Northman's Fury

The recent drop in casualties in Iraq is variously credited to different causes depending on political persuasion, with the "Surge" being the popular one for those who supported it, even if it morphed into something quite different during its implementation.

One of the other big reasons for the drop was the cease-fire declared by Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia, and William Lind sees something quite ominous in that.

The Sunday, November 18 New York Times made passing mention of a possible clue. It suggested that the Mahdi Army and some other Shiites have backed away from confronting the U.S. because Iran asked them to.

If that is true, it bumps the same question up a level. Why are the Iranians asking their allies in Iraq to give us a break? I doubt it is out of charity, or fear, although elements within Iran that do not want a war with the United States seem to be gaining political strength.

Here's a hypothesis. What if the Iranians had determined, rightly or wrongly (and I suspect rightly), that the Bush administration has already decided to attack Iran before the end of its term? Two actions would seem logical on their part. First, try to maneuver the Americans into the worst possible position on the moral level by denying them pretexts for an attack. Telling their allied Shiite militias in Iraq to cool it would be part of that, as would reducing the flow of Iranian arms to Iraqi insurgents and improving cooperation with the international community on the nuclear issue. We see evidence of the latter two actions as well as the first.

Second, they would tell their allies in Iraq to keep their powder dry. Back off for now, train, build up stocks of weapons and explosives and work out plans for what they will do as their part of the Iranian counter-attack. Counter-attack there will certainly be, on the ground against our forces in Iraq, in one form or another. In almost all possible counter-attack scenarios, it would be highly valuable to Iran if the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias could cut the Americans' supply lines running up from Kuwait and slow down their movements so that they could not mass their widely dispersed forces. In John Boyd's phrase, it would be a classic Cheng-Chi operation.

I still hope that the professionals in the US military will dissuade the idiots in the White House from any adventuresome meddling in Iran, but there are some signs that military action may be forthcoming.

The above scenario is plausible, and something to think about.

Apparently we Canuckistani beer lovers are a real threat to the planet.

The government-commissioned study says the old, inefficient "beer fridges" that one in three Canadian households use to store their Molson and Labatt's contribute significantly to global warming by guzzling gas- and coal-fired electricity.

And you just have to love the way the "serious" news folks at Fox report such a story.

The problem is that the beer fridges are mostly decades-old machines that began their second careers as beverage dispensers when Canadians upgraded to more energy-efficient models to store whatever Canadians eat besides doughnuts and poutine.

The story does actually provide a link to the New Scientist article it bases the above tripe on, though that article notes the beer fridge is something of a North American and Australian phenomena, rather than just a Canadian one.

Basically, despite the ridiculous manner in which it is getting reported, these old fridges are a serious source of energy consumption, if a damned convenient thing to have in the garage for get-togethers.

It's just so nice to see a serious environmental story turned into an excuse to make fun of a Canadian caricature. News reporting at its finest.

Ian Welsh at the Agonist uses the easily foreseeable quagmire the Ethiopians admitted to finding themselves in in Somalia to offer this piece of advice:

Really, what the US needs to do right now, is nothing. Don't talk to anyone. Don't invade anyone. Forbid anyone in government from talking to anyone in a foreign government about anything that isn't routine and technical until Bush is out of power. Because there is no situation so bad that the Bush administration cannot make it worse with their Rambo diplomacy, refusal to acknowledge the sovereignty of the people, and their belief that anyone who they think they can shove around, should be shoved around, just on general principles.

Just do nothing.

Unfortunately, the world can't afford an America that doesn't do anything, but its hard to argue that on the whole, not letting Bush and his buddies meddle in other countries in their ham-handed way wouldn't be the best course.

And in Africa, there's no question that the Bush administration's support for the Ethiopian tyrants have made things worse, and not just for Somalia.

Ethiopian soldiers have forcibly drafted hundreds of civilians to fight separatist rebels in the desolate, predominantly Muslim Ogaden region in a shadowy military campaign supported by the Bush administration, according to more than a dozen refugees and former recruits who've fled to neighboring Kenya.

The untrained and ill-equipped draftees — including students, camel herders and tribal leaders who've never fired weapons in combat — are being thrown into pitched battles with ethnic Somali guerrillas and often suffer heavy casualties, the refugees and ex-recruits said.

Men who resist joining these civilian militias — known as "dabaqodhi," or "puppets" of the government — are beaten, locked up in military prisons or killed, the refugees said in interviews. When recruits perform poorly in combat, as they often do, they're abused and accused of aiding the rebels, refugees said.

But no matter. As the story goes, Ethiopia is an ally in the "War on Terror", like those adorable Saudis and the friendly dictatorship of Musharraf, and so they will continue to get the unflinching support of the US to kill and suppress.

And yet, when the inevitable blowback comes, those most vocal in their support for these actions will be scratching their heads and wondering, "Why do they hate us?"

With the increasing focus on the opening up of the Arctic to possible exploration due to the ice cap melting, the countries bordering the Arctic ocean have been playing the old game of flag-planting, among other things, to stake claims to what might be rich resources.

Wired has an article that points out that what ultimately happens in the Arctic may set the precedent for future resource grabs in Antarctica, the seabed, and even the moon and other planets.

But what has gone unnoticed amid the international clamor is that the Arctic battle has implications that reach far beyond the top of Earth. The squabbling will be a prelude to — and even set the tone for — eventual sovereignty claims on the moon. At the same time that it was making Arctic claims, Russia announced plans for manned lunar missions by 2025 and a permanent base there by 2032. Japan might beat them to the punch with a 2030 base. Both will be able to stop over and share a glass of Tang with US astronauts, who are supposed to start setting up shop in 2020. China also has lunar aspirations, though officials will say only that they plan to get to the moon sometime after 2020.

It could get crowded up there, and the rules for lunar landgrabs will likely be patterned on what is happening now in the far north. "The recent Arctic events are relevant," says Joanne Gabrynowicz, an international space law expert at the University of Mississippi. "The seabed, high seas, Antarctica, and space are, as a matter of law, global commons. What happens in one can be argued to be legal precedent in the others."

So how the Arctic claims get settled may set the legal framework for space exploration. It is, at the very least, an interesting thing to think about.

Clear thinking about Israel/Palestine is ever in short supply, but Bing at HJHOP finds a true gem of the religiously-inspired kind.

However, he [Bush] is embarking on this Israeli - Palestinian (so-called) “Peace Conference” in Annapolis, Maryland, on Tuesday, November 27. The Iraq war notwithstanding, this effort to build himself (and Condoleezza Rice) a “legacy” could have very severe consequences for our nation.

How can I say that? Isn't “Peace” desirable? Doesn't “the world community” (most of whom are cruel dictators, communists or socialists) yearn for this? Most would answer “Yes”. But it is unattainable and, even worse, this specific “peace” effort goes directly against God's Prophetic Word about Israel. [emp. in original]

The best part, though, is the link provided to this delightful list of the consequences of dealing with Yasser Arafat. Most wingnuts would use terror attacks carried out under Arafat's watch, but these are religious wingnuts, so the list is, how to say this, a little further off the beaten track.

* September 1, 1993: President Clinton announces he will meet Arafat and Rabin on September 13 in Washington, DC to begin the Oslo Peace Accords. After nearly a week of meandering in the Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Emily hits North Carolina on this day.

