Northman's Fury

Given oil topped $86/bbl today, Corrente has started a pool to guess when it will pass $100/bbl.

I'm going to go with March 20, 2008. Fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, and the same date I've picked for the start of the Iran War, neither of which have anything to do with oil. Honest.

A lot of ink and pixels are being spilled over the US Congress’ resolution to label the killings of the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire genocide. And its not about the killings, but about the timing.

This obviously isn’t good timing. Good timing would have been, oh, about 90 years ago. Why it wasn’t recognized then, and why it still hasn’t been, is a really good question in its own right. And the Turks don’t help their case much by making it a criminal offense to call the killings genocide

I still think the matter should be decided on the facts of the case, and the facts don’t look too good for the Ottoman Empire. That said, I’m pragmatic enough to realize, after some thought, that pushing to pass the resolution now probably isn’t the best choice the Democratic leadership could have made.

The storyline going out is that the Democrats are using this resolution to purposely harm US-Turkish relations in the hopes that Turkey will stop allowing the US to use its airbases for logistical support of the Iraq War, and therefore increase the pressure on President Bush to withdraw American forces. I doubt its accurate, but it sounds just plausible enough that a good number of people will buy it.

Let’s be clear, the reasons why the US-Turkish relations are strained go far beyond this little resolution. The vote by the Turkish parliament denying the Americans a northern front during their invasion was met less than diplomatically by the Bush administration, and the last four years of giving Kurdish terrorists free reign in Northern Iraq to launch cross-border attacks, amongst other actions and inactions, hasn’t exactly made the US a popular nation amongst Turks. The success of “Valley of the Wolves” should be proof enough of that.

The genocide resolution has been described as the “last straw”, and it may very well be. Still, let's not confuse the straw with the load the Bush administration has already piled up there. If the Turks use this to pull their support or launch a cross-border invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, it will be the excuse, not the reason.

However, the Republicans will make sure to say it’s the reason. After all, they need to find a way to blame the loss of Iraq on the Democrats. What doesn’t make sense about this is why the Democrats have decided to help them with their revisionist writing.

At the very least, the Democratic leadership seems to be doing their level best to screw themselves over politically. They lie down and let themselves get steam-rolled by the White House for things Americans would really like them to fight for, like the FISA authorizations, or measures to give troops sufficient leave, to impose deadlines on the mission, or to just stop giving Bush every penny he asks for without any restrictions. Instead, they’ve decided to battle the White House on a resolution that means almost nothing after all this time, has little to no popular support, and will give Republicans plenty of ammunition to use against them regarding the eventual failure of the Iraq War.

Now, if the Democratic leadership backs down, they look weak. If they go forward, they’ve put American troops at risk. You almost think they like to lose elections.

A month ago, Stephan Harper made a big kerfuffle over the issue of Muslim women voting while veiled. It was, as I noted, a tempest in a teapot. The number of women in question was miniscule, not to mention that they all were willing to lift the veil to identify themselves.

At the time, I limited my criticism of Harper's motives to the fact that the Conservatives were under investigation by the Elections Commission for overspending in the last federal election, and this was a good way to attack the credibility of the Elections Commissioner.

There are, of course, much darker and more sinister motivations for such attacks, and those were on display in Harper's adopted home base of Calgary this weekend.

Protesters from both sides of a white supremacists rally were hauled away in handcuffs after tempers and profanity flared on the steps of Calgary city hall.

A group of 15 neo-Nazis, most wearing balaclavas and carrying black flags bearing a "white pride" Celtic symbol, clashed with a crowd of over 60 counter-protesters Sunday afternoon.

On the eve of a civic election, the white supremacist group handed out leaflets protesting Canadian legislation allowing women to vote wearing face-covering burkas.

Kudos to the counter-protesters. Western Canadians, and Albertans in particular, have enough trouble being painted as racist red-necks without idiots like those being unchallenged.

Via Impolitical, who does an excellent job taking Harper to task for setting the tone and amplifying this non-issue to national prominence for his own ends.

It looks as though somebody has finally noticed that under the Bush Administration's overly broad definition of who qualifies as an "unlawful combatant", the PMCs the US is using in Iraq probably qualify:

The guards also operate under immunity from Iraqi law -- immunity was granted in 2004 by U.S. officials -- and in a murky status with respect to American laws.

The designation of lawful and unlawful combatants is set out in the Geneva Convention.Lawful combatants are nonmilitary personnel who operate under their military's chain of command. Others may carry weapons in a war zone but may not use offensive force. Under the international agreements, they may only defend themselves.

It's quite clear that PMCs like Blackwater are not under the military's chain of command. The question then revolves around how you define "defensive force". The problem with that, of course, is that if you define it in such a way that allows these PMCs to fight those they believe have "hostile intent", as the US military likes to say, then you also have to apply that standard to the insurgents the US is fighting. Want to argue that an invading and occupying military force doesn't have "hostile intent"?

John Hutson, a former top Navy lawyer, said he did not consider contractors to be unlawful combatants.

But that will be a difficult argument for U.S. officials to make, he emphasized.

"We are going to be hard-pressed to draw a distinction between the guys in Blackwater carrying automatic weapons and the bad guys setting bombs along the side of the road," said Hutson, now dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire.

U.S. officials have described many of the suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban affiliates it holds at Guantanamo Bay as unlawful combatants either for taking part in hostilities against the United States or by supporting the hostilities while not part of a nation's military.

By that standard, some of the private guards in Iraq and Afghanistan also could be seen as unlawful combatants, particularly if they have taken offensive action against unarmed civilians, experts said.

I would leave it at that, except there is one more paragraph that caught my eye.

Many of the current and former federal officials think the administration has an obligation under the Geneva Convention to clarify the contractors' status. Some are perplexed that the Bush administration did not resolve these issues -- or at least discuss them more thoroughly -- before putting contractors on such a complex battlefield.

Perplexed? Really? Have these guys been paying the slightest attention to what the administration has been doing for the last six years? For one, they have a very different definition of "resolving" an issue. As long as they have some sort of legal memo covering their asses, they probably consider the issues resolved.

Second, they've stated that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and don't apply to these wars. Why clarify the contractors' status for a treaty you're going to ignore?

Rice Avoids Criticizing Putin as U.S. Seeks Russia's Cooperation

So says the Washington Post in its headline, and the story outlines how she used very careful language so as not to interfere with their attempts to get Russia on board with their plans against Iran.

But then I also read the Guardian today:

Russian President Vladimir Putin's concentration of power is stifling his country's transition to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.

``In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development,'' Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

``I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma,'' said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.

The top American diplomat encouraged the activists to build institutions of democracy. These would help combat arbitrary state power amid increasing pressure from the Kremlin, she said.

Apparently the only criticism Condi avoided was mentioning Putin's plan to become Prime Minister when he steps down as President. I'm sure Putin was highly grateful and will be very strict with his Iranian hosts when he travels to Tehran next week.

There was one very odd point in the Guardian story regarding a recent report Rice's State Department issued;

Its most recent human-rights report on the US notes continuing centralization of power in the White House, a compliant Congress, political pressure on the judiciary, intolerance of ethnic minorities, corruption and selectivity in enforcement of the law, and media restrictions and self-censorship.

No.

Wait.

I apologize, that should read Russia, not the US, Kremlin not the White House, and legislature rather than Congress. I can't imagine how I got that confused.

It has been a beautiful weekend up here. A bit overcast today, but otherwise a quite pleasant day to take the dog out for a nice little hike of a few hours. As I was heading out onto the land, I see this:


(Click to expand)

People are skating on the ponds! I saw the same thing on a larger pond yesterday, but I didn't bring my camera with me and I figured I'd need some photographic evidence.

It's the middle of October, and the ice here is thick enough to skate on. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

While there have been numerous stories recently about the increased use of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) like Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what the use of such companies without any effective oversight or legal framework is doing to the whole, “hearts and minds” strategy, there is little or no focus on what this is doing to the military itself.

The US has always fought its major wars with citizen-soldiers; average, run-of-the-mill men called up to defend their country and performing heroically. It’s part of the mythos of the nation, from the minutemen to the “greatest generation”, and for the most part it has served them well.

That model broke down in Vietnam because the war dragged on without any clear threat to the US as a whole, and the American people stopped supporting drafting soldiers to fight in such a conflict. The military subsequently became an all-volunteer force. Professional soldiers instead of citizen-soldiers would fight future conflicts.

The Iraq War has seen the extension of this, not just by relying on mercenaries to fill the gaps the volunteer force doesn’t have the men to fill, but by making the volunteer force a mercenary force in its own right.

