I have officially reached the end of my tether, it is confirmed. This town, and all the news its inhabitants generate, have brought me to standstill and I'm not quite sure how to fix my ailment and get moving again. To be honest, I'm not even sure I know what the problem is. The textbooks I've got lying around from undergrad hold a bunch of possibilities, variously referring to things such as psycho-sensory overload, cerebral saturation, and mental fatigue, but those seem to miss the overwhelming nature of my current affliction. WebMD and other self-diagnosis sites also prove fruitless in obtaining an explanation -- is there a male version of exhaustion caused by excessive menstruation?

Regardless of the technical term or a Y-chromosome strain of the previous condition, I know I most likely am what my grandmother down in Florida calls just plum tuckered out. Utterly and completely exhausted, sick of all things spun or self-serving.

The current political scene and its endless go-round have gotten me so down that I've found myself in this strange phase of retreat lately, ducking from everything that even remotely smacks of news. I've stopped reading the newspaper every morning, logging on to the online editions only long enough to quickly check my horoscope just in case the stars think it's going to be a good day. Is today an eight -- "Great things will happen to you today. Be ready for some new and exciting wrinkles to billow your languishing sails" -- or the latest in a long line of sub-fours -- "You're stuck in a rut, but don't count on going anywhere soon. Struggling and spinning your wheels now will only leave you mired deeper in the muck."

Magazines are piling up under my coffeetable unread -- New Yorkers, Rolling Stones, Current History's and Foreign Affairs -- multiplying beneath the surface while commiserating with the dust bunnies because I can't even bring myself to look at them without feeling pangs of guilt and unease over their neglect. I can't turn on the TV at night because the Tivo's usually taping a Daily Show or a Colbert Report and to laugh at the jokes, the same jokes we've been hearing in one variation or another for what feels like an eternity now -- and is it just me or does Jon look utterly exhausted, too? It could just be the newborn, but is it reaching to think he's feeling the same thing as me? -- is a bit like laughing at the homeless man in tin foil pants you pass everyday on your way to work. Amusing the first time or two, but just wrenching and sad after a while.

The radio's a minefield because I always seem to scan past NPR with its endless rays of sunshine -- a special report on AIDS in Africa, an in-depth piece on child prostitution in Eastern Europe -- that make me feel like slamming my already delicate head in a door to just make it all stop. Email updates are gone, as are cell phone alerts for breaking news. Even CNN on one of the TVs at the bar I work at has been replaced by frothy daytime soaps.

I simply can't take it any more.

I feel a bit like a battered spouse or a kid who's been screamed at one too many times by his father these days -- jumpy, tense, and ready to run from the room at the slightest provocation. It's like I'm the living embodiment of a 1950s PSA, ready to duck and cover under my desk the moment I hear the air raid siren in my head start to wail.

And what's funny is that the thing that drove me to this state initially seemed like a godsend, a can't-miss wake-up call for just how ridiculous things have become here in Washington. In truth, I actually laughed about it, at first -- "the Vice President shot a guy in the face? You've gotta be kidding me!" And then to find out that he waited 14 hours to talk to the police, nearly twenty-four hours to tell the mainstream media (kudos, by the way, in letting the Corpus Christi paper have the exclusive and letting the ranch's owner handle all the details. It's not like you have a press secretary to handle that stuff...), and even longer to talk about it directly with the President. (The two met together Monday afternoon, according to CNN, but apparently didn't discuss the event as the President's recollection of their Wednesday meeting was the one that really registered "the deep concern he had about a person who he wounded." Up to that point only White House Chief of Staff Andy Card and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove had talked directly to the President about it.)

It seemed certain that this would finally be the thing to wake people from their comas, to snap them from their stupors and get them to realize how incompetent (and unabashedly self-serving) the top ranks of this Administration are. How can you mishandle an accidental shooting involving the second most powerful man in the entire country? All you have to do is treat it like any other accident -- A) make sure the injured party is cared for and alright before B) making sure the authorities are notified and the proper forms are filled out.

You don't go home after part A (I've got to give them that, they at least got part of the equation right) and let the police know the next day when your friend gets around to calling to tell them. That's like getting in a hit and run accident and letting your mom call the cops after she makes you breakfast the following morning. Fleeing the scene of any crime? Not good.

But it wasn't until the situation devolved into the miserable farce it became Friday -- when Whittington actually apologized to Cheney upon his release from the hospital(I'll take a moment to let that sink in...), saying that he was "deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this week" (#$@&#!) -- that I finally snapped. The man who got shot tells his shooter he's sorry he caused so much trouble? That's like the moth whose wings you pulled off apologizing for getting your fingers dirty. My brain can't even process how irrationally fucked up things have gotten when this type of occurrence seems logical and sound. It just goes to show you that despite what we may tell ourselves, there is always a little bit more room at the bottom of the barrel.

But this wasn't the only offense. It was merely the latest in the seemingly endless train of miseries -- unstoppable back and forths between the half-truths and lies we're subjected to and the eventual uncovering of the truth, which somehow ends up being worse -- that finally caused my brain to overload and cry foul.

Nothing makes sense to me anymore.

Rational human beings have been reduced to gibberish-spouting invalids, good-hearted, giving individuals have become maniacally self-centered and mercenary, and the principles of explanation, justification, and accountability have become as blasphemous and taboo as incest and molestation. We've become stuck in that ballyhooed Bizarro world where up is down, good is bad, and rabbits rule roosters in the palace court of the farm.

Besides the Cheney shooting, there's been myriad other sources of grief to start the compliant, trusting half of your brain tearing away from its coolly logical, calculating neighbor.

There was the 9/11 Commission and its follow-up investigation, which were first fought in their mere creation by the White House before being accepted, but not fully endorsed, as they refused to let high level members of the Cabinet testify before it (including former national security advisor Condoleeza Rice, at one point, and the President and Vice President themselves, who talked to the Commission for only one hour and not while under oath) and delayed endlessly to hand over requested documents, despite professing their continuous support of the endeavor.

There was the Valerie Plame outing, allegedly in response to Ambassador Wilson's op-ed piece that debunked one of the Administration's justifications for going to war in Iraq, and the President's vow that anyone in his Administration who revealed her identity would no longer work for him, until it turned out the leakers were Karl Rove and Scooter Libby and thus too important to part company with. (At least for the former...) 

There was the Abu Ghraib affair, which disproved the Administration's assertions there was no torture occurring in our detention centers in Iraq. There were similar averrances regarding our Guantanamo Bay facility, both for torture and their indefinite detention of suspects, that have also proven faulty. (See UN, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch reports, to name a few, for the former, as well as State Department documents chastising other countries for using the same tactics detailed within.)

There were promises the government wasn't spying on US citizens that were contradicted when the NSA wiretap issue came to light, and then similar statements by the President vowing that all such wiretaps required a court order, despite the latter later proving absent.

The justifications for the war in Iraq -- was it WMD, the spread of democracy, or the removal of an undeniable despot? Were all presented equally and held that way throughout as the White House maintained, or were some clearly given primary status and justifications adapted on the fly? Was the intelligence considered fully or "cherry-picked," as recently stated? Was the decision ever in jeopardy or all-but decided way back on 9/11, as Richard Clarked declared?

What about Katrina -- did FEMA and the White House not know how bad things had gotten, with levees breaking and overcrowding occurring at the Superdome and Convention Center, until several days later, as they earlier claimed, or did they really find out much sooner, almost immediately? The Geneva Convention's stance on torturing -- did the Administration really try to ignore it, calling it old and outdated as was reported, or not, as they first maintained? Tom Delay -- is he innocent, as the President has said, the poor victim of a pitchfork-bearing lynch mob, or exceedingly, exceedingly guilty? Jack Abramoff -- have he and the President never met, as Bush maintains, or have the two not only spoken but been photographed and seen talking together on several occasions as various others, besides Abramoff, have said? Global warming -- is it an unlikely, unprovable thing as the White House claims or have the reports simply been doctored?