* March 2, 1997: Arafat meets with President Clinton in Washington, DC. The same day awesome tornado storms unleash tremendous damage in Arkansas and flooding in Kentucky and Ohio. Arkansas and Kentucky declared disaster areas.

* January 21, 1998: President Clinton is waiting to meet with Arafat at the White House. At this exact time the President's sex scandal breaks.

* September 27, 1998: Arafat is meeting with the President in Washington. Hurricane Georges hits Alabama and stalls. The Hurricane stalls until Arafat leaves and then it dissipates. Parts of Alabama declared a disaster area.

* October 17, 1998: Arafat comes to the Wye Plantation meeting. Incredible rains fall on Texas which causes record flooding. FEMA declares parts of Texas a disaster area.

* November 23, 1998: Arafat comes to America. He meets with President Clinton who is raising funds for the Palestinian state. On this day the stock market fell 216 points.

* December 12, 1998: On this day the US House of Representatives votes to impeach President Clinton. At the very time of the impeachment, the President is meeting with Arafat in Gaza over the peace process.

* March 23, 1999: Arafat meets with Clinton in Washington, DC. Market falls 219 points that day. The next day Clinton orders attack on Serbia.

* September 3, 1999: Secretary of State Albright meets with Arafat in Israel. Hurricane Dennis comes ashore on this very day after weeks of changing course in the Atlantic Ocean.

* September 22, 1999: Arafat meets with Clinton in Washington, DC. The day before and after the meeting the market falls more than 200 points each day. This was the first time in history the market lost more than 200 points for two days in a week. The market lost 524 points this week.

* June 16, 2000: Arafat meets with President Clinton. The market falls 265 points on this day.

* July 12-26, 2000: Arafat at the Camp David meetings. Powerful droughts throughout the country. Forest fires explode in West into uncontrolled fires. By the end of August, fire burns 7 million acres.

* November 9, 2000: Arafat meets with President Clinton at the White House to try and salvage the peace process. This was just two days after the presidential election. The nation was just entering into an election crisis which was the worst in over 100 years.

* November 11, 2001: Arafat speaks at the UN General Assembly and condemns Israel. He later meets with Secretary of State Colin Powell. On this day, Saddam threatens the US with nuclear weapons. Within 24 hours of meeting with Powell, an airplane crashes in NYC killing 265 people. The crash was 15 miles from where Arafat spoke.

* May 1, 2002: Under pressure from the US, Israel releases siege of Arafat's headquarters. Massive tornado storm in eastern US with F-5 tornado very close to White House.

The hurricanes, fires and, "tornado storm", are standard religious nuttery. Even the plane crash, I suppose, but the Dow dropping and the Lewinsky scandal as Acts of God? Although at least with Lewinsky, god actually bothered to aim, something all the other apparently Arafat-inspired Acts seem to have failed miserably at. I really wonder at people who would worship someone with the bad habit of destroying anything and everything but the people actually responsible.

In any case, read the post at Happy Jihad's for a more thorough take-down of the foolishness.

This is really quite funny in a sad way:

Bush has lost his mind and his moral compass. This statement is an outrage. A lie and a blood libel. Israel has never committed any acts of terrorism. What a tool of Islamic jihad. Based on that, Bush is a terrorist, anyone that defends himself, his family, his country is a terrorist.

How short, and how selective, the memories of the pro-Israel crowd are:

Four extremist Jewish settlers have been charged by an Israeli court for allegedly plotting to blow up an Arab girls' school in Jerusalem a month ago.

Or,

A Jewish settler absent without leave from the Israeli army opened fire Thursday on a public bus traveling to an Arab town in northern Israel, killing at least four people and wounding 10. In the immediate aftermath, passengers swarmed the gunman, killing him before he could leave the bus.

In a statement, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called the shooting "a reprehensible act by a bloodthirsty Jewish terrorist who sought to attack innocent Israeli citizens." Israeli police officials suggested that the attack was an attempt to derail the government's planned evacuation of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank scheduled to begin later this month.

As I recall, a fair number of right-wing blogs actually applauded Sharon for calling the act for what it was, contrasting him with the Palestinian leaders who refuse to use the "T" word.

Of course, the old saw about one man's terrorist being another's freedom fighter still holds, and Israel is no exception.

The rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, are commemorating the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine.

They have erected a plaque outside the restored building, and are holding a two-day seminar with speeches and a tour of the hotel by one of the Jewish resistance fighters involved in the attack.

Simon McDonald, the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv, and John Jenkins, the Consul-General in Jerusalem, have written to the municipality, stating: “We do not think that it is right for an act of terrorism, which led to the loss of many lives, to be commemorated.”

And it isn't just the old terror attacks that get commemorated:

Militant Jews have gathered at the grave of Baruch Goldstein to celebrate the sixth anniversary of his massacre of Muslim worshippers in Hebron.

The celebrants dressed up as the gunman, wearing army uniforms, doctor's coats and fake beards.

. . .

In 1994 on Purim, Goldstein stormed a mosque and fired on praying Muslims in the West Bank city's Tomb of the Patriarchs - a shrine sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

Twenty-nine people died in the attack, and the angry crowd lynched Goldstein in retaliation.

Israeli extremists continue to pay homage at his grave in the nearby Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, where a marble plaque reads: "To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah and the nation of Israel."

Ignoring the crimes of those you support is too often the reason those crimes continue. There are militant extremists on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and until they are all called to account, as the statement read by Bush at least promises to do, peace is unlikely.

Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has acknowledged that his troops cannot withdraw from the conflict in Somalia.

Mr Meles said he had expected to withdraw his soldiers earlier in the year, after Islamists had been driven out of the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

But he said divisions within the Somali government had left it unable to replace the Ethiopians, while not enough peacekeepers had arrived.

. . .

"Having done the main work, we had the belief and expectations that a situation would be created for us to be able to withdraw," Mr Meles told MPs.

"However, this belief and expectations could not be met according to our plan."

I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about this situation sounds familiar. [/snark]

Day 3 and spreading

Shamanic believes they're not that big a deal, Michael Van Der Galien thinks it's a war with "street terrorists". In this case at least, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

In the comments at Michael's post, someone left a long list of US race riots from the late 60's, all of which were far more violent than the current riots in France. I'm too young to remember any of those, but I do recall the riot in LA following the Rodney King verdict.

There, as in France, the reason for the rioting went much further than the nominal trigger. At its base, the black community in LA didn't trust the police or believe they were being treated fairly by them. The high-profile verdict sparked the underlying rage into full rioting. The same dynamic can be seen in France. The deaths of the two kids triggered the violence, but the rage that's fueling it didn't spring up out of air. It's built on prejudice, perceived or otherwise, and it colours how these events are seen by the communities affected.

Many in Villiers-le-Bel do not believe the authorities' version of events on Sunday night.

The initial results of a police inquiry suggested that officers were not to blame for the accident that killed two teenagers.

The local prosecutor said the boys' motorbike had crashed into a police patrol car at high speed, adding that three witnesses had backed up this version of events.

. . .

One police source said more investigations were needed, but here again the inquiry does not seem to be working on the premise that any "serious error" was committed.

