Sun King

There’s a long list of “froms” behind the quote below. I found it first on firedoglake, followed her link to The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin who is quoting from a quote in a New Yorker profile by Jane Mayer, not available on line.

"Bruce Fein, a Republican legal activist, who voted for Bush in both Presidential elections, and who served as associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, said that Addington and other Presidential legal advisers had 'staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He's said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President's reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world's a battlefield -- according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It's got the sense of Louis XIV: 'I am the State.' "

Most of us know that the Bush administration considers itself above the laws and the rest of us to be dumbass tools sent off to shoot up the world, sweep up, and be perhaps useful as organ donators, but what's interesting is this characterization comes from a Reagan Republican.

Update: asshole (a feel good link)

Micro, microecon

On my street, three of the 24 houses are for sale, two of those for more than a year. Out on the main road there are two new homes, built on spec I think, that are also unsold. There has been a sustained house building boom here in northeast Pennsylvania that may now have over built itself out business. Part of this slowdown may be due to local causes.

As more working people move here to escape the high cost of housing in New York and New Jersey, schools are being built and property taxes are going up. Soon they will be high enough to make housing in New Jersey competitive again. Also, under the best of traffic and weather conditions it takes 1 ½ to 1 ¾ hours to drive to New York. Commuting uses a lot of gas and as gas prices rise, along with interest rates, tight budgets become tighter and sometimes snap. Too many people that are driven by dreams of a country home, backyard and good schools make delusional calculations on what they can afford. There are a lot of foreclosed homes competing with a growing number of new houses for a dwindling number of buyers. I’m guessing that for many the financial benefit of living in the Poconos no longer out weighs the agony of spending four to six hours a day getting to work. I’m also betting that the swindling builders are no longer able close deals with wised up potential buyers, with an unfounded promise of a new commuter railroad to built any minute now.

In addition to keeping track of the homes on my street up for sale, I also study the golf courses. I used to golf and some friends still do. There are many public golf courses here and a few years ago they were crowded. There were usually more cars in the lots with New York and New Jersey plates than there those licensed in Pennsylvania. It was difficult to get tee times and when you did you crept along the course taking five and more hours to complete 18 holes. It was almost as frustrating as commuting. You paid a hundred bucks to get pissed off.

Now, no one is golfing; it seems. My friends that golf say the courses are nearly empty. You can play a round quickly and then go around again and again until dark. I confirm their observations every day on the way to the post office. The golf course at the bottom of the hill is always nearly empty or at best there are five or ten cars in the lot, a few more on weekends, very different from the spill over mobs a few years ago.

As with the collapse of the housing market I have guesses about empty golf courses too. Would be golfers are working long weekday hours and also weekend hours, because they are scared shitless they will lose their jobs and fail to keep up with a rising flood of debt. Those demands on workers, white and blue collared, coupled with family duties, leave no time for golf. An afternoon of golf today turns into hours of agonizing over vulnerabilities coming from things left undone.

At last check, the market was down better than a hundred points today, the drop mainly fueled by the diminished housing market.

Cancer update

The last few days I have been consumed with trying to find an MRI provider that could do an "endorectal coil" scan. Searched all of Northeast PA and nearly all of NJ, many, many telephone calls and finally, with the aid of the radiation oncologist’s staff, who also searched diligently, found one in Warren, near Plainfield.

As I understand it, the endorectal coil involves shoving some device up my ass to amplify the MRI. Supposedly it gives a more accurate image of my cancer area and thus allows them to more precisely guide the radiation treatments thus diminishing the chances of missing some cancer. Given the aggressive nature of my particular form, I expect a recurrence could kill me. Also, the enhanced image probably limits unnecessary collateral damage, which could include leaving me permanently incontinent (both bowl and urinary), impotent, and who knows what else. Imaging my pelvic area, of course, is complicated by my titanium hips which distorted earlier images.