This is just what I could think of off the top of my head, the biggest sources of misery I could pinpoint without a CAT scan and a session of deep hypnosis, that show how ridiculous things have really gotten. They show the irrationality, the half-truths and misstatements, the continuously shifting burden of proof in all their agonizing glory.

Is this really politics as usual, or am I crazy for thinking that things are infinitely worse than they have ever been before?

This isn't a series of isolated incidents as critics -- of my point and those few outlets who raise similar complaints in the news' -- imply, but an overwhelming pattern of behavior that lays this Administration's incompetence, incestuousness, and insincerity bare for all to see. We just have to force ourselves to acknowledge it.

Sadly, things aren't much better for us on the other side of the aisle either, with such luminaries as the overly deliberative and plodding Kerry, the volatile and hyperbolic Dean, and the insincere and ultra-calculating machinations of Hillary to light the way. Even newcomers like Tim Kaine seem too robotic and forced to do any good. Only Barack offers any real hope, and he's been stuck on the sidelines for the near future while the stodgy old veterans above him keep running the same plays they've been using for the past fifty years.

Don't get me wrong -- this is not to equate the transgressions of the sides or imply that both are equally flawed. Far from it. It is merely meant to fully illustrate the depths of our dilemma and harrowing descent.

So it looks like the horoscope is right. Today does seem like a four, that we're stuck in a rut and not going anywhere for a while. For until we snap out of our stupor and see things as they truly are, we will remain locked in our Bizarro world, watching stars shine in the pavement, sunrise come at dinner, and villains worshiped as heroes.

I'll see you next time, my friends, still struggling at the bottom of the barrel. A piu tarde...

You knew it was coming. I rant about far smaller and seemingly trivial points (in certain eyes) here every week or two, how could I write about anything but the large, all-important State of the Union speech this time? To be honest, I've been trying to convince myself this past week that I actually have to, that it's worth the time and effort.

Since the speech, by and large, was nothing more than a compilation of the President's greatest hits (now available for a limited time offer of $9.99 -- operators are standing by), anything I wrote about would merely be another round of flogging that dead, bloated horse rotting on our country's shag carpeting. Iraq? The War on Terror? The President's equating criticism with incivility? Going after these topics would be like attacking the fat kid on the playground -- too easy a target, and nothing that hasn't been heard before.

But there was a moment, about three quarters of the way through, that gave me hope. (No, not the wonderful, spontaneous show of backbone by the Democrats when the President began to dress them down for not passing his Social Security "reforms" and they stood up, en masse, to applaud themselves for their efforts.) Something new -- fresh meat with which to gnash my teeth upon.

The point I am referring to was when the President declared that we were "addicted to oil," a surprising statement for someone whose past and family ties are so firmly entwined with the oil companies, and that one of the ways we were going to cure our addiction was by reducing our oil imports over the next few decades. Sounds good -- who's going to argue with that laudable goal, especially in an election year? -- but what's important here is that the President didn't keep it that vague.

State of the Union speeches -- heck, political speeches in general -- are often big on ideas and rhetoric and short on actual, actionable specifics. They call for "the dawning of a new tomorrow" or "a third way" towards political reform and prosperity, but never give you the directions to reach that destination. It's like asking someone to make a souffle without telling them what the ingredients are. 

But the President didn't do that here. He specified a date of completion, an amount of desired reduction, even a region from which we were going to assert our oil-based independence. Here's what he said:

"Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."

Wow. Now that's the type of stuff Americans can get behind. That's a firm plan for action -- we know where we're going and we know the way to get there (ethanol development and the "other new technologies" he references above). That's a man being a leader and pushing us towards a goal. Difficult, no doubt, but doable, especially since imports from that region make up less than 20 percent of our overall daily total. In short, that's a President acting like a President -- bold, confident, and inspiring.

Unfortunately, it was all a joke.

Yes, as we learned the following morning once the spin doctors had gone into full scale damage control, the President's inspiring call to action was nothing more than "an example," according to his Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, something we were supposed to take as serious as the comic strip around a piece of Bazooka. The President was just riffing, in essence, trying out a few new bits in his standup routine and not intending to be taken literally.

So if this ultra-specific statement, one of, if not the only such instances in the entire speech, was not meant to be taken seriously, what about the rest of the President's averrances? How are we to know when we're supposed to listen and when we're supposed to tune out, to understand he's just rapping -- bullshitting with his peeps -- and not intending for us to actually believe him?

When are we on the record and when are we off?

Progress being made in Iraq and our plans to fight the relentless insurgency there -- is this fact or is this fiction? How we're conducting and advancing in the War on Terror -- are we talking newspaper-worthy or the land of fairytales? The historical and legal justifications for the NSA spying program -- are we more Encyclopedia Brittanica here or A Million Little Pieces?

Which is it, and how are we supposed to know the difference?

The fact that this statement survived the thirty rounds of revision the speech went through before Tuesday night, as reported in this week's New Yorker, shows it was no fluke, that it was definitely meant to be there, but it does force you to wonder why no one, in those thirty rounds, asked whether its inclusion would cause more trouble than it was worth. With the astounding level of detail these things are subjected to before appearing -- is it better to say "liberty" or "freedom;" what are the ramifications for saying "must" over "should" comply; should I use another comma here or start a new sentence for maximum impact -- it's amazing that the White House and its minions were surprised people took these statements literally.

If there was any reason they were worried about being taken seriously here and didn't want to be, you know the offending statement would have been removed in a heartbeat. That it wasn't shows one of two things -- they were trying to slip one by the American public again, gaining poll points for laudable ideas without ever intending to follow through on them (No Child Left Behind, anyone?), or they were serious. Either way, their actions in the days following the speech and their decision to not go forward on this point mean we all lose. Again.

By the President continuing to be disingenuous, speaking in half-truths or outright lies and expecting us to discern the difference without a team of researchers to do the fact-checking, we are left with a situation where we can't take a single word he has to say seriously anymore. Are we really making progress on the path to freedom and getting closer to eradicating tyranny across the globe or did these just slip by the censors, too? To take his statements on face value is impossible, not to mention dangerous (if you prize accuracy and the ability to believe anything you see or read), because we never know whether we're getting the truth, the whole truth, or nothing even resembling the truth.

Maybe we need to trot out those lights that they use at the presidential debates while he's talking -- green light, now you can believe me, red light, now not so much. Or maybe we need to implement a system of hand signals like in baseball where the President tugs at his ears and wiggles his nose at the lectern to let us know what we're supposed to do. Tug the right earlobe and then touch his chin? That's on the record, 100% USA-grade truth, baby. But do that with the nose-wiggling, tongue-out qualifiers in front? That's take, all the way, nothing but junk.

That this system works is beyond the point -- it's kept baserunners and batters in America's pasttime informed for over a hundred years, after all -- but do we really want an equivalent of it in our political system? Do we really want to listen to the President speak and constantly be wondering whether he's telling us the truth or whether we merely missed the modifier clueing us in that he's gone off the farm and is just jabbering? Seems like that would be a sorry state of affairs -- and union -- if you ask me.

Until next time...

Rolling Stone had an interesting article in last week's issue on the destruction of FEMA and Homeland Security during the Bush administration, a demise that contributed to and compounded its disastrous response to the Katrina situation. Relentless outsourcing of government work, a strong reliance on no-bid contracts, and a hearty helping of unabashed cronyism to fill the agencies' top spots all led to a crisis operation that could be called embarrassing at best, if not downright disgraceful. (Or "pathetic," according to Connecticut Republican representative Christopher Shays who is on the House's investigating committee for Katrina.)

But let's take each of them in turn so as not to lose how they made an already bad situation worse, like adding a beret and cane to your army jacket and leather pants ensemble. With regards to outsourcing, there are three types of government contract that one may find, as this article by the Center for Public Integrity from two years back so nicely explains -- fixed price, time and materials, and cost reimbursement.

In the first category, the government and contractor hammer out a price for the work that is fixed, as the name implies, no matter if the contractor is able to meet its budget or come in under cost. This is done before the actual work begins. In the second one, cost for materials, labor, and other overhead are calculated beforehand and an hourly rate is agreed upon, also before work begins.