"The cops, they have all the rights," one resident told the newspaper Liberation.

"We must get revenge," he added, "they left [the scene of the crash] as if they'd just run over a pigeon."

These riots and the ones from 2005 haven't reached anywhere near the level of violence and damage that the LA riots reached, but if the situation is left to fester, they will continue, and continue to grow, until they reach that level.

I don't envy the French police the job they have ahead of them to get order restored once again, but I'm fairly sure they'll be able to do that without putting tanks onto the streets. That's when the real work should begin.

They have to find a way to make the people there trust them; to make them feel like they're being treated in a fair manner and not like some second-class citizens. Find some way, some fashion, to properly integrate the immigrant-descended population into the rest of society. Given the current French leadership, I'm not so certain there will be any attempt to do so, which is unfortunate.

Because when your only response is to use force to keep a population under control, the amount of force you need to use keeps rising, as do the costs and retaliations.

Then they will have a war on their hands.

It's little wonder Stephane Dion can't get any leadership cred. When he does do something praiseworthy, nobody seems to take notice.

Calling it a gesture "in the name of justice and simple humanity," Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion wrote a letter on Thursday to the governor of Montana, seeking clemency for a Canadian citizen on death row there.

Dion raised the subject of Ronald Allen Smith in the House of Commons during Question Period on Thursday, saying Smith — convicted of two 1982 murders — should have his death sentence commuted because he is a Canadian citizen.

"Canadians are against the death penalty," Dion said in the House, challenging the Conservative party to intervene in Smith's case and uphold Canada's reputation on the world stage as a progressive nation.

Dion is doing what our Conservative government should be doing if they didn't want to bring the death penalty back in Canada.

Davis's remarks were in response to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's announcement this month that Canada would no longer seek clemency for Canadians sentenced to death in democratic countries where the individual will receive a fair trial.

Harper also said Canada would no longer co-sponsor a UN resolution opposing the use of the death penalty around the world.

So Dion is standing up for Canadians and for what most of us believe in. It's too bad not more people are paying attention.

Who asks the more substantive questions? The reporters:

How much flak are you getting for endorsements by Chuck Norris and Ric Flair?
Is the drop in violence in Iraq making it a less important campaign issue?
What’s it like facing the Clinton political machine?
Why aren’t you spending more time in Iowa right now?
What do you think of Romney and Giuliani going after each other?
What’s going to be your strategy coming out of Iowa?

Or the bloggers:

Can you speak about the Arkansas home-schooling bill that came up when you were governor?
How is the Fair Tax likely to affect tourism in Michigan?
What are your thoughts on a parental rights amendment?
How do you plan to make education a bigger issue on the trail?
Can you respond to claims that your economic policies are in line with populist traditions of the Democratic party?
What would you say to immigrants turned off by all the anti-immigration talk among Republicans?

The result should be no surprise to anyone who reads blogs regularly. Regardless of political leanings, complaints about the MSM is pretty much standard fare, (except when they happen to agree with you). It's just rare to see such a glaring example of the MSM's failings regarding political reporting compared to bloggers on display.

After all these years of pandering to the religious right, the damned nutcases might actually vote for somebody who believes all that stuff.

Don Surber's latest plea for the Republicans:

We need our Tony Blair, our Nicolas Sarkozy.

I feel a little sorry for Steven Harper. You have to know he'd love to be held in such high regard among the Bushbots. He's even dressed for the occasion.**



He waxes long and mournful over the two above-named foreign leaders wonderful speeches to the US Congress and laments that none of the current Republican hopefuls can match their impressive rhetoric. Apparently all that Surber believes is required of a good president is the ability to stroke the egos of "patriots".

Curiously, he leaves out the quite carefully crafted State of the Union speeches uttered by the current Republican "Man of Vision" occupying the White House. Speeches quite long on the ideals of "freedom" and "democracy" and the defeat of evil. Themes the Republican candidates continue to parrot as they campaign.

The problem isn't vision, or lofty ideals. It's that their actions speak louder than their words and happen to bear very little resemblance to them.


*This column is in no way meant to disparage the noble Poodle, a breed much maligned by the comparisons made between it and Bush lapdogs, most of whom couldn't match the Poodle's intelligence.

**Picture blatantly stolen from Alison at the Galloping Beaver, which I couldn't resist using, and explains why I added to the maligning of the breed.

It's a sign of just how commercialized the season has become that we have names for the major shopping days surrounding the holidays. I do, however, quite like the reason for this one:

The Monday after the American Thanksgiving, tagged "Cyber Monday" by the U.S. National Retail Federation, marks the first big online shopping surge for many merchants as consumers return to their work computers.

I just bet employers are delighted to know their workers are spending their time at work shopping for the holidays, a total and complete waste of productive time much better spent on blog-reading. ;)

We all know power corrupts, but now we have an idea of just what it is that gets corrupted; powerful people lose their empathy.

But new research in political science and psychology has provided a novel explanation for why leaders and managers regularly let their followers down and resort to the kind of "layoffs and pay cuts are good for you" talk that defines absurdity. These studies show that leaders often emerge from communities not because they are ruthless, but because they are skilled at managing social relationships.

Something happens to people once they acquire power, however, and the transformation appears to be psychological. Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, recently had volunteers describe either a situation in which they had power over someone else or a situation in which they felt powerless. Those asked to remember a situation in which they felt powerful were made to feel even more powerful by being given control of the distribution of goodies, whereas the volunteers asked to remember a powerless situation were further reminded of their powerlessness when they were asked to estimate how many goodies they expected to receive.

When Galinsky and his colleagues asked all the volunteers to draw the letter E on their foreheads with a marker, those who had been made to feel powerless were three times more likely to draw the E so that it was legible to someone facing them. Those made to feel powerful, however, drew the letter so that it looked correct from their internal perspective but was a mirror image from the point of view of someone facing them.

Galinsky's point, which he noted in a study published in the journal Psychological Science, is that volunteers made to feel powerful, even in a trivial laboratory experiment, almost instantly lose the ability to see things from other people's points of view.

. . .

But once socially gifted people rise to power, Keltner added, the paradox is that "power simplifies our thinking. We tend to see things in terms of our own self-interest, and it makes us more impulsive. We forget our audience in service of gratifying our own impulses."

Keltner and others have shown that power exacerbates many cognitive biases. People who lack power turn out to be more accurate in guessing the opinions of those around them, whereas those in power tend to be inaccurate. Because subordinates are also hesitant to tell superiors things they do not want to hear, the problem gets worse, with powerful people having even less input and perspective about how others think and feel.

. . .

In some ways, the results should not be surprising: Not having power forces you to see things from other people's points of view and increases empathy and social behavior. Having power allows you to ignore other points of view -- depriving you of the social skills that led to power in the first place. When powerful people such as Musharraf say and do things that are absurd, in other words, it could be that they are simply unaware of how they appear to others.

I’m sure there could be many comments made about the “Bush Bubble” and the fact that the out-of-power liberals predictions being far more accurate then the in-power conservatives, but this study isn’t partisan, and its that fact that makes it most depressing.