Though this type of MRI is the one the radiation doc said was best, he said if I couldn't find it he'd make do with a regular scan. At first I was going to take the easy way out and just drive over to Pocono hospital and be satisfied with what they had. But I changed my mind. I figured if the cancer treatment goes bad, I don’t want to look back and say "I should have worked harder to find the endorectal coil."

To make matters more interesting, the MRI providers say I have to give myself a Fleet Enema, one hour before my scheduled scan. It could be an hour and a half drive to the provider, more in traffic.

In addition to being terrifying, having cancer is an unending unfolding of humiliations and disappointments. New news is nearly always bad. But maintaining a positive attitude is of critical importance. An important positive, so far, is the unanimous courtesy, kindness and diligence of the professionals and support staff I have encountered. It helps.

What also helps is that I diligently make myself aware that as cancers go, mine isn’t all that bad and that so many would gladly swap theirs for mine. In other words, I am usually successful at finding firm ground on which to build some gratitude.

Coping with rising water

Albert Naquin, chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha said, as another sun set on the encroaching waters. "I thought I could change the world, but the world is changing me."

From the last paragraph of "In Louisiana, a Sinking Island Wars With Water and the Government", New York Times. LINK

"Class War Politics" Krugman

Here's a paragraph from today's Krugman in the New York Times.

...if the real source of today's bitter partisanship is a Republican move to the right on economic issues, why have the last three elections been dominated by talk of terrorism, with a bit of religion on the side? Because a party whose economic policies favor a narrow elite needs to focus the public's attention elsewhere. And there's no better way to do that than accusing the other party of being unpatriotic and godless. ...

We all know this already but it's nice to see it in print. Here's a LINK but to access the column you need to be a subscriber.

More fuel for global warming

From: "Thawing permafrost could unleash tons of carbon" by Deborah Zabarenko.

...As the Siberian permafrost thaws, it will release the carbon contained in old grass roots and buried animal bones into the atmosphere, in what could be an unstoppable contributor to global climate change, according to the researchers.

Earlier climate models may have failed to account for this possible component of global warming, he(Ted Shuur, ecologist, University of Florida) said.

Schuur said this source of atmospheric carbon could create a vicious global warming cycle.

"You have anthropogenic (human-generated) carbon that's making things a little bit warmer, and that causes the permafrost to warm up and carbon is then released from the permafrost," he said. "It goes into the atmosphere and makes things warmer yet again, so then more permafrost thaws...LINK, Reuters

But there is good news, also from Reuters.

Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. (BSC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Thursday its quarterly profit rose 81 percent, easily beating estimates, as strong trading results boosted its key fixed income business.

Bear Stearns shares rose over 4 percent, in line with a rally in brokerage stocks, which outperformed the broader market after falling in recent sessions on concern about an overall plunge in equities. LINK

Thank God.

CNN, trusted source on the job

Britney Spears says she's an "emotional wreck".

Spears said she has wept on occasion over allegations that she is a bad mother, and wished only that paparazzi would leave her alone.

LINK

Altruistic practicality

It may be that the most effective tactic to win support for a Gore candidacy is to bring attention to global warming, its consequences and ways to arrest it.

Long term, altruism may always be the most practical course. In this case, since the issue is now closely connected to Gore, it certainly is.

Here's some paragraphs from an article on global warming, entirely available here LINK

…Global warming—and the other environmental disasters that will exacerbate and be exacerbated by global warming—doesn’t permit this hope. It takes forty years or more for the climate to react to the carbon dioxide and methane we emit. This means that the disasters that have already happened during the warmest decade in civilized history (severe droughts in the Sahel region of Africa, Western Australia, and Iberia; deadly flooding in Mumbai; hurricane seasons of unprecedented length, strength, and damage; extinction of many species; runaway glacial melt; deadly heat waves; hundreds of thousands of deaths all told) are not due to our current rates of consumption, but rather the delayed consequences of fuels burned and forests clear-cut decades ago, long before the invention of the Hummer. If we ceased all emissions immediately, global temperatures would continue to rise until around 2050.

