Rollback 2

Earlier in the week I posted about how it seems that the Bush Administration's anti-gay agenda is not limited to "protecting marriage," and, in fact, is also an effort to rollback those rights already granted to the gay community. Scorpio offered a list of links for my use, but I'd rather you go Eccentricity for them. I really have nothing more to add, other than the fact that this is an issue, and a policy strategy, that could easily fly under the radar if it is ignored by the SCLM and Kerry.

Former FBI Translator Adds Voice to the Chorus of BushCo Critics

They just keep coming and coming:

Mrs Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed "secure" room at its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBI's Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qa'ida attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps.

She said said it was clear there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an attack. "Most of what I told the commission ­ 90 per cent of it ­ related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well."

"President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away.

As former Reagan and Bush I staffer James Pinkerton wrote yesterday, "[Dr. Rice] might be able to say that she knew nothing about the dangers [Richard] Clarke was warning against and be totally immune from a perjury rap, by virtue of telling the truth. But of course, if Rice admits to that, she will have convicted herself of supreme incompetence."

Troops Not Stretched Too Thin, Eh?

Private U.S. Guards Take Big Risks for Right Price

Nestled inconspicuously amid the pinelands and horse farms of northeastern North Carolina lies a small but increasingly important part of the nation's campaign to stabilize Iraq.

Here, at the 6,000-acre training ground of Blackwater U.S.A., scores of former military commandos, police officers and civilians are prepared each month to join the lucrative but often deadly work of providing security for corporations and governments in the toughest corners of the globe.

<-snip->

Though there have been private militaries since the dawn of war, the modern corporate version got its start in the 1990's after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At that time, many nations were sharply reducing their military forces, leaving millions of soldiers without employment. Many of them went into business doing what they knew best: providing security or training others to do the same.

The proliferation of ethnic conflicts and civil wars in places like the Balkans, Haiti and Liberia provided employment for the personnel of many new companies. Business grew rapidly after the Sept. 11 attacks prompted corporate executives and government officials to bolster their security overseas.

But it was the occupation of Iraq that brought explosive growth to the young industry, security experts said. There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds of private military concerns around the world. As many as two dozen companies, employing as many as 15,000 people, are working in Iraq. [emphasis added]

So, we now have to hire mercenaries. But, according to Rumsfeld, our end strength is dandy. That doesn't exactly add up.

National Geographic Flirts with the Political

Bin Laden Hunt Hurt by U.S. Disrespect of Afghans, Experts Say

By disrespecting Pashtun tribal culture in Afghanistan, the United States may have failed to gain a vital ally in its search for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to experts, including National Geographic Adventure magazine's Robert Young Pelton.

I'm really, really surprised. But seriously, the article points out something that I was not aware of that it quite interesting:

Pelton believes raising the U.S. government's bounty on Osama bin Laden from 25 to 50 million dollars illustrates cultural ignorance of the Pashtun people.

"If bin Laden is a criminal, and he killed thousands of people, why do we need to pay someone 50 million dollars to turn him in?" Pelton asked. "To the Pashtuns, that's an insult."

This could support one or both of two hypotheses:

1. The American attempt to deal with other cultures is consistently ignorant, inept, and ham-fisted; and/or
2. As Kathryn Cramer suggests, "[The bounties] are not set that high so that your average person who just happens to know the fugitive is can collect. We do not see coverage of an Ed McMahon-like character out there handing out big checks to lucky Iraqis. Rather, those bounties are an announced market price for the fugitive, set to engage the attentions of private military companies."

I'm continually amazed that with our extensive academia and healthy intelligentsia that our government can't seem to get American brains to augment American muscle. Especially when you consider the cost of one component of military equipment, you would think that they could afford some good translators and experts in the values of other cultures.