Exactly like the old saw of power corrupting, it is saying that no matter how gifted, intelligent, and empathetic the person you put into power happens to be, having that power will turn them into selfish and impulsive tyrants, increasingly cut off from reality.  You can see it happen to entire parties, who come to power to clean up the bloated corruption of the old, only to turn into bloated, corrupt bastards themselves, usually with surprising swiftness.

No wonder people who follow politics closely, (and don’t self-identify with any of the main actors), tend to be such pessimists.

Matthew Yglesias turns the tables on the Iranian question:

And, indeed, it's not clear that a policy of appeasement would be wise. True, we've seen rational leadership even from vicious dictators like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, but the contemporary United States is led by religious fanatics, which introduces a new element into the equation. What's more, the USA is the only country on earth to have ever actually deployed nuclear weapons. Indeed, current political elites are so war-crazed and bloodthirsty that they not only engineered the 2003 attack on Iraq -- a country that tried to appease the Americans by eliminating its nuclear program and allowing IAEA inspectors to certify that it had done so -- but they continue to deny regretting it to this day. And that includes not only radicals like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but so-called "moderates" like Hillary Clinton as well.

Key religious leaders like John Hagee explicitly argue that the United States should attack Iran in order to hasten the coming of Armageddon, and Hagee gets not only a respectful hearing at the White House, but also works closely with AIPAC giving him important entrée with many Democrats. All of the incumbent faction's candidates from office have said they'd contemplate a nuclear first strike against Iran, media sources generally lambaste anyone who criticizes American moves to ratchet up conflict with Iran, and in general any responsible Iranian leaders needs to wonder if the USA is really a country that one can risk doing business with.

David Broder in the Washington Post:

The hankering for unity is also palpable and reflects the conspicuous absence of agreement -- and excess of partisanship -- in the contemporary political scene. I have been saying for months that voters care less whether the next president will be a Democrat or a Republican than that the person moving into the Oval Office be someone who can pull the country together to face its challenges.

. . .

Where each party used to have an ideological mixture, each is now more clearly defined in opposition to the other. The result is a Republican Party that is far more universally (and stridently) conservative; and a Democratic Party whose center of gravity has moved equally far to the left.

. . .

The congressional divisions have been heightened by President Bush's strategic decision to govern almost entirely within his own party's relatively narrow political base. He courted mainly core Republicans to power his two trips to the White House, and he has relied almost exclusively on Republican votes in the House and Senate to sustain his program.

While giving him some notable victories, this strategy also solidified the opposition and stiffened the Democrats' determination to oppose him at every opportunity, whatever the consequences.

The first paragraph makes sense; the rest is that peculiar form of beltway wisdom that bears little resemblance to reality. I mean, just where is this Democratic determination to oppose the president at "every opportunity, whatever the consequences"? The Democratic party did virtually nothing while in the minority, claiming they were powerless, and now that they are the majority party, they've still given Bush just about everything he's asked for.

The Republicans, who apparently have different advisors, keep going for party unity over reaching across the aisle, which has cost them, but still allows them to paint the Democrats as weak-willed when they continually bend over backwards and collapse in their attempts for unity across party lines.

And the Democrats have moved as far to the left as the Republicans have to the right? What planet is this guy on? Look at the last election where the Democrats elected several members who were former Republicans disgusted at what their party had become. If anything, the Democratic leadership has shifted rightward. Just because the Republican party has moved to the hardest of hard right positions in most areas doesn't mean that their opponents have done the same.

But, as Brownstein notes, there has been no comparable increase in partisanship among the voters, who cling stubbornly to a common-sense, moderate conservative view and simply want the practical problems that bother them addressed. The things the public worries about -- the Iraq war, health care, energy, immigration -- are not partisan problems but national challenges.

More-or-less true, with the caveat that there aren't any moderate conservatives left in the Republican party. Success for the Democrats will come when they stop trying to court the ultra-partisan Republican supporters and start speaking to the vast majority of Americans who already support their ideas, if they'd only start standing up for them.

Man, the neocon supporters are out in force today.  Along with the VD man’s column, we have this gem from the Times of London.

And much like Hanson’s argument, the author tries to paint Bush and his policies as being very much in line with what his critics are advocating, although in his case, it's to argue that Bush just hasn't been neoconservative enough.

Critics of George W. Bush's Middle East policy are hoping for a change in direction once America's 43rd President has left the White House. The foreign offices of Europe all hope for more multilateralism. More realpolitik. Less sabre-rattling.

The critics have a problem, however. In reality, Team Bush has largely been following European approaches to foreign policy for most of the world's troublespot nations.

Of course! The reason everyone's complaining is because Bush is doing exactly what we want him to do! How could I have missed that?

Take Pakistan. The “realist school” couldn't honestly disapprove of any aspect of Bush's dealings with Islamabad. American taxpayers have financed a military dictator in the hope that Musharraf will suppress the fundamentalists and provide logistical support for Nato operations in Afghanistan. Has this worked? No. Islamic militancy is mushrooming.

Yep, no “realist” could argue that supporting the guy who’s military and intelligence services propped up the Taliban for years and turned a blind eye to the worst nuclear proliferator in human history might not turn out to be a good idea.

And Bush’s standing right on side with the General as he works to crush his secular domestic critics while leaving the Islamists to their own devices is right in line with the foreign offices of other nations, like the British Commonwealth, for instance.

And let’s not forget that this is totally on Bush’s watch.  The Clinton administration cut off ties in protest over Pakistan’s nuclear tests.  Bush reversed the policy after 9/11 and sent billions in military aid that Musharraf has used to arm for possible war against India instead of fighting the insurgents in the Northwest frontier provinces.

Musharraf has often bargained with the political patrons of the madrassas in order to stymie his democratic opponents. If he falls, the Pakistan people may see America as the nation that propped up the regime that introduced martial law and warped the constitution.

May?

It's all too reminiscent of its relationship with the Shah of Iran in the 1970s. [Oh, how much they've learned! - ed] When it comes to present-day Iran, Team Bush has been patiently multilateralist. Washington allowed the years to pass as Europe promised to negotiate an end to Tehran's nuclear plans. As it became obvious that the talks were failing, the Americans turned to the United Nations. Russia and China have vetoed any significant action.

Yup, patiently refusing to “talk to evil” and demanding complete capitulation from the Iranians as the precursors for any possible talks.  Very multilateralest of them.

A couple paragraphs of how the “surge” is turning the tide in Iraq and how we should wait for history’s judgment because Iraq could turn into paradise and if we don’t follow the pre-emptive war policy on Iran, it will be the great nuclear terror of the planet, and then this conclusion:

When it comes to foreign policy the next US president has to remember that America is most effective when the world's only policeman is seen as strong, as in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion. Libya disarmed. The Khan nuclear exchange programme was exposed. Syria withdrew from Lebanon. Problems multiplied when America looked unwilling to commit necessary troops to finish the first battles of the War on Terror. A weak America, tied down by do-nothing multilateralists, is the last thing our dangerous world needs.

I just love how now it’s the mutlilateralists fault that Bush and Co. didn’t send enough troops to do the job.  It’s the multilateralists fault that Bush and Co. pissed away the US’s military strength and tied themselves fighting two insurgencies.  It’s the multilateralists fault that the US finds itself too weakened to properly threaten Iran.  Apparently if we’d just allowed Bush to be more of a neoconservative, none of those problems would have cropped up.