This long lag is the feature that makes global warming so dangerous. Yes, this is how we would destroy ourselves—not by punching red buttons in an apocalyptic fit, but by appropriating to ourselves just a little too much comfort, a little too much warmth, a little too much time. Like Oedipus, we’ve been warned. Like Oedipus, we flout the warning, and we’ll act surprised, even outraged, when we find out what we’ve done….

…Only one feature of our otherwise forgotten 20th-century world seems likely to remain and be reinforced—the supreme importance of wealth. Rich countries will do better than poor countries, rich households will do better than poor households, rich species (Homo sapiens and their pets) will do better than poor species (all the rest). Global warming will deepen the divide between haves and have-nots—Hurricane Katrina offers a one-off example of how this can occur even in the US, but the sharper distinction will be international. As poor countries are hammered by sudden disasters and longer-term droughts, shortages, and epidemics, wealthier countries will paradoxically and perversely provide less aid, as they struggle with their own resource problems and future uncertainties. … LINK

(Via 3 Quarks Daily. I can't keep up with them.)

My guess is that there is a wide spread, if unstated, awareness and acceptance of the pending horror promised by global warming. This specter is what holds together those on the top rung of our society. The rich and powerful in the corporatocracy, especially those in the marginally elite mainstream media, believe there is not enough room in the lifeboat for everyone and their inclination is to protect their seats, their privileges, at the expense of their integrity. In short, those in power have basically written most of us off and have come together to save themselves and keep the rest of us deluded and at bay; come together not necessarily in a conscious conspiracy, but in some undercurrent of recognition and agreement of who’s in and who’s out.

The altruistic course, and likely the best one, is to work to save everyone. I hope this is the foundation of what left of center Democrats stand for.

We have the votes but not the counts

The Republican machine stole the 2004 Ohio election and thus the national election says Robert Kennedy Jr. in a Rolling Stone cover story due out Friday. The online version will be out tomorrow, according to The Brad Blog LINK

Unless opposition leaders spotlight the issue of election theft the Bush Republicans will do it again in 2006 and 2008. They will not risk losing control of Congress in a fair election.

Happy go lucky celebrity bloggers and party leaders out there in make believe land continue to play the who is going to be the cadidate game as if votes counted in key areas had anything to do with votes cast. You would think the obvious theft of two presidential elections would result in some action by a party investing millions in candidates. Don't get your hopes up.

We have the votes but we don't have the counts.

UPDATE: The complete Rolling Stone Kennedy article is now available here.

Finally, we kill the timid. They must have done something

Even though we are now a country that tortures prisoners and holds them without trial or charges, wages wars of aggression and is run by a fabulously wealthy corporate and military clique that ignores the Constitution when it suits them and uses terror to propagate their power, we still are largely under the mass delusion that we are somehow a special place with a special system where the worst abuses of corrupt power (because of our specialness) will not happen. What fools we are.

Below are a couple of paragraphs from an article I found linked on the very smart 3 Quarks Daily.

...On March 24 of that year (1976) a military coup, widely welcomed by the Argentine majority, overthrew the weak and vicious presidency of Isabel Perón. Hundreds had been killed before, mostly by the right. But the 1976 coup was the beginning of the “dirty war” in which some 30,000 people were murdered. ...

…Born in a country with 120 years of constitutional history, the seven-year Proceso, or national reorganization process, created a society of torture and murder. It was also about vanishing. The victims officially vanished from the earth, although at first bereaved parents might have been told that their missing child was in France. Sooner or later everyone understood that you could be seized, tormented, and killed apparently at random. The terror’s intent was, nominally, societal behavior modification. But you could burn your blue jeans and your books, cut your hair and cut off your politically suspect friends, and still you and your family could be disappeared….

