Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

Krugman on the Social Security:

If Mr. Bush were to say in plain English that his plan to solve our fiscal problems is to borrow trillions, put the money into stocks and hope for the best, everyone would denounce that plan as the height of irresponsibility. The fact that this plan has an elaborate disguise, one that would add considerably to its costs, makes it worse.

Remember when you could destroy a vital program through mere incompetence? Now, it seems, incompetence is not enough - it must be paired with trillions of dollars of borrowing. The fix is in, by the way.

The pundits have said that this election was decided on the issue of moral values. I don’t believe that. It is a moral value to provide health care. It is a moral value to educate our young people. The sense of community that comes from full participation in our Democracy is a moral value. Honesty is a moral value.

Reform is a daily battle.

The full speach is here.

Anybody?

I am both ashamed and horrified that torture is being committed in my name, and I am ashamed that our leaders, who are responsible for that torture, are not held accountable. I am mortified that a man who authored memos justifying torture has been nominated as the next Attorney General of the United States. I am seething with anger over the fact that the Secretary of Defense and his underlings have retained their jobs when they should be on trial for war crimes.

The Liberal Avenger expresses feelings, very close to my own, far better than I ever could. Go read.

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?”

-Army Spc. Thomas Wilson, in a question to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Apparently the military leadership knew all about the abuses at Abu Ghraib:

The documents released Tuesday, however, reveal that senior U.S. officials, who claimed they were unaware of the abuse, were repeatedly informed of accusations of abuse through official channels. They also suggest that these and other reports of abuse failed to trigger investigations into what increasingly appears to have been a widespread pattern of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

The military is lying to me, and I take it pretty personally. Why should I trust any general or civilian military employee of any rank or pay grade who says “Trust me — we know what we’re doing”?

I’ve stolen what is posted below my pitiful little rant, entirely from Atrios. I repost it here with many troubled emotions.

The idea of a war over values and culture, at least in the way that war is currently framed, sickens me. In my mind, the values war that should consume the minds of an informed public, when it comes to federal elections and federal office holders, should concern the actions of the federal government, and how those actions represent the American public.

When we discuss public morality, we rarely discuss the moral implications of executing prisoners, the implications of social policy, or the moral implications of our foreign policy - be it a war or a trade agreement. Instead we discuss religious beliefs or the lack thereof, sexual orientation, or a preference for one type of artistic expression over another, however depraved or without worth, which is deemed more or less morally acceptable than another.

What on earth are we thinking, where on earth is this going, and what possible good does it serve? Bemoaning another person’s cultural depravity is every American’s right, and lord knows I’m guilty, but what on earth is this line of thinking doing in our political discourse?

We, as a nation, have ceded our sense of civic morality to the basest elements of our society. We engage in a cultural war with those who choose to willfully ignore the meaning of our founding documents and choose instead to deal in historical fallacies and lies. We accept their notion of a Judeo-Christian nation without ever bothering to examine many of our founder’s Deism or the ideas of the Enlightenment, which they attempted to infuse into our Constitution.

We engage in the ‘values’ argument on their terms (as I do below). We never invoke the true meaning of the electorate’s moral responsibility for the actions of its elected government. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people, I might add.

More fool us.

So why do I post what I do below? I don’t even know. I don’t care about this person and I don’t particularly care about his hypocrisy in invoking a ‘war on our culture’.

I suppose I’m angry. I’m angry that people who fancy themselves so much better than me, rule my country and have elected an incompetent President. I suppose I don’t mind seeing them cut down a notch, particularly when that President is involved. This gentleman’s alleged failings are certainly not the sole possession of a particular ideology or…blah…blah…blah…whatever…

It’s a special day for Mike (Hintz) and Sharla, not because they’re with the President or with Chairman Grassley, but because it’s their 13th wedding anniversary. Theirs is a typical story. See, last year they received a child tax credit check for $1,600 for their four children. And under all the tax relief we’ve passed, they saved about $2,800 last year. With this extra money they bought a wood-burning stove to reduce their home heating costs. They made a decision for their family.

-President George W. Bush, commemorating his signature of the Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004 in Des Moines, Iowa

“Where we are in this world, with not just the war on terror, but with the war with our culture that’s going on, I think we need a man that is going to be in the White House like President Bush, that’s going to stand by what he believes.”

-Reverend Mike Hintz, commemorating President George W. Bush’s Signiture of Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004 and discussing, breifly, the war with “our culture”.