Two recent stories to illustrate what I mean:

The Army is offering cash bonuses of up to $35,000 to retain young officers serving in key specialties -- including military intelligence, infantry and aviation -- in an unprecedented bid to forestall a critical shortage of officer ranks that have been hit hard by frequent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

. . .

In response, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates approved the unusual incentives last month as a temporary measure for this fiscal year, and over the past three weeks, more than 6,000 Army captains have accepted cash awards ranging from $25,000 to $35,000 in exchange for committing to serve three more years.

And:

The Pentagon has paid more than $100 million in bonuses to veteran Green Berets and Navy SEALs, reversing the flow of top commandos to the corporate world where security companies such as Blackwater USA are offering big salaries.

. . .

Overall, more than 1,200 of the military's most specialized personnel near or already eligible for retirement have opted for payments of up to $150,000 in return for staying in uniform several more years.

The US government’s decision to privatize war-fighting has not only proved a boon for mercenary contractors, but has made the US military itself a competitor for top military talent on the open market. Where before the call to serve one’s country would have been the enticement to keep men in uniform, it’s now moving more heavily towards financial incentives to offset private competition.

Gives a whole new meaning to “the best military money can buy”.

Have I ever mentioned how nice it is to be done with that TimesSelect firewall? Whether you agree with them or not, the columnists writing for the NYT are some of the best there are, and its nice to be able to access and discuss their work on-line once again. Today, the column to discuss is Frank Rich's.

“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

. . .

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Read it all. And Sullivan's linked column is well worth a read as well if you haven't already done so.

I think this would actually be a great idea.

Now, Davis and other local sex workers have banded together to establish Canada's first cooperative brothel in an attempt to offer women a safe place to work.

The group, formed by a sex workers' alliance based here, called the British Columbia Coalition of Experiential Women, will incorporate next month and is already setting the groundwork to open the co-op brothel.

Members have begun scouting for a location and are enlisting the backing of local businesses, police and labor organizations.

Faced with the task of cleaning up the city to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver authorities said they are open to the idea.

For the most part, the major problems with the sex trade come as a result of it being pushed into the margins where the women are isolated and vulnerable. And while there are some rumblings about dealing with the pimps and violent johns, the vast majority of legal action and stigma always seems to fall onto the women themselves.

Giving it a legal face and a location where it can be watched and controlled may not do much for the stigma, but it will certainly put a spotlight on and probably curtail the exploitive bastards who are the real issue.

Prostitution itself is legal in Canada. However, since most activities associated with it are not -- such as soliciting sexual services in a public place, operating a bawdy house and living off the avails of prostitution -- the group is planning to appeal to the federal government for an exemption.

Damn, so close. No chance Harper and the Conservatives go for this. Their religious base would go ape-shit. Unless we elect a new government in the near future, it appears as though the ladies of the night will be out of luck.

It's not only oil that hitting new highs, the cost of Freedom has went up as well, via the Onion:

According to a report released Monday, the cost of American freedom has soared from its previous 1779 high of bravery, sacrifice, fighting for what's right, and 25,071 human lives, up to a record bravery, sacrifice, fighting for what's right, 321,932 human lives, personal privacy, peace of mind, honor, liberty, comfort, and $14.2 billion. Even as it reaches unprecedented levels, most Americans have no choice but to pay for the intangible commodity.

"I suppose you need freedom," said Nancy Holstrom, who was forced to send her two eldest sons to Iraq last month to help defray rising freedom costs.

Government officials said they are committed to exploring all viable alternatives to freedom, including converting to a military dictatorship.

The scary part is that I'm not sure that last paragraph is actually a joke.

A worthwhile read on the theme of the right-wing's debating skills over the last week or so. It's worth reading the entire column, but I'll excerpt a bit from the end.

Still, I can’t imagine that this was what William F. Buckley had in mind for his magazine when he founded it in 1955. One wonders how these yawping barbarians took over the magazine: at gunpoint? At knifepoint? There was a civility in the old National Review that allowed Sturgeon and Buckley to be friends, to be friendly antagonists, and for Sturgeon to find a welcome readership for his criticism, even though it was known that Sturgeon wasn’t “ideologically pure” by National Review standards.

But Buckley’s magazine had some qualities that today’s incubus version does not: civility, playfulness, a sense of humor, lively debate and intellectual confidence. When you are CONFIDENT about what you believe, you need not make yourself taller exclusively by the tactic of cutting off everyone’s heads around you. You can hold your own in a debate without recourse to the gutter; you can actually debate. [emp added]

Look: the reason that we’ve come to this pretty pass is that DEBATE CEASED IN 1986, when Rush went on the air. Incapable and incompetent to hold his ground in a fair debate, his radio show and then his emulators and then the entire Republican Party removed themselves from the arena of debate, and only held mock and sham debates, as phony, choreographed and rigged as TeeVee Wrestling.

And, in this psychotic delusion of “debate” they always win, they create straw men and knock them down, thinking themselves “El Cid.” They tilt at cardboard windmills and fancy themselves Lancelot. They put on newspaper hat(e)s and brandish wooden swords, all the while thinking themselves modern Parsifals, triumphantly holding up the hard-won “Holy Grail” — which, on closer examination, turns out to be a Slurpee™ cup scavenged from a dumpster.

The point about confidence resonates with me. Their core principles have been sold out to make electoral gains, so its no surprise that they can't debate their positions from a position of confidence. Discredit your opponent so you don't have to debate them.

Lashing out at your opponent is the first recourse of the coward, and the far-right lashes out whenever they are, or just feel, challenged.

So Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez has decided to join the seemingly endless line of former Bush administration officials and retired military officers in telling us all that the administration is incompetent and the war is going badly.

In one of his first major public speeches since leaving the Army in late 2006, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez blamed the administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current “surge” strategy as a “desperate” move that will not achieve long-term stability.

You know what? We know that. Hell, everybody with more than a couple of functioning brain cells that has been following the total clusterfuck these idiots made of Iraq knows that, and that even includes a good chunk of the people who still support the Bush administration. This isn't news.

What we'd really like to know is why nobody in the administration, or the military, has the balls to stand up and tell everybody how FUBARed the whole thing is before they've left and signed a book deal.

I understand personal profit being a major motivation for a greedy and selfish race like ours, but I'd hope that, at least possibly in the military, the words honour and duty would be more than just words. I guess I'm still not pessimistic enough.

I’m a little torn over Gore winning the Nobel Peace Price.  On one hand, it is a lot of fun to watch all the wingnuts go into convulsions over it, even if it is getting a little old. I mean, just this week, they've went into convulsions of rage over a 12-year old and the SCHIP program, convulsions of rage over lighting the Empire State Building green for Ramadan's end, and now convulsions of rage over Al Gore winning the Nobel. They're just rage-aholics looking for the next thing to get enraged about.

Still damn fun to watch, though.

Anyway, back to Gore and the award.

There's no question that Climate Change will have a major effect on conflicts all over the world.  It will cause resource scarcity in many heavily-populated regions across the planet, causing enormous strain, starvation, privation, and fighting over what will be left.  To prevent that, or at least mitigate it, is a goal worthy of the Nobel.

So raising awareness of Climate Change is laudable, but it is only part of what I think is needed to be worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Because so far, awareness is all that’s been changed.  For the most part, nations and people haven’t made the changes they need to to stop emissions from rising.

If the film and the panel’s reports actually lead to real changes in emissions, then they will be deserving of the prize.  Until then, it is little more than words, and I think the prize is better given to those whose actions have already led to real change or prevented real bloodshed.  It seems that the Nobel Committee has just decided to help raise awareness themselves, rather than award an accomplished peace-maker.

All in all, I find the award this year to be . . . premature. Here's hoping it won't be a wasted effort.

A couple days ago, Ali Eteraz wrote an excellent article called, "The Myth of Muslim Condemnation of Terror". In it, while pointing out that Muslims have in fact come out to condemn terror quite often, he also made the argument that holding Muslims as a collective responsible for the acts of individuals means holding them to a much higher standard than any other religious group, as well as being dangerous. After all, if you can make a collective responsible for individual acts, then you can bring down collective punishment for those acts.

In any case, one of his other points was that when Muslims leaders do come out to either condemn terror or otherwise reach out to other faiths, it gets ignored or downplayed. Yesterday, over a 130 Muslim religious scholars wrote to the Pope and other Christian leaders looking for greater understanding and peaceful relations between the two faiths. Cernig noted it and said that, like Ali Eteraz had noted, such would, "be entirely ignored or slapped down by the xenophobic bigots of the Right's-far-Right."