All "Gunboats," No Colonies

When the word "empire" is used to describe current American geopolitical strategy, you are likely to be faced with an incredulous response, both from Bush Administration apologists and moderate voices on the left. "Where are the colonies?" is the typical rebuttal. Obviously, we do not have literal colonies across the world, and such obvious power outposts are considered to be the sine qua non of empire. But if you provisionally separate the form of empire with its function, to retain power over peoples and their natural resources, under what name should the function component be placed? Or to draw an imperfect analogy, we do not classify the United Kingdom as not being a democracy because its government is not precisely divided in the same form as ours. Even if it doesn't conform to our form of democracy, we are willing to grant that its essential function remains the same.

Tom Engelhardt, in "Twenty-first Century Gunboat Diplomacy," outlines exactly this distinction. He posits that "our particular version of military empire is perhaps unique: all 'gunboats,' no colonies." For no matter how benevolent we imagine American intentions to be, it is indubitably true that our global reach is unprecedented, and our ability to project military power in a way of our choosing has even resulted in the neologism "hyperpower." Englehardt begins "Twenty-first Century Gunboat Diplomacy" with a quick review of how gunboat diplomacy worked the first time around.

The wooden sailing ship mounted with cannons, the gunboat, [and] the battleship...-- these proved the difference between global victory and staying at home, between empire and nothing much at all. In the first couple of centuries of Europe's burst onto the world stage, the weaponry of European armies and their foes was not generally so disparate. It was those cannons on ships that decisively tipped the balance.

Though Engelhardt doesn't draw this particular analogy, the above scenario illustrates the confusion of power of force with power of history. Just as Europe believed that it was the fortunate victor out of the value of a "civilization" that it was destined to spread around the world (see "white man's burden"), we are now told that we will succeed merely because of the universal love of "freedom," not because we've got the biggest national muscles in the world. Again, we are assured that our virtual empire is fueled by pure idealism, and strengthened by an almost neo-Hegelian belief in the inevitability of the history we are making. But is that really our goal and motivation?

[O]ur military bases [are] liberally scattered like so many vast immobile vessels over the lands of the Earth. This has been especially true since the neocons of the Bush administration grabbed the reins of power at the Pentagon and set about reconceiving basing policy globally; set about, that is, creating more "mobile" versions of the military base, ever more stripped down for action, ever closer to what they've come to call the "arc of instability," a vast swath of lands extending from the former Yugoslavia and the former SSRs of Eastern Europe down deep into Northern Africa and all the way to the Chinese border. These are areas that represent, not surprisingly, the future energy heartland of the planet. What the Pentagon refers to as its "lily pads" strategy is meant to encircle and nail down control of this vast set of interlocking regions -- the thought being that, if the occasion arises, the American frogs can leap agilely from one prepositioned pad to another, knocking off the "flies" as they go.

To think that our historic interest in the Middle East has been devoid of considerations related to the area's considerable energy reserves is silly. And it would also be a mistake to think that Bush and prior Republican administrations are entirely unique in this regard. Yet, there is a palpable change of tone in the boldness of this administration's pursuit of global power.

As Chalmers Johnson has calculated it in his new book on American militarism, The Sorrows of Empire, our global Baseworld consists of at least 700 military and intelligence bases; possibly -- depending on how you count them up -- many more. This is our true "imperial fleet" (though, of course, we have an actual imperial fleet as well, our aircraft carriers alone being like small, massively armed towns). In the last decade-plus, as the pace of our foreign wars has picked up, we've left behind, after each of them, a new set of bases like the droppings of some giant beast marking the scene with its scent. Bases were dropped into Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf emirates after our first Gulf War in 1991; into the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo air war of 1999; into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and several of the former Central Asian SSRs after the Afghan war of 2001; and into Iraq after last year's invasion.

