It's nice to see someone is working on it.

A Democratic lawmaker on Wednesday proposed legislation to stop network providers from playing traffic cop on the Internet.

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, introduced the bill to promote the principle, known as "Net neutrality," of treating all Internet traffic equally.

Markey, who introduced similar legislation in 2006, said the bill doesn't regulate the Internet, only makes sure the rules of online engagement are fair. His spokeswoman said he wanted to defuse critics' arguments that the bill amounts to regulation, which she called inaccurate.

"It does, however, suggest that the principles which have guided the Internet's development and expansion are highly worthy of retention, and it seeks to enshrine such principles in the law as guide stars for U.S. broadband policy," Markey said of The Internet Freedom Preservation Act.

As I said yesterday, if you want to know if Obama is really the front-runner, you don't have to look much further than the WSJ to see who they are attacking. This is another gem from them.

A number of ways to come to this conclusion, but the simplest is to look at the editorial page of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, which has for two days in a row, used it's space to launch attacks against him. Yesterday, it was lambasting him for refusing to vote for telecom immunity, because after all, there's nothing more important to ensuring peaceful security for Americans than making certain that megacorp telecoms can't be held accountable for lawbreaking.

Today, it's about his statement about meeting with foreign leaders without preconditions. Matt Yglesias makes the appropriate point.

The essence of the argument is that if Obama thinks that face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders will single-handedly solve all of America's policy problems, then he's sorely mistaken. This is, of course, true but O'Hanlon can't be bothered to adduce any evidence that Obama does think this. After all, you'd have to be extraordinarily dumb to adopt the straw-man view that O'Hanlon's attacking here.

Of course, extraordinarily dumb straw-men and far-right blogs go hand-in-hand, so I assume we'll be seeing far more of this in the near future.

Sara Robinson has a pretty decent article up debunking a number of popular misconceptions about the Canadian health care system put out by those who advocate for a continuation of the American status quo. It is a pretty fair assessment, but I do have a serious quibble with her reasoning in Myth number 9.

9. People won't be responsible for their own health if they're not being forced to pay for the consequences.

The first half of her reasoning regarding the whole Calvinist, "you only get sick if you're not virtuous and lack the self-discipline to look after yourself", is probably not a bad template for how many view health care issues, but she loses me when she tries to describe why us Canucks look after ourselves.

This difference is expressed in a few different ways. First: Canadians tend to think of tending to one's health as one of your duties as a citizen. You do what's right because you don't want to take up space in the system, or put that burden on your fellow taxpayers. Second, "taking care of yourself" has a slightly expanded definition here, which includes a greater emphasis on public health. Canadians are serious about not coming to work if you're contagious, and seeing a doctor ASAP if you need to. Staying healthy includes not only diet and exercise; but also taking care to keep your germs to yourself, avoiding stress, and getting things treated while they're still small and cheap to fix.

Third, there's a somewhat larger awareness that stress leads to big-ticket illnesses -- and a somewhat lower cultural tolerance for employers who put people in high-stress situations. Nobody wants to pick up the tab for their greed. And finally, there's a generally greater acceptance on the part of both the elderly and their families that end-of-life heroics may be drawing resources away from people who might put them to better use. You can have them if you want them; but reasonable and compassionate people should be able to take the larger view.

The bottom line: When it comes to getting people to make healthy choices, appealing to their sense of the common good seems to work at least as well as Calvinist moralizing.

I really hate to break it to Sara here, but frankly I don't know anyone who looks after themselves because of a feeling of "duty" to our fellow citizens, or the wish not to be a burden on other taxpayers. I, like most other people I know, treat healthcare as a right to be used as required and damn the cost.

Really, I don't know what Sara is smoking out there in BC, but the last thing I think about when going to the doctor is, "Gee, I wonder how much of a burden I'm putting on my fellow Canadians by making this visit?" I don't give a rat's ass. The reason I do what I can to stay healthy is far, far simpler.

I DON'T LIKE BEING SICK!

Honestly, talk to anyone who has had a cold or flu, measles or chicken pox, their tonsils or appendix removed. How many of them are likely to say, "Gee, I'd love to go through all that again, it's just the thought of the cost that's stopping me."

People try to stay healthy because they aren't fond of the alternative. Affordability, if it enters into the equation at all, is pretty far down the list.

The Republican base seems to be having a hard time warming up to their presumptive nominee. McCan's made a few moves against the wishes of the base, and particularly during the 2000 campaign, he did the unpardonable by calling out the religious right for the nutjobs they are, but he's spent the last seven years doing all he could to suck up to the base in any number of ways, and yesterday he picked another opportunity to do just that.

The Senate voted 51 to 45 on Wednesday afternoon to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency against high-level terrorism suspects.

Senate Republicans generally opposed the bill, but several of them also did not want to cast a vote that could be construed as supporting torture, and so were relying on President Bush to make good on a threat to veto legislation limiting C.I.A. interrogation techniques.

So what did the man who spent time being tortured in a Veit Cong prison camp, who was a lone voice of sanity in the Republican debates when his opponents were blustering about doubling Guantanamo and letting Jack Bauer be their role model for "aggressive interrogation techniques", who has spoken out repeatedly about the use of these torture methods, do when he was offered the chance to vote to ban them?

Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, has consistently voiced opposition to waterboarding and other methods that critics say is a form torture. But the Republicans, confident of a White House veto, did not mount the challenge. Mr. McCain voted “no” on Wednesday afternoon.

Yep. After gathering to himself all of the moderate and independent-minded conservatives looking for a break from the power-happy administration of the Bush years and a return to the possibly mythical days when Republicans didn't just talk about morals but actually possessed some, the might "maverick" fell in line with his Republican colleagues and voted against banning waterboarding.

Way to stand on principle.

Update:

What John Cole says. Anybody really surprised by this hasn't been paying attention to what McCain has been doing over the last seven years.

“What’s gone wrong is very simple,” said Hassan Nemazee, a national finance chair for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“If we had won Iowa and New Hampshire, as we had anticipated, projected, et cetera, you would not have been in a situation in which you are losing all of these small states—because we didn’t put any resources in those small states,” he said. “Obama, on the other hand, put resources in these small states.”

Compounding the damage of the bad defeats in Iowa, and then South Carolina, Mr. Nemazee explained, was the lack of the necessary foresight to invest the campaign’s resources in the states that Mrs. Clinton’s rival, Barack Obama, is now gobbling up as fuel for his ever more threatening momentum.

“You needed to have a Plan B, and Plan B was just doing what we are doing right now rather than having resources in the small states,” he said. “We basically ceded every one of these small red states that he has racked up victories in. And the reason that he has racked up victories at this level isn’t because he was so much more well received, or because his message was any better; it was because we didn’t put any resources in there. We weren’t campaigning there. We didn’t have anybody in Utah, in Idaho, in the Dakotas. In Alaska.”