In the final category, though, the work is commenced and/or completed before any  price negotiations are conducted, the contractor coming back to the government later on to tell it how much things cost. The government likes this approach, referred to as the "defraud me please" type in the article, because it allows it to maintain its flexibility, initiating work without allocating a set amount of money for the project.

If they pound out a deal for $500 million, they have to make sure they've got $500 million available or nothing will get done. If they use this option, though, they can get the ball rolling without shelling out a dime -- it may come in under $500 million, it may not, but you can cross that bridge when you get to it. It's a bit like buying a house on credit and figuring out how to pay for it later. You may have the money, you may not, but at least you've had a sweet roof over your head before you have to have that headache.

The obvious downside here, though, is that this type of deal is prone to price padding on the part of the contractor, as we saw last year with Halliburton's $100 million overcharging of the government in its Iraq oil contract. But this wasn't an isolated incident. (Its issuance, that is, though ostensibly the fraud, as well.) As you might have guessed, according to the Center this type of contract makes up "the highest value of those awarded in the last two years for reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan."

To illustrate just how pandemic this practice has become for the Bush Administration, consider the following quote from the Rolling Stone article:

"According to the Homeland Security Research Corporation, a private firm that monitors the "market" in federal contracts, government outsourcing on homeland security has soared by $130 billion since Bush took office. And that's just a fraction of the windfall expected in the next five years. By 2010, the firm predicts, "the tragic events that resulted from Hurricane Katrina" -- combined with the administration's "much greater reliance on the private sector" -- will boost the global market in homeland security by another $400 billion."

These guys were so keen on outsourcing, they were even farming out  the process' oversight, allowing the same contractors who were doing the work to evaluate their own efficiency, competence, and fiscal value, until Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) put a stop to it last year. (Citing major conflicts of interest in the companies' abilities to offer an unbiased evaluation of their work, the pair found $130 million worth of existing contracts that were susceptible and forced back under government scrutiny.)

And if issuing these blank check-type contracts wasn't bad enough, the Administration also has a penchant for adding insult to injury -- at least if you're a taxpayer keen on effective government spending -- by repeatedly granting said contracts through a no-bid process. Consider some of the "sweetheart deals," in the words of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who has railed against the government's refusal to give rebuilding work to Mississippi businesses, sent out in the early days of Katrina:

***$100 million, Shaw Group, to provide housing
***$100 million, Shaw Group, to pump water out of the flooded streets
***$88 million, KBR (Halliburton subsidiary), various
***$550 million, Ash-Britt, for debris removal
***$236 million, Blank Rome Government Relations, to provide cruiseships for temporary housing
***$100 million, CH2M Hill, various

Coincidentally, these all went to firms that had strong ties to members of the Bush administration -- the Shaw Group was represented by former FEMA head Joseph Allbaugh, the president's former campaign manager; Ash-Britt was represented by former Army Corps of Engineers director Mike Parker, a former Republican representative from Mississippi; Blank Rome, which also represented CH2M Hill, was represented by its senior partner Mark Holman, a former Bush Pioneer (meaning he raised over $100,000 for the President in his 2004 campaign, of which there are only 323 nationwide) and adviser to one-time DHS head Tom Ridge. These are just a few.

And as the Rolling Stone article explains, even when four of these no-bid deals were overturned and forced to go through a normal bidding process, months had been lost, millions of dollars wasted, and still not much has changed. Consider the following:

"'Look at Titan, one of the companies contracted to do interrogations at Abu Ghraib,' says Danielle Brian, the government oversight director. 'It was charged with hiring and supervising an employee who tortured prisoners, and with overcharging the government more than $200 million for the work. Now Titan has a DHS contract to do cleanup for Katrina. It's amazing. Not only have we failed to learn from our mistakes at the Pentagon, we're amplifying them.'"

But wait, there's more.

For the final turn of its ridiculous triple play, its coup de grace, the Administration spent the past few years filling the higher ranks of FEMA and DHS with under- or unqualified political patrons, the final indignity the organizations could suffer before collapsing under the weight of Katrina. Besides Michael "Arabian Horses" Brown, who as we all know did "a heck of a job" before finally getting the boot, there's Donald Powell, a former Texas banker and another Bush Pioneer, who's now in charge of the entire Katrina reconstruction effort, despite having "no disaster recovery experience," according to Senator Edward Kennedy; Andrew Maner, a former travel aide for Bush Sr. and now CFO for Homeland Security, "the only Cabinet-level CFO post that does not require Senate confirmation;" Patrick Rhode, a former Arkansas and Alabama TV anchor and now acting deputy director for FEMA, who is quoted as saying that the government's post-disaster activity was "probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country's history;" and Julie Myers, the niece of General Richard Myers and now head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, thanks to the recess appointments I mentioned in the last post -- an organization with "20,000 employees and a $4 billion budget" -- despite having no experience or expertise in the area.

Small wonder that a 2004 survey of FEMA employees found that eighty percent of those working there felt that the agency "was worse off" than it was before being rolled into Homeland Security. A mere two percent -- less, actually -- felt that it had gotten better. Along those lines, sixty percent of the people said they would leave the agency if they had another job offer and seventy four percent said they would immediately retire once they had the opportunity. As the article quotes the Wall Street Journal as reporting last year, "Once the highest-ranked government office for worker satisfaction, FEMA is now dead last."

Sure comforting that these are the people tasked with helping us cope with another disaster -- the "when, not if" ones we hear about all the time now, be it a terrorist attack or deadly outbreak of the flu. Sleep tight, my friends.

I wanted to close with this graphic that was imbedded in the print version of the Rolling Stone article showing the distribution of DHS funds by state, along with their estimated risk of attack. The risk analysis is obviously subjective and thus subject to debate, but let's take the easiest four targets as givens -- as even the dimmest of knobs could come up with, these are New York, California, and Illinois, since they contain the largest three cities in the country with NYC, LA, and Chicago, and DC as it, with NY, was attacked before -- and look at how they stack up against the other states.

As is somewhat amazing to see, with the exception of DC, the remaining three locations lag far further back than they should be, with Illinois and California getting roughly a third of what the top five states -- Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and DC -- do per capita. (They receive almost half that of NY's total, which itself is tenth overall.) In fact, exactly half the states receive more than these two do, including such high-risk terrorist targets as Montana, Nebraska, Idaho, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. I may be wrong, but it's pretty safe to assume that the members of Al Qaeda or its similarly inspired kin will find more high profile targets in Chicago and LA than they would in Butte or Boise, so the money might be better spent elsewhere. But what do I know?

Until next time, my friends...

I had the opportunity to have a series of interesting, and frustrating, conversations while I was home for the holidays the past few weeks that I thought warrented mentioning here. (And no, the previous phrasing is not another example of the war on Christmas that O'Reilly and everyone at Fox News were in such a lather over -- as the New Yorker reported last week, over one five-day span before going to press the network aired no less than fifty-eight different pieces on the issue, "some of them labelled 'CHRISTMAS UNDER ATTACK'" and at least a dozen of which I had to sit through as I was visiting with family. (Yes, I'm sure you'll be surprised to learn that not everyone in my family is an "ultra-left, bleeding heart liberal" as some of you have labeled me. Shocking, isn't it?) Not only did I celebrate Christmas while I was there, but also portions of Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and my personal favorite, Festivus, hence the term "holidays.")

One of them involved the recent scandal over the President's usage of the NSA to conduct domestic spying operations of terrorist suspects without a warrant that, to show the level of political jadedness that my friends and I have for this Administration acting improperly or short-sighted after the past five years, elicited no more than a, "Huh. I guess I sort of assumed that was happening already" when we learned about it over coffee. While sitting with the aforementioned right wing of my family, though, I met with an entirely different, and rather surprising, defense. Essentially, their view was that it didn't matter that Bush was spying on American citizens, even if he was doing so without a warrant.

Why? Because Clinton and Carter did it too, they said.

