Year: 2007

We are Losing Afghanistan

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Not surprising, and largely driven by American failures:

  • Failure to devote sufficient resources.
  • Failure to deal with Pakistani government support (by which I mean their intelligence service, the ISI) of the Taliban.
  • Just plain stupidity:

Although it is a volatile area and a centre of Taliban support, the Dutch forces had forged close links with community leaders, cutting down the fighting, until a botched poppy eradication program by a US private security firm a few months ago, analysts say.

“Uruzgan was going OK until they went in with tractors and started ripping the poppy fields up,” said the Kabul-based security analyst. “The Dutch had a good relationship with the people down there, the local leaders, but when they rip up your crop, what do you do? You grab your gun. They didn’t even do that much damage to the crops in the end.”

To quote John Wilkes Booth, “Useless”.

‘Phants Realize that Bush is Millstone About Their Necks

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The Republican leaders, from left, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Trent Lott and Representative Roy Blunt, after a meeting with President Bush on the children’s health insurance program.
Note picture: Trent Lott, who was knifed by Bush, is front and center, he is front and center to show that Congressional Republicans are not happy with Bush.

The fact that Republicans in Congress are unhappy with Bush on S-CHIP is to a large degree an artifact of the fact that Bush is delusional:

At the White House, administration officials urged Congressional Republicans to try to remain positive and ride out the current turmoil. Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mr. Bush, told the visitors, according to multiple accounts, that had Republicans sided with Democrats on the health program, they would have opened themselves to withering criticism from conservatives and been in a worse position than they are now.

This is crap. They are in a bad position because they are denying health care to children of hard working parents.

They have been owned on this issue because the facts are clear, and the press is covering the facts.

John Edwards Proposals for Changes

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Today In New Hampshire Edwards Outlines Agenda To Return The Power In Washington To Regular People

First indent is the Edwards bullet point, following are my assessments of pros and cons of the specifics

  • Reforming Campaign Finance to Strengthen Small Donors
    • Reduces maximum contribution from $2300 to $1000, and does matching only on the first $100, at an 8 to one ratio, so a $100 contribution nets $900 in funds, and a $1000 contribution nets $1900 in funds.
      • Pros: Reduces the effect of big donations and bundling of donations.
      • Cons: The Supreme court may find the $1000 limit excessive. Additionally, the problem of money in politics is driven by costs, specifically one cost, the cost of advertising on over the air television. Seeing how we, the public, own the airwaves, it makes a lot of sense to add airtime for candidates to the mix for broadcast licenses.
  • Ending the Unique Power of Lobbyists
    • Would prevent lobbyists from making campaign donations, and from bundling donations. Would extend the ban on lobbying after leaving government positions to 5 years. Add a “constitutional” line item veto. Increasing disclosure requirements for lobbyists.
      • Pros: Disclosure is good, as is an extended period between government and lobbying jobs.
      • Cons: Prohibiting lobbyists from making political donations is flat out wrong. It’s more restrictive than the limitations on active duty military. Definition of lobbyists is a difficult thing. A “constitutional” line item veto would likely require amending the constitution, which is unlikely, at best.
  • Strengthening the Voice of Ordinary Citizens
    • Requires a voter verifiable paper ballot. Allow election day registration. Eliminate felon disenfranchisement. Give DC residents a congressional representative. Fight voter suppression. Have a biennial national town hall of over 1 million people working together to solve problems.
      • Pros: The voting proposals are good. Getting DC a representative is good.
      • Cons: DC really should be a full state. It has twice as many people in it as Alaska or Wyoming. The biennial national town hall is just silly. It sounds like a Grateful Dead concert.
  • Promote Open and Democratic Media
    • Require that real public interest obligations be a part of all broadcast licenses. Require net neutrality. Universal broadband by 2010. Make media ownership more difficult.
      • Pros: All good ideas.
      • Cons: Getting this done will be tough. In terms of universal broadband, I believe that this will require some level of government ownership of the “last mile” of wire to the house, which is how it happened in Japan and Korea, but this will be nearly impossible to accomplish in the current political/social environment in the United States.

The only one I truly disagree on is the ban on lobbyist contributions, which I think is just plain wrong. Everyone should be able to contribute, but it is rather blue sky.

New York Times is Reporting that Israeli Air Strike Was On Nuclear Reactor

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OK, this has gone back and forth about half a dozen times now, but this is the current flavor of the day.

According to “U.S. and foreign officials who had access to the analysts’ intelligence reports”, the reactor was very similar to the DPRK’s graphite moderated reactor at Yongbyon.

Here are the two most significant quotes from the article:

Information on the raid has been under under tight wraps in both Washington and Israel, the newspaper said, restricted to a handful of officials, and Israeli media have been barred from publishing information about it.