Okay, I know it is just a political campaign and all, but when I look over that passage and see phrases like, "If we had won . . . as we had anticipated, projected, et cetera, you would not have been in a situation in which you are losing", "the lack of the necessary foresight", and "You needed to have a Plan B, and Plan B was just doing what we are doing right now", it sounds an awful lot like the planning that went into the Iraq War that Hillary voted for and still refuses to show any regret over.

"It'll be a cakewalk", "Nobody could have anticipated the insurgency's strength". "Plan B is to make Plan A work".

It is the same kind of rhetoric. The same kind of shock that the inevitable path to a glorious fate may not go exactly as planned. The same lack of contingency thinking should the unthinkable, (to them), come to pass.

I still firmly believe that the Clintons would make a better presidency than W and his crew have by a vast margin, but the above is another example of why I would prefer to see Obama at the helm of our southern neighbours. His ability to think strategically, not just lay plans but follow through and adapt as necessary, just seems far superior to Clinton's.

Update: Hit the publish button and then saw this, making the point a bit more clear:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is moving belatedly to make a contest of next Tuesday's Democratic presidential primary.

. . .

Obama appears to be better organized in Wisconsin than Clinton, who looks to be throwing together her state operation at the last minute, said UW-Madison political scientist John Coleman.

with temporary benefits:

Violence is increasing in Iraq, raising questions about whether the security improvements credited to the increase in U.S. troops may be short-lived.

Car bombs in Baghdad on Monday killed at least 11 people and injured a prominent leader of one of the country's most influential American-allied tribal militias.

The Ministry of Electricity announced that power to much of the nation, already anemic, is likely to lag in coming days because insurgents had blown up transmission facilities and natural gas pipelines that fuel generators.

CBS News confirmed that two of its journalists are missing in Basra, in Iraq's south.

A leading parliament member warned that budget disputes have paralyzed the legislature.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, finishing a two-day visit to Baghdad, said that he was likely to advocate a pause in troop withdrawals to evaluate the situation after the last of the additional troops sent here under President Bush's so-called surge strategy had left later this year.

The paralyzed legislature is the clearest sign of the failure of the surge, whose stated goal was to bring about a window of security for the government to actually start doing something and assert its authority.

That plan was thrown out the window as soon as the US decided instead to take advantage of the "awakening" in Anbar and allow local leaders free reign to pacify their own territories. Those alliances of convenience, so heavily touted as successes by the pro-war crowd, are now starting to break down.

Later, Sheik Ali Hathem al Suleiman al Duleimy, who was injured in the attack, went on Iraqi TV and declared war against his enemies. He said that his militia, many of whose members are paid by the United States, no longer would allow the U.S. or Iraqi government to interfere with its work.

His comments came as similar U.S.-allied groups in nearby Diyala province continued to refuse to work with American or Iraqi government forces until the provincial police chief is removed. On Monday, hundreds protested in Diyala to demand the chief's removal.

No matter. I'm sure this is all just the desperate actions of dead-enders in an insurgency in its last throes, same as all of the other attacks have been for the last five years. Odd how they can maintain that desperation for so long.

The "surge" succeeded in its only real objective; it guaranteed that the Iraq War will be dumped on the next president's lap.

There's a bit of rumbling going on about the fact that Hillary has stopped congratulating Obama on his victories. Now I'm sure this may seem like petty, sore-loser behaviour to some people, but the real reason is far simpler.

As Hillary explained after the weekends primaries, none of those victories really matter, so there is no need to congratulate Obama on them. I'm sure if he manages to win a real primary sometime in the future, Clinton will only be too happy to conceed with grace.

From Go with the tough guy

Vote McCain! He'll start the wars Bush never got around to!

At least he's honest about it.

A number of disheartening stories for those paying attention to the economy. The first involves the continuing signs of the mortgage and credit crisis moving beyond the sub-prime lenders.

As home prices fall and banks tighten lending standards, people with good, or prime, credit histories are falling behind on their payments for home loans, auto loans and credit cards at a quickening pace, according to industry data and economists.

The rise in prime delinquencies, while less severe than the one in the subprime market, nonetheless poses a threat to the battered housing market and weakening economy, which some specialists say is in a recession or headed for one.

Until recently, people with good credit, who tend to pay their bills on time and manage their finances well, were viewed as a bulwark against the economic strains posed by rising defaults among borrowers with blemished, or subprime, credit.

“This collapse in housing value is sucking in all borrowers,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

Moving beyond that is the announcement by GM that it is offering it's entire hourly workforce a buyout package in an attempt to get rid of the higher-wage workers, who also happen to be the most experienced, so they can replace them with lower-paid newbees, and not nearly as many of them. That's likely to put yet another crunch on the already weakening economy.

Then from Arizona, there are signs that the Latino immigrant community is leaving.

The signs of flight among Latino immigrants here are multiple: Families moving out of apartment complexes, schools reporting enrollment drops, business owners complaining about fewer clients.

. . .

On Monday, state lawmakers, concerned about shortages of workers and the failed revamping of immigration law in Congress, which was pushed by Senator John McCain of Arizona, pledged action.

Bills were announced that would create a state-run temporary worker program, though it would need Congressional authorization. And last week Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, offered to help the United States Labor Department rewrite regulations designed to streamline visas for agricultural workers, who growers say are increasingly hard to find.

While data for the last month or so are not available, there were already signs of migration out of Arizona at the end of last year. In the fourth quarter of 2007 the apartment-vacancy rate in metropolitan Phoenix rose to 11.2 percent from 9 percent in the same quarter of 2006, with much higher rates of 15 percent or more in heavily Latino neighborhoods.

“You have many people moving out, but they are not all illegal,” said Terry Feinberg, president of the Arizona Multihousing Alliance, a trade group for the apartment and rental housing industry. “A lot of people moving are citizens, or legal, but because someone in their family or social network is not, and they are having a hard time keeping or finding a job, they all move.”

A number of factors are at work here according to the article, with one being the tough new legislation targeting illegals, but the article does make a few other points worth considering, particularly those looking to do this sort of thing on a national scale. Getting rid of all of those illegals, and in some cases, their legal relatives, means further vacancies in a housing market already in deep trouble. Plus, as noted in the first paragraph, a lot fewer consumers for all types of business products and services.

The economic effect of tossing out millions of local customers would be a massive hit on the US economy, something most immigrant bashers tend to ignore.

The other major factor mentioned is in fact a slowing economy. Less chance for work means fewer people coming to look for it. Ties in nicely to the story about GM above. Well-paying jobs in the US are growing scarcer.

Ms. McLaren, the economist, said that in the end history showed it was difficult to stop illegal immigration so long as jobs paid better in the United States than at home. An economic rebound would probably draw people back here, no matter the laws.