The ignoring goes far beyond the xenophobes of the far right. The story got very little coverage in the North American media, if at all, but it didn't take me long to find the slapping down part:

Yeah, it’s the fine print that really gets you. Basically, what these Muslim leaders are saying is that so long as we Christians don’t do anything against Muslims, it’s all good. What I didn’t see is a similar promise that Muslims won’t oppress Christians as they have done in Darfur and are doing in plenty of other nations. I didn’t see Muslims promise to work with Christians so that we can all worship freely in Islamic countries. I didn’t see anything there but demands upon Christians. See, that’s how it works in the wonderful world of dhimmi. The Muslims make the rules and we either comply with them and know the magnanimous peace of the conqueror or we get the sword.

Reading comprehension isn't exactly high amongst these folks, though with anything Muslim, I'm sure its more a purposeful blindness. The letter calls upon both faiths to come together in greater understanding and cooperation, but because in a letter addressed to Christian leaders, they don't first go about condemning every nasty act ever committed by people calling themselves Muslim, these scholars should just be ignored.

A few weeks ago, there was a story that had many on the right gearing up to watch some Muslim riots, because the Pope had made some critical comments about religious prosecution. I disagreed, in part because, unlike the last time when the Pope had actually said something against Muslims as a whole, this time he was only criticizing government oppression rather than the faith itself.

The fact that the riots never happened will gain no points for Muslims, of course. As with every other piece of evidence that doesn't paint their religion in a poor light, it will be ignored and forgotten. It does show the problem, however. Those on the far-right really do see Islam as a monolithic collective. When someone criticizes a Muslim, they take it as criticism of the entire faith and everyone who follows it because that is exactly how they see it. They don't make the distinction and therefore can't recognize when anyone else does.

It is a truly large and truly dangerous blind spot.

Senator Hillary Clinton said yesterday that if she is elected president, she intends to roll back President Bush's expansion of executive authority, including his use of presidential signing statements to put his own interpretation on bills passed by Congress or to claim authority to disobey them entirely.

"I think you have to restore the checks and balances and the separation of powers, which means reining in the presidency," Clinton told the Boston Globe's editorial board.

The words sound nice, and she may even be telling the truth, though I’m not that trusting of any politician and particularly one who gives the kind of professional political answers that fail to actually answer tough questions like Hillary does.

In any case, even if she is being 100% truthful in her willingness to rollback many of the excesses of the Bush administration, it won’t be a total rollback, and Executive power will still be far more advanced than it was prior to Bush taking office.

Bet the right will be real happy to see that power in her hands.

New York's iconic Empire State Building is to be lit up green from Friday in honor of the Muslim holiday of Eid, the biggest festival in the Muslim calendar marking the end of Ramadan, officials said.

"This is the first time that the Empire State Building will be illuminated for Eid, and the lighting will become an annual event in the same tradition of the yearly lightings for Christmas and Hannukah," according to a statement.

Now, you would think a simple gesture treating a major Muslim holiday the same as major Jewish and Christian holidays are wouldn't be too big a deal. A nice gesture of inclusion for the seven million Muslims calling the US home, in fact.

You might think that if you were a rational individual without an irrational hatred of everything Muslim, which doesn’t apply to many of the right-wing blogs who linked to the story

Of course, anyone who has been following the blogstorm regarding the attacks on the 12-year old Graeme Frost doesn’t need to be told that these folks are really good at irrational attacks, (well, maybe CNN), but it’s always nice to get some additional confirmation.

Now these aren’t racist proto-fascists who hate all Muslims, honest.  They’re just outraged because they think it is an insult and travesty to treat America’s Muslims the same way Jews and Christians are.  There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?

Canadian airlines flying through U.S. airspace will have to hand over the personal data of everyone aboard the plane if a U.S.-proposed program comes into effect.

That's even if the destination does not include the States.

. . .

Homeland Security's Transportation Security Agency (TSA) wrote that the goal of the proposal is to "prevent known or suspected terrorists from boarding aircraft where they may jeopardize the lives of passengers and others," according to the Globe.

Still, ATAC policy vice-president Fred Gaspar told the newspaper the proposal seems out of place, since Canada already has its own no-fly list in place — a list that was developed, in fact, after close consultation with the U.S. government.

Not that Canada's no-fly list is exactly fool-proof, but it is nice to know that the airlines are at least considering fighting to keep Canadians' personal information private.

This matters more than the above story implies, because a previous story about this kind of program for European airlines noted that the personal information that US Homeland Security was demanding from them would not be protected under privacy laws and could be passed along to third parties for whatever use they wanted to make of it.

This proposal doesn't appear to be asking for the amount of personal information the Europeans were being asked to cough up, but I have little doubt that if they get away with this much, they'll be asking for more later.

The plan apparently calls for the Marines to take over the leading role in Afghanistan, where they are currently almost non-existant, and leave the ground operations in the Iraq War to the Army. On the face of it, it sounds like a simpler deployment schedule for both services, but what caught my attention in the report was this piece:

The Marine proposal could also face resistance from the Air Force, whose current role in providing combat aircraft for Afghanistan could be squeezed if the overall mission was handed to the Marines. Unlike the Army, the Marines would bring a significant force of combat aircraft to that conflict.

. . .

Military officials say the Marine proposal is also an early indication of jockeying among the four armed services for a place in combat missions in years to come. “At the end of the day, this could be decided by parochialism, and making sure each service does not lose equity, as much as on how best to manage the risk of force levels for Iraq and Afghanistan,” said one Pentagon planner.

Tensions over how to divide future budgets have begun to resurface across the military because of apprehension that Congressional support for large increases in defense spending seen since the Sept. 11 attacks will diminish, leaving the services to compete for money.

It is a measure of just how dysfunctional the US military is when the debate about how to deploy troops boils down to how certain services can continue to justify their budgets. The Navy and Air Force don't want the Army to get more money than them, even if their contribution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is, shall we say, considerably less. This is, I'm sure, why part of Operation Enduring Freedom, aka the Afghan campaign, includes a naval component to interdict the land-locked nation. A brilliant use of resources.

It comes in large part because the US, and its allies, are trying to fight these wars using their peace-time military forces. There was a time that fighting wars meant massively increasing the size of the military to deal with the threat and then draw back down when the fighting was over. Since the "War on Terror" is designed to be a perpetual war, it needs to be fought with a perpetual military force, which also means perpetual budget battles between services.

So if the Marines take over Afghanistan and the Army leaves, the Air Force is no longer required to be there in any major combat role either. Less combat roles might translate into less pork from Congress for shiny new toys. So the real battle won't be about whether this makes logistical sense, but whether each service still gets their allotment of defence contracts. It should be interesting to see how it plays out.

Excellent question! Let's see what Michael Gerson comes up with for an answer.

In the backlash against President Bush's democracy agenda, conservatives are increasingly taking the lead.

Really?

It is inherently difficult for liberals to argue against the expansion of social and political liberalism in oppressive parts of the world -- though, in a fever of Bush hatred, they try their best.

I’m hard-pressed to recall just where this expansion has been taking place, what the Bush administration has to do with it, and what liberals have been trying their best to argue against it. Other than that, it’s a great point.

It is easier for traditional conservatives to be skeptical of this grand project, given their history of opposing all grand projects of radical change.

And they were, and they got kicked out the Republican Party and the Conservatism Movement for their troubles. It is quite illuminating watching these columnists suddenly decide conservatives need to, “get back to their roots” now that the whole transformative mission of Iraq that they supported and cheer-leaded for has turned into a clusterfuck.

A couple of paragraphs about how conservatives respect culture and tradition and resist utopian causes, and then this:

At the most basic level, the democracy agenda is not abstract at all. It is a determination to defend dissidents rotting in airless prisons, and people awaiting execution for adultery or homosexuality, and religious prisoners kept in shipping containers in the desert, and men and women abused and tortured in reeducation camps. It demands activism against sexual slavery, against honor killings, against genital mutilation and against the execution of children, out of the admittedly philosophic conviction that human beings are created in God's image and should not be oppressed or mutilated.

Of course, democracy itself means none of that. Democracy unrestrained usually means the tyranny of majority. It wasn’t that long ago that the US Supreme Court finally overturned sodomy laws because they were targeting homosexuals. And speaking of reeducation camps . . . This is the democratic agenda liberals are having a hard time opposing?

The above is about protecting human rights, and while democracies tend to be better at that on the whole, at least in their home countries, the real requirement is rule of law, so that even a majority of the population cannot overturn protections granted to minorities. In other words, what the right like to call “activist judges”.

And the democracy agenda goes a step further. It argues that the most basic human rights will remain insecure as long as they are a gift or concession of the state -- that natural rights must ultimately be protected by self-government. And this ideology asserts that most people in all places, even the poor and oppressed, are capable of controlling their own affairs and determining their own rulers. If this abstract argument seems familiar, it should, because it is the argument of the American founding.