And related to a question I posed in an earlier post:

At least as now imagined in the Pentagon, twenty-second century "gunboat diplomacy" will be conducted by what the Air Force's Space Command refers to as "space-based platforms" and the "cannons" will be a range of "exotic" weapons and delivery systems. In still unweaponized space (if you exclude the various spy satellites overhead), we plan for our future "ships" to travel the heavens alone, representatives of a singular heavenly version of gunboat diplomacy. Among the "five priorities for national security space efforts in 2004" set out by Peter B. Teets, undersecretary of the Air Force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office, in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committe, the most striking, if also predictable, is that of "ensuring freedom of action in space" -- as in freedom of action for us, and no action at all for anyone else.

Americans are uncomfortable with such claims of an American empire. I chalk this up mostly to self-perceptions. We look at ourselves as good, and our government is supposed to be a representation of us. How could they not be good? Perhaps, though, it might be time to ask "How good do togas look with a baseball bat, an apple pie, and a space helmet?"

Rollback

White House agency head erasing sexual orientation from protection against bias
The official Bush Administration line is that its support for the Federal Marriage Amendment is not indicative of an anti-gay agenda, but merely the defense of a sacred, traditional institution. That official line has deserved plenty of suspicion. Yet, in an attempt (in hindsight terribly misguided) to be generous, and in the absence of countervailing evidence, I have approached Bush's support of the FMA as being for the reasons that he has stated. (I know. It is foolish to take this man at his word, but it isn't possible for every single word that comes out of his mouth to be a lie. Blame my inner skeptic, innocent until proven guilty demeanor, blah, blah, blah.) But now, it is looking increasingly obvious that his administration is about, rollback, not just the "protection of marriage."

Some gay and lesbian federal workers would lose protection against sexual orientation discrimination if the office charged with enforcing a nearly 30-year-old statute decides their complaints fall outside the scope of the law.

In February, the new head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, Scott Bloch, removed all references to sexual orientation from its Web site, brochures, training slides and complaint forms while he reviews the 1978 law that has been the basis for the investigation of such complaints.

<-snip->

White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said this week that the president believes no federal employee should be subjected to unlawful discrimination. "The administration will and does continue to vigorously enforce the law," she said.

But critics say Bloch's actions go directly against guidelines established as far back as 1980 by the federal Office of Personnel Management that list sexual orientation discrimination among prohibited personnel actions under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

That's right. A sexual orientation discrimination policy that survived the Reagan years is danger. I'm beginning to think that the "compassionate" in "compassionate conservatism" means "to the right of Reagan."

An Ugly Version of Zero Tolerance Policies

Welfare Reauthorization Delays Leave Recipients in Limbo

Kevin McGuire, executive director of the Maryland Department of Human Resources' Family Investment Administration, said [p]eople are participating [in welfare-to-work programs]..., but under current law their welfare-to-work hours do not count if they miss even a single hour of their commitment.

Yet another example of the value of family being only a rhetorical trope, with little meaning to those families who are considered indentured servants to the state.

With Common Goals, Why Such a Strange Strategy, Ralph?

Nader Advises Kerry to Loosen Up

Nader said he plans to meet with Kerry and former presidential candidate Howard Dean to discuss his strategy.

"I'm going to say 'Look, we have one thing in common. We want to send the Bush corporation back to Crawford, Texas.'"

I really wish he Nader would just drop out and work within the Democratic Party. It seems so obvious that I'm beginning to get the feeling that ol' Ralph is truly senile.

Where'd the Troops Go?

Conscientious Objectors from the State Department Speak Out

"Having served for six months in Afghanistan and having seen personally how far we had to go to bring the security environment into one that you could really start working on civil reconstruction of the country....If we had had that 130,000 troops we put in Iraq and put them into Afghanistan a year ago, things would be a hell of a lot different in Afghanistan. We've squandered time that we could have been using to wrap up Al Qaeda for a purpose that had nothing at all to do with the war on terrorism." - Ann Wright, former diplomat

How many professionals and insiders is it going to take before that becomes "common wisdom"?