Probably true. But the fact of the matter is, thanks to a number of factors, the jobs in the US may not pay more than elsewhere for a whole lot longer.

The ideology of unrestricted free trade (via globalization) assumes that the majority of the participants in the US economy are sufficiently differentiated from the billions in China, India and the rest of the world to command higher salaries. I suspect that isn't the truth and that the majority of Americans don't hold any substantive qualitative advantage over newly minted participants in the global economy.

Old advantages appear ephemeral -- seen in how quickly the US slipped to 38 in broadband. If we think in terms of how rewards/resources are allocated if the global economy operates as a single entity and not many loosely joined parts... then the vast majority of US workers will soon find their wages/salaries normalized to global standards (to those with similar skills etc.). The result will be that the US, as collection of citizens will get poorer (or at best tread water until everyone else keeps up).

It will, at least, solve the problem of illegal immigration, though I feel sorry for whatever group gets to take their place as scapegoats.

The Bush administration is making another push for passenger data from the EU, along with other “security” measures that push the already too generous envelope.

The US administration is pressing the 27 governments of the European Union to sign up for a range of new security measures for transatlantic travel, including allowing armed guards on all flights from Europe to America by US airlines.

The demand to put armed air marshals on to the flights is part of a travel clampdown by the Bush administration that officials in Brussels described as "blackmail" and "troublesome", and could see west Europeans and Britons required to have US visas if their governments balk at Washington's requirements.

. . .

And within months the US department of homeland security is to impose a new permit system for Europeans flying to the US, compelling all travellers to apply online for permission to enter the country before booking or buying a ticket, a procedure that will take several days.

The data from the US's new electronic transport authorisation system is to be combined with extensive personal passenger details already being provided by EU countries to the US for the "profiling" of potential terrorists and assessment of other security risks.

Washington is also asking European airlines to provide personal data on non-travellers - for example family members - who are allowed beyond departure barriers to help elderly, young or ill passengers to board aircraft flying to America, a demand the airlines reject as "absurd".

As with most things, if you give in to one of their demands, they just push for even more.

One of the points regarding hyperpowers made by Amy Chua, was that they exhibited a type of tolerance. They didn't try to force their ways upon others, but allowed local leaders to retain their legitimacy, while seeking out the best and brightest offered around the world and integrating them into the empire’s fold.

For a long time, the US was the leader in this, educating the young elites of the world in its universities. Since 9/11 and the ever increasing difficulties placed on travelers to the US, they’ve lost that lead, most significantly among the Islamic world. Measures like the one above make even business travelers and tourists reluctant to visit. It’s one of the reasons that, despite an ever weakening dollar, tourism numbers have decreased rather than increased.

But no matter, the Bush administration still believes in its power, and you can see it in their negotiating ploys.

According to a US document being circulated for signature in European capitals, EU states would also need to supply personal data on all air passengers overflying but not landing in the US in order to gain or retain visa-free travel to America, senior EU officials said.

Basically, agree with our demands, or we’ll make it even harder for your citizens to travel to the US. And this time, it will probably work for the most part. There are still too many ties for the Europeans to afford a massive curtailing of traffic. But the new restrictions and demands will have a curtailing effect of their own, and it will encourage a widening of European options for future business opportunities. The negotiating tactics of the Bush administration are a function of their worldview.

. . . If, as the neoconservative worldview would have it, the United States posesses an enduring, historically unprecedented concentration of power, then the Bush/Clinton strategy makes perfect sense. If the world is truly unipolar, then to be cut off diplomatically and economically from the United States is to be left out in the cold. To be cut off from Washington is functionally the same as being cut off from everywhere else.

If, however, the world is (or is fast becoming) functionally multipolar, the strategy breaks down. In such a situation, while a relationship with Washington may bring many benefits, it is far from essential. There are other power centers to which countries can look for diplomatic, military and economic support. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders understood this reality, and so made a greater effort to woo foreign capitals, always concerned that the Soviets would make a better offer.

The world is already moving to the latter balance, and every time the US throws it's still considerable weight around like it's doing over air travel to bully others to comply with their wishes, the more everyone wants to see that latter balance take hold.

On the Dem side, a sweep for Obama, which at this point isn't really a surprise anymore. The real question now is whether Clinton's focusing on the big-state primaries of Texas and Ohio on March 4th while all but conceding all the remaining, smaller primaries preceding them will be as successful as Guiliani's Florida strategy was. Of course, now that she's fired her campaign manager, maybe she'll find a way to win something, anything, in between and keep the race from looking like a runaway.

On the Republican side, the race is over, supposedly, but the fight clearly isn't. The presumptive nominee McCain lost both Kansas and Louisiana, earning only a somewhat weird victory in Washington. Maybe.

The base appears highly reluctant to fall into line on this one, and Huckabee is the beneficiary of those feelings. Worse for McCain, anything he does to court his party's base, damages his reputation as a moderate.

Somehow, despite the battle for a nominee, the Democrats still appear united. (So far, anyway.) The Republicans, on the other hand, are still very much fractured despite having a presumptive nominee.

It is a curious dynamic, and as a political junkie, I must admit to looking forward to seeing how it plays out over the next month or so.

The European public needs convincing that Nato's mission in Afghanistan is part of a wider fight against global terror, the US defence secretary says.

The problem, Mr. Gates, is that most of the European voters already do believe that Afghanistan is part of the global "War on Terror". The same one that's being fought in Iraq. And, as you may have heard, they're not terribly fond of that war, and all of its related contests.

At one time, it was believed by many that Afghanistan was justified. It was, at the very least, where the guys responsible for the 9/11 attacks actually were. But once the US left NATO holding the bag so they could go play in the Iraqi sandbox, support for a conflict that means de facto support for the Iraq War hasn't exactly been gaining popularity.

The smart thing to do would be to try and keep the two conflicts separate in people's minds, but smart and Bush foreign policy aren't words that have ever appeared in the same sentence unless in a mocking, sarcastic sense.

So keep linking the two together, and drain away whatever residual support the Afghan mission has. You can be assured that boot-lickers like Harper will still support you, but that will be about all.

For Obama in Washington, Louisiana, and Nebraska.

However, the real surprise is that it may be true for Huckabee as well. He won Kansas, and is leading in Louisiana and Washington so far. Somebody apparently forgot to tell his supporters that McCain has already won.

Nice little story about Obama today in the New York Times, the thrust of which seems to be that Obama may have lied about his youthful experiences with drugs, although in a very different way than that's usually meant.

Years later in his 1995 memoir, he mentioned smoking “reefer” in “the dorm room of some brother” and talked about “getting high.” Before Occidental, he indulged in marijuana, alcohol and sometimes cocaine as a high school student in Hawaii, according to the book. He made “some bad decisions” as a teenager involving drugs and drinking, Senator Obama, now a presidential candidate, told high school students in New Hampshire last November.