This actually sounds very much like the libertarian argument, and the argument that civil rights watchers have been making for the last six years as the Bush Administration has been doing its best to prove just how insecure those rights can be in a purported democracy.

America’s founders and others have warned about constant vigilance and an informed electorate, which today’s America finds itself sorely lacking.

From here, things get rather weird. Gerson goes on about slavery and moral absolutism. It’s hard to tell, but Gerson is apparently making the argument that allowing the traditional conservatives to warn off people like him from kicking open wasps nests like Iraq is bad because several centuries ago, other traditional conservatives defended slavery.

The unavoidable problem is this: Without moral absolutes, there is no way to determine which traditions are worth preserving and which should be overturned. Conservatism assumes and depends on an objective measure of right and wrong that skepticism cannot provide. Without a firm moral conviction that independence is superior to servitude, that freedom is superior to slavery, that the weak deserve special care and protection, the habit of conservatism is radically incomplete. In the absence of elevating ideals, it can become pessimistic and unambitious -- a morally indifferent preference for the status quo.

The argument here is near to the opposite of Machiavelli’s “ends justifying the means”, which would almost certainly be the argument if there were any ends worth mentioning. Here it’s that the people like those who turned Iraq into a maelstrom of death and destruction should be judged on their intentions rather than the results.

The traditional conservatives were “morally indifferent” because they didn’t want to go in and make Iraq better. You need people with a “firm moral conviction” to go out and make a difference.

Well, many do say that Bush has a firm moral conviction, and there is little question that he’s made a difference. Gerson and others with their good intentions paved the road to Baghdad and the result of that has been to link the city and country quite firmly to the other place that road is said to lead.

There was a time that this project was considered the only “reconstruction” project running on time and on budget. At least, that was the story until the date is was supposed to be opened came closer. Now, it is just another in the incredibly long list of projects in Iraq where poor oversight and shoddy construction leads to massive cost overruns and delays, and if this were for the Iraqi people rather than US personnel, probably abandonment.

The sprawling complex, whose cost is edging toward $750 million, was set to open last month but U.S. lawmakers say shoddy work by the contractor and poor oversight by the State Department have delayed it.

. . .

Congress originally allocated nearly $600 million to build the biggest U.S. Embassy in the world but Waxman said the project was now $144 million over that budget.

In addition, he said new documents showed hundreds of violations of fire codes and other regulations and electrical problems throughout the complex.

"These problems were so severe and widespread that the inspectors concluded that none of the buildings on the new embassy compound could be approved for occupancy," wrote Waxman, a staunch critic of the State Department's oversight of its contractors in Iraq.

Does the State Department even provide oversight of its contractors in Iraq? You honestly have to wonder at times. I also like this little gem from the State Department spokesman:

McCormack said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was prepared to "cut everybody involved some slack" if the delay fell within the norms of opening a large embassy complex but would demand answers if it dragged on too long.

There is nothing at all “normal” about this embassy complex. It’s a fortified city within a city. The closest parallel I can think of off-hand would be Vatican City, except for the fact that Romans don’t send rockets and mortars their way on a daily basis. I’m sure under the circumstances; they can re-define “normal” into a continuing construction contract until its ready for helicopters to evacuate them.

A proposed House resolution that would label as "genocide" the deaths of Armenians more than 90 years ago during the Ottoman Empire has won the support of a majority of House members, unleashing a lobbying blitz by the Bush administration and other opponents who say it would greatly harm relations with Turkey, a key ally in the Iraq war.

All eight living former secretaries of state have signed a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warning that the nonbinding resolution "would endanger our national security interests." Three former defense secretaries, in their own letter, said Turkey probably would cut off U.S. access to a critical air base. The government of Turkey is spending more than $300,000 a month on communications specialists and high-powered lobbyists, including former congressman Bob Livingston, to defeat the initiative.

I'm all for good diplomatic relations and all, but I must say I find this whole argument a little distasteful. Basically, rather than looking to the historical evidence and making a decision based on it to determine if the killings during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire constituted a genocide. The whole argument seems centered around what this resolution will do to diplomatic relations and military cooperation.

The facts are apparently not so important. The real determining factor seems to be which lobbying groups will be more successful; the Armenian-Americans or the Turks and State Department. (And where does the government of Armenia stand in all this? One would think such a resolution would at least spark some interest from the Armenian population in the area, but I see nothing to indicate they've even been asked for an opinion. Weird.)

One can't help but compare this to the best-known genocide of the 20th Century; that of the Jews in Europe. Denying it is a criminal offense in most of the western world, and relations with Israel are coloured by it, for good or ill. But the facts are there, and making sure it isn't forgotten may possibly some day keep us from allowing such things to keep happening to other peoples at other times.

The facts should be there in the case of the Armenian killings as well, and that should be all that this decision is based on.

It is probably a measure of just how far the Republican Party and what's left of its supporters have fallen in my opinion that their willingness to launch a smear campaign against a 12 year-old doesn't even surprise me.

As with many other things, the soon-to-be-former GOPer John Cole provides an excellent summary of the situation. I suggest reading all of it, but I thought I'd highlight one piece.

I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.

Again, I'm not surprised anymore, but as someone who has thought of himself as a conservative, I know the sick feeling that these jackasses are the people who represent conservatism these days.

So oil companies in Alberta are crying about plans for the government to actually start charging them the royalty rates that they should have been paying for the last several years.

And they’re saying that despite record high oil prices and the record high profits that go with them, they’ll be so put out by this increase that they’ll have to cut jobs and production.

Not even the world’s smallest violin will be playing any sympathy notes over this one.

Frankly, even if they did cut back on some jobs, and I’m pretty sure they’ll find a way to keep pumping the black gold out of the ground so the real gold keeps flowing into their wallets, it isn’t like the Alberta economy is exactly hurting for employment.  I’m betting there are more than a few employers that would be delighted to see the oil industry lay off a few people so that they won’t be so hard up for workers.

Besides, it will allow some of the Newfoundlanders to go home and work on the new offshore deals Danny Williams signed recently. The ones the oil companies said would never get signed because Premier Williams was asking for too much ownership and royalties for the people of Newfoundland.

I sense a pattern.

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

. . .

Al-Qaeda supporters, now alert to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

Since there is no information yet as to who or why the data was leaked, it is hard to make any accusations beyond sheer incompetence, which given the Bush administration’s record, means business as usual.

It is, however, reminiscent of a different politically-timed disclosure of an intelligence asset that disrupted a high-level sting operation. You almost wonder if they want the terrorists to remain free.

When scoring political points is more important than using intelligence assets properly, you are setting yourself up for quite a fall.

I know the Rubik's Cube can be solved, even if I was unable to back when I had one when I was eight, but how the hell is the world record time for doing so comparable to the 100m dash?

I'm stunned that's even physically possible.

And doing it blindfolded? How?

Hillary Clinton's opponents are hyping this bit of conventional wisdom: If she wins the Democratic nomination, her high negative ratings in polls will make it especially difficult for her to win the general election in November 2008.

. . .

But polling experts say that Clinton's negatives - generally somewhere around 45 percent of people tell pollsters they view her unfavorably - may not be politically fatal or even much of a drag.

I agree that her high negative ratings probably won't be fatal. The Republicans are working from such a poor position that beating them should be child's play for whomever the Democratic nominee happens to be, though given the Democrats recent record, that still doesn't guarantee success.

However, the next President doesn't just need to win, they need to be able to re-unite the nation. Hillary can't do that. Her negatives are so high in large part because there is a significant portion of the US population who go into convulsions at the mere mention of the name "Clinton". How many other Democratic candidates are facing these kinds of stories already?

I give political analysis, not financial advice. But sometimes, the two closely merge. So here’s what I think: Hillary Clinton will cause the stock market to crash as her likely election as president approaches.

Hillary says she wants to raise the capital gains tax. Now it’s 15 percent. She might hike it to 30 percent, or she might eliminate it altogether and tax profits from sales of stock or houses as ordinary income at 40 percent.

So what will happen? As Election Day approaches, smart investors will sell their stocks because they will want to pay 15 percent, not 30 or 40 percent. They’ll realize that if they wait, they’ll just have to cough up more in taxes. That will cause stock prices to tank and with them our retirement savings. And that is only the start of the many gifts we’d get if Hillary becomes president. Only the start.

The poster is hardly unbiased, but that's the point. Most Republicans already hate Hillary, even some of those who have left the party. She'd probably still win, but it will be an election like 2004; close, leaving the country divided, and with even many of those voting for her not particularly liking her.

America could do better, though with the major candidate news stories being about Edward's haircut, Hillary's cleavage, and Obama's lapel, doing better will probably be difficult.