But a senior Israeli official said the attack was meant to “re-establish the credibility of our deterrent power,” the Times said. Several U.S. officials told the paper the strike may also have been intended for the attention of Iran and its nuclear program.

I read this as saying that it was primarily intended to be a warning to Iran, but there is an unspoken subtext, that the Olmert government might have been motivated to make the strike, at least to a degree, for political considerations.

The proof will be in whether or not Olmert calls for snap elections soon.

The newspaper also reported that Vice President Dick Cheney and other hawkish members of the administration contended that the same intelligence that prompted Israel’s attack on the reactor strengthened the case for U.S. reconsideration of negotiations with North Korea over ending its nuclear program, as well as Washington’s diplomatic posture with Syria.

This means that the usual suspects among the Neocons are using this as an excuse to agitate for war with Syria (and possibly Iran) and to overturn the current deals with the DRPK.

One should recall that vb before building the reactor at Yongbyon, the DPRK had already located Uranium mines, begun mining, and had manufactured fuel, both unenriched and enriched. The presence of a reactor in Syria does not constitute a competent and self-sufficient nuclear program on its own.

The Fight Over White Space

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Microsoft and Google, on the same side for once, are in in a tussle with commercial TV stations over “white space”, the unused channels in broadcast TV.

Basically, Microsoft sent a prototype to the FCC which was supposed to automatically detect white space, and use the spectrum for (very) high speed connectivity, but it failed because Microsoft never gets anything right the first time.

Broadcaster’s heads are exploding over this proposal, with claims of severe interference, technical problems, and that it will make your daughter date a biker.

While part of this is no doubt a result of the proprietary feelings that broadcasters have regarding “their” (it belongs to all of us) spectrum, I think that another part is that they do not want to have a competing use.

If there is a competing use, at some point regulators might give priority to that use, as opposed to broadcasting reruns of “my mother the car”.

Army needs three to four years to recover from Iraq strains: chief – Yahoo! News

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General Casey is claiming that the service is not broken, but that it will take 3-4 years for it to recover from Iraq.

Well duh!!!

It’s actually going to take longer. When you consider the amount that the army has had to drop it’s standards for recruits, the people held in by stop loss orders and inactive ready reserve (aka backdoor draft), and the people who are staying only because they don’t want to leave their buddies while the fight is still going on, it’s going to be a lot longer.

Afghanistan Clamps Down on Mercenaries Private Security Firms

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These guns for hire are not just a problem in Iraq, they are a problem in Afghanistan, where authorities are clamping down on unlicensed, incompetent, and excessively violent security contractors.

Two of the main problems are the US and UK, where many of these firms are based, and which have not signed the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, which is why all the companies we hear about are from the US and UK.

Contact your congressman about getting the us to ratify this convention.

All White Jury

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That is all you need to hear to understand why seven boot camp guards and one nurse at the Bay County boot camp were acquitted following the videotaped beating and death of Martin Lee Anderson, a 14 year old black child.

An autopsy found he had a previously undiagnosed blood disorder. The defense argued that is what caused his death. The all-white jury agreed.

The “blood disorder” in question is Sickle Cell trait. This means that he carried one Sickle Cell Anemia gene. The effect of this condition is much like carrying one gene for Cystic Fibrosis: there are no significant effects. (Being heterozygous for Sickle Cell will increase resistance to Malaria and decrease oxygen carrying capacity by much less than 1%, and being heterozygous for CF protects against Diphtheria). The Air Force does not consider Sickle cell trait to be a reson to exclude someone from being a pilot, for example.

“You kill a dog, you go to jail,” Crump said on the courtroom steps just after the verdict was delivered. “You kill a little black boy, nothing happens.”

Welcome to Bay County, Florida.

CIA Director Hayden on Jihad Against CIA Inspector General

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General Haden has ordered an inquiry into the work of the CIA’s Inspector General, John L. Helgerson.

Any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would be unusual, if not unprecedented, and would threaten to undermine the independence of the office, some current and former officials say.

Frederick P. Hitz, who served as C.I.A. inspector general from 1990 to 1998, said he had no first-hand information about current conflicts inside the agency. But Mr. Hitz said any move by the agency’s director to examine the work of the inspector general would “not be proper.”

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Mr. Hitz, who now teaches at the University of Virginia. “Under the statute, the inspector general has the right to investigate the director. How can you do that and have the director turn around and investigate the I.G.?”

This is clearly an attempt to intimidate or remove the inspector general. It’s pretty much unprecedented, and it is profoundly antithetical to the most basic sort of principals of bureaucratic accountability, so it’s pretty certain that Bush and His Evil Minions™ have knowledge of and approved this.