Mr. Obama’s admissions are rare for a politician (his book, “Dreams From My Father,” was written before he ran for office.) They briefly became a campaign issue in December when an adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s chief Democratic rival, suggested that his history with drugs would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if he became his party’s nominee.

. . .

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

Apparently being unable to make any attacks stick about his past drug use since he already admitted to them and put them out in the open, we're now supposed to doubt him because he may not have used drugs enough.

It's a weird world we live in.

In any case, there are nastier narratives out there, and I expect we'll see them more often if Obama continues to do well in the nomination race. This one is a good example of the depths some people are willing to sink to.

To me, it's like you are all voting for Obama because of some unexplainable aura he exudes. Everyone is swooning over this almost mysterious attraction he exudes. "Electric" is another word I have been hearing. Call it what you will; let's just call it his innate charisma.

I understand that some of you are voting for Obama for reasons other than his charisma. But, as I watch the size of your group swell before my very eyes (literally every refresh shows another five to ten more supporters) I am becoming more alarmed by your thought processes, and less convinced that you know what an Obama presidency will actually look like.

History shows that it was exactly this kind of thinking which allowed charismatic leaders like Adolf Hitler to take power. Extreme? For sure. But, it is a relevant comparison when looking at large groups of people being swayed to act for all the wrong reasons.

. . .

Sadly (for Obama) it all comes down to the race. As much as Obama would like to believe that race is no longer an issue for us voters, it absolutely is an issue, and may even be the source of his charismatic power. Let's play a pretend to see how it works. Pretend that Barack Obama is white. Imagine a white, mostly inexperienced junior senator from Illinois with the exact same ideas and speeches.

Does it have the same effect? Imagine a lanky white candidate with the exact same rhetoric and the exact same calls for "change." Is the image as powerful? Does he seem as attractive to you? Are you even listening?

Barack Obama is able to compensate for his lack of experience by being black. And to me this is a shame, because I think there were a handful of highly qualified Democrats with betters ideas and a whole lot more experience who were out-dazzled by Obama's race.

The smear that he's only got this far because of his skin colour, plus a comparison to Hitler, all in one post.

Sadly, (for us), I expect to see and hear a lot more of this.

Via bastard.logic, an interesting conversation with Amy Chua, author of "Day of Empire - How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall"



A lot to take in, and I'm not sure I agree with everything she says, but it looks as though the book would be worth the read.

Speaking at CPAC today, notorious Iran war hawk John Bolton emphasized his support for McCain, saying McCain proved he is “stronger” than the Bush administration with the senator’s statement on Iran.

McCain also apparently tried to get Bolton confirmed as UN ambassador for the US, another of McCain's truly "moderate" positions, I guess.

I'm really curious how McCain's campaign is going to turn out. He's basically a straight-line conservative who the conservative movement hates because of a handful of times he didn't march in lockstep with them, and a super war-hawk who has been getting the moderate and independent support of anti-war types, who apparently only caught on to his early criticisms of Bush's war plans without realizing he was calling for bigger and better wars.

How is that democracy and freedom thing working out for them?

The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion -- some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.

The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other "rules" that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.

. . .

Amnesty International has raised concern about the increasing violence toward women in Iraq, saying abductions, rapes and "honor killings" are on the rise.

"Politically active women, those who did not follow a strict dress code, and women [who are] human rights defenders were increasingly at risk of abuses, including by armed groups and religious extremists," Amnesty said in a 2007 report.

. . .

"We thought there would be freedom and democracy and women would have their rights. But all the things we were promised have not come true. There is only fear and horror."

The truly terrible thing about all this, is that I don't see any real way to reverse the slide into misogynistic theocracy. More on that later, but for now, it is important to remember just what has been wrought in the name of "freedom".

and even the words are years too late.

The Army has drafted a new operations manual that elevates the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations, making it equal in importance to defeating adversaries on the battlefield.

Military officials described the new document, the first new edition of the Army’s comprehensive doctrine since 2001, as a major development that draws on the hard-learned lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, where initial military successes gave way to long, grueling struggles to establish control.

It is also an illustration of how far the Pentagon has moved beyond the Bush administration’s initial reluctance to use the military to support “nation-building” efforts when it came into office.

But some influential officers are already arguing that the Army still needs to put actions behind its new words, and they have raised searching questions about whether the Army’s military structure, personnel policies and weapons programs are consistent with its doctrine.

. . .

“The parts of the Army closest to the battlefield have adapted, including tactics and doctrine,” said Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, who wrote a widely circulated article criticizing how the generals fought the Iraq war. “However, the institutional Army, to include our organizational designs and our personnel system, is essentially the same as before 9/11.”

He added: “The most important tasks we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan are building host-nation institutions, including security forces and governance. We need to attract the very best officers into these specialties to be successful at these tasks.”

The Pentagon has decades of institutional inertia built up that makes any kind of true doctrinal change a very slow process, if not outright impossible. And, as noted elsewhere in the article, the weapons systems being bought and being sought, don't match up to this mission in the slightest. Nor does a budget that despite five years of ground warfare still allocates 1/3 of its resources to both the Navy and Air Force and 1/3 to the Army.

For now, the manual is just paper. We'll see over the next decade or so whether or not they're really serious about it, and that's probably too late to save the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I was reluctant to call it before now, but events today have made it clear that Obama will win the Democratic nomination for President. No need to worry about a brokered convention. It's in the bag.

What events you ask? Simple.

Mitt Romney has dropped out, and John McCain is now the shoe-in for the Republican nomination, and you know what that means.



It's like the kiss of death, and I feel sorry for Hillary on this. She's run a damn good campaign and really doesn't deserve to go out like this.

Or does this sound awfully like the argument used to justify segregation in the US?

Parents and educators who support the creation of a Afrocentric school in Toronto say equity doesn't mean sameness, and sometimes requires special treatment.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty opposes the idea of a black-focused school, saying he'd rather talk about improving the curriculum for all students to make it more inclusive.

But Professor Grace-Edward Galabuzi of Ryerson University says a curriculum that assumes sameness, or colour blindness, does not necessarily lead to equality.

He says society sometimes has to do things differently for some groups to ensure equitable outcomes.

"Seperate, but equal."

Somehow

I haven't looked really carefully at this issue, but the idea of separate schools and curriculums doesn't sound like one that promotes equality in any way, shape or form.

While the battle for votes south of the border takes up a lot of press, we also seem to be moving towards a possible election on this side of the border. It's sometimes hard to tell given how the Conservatives have basically treated their entire time in power as one long election campaign, but a few things are coming to a head that may actually conspire to bring the government down.