Space Pearl Harbor

This makes absolutely no sense:

Shortly before his appointment as secretary of defense,...Donald Rumsfeld chaired a blue-ribbon commission investigating the role of space in national security. It concluded in January 2001 the likelihood of an attack on U.S. space systems needed to be taken seriously to prevent another "space Pearl Harbor."

Land, sea and air have seen conflict, the report noted, asserting space will be no different. "Given this virtual certainty, the U.S. must develop the means to both deter and to defend against hostile acts in and from space."

The report remains consistent with the Defense Department's current position on weapons in space, a Defense spokesperson confirmed.

Keep in mind that in January 2001 it was not a "virtual certainty" that there had been bodies of water on Mars, and the list of countries with viable space programs is not that large. So, without an astral-Qaeda or a Martian Martyrs Brigade, who exactly is going to embark upon a "space Pearl Harbor"?

No Protesting in Crawford, TX

The Progressive has been running a section of their website under the title "McCarthyism Watch," and I finally got around to seeing this item from March 17^th:

At [the] trial [of the Crawford Five], the police testified that the protesters in Crawford were yelling "anti-Bush, anti-war slogans," though the defendants deny this and a tape of the arrests backs them up, they say.

Their lawyer, Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, cross-examined Police Chief Tidmore and extracted an alarming--and telling--concession from him.

Harrington asked him "whether one of the defendants would have violated the ordinance by sporting political buttons, such as those that read 'No Nukes' and 'Peace,' without the permit," according to the Waco Tribune-Herald.

"It could be a sign of demonstration," Chief Tidmore responded, according to the paper.

WTF?

Born into Brothels

Kids with Cameras
This past weekend I saw the documentary film Born into Brothels. I'm not sure when or if it will get wider release in the theatres (it will be on HBO Spring of 2005), but if you get a chance to see it, you really should. Check out the website, and if you have the money and like the photos, which are really excellent, you can feel good buying them knowing that the money goes to these kids' education.

Kerry Proposes the Inventors Tax

Bush Campaign Says Kerry Would Raise Gas Taxes

President Bush, faced with record-high fuel prices, will accuse Democrat John Kerry on Tuesday of wanting to increase gasoline taxes.

A new television advertisement from the Bush re-election campaign seeks to pre-empt Kerry's announcement on Tuesday of a new plan to reduce fuel costs.

"Some people have wacky ideas, like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That's John Kerry," the Bush ad will say.

<-snip->

Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday accused Kerry of planning to eliminate many expiring tax cuts and said he faced a $1 trillion gap in paying for his own spending proposals.

"It takes little imagination to figure out just how he would fill that tax gap -- a major new tax increase on the workers, entrepreneurs and inventors of this country," Cheney said in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

I'm kidding about the title, but isn't there something "wacky" about suggesting that people in the highest tax brackets are, as Cheney claims, "the workers, entrepreneurs and inventors of this country"?

And regarding that "wacky" concept of the gas tax: it's called Pigou's Solution. It may be wacky to a potatohead, but it's really not all that bad of an idea.

WorldNetDaily (Perhaps Accidentally) Undercuts the Hypothesis of Liberal Media Bias?!?!

Strange things in strange places, I guess. But in an article titled "NBC News dumps Ashleigh Banfield: Contract not renewed for reporter who bashed network war coverage," WND either reveals an instance of liberal media reverse psychology judo, or undercuts the case that our media is run by a bunch of pacifist commies.

Banfield was officially scolded by network President Neal Shapiro for remarks she made ripping her colleagues in TV news for allegedly sugarcoating Iraq war coverage with patriotism and not showing the realities of the conflict.

Banfield, in a speech at Kansas State University, had lashed out at "cable news operators who wrap themselves in the American flag and go after a certain target demographic."

Banfield also claimed in her speech TV should have shown the gruesome results of coalition force in Iraq.

"We didn't see what happened when Marines fired M-16s," Banfield said. "We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?"

