Bush gets one thing right

The general dishonesty of Bush’s ridiculous press conference Monday has already been covered, but he did say two things that weren’t outright lies. That U.S forces will never leave Iraq if he can help it is a given, but I want to point out the one other thing Bush said that was true – before he realized and corrected himself. About half way through, the question came:

“What do you say to people who are losing patience with gas prices at $3 a gallon? And how much of a political price do you think you’re paying for that right now?”

The child-president managed to sputter:

“Look, I understand gas prices are like a hidden tax – not a hidden tax; it’s taking money out of people’s pockets. I know that.”

But, as Greg Palast explains in his book Armed Madhouse, that’s exactly what the high oil prices are – a hidden tax, government revenue. How so?

Americans pay nearly triple for gas; many of those petro dollars, of course, go to Saudi Arabia, whose puppet-princes skim enough off the top for their own coke, prostitutes and Mercedes Benzes and then spend much of the rest purchasing American securities – that is, the government debt that is driving this war machine whose mission, in part, is keeping the Saudis at the top of OPEC, thus setting that high price through production quotas.

Some may wish to keep this in mind when they pump those gallons and when they hear the Republicans claim to cut our taxes.

Life in These United States

Occasionally, when time permits (and it rarely does), I indulge myself by reading something non-work-related, something wonderfully distant from the carnage in the Middle East or the police state at home. Maybe something about art, or sports, or science. For instance, today I read a piece at Salon.com about male circumcision, arguments for and against. I have no position on the issue – and I don’t care what yours is, so don’t send me any foreskin screeds – it was just a way to kill five free minutes without thinking of politics (an ancient idiocy we libertarians are supposed to be trying to eradicate – with great success, you might have noticed).

Anyway, at the end of the piece, Slate’s editors posted a few of the most insightful comments from readers. And at the conclusion of the third comment, in reference to an upcoming anti-circumcision conference in Seattle, one of Slate’s all-star commenters writes,

Symposia such as the one in Seattle have more than a whiff of hysteria about them. I wouldn’t dare to suggest that there might be a small hint of anti-semitism as well.

Which, stripped of sophomoric coyness, means, The anti-circumcision movement is driven by hatred of Jews.

Ah, anti-Semitism: the one topic no discussion in this country is ever allowed to omit. Posterity will have a field day with us.

Be All That You Can Be

Aim High! Step right up! Bring your daughter on down!

Sign her up for the Service.

It’s a great way for her to be able to afford to go to college and be a professional when she grows up! (If you don’t mind her being raped, that is.)

“More than 100 young women who expressed interest in joining the military in the past year were preyed upon sexually by their recruiters. Women were raped on recruiting office couches, assaulted in government cars and groped en route to entrance exams, a six-month investigation by the Associated Press found.”

“The investigation found that more than 80 military recruiters were disciplined last year for sexual misconduct with potential enlistees. The cases occurred across all branches of the military and in all regions of the country. …

“[M]ilitary and civilian criminal prosecutions are rare.”

When will the Department of Justice finally stop those pro-Taliban pinkos at the Washington Times from overtly aiding the Islamo-Fascists like this?

Don’t they know there’s a war on? The rest of you too!

Well-Timed Terrorism?

The foiled terror plot of August 10th has had considerable effect on the news of the past week. It’s turned the airline industry upside-down in a scramble to prevent such innocuous items as bottled water from finding their way on board a jet, where they would be combined with some ill-defined collection of other liquids in an effort to create an explosive. Admittedly, this threat appears largely illusory, but it makes for very exciting news. Less well publicized is the enormous effect it has had on the British political landscape, and that’s what I hope to examine here.

British Home Secretary John Reid got his political start in the 1970’s as a member of the British Communist Party. Since then he has become one of Tony Blair’s closest allies, and a staunch defender of New Labour. Though his often controversial attacks on his enemies have long kept him in the public limelight (recall on March 18, when then Defence Secretary Reid accused tens of thousands of London antiwar protesters of supporting terrorism), he had never been more than a second-tier player in British politics. This past week, that has changed, and Reid is suddenly now considered a legitimate contender in the race to succeed Tony Blair as Prime Minister. The frontrunner remains Blair’s longtime rival, Chancellor Gordon Brown, but Reid is now being discussed as a credible rival for him.