For one, there's an inkling that the Liberals may have finally pulled their act together and may be willing to fight an election. At least Dion is talking about it, which is a leap forward from where they were a year ago. The other is that I suspect the Conservatives would like to get an election under way before one of the various scandals bubbling about in the background manages to break free of the intermittent coverage and lodge itself into the Canadian consciousness.

This brings me to the vote over the Afghan mission, which may be the one that brings down the government. I say may, because it appears the budget will come first, and that could also trigger an election.

The Liberal position on Afghanistan appears to be the same sort of wishy-washy commitment we've been bitching to the Germans and French about; carry on in Afghanistan doing reconstruction work and avoid combat missions. It's an ugly type of compromise position. Generally speaking, in a war, you should be all in or all out. On this, I basically find myself agreeing with Jack Layton, (shudder), we should just leave.

On the other hand, I understand the diplomatic dance of not abandoning out NATO allies. Hell, the Liberal position would see us matching our mission to what most of the rest are doing already. It's a brutal an ugly calculus that puts our soldiers in harm's way to maintain cordial relations with our allies in what is likely a lost cause.

Hardly a great position, but it beats the Conservative calculations of presumably greater costs in human and material terms just to suck up to the US.

The real question comes down to what form the vote actually takes. Do the Conservatives swing for the fences and ensure the mission ends if the vote fails? Or do they back off and put something vague on the table that might pass and that they hope they can twist into a combat extension rather than just an overall presence?

And ultimately, are the Liberals tired enough of the bullying tactics of the Harper set to throw this latest example back in their faces?

Bush's time in office is coming to an end. It would be nice if we could get rid of his poodle in the near future as well.



(Picture courtesy of TGB)

This is nutso. The Obama campaign's response to the news that Hillary lent her campaign $5 million last month is to highlight the fact that they raised nearly that sum in the brief period that's passed ... since the polls closed yesterday!

In that time span, the Obama camp has raised: $4, 252, 184.

This highlights, yet again, a key emerging factor in the race: The Hillary camp faces the prospect of a weeks-long contest, perhaps leading all the way to the convention, during which they could find themselves dramatically outspent by their rivals.

The number when I checked this morning was $6,747,910. The movement hasn't crested yet.

That seems a little strong to me, though McCain is clearly the most hawkish of the candidates.

In other news, Hillary Clinton has lent herself $5 million to try and keep up with Obama, and is considering more. That has the smell of desperation to it, particularly if Obama picks up wins in most of the little states coming up. However, thanks to the way delegates are selected, it looks like they're planning to go all the way to the convention, and the decision will be in the hands of the superdelegates. Not a particularly great prospect.

Obama racked up more victories and might even edge out Clinton in the overall delegate count, despite Hillary winning the big states.  (Margins are key.)  Whatever the spin the campaigns put on things, it’s virtually a tie.  I won’t call Obama the big winner, because there hasn’t been any clear knockout blows landed and Hillary still has a solid base of support that he needs to overcome.  Still, given the polls of just a month or two ago, it’s clear that his movement is a rising tide.  What does that mean for the future?  I think Matthew Yglesias gets it pretty much right here:

Now the landscape gets much more favorable for Obama. On Saturday, it's Louisiana, Nebraska, and Washington. Then on Sunday it's Maine. Then Tuesday offers Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Then February 19 offers Wisconsin and Hawaii. That's a lot of states, but not a ton of delegates. On March 4 comes the big showdown in Texas and Ohio. The question is whether Obama can build up enough momentum between now and March 4 to put Clinton away, or whether Clinton can draw enough blood in the intermediate states to shut him down on the March 4 firewall.

Who wins that is anyone's guess at this point. One thing I can predict is that you'll see a lot of handwringing about how this fight is dooming the Democratic Party. It's all, as best I can tell, total nonsense. Disagreeing about which of two strong leaders should go try to implement a pretty widely agreed upon vision of national policy is a healthy thing to do. Meanwhile, the stuff that really matters for general election purposes won't for many months.

That’s not to say that I don’t see Ed Morrissey’s scenario of the Clintons using their edge in super-delegates to tip the convention in their favour being out of the question, but it doesn’t seem very likely unless there is a razor-thin margin to begin with.  And the scenario doesn’t work the other way around.  The Clintons using their influence to win may alienate black voters, but Obama is an acceptable choice to most Clinton supporters.  If he wins, however he wins, the party will be behind him.

The Republican side however, still looks like it could get messy..  McCain is clearly the front-runner, but the votes show a weakness to his support.  The social conservative/evangelical voters came out in droves for Huckabee, giving him his victories in the south, and the self-indentified conservatives broke for Romney, allowing him to pick up several western states.

McCain’s victories came in part due to the vote-splitting effect of the other two candidates, and from the moderate and independent voters.  (He also gets the Republican anti-war vote, which is odd given his being the most ardent supporter of sending even more troops into Iraq, having no problems with leaving them there for a century, and that whole, "Bomb, bomb, Iran", piece that should figure big in any Democratic campaign against him.) His big victories in California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois are all in solidly blue states that either Democratic nominee will carry in the general.

McCain still suffers from the fact that the hard-right base doesn’t like him and will be tepid in their support of him should he, as expected, carry on to win the nomination.  The results also show that neither Romney nor Huckabee could consolidate the base either. Their respective supporters don't have a lot of overlap, issue-wise.

The Republican convention may not be brokered, but the party itself has some pretty clear fractures.

Air Canada Jazz managed to launch some flights from the Northwest Territories capital over the weekend after an extreme cold snap ground the airline's flights in and out of Yellowknife last week.

On both Sunday and Monday, the morning flight to Vancouver was cancelled, but afternoon flights to Calgary and Edmonton departed on schedule, according to Air Canada's website.

Air Canada Jazz officials have maintained that the company's regional jets, the Bombardier CRJs, are not certified to operate when temperatures reach below -40 C. Temperatures in the city have hovered between -35 C and -45 C since last Sunday, conditions that officials said were extraordinary.

Extraordinary to who? Granted such temperatures haven't been as common the last few years, but look at a bloody map! Yellowknife is in an area, the one near the Arctic Circle, where such temperatures aren't exactly unheard of.

Where these officials working under the idiotic impression that global warming means winters won't be cold anymore?

Still counting the votes, and the votes still count.

For the Republicans, McCain's now the front-runner, and Huckabee looks like a probably VP candidate.

For the Democrats, Clinton remains in the lead thanks to California, but Obama wins more states and should have more than enough delegates to keep things interesting. Given he seems to be able to win people over the longer he has, this doesn't bode terribly well for Clinton going forward.

One other thing from the comments at Balloon Juice:

Both McCain and Obama seems to be in the same both. One is winning in blue state, and the other is winning in red state. I’m not sure what all that means in the general election if it was obama vs mccain. Probably not much.

Actually, I think there’s a real difference.