Of course, when you’re trying to argue that talks are useless and that war is the necessary route, some blatant revisionism is pretty much the order of the day.  And the real lie is one of omission, because there is one foreign policy success of Bush’s that the article doesn’t bother to mention at all, North Korea.

The reason is quite simple; the North Korean example directly contradicts the point the author is trying to make.  When Bush and Co. tried the same strategy they’re trying with Iran, refusing to negotiate unless the North Koreans capitulated first, the North Koreans pulled out of the NPT and rushed ahead with a bomb program.  When the US swallowed its rhetoric and sat down at the negotiating table, the North Koreans agreed to dismantle their program and allow IAEA inspectors back into the country in return for US aid.

Normally, supporters of the Bush administration would be happy to tout any and all successes, even ones like the “surge”, whose success is yet debatable, but the North Korean success leaves them in quite a quandary.  Tout it, and it while it could boost Bush’s image, it also touts a strategy diametrically opposed to what they want to do with Iran.  Ignore it, and Bush’s image continues to deteriorate to levels where he can’t do what they want him to do with Iran.  A lose-lose game.

I’m sure the multilateralists are to blame somehow.

Will Neocon Ideas Return?

Somebody should inform the "eminent" scholar that for something to return, it first has to leave. Neocon thought and ideas are well and thriving in the Republican presidential field. Short of Ron Paul, they all toe the line when it comes to the neocons pet projects.

Hanson, of course, does his best to try and camouflage what neocon ideas actually are so he can pretend the Democrats are coming over to their side:

As fear of defeat in Iraq recedes from the political landscape, look to a growing consensus elsewhere. "Neocon" - the term often used to describe "new" conservatives who today support fostering democracy in the Middle East - may still be a dirty word.

But if you take the anger about George Bush out of the equation, along with the Iraq war and the fear of any more invasions by the U.S., why not support democratic reform in the Middle East? We know the alternatives only play into the hands of terrorists.

That's why presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., recently said that America needed to support democracy and pressure Gen. Pervez Musharraf to restore elections in Pakistan.

Few Democrats or Republicans would disagree with his idealistic rhetoric. Although Obama wouldn't express the same support for the struggling Iraqi democracy, he sort of sounded like a softer neocon - more worried about the lack of freedom in Pakistan than the fact we might undermine a strongman with nukes and a restive population.

See! We neocons support "fostering democracy", and that makes Democrats who think we should support democracy just "softer" neocons.

Of course, neocons only want to "foster" democracy after first making their target countries orphans. Thier philosophy isn't about supporting democracy, but about imposing democracy by force.

And further, as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and most recently Pakistan have shown, they're only about democracy "support" when the country in question opposes the US-Israeli hegemon. When it comes to dictators who are allies, the neocons are suddenly willing to accept platitudes about "support for democracy" that don't have to be matched by actions. (Or, they can go completely delusional like Bush and pretend that dictators are democrats! Really!) That glaring hypocrisy, added to an ever-eager willingness to use force to try and solve every problem, is what neoconservatism has come to stand for.

And its that philosophy that most people would be very happy to see the back of.

Haven't read the books, but I'll probably go see the movie, if only because it seems to be pissing off the kinds of people I enjoy seeing pissed off.

The Halton Catholic school board is reviewing whether to keep copies of the children's fantasy novel The Golden Compass in its elementary school libraries, after receiving one complaint.

Rick MacDonald, a superintendent with the board, wouldn't say exactly what the complaint is, but did tell CBC News that a committee had been formed to "review the book and consider its appropriateness."

Some reports said the board is reacting to allegations the author Philip Pullman is an atheist and that the novels are anti-religious. Similar complaints have been made against the book in the United States.

Thanks to salvage, who's been following this for some time, I think I may have found a lead on where the complaint originated.

Sounds like the perfect movie and book combo to get for the neices and nephews now that the Harry Potter series has nearly run its course.

The election strategy of the Australian prime minister, John Howard, was in turmoil today after members of his Liberal party were caught red-handed in an inept dirty tricks campaign.

Bogus flyers from a fake organisation called the Islamic Australia Federation were distributed through the letterboxes of voters in a marginal seat, claiming the Labor opposition sympathised with Islamic terrorists.

The leaflets referred to the men imprisoned for the 2002 nightclub bomb attacks in Bali, which left more than 200 people dead. The flyers also claimed Labor support for the building of new mosques in the area.

Let's see, the party of staunch Bush ally in the "War on Terror" caught pandering to anti-Muslim sentiment as a ploy to get votes. I wonder where they got that idea?

and another example of how tasers, rather than a means of last resort, are being used to force people to comply simply because it seems so much easier.

And why worry? After all, the manufacturer tells us they're completely "safe".

As I pointed out before, their "safety" isn't the issue. It's how they're being used that's the problem. The increasingly careless use of these weapons to force obedience is the best argument I've seen for banning their use. And Digby says it quite well:

Police in the country are now allowed to torture speeders by the side of the highway in order to get them to comply. The only difference between this officer slugging the speeder in the stomach and putting 50,0000 volts of electricity in him is that the latter doesn't leave any marks. The intent, the pain and the goose-stepping authoritarian message are exactly the same.

Time to take their new toy away.

Ottawa announced Wednesday it is acting to protect two large swaths of boreal forest and tundra in the Northwest Territories from development.

The two areas, which cover close to 10 million hectares, include tracts of wilderness in a 15,000-square-kilometre area along the Arctic Circle called the Ramparts River and Wetlands, and a section of the East Arm of Great Slave Lake.

I'm sure I'll find something else they've done to bitch about in the near future, but credit where credit is due. This is a good decision.

Bush's grasp of reality seems as spot on as ever, more's the pity.

President Bush yesterday offered his strongest support of embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying the general "hasn't crossed the line" and "truly is somebody who believes in democracy."

Well, I suppose when when you consider the Bush definition of democracy . . .

As for the sheer ridiculousness of the "crossed the line" bit, the quote from Biden about sums it up.

"What exactly would it take for the president to conclude Musharraf has crossed the line? Suspend the constitution? Impose emergency law? Beat and jail his political opponents and human rights activists?" asked Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a presidential candidate. "He's already done all that. If the president sees Musharraf as a democrat, he must be wearing the same glasses he had on when he looked in Vladimir Putin's soul."

It's bad enough the US has to deal with people like this as a function of their foreign policy, but the sheer and utter hypocrisy that surrounds those dealings just makes everything else they say about democracy promotion, human rights, and peace initiatives that much more suspect and less credible.

Joseph Galloway - McClatchy

We don’t rush into a war that has cost so many lives and so much national treasure, and has so damaged our standing in the world, based on a tissue of lies. But under the leadership of George W. Bush, that's what we did in Iraq.

We don’t stand idly by, backs turned and eyes closed, while in wartime our friends and political contributors loot the national treasury of billions of taxpayer dollars. But the Bush administration and a Republican-controlled Congress did just that.

We don’t send our soldiers and Marines into combat without enough of everything they need to fight, survive and win. But that's what this administration and its political operatives in charge of the Pentagon did.