Why hasn't that other comrade outpost CNN picked up this bourgeois ideology-exploding warrior yet?

A Tale of Two Violences

David Neiwert has an extremely good piece comparing the Boston union violence to something that happened in Atlanta. Read it.

UPDATE: It seems that the story that Neiwert reported may not be true. He explains on the same post as the one in which the story was first mentioned.

Pleasure and Procreation

Concomitant with the homosexuality contra nature argument is the axiom of reproductive primacy given to sexuality in general. It is said that the heterosexual family is the natural result of humankind's reproductive urge, a model against which any other family structure can only be an aberration. A corollary of this way of thinking is the hyperbolic claim that rampant homosexuality, or even its acceptance and tolerance, could lead to the extinction of the species. Biological Exuberance yet again offers empirical refutations of that line of thinking.

[I]f homosexuality actually resulted in a significant decrease in population growth, one might expect it to be disproportionately represented among animals that are suffering a severe decline in numbers....However, of the 2,203 mammals and birds in the world that are currently classified as threatened..., homosexuality has been documented in just over 2 percent of these. Moreover, the distribution of homosexuality across different species clearly has nothing to do with their endangered status: there are examples of two closely related species, such as the Pukeko and the takahe - two birds of New Zealand - in which homosexuality only occurs in the nonendangered one (the Pukeko) [original emphasis]; or animals in which one subspecies is endangered...yet homosexuality is not restricted to this subspecies; or else cases in which one or more subspecies are threatened..., yet homosexual behavior is found in the nonthreatened subspecies of the same animal....

One explanation offered is the fact that homosexual animals often do procreate, and when they do not, they often play an integral role in the raising of offspring, sometimes even "baby-sitting":

[A]mong Hanuman Langurs..."helpers" actually enable breeding animals [original emphasis] to participate in homosexual activity. Mothers in this species often engage in same-sex mounting, but only when they have been temporarily "freed" from their parental duties by other individuals who "baby-sit" their young.

Pleasure and procreation don't seem to be inextricably bound together in the "natural," non-human world. Why think that they have to be in the human world?

If People Actually Believe the Truth, It Could Be Dangerous

G.I.'s Padlock Baghdad Paper Accused of Lies

[Al Elsadr, the media liaison for the occupation government,] said that incitement of violence could come in many forms and that it did not have to be direct to be considered a violation of the administrative law.

"If people actually believed that coalition forces were slaughtering civilians," he said, "it could be real dangerous. That's incitement."

Yet:

In January 2003, when war was looming, several anti-war activists in the United States and Britain started Iraq Body Count, whose Web site posts a running tally of civilian deaths in Iraq. On Tuesday the group estimated that 8,581 to 10,430 Iraqis had perished, based on incidents reported in the news media and eyewitness accounts.

The group's co-founder, Hamit Dardagan, said the numbers are essential.

"It was absolutely necessary for people to know the death toll in the World Trade Center bombing," he said, "so that people could gauge the extent of the calamity. In Iraq, people apparently don't want to know. Saddam Hussein is gone. That's a good thing, but there are people who paid the price for that."

You see, 3,000 Americans were slaughtered, but 8,581 to 10,430 Iraqis just got in the way of freedom.

New York Times link via Musing's musings

Don't Tie a Yellow Ribbon Around This Tree

Color me confused, but I've never viewed a yellow ribbon as an explicitly political statement, and certainly not a partisan one.

Yellow ribbons tied around utility poles to welcome soldiers home from Iraq were removed by the National Park Service, which says they are a political statement.

About a dozen ribbons were posted along a park service-owned street that runs through the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, where his presidential library, birthplace and gravesite are all located.

Yo, Gale Norton, what's the deal?

Kerry Is Not Allowed to Quote the Bible in Church

Kerry quotes Bible, irks Bush camp

"The scriptures say, what does it profit, my brother, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?" Kerry said. "When we look at what is happening in America today, where are the works of compassion?"