This struck me as a rather funny defense -- and wholly untrue, as well -- but in the interest of maintaining familial accord and because I had no evidence at hand to directly contradict it, I let it go with a mere averrance that that was horseshit and please pass the potatoes. Later that night, though, while basking in the light of Brit Hume's stony Sam the Eagle-like visage (the Muppets, anyone?), I heard the same refrain as before, that Clinton and Carter had both issued executive orders to "perform wiretaps and searches of American citizens without a warrant," same as President Bush. So if it was ok for those guys, two of the left's most beloved former leaders (how convenient!), then there was no reason to get up in arms about our current leader's doing so.

Unsure if it was merely my overindulgence in all those carbohydrates and sweets at dinner that was slowing my brain or the fact that I was, in reality, getting dumber, I said to my family that that didn't make any sense and had to be wrong. It was impossible -- it sounded far too out of character for Clinton and Carter and far too convenient for the right's cacophanous wall of noise. Furthermore, I was reasonably sure I hadn't repeatedly missed those days in history class over the past decade, but couldn't quite be certain. Sure enough, ten minutes of searching on the web later, I had turned up what really occurred.

As I'm sure you'll be surprised to hear, Hume and his friends at Fox -- as well as their brothers in arms at the Republican National Committee who put the claim in a press release the same day-- had only told us half the story. Clinton and Carter had signed executive orders permitting domestic surveillance of American citizens without a warrant. In that, they were correct. Here's the text of their orders as it appeared in the press release and was quoted on Fox News:

"President Bill Clinton: "[T]he Attorney General Is Authorized To Approve Physical Searches, Without A Court Order, To Acquire Foreign Intelligence Information For Periods Of Up To One Year ..." (President Bill Clinton, Executive Order 12949, "Foreign Intelligence Physical Searches," 2/9/95)

"President Jimmy Carter: "[T]he Attorney General Is Authorized To Approve Electronic Surveillance To Acquire Foreign Intelligence Information Without A Court Order ..." (President Jimmy Carter, Executive Order 12139, "Exercise Of Certain Authority Respecting Electronic Surveillance," 5/23/79)

But as always seems to happen with these guys, they leave out the but. ("Knowing what I know today, I'd still make the decision to go into Iraq, *BUT I'd do x, y, and z," for example. (*Starred portion courtesy of the Fiction Writers Guild of America, 2006.) Showing us once again that what they leave out is often more important and telling than what they chose to include, please consider the FULL text of what Clinton and Carter actually signed into law.

Clinton:  "Section 1.  Pursuant to section 302(a)(1) of the Act, the
Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a
court order, to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of
up to one year, if the Attorney General makes the certifications
required by that section."

Carter: "1-101. Pursuant to Section 102(a)(1) of the Foreign Intelligence
   Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1802(a)), the Attorney General
   is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign
   intelligence information without a court order, but only if the
   Attorney General makes the certifications required by that Section."

What does that crucial last bit mean, the part about the certifications? (Which, I'm sure you've noticed, happens to come in the same sentence and immediately following the quoted material from Fox and the RNC, yet is strangely omitted from their offerings.) Well, as the non-partisan watchdog Media Matters points out, "What the Attorney General has to certify under that section is that the surveillance will not contain 'the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.'"

Or, as the code itself says, " (i) [A] "United States person" means a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence, an unincorporated association a substantial number of members of which are citizens of the United States or aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or a corporation which is incorporated in the United States, but does not include a corporation or an association which is a foreign power, as defined in subsection (a)(1), (2), or (3) of this section.

In short, pretty much anyone who holds a passport and a permanent address in this country. Nice to know that these guys weren't deliberately trying to mislead us on this or anything. It's heartening that their research departments were able to unearth the appropriate clauses in these specific executive orders -- which are ten and 26 years old, mind you -- and yet report only the fragments of the sentences that best suit their cause. Sounds suspicious, but then I've already admitted how jaded and cynical I am on these things. I'm sure everyone else who heard this took the time to doublecheck what they'd said/read as we're expected to do now, as well. Not a problem...

In case you'd like to see some of the other myths being promulgated regarding this issue and their validity, check out the Media Matters' "Top 12 Media Myths and Falsehoods on the Bush Administration's Spying Scandal."

As for the second conversation, it goes back to the war in Iraq and the Administration's seemingly newfound interest in disclosure, discussion, and the admission of mistakes. At least, that's what some in my family would have you believe. They say that his recent quartet of speeches on the war in Iraq, given at such unfriendly places as the Council on Foreign Relations, and his recent powwow with former secreteries of defense and state on the status of things in that country show he has turned over a new leaf. That he has heard the dissent and begun to incorporate their critiques into his policy, encouraging a culture of debate and a policy of flexibility and revision instead of continuously squashing the former and dunking the latter in cement.

Well, I have news for you -- he hasn't. Take the vaunted speeches, for example, the ones he gave in front of unscreened audiences, allegedly. As Matt Taibbi points out in last week's Rolling Stone, just because the speech is occurring in a theoretically hostile environment (read non-military location) doesn't mean they just opened the doors and let everyone standing outside in. To get around the likelihood that the majority of the crowd would be academics and scholars critical of Bush and his policies, they tinkered with the details -- location, start time, advance notice, etc.

Here's how they handled the planning for the four speeches: "U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, November 30th, no advance publicity, closed audience: check. Here at the Omni [Council on Foreign Relations], December 7th, again no advance warning, handpicked audience, ten reporters max (no one else knew about it), with even the cashiers in the hotel's coffee shop unaware of the president's presence: check. Dates three and four, venues and dates unknown for security reasons: check and check."

And then consider how he handled the powwow of all the former secretaries, a brilliant chance to gain new perspectives and opinions from people who had been in these positions before; had held the same seats of power and been forced to make similar critical decisions affecting both domestic and foreign policy. Seems like a wonderful opportunity to add some nuance and flexibility to your arsenal from the other side of the aisle, as a "uniter, not a divider" would likely be wont to do.

"But if it was a bipartisan consultation, as advertised by the White House, it was a brief one. Mr. Bush allowed 5 to 10 minutes for interchange with the group - which included three veterans of the Vietnam era: Robert S. McNamara, Melvin R. Laird and James R. Schlesinger - before herding the whole group into the Oval Office for what he called a "family picture."

This, after "an exceedingly upbeat 40-minute briefing...on how well things are going in Iraq," according to the Times and Post reports. Five to ten minutes hearing what all these former decision makers, "a regular who's who of who's bombed what," in the words of the Daily Show, have to say? Your doctor spends more time with you than that, and he doesn't make you wait half as long.

This doesn't seem like a cause for celebration, instead it smacks of more of the same -- faint attempts at bipartisanship and discussion after all other options have been exhausted. (Or your poll numbers get too low.) Admitting a mistake or attempting to engage opinions other than your inner circle's two and a half years later isn't enough. It's a bit like the client who you tell over and over again to sell a certain stock -- "Enron is not going to make a comeback, Jack, their CEO has just been indicted. Just SELL!" -- but doesn't decide to do so until a year-plus later. Great idea, but maybe you should have thought of it a little sooner -- you know, while the rest of the world was selling their shares (and telling you to do the same) before it hit rock bottom.

But this President doesn't work like that and he most certainly isn't interested in debate. He automatically assumes he is right, no matter what other people -- even those within his own party -- may say. If you're still doubtful, look no further than his recent recess appointments to various high-level administration jobs, including the head of the State Dept., the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the deputy defense secretary, and three of the six seats on the Federal Election Commission. (No important jobs there -- you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!) Bush made seventeen appointments over the holiday break, which I'm sure some of you will state is his prerogative, a perk of executive privilege.

And you're right. But typically, as the Times notes, this is done when the Congress is controlled by the opposing party, NOT when it's held by the President's own. Consider the following:

"Modern presidents have employed this power to place nominees who ran into political trouble in the Senate. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton made scores of recess appointments. But both of them faced a Congress controlled by the opposition party, while the Senate has been under Republican control for Mr. Bush's entire five years in office."