We don’t turn the office of the attorney general and key parts of the Justice Department into a branch of a partisan political campaign — gutting offices charged with protecting the civil rights of minorities and directing the prosecution of those of a different political party — but this administration did.

We don’t declare war and then expect that the entire sacrifice will be borne by the half a percent of our population who wear uniforms. We don’t fight a long and costly war by cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans and borrowing trillions of dollars to finance it from foreign competitors such as China. But this administration did.

We don’t prosecute a war to spread democracy by curtailing democracy and suspending the Bill of Rights at home. We cannot promote our principles abroad by denying the same principles — the right to a lawyer, the right to a fair trial, the right to be secure in our homes — to ourselves. But this administration did.

We don’t beat or torture confessions out of prisoners in violation of our laws and the laws of the civilized world. We don’t lock people up and hold them incommunicado for years without charges or trials. But this administration did and does.

We don’t applaud and cheer an administration and a Congress that make the rich vastly richer, the middle class less secure and the poor even poorer. But this administration has done just that, in violation of our principles and the principles of love, peace and charity that are engrained in the Christianity that these rogues and charlatans embrace so publicly but violate every day.

It will be a good day when they are gone, and good riddance to them all.

Cheers.

Stockwell Day, making fence posts look like geniuses:

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day says he wishes Canadians were as outraged over impaired driving deaths as they are over the death of a Polish immigrant shot with a Taser by police.

Perhaps our illustrious Public Safety Minister can let us all know how he’s decided that drunk drivers should be allowed to walk around after killing people rather than the current practice of throwing them into jail.  And while he’s at it, maybe he can explain the Conservative’s government plan to put these drunken killers on the payroll for the task of protecting us!

I mean, think about this for a moment.  Our government is telling us that we should view the actions of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in exactly the same light as we would view the actions of a group of convicted felons.

Apparently, the Conservative Party thinks that the RCMP is no better than a pack of criminal thugs and we shouldn’t get so upset when they act like it.  So much for their “law and order” agenda.

Canadians think quite a bit higher of the RCMP, which is why we’re so upset that they’re not living up to those expectations.

What would Lincoln's famous Gettysburg address been like had Powerpoint been around back then? Having had to sit through a few of these, I have to admit I found this rather amusing.

Disgusting:

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

This must be that new kind of fiscal conservatism that Bush is suddenly a fan of. Screw over the wounded so that you have more money to send Halliburton's way.

Scott McClellan edition:

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being "involved" in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.

McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”

The excerpts give no details about the alleged involvement of the president or vice president.

But McClellan lists five top officials as having allowed him inadvertently to mislead the public.

“I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.”

No shit. Once again, thanks for waiting until you could profit from it to tell us all.

Yury Baluyevsky, the chief of Russia's general staff, said in an interview with the Russia Today TV channel on Tuesday that the Russian Armed Forces were under no obligation to protect the world from the U.S. Answering a question as to whether or not the world could count on Russia to defend it from "insidious American plans," Baluyevsky replied, "Today, there is no need to be afraid of the Russian Armed Forces. However, I do not believe that the Russian military is obliged to defend the world from the evil Americans".

There was a time that would have been funny, and of course to some extent it still is, but . . .

This story seems to be getting very little coverage this side of the Atlantic:

The death toll from Sunday's blast at a mine in Ukraine has risen to at least 90, making it the worst mining accident in the nation's history, officials say.

They say 10 miners are still missing in the Zasyadko coal mine in the eastern Donetsk region.

Fires have hindered rescue efforts, and a senior union official has said there is no chance of finding survivors.

Not that there aren't plenty of other stories out there to distract us, but mining disasters usually get more of a reaction, particularly those with large numbers of casualties and ongoing rescue efforts.

Is there any industry with a poorer safety record than mining, I wonder?

One other thing of note.

Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych said on Sunday that there had been a cave-in at the accident site.

He also said a safety watchdog had reported that miners were working in accordance with regulations.

"This accident has proven once again that a human is powerless before the nature," Mr Yanukovych said, according to the Associated Press news agency.

But President Yushchenko said the government had "made insufficient efforts to reorganise the mining sector, particularly the implementation of safe mining practices".

Using a disaster to try and push a partisan political agenda. I wonder where they learned that from?

It seems that regardless what externalities affect other parts of the US economy and cause some suppliers to cater to American consumers, there is still one industry that follows the textbook supply/demand curves to go where the money is.

Cocaine traffickers appear to be reacting to the rise of the Canadian dollar and the fall of the U.S. greenback, preferring Canadian and European markets to those in the U.S., say drug experts and medical officials.

For the first time in years, many American cities seem to be experiencing a cocaine shortage while experts say some Canadian cities — including Vancouver and Ottawa — say they're seeing more cocaine than ever.

. . .

But the surest sign of cocaine scarcity south of the border is a 44 per cent increase in the street price across the United States, where a pure gram now averages about $137 US, said American drug enforcement officials.

. . .

DEA officials said the large traffickers are turning away from the U.S. dollar, preferring to trade their cocaine for euros.

That's driven a surge of cocaine imports to Europe and evidence from the streets suggests the same thing may be happening in Canada.

Vancouver prices, for example, are substantially lower than those in the U.S., said Vancouver police Sgt. Steve McKenna, who works on the downtown drug squad.

"A street-level gram right now is about 80 bucks," he said.

Of course, the rise in the loonie is hurting some of our domestic producers, but the black market in drugs alone is worth at least $3-400 billion. And where that market goes in its search for wealth, the legitimate markets will follow.

I guess this explains their reluctance to release the video.

A wave of public anger about the death of Robert Dziekanski is washing over the RCMP in the Lower Mainland, with upset Canadians berating officers at the airport and at the nearby Richmond detachment – and even throwing eggs at one police cruiser.

Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass, commanding officer for the RCMP in British Columbia, told The Globe and Mail that members of the public have been acting “very aggressively” toward officers since Mr. Dziekanski's death a month ago.

Modeled on what appears to be a successful "Anbar Awakening" in Iraq, the US is apparently looking to arm Pakistani tribesmen to help in their fight against al Qaeda.

Altogether, the broader strategic move toward more local support is being accelerated because of concern about instability in Pakistan and the weakness of the Pakistani government, as well as fears that extremists with havens in the tribal areas could escalate their attacks on allied troops in Afghanistan. Just in recent weeks, Islamic militants sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban have already extended their reach beyond the frontier areas into more settled areas, most notably the mountainous region of Swat.

. . .

Historically, American Special Forces have gone into foreign countries to work with local militaries to improve the security of those countries in ways that help American interests. Under this new approach, the number of advisers would increase, officials said.

The problem here is that they're not talking about supporting the Pakistani military. They're talking about arming and supporting local militia forces that don't generally acknowledge Islamabad's authority. Doing so pushes the Pakistani state into greater instability and weakness, which only helps a non-state force like al Qaeda.

And this doesn't sound too encouraging regarding the amount of thought they've put into things:

One person who was briefed on the proposal prepared by the Special Operations Command staff members, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because the briefing had not yet been approved, said it was in the form of about two dozen slides. The slides described a strategy using both military and nonmilitary measures to fight the militants.