About a week ago, a small group of Democrats came up with a proposal to create a small surtax to pay for the Republicans War in Iraq. The Democratic leadership ran away from the proposal almost as soon as it was announced, apparently preferring to simply give Bush everything he asks for while also continuing the Republican Congress' record for fiscal irresponsibility, rather than be faced with the Republicans blaming them for raising taxes. I thought that would be the last of it, but this weekend there were a few stories about the proposal that made for entertaining reading.

First, from E. J. Dionne, Jr.

Would conservatives and Republicans support the war in Iraq if they had to pay for it?

That is the immensely useful question that Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, put on the table this week by calling for a temporary war tax to cover President Bush's request for $145 billion in supplemental spending for Iraq.

The proposal is a magnificent way to test the seriousness of those who claim that the Iraq war is an essential part of the "global war on terror." If the war's backers believe in it so much, it should be easy for them to ask taxpayers to put up the money for such an important endeavor.

. . .

That's an aggressive way to frame any such antitax "no" votes, but it's also accurate. If a war appropriations bill with a tax included went down to overwhelming defeat, wouldn't that tell us something about the depth of commitment to this war?

. . .

Here is a president who signed one bloated spending bill after another -- as long as they were passed by a Republican Congress -- posing as a fiscal conservative now that Democrats are in the majority. He's so tough and determined that he's also drawn the line on . . . children's health care.

. . .

And if the president believes in this war so much and doesn't want to raise taxes, let him propose the deep spending cuts it would take to cover the costs. Then Bush would show how much of a priority he believes this war is -- and he wouldn't be playing small ball.

The next column is by Thomas Friedman, who is, as David Brin put it, "one of the brightest but also most erratic and infuriating of pundits". Often derided for his contention that the Iraq War will work itself out in a certain timeframe that now carries his name, he is still capable of decent analysis and prose.

Every so often a quote comes out of the Bush administration that leaves you asking: Am I crazy or are they? I had one of those moments last week when Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, was asked about a proposal by some Congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war, and she responded, “We’ve always known that Democrats seem to revert to type, and they are willing to raise taxes on just about anything.”

Yes, those silly Democrats. They’ll raise taxes for anything, even — get this — to pay for a war!

. . .

Friends, we are through the looking glass. It is now “fiscally irresponsible” to want to pay for a war with a tax. These democrats just don’t understand: the tooth fairy pays for wars. Of course she does — the tooth fairy leaves the money at the end of every month under Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s pillow. And what a big pillow it is! My God, what will the Democrats come up with next? Taxes to rebuild bridges or schools or high-speed rail or our lagging broadband networks? No, no, the tooth fairy covers all that. She borrows the money from China and leaves it under Paulson’s pillow.

There is one paragraph from Friedman's column that I'll have to take exception to:

Excuse me, Ms. Perino, but I wish Republicans would revert to type. I thought they were, well, conservatives — the kind of people who saved for rainy days, who invested in tomorrow for their kids, folks who didn’t believe in free lunches or free wars.

The Republicans haven't been conservatives, or at least fiscal conservatives, for quite a long time, and Friedman's colleague at the NYT wrote a column today reminding everybody that the Republicans are reverting to type.

There have been a number of articles recently that portray President Bush as someone who strayed from the path of true conservatism. Republicans, these articles say, need to return to their roots.

. . .

For example, people claim to be shocked that Mr. Bush cut taxes while waging an expensive war. But Ronald Reagan also cut taxes while embarking on a huge military buildup.

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”(Emp. added)

The rest of Krugman's column is worth reading as well, but the key point for this post is that Republicans have walked away from fiscal conservatism, and as a result, fiscal conservatives are finally walking away from the Republican Party.

Of course, according to David Broder and his GOP strategist friend, the real problem here is that the Democrats are being too confrontational by coming up with proposals like this war tax. The good thing for the Democrats to do, according to the GOP strategist, is to follow Pelosi's lead by running away from such proposals and be more willing to cooperate with the Bush Administration.

Little wonder that the Democratic Congress has higher approval ratings among Republicans than their own party.

Dozens of police officers fanned out across the town of Hay River in the Northwest Territories on Sunday in the search for suspects after the shooting death of an RCMP officer.

. . .

Police said they lost radio contact with Const. Christopher Worden around 5 a.m. local time Saturday while he was responding to a citizen's call for help at a residence. He was found in his car, dying from a gunshot wound.

. . .

Candace Walker, who works in a grocery store and was born and raised in Hay River, said it was strange to see officers with sniper rifles, and planes circling overhead.

I've been following this story with some interest since I have relatives in the community. Police officers getting shot and killed tend to be rare events in Canada, but this is a reminder that even in small towns where people tend to know each other, police work can be dangerous.

UPDATE - October 8th - RCMP have now issued a warrant for the arrest of a suspect in the shooting.

Since Blackwater, USA has gotten some, let's say bad press recently, the US State Department has been under fire for its use of the mercenary contractors. (If only someone would put our government's feet to the fire for their use of these guys.)

Anyway, Condi Rice has come up with a solution to make it appear as though the State Department is going to hold Blackwater accountable.

Under orders issued by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, video cameras will be mounted in Blackwater vehicles and federal agents will ride with the security contractors who escort diplomatic convoys.

. . .

The State Department will also deploy dozens of additional in-house Diplomatic Security agents to accompany Blackwater guards.

What use these agents and their video cameras will be when the mercenaries themselves still exist in a kind of legal limbo land where nobody can charge and convict them for any crime should be an interesting test. Of course, this is also the government who still won't allow all the pictures and videos from the Abu Ghraib investigations released despite repeated judicial orders, so the odds of anyone seeing any bad stuff from the cameras is virtually nil.

But beyond all that is a point put quite eloquently by Dave at the Galloping Beaver:

So, in order to continue to give Blackwater USA and its Republican-connected chairman, Erik Prince, a nice juicy government contract in Iraq, the government will pay to have government security agents ride along with the private security agents which the government has hired to relieve government security agents of the task of protecting State Department personnel.

I don't want to say "redundancy and waste" too loudly, but how much sweeter a deal can Blackwater get?!

Since it is often fashionable for the torture apologists of the Bush Administration to compare the current war against a noun to the struggle against fascism in WWII, the story of the men who were in charge of interrogating Nazi war prisoners is particularly damning of the tactics the Administration is defending.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration's methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

"I feel like the military is using us to say, 'We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now,' " said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.

What's truly amazing about all this is reading people like Sister Toldjah and Captain Ed try to explain that the Third Reich and its adherents, with the world's largest military budget at the time, with its submarines targeting civilian liners, and its bombers and missiles raining down on civilian population centres, its armies ravaging the better part of two continents, and, oh, that little thing about putting some 12 million people, half of them Jews, into gas chambers, were really not that bad because they, "believed themselves civilized and members of the Western culture." (Yay for Western culture!)

Therefore treating the Nazis like human beings in WWII was apparently okay, but when faced with the ungodly terrible threat of few blokes in caves who can occasionally manage to kill a few dozen civilians at a time, we should immediately get rid of every legal framework and law that would require interrogators to retain any shred of humanity and do our worst to whomever we capture, be they high-value or not, in the hopes that we may get confessions good enough to justify our new tactics.

different threats sometimes require different strategies

Too true, and it is unfortunate that Bush and his supporters have some serious delusions about which threats are greater and what strategies actually work.

Thanks to climate change, the ice cover in the Arctic shrunk to an unprecedented level this summer, leaving the fabled Northwest Passage ice-free along its entire length for a short time, and implicit in that is the promise that its waters will be ice-free more often and for longer periods as the ice cover continues to shrink.

As a result, there has been much greater focus regarding the various claims to the polar regions in recent years, with sovereignty over the Passage being a major bone of contention between Canada and the US in particular. An article I came across recently claims that the war of words over the straight(s) may be wasted effort.

The list of reasons against using the Passage is actually quite impressive. When it was being searched for back in the 16th century, the ships in use at the time could have really made good use of such a shortcut. Modern container ships, on the other hand, are considerably larger and need a great deal more room to maneuver. Room most of the Passage, particularly the most southerly route that opened up this year, doesn't have.

It's too narrow and too shallow. It's mostly uncharted. There are no ports nearby if the ships get into trouble. And floating ice can still pile up in the narrow, shallow channels and block the Passage at random times, which would play havoc with shipping schedules.

All this is true, but even the article notes that it expects increased shipping in the region.

Most analysts do expect increased shipping going into and out of the Arctic to meet growing demand for the remote region's rich store of minerals.

But experts say that does not mean cargo vessels will be crowding through the passage as they seek a short cut.