…Out of the 5,300 people brought in to the ESMA about 200 survived. We will never know which of the 5,300 read the wrong books, had leftish sympathies, worked with guerrilla insurrectionists, or tossed bombs, because the regime destroyed its records when the dictatorship fell. There was no innocence. General Iberico Saint Jean said at the time, “First we kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators; then . . . their sympathizers, then those who are indifferent and finally we kill the timid.” But to many the military was never wrong; the mantra among the oppressors, the bystanders, and even some relatives of the victims was “they must have done something.”… LINK

Make no mistake about it, this is where the Republican far Right plutocrats and their numbskull working and middle class supporters are taking us. With the breakdown of rule of law, the corruption of the judiciary and the press, the privatization of the military, a replay of the Argentina experience is where we are headed. Someday, events like the Miami “riot” of Republican congressional staffers (at the time actually a wimpy little demonstration by banally evil thugs) that stopped a legal vote recount will be seen as milestones of our collapse, along with tolerance of officially condoned torture, illegal arrests, and fascist style spying on ordinary citizens.

I don’t think for a single second an election is going to rid us of them unless Democratic leaders magically find the courage to resist the Right’s every move and also do what it takes to ensure a fair election and somehow confront the attraction fascist rhetoric has for those that choose to be in the stubborn and willfully ignorant, but sizeable, voting wad.

Will your vote count?

As if we didn't know already, a column in the current Newsweek, "Will Your Vote Count" tells us that electronic voting machines are easily rigged.

May 29, 2006 issue - Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the voting booth, here comes more disturbing news about the trustworthiness of electronic touchscreen ballot machines. Earlier this month a report by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines for an organization called Black Box Voting. Hursti found unheralded vulnerabilities in the machines that are currently entrusted to faithfully record the votes of millions of Americans.

How bad are the problems? Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever documented. Basically the trouble stems from the ease with which the machine's software can be altered. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that, if it contained malicious code, could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. The machine could go dead on Election Day or throw votes to the wrong candidate. Worse, it's even possible for such ballot-tampering software to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems... LINK

With impeachment at stake, it is not too hard to imagine that the Republican vote fraud engine has subtly rigged key elections to ensure continued control of Congress. Not with easily detected massive fraud, but with just enough tweaking to get the job done while allowing most voters to maintain a comfortable delusion that elections are honest.

Another cancer update

My friend Jim at Noutopia wrote to ask how I was doing. I assumed he meant with my cancer. For anyone else interested, here's what I wrote back:

I feel fine. No symptoms, no side effects. There never were any. But there is some kind of jump into another dimension. Things look and feel different, almost watery, and I am more detached than ever, ever more keenly and immediately aware of impermanence. Very odd. But also feels very "true" and causes me to be more quiet, move more carefully and be more watchful and conscious of others, their agendas, feelings and importances.

Mostly I am quite content to hang out here with Joanne and the dogs. I take one pill a day. Have had a shot of something that lasts three months and if all goes well will begin a rigorous course of radiation sometime in July that will last nine weeks, five days a week. Very surreal. A huge rush of intense action and emotion followed by a stretch of nothing.

Hillary heads right

Here's Hillary on George Bush:

"He is someone who has a lot of charm and charisma, and I think in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I was very grateful to him for his support for New York," Clinton said Tuesday night during a talk at the National Archives about her life in politics.

Clinton, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, said that despite their "many disagreements about many, many issues," she has always had a good personal relationship with the president. ...

LINK

Bush's charm and charisma have been hidden from me but Hillary seems to have found them. She also finds something attractive in McCain, Newt Gingrich, Rupert Murdoch and Lindsay Graham. Here's a few paragraphs from an article in the Financial Times.

Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant who worked on Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign, said the alliance makes sense for both Mrs Clinton and Mr Murdoch. "She's not going any place. The only place she goes after this is the White House. Why not have a friend? That's a smart move for Mr Murdoch to make." He acknowledged that "there are some on the left who will feel that this is not a good thing".