One slide included a chart that categorized one to two dozen tribes by location — North Waziristan and South Waziristan, for example — and then gave a brief description of their location, their known or suspected links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and their size and military abilities.

A couple of dozen slides? One slide to tell people about known and suspected al Qaeda links for the entire region?

It's little wonder the US rarely seems to make any good decisions when they are based on such a paucity of data.

William Lind’s On War article this week was titled “Cops Who Think”. The thrust of the article is that, given the trend towards non-state forces like gangs and terror organizations being our greatest threats, it is the police and not the military that will find itself on the front lines.

The reason for this is in large part because our military forces are mainly designed to fight other military forces. Move beyond that and, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, they don’t perform nearly as well. Just think for a moment if the tactics our forces were using in Afghanistan were a common occurrence in Calgary or Toronto.

Defeating non-state forces requires local cooperation and intelligence. And particularly in domestic situations, it is the police who have the ability to fill those requirements.

From Lind:

Prevention can only be done by police, because only police, not the military, are sufficiently integrated with society to get the "tips" prevention usually requires. The need for such integration in turn explains why police should never allow themselves to be militarized, despite most cops' enthusiasm for military gear. Militarization automatically separates police from civil society, which leaves them blind and deaf.

And that brings me to a post by Boris at The Galloping Beaver, where, somewhat unfortunately given the above, he talks about how our police forces are evolving:

My father was a policeman during the 1960s and would often go out on patrol without his service revolver. Never once did he have to draw his weapon or beat someone to make an arrest. Indeed, he once, unarmed and alone, successfully disarmed and arrested a man with a shotgun who’d just blown a hole in his wife’s leg. He did this with a calm voice and discussion.

Somewhere between his day, and now, there seems to have been something lost in the human side of policing.

. . .

Somewhere in the past 10 or 15 or 40 years, I suspect something changed in North American policing. Police stopped wearing light-blue linen shirts, and began to appear in monotone navy or black outfits, with armour, looking much closer to a infanteer than someone who is meant to professionally and courteously interact with the public.

. . .

Offensive gadgetry from taser and mace to firearms replaces politeness, brains, and communication skills. The cruiser replaces the footpatrol. I think it’s a trickle down effect of military-industrial complex. We have air-support so we’ll bomb the hut.

. . .

What the police appear to miss is that not everyone cowers when confronted with power and threats. Some people push back. Even innocent, unarmed ones. Granted, the police should be able to protect themselves, but not at the expense of the public. Ultimately, this harms the police as public trust is eroded, and the public begins to fear the people meant to protect them. Policing then becomes a version of a protection racket.

Much like our military, the byword for the police now seems to be "force protection". As the incident with Mr. Dzeikanski showed, the RCMP are far too willing to use force, even possibly lethal force, rather than chance any unpleasantness by trying to resolve the situation peacefully. (And this incident is hardly better.)

Rather than working to integrate themselves within their communities, our police forces are erecting barriers between themselves and the public they're nominally supposed to be protecting.

"blind and deaf".

It bodes poorly for the future.

Despite the fact that Iraq and U.S. officials have made water projects among their top priorities, the percentage of Iraqis without access to decent water supplies has risen from 50 percent to 70 percent since the start of the U.S.-led war, according to an analysis by Oxfam International last summer. The portion of Iraqis lacking decent sanitation was even worse -- 80 percent.

Now, though, some U.S. officials think they're about to make progress.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, using more than $1 billion in reconstruction funds, is building massive water treatment plants in urban areas, including one in the slums of Baghdad's Sadr City.

Construction crews over the last three years, working there under heavy guard, have constructed a treatment plant that will produce an additional 25 million gallons of drinking water daily, enough for nearly 200,000 people. Miles of new water lines are also being installed, allowing 2 million of Sadr City's residents to tap directly into the new plant and existing water supplies.

In Nasiriyah, a $277 million water treatment facility is to be handed over to Iraqis in December. It is billed as the largest facility of its kind in Iraq and is designed to provide clean drinking water for an estimated half-million people in southern Iraq.

As many as 1,500 water treatment and sewage projects have been completed, with 150 more in progress, according to the corps of engineers.

Given the record of US reconstruction projects in Iraq, I'm not too hopeful the situation is going to improve. Hell, they say they've completed 1,500 projects while watching the situation grow steadily worse, with only 10% of that number now in progress.

However, if we ignore the fact that the Bush administration's policy of giving contracts to incompetent cronies generally dooms any and all reconstruction projects before they start, the idea of using the relative security the current lull has afforded them to try and get some rebuilding done is a very good one.

Granted, the original point of the surge was to create breathing space for the Iraqi government to come to some sort of power-sharing arrangement, but that wasn't going anywhere, and the current strategy of arming local groups to self-police is at cross purposes to it. The Iraqis are the only ones who can decide how the power will be shared and the US is stuck as observer, how ever much they like to pretend otherwise.

But while the US can't force the Iraqis into peaceful coexistence, they can affect the quality of life by actually accomplishing the reconstruction they've been promising since they blew everything up to begin with. Bring some actual, tangible, benefits to the Iraqis, and they may be less inclined to plant land-mines along your patrol routes.

Probably too late to make much difference, but unlike slaughtering their allies, rebuilding, at least, isn't going to hurt their chances.

Not that its anything too original, but yesterday I noted that the continued hegemony of the US dollar was far from assured, and not long afterwards, this little gem pops up.

On Friday night, during what the participants thought were private talks, Venezuela's oil minister Venezuela Rafael Ramirez and his Iranian counterpart Gholamhossein Nozari, argued that pricing - and selling - oil using the crippled dollar was damaging the cartel.

They said Opec should formally express its concern about the weakness of the dollar when the cartel makes its official declaration at the close of the summit today. But the Saudis, the world's largest oil producers and de facto head of Opec, vetoed the proposal. Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, warned that even the mere mention to journalists of the fact that leaders were discussing the weak dollar would cause the US currency to plummet.

Well, its been mentioned, though I expect most of the big players will try to pretend it wasn't to keep the whole system from collapsing. They'll probably succeed this time, but eventually it's going to fail, and then it will be a rush to the exits to see who can get out before they lose too much.

Update:

The Dollar's Decline

Two stories from Afghanistan provide a very ugly confluence regarding our tactics in Afghanistan and how effective our leadership is,

The first is about our troops killing an Afghan civilian on Friday. The CanWest headline reads:

Canadian soldiers shoot Afghan civilian in self-defence, ISAF says

That alone should tell you there's a problem, since civilians are by definition supposed to be non-combatants. You can't defend yourself from someone who isn't attacking you.

Canadian troops shot and killed an Afghan civilian and wounded another, the International Security Assistance Force and Canadian military said late Friday.

. . .

ISAF said a taxi had approached a patrol convoy Thursday, and had ignored visual signs to stop.

"Warning shots were fired and the ISAF troops then carried on with their patrol," a news release late Friday said.

So they fired "warning" shots directly into the cab, killing and wounding its occupants, and drove on without stopping to see what effect their "warning" shots might have had.

This is not the first such incident, and the patrol was following what appears to be standard operating procedures. The reason this is so ugly, beyond the immediate deaths of innocent Afghans, is because when things like this happen, it makes the local population far more supportive of things like this:

Two Canadian soldiers and an Afghan interpreter were killed Saturday after the vehicle they were travelling in struck a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, a military official said.