"There's going to be a lot more people and lot more ships there but it's not going to be the Panama of the north," said Falkingham.

With more people and more shipping, some of the above issues will be dealt with. The waters will increasingly be charted, and any mining operations of import will have to build up port facilities to ship out ore, something our government recently took advantage of.

And most importantly, the ice melt isn't slowing down any time soon. The more open, northerly routes are going to open up in the next several years and likely be consistently ice-free sometime after that. That, I believe, deals with all of the current objections. I wonder if we'll be ready for it.

David Brooks has an article out today in the New York Times where he tries to explain the reasons the Republican Party seems to be disintegrating. Its a lot of talk about dispositions, ideologies, creeds, and so forth, which starts out not too badly, but loses me when he starts pretending that the "creedal" conservatives have been pushing for individual power and freedom while ""temperamental" conservatives would prefer to see a bit more government control, and that's why they're abandoning the GOP.

I'm pretty sure the former libertarian-minded wing of the GOP, and anybody else who pays attention to civil liberties and rights, would be happy to tell Brooks that the current GOP hasn't exactly been overwhelming in pushing for "too much individualism".

In any case, if you want to know why the traditional conservative party in the US is in trouble, you don't have to look very hard.

When they came home from Iraq, 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard had been deployed longer than any other ground combat unit. The tour lasted 22 months and had been extended as part of President Bush's surge.

1st Lt. Jon Anderson said he never expected to come home to this: A government refusing to pay education benefits he says he should have earned under the GI bill.

"It's pretty much a slap in the face," Anderson said. "I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership... once again failing the soldiers."

Anderson's orders, and the orders of 1,161 other Minnesota guard members, were written for 729 days.

Had they been written for 730 days, just one day more, the soldiers would receive those benefits to pay for school.

"Which would be allowing the soldiers an extra $500 to $800 a month," Anderson said.

. . .

Both Hobot and Anderson believe the Pentagon deliberately wrote orders for 729 days instead of 730. Now, six of Minnesota's members of the House of Representatives have asked the Secretary of the Army to look into it -- So have Senators Amy Klobuchar and Norm Coleman.

Klobuchar said the GI money "shouldn't be tied up in red tape," and Coleman said it's "simply irresponsible to deny education benefits to those soldiers who just completed the longest tour of duty of any unit in Iraq."

Now that story, amongst many other examples of how the Republican administration hasn't been terribly kind to the soldiers it has sent to war is only a partial explanation for the decline of the Republican Party. The other part is that while this story is being reported, all those folks who constantly spout the talking point about "supporting the troops" like a barrage against any criticism of the War President are far more concerned about the fact that Barack Obama isn't wearing a US flag lapel pin.

When your base has those kinds of priorities, you should expect that rational people are going to desert you.

Apparently Dilbert creator Scott Adams would like to get killed by becoming President of the United States and solving all the country's problems.

Actually, I doubt he has a death wish and I'm pretty sure he's not running, but I can't fault some of his insights:

As president, I would solve all the world’s problems by creating a reality TV show where think tanks compete for the best solutions to everything from health care to energy policy to immigration. The judges would be experts who help viewers sort the squirrel shit from the caviar, but the final decisions would be made by viewers, just like on American Idol.

I think you can see many problems with this plan. But you have to compare it to the current political process where idiots elect liars to transfer wealth to crooks. How's that working out for you?

He'd have my vote, though I wouldn't be volunteering for the security detail.

No status Indians could be left in Canada within 200 years if current laws defining who qualifies are not changed, according to a Winnipeg demographer.

Currently, federal legislation eliminates the treaty status of some children if one parent is a certain type of registered Indian and the other is not.

That means fewer and fewer children will qualify for status, Winnipeg demographer Stewart Clatworthy told CBC News.

"If nothing changes and intermarriage rates stay the same, and the rules of the act stay the same, and you string it out long enough, you could essentially create a situation where there would be no one born who would qualify," Clatworthy said Thursday.

Within six generations — roughly 180 years — Clatworthy's projections suggest no one born could qualify to register as a status Indian.

I won’t bother disputing the numbers, since I can think of several scenarios where this would wind up being the case.  It would only take a slight imbalance to produce such a result over time, and I know from some relatives who do and don't qualify for status that the rules are rather less than intuitive when one considers their actual ancestry.  (Side note:  Are we still supposed to be calling them Indians?  My sister always yells at me every time I use the term.)

Back when we treated our aboriginal populations in such a way that it was thought to be a good model for the South African apartheid regime, this sort of issue probably didn’t come up too often.  But since we started allowing natives off their reservations and noticing that they’re, well, people, human nature has kicked in and the mingling has begun.

Change the definition slightly so that anyone descended from a status Indian remains a status Indian and the same demographic trends would likely find all Canadians becoming status Indians in roughly the same time frame.  Intermarriage has that effect.

I doubt such a proposal would be very popular, and setting things up so that status natives die out hardly seems a fair way to go either. Its a thorny issue at the best of times, and I'm not going to try and offer some pat solution, because I've long been convinced that none exist.

I will say this though. I don't think that assigning people a distinct legal status based upon their ancestry is the kind of thing that we should be looking to try and perpetuate.

Harper said he doesn't want an election before 2009. But the prime minister added that he would consider any votes during the upcoming parliamentary session on items in the speech from the throne as confidence motions.

"If they get approval of the throne speech, we're going to expect those things to be passed," Harper said.

This is a totally empty threat, as Harper can't rewrite how Parliament works to go along with his wishes. The arrogance of this remark would piss me off even if I agreed with everything he puts into the throne speech. And that's actually possible, as the throne speech in the parliamentary version of campaign promises; long on vision and short on details.

As an example, I expect they will say nice things about defending Canada's Arctic Sovereignty, which I obviously support. I also have significant disagreements with what the Conservatives are actually doing about it. And what Harper says doesn't always mean what it means.

In June, Harper said he wanted to find a consensus among all parties about what Canada should do when the February 2009 mission deadline in Afghanistan expires.

On Wednesday, Harper said consensus was perhaps the wrong word but that he does need some agreement.

"We have to have the support of some members of the opposition — parliamentary support to get a majority vote in favour of deployment," Harper said.

It is fairly obvious that Harper is just hoping to get an election called before the Liberals can get their house in order, if they ever do, though the latest polls suggest that they would be headed for another minority, if not a Liberal one. Only probable strategy I can see is to make Canadians so sick of elections they finally give them a majority.

The recent rise of the Canadian dollar has been good for those of us who found ourselves traveling across the border recently, but its strength can hurt industries that depend on exports to the US for profits. The 62% rise in the loonies value over the last five years has meant products made in Canada have become far more expensive south of the border, and one $7 billion industry is starting to feel the pinch; the export of BC Bud:

At least one watcher of the underground economy says the price of B.C. marijuana has gone up in the United States, and that could mean plummeting demand from Americans in future.

Marc Emery, head of the B.C. Marijuana Party, said there are several factors behind the rising price of B.C.'s most infamous export, including tighter border security and the loonie's steady ascent over the past five years.

Pot selling for $2,200 a kilo in 2002 would have cost an American only $1,600 because of the differences in the dollar, he said.

"Now the marijuana is at $2,400 Cdn and now it costs $2,400 US to buy it," Emery said. "So for the Americans, Canadian marijuana has gone up by almost 50 per cent," he said.

Like in all industries, with Canadian marijuana going up in price, it makes domestic production of marijuana in the US much more attractive, as it can compete far better now dollar for dollar. Manufacturing has a lag time, as is isn't easy to move factories, but growing crops is easy, and production is up.

At the height of the harvest season, it appears Nevada County farmers can make a lot more money from marijuana than anything else.

And the amount of pot seized is spiking this year, driven in part by stepped-up enforcement.

Illegally-grown marijuana seized in Nevada County through August this year appears, conservatively, to be worth between $123 million and $205 million, based on federal estimates of crop value and local figures on plants confiscated. That figure is based on state and national law enforcement wholesale costs per pound, assuming a yield of 1 pound per plant.

That dwarfs the value of legal crops grown here in 2006 - the latest figures available - when farmers, loggers and livestock producers produced goods valued at $16.2 million. Those figures appeared in the annual crop report submitted by Nevada County Agriculture Commissioner Jeffrey Pylman in August.

The 41,000 marijuana plants seized here this year far exceed the 4,863 found during 2006, which would have brought roughly $14.6 million on the low end and $24.3 million at the high. That compares more closely with the county's $16.2 million value for legal crops in 2006, but does not count legal pot crops and illegal plants not seized.

Quality of course, may still be an issue, but the trend is clear. Pot smokers in the US are going to start looking more and more to their own plants to get high, and places like BC are going to suffer the economic impact of decreased demand.