But mainstream Democrats who want to ensure that Mrs Clinton wins re-election handily and is in a strong position to run for president will not mind. "They will see it as putting together a coalition that works."

Mrs Clinton has worked to tone down the liberal image she won during her husband's presidency, when she led the failed fight for national healthcare. She has courted Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, appearing with him on a panel on healthcare reform, and Republican senator Lindsay Graham, who was involved in impeachment charges against Mr Clinton....

LINK

She must be so confident of winning the nomination that she is already campaigning for Republican votes. The people she is courting need a kick in the teeth, not an embrace from someone so eager to earn approval from the Right. Hopefully, she is in for a big surprise in the primaries when the real "mainstream Democrats" show themselves to be well left of Hillary. It is amazing how eager so called centrists are to sell out the rest of us. Most are protecting comfy seats in Congress or cushy mainstream media jobs which they aim to keep no matter who is in power. To do this they work to be simultaneously Left and Right and all things to all people. Shape shifters like Hillary we do not need.

Right is wrong, no matter what party dress it comes in.

Update: More on "don't make waves" Democrats here.

Be careful who you piss on

Goss's resignation should come as no surprise to blog readers, especially those that follow Billmon. He was prescient last week, on April 28, when he wrote this:

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the news (from Harper's via TPM Muckraker) that Porter Goss, director of the CIA, may be implicated in a hooker service for corrupt (and horny) congressmen paid for by defense contractors and run out of -- you really gotta love this part -- the Watergate Hotel.....

...Goss has a lot of enemies, including just about the entire career staff at the CIA, which he has been industriously purging of suspected Democrats at the behest of his White House masters. (If Porter ever turns up dead, the suspect list is going to include half of the McLean, Va. phone book and most of the world's professional assassins.)...

LINK

So who knows what anonymous hands are helping run down all the threads winding through the Duke Cunningham toxic waste dump.

Josh Marshall gives us the backstory.

Billmon update: LINK

Woods for sale. Whose are they?

If you're planning to hike the Appalachian Trail, or visit any other areas in National Forests, you better get there in a hurry. The Bush regime needs money and to get it they are going to sell our woods. They're covering the sale by suggesting it's to help the poor.

Here's the first paragraphs of the story and a link to the rest.

National forest lands could go up for sale
Protests greet Bush administration proposal to offset states' losses from logging revenue

By Tom Pelton
Sun Reporter

ROANOKE, Va. // Along a rocky path of the Appalachian Trail, Sherman Bamford pointed to a mist-shrouded mountainside in the Thomas Jefferson National Forest, where 121 acres could soon be up for public auction.

The land is on a list of about 300,000 acres of national forest the Bush administration has proposed selling to help fund the operation of rural schools and offset cuts in federal aid.

Forest Service officials said yesterday that they do not expect to sell more than about 175,000 acres in order to reach their goal of raising $800 million. But auctioning any of the land would reverse more than a century of federal policy and law barring such sales of national forests....

LINK

(Thanks to America Blog.)

You can only sell them once. After the woods are gone maybe Bush will sell some monuments and whatever else he hasn't already given away to Halliburton.

Colbert 2

Here's a link to Michael Sherer's fun to read (but not for Bushistas) Salon article on the Colbert take down of the regime.

The truthiness hurts
Stephen Colbert's brilliant performance unplugged the Bush myth machine -- and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping.

Here's a sample:

...Then he turned to the president of the United States, who sat tight-lipped just a few feet away. "I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world." ...

...What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more "truthiness" than truth. ...

Thanks to Atrios

Billmon's review illustrates larger problem

Here's a lengthy quote from the center of Billmon's review comparing the movie American Nightmarez to Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents dinner.