This is just one more example showing how little the President cares about our way of doing things -- our system of checks and balances, discussion, dissent, and debate, and a democracy that prides itself on its openness, inclusiveness, and accountability to the public, not its reclusiveness, opacity, rule of the few. He's shown time and again that it's his way (or his friends' way) or nothing at all and relies on an army of dissemblers (including himself) to advance his case. (Besides my little ten-minute exercise described above, Al Franken's new book, The Truth (with Jokes), does a fantastic job of debunking the right's chronic misstatements and half-truths on everything from the election to the Swift Boat episode to Bush's mandate/bounty of political capital. I highly recommend it.)

It's not a case of the Democrats or the American public being negative and uncooperative as the White House often posits, it's that the President has repeatedly shown that their opinions don't matter. Or as the Times states,

"The White House regularly accuses Senate Democrats of unfairly blocking the president's nominees, and it is true that one determined senator can freeze an appointment. But Mr. Bush's record in this area owes less to unreasonable Democrats than to the low caliber of some of his choices, his disinterest in bipartisan consensus and his aversion to any form of accountability, whether to the Senate, the courts or the public."

This isn't what this country needs. What it needs -- and I think truly craves -- is a national discourse on these issues that doesn't insult their intelligence; that doesn't assume they are too dim, disinterested, or distracted to care. One that openly engages these issues as our founding fathers intended and holds those who violate this trust (or the law, even) accountable -- with a loss of political support, a loss of financial backing, and even prison time, if need be. But to openly flout these precepts, to continuously subvert our system of checks and balances and instead act opaquely on the opinions of a few, branding dissenters unheard as unpatriotic, is unacceptable.

For as the President himself said yesterday, "There is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate, and it's even more important to conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

 We'll close with a couple of readers again, first this one from Rolling Stone on the White House's propaganda man, Jon Rendon, the man who recently came to the public's attention for paying to get pro-war/Bush stories printed in Arab newspapersand aired on TV. Remember how crazy for us the Kurds were in the first Gulf War, waving flags and such? Yeah, well it turns out that may not be quite right, either. Rendon supplied the Kurds with all the flags and did his work on the papers and TV coverage in that war, too. Sigh. Really interesting stuff, to say the least.

And then there's this one from my hometown Trib, their defense for the war in Iraq and the administration's portrayal of it. They look at nine of the administration's pre-war justifications and determine whether they were valid or misleading after two and a half years of perspective. Despite finding over half of them wrong or a wash, using the following statements to express their findings --

"Many, although not all, of the Bush administration's assertions about weapons of mass destruction have proven flat-out wrong;" "The White House advanced its most provocative, least verifiable case for war when others would have sufficed;" "Claims that Iraq sought uranium and special tubes for processing nuclear material appear discredited;" " If the White House manipulated or exaggerated the nuclear intelligence before the war in order to paint a more menacing portrait of Hussein, it's difficult to imagine why;" and " The drumbeat of White House warnings before the war made Iraq's terror activities sound more ambitious than subsequent evidence has proven. Based on what we know today, the argument that Hussein was able to foment global terror against this country and its interests was exaggerated."

-- they still deem the war and the administration's justifications to be warranted. Not sure how that arithmetic works, but it's interesting to look at, nonetheless. Until next time, my friends...

Well, as much as the Newsweek article did for a nationwide audience, my previous column seems to have hit a nerve in my little neck of the woods, earning a rather sizeable amount of feedback this past week. And as frequent readers here can attest (all eight of you), while I typically don't respond directly to these comments -- it's tough to say anything constructive or useful when people are disparaging my mother, sister, and/or girlfriend, after all -- this week several readers' comments warrant direct engagement as their claims are echoed by many in the media and general public, misguided as they may be.

First, several of you took issue with how I characterized the President's statement about, despite everything that has come to pass the past two and a half years, still wanting to go into Iraq. One reader put it this way: "There's a difference between the commitment to go to war (a single decision) and commitment to every decision made there out. Questioning the merits of that single decision is legitimate, however it is unfair to assign the President's belief to all decisions he has made after he was referring to one in particular."

True. If we were strictly going on the contents of that one sentence -- "I made a tough decision, and knowing what I know today I'd make the same decision again." -- the President merely states that he would opt again to invade Iraq, a single, unqualified decision. But that's precisely what I'm criticizing him, and the members of his Administration for -- that they feel no need to issue qualifications, ever, to their statements on issues as complicated and nuanced as these.

A normal individual, when discussing a major decision s/he has made, may indeed say, "I made a tough decision, and knowing what I know today I'd make the same decision again." They'd buy that car or marry that girl or tell that person what they really thought. But they would also almost invariably offer a host of things they would do differently if given the chance.

"Yeah, I'd still buy that Mercedes, but I'd go for the S-class and make it silver instead" or "I'd still marry Tonya, but I'd wait until I got that promotion first." Even, "I'd still tell my boss to go #$%@ himself with an inverted shoehorn and tape it for the evening news -- I've been working here for six years without a raise, for chrissakes -- but maybe I wouldn't use those exact words."

And yet for something as complicated and important as invading another nation and installing a new form of government, despite everything we know about how difficult and costly it has been, there is nothing. Not a single "but I woulda" to be found.

And so while the literal assessment may seem right -- we are only talking about one decision -- the implication by the President's lack of exposition is that in reality we're actually talking about a whole range of them -- the decision to go in with so few troops, the decision to disband the Iraqi army and security forces, the decision to base the case for war on the hunt for WMDs and to say that the war would essentially pay for itself thanks to oil revenues, etc. By not taking the opportunity to further explain himself, humoring the taxpayers and families of those whose sons and daughters are actually fighting over in Iraq, the realization we're left to make is that nothing should change.

Which brings me to the second point I'd like to make, that this discussion -- reexamining the runup to war and the decisions made in the intervening time -- is much more than a mere academic exercise or a meaningless effort to assess blame. ("Silly," to use the words of some of my readers.) This isn't mindless quibbling among people who want to make sure the history textbooks read right, this is absolutely crucial to how things will happen in the near future because these decisions and the Administration's utter refusal to make alterations to them very much affect what is happening today.

"While it is always helpful to learn from past decisions to help in making future ones," one reader wrote, "Hypothesizing about what one would do given the benefit of the hindsight of that decision is a pointless exercise. Saying, "Well knowing what I know now, I definitely would not have gone to war" doesn't make the current conflict just magically vanish. Nor does it do any service to the men and women fighting that war."

And that, despite being intended to argue the opposite point, is exactly right. Analyzing these past decisions to merely say, "Wow, you fucked up," like your mother asking which of your siblings broke her favorite lamp isn't going to make these problems "magically vanish" any more than it would repair her shattered lamp. But that's not why people like me are so adamant about having these conversations.

The reason it's so critical is because these past decisions aren't being used "to help in making future ones," as the reader advises. They aren't being acknowledged at all, by and large. And that's the point. 

Because the Administration is still doing the same thing, dissembling about any range of issues -- the existence of WMDs, the strength of intelligence, the use of torture on terrorist suspects or spying on the domestic population -- or claiming perfection, placing the burden of disproving these statements on the average citizen and then pleading dumb when the contrary comes to light, we're stuck in a situation that has drastically worsened without changing our course of attack. This isn't someone saying, "Next time I'll go without the pepperoni" when they have a bad case of heartburn after a pizza, this is someone saying "My foot's fine" as its stuck off the curb and getting repeatedly run over by traffic.

One has effects that are finite and brief, the other has ones that are recurring and extended, not to mention quite painful.

And it's obvious that we're stuck in an area nowhere near the former situation. Take James Fallows' examination of why Iraq still has no functioning army or police force, an omission whose remedy he claims is our only means of success, in the latest Atlantic Monthly. Fallows writes,

"Nearly three years after the invasion of Iraq the typical company of 150 or so US soldiers gets by with one or two Arabic speakers. T.X. Hammes [a Marine colonel who served in Iraq] says that US forces and trainers in Iraq should have about 22,000 interpreters, but they have nowhere near that many...The Pentagon's main weapons-building programs are the same now that they were five years ago, before the United States had suffered one attack and begun two wars. From the Pentagon's policy statements, and even more from its budgetary choices, one would never guess that insurgency was our military's main challenge and that its main strategic hope lay in the inglorious work of training foreign troops."