McCain is despised by many of the opinion leaders for the Republican base—Limbaugh, Coulter, Dobson, on and on and on—and unless they find a way to roll that back, the base is going to be at the very least half-hearted in their support in their base states. If McCain gets the nod, he’s going to have to spend a lot of energy drumming up support in states a Republican candidate would otherwise be able to take for granted.

Obama, meanwhile, is a perfectly acceptable choice for Clinton backers, and if he gets the nod, he’ll have no problem keeping his base in line. He can focus all his energy on the swing states, while McCain would have to play on a much broader field. Big advantage.

Add to that, that even in the southern, conservative base-states, the Democrats had higher turnout and more voters than the Republicans, and it's looking very good for the Democrats in November, even if they're running against McCain.

Two stories out today, when nobody is likely to pay attention due to the US primaries, that show just how screwed up the tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.

The first regards an Afghan war hero:

Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was regarded here as a war hero, famous for his resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980s and later for a daring prison break he organized for three opponents of the Taliban government in 1999.

But in 2003, Mr. Hekmati was arrested by American forces in southern Afghanistan when, senior Afghan officials here contend, he was falsely accused by his enemies of being a Taliban commander himself. For the next five years he was held at the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he died of cancer on Dec. 30.

The fate of Mr. Hekmati, the first detainee to die of natural causes at Guantánamo, who fruitlessly recounted his story several times to American officials, demonstrates the enduring problems of the tribunals at Guantánamo, say Afghan officials and others who knew him.

. . .

Several high-ranking officials in President Hamid Karzai’s government say Mr. Hekmati’s detention at Guantánamo was a gross mistake. They were mentioned by Mr. Hekmati in his hearings and could have vouched for him. Records from the hearings show that only a cursory effort was made to reach them.

Two of those officials were men Mr. Hekmati had helped escape from the Taliban’s top security prison in Kandahar in 1999: Ismail Khan, now the minister of energy; and Hajji Zaher, a general in the Border Guards. Both men said they appealed to American officials about Mr. Hekmati’s case, but to no effect.

. . .

According to transcripts released by the Pentagon, the United States military charged, among other things, that Mr. Hekmati was “high in the Al Qaeda hierarchy,” acted as a smuggler and facilitator for it, and was “part of the main security escort for Osama bin Laden.” He was also accused of attending a terrorist training camp near Kandahar and of involvement in assassination attempts against Afghan government officials.

He was also identified as a senior leader of a 40-man Taliban unit, and even as supreme commander in Helmand Province.

That last allegation was rebutted by another unidentified detainee, who explicitly stated that Mr. Hekmati looked nothing like the Taliban commander and that the commander was “not the same person as the detainee,” according to the transcript.

. . .

The Prison Break

The 1999 escape was a deep humiliation for the Taliban government, which blocked roads and searched houses across the country for days afterward and offered $1 million for the capture of the escapees. Two of Mr. Hekmati’s relatives were badly tortured by the Taliban after the prison break as the Taliban looked for information.

Two of the men Mr. Hekmati freed, Mr. Khan and Hajji Zaher, returned to the battlefield to lead forces against the Taliban. They both received significant American support in 2001 and worked with Special Forces units.

A third man who escaped with them was another commander of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Gen. Mohammed Qasim.

It is so nice to see that the US is treating it's allies against the Taliban so well, isn't it? It's truly a wonder why they can't seem to get a handle on the insurgency.

The second story involves the Canadian Omar Khadr. If it wasn't bad enough that the child-soldier was being charged with murder in contravention of all international legal standards, it now appears that the US military has been hiding evidence that casts doubt on their version of events.

Another fighter was still alive inside the Afghan compound where Omar Khadr was captured at the time a grenade killed a U.S. soldier, casting doubt on allegations that only the teenage militant could have been responsible for the soldier's death.

It has long been assumed by many that Mr. Khadr was the only combatant alive during the firefight, and so must have been the one who threw the grenade.

The revelations, mistakenly released in never-before seen documents, came during a military tribunal hearing for Mr. Khadr Monday at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Documents that were supposed to be censored in their entirety were accidentally handed out to reporters in the courtroom, taking both defence and prosecution lawyers completely by surprise.

I certainly feel much better now about how fair the process at Gitmo is. The railroading of Khadr just got "accidentally" harder, but I'm betting they'll be much more careful about what they release in the future. How many more will die in detention without ever getting a fair hearing?

It's a good reminder of why the choices being made tonight in the US are so important.

While I get myself set for an evening of primary returns, it has come to my attention that today is an important anniversary:

Five years ago today, Colin Powell decided to spend all of his credibility to sell George Bush's War. The war John McLovin' wants to last 100 years. A war that costs us more than $100 billion every year (and probably about $2 trillion so far) -- and will cost thousands more dead this year.

My personal favourite has to be the Super Cobra Commando Mobile Bioweapons Labs.



A day worth remembering indeed.

Conservative. It means absolutely nothing- it really is code for “in the cool club.” I just spent the last hour and some on the exercise bike watching Morning Joe, where Scarborough had an endless stream of guests and snide comments claiming that Romney was the “real conservative choice” and the “true conservative.”

. . .

But when folks say “conservative,” and they will say it seriously as if it means something, no doubt also invoking the “mantle of Reagan,” just laugh at them. They might as well be talking about flogiston. Whatever conservative used to mean, if anything, it no longer does.

Limbaugh Defends Clinton and Obama on Iraq

As nasty as the dissonance that headline produced is, I expect it to be nothing compared to the whiplash to come if, as appears likely, McCain becomes the Republican nominee and these guys turn from furious critics to ardent supporters.

While most of the attention has been focused on the people competing to get the job of US president, the guy still sitting in the chair has been quietly continuing his power grabs for the Executive Branch. In this case, by doing nothing.

The Bush administration has failed to nominate any candidates to a newly empowered privacy and civil-liberties commission. This leaves the board without any members, even as Congress prepares to give the Bush administration extraordinary powers to wiretap without warrants inside the United States.

The new board, while far from perfect, is supposed to be keeping an eye on little things like the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, something the Bush administration has continually pushed the bounds of legality on. It's not a surprise that the administration would fear any kind of real oversight on the program, and letting the commission die a quiet death by failing to nominate any board members is an elegant solution to the problem.

My pre-Super Tuesday post. Via TMV, I came across this post examining one of the major differences between Obama and Clinton when it comes to foreign policy; the willingness to talk to the leadership of unfriendly nations without pre-conditions, and what it says about their respective world-views.

The real question that needs to be answered before deciding which one of these strategies is appropriate is straightforward: how much power does the United States have relative to other actors in the international system? I have attempted to address this question before, and the answer is complex but vital. If, as the neoconservative worldview would have it, the United States posesses an enduring, historically unprecedented concentration of power, then the Bush/Clinton strategy makes perfect sense. If the world is truly unipolar, then to be cut off diplomatically and economically from the United States is to be left out in the cold. To be cut off from Washington is functionally the same as being cut off from everywhere else.