Something else about Reverend Hintz:

Rev. Mike Hintz was fired from the First Assembly of God Church, located at 2725 Merle Hay Road, on Oct. 30. Hintz was the youth pastor there for three years.

“They did acknowledge with their congregation that Mr. Hintz had made apparently some admissions to his inappropriate activity, and they took a proactive approach and immediately terminated him from his position,” Johnston police Sgt. Lynn Aswegan said.

Not only is the military beating up prisionors in Iraq, but members of the military are threatening people who talk about it:

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - U.S. special forces accused of abusing prisoners in Iraq threatened Defense Intelligence Agency personnel who saw the mistreatment, according to U.S. government memos released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The special forces also monitored e-mails sent by defense personnel and ordered them “not to talk to anyone” in the United States about what they saw, said one memo written by the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, who complained to his Pentagon bosses about the harassment.

Elsewhere, this same article has the following:

Prisoners arriving at a detention center in Baghdad had “burn marks on their backs” as well as bruises and some complained of kidney pain, according to the June 25, 2004 memo.

Great. Just great.

Y’know, forget Aljazeera and the bad guys for a minute. I want to talk about me.

I’m a good guy. No criminal record. I pay my taxes, and even paid the Philadelphia Business Privilege tax when applicable.

I may or may not like this war, but I do think I have a right to the truth. No, I don’t have to know the details about troop movements, secret weapons, or anything that might put our troops in legitimate jeopardy. I DO think I have (or should have) the right to know if prisoners are getting beat up with my tax dollars. Apparently, the military does not.

What gets me even angrier is this: every time the military tries to cover up something like this and it leaks out, it endangers our troops on the ground. If one of them gets captured, what will motivate their captors to follow the Geneva Convention?

I support the troops. I want them all to come home safely, including and especially those that get captured in battle.

For a more informed take on the dollar’s decline than what was offered in my own paranoid blatherings, have a look at this article in the Economist. Since it’s Cutting & Pasting day at Rowhouse Logic, here’s a little from the article:

Many American policymakers talk as though it is better to rely entirely on a falling dollar to solve, somehow, all their problems. Conceivably, it could happen—but such a one-sided remedy would most likely be far more painful than they imagine. America’s challenge is not just to reduce its current-account deficit to a level which foreigners are happy to finance by buying more dollar assets, but also to persuade existing foreign creditors to hang on to their vast stock of dollar assets, estimated at almost $11 trillion. A fall in the dollar sufficient to close the current-account deficit might destroy its safe-haven status. If the dollar falls by another 30%, as some predict, it would amount to the biggest default in history: not a conventional default on debt service, but default by stealth, wiping trillions off the value of foreigners’ dollar assets.

The dollar’s loss of reserve-currency status would lead America’s creditors to start cashing those cheques—and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price.

Via TPM

Computer Professionals of Center City is pleased to announce it’s next two networking events:

Tuesday, December 14, 2004 7:00-9:00 pm

Tuesday, January 18, 2004 7:00-9:00 pm

Location: The Irish Pub in Center City Philadelphia at 2007 Walnut Street. Events are free with cash bar. If you register in advance, we will have a pre-printed nametag ready for you.

Dress code is business-casual. Click here to email our webmaster, David, who will put you on the registration list and send you an email confirmation. Please remember to include your name as you would like it to appear on your nametag, as well as your company name and/or title if you would like.

Or is this an example of freedom on the march?

A classified cable sent by the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials.

The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior C.I.A. official who recently visited Iraq.

Recent article from Knight Ridder Newspapers indicates that the insurgency is far from over:

WASHINGTON - A senior American commander made the mistake of telling reporters that the military offensive that eventually captured a largely depopulated and destroyed Fallujah had “broken the back of the insurgency” across Iraq.

That insurgency will only be broken when the Sunni population, 20 percent of Iraq’s 25 million people, is convinced that they have a viable future in the Iraq that is being rebuilt on a different model.

Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) recently visited Iraq and indicated publicly that the place has gotten worse, not better since his visit one year ago:

“It’s a very tenuous security situation,” Chafee told CNN. “I’d been there a year ago — what a change.”

“Also, in the Green Zone a year ago we felt very secure,” he said, referring to the fortified section of the capital that is home to Iraqi and foreign governments and the military. “Not so this time.”

So, how do we plan to secure the place for free elections? Can you have free elections that are not secure? Can we expect people to adhere to the results of elections that are not secure, and thus not free?

“I don’t know. I can tell you …”

-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s response when asked whether or not HIV/AIDS can be transmitted via sweat or tears. Frist, by the way, is a doctor.