It is this type of mentality that I am railing against and seeking desperately to change, because it does have such a critical impact on both today's events and our not-too-distant future. If we continue to cut short these debates and act like nothing's happening -- that our foot is indeed fine and in no need of the situation being altered or the President branding dissenters as mere "defeatists" just two days ago -- then we are in severe trouble.

There is a passage in an article on humanity's predisposition to religious belief from the same issue of the Atlantic that is also quite applicable to this end. In it, author Paul Bloom writes, "No honest person wants to be in the position of defending a view that makes manifestly false claims, so religious authorities and scholars often make serious efforts toward reconciliation -- for instance, trying to interpret the Bible in a way that is consistent with what we know about the age of the Earth."

This adaptability by religious leaders (he cites recent comments by the Pope and the Dalai Lama, for example) is done, Bloom says, "in part to make their world view more palatable to others, and in part because they are legitimately concerned about any clash with scientific findings."

So if the highest members of our normally staid and sedentary religious community can do it, why can't this Administration?

It's quite unfortunate. Or as one unhappy reader, bothered by my attack on what he perceived to merely be the President's differing viewpoint, might say, tragic.

"The wholesale characterization of opinions different than your own as stupid is, well stupid, primarily because it undermines the logical strength of an argument. Don't fear though, you are not the only one to fall prey to this action; both sides of the political and cultural spectrum throughout history have retreated to this position when confronted with an alternative opinion. It is tragic, however, that in this country we are not able to acknowledge the value of differences of opinions and debate those differences on their merits. Instead we find it necessary to malign each other personally to avoid that real debate."

I hope my arguments above show that my criticism has never been merely towards the people making these decisions, but always with the choices they have made and their refusal to admit any wrong. For I agree with you when you so aptly state, "The best way to make sure you're always right is to always be open to the possibility you may be wrong." 

And I try to do just that, which is why I provide such a lengthy and seemingly pointless list of justifications and articles as proof of what I have written. If the foundation is off, then you know exactly where I went off track and where to hammer me on the head for it.

Just don't forget the last bit of what you told me -- that despite your displeasure with what I've said, you know that "the President and other decision makers don't follow the unrealistic advice I've just offerred."

And that's the problem.

Until next time, my friends...

The cover of Newsweek this week, with its depiction of the President stuck inside a bubble in reference to his cloistered, blindered existence in the White House, has generated quite a bit of controversy and debate as people bristle against this supposedly unfair characterization.  And while this portrayal comes as no surprise to many of us -- those who have spent the past five years without their heads in the clouds, a cave, or the murky confines of their nether regions -- it seemed particularly apropos this week as the President vowed that he "would make the same decision again" to invade Iraq, despite all the information that has come out the past two and a half years ("WMD? What WMD?") and all that has happened during that time. (Relentless insurgency, diminished military reserves, double, triple, and quadruple tours of duty, cost of war mushrooming past the multi-billion mark, a deficit that makes that total look paltry, etc.)

"I made a tough decision," he said. "And knowing what I know today I'd make the same decision again." This amazing statement came in the third of the President's four speeches on the state of Iraq, this one to the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia Tuesday, but a sentiment echoed by the other three offerings as well, and its import is twofold. First, it shows how spot-on the Newsweek portrayal is -- to make a claim like this with a straight face is like saying you'd sneak up on a donkey and yank its tail again after he just caved your face in for doing so the first time. Just because he didn't knock out all your teeth doesn't mean you should repeat the process and hope for better numbers the second time around -- and just how ridiculous the current Administration is.

For them to continue making statements and claims like these despite the overwhelming contradiction of the facts -- whether it's the justification for the war in Iraq (no WMDs), the supposed links between 9/11 and Iraq Cheney and others so frequently made (bubkus), their averrance that we don't torture terrorist suspects in the US or abroad ('fraid so), or their belief that Congress and the public had access to the same prewar intelligence as the President did (actually, no), to name a few -- is just utter stupidity.

And this isn't a matter of Republican vs. Democrat or liberal vs. conservative. It isn't partisan issue at all -- it's a matter of having our leaders act in ways that we wouldn't let even a two-year old get away with. To claim that you wouldn't change anything about your decisions even with the benefit of hindsight is absurd. Decisions, by nature, are inherently flawed, the best you can do at any given time with the information that is available. Obviously as time passes and more information comes your way -- some perspective as well, perhaps, as a result of reflection and distance -- you alter and amend parts of your previous decisions to make a better, though still flawed, assessment.

So to say that you wouldn't change a thing, even if you had the luxury of hindsight at your disposal, is just stupid, stubborn, and incredibly negligent. It's like telling your family you'd jump out of an airplane again without a parachute because by some miracle you survived doing so the first time or running around insisting that the world is flat or the sky is falling, despite the crushing weight of reality proving the contrary.

After all that's gone on in Iraq or all that's come out about the validity and handling of prewar intelligence or the actions of our interrogators towards prisoners you're going to keep telling us the same things, say you'd make the same decisions and give us the same schpiel we've been getting the past five years? (The "everything old is new again" National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, for example.)

Really?

This shows more than a complete disregard for the intelligence of the general population, it also shows an incredible amount of hubris. Seymour Hersh had a revealing quote in his article a few weeks ago in the New Yorker on how bad Bush's single-mindedness and oblivion have gotten. He interviewed an anonymous former senior defense official who said, "The President is more determined than ever to stay the course...He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage 'People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.'"

Hersh, citing the former official, goes on to say that "the President [has] become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. 'They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official said. Bush's public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. 'Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,' the former official said, 'but Bush has no idea."

Life in a bubble, indeed.

We'll close, as usual, with a couple of readers, first this one from the Atlantic Monthly, the first really convincing explanation I've read of why we should get out of Iraq. Answering questions such as whether this would doom the country to a civil war (no), embolden the insurgency (no), or allow Iran to decisively take control of the country (also no), Nir Rosen, who has spent the past sixteen months in Iraq as a reporter, gives a lot of food for thought on the issue. When 80 percent of the Iraqi population wants us out and less than half are optimistic about the future (see the graphic), analysis like Rosen's make you think calls like Representative Murtha's of getting out now may not be as cowardly, unpatriotic, and wrong as the Administration would have us believe.

Then there's this one from the New Yorker on intelligent design (I know, I know, I'll shut up about it soon), an in-depth look at the Pennsylvania trial I referred to a few weeks back that is absolutely fascinating. It picks apart both the school board's case and the participants on both sides, essentially giving a play-by-play of the actual case proceedings. Extremely interesting stuff.

Finally, we'll go back to Bush and close with this quote I heard on the History Channel's documentary on the various US presidents that aired last week. Addressing the President's seeming lack of intelligence in public speeches and interviews, Walter Isaacson, head of the Aspen Institute, a Washington-based institute that focuses on leadership and political dialogue, said, "His intelligence is an emotional intelligence. He can look at people, he can size them up pretty quickly, he can get to the heart of what they're like and tend to know how to judge them. That's a pretty useful attribute in a politician and a pretty useful one in a president."

He paused, and then added, "It would be nice if it were combined with a depth of reflection and some nuance, some curiosity and some intellectual curiosity and rigor about the issues."

Beat, look at the camera, cut to a new frame. Hilarious. Until next time, my friends...

Yesterday was a momentous day in Latin America -- election day, for at least those in Venezuela -- and one where those of us to the north who weren't already concerned about Hugo Chavez's influence and hold on power were forced to take pause and reconsider, though not for the reasons so typically cited (or shouted). More on that in a moment.