"...Like its upscale sibling, the annual Gridiron Club dinner, the White House Correspondents dinner is a ritual designed, at least implicitly, to showcase the underlying unity of our Beltway elites. It's supposed to demonstrate that no matter how ferocious their battles may appear on the surface, political opponents can still gather in the same room and break bread, with the corporate media acting as the properly neutral host. It's a relic of the good old days of centrism and bipartisan log rolling ("the end of ideology"), visible proof that in the American system, there may be enemies, but there are no mortal enemies. And so we last night we had Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame sitting at one table, Karl Rove at another, and no knives were drawn.

The light entertainment at these events is also supposed to reflect the same spirit of forced good cheer, to the point where even matters of deadly seriousness -- things that in other countries might cause governments to fall -- are treated like inside jokes, as with Shrub's looking-for-the-missing-WMDs-under-the-couch routine. Ha ha ha. We're all friends here!

The underlying message, never stated or even acknowledged, is that there are no disputes that can't be resolved within the cozy confines of our "democratic" (oligarchic) system. Friends don't send friends to jail -- or smash their presses or abolish their political parties or line them up against the wall and shoot them.

The problem is that the tissue of this particular lie has been eroding ever since the Clinton impeachment, if not before, and is now worn exceedingly thin. It's becoming harder and harder to conceal the ruthlessness of the struggle for power, or ignore the consequences of losing it...."

LINK

The first inclination of nearly all the insider/plutocrats is to stick together when the status quo is threatened. Even the insider outsiders, like elected Democrats, supposedly neutral big media members and even many celebrity left of center writers, know their cushy lives, padded with gigantic pensions, and fantastic health insurance, depend on ruling class unity and keeping the great starry eyed wad deluded and dutifully trooping off to solemnly vote in rigged elections. (Oh shucks, we lost again; we’ll just have to tighten our belts and try harder in 2008.)

The complicity of the opposition, usually masked as civility, is much of what makes fascists, once in power, so difficult to dislodge.

Prostate cancer update

The two oncologists I consulted agree. The only real option is hormone therapy for three months followed by external radiation, 45 treatments, with hormone therapy continuing for up to two years.

I need an MRI because my two hip replacements obscured the CT scan view of the lymph glands near the prostate.

For me, here’s the key dialogue:

TR: This is probably a stupid question but is this going to kill me and in how long?

Sloan/Kettering, St. Clare’s oncologist: It’s a great question. Of course we don’t know but statistically you have about an 80% chance of living five years and a 60% of living ten….

There you have it. I am taking an oral med. Casodex 50mg once a day. Will get a hormonal injection, likely in the stomach, on Tuesday that should cover me for three months. If all goes well (meaning, among other things, the prostate gland shrinks) I will begin radiation.

There are numerous side effects from the hormonal treatments, though the oncologist said the intensity varies among individuals.

I told my daughter she may not be losing a father, but may be gaining a grandmother.

As for me, I have no symptoms, feel great, did fierce workouts three days last week, and intend to spend the weekend riding the Harley and raking leaves.

Goss goose cooked?

If you’re a procrastinator, like me, and looking for a way to wile away a few minutes and you really don’t want to deal with the implications of peak oil before the weekend but would rather daydream about Republicans sizzling on the spit, check out the last couple of posts from Billmon.

Cancer

The full body bone, CT scan and chest X-ray were all clean. Tomorrow I go to the second of two oncologists to discuss treatment. I will post all details tomorrow night or Saturday, but so far it appears I have late Stage 2 or early Stage 3 Prostate Cancer. Gleason scores were 8s and 9s. A year ago this May I had a PSA of 1.9. In March it was 4.7. The cancer seems to extend immediately beyond the "capsule" (whatever that is). But for very minor, barely noticeable occasional discomfort when peeing, I have no symptoms. I feel like I am in the best health of my life. (I'm 62)

As for the national cancer, there is almost too much going on for me to keep track of. Each of the great blogs, most of those listed to the right, are following one or another of the rapidly unraveling threads. Check them all out. Who knew we would have such easy access to so much brilliance. Enjoy it while you can because this freedom too won't last forever.