If, however, the world is (or is fast becoming) functionally multipolar, the strategy breaks down. In such a situation, while a relationship with Washington may bring many benefits, it is far from essential. There are other power centers to which countries can look for diplomatic, military and economic support. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders understood this reality, and so made a greater effort to woo foreign capitals, always concerned that the Soviets would make a better offer.

Like the author, I can see that the world has moved to the multi-polar model, and it would be nice to see the US run by someone who has a good grasp of that reality.

The Brits are apparently having some issues with the whole fact or fiction distinction.

Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real.

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain's most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi and Battle of Waterloo victor the Duke of Wellington also appeared in the top 10 of people thought to be myths.

Meanwhile, 58 percent thought Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Holmes actually existed; 33 percent thought the same of W. E. Johns' fictional pilot and adventurer Biggles.

I'm a little curious just what the survey actually asked, because Churchill has certainly been mythologized, and he hasn't been dead so long, or the history of his actions so far past, for a large number of people thinking him entirely fictional to make sense. (Florence Nightingale, sure. I thought she was a myth at one time. The Crimean War wasn't exactly well-covered in school and her name has a made-up sound to it.)

Anyway, it does go to show, that when you mythologize the man, the man himself becomes myth. I wonder how mant centuries until the Churchillian legend is treated the same way as the Arthurian one?

Internet services in Qatar have been seriously disrupted because of damage to an undersea telecoms cable linking the Gulf state to the UAE, the fourth such incident in less than a week.

Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday.

The first two in the Mediterranean seemed like an accident, the third off Dubai began to seem suspicious. A fourth undersea cable going down is beginning to push things. Dave at The Beav has a possible scenario that may explain things:

Those cables are about the width of a normal human thumb. And a ship's anchor would indeed rip right through one. But four? In three different locations in under a week? Run that little coincidence by any police detective and ask what she/he thinks.

So, at the risk of perpetrating a conspiracy theory, I will state that I am highly suspicious and until someone can point at USS Jimmy Carter snuggly alongside at its berth in Bangor, Washington, the Bush administration becomes as strong a suspect as any other possible perpetrator. There is also the fact that USS Jimmy Carter was due to become operational this year.

The Jimmy Carter, interestingly, is purpose built where its predecessors were regular attack subs modified for specific jobs. USS Parche was equipped with a set of pick-up arms designed to rip an armoured fiber-optic cable from its meter deep trench and tap into it. As a matter of certain knowledge, the USN did exactly that with submarines on Soviet undersea copper cables during the cold-war. They conducted a successful tap on the Soviet navy's Pacific Fleet headquarters when they tapped an undersea cable in the Sea of Okhotsk, which was discovered by the Soviets and another of the Kola Peninsula tapping into the Soviet Northern Fleet headquarters which remained undiscovered.

. . .

If I were conducting an intercept operation requiring an undersea fiber-optic cable splice which I knew the cable operator would detect, I need a way to prevent that operator from detecting it. Create a diversion.

By disabling the cable, either by severing it underwater or creating a problem ashore, it gives me time to do my splice undetected in a location far away from the diversionary problem. When the cable operator says it will be days before a repair ship can get to it, that gives me plenty of time to get the job done and get out of the area

So, if I'm right then all we have to do is find USS Jimmy Carter. If I'm wrong, I've just given the NSA a strategy for making undetected taps. On the other hand, it might just be the most concerted attack on the global fiber-optic network by merchant ship anchors in history.

I'm not quite ready to believe that particular theory, in part because the fourth cable doesn't appear to have been cut, but is suffering from some other type of damage related to the power system. However, multiple breaks does make it appear as though the damage is deliberate, whoever may be responsible and for whatever purpose.

Via Jon Swift and skippy the bush kangaroo, today is Blogroll Amnesty Day, which apparently started out as a move by the big A-list blogs to stop blogrolling us little guys, but through the efforts of the above-named bloggers, has now become a reason to increase the number of links in an effort to help raise the profile of the small, undiscovered blogs out there.

I can't exactly take Blue Gal's advice to link to blogs with lower traffic numbers than mine, since I'm not actually aware of any, but I figured it would be a good opportunity to correct at least some of the oversights on my blogroll of the sites I visit on my daily surfing. (Others may be added as I go through the bookmarks and remember to check them against the blogroll.)

For now, I'll welcome Blue Gal, CathiefromCanada, JimBobby Sez, The Reaction, and skippy to the blogroll.

A little nap will do your memory good.

A short afternoon nap can boost a person's ability to perform memory-based tasks, but only if they've learned the task well beforehand, says a U.S. study.

Harvard Medical School researchers showed that subjects who took a 45-minute nap between memory tests were more likely to improve their scores the second time than those who remained awake.

Add that to this study showing that an afternoon seista lowers the risk of dying from heart attacks, and the idea of allowing nap breaks at work no longer seems so foolish.

Still, best to check with the boss before snoozing at your desk.

Just look at the foolish stories they're putting out.

The U.S. military is not prepared to meet catastrophic threats at home, and it is suffering from an "appalling gap" in forces able to respond to chemical, biological and nuclear strikes on U.S. soil, according to a congressional commission report released yesterday.

The situation is rooted in severe readiness problems in National Guard and reserve forces, which would otherwise be well-suited to respond to domestic crises but lack sufficient personnel and training, as well as $48 billion in equipment because of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report by the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.

Guard readiness has continued to slide since last March, when the panel found that 88 percent of Army National Guard units were rated "not ready," said retired Marine Maj. Gen. Arnold L. Punaro, the commission chairman.

And

Although the Bush administration calls it a vital weapon against terrorism, its domestic wiretapping effort could become a devastating tool for terrorists if hacked or penetrated from inside, according to a new article by a group of America's top computer security experts.

. . .

By diverting the flow of so much domestic data into a few massive pools, the administration may have "[built] for its opponents something that would be too expensive for them to build for themselves," say the authors: "a system that lets them see the U.S.'s intelligence interests...[and] that might be turned" to exploit conversations and information useful for plotting an attack on the United States.

. . .

. . . judging by past breaches, the authors conclude this system could be compromised also – from within or outside.

In 2004, hackers cracked a wiretapping function on a Greek national cell phone network. For 10 months, they intercepted conversations by the country's prime minister and its ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice, and roughly 100 other officials and parliament members, the authors note. The hackers were never caught.

"Although the NSA has extensive experience in building surveillance systems, that does not mean things cannot go wrong," the authors state. "When you build a system to spy on yourself, you entail an awesome risk."

Just as dangerous is the possibility that an insider could access the system undetected, according to the experts. Poorly-designed surveillance technology used by the FBI relies on a "primitive" system to track people who use the operation to wiretap phone conversations, the authors say, creating what they call a "real risk" of an insider attack.