Be sure to read the rest of the transcript, as it doesn’t get any better.

Is this an example of a)The broken back of the insurgency? b) The broken will of the insurgency? c) Turning the corner? d) Freedom on the march? e) All of the above?

U.S. troops fought a gunbattle with insurgents along a busy street in Baghdad on Monday, sending passers-by scurrying for cover, witnesses said, while five U.S. troops were reported killed in separate clashes in a volatile western province as insurgents stepped up attacks ahead of next month’s elections.

The attacks, focused in Baghdad and several cities to the north, appeared to be aimed at scaring off those who cooperate with the American military — whether police, national guardsmen, or ordinary people just looking for a paycheck.

What about this?

Militants surrounded a bus full of unarmed Iraqi contractors employed by American forces as they rode to work on Sunday morning and gunned down 17 of them. It was the latest in a series of increasingly brazen attacks that have left more than 80 people dead in the past three days and deepened the sense of growing mayhem here as the January elections approach.

The bus ambush in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, also underscored the increasing risks faced by Iraqis who work for the American-led occupation and are singled out as collaborators. The ambush was part of an intensified insurgent campaign aimed at terrorizing Iraq’s fledgling security forces and fomenting sectarian divisions that could undermine the elections or perhaps force a delay.

You may remember that charming trial balloon that was set aloft on the front page of the Washington Post back on November 18. The proposal would basically end the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes as well as end the deduction for employers who provide their workers with health insurance. Well, it’s back.

Delightful right? Tax increases targeted for the very areas that are responsible enough to tax their citizens at a rate which pays for services and infrastructure used, and which, by the way, generally voted for John Kerry. I assume the title of the tax bill, if it’s ever introduced, will have the word ‘compassion’ in it.

Personally, I can’t wait until my boss sends out the email announcing that they are cutting health benefits.

Forced labor is a war crime, isn’t it?

I got this off of the phillyforchange Yahoo Group regarding an upcoming event.
Democrats, Religion And Moral Values:
Learning to Speak Purple in a Red Nation.

David

Info is available here.

[Update] Chris made some changes.

I search for the words napalm and white phosphorus nearly every day to see if the story has been picked up by any major U.S. news outlets. So far it hasn’t, although it does seem to be causing a minor stir in the U.K. and a fairly major one in the Middle East.

What’s really going on here and why hasn’t there been any investigative reporting into the matter? If the U.S. military actually used white phosphorus in Fallujah what on earth were they thinking and who authorized it? White phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon, but the moral implications of using an incendiary weapon, whose primary destructive component is a chemical, are quite ugly indeed. The use of this weapon would especially galling, considering all of the blather we’ve heard from the Administration and other war enthusiasts about Saddam’s use of chemical weapons in Halabja.

If, on the other hand, this story is really nothing but a pile of lies and misinformation, it’s certainly not being treated that way in the Middle East (read this opinion piece comparing Fallujah to Halabja and Guernica for an example). If the Administration were at all wise (try not to laugh), it would have been out in front of this a month ago. Now it’s too late. Regardless of what the reality may be, opinions have formed.

I woke up this morning and to my great delight saw that one of my five guest posters had actually posted something. Hurray! I’ll take this occasion to point out the obvious. The opinions expressed by my guest posters are their own and not mine. The opinions that I express are mine and not theirs.

I’ve tried to sign up people who I think will have interesting things to say, regardless of whether or not I always agree with them or don’t agree with them at all. I haven’t given them any rules and they are more than welcome to write anything they like, even if it’s a flame of something I’ve written.

The New York Times says that the state of Texas has a problem with the death penalty.

What a surprise.

Apparently, Texas judges have been instructing jurors to lie.

Don’t take my word for it. Read all about it here

David Lynn
Webmaster, Shadow Protest

Continuing with the holiday ale theme, here is Delirium Noel brewed by The Huyghe Brewery in Melle/Ghent, Belgium. Now you have to admit that any beer that features Santa being pulled by a team pink elephants is pretty damn hard to resist. At only $9.50 a bottle and 10% alcohol by volume, this dark and spicy holiday ale is the perfect choice when you are preparing to brace yourself a day of holiday festivities or shopping. In my case, I’m about to be dragged, against my will, to a Christmas Tree lighting in the park. Each sip of Delirium Noel makes the prospect just a little less ghastly.

By the way, if you prefer cat blogging, my cat is in the picture. See if you can find her.

If you can’t see Santa in this picture, I put a different one after the jump where Santa is a little clearer.
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