The initial cause for concern -- that which sparked a grimace and uneasy inhale through gritted teeth while reading the news -- was Chavez's winning in a rout yesterday and his party extending its slight congressional majority to pick up nearly all of the country's 167 legislative seats. Besides almost assuredly locking up another six-year term as president for Chavez in next year's election, this will enable him to enact virtually any policy he chooses, altering the country's Constitution and legislating almost at will.

If you're still struggling with the importance of this type of victory, consider what it would be like if the Republicans had gotten an extra five seats in the Senate in the last elections and been able to form their supermajority, defeating all filibusters and dissent. Now stretch that to both chambers of the Congress and to almost every single seat, removing the probability (and importance) of crossover dissent or that from within, and you've got it. Understand now? Yeah -- yikes.

And while these results themselves are disconcerting enough, the real cause for concern was why they existed in the first place. Washington, when they decide to talk about Latin America at all, always goes on about the tilt to the left on the continent and how dangerous it is that there is such an upswell of popular support for this type of leftist, liberal governance. And while there has undoubtedly been an increase in the number of these types of administrations down south -- Argentina, Uruguay, and Mexico, most likely, after next year, to name a few -- that didn't lead to yesterday's landslide in the one place where you'd most expect it to be, if you buy into the White House's rhetoric.

The true cause of yesterday's electoral devastation were the events from earlier in the week where the country's major opposition parties announced they were boycotting Sunday's elections, a move that guaranteed the carnage that ensued. Angry about the perceived pro-Chavez bias in the nation's Electoral Council, the five largest parties opted out of Sunday's vote saying that they would not participate because they could not guarantee a fair election.

To be fair, this is partly just political bluster as polls indicated that Chavez's party would have won handily in any event, maintaining and ostensibly enlarging their majority in the Congress. But for the opposition to completely fold leaves a dangerous situation at hand in that country.

That's because an amazing 75 percent of eligible voters decided not to participate in the elections yesterday. You thought you were angry to be led by someone nearly half the population didn't support? Try choking down a situation where a mere quarter of the country supports the ruling party. That's a bitter pill to swallow.

So the danger isn't that Chavez enjoys overwhelming support as the White House wants us to believe. The real danger illuminated yesterday is that there is no longer any organized opposition in Venezuela and no way for dissent to stem the tide of his future legislation short of protest and riot. And when the peaceable means to resistance have all been removed and a population's voice of opposition has been shackled, you have the recipe for potential disaster, a scenario that is far more dangerous than a blustery, cult of personality leader, no matter what his politics.

Along the latter lines, another of the men Washington says we should fear is Bolivia's Evo Morales, an indigenous leader in the veins of Che for his idealism and Chavez for his perceived danger. Though as this article from the New York Times magazine last week shows, he, too, may not be as much of a threat as those in the White House would like us to think. For as the following quote offers, his ties to the past may be more a sign of futility than of honest belief in their efficacy.

"The problem, of course, is that given the severity of the Bolivian crisis, the militancy of so much of the population and the impossibly high level of expectations that a MAS [Morales' party] government would engenger among Bolivia's poor and its long-marginalized indigenous populations, there is very little time. It is quite accurate to speak of the rebirth of the left in Latin America, but the sad truth is that the movement's return is more a sign of despair than of hope. Almost 40 years ago, one self-proclaimed revolutionary, Che Guevara, died alone and abandoned in the Bolivian foothills. Today, another self-proclaimed revolutionary, Evo Morales, could become the country's first indigenous and first authentically leftist president. But as was true of Che himself, it is by no means clear that Morales has any hope of fulfilling the expectations of his followers."

Really interesting and revealing read along the lines of the Chavez profile I posted a few weeks back. Good stuff.

Finally, we'll close with this, a fun little clip from an old SNL with the W (played by the inimitable Will Ferrell -- I've said it before, funniest man in America) expounding on the danger of "global warmings." Funny stuff -- I particularly like his take on the polar ice caps -- and it takes you back to a simpler time where most thought the President was simply a humorous nabob and not the dangerously inept dissembler he's turned out to be. Enjoy, my friends...

In Richard Clarke's latest book, The Scorpion's Gate, the former counterterrorism chief lays out his slightly fictionalized account of what life could be like in a few years in the Middle East. In it, the Saudi empire has collapsed under a revolution and the country been reborn as the independent nation of Islamyah, the after effects of which drive the main plot of the story -- an attempt by the Iranian government to frame the new ruling coalition as terrorists in order to spark a US-led countercoup while consolidating control in the region.

The story is considered fiction as Saudi Arabia is obviously still in existence, but it is in reality not far from the non-fiction shelves as a number of its key aspects could be plucked Law & Order-style from today's headlines. Consider the following: an aggressive, repressive theocracy in Iran that deals in terrorism to further its overseas agenda; an arrogant, renegade Secretary of Defense and equally bull-headed gang of Pentagon hawks who buy into the Iranians' ploys and move to reinstall the former Saudi leaders, despite the advisement of their intelligence agencies, as they are so blinded by their desire to restore the House of Saud and the US' oil-rich foothold within; a strengthened China asserting its influence in the region militarily, much to the chagrin of US legislators; an insurgency in Iraq that has uprooted the region and created unrest throughout, worsening the US' position abroad and their safety in the war on Terror. Sure sounds like a wild stretch of the imagination, doesn't it? 

They may not have happened yet, but aren't too far outside the realm of possibility, based on our current state of affairs. And this, besides being able to take a few more potshots at the Administration for their disastrous handling of the situation in Iraq, is the main reason Clarke wrote the book, to scare some sense into our politicians and leaders and spurn action before this thinly veiled fiction becomes an all too daunting reality.

As in his previous effort, last year's fantastic non-fiction (contrary to his critics' assertions) Against All Enemies, Clarke fills the pages with fascinating behind the scenes details about how our government really operates -- his opening three chapters in the former outing on the events immediately after the attacks on 9/11 were absolutely captivating and once rumored to be optioned for a movie adaptation -- and raises a range of interesting issues pertinent to the area. (Like who is really responsible for the spread of Wahhabism, thanks to their financial and political support of the movement and its teachings during its critical early days. One guess -- it may go by a different name in the book, but is currently a dear, dear friend to our President and his friends...)

One of the more interesting questions Clarke raises is on the course of the Arab world and the responsibility it has to itself for its status in the world. The following conversation between two of the main characters, brothers and leaders of the new Islamyah regime, deals with this issue head on and is reprinted below for its poignancy. It revolves around a UN report by leading Arab scholars on how the nations in the region compare to the rest of the world.

"I have lived in North America, but I have also been to Germany and Sinagpore, to medical conferencees in China and Britain. Things are invented there. Technology and pharmaceuticals. What have we invented in the last thousand years? The world is leaving us behind because we have tied this Wahhabist brick around our ankles. Our scholars study only the Koran, which is good, but we need only so many Koranic scholars in a generation...

"The winners in the modern world are knowledge societies, countries that put an emphasis on learning, sharing information, doing research. Look at these numbers...two percent of our people have Internet access, compared with 98 percent in Korea. Five books are translated into Arabi a year per million people, compared with 900 translated into Spanish. Even in our own language, we publish only one percent of the world's books. One out of five books published in Arabic is on religion. We spend less than one-third of one percent of our GNP on research. Maybe this explains why one out of four of our university graduates leave the Arab world as soon as they can. We do not create knowledge; we do not import knowledge. We import finished goods. This is not the way of the modern world, which is leaving us in the dust."

He continues, referring to the governing Shura council of which several members have advocated the nuclear option and the new country's acquisition of nuclear weapons.

"If you let these people on the council have their way, we will continue to be slaves of our own oil, able to do nothing but watch as what Allah put in the ground comes out of it. And the money we get from it will continue to be wasted in supposedly 'religious' follies. We are not a country, we are an oil deposit! And if that is all we are, others will come, the scorpions will come for their food, their precious black liquid. They will keep us enslaved, buying everything we need from them, including weapons which we do not need.