At least they'll have plenty of product to ease the pain.

Alright, anything I ever said regarding the purported liberal bias of American universities during the visit of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can apparently be thrown right out the f***ing window.

Back in April, when University of St. Thomas staffer Mike Klein informed his colleagues in the Justice and Peace Studies program that he'd succeeded in booking Archbishop Desmond Tutu for a campus appearance, the faculty buzzed in anticipation. For a program dedicated to fostering social change and nonviolence, there were few figures who embodied that vision more aptly than the world-renowned civil rights activist and Nobel Laureate.

. . .

But in a move that still has faculty members shaking their heads in disbelief, St. Thomas administrators—concerned that Tutu's appearance might offend local Jews—told organizers that a visit from the archbishop was out of the question.

"We had heard some things he said that some people judged to be anti-Semitic and against Israeli policy," says Doug Hennes, St. Thomas's vice president for university and government relations. "We're not saying he's anti-Semitic. But he's compared the state of Israel to Hitler and our feeling was that making moral equivalencies like that are hurtful to some members of the Jewish community."

. . .

That was news to Marv Davidov, an adjunct professor within the Justice and Peace Studies program.

"As a Jew who experienced real anti-Semitism as a child, I'm deeply disturbed that a man like Tutu could be labeled anti-Semitic and silenced like this," he says. "I deeply resent the Israeli lobby trying to silence any criticism of its policy. It does a great disservice to Israel and to all Jews."

This by itself would be bad enough, and a pretty foul indictment on the level of free speech allowed in the US on issues of a controversial nature, but the next part is truly ugly if what it implies turns out to be the case.

The controversy didn't end there. Incensed at the administration's decision, Professor Cris Toffolo—chair of the Justice and Peace Studies program at the time—sent Tutu a letter on May 24 informing him of the administration's decision. She also indicated her disagreement with the move and warned Tutu that he might be in for a smear campaign.

University brass caught wind of the letter, and on August 1, Tom Rochon, executive vice president of academic affairs, sent a letter of his own to Toffolo informing her that St. Thomas administrators had decided to revoke her position as chair of the Justice and Peace Studies program.

This is reprehensible. Shutting down a speech by a Nobel Laureate just because he has criticized the Israeli government is a painful reminder of just how easy it is for a vocal pressure group to shut down debate on critical topics.

Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak, but was roundly criticized and ridiculed, and nobody of consequence was going to take what he said seriously in any case. Anything he said against Israel can be dismissed as the rantings of a lunatic. Archbishop Tutu is a whole other problem. He has the kind of credibility most people, even world leaders, can only dream of. Any criticisms he makes are going to be taken seriously.

The fact that he can be stopped from making an appearance at a university is indicative of just how badly skewed the US is in regards to Israeli issues. The blinders need to come off.

Eduardo Gonzalez, a petty officer second class with the U.S. Navy, is about to be deployed overseas for a third time. Making his deployment even tougher is the fact his wife may not be around when he comes back.

His wife faces deportation to Guatemala -- her home country that she hasn't seen since 1989. He also doesn't know what would happen to his young son, Eduardo Jr., if that happens.

"I like being in uniform and serving my country, but if she goes back I'm going to have to give it all up and just get out and take care of my son and get a job," he said.

"Defending the country that's trying to kick my family out is a thought that always runs through my mind."

If this story doesn't sound familiar, it should. I posted about another case of a soldiers wife facing deportation back in June, and I was far from alone. I believe that once attention was paid to the case, the wife was allowed to stay, but the basic problem is obviously still there. In that previous case, the wife had in fact entered the country illegally, but that doesn't appear to be the case here.

In Gonzalez's case, his wife, Mildred, came to the United States with her mother in 1989 when she was 5 years old. They were granted political asylum because of their status as war refugees from Guatemala.

In September 2000, Mildred's mother applied for legalization and included her daughter in that application. Her mother was granted legal status in July 2004, according to Gonzalez.

However, six weeks earlier, Gonzalez and Mildred got married, canceling Mildred's ability to apply for legal status through her mother because she was no longer an unmarried daughter under the age of 21. As a result, her legal status still remains in jeopardy.

So in the country legally except for some bureaucratic red tape surrounding the date of her marriage to a US citizen, but she still faces deportation.

That's just fine, according to Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which lobbies for tougher laws on illegal immigration.

"What you're talking about is amnesty for illegal immigrants who have a relative in the armed forces, and that's just outrageous," he said. "What we're talking about here is letting lawbreakers get away with their actions just because they have a relative in the military. ... There's no justification for that kind of policy."

Nope. I can't see any possible justification to allow the family members of those men and women who are sent all over the world to risk their lives for the United States of America to actually stay in the country and share in the benefits of the freedoms their spouses are nominally out there defending. That's just crazy talk.

An influential group of Canadian chief executives says climate change is the "most pressing and daunting" issue the world faces today and business must do its share to fight the problem. 

A task force of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives released a report Monday that calls for a national action plan that would see government, business and individuals working in concert to make real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

"We know enough about the science of climate change to recognize that aggressive global action is required," the report said.

It is, of course, hard to tell just how serious people are when they make these kinds of announcements, but it certainly does sound good. What I particularly like is that they are calling for a hard cap and real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, unlike the Conservatives in Ottawa, who are looking for modest increases in efficiency while allowing overall emissions to increase.

One other point worth noticing:

They acknowledge that market forces alone are unlikely to be enough to do the job and that some kind of government intervention will be necessary.

That's a significant admission for business leaders to make.

A somewhat related story gives some idea as to where the government can make effective policy impact.

The Saskatchewan government has launched a new program aimed at helping people who want to get credit for feeding their own electricity into the power grid.

On Monday, the Crown utility, SaskPower, unveiled details of a new "net metering" program that will give homeowners credits for extra electricity they produce with windmills, solar power cells and other alternative sources.

Under the system, people feeding extra power into the grid will receive credits that are valued at the same rate as the electricity they buy from SaskPower.

That's good news for people like Terry Deck, who generates his own power from two windmills on his acreage near Lumsden.

Until now, SaskPower was only willing to pay people like him half price to sell his power back. Deck said if that changes, so will his operation.

"That definitely changes the economics behind it," he said about the dollar-for-dollar credit system. "Now it makes it more viable for me to actually invest my capital into windmills and solar panels to actually make a change."

This sort of idea is something I'd like to see a lot more of. Letting people generate their own power, and giving them credit for the excess they produce, is an excellent way to drive not only environmentally-friendly power production, but also resilience and self-sufficiency in power generation. All good in my book.

John Cole on what happens when the balanced budget fiscal conservatives are booted from the party in favour of tax-cutters and somebody proposes a new tax to pay for their war:

I never met a tax I liked, but I do like the fact that I will get to watch the Patriots (and I don’t mean Tom Brady and Randy Moss) in the right blogosphere go BALLISTIC over this proposal. I mean, come on- when they spent the last five years telling you, me, and everybody that this is the greatest struggle of our lifetime and we have to win or Muslim radicals are going to force us to wear burkhas, they didn’t mean it was so fucking serious we had to have a tax increase.

Let’s have some god damned perspective, Democrats. Sure- the war is super important, but when we said sacrifice we meant defacing your car with a patriotic bumper sticker. Not raising taxes. Jesus. It isn’t THAT important.

You can look to Memeorandum to check his accuracy, which is unfailing.

The State Department's initial report of last month's incident in which Blackwater guards were accused of killing Iraqi civilians was written by a Blackwater contractor working in the embassy security detail, according to government and industry sources.

It must be so much easier for the State Department to cover for their mercenary contractors when they've out-sourced the writing of the incident reports to the same contractor.

. . . of what happens when a party is in power too long. In this case, the party in question is the Alberta Tories, and Calgary Grit does a run-down of the financial irregularities that the government there is beginning to amass. The major one being the fact that the oil and gas sector has been getting away without paying its fair share of royalties to the Province, but the others are notable for the culture of entitlement and greed that always seem to accompany a governing party that has no effective opposition.

When you can take your support for granted, you stop governing for the people and start governing for the party. All a good sign that the system requires a serious shake-up.

Three news stories in recent days show just how much the elections of 2008 will be the Democrats to lose, (which, given their recent efforts, remains a distinct possibility).

The first concerns fundraising, and the massive edge the Democrats have been maintaining in this area:

The Democratic presidential candidates continued to raise significantly more money during the last three months than their Republican counterparts, according to official and unofficial third-quarter fund-raising tallies that were released yesterday.

. . .