And what truly rankles me is the crass stupidity of the military spokesperson:

"The area is fairly active in terms of insurgent activities," Juneau said. "However, you have to understand that the insurgents are desperate for a spectacular event or spectacular victory that would help them finish the fighting season on a high note.

"They haven't been very successful so far this season," he added.

I'll leave it to salvage whether or not he needs to add this to his desperation watch, but seeing our military spout the same tired talking points of the Americans in Iraq is as disheartening as the fact that our military seems to have decided to copy their tactics.

And given the fact that the Afghan insurgency has killed more coalition troops this year than any other since the US invaded in 2001, in a trend of steady increases, would Col. Juneau mind telling us just what he thinks "successful" would be? Guerillas win so long as they don't lose, and its pretty clear that the Afghan forces are far from defeated.

When our leadership is more interested in PR than proper strategy, there is no chance that things are going to turn out well.

A few days ago, Neil MacDonald wrote an article explaining the reasons why, despite the Candian dollar having surpassed the US dollar in value, goods in Canada still cost more. A significant part of the explanation has to do with the US dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.

Washington essentially prints the world's money and has since the end of the Second World War. All internationally traded commodities, most importantly oil, are priced in U.S. dollars.

"It gives the U.S. a huge privilege," says Prestowitz. "It means that Americans can buy and borrow in their own currency. So whereas you in Canada, if you want to buy a Toyota, you have to sell something to get U.S. dollars and then you go buy a Toyota. In America all we do is just print dollars and send the paper to Japan and we get the Toyota."

The danger isn't is that it's true, since it remains so for now, but in treating it as a truism. That is, believing that because the US dollar is the reserve currency now, it will remain so regardless of how badly the US handles it's finances.

Yesterday, I saw this story:

Foreign tourists to many of India's most famous landmarks will no longer be able to pay the entrance fee in dollars, the government says.

The ruling is aimed at safeguarding tourism revenues following the recent falls in the dollar.

Until now, foreign tourists to sites such at the Taj Mahal have had the option of paying in dollars or rupees.

By itself, the story is practically insignificant, but it isn't by itself. It's part of a growing trend of countries moving away from the US dollar where they can. Putin's continued threat to start selling oil in Euros, and China discussing diversifying their foreign currency holdings are far more significant shifts should they take place, and they yet may.

At some point, it makes more sense to sell the US dollar than wait around until your holdings in it are inflated into being worthless. When that happens, the truism of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency will burst over the catered-to US consumer in a very ugly way.

From Harpers

IG investigators were astonished particularly by what transpired in the first ten days of Arar’s detention. Well-defined procedures were not followed. The State Department was consciously kept out of the loop. Steps were taken to circumvent Arar’s rights, and particularly to guard against the prospect that a lawyer for Arar would challenge his highly dubious treatment through a habeas corpus proceeding. Who was at fault in this process? A group of very senior figures, mostly in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Justice Department figures, and particularly those who are fingered and criticized in the early drafts of the IG Report, have been frantic in their efforts to quash it. And they’re succeeding. That, I am told, is why the IG Report has not been finalized and transmitted to Congress.

Arar more than deserves an official apology from the US government, at the very least, but you can guarentee that it won't happen under this administration.

This sort of stunt completely misses the point.

An Ottawa police officer was zapped with up to 50,000 volts of electricity in front of CBC reporters Thursday in an attempt to demonstrate that the Taser that delivered the jolt is safe when used properly.

Staff Sgt. Mike Maloney, who was kneeling as his colleague Sgt. Mark Barclay shot him with the device, stiffened suddenly and fell forward silently with his knees still partly bent, twitching slightly for a few seconds

When asked moments later how he was, he responded: "I'm fine. Do you want me to get up and run?"

See!  Totally safe!  No need to get upset about police using tasers on people!

Further down in the story, the officer makes this statement:

A key to safe use, he said, is to teach officers that the device is a substitute for other weapons such as batons, not a substitute for talking.

It is not a key, but the key for understanding why what happened to Robert Dziekanski was excessive use of force and brutality on the part of the four RCMP officers.

I was an amateur boxer in my teens, and so I can say from experience that it is perfectly “safe” to pummel someone to the head and body in the exact same way its “safe” to taser someone.  I’ve seen guys take tremendous blows to the head and fall to the mat, to bounce right back ready for more within a few seconds, just like our friend Sgt. Maloney claimed he was capable of.

Do you think the defenses the RCMP are using to claim their use of tasers was legitimate would stand up if the action taken was two baton chops to the skull instead of two taser shots to the body? Because as Sgt. Barclay says, the taser is a substitute for the baton, and the use of one to force submission is as legitimate as the other.  Batons just make it more clear what's being done.

The fact that tasers are "safe", meaning that they don't normally kill the people you shoot with them, is entirely beside the point. Its their use when they need not be used that's the point. We give these guys guns and authorize them to shoot people when its justified. We'd make quite a bit of noise if the police starting shooting people when it wasn't necessary. We shouldn't be any less angry over excessive use of force in any other instances.

The continued use of demonstrations like the one above to give the impression, both to people and particularly to police, that tasers are somehow a less violent solution contributes directly to cops like those four RCMP officers thinking its acceptable to use them as a matter of course.

Update:

When I finished writing this post, I came upon this bit of information via Boris at the Galloping Beaver:

In the end, the continued use of TASER® remains one of public perception and risk-benefit analysis. Law enforcement and the general public must understand that the term non-lethal, as defined by the US Marine Corps and used by TASER International, does not imply lack of ability to kill, but rather an intent that the weapon system "incapacitate personnel or material, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property and the environment"

[3]. The TASER® system should be viewed more accurately as less-lethal, rather than non-lethal or less-than-lethal.

It appears that this won't be going away anytime soon.

Canada's ambassador to Poland has been invited to sit down with Polish officials in Warsaw on Monday to discuss the death of Robert Dziekanski after he was stunned by an RCMP Taser at Vancouver International Airport.

Which I believe is diplomatic-speak for, "reaming you a new asshole for killing one of our citizens". Certainly would be nice if our government cared that much about Canadian lives.

Many Poles view it as a case of excessive force by police using a weapon that may be unsafe, Piotr Ogrodzinski, the Polish ambassador to Canada, said in Ottawa on Thursday

Judging from the comments on seeing the video, I'd say most Canadians feel the same way. Maybe now that it's turning into an international incident, we might see some serious review of police tactics.

Not that I'm too hopeful.

From CalgaryGrit

There was a great 22 Minutes skit after the Airbus settlement. When asked to explain the 2 million dollars that were "wasted", the "mounties" answered "when I think about the look in the eyes of the average Canadian at the thought that maybe, just maybe, Brian Mulroney would be going to jail - well, you just can't put a price tag on that kind of happiness."

For all the talk of Bush and Clinton derangement syndromes south of the border, they're mostly outflows of partisan dislike. Mulroney was universally despised when he left power; single-digit approval ratings and the utter destruction of his party as a federal force as his legacy. I'm sure now that the Airbus scandal has resurfaced, a lot of Canadians are getting that old gleam back in their eyes again.