Common sense and forward progress took another beating this week as our culture -- or disconcertingly large parts of it, anyway -- went on a little trip down memory lane and landed us back in the 1920s with the latest legislative victories for the anti-evolutionist crowd, taking one giant step backward for us all.  That's because the people in Kansas and Pennsylvania -- those who still think evolution is a crackpot concept of some carnival fortune teller -- scored two important victories in getting those ideas opposed to evolution taught in public schools.

In the first case, the Kansas Board of Education voted 6-4 to overhaul their state's school science standards and allow for the teaching of "alternative viewpoints," such as the much maligned (for those of you who have half a brain or read this page, at least) intelligent design. The move, besides allowing that thinly disguised religious "theory" back into the classroom -- and trying to deny that ID is merely creationism in new clothes is like saying you're not talking about God when you capitalize "He." Just because you don't mention him directly doesn't mean you're fooling anyone. -- also looks to redefine science itself, allowing explanations that are no longer strictly verifiable in nature, but based on faith and spirituality, as well.

Guess we finally know the answer to Thomas Frank's best selling question from last year, "What's the Matter with Kansas?"

A lot, man. Dumptrucks full.

One of the best quotes to come out of the Kansas debacle was from one of the dissenting board members, Janet Waugh. "This is a sad day," she said, "not just for Kansas kids, but for Kansas [itself]. We're becoming a laughingstock not only of the nation, but of the world."

And it's true -- defending these guys to outsiders is getting to be like having a girlfriend who picks her nose in public and wipes it on the underside of her chair. You just start to look at them like, "Are you kidding me? Do you know how hard it's getting to explain to people why you're not crazy? It's difficult to say I even know you anymore..."

Sadly, though, Kansas wasn't the only offender in this arena, as their likeminded brethren in Pennsylvania also took Darwin, Scopes, and their hufflepuff theory to task, forcing a lawsuit with angry parents when they unilaterally voted to enter the teaching of ID into the state's curriculum a year ago. The trial concluded this past week with a victory for logic and the evolutionist camp, but as Matt Taibbi points out in this Rolling Stone article, although religion and ID may not have been the legal winner this time around, they may have been the practical victors.

That's because the defense was able to show, or at least call into question the possibility, that many in the scientific community hold religion and science to be wholly incompatible -- "that most scientists secretly hate God, laugh at his followers and would like to stamp out both for all eternity, only they don't take Christians seriously enough to be straight with them about this," as Taibbi writes. By getting several of the witnesses to admit their personal beliefs and begrudgingly acknowledge that there is a gap between the clinical and the religious; between the scientific and the spiritual mind, the IDiots achieve a bigger victory than a mere legal case in a tiny Dover courtroom because they were able to create confusion and uncertainty in the minds of the wider population, akin to playing the race card in other trials in an effort to muddy the issue and cloud the minds of the jurors. As a result, anti-evolutionists may walk away the losers in this battle, but the ultimate winners of the war.

For those of you who frequently read this page (all eight of you, two of whom are outside my extended family), you know that I often highlight matters affecting Latin America and refer to it as the lost continent for the amount of attention and understanding it gets in this country today. Yet for as bad as its situation is -- it's the equivalent of one's own shadow, as ignored as it is geographically close -- there is another region whose isolation and coverage are far worse, that of Africa.

Consider this -- it is the second largest continent and the second most populous behind Asia, in both categories, with over 900 million inhabitants. (North America has just over half that population, by contrast, and ranks third and fourth, respectively.) There are over two thousand languages and an astounding 53 countries in Africa, though I'm willing to bet none of us can name more than five of its states that weren't saturated in the media thanks to some US involvement the past ten years. (That means Somalia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Africa are out. Heck, I bet even with those four most people can only barely beat the aforementioned hurdle. Try it and see...)

And despite the world's better efforts to avoid getting involved in what's going on there -- the continuing crisis (or "genocide," if you prefer the word of the US State Department and Congress) in Sudan, the on-again, off-again civil war in Congo (there's two more for your count), and the continent-wide devastation wrought by HIV and AIDS (25 million dead and millions more infected, with roughly three million new cases each year) -- the problems its people face refuse to go away.

Case in point being malaria, the focus of an absolutely fascinating article in last week's issue of the New Yorker. Half the world's population is exposed to the disease each year, but nearly everyone living in Africa is forced to deal with the disease, which kills roughly one million people directly and nearly three million annually there due to related illnesses, "almost all of whom are under five, desperately poor, and African," as the article notes.

What makes the disease's impact all the more maddening, though, is how avoidable it is. Efforts towards its prevention account for nearly 40 percent of all public health spending on the continent, a none-too-paltry total of $12 billion annually, but this sum falls well short of what is needed and it is the assistance from the rest of the world, specifically the industrialized nations where malaria has already been eradicated, and their reluctance to aggressively bridge this gap that is so unfortunate.

"Is is a moral outrage," says Richard Feachem, the director of the UN's Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, in the article. "This is an utterly preventable holocaust and the numbers [of deaths] are far higher than the W.H.O. says...You have to remember we almost eradicated malaria before. And what has happened? Not only have we failed, but by any reasonable measure more people have suffered from malaria in the past fifty years than in the history of mankind. It has been a remarkable march backward."

One of the problems is that the western world has lived without malaria for decades and thus its pharmaceutical companies have long since discontinued their research into malarial vaccines and preventions. It's the cruel side of capitalism -- if these companies have no customer base that can afford its wares (and neither the fifty percent of sub-Saharan Africa nor the twenty percent in the north living in absolute poverty, or less than one dollar a day, qualify as such), there is no market incentive for them to continue producing these items. No altruistic "greater good" type stuff here, only the edicts of the cold bottom line.

That's why less than ten percent of all investment towards health research is reserved for the diseases affecting nearly ninety percent of the world's population, an amazing statistic. It's a marriage of that capitalist instinct and the aforementioned apathy towards Africa. As Kent Campbell, the former head of the CDC's malaria division, said, "It has gone on for too long...I would love to believe that in the United States this effort is being driven by a decent desire to help, but I don't think most Americans give a rat's ass about the death of millions of African kids each year. I don't think they ever have."

There is at least one ray of hope, though, coming in the unlikely form of Bill Gates and his massive global health foundation. With an endowment of roughly twenty-nine billion dollars -- more than ten times the annual budget of the W.H.O. ($1.65 billion) and the entire GDP of Tanzania -- Gates is looking to single-handedly make a dent in the outbreaks of preventable disease in Africa, be it hepatitis B, pneumonia, sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis, or malaria. His foundation has already given six billion dollars to these ends since 2000, including 750 million to the UN's Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunization and 125 million to the Children's Vaccine Program.

Part of the problem he faces is history -- malaria was wiped out in this country in 1951 and in the rest of the industrialized world by the 1970s thanks to a concerted global effort after WWII and the aid of chemicals like DDT, but any similar advances made in Africa have long since been reversed by the reasons I just mentioned.

The other major obstacle -- and possibly the most important one since it ruins even the most earnest attempts at philanthropy -- is malaria itself with its incredible genetic complexity. Typical viruses like polio and even the notoriously difficult HIV have only a few genes that scientists need to conquer and understand to create pharmaceutical defenses for affected patients. Malaria, on the other hand, has an estimated five thousand genes to bog researchers down with and its ability to regularly mutate and develop defenses to available drugs have made it virtually impossible to defeat.

That is why Gates' efforts are so heavily concentrated on cutting-edge technologies, a move that earns him and his foundation regular criticism from those looking to make a more immediate impact with existing solutions like chemically-treated mosquito nets and vaccinations. Regardless of whose path is correct, the article is fascinating both because of what it reveals about this disease and how it changes your perceptions of the multi-billion dollar tycoon philanthropist -- Gates does not seem to be doing this for the ego stroking and press as you expect at first glance, but seems to be genuinely concerned with the problem and highly involved with the foundation's endeavors. Really interesting stuff. Check it out here.

And just a little postscript to last week's comments on the gun issue -- Brazil's anti-gun ban supporters managed to overturn the referendum last weekend and voted overwhelmingly to keep guns legal in Brazil. Guess the NRA has a longer reach and more siblings than previously thought.

Until next time, friends...