To understand why we need to go back to the day before the plot was foiled, August 9th. Reid was delivering a talk to British think tank Demos, a third way advocacy organization very friendly with New Labour which was founded by the former editor of the British Communist Party’s journal “Marxism Today”. Dr. Reid is extremely adept at getting into the headlines, and this talk was no different. In it, he condemned the Court of Appeal’s insistence that terror detentions conform to human rights laws and declared that, in the name of winning the fight against terror, the British would have to modify (read: eliminate) certain long cherished freedoms. This declaration was enough to get him into the headlines of most British news outlets, along with more than a little grumbling from civil libertarians about the threat his policies would pose to personal freedom.

Then, the very next day, a major terror plot is foiled. In light of this “breaking news”, Dr. Reid’s speech seems almost prescient. Almost, at least, until you consider that he knew about the upcoming foiling well in advance of the speech. How do we know this? That requires us to look at the American response. On the day of the arrests, CNBC was reporting that Bush’s apparently impromptu speech on the topic was in fact written the day before. When asked about when they were informed about it, Tony Snow was evasive, as usual, but he did confirm that the White House had known about it for some time, as it was a topic of discussion during their Sunday briefing (August 6). Ultimately, since the British had informed the White House that they were scheduling the plot foiling three days before Dr. Reid’s speech to Demos, it is reasonable to assume that his speech was written with an eye towards the events of the following day.

Also interesting is the way he’s sort of “spontaneously” taken over the response to the incident in Tony Blair’s absence, much to the chagrin of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who Blair had initially left in charge before going on vacation. The view of Dr. Reid as the sort of person who doesn’t lose his head and can take charge in a crisis has dramatically increased his popularity, but when one considers that this “crisis” had several days of lead time to it, it is doubtful that it was all that spontaneous.

But the underlying question, and it’s one that we unfortunately can’t answer at this time, is exactly when the British government scheduled this canned “crisis”. Since they’d told the Americans at least as early as August 6, that’s the latest they knew about it. But Tony Blair went on his scheduled vacation on August 4, only two days earlier, leaving Prescott in charge. If he knew about the upcoming arrests before he left, a response that already appears to be a planned PR move may well have been a carefully orchestrated King-making event designed for the specific reason of making Blair’s ally John Reid a legitimate candidate to succeed him as Prime Minister. If any real threat existed, surely Tony Blair would not have abandoned his country and gone on vacation.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s relative inexperience and tendency towards public speaking gaffes rule him out as a reasonable candidate for Prime Minister when Blair steps down. John Reid, on the other hand, had the experience and the name-awareness to be the “Stop Brown” candidate that the Blairites have so desperately sought since their respective controversies ruined the chances of both David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, the previous two Home Secretaries. All he really needed was a crisis to handle to endear himself to the public, and he appears to have gotten that. A question that the British public ought to be asking is, how real was this crisis, and how well planned was his handling of it?

Justice Department Appeals Ruling on “No Hereditary Kings”

Federal judge Anna Diggs Taylor declared in a ruling today: “We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution. So all ‘inherent power’ must derive from that Constitution.”

The Justice Department is outraged by the ruling and is racing to appeal it.

I have not yet seen any briefs or other notices that the Justice Department has filed on the decision.   I would expect that they would not make a big deal out of the ‘hereditary king’ aspect of the ruling.  Instead, they will challenge the judge’s decision that Bush’s illegal warrantless NSA wiretaps are illegal and unconstitutional.

The judge noted: “The Government appears to argue here that …. because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.”

I presume that conservative activists are busy at this moment seeking evidence that this judge has received kickbacks from suspect Muslim charities.  Why else would a judge issue such a reactionary ruling?  [[Comments & denunciations on this topic are welcome at http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/08/17/justice-dept-appeals-ruling-on-no-heridatary-kings/

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