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said Kerry's comment "was beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and a sad exploitation of scripture for a political attack."

One word: hypocrisy.

Things Going Grrrrrreat!!! in Afghanistan

UN warns on Afghanistan reverting to terrorism

Iraq is receiving "10 times as much development assistance with roughly the same size of population". Development inflows amount to $67 per person, compared with $248 in Bosnia Herzegovina and $256 in East Timor, according to the report.

Could BushCo stop acting like Afghanistan was a success and spend some money and time making it one?

Chimps Do It!

For somewhat obvious reasons, arguments against homosexuality reasoned from "nature" have always struck me as both absurd and disingenuous. If nature is the final arbiter of morality, then we would all have to ascribe to an extremist simplicity that could make the Amish look like abject hedonists. We are surrounded by technology and culture, both of which, though arguably results of "human nature," are typically approached as being antithetical to nature, and we do not thereby make moral issues of the internet, the toaster, or the square dance.

Yet, there has always been something else that bothered me about the homosexuality contra nature argument: it is not true. Anyone who has observed two cats or dogs of the same sex knows better. Such common household pets regularly engage in what can only be described as homoerotic acts. Of course, those our dogs and cats, someone might say, and we are not dogs or cats. We are human beings. Our nature and their nature are not the same thing. Perhaps. But if we are not to have a basis for a "natural" human act in an observance of nature, of what veracity can that model of "human nature" be?

Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, written by biologist Bruce Bagemihl, Ph.D., offers over 700 pages of information that is a direct refutation of any semblance between traditional Western sexual morality and what is natural. Drawing on the observations of over 300 species of mammals and birds, the book is an illustration of just how varied life on this planet is.

However, the most telling species in a discussion of human sexuality would be our closest living "cousin," the Common Chimpanzee. Ladies first, as they say:

Female Chimpanzees participate in a variety of same-sex activities. One form of mutual genital stimulation is sometimes known as Bumprump: two females, standing on all fours and facing in opposite directions, rub their rumps together (usually in an up-and-down motion), stimulating their genital and anal regions. Sometimes one female lies on top of the other in a face-to-face position - or the two sit facing one another - rubbing their genitals together. Mounting also occurs in the front-to-back position typical of heterosexual mating.

<-snip->

Females that participate in same-sex activities are also usually functionally bisexual, copulating with males as well. However, a few individuals appear to be more exclusively homosexual: one female, for example, refused to mate with males and was only involved sexually with other females for many years. She even developed a close relationship with another female and her offspring. Socially, she occupied an intermediate position between the male and female subgroups: she often associated with males and "ganged up" with them against other individuals, but she also maintained primary bonds with females and sometimes even defended them against the sexual advances of males.

While it is not known exactly how prevalent female same-sex activity is:

Mounting between males constitutes anywhere from 1-2 percent to one-third or one-half of the behaviors involved in reassurance, enlistment of support, and other activities during or following conflicts. Kissing and embracing between males constitute from 12-30 percent of such interactions (depending on the population). Overall, 29-33 percent of all mounting activity occurs between males.

I am fully aware of how limited such observations will be to counter arguments made by those that do not ascribe to an evolutionary tree of life. Appeals to our genetic closeness to Common Chimpanzees will fall on deaf ears. However, I do believe that this information could at least blunt the force of the natural argument. This is a multi-front debate, and I hope to provide further information that will make the common (non)sense arguments against homosexuality moot.

And This Is the "Good Guy"?

Chalabi: A Questionable Use of U.S. Funding

In 2001, State Department auditors found that the defector program had rung up more than $465,000 in costs that were 'inadequately' or entirely undocumented. A subsequent audit found that the INC had improved its accounting methods. Even so, the State Department decided in summer 2002 that it no longer wanted to pay $150,000 per month to the INC for 'information collection.'

These are the Iraqis that our government thought to be worthy of our trust? Just when you think it couldn't get any worse...