Strategists in both parties said that the fund-raising imbalance showed that Democrats, and their donors, are more energized this year as they battle to reclaim the White House after nearly eight years of Republican rule. And they said President Bush’s sagging popularity is hurting the Republicans who are vying to replace him.

“This just shows the difficult political climate that Republicans are facing,” said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. “The bright side is that next spring, the Republicans will have plenty of money to give the candidate who goes up against Hillary Clinton.”

Clinton is, of course, the dream candidate for the Republicans. No other Democratic contender will be able to energize the Republican base against them so well. Another point on the, "Do the Democrats want to lose?" scale.

Anyway, the other two stories are even more significant, and show just how bad the situation the Republicans find themselves in really is. Two of what have been their major base constituencies are looking elsewhere for 2008.

Some of the nation's most politically influential conservative Christians, alarmed by the prospect of a Republican presidential nominee who supports abortion rights, are considering backing a third-party candidate.

. . .

"There is such jaundiced feelings about any promises or commitments from any Republican leaders," he said in a phone interview. "You could almost cut the anger and the frustration with a knife in that room it's so strong. Because they don't know what else to do, they're talking third party."

. . .

However, the proposal to consider a third-party candidate comes from anger that the Republicans whom Christians have helped elect for decades have failed to act on policy issues important to evangelicals on abortion, marriage and school prayer.

"Conservatives have been treated like a mistress as long as any of us can remember," Viguerie said. "They'll have lots of private meetings with us, tell us how much they appreciate it and how much they value us, but if you see me on the street please don't speak with me."

And finally, the business community and fiscal conservatives are also walking away from the Republican Party, which has been focusing too much on social issues and tax cuts for their liking.

The Republican Party, known since the late 19th century as the party of business, is losing its lock on that title.

New evidence suggests a potentially historic shift in the Republican Party's identity -- what strategists call its "brand." The votes of many disgruntled fiscal conservatives and other lapsed Republicans are now up for grabs, which could alter U.S. politics in the 2008 elections and beyond.

. . .

Some well-known business leaders have openly changed allegiances. Morgan Stanley Chairman and Chief Executive John Mack, formerly a big Bush backer, now supports Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. John Canning Jr., chairman and chief executive of Madison Dearborn Partners, a large private-equity firm, now donates to Democrats after a lifetime as a Republican. Recently, he told one Democratic Party leader: "The Republican Party left me" -- a twist on a line Ronald Reagan and his followers used when they abandoned the Democratic Party decades ago to protest its '60s and '70s-era liberalism.

. . .

But polling data confirm business support for Republicans is eroding. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in September, 37% of professionals and managers identify themselves as Republican or leaning Republican, down from 44% three years ago.

Richard Clinch, a 69-year-old New York native, illustrates the party's plight. The retired Westinghouse manager and mechanical engineer says he has been "a lifelong Republican." As a young fiscal conservative, he was attracted by the party's reputation for frugal and competent governance, he says. The Democratic Party left him cold, he says, because of its social spending and ties to the unions that exasperated him at work. As a retiree in Annapolis, Md., he became a local Republican officer.

Yet next year, for the first time since he began voting in 1960, Mr. Clinch won't support the Republican presidential nominee, he says. He only "very reluctantly" voted for Mr. Bush's re-election in 2004. "Like many Republicans, I am frustrated," he says. "We've lost control of spending," and the administration's execution of the Iraq war has been "incompetent." Mr. Clinch says he is liberal about rights for women and gays, and vexed that "we [Republicans] get sidetracked on these issues like gay marriage."

All this is quite familiar to me, as I identified myself as a conservative for most of my adult life, and to some extent still do. The problem is that what I grew up understanding as conservatism bears almost no resemblance to what the "Conservative Movement" has become.

Being an atheist and to some extent a libertarian, I cannot support the imposition of fundamentalist religious ideology on people, and it was the growing influence of the Christian right on the conservative movement that caused me to stop supporting conservative candidates.

What has really struck me over the last while though, is the complete lack of fiscal restraint from the right these days. "Tax and Spend" liberals may be bad, but spending without taxing is worse, because those record deficits will have to be paid someday, and that means even greater taxation in the future. Everything the Republicans have been doing is focused on short-term electoral gains rather than any real long-term vision, and its finally catching up to them, a good thing in my opinion.

The moderates have been streaming for the exits for some time now, and now what's left of the conservative base is squabbling over what appears to soon be a carcass of a party. Its hard to imagine a way the Democrats could screw this advantage up ahead of the 2008 elections.

Of course, reality can sometimes make the most imaginative scenarios look tame in comparison, and given the Democratic record so far these last several years, and particularly since they theoretically took control of Congress, means that even with the Republicans imploding, the Democrats victory is far from assured. Hopefully, someone amongst them will find a way to give the party some backbone.

Without any collaboration, it is hard to tell if this story is true or not, (and it has been toned down from when I first read it yesterday), but it is unfortunately within the norm of behaviour for the regime there.

The reports follow claims from a former intelligence officer in Burma's ruling junta that thousands of protesters have been killed and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle.

Public anger ignited on August 19 after the government increased fuel prices, then shifted into protests led by Buddhist monks against 45 years of military dictatorship.

Soldiers responded last week by opening fire on unarmed demonstrators. The demonstrations have now died down.

. . .

The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win, said: "Many more people have been killed in recent days than you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand."

Under such circumstances, it is easy to want to see the military junta overthrown, but as Eric Margolis reminds us, simply overthrowing the strongmen doesn't always make for a good plan.

Myanmar’s central government has been at war for 50 years with 17 ethnic rebel groups seeking secession from the former 14-state Union of Burma created by Imperial Britain, godfather of many of the world’s worst current problems.

Burmans, of Tibetan ethnic origin, form 68% of the population of 57 million. But there are other important, distinct ethnic groups: Shan, the largely Christian Karen, Kachin, Chin, Mon, Wa, and Rakhine, Anglo-Burmese, Indians and Chinese. The largest, Shan, with their Shan State Army, are ethnically close to neighboring Thailand, and in cahoots with the Thai military. Each major ethnic group has its own army and finances itself through smuggling timber, jewels, arms, and drugs.

The military juntas in Rangoon, and its 500,000-man armed forces, know as `Tatmadaw,’ battled these secessionists for decades until the current junta managed to establish uneasy ceasefires with all the major rebel groups.

If the junta were to be replaced by a democratic civilian government led by the gentle Suu Kyi, and military repression ended, it is highly likely Myanmar’s ethnic rebellions would quickly re-ignite. The only force holding Myanmar together is the military and secret police.

. . .

A new democratic government in Yangon-Rangoon that is not tough enough to deal with secessionist regions around its troubled periphery could see Burma fall into internal turmoil and also invite intervention by covetous neighbors.

Likely, as in the Sudan, the situation in Myanmar will continue on without any interventions. Not enough people really care to make a call for action. That can be frustrating, but what's truly frustrating is that inaction on the part of the West may actually be the best option.

Iceland has withdrawn its solitary soldier positioned in Iraq today. John Avarosis has posted his story.

The power struggle between the pro-Western Yushchenko and pro-Russian Yanukovych continues. The initial story-line of this struggle as told through the western media has had Yanukovych playing the villain. It fit well with the Cold War narrative of dastardly former KGB types like Yanukovych and Putin opposing democracy and poisoning their rivals. (I'm still waiting to hear about what happened to that investigation over the "poisoning" of Yushchenko. For some odd reason, as soon as Yushchenko won the election for President, I haven't seen any stories about that at all.)

Earlier this year, the "pro-democracy" Yushchenko was calling in troops to Kiev after Yanukovych's supporters took to the streets to protest the sacking of the prosecutor-general, which was part of another power play over the make-up of Ukraine's parliament, which had become too pro-Yanukovych for Yushchenko's tastes. The troops were stopped, and this recent election is the result.

Given how tight the results are, and the not always friendly relations between Yulia Tymoshenko and Yushchenko, odds are good that Yanukovych will be able to again consolidate his power in the parliament by luring a couple members away from the "orange" allies bloc. This will spark another confrontation, and another crisis. So long as they continue to settle things by calling new votes, there is some chance that one force or the other will eventually get a clear victory and be able to end the instability the power struggle causes.

The danger, of course, is that the next time troops are called in, they won't be stopped by peaceful means. The support bases for both sides have relatively clear geographical and ethnic basis', and anyone who has been paying attention to international affairs recently should be able to tell you what that can lead to. Just because the Ukraine happens to be in Europe doesn't mean that it can't fall into chaos like Iraq did.

Still, that is a fairly extreme case, and the more likely result is a far more peaceful partition. The break-up of nation-states seems ever more popular these days, and Europe is not immune. Certainly not in the east, as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia proved, and not in the west either.

More interesting times ahead, it appears.