They note that convicted spy Robert Hanssen, one of the most destructive moles in the bureau's history, exploited similar weaknesses to steal information and follow the investigation into himself on FBI computers without leaving a trail.

All this concern about massive security weaknesses and readiness gaps!

Haven't these fools been paying attention? President Bush has devised a brilliant strategy whereby the US fights the terrorists in places like Iraq so the US doesn't need any defences at home. It's wprking so well that they don't feel the need to explain why they're doing a "limited" massive data-mining operation on ordinary Americans to catch al Qaeda because it's vital to protect citizens from the nearly non-exsistent threat.

Of course, the liberal media won't tell you these things. They'll just whine about how weakened and unprepared we are despite the massive erosion of liberties that's occurred. They just don't see the big picture.

Honestly, his superiors in the Bush administration can't be very happy with the guy. First was his attendance at the Davos panel discussing Iran's foreign policy that included a couple of Iranian officials, along with the fact that he allowed an insult to walrus-face Yosemite Sam John Bolton to go unchallenged.

Now he has the incredible audacity to suggest that the US's toppling of the Taliban regime and Saddam Hussein, both bitter enemies of the Iranian government, has improved Iran's position in the Gulf.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq removed a key rival of Shiite Iran with the ouster of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government. Iran has friendly ties with the Shiites now in power in Iraq.

"It's helped Iran's relative position in the region, because Iraq was a rival of Iran ... and the balance there has disintegrated or weakened," Zalmay Khalilzad said while answering questions from students at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. "And so one of the objectives of Iran, in my view, is to discourage a reemergence of Iraq as a balancer. And Afghanistan, too, the change was helpful to Iran."

. . .

Iran almost went to war with the Taliban in the late 1990s, because of its extremist theology and its killing of Afghan Shiite Muslims. With the United States' overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, Iran's relations with Afghanistan improved, their trade grew and Iran helped build roads and power lines in Afghanistan. But the Bush administration says Iran is now arming the Taliban to make life difficult for the U.S.

It is incredible that someone with this kind of clear-eyed, rational assessment of US actions and the ability to not go into apoplectic fits at the mere prospect of exchanging words with officials from nations on the US shit-list has managed to get a job, let alone keep it, with the Bush administration.

He'll have to be stopped before people start remembering that it's possible for the US to engage in a rational foreign policy.

When Ray McDaniel, president of Moody’s, addressed a debate in Davos last week, the mood was so hostile that some speakers joked that he was brave to appear “without a bodyguard”.

No wonder. As the credit squeeze persists, ratings agencies are being forced to downgrade thousands of securities, after failing to foresee the recent wave of defaults, particularly in subprime loans. On Wednesday night alone, Standard & Poor’s downgraded more than 8,000 residential mortgage-related securities worth some $534bn (£268bn, €360bn).

These downgrades have triggered bitter recriminations, amid a wave of losses at asset managers and banks. “Much of the money lost has been held by people who held AAA securities [that were downgraded],” points out Wes Edens, head of Fortress Investment Group, a big hedge fund. “That has caused a tremendous loss of confidence.”

But the downgrades have also left policymakers and analysts scrambling to determine what has gone so badly wrong. As this search intensifies, some economists are starting to suspect that the answer lies in a striking recent change in American household choices – a shift that could have important implications for policymakers and investors alike.

What has gone so badly wrong?  One could make the snarky comment that no one could have possibly suspected that giving huge loans to people who couldn’t afford them would ever cause any kinds of problems, but what the article actually points to is something pointed out in this schadenfraude alert.

It isn’t that they didn’t know the loans were going to go bad.  It’s that they figured they’d have some more time and a better warning of when to leave some other suckers holding the bag.

The issue at stake revolves around so-called delinquency rates, the proportion of people who fall behind on their debt repayments. When American households have faced hard times in previous decades, they tended to default on unsecured loans such as credit cards and car loans first – and stopped paying their mortgage only as a last resort. However, in the last couple of years households have become delinquent on their mortgages much faster than trends in the wider economy might suggest. That is particularly true of the less creditworthy subprime borrowers. More­over, consumers have stopped paying mortgages before they halt payments on their credit cards or automotive loans – turning the traditional delinquency pattern on its head. As a result, mortgage lenders have started to face losses at a much earlier stage than in the past.

“In the past, if a household in America experienced financial problems it tended to go delinquent on its credit cards, but kept on paying its mortgage,” says Malcolm Knight, head of the Bank for International Settlements, the central banks’ bank. “Now what seems to be happening is that people who have outstanding mortgages that are greater than the value of their home, or have negative amortisation mortgages, keep paying off their credit card balances but hand in the keys to their house ... these reactions to financial stress are not taken into account in the credit scoring models that are used to value residential mortgage-backed securities.”

The other major point seems to be that the fall in house prices means people can no longer refinance their way out of trouble and have left some people concluding it makes more sense to walk away from a house that’s worth less than there mortgage on it is, rather than struggling to keep up the payments on it.

All part of a nasty cycle whose effects continue to spread.  The Washington Post has a decent article on how the housing market collapse has affected the Canadian lumber industry, (though it takes a typically American-style view of the softwood lumber tariffs issue).  And as the credit tightens and the economy slows, the US isn't just shedding wage growth, it's beginning to shed the jobs themselves.

The U.S. unexpectedly lost jobs for the first time in more than four years, increasing the odds the economy will fall into a recession and making it likely the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates another half point next month.

The Fed will continue doing all it appears it can do and cut interest rates yet again, though there isn't much room left for them to do so. Of course, doing so increases inflation fears, or more likely, stagflation, as prices rise while the economy fails to grow. And on that bright note, I give you the other economic shock headed our way.

China’s latest export is inflation. After falling for years, prices of Chinese goods sold in the United States have risen for the last eight months.

Soaring energy and raw material costs, a falling dollar and new business rules here are forcing Chinese factories to increase the prices of their exports, according to analysts and Western companies doing business here.

The rise was a modest 2.4 percent over the last year. But even that small amount, combined with higher energy and food costs that also reflect China’s growing demands on global resources, contributed to a rise in inflation in the United States. Inflation in the United States was 4.1 percent in 2007, up from 2.5 percent in 2006.

Because of new cost pressures here, American consumers could see prices increase by as much as 10 percent this year on specific products — including toys, clothing, footwear and other consumer goods — just as the United States faces a possible recession.

Isn't economics wonderful?

A pretty good editorial in the New York Times examining some of the divisions racking Pakistan. I'm not sure of some the author's assertions, such as the Sindhi joining with the Baluchs, or the healing quality of the 1973 constitution, but on the whole, the threat of Balkanization is very real and likely very hard to reverse.