Delaware Libertarian
With Bubba, nothing is ever simple, so you always have to ask...
... is this what he really thinks, or is this the first step in either setting up Hillary for a primary challenge in 2010 or insulating himself from the new interview tapes?
Whichever it happens to be, former President Bill Clinton draws a distinctive line between himself and Jimmy Carter on CNN:
(CNN) – Former President Bill Clinton told CNN Monday that he thinks some of the criticism directed at President Obama is racially motivated, but added that not all of Obama’s detractors are racist and urged his fellow Democrats to remain focused on trying to enact health care reform.
“I believe that some of the right-wing extremists which oppose President Obama are also racially prejudiced and would prefer not to have an African-American president,” Clinton told CNN’s Larry King in an interview to air Monday evening. “But I don’t believe that all the people who oppose him on health care – and all the conservatives – are racists. And I believe if he were white, every single person who opposes him now, would be opposing him then. Therefore, while I have devoted my life to getting rid of racism, I think this is a fight that my president and our party – this is one we need to win on the merits.”
Clinton later added, “I really think that we should disaggregate lingering problems of discrimination from the attacks to which the president is subject.”
Whichever it happens to be, former President Bill Clinton draws a distinctive line between himself and Jimmy Carter on CNN:
(CNN) – Former President Bill Clinton told CNN Monday that he thinks some of the criticism directed at President Obama is racially motivated, but added that not all of Obama’s detractors are racist and urged his fellow Democrats to remain focused on trying to enact health care reform.
“I believe that some of the right-wing extremists which oppose President Obama are also racially prejudiced and would prefer not to have an African-American president,” Clinton told CNN’s Larry King in an interview to air Monday evening. “But I don’t believe that all the people who oppose him on health care – and all the conservatives – are racists. And I believe if he were white, every single person who opposes him now, would be opposing him then. Therefore, while I have devoted my life to getting rid of racism, I think this is a fight that my president and our party – this is one we need to win on the merits.”
Clinton later added, “I really think that we should disaggregate lingering problems of discrimination from the attacks to which the president is subject.”
Truth in advertising: not everybody who tried to sting ACORN ended up with what they thought....
... and this story is actually about ACORN Delaware.
Nancy Armstrong is a disabled USN vet and a blogger out of Wichita KS, who is interested in investigating ACORN's funding sources. She is far less sensational than most, and--a pleasant rarity in the world today--actually reports factual information that would run counter to her original thesis.
Armstrong recently published an investigative post about where ACORN is finding the money to do foreclosure counseling, and she lays out the organization's profit or potential profit from a number of lawsuits, including actions acainst HSBC and Sherwin Williams. That's interesting, but not germane to my point today.
Armstrong apparentely attempted her own sting operation in June 2009 to discover what kind of response people who turn to ACORN for mortgage foreclosure help get.
What drew me to this post is that her target was ACORN Delaware. [Who knows why a woman in Kansas calls ACORN Delaware?]
Here's what she writes:
ACORN has become directly involved in stopping foreclosures by doing foreclosure counseling with “housing experts.” Recently I spoke with the ACORN Delaware office purposely representing myself as a person who is in foreclosure in the State of Delaware to elicit details of the counseling. The polite and knowledgeable representative in the ACORN Delaware office answered my questions in full.
I told her that I needed to forestall a foreclosure. She informed me there were documents that I need to provide to the ACORN office to go “through the foreclosure counseling process.”
Here is a list of those items I needed to provide at “my appointment”:
1. Current mortgage statement
2. 2008 Federal Tax Return
3. Sheriff’s Sale Date
4. Current W-2
5. If you are disabled they require the follwing documents:
a. Current VA Award Letter
b. Current SSI award Statement
Uh, gee--the polite and knowledgeable representative in the ACORN Delaware office?
And for an intake interview, look at the documents required. Precisely what you would expect for somebody to make an initial determination of whether they could help you.
But, strangely enough, no major blogs or outlets for the MSM have ever picked up Ms. Armstrong's post.
Sometimes that can be written off to the fact that there is no news when things go the way they are supposed to go, but in this case it is also possible that ACORN has simply become to radioactive for the MSM to handle in any objective fashion. It's not middle class. It's pretty radical in its approach to a lot of issues. It has ugly corners while it is arguably doing some good work.
Easier to go with the pimp and the prostitute who were no more real than Ms. Armstrong's fictive Delaware citizen in foreclosure.
Here's my challenge for the members of our local blogosphere: if you are going to write about ACORN, write [as pretty much only Nancy Willing has heretofore done] about what's going on at ACORN Delaware. What are they doing and how well are they doing it?
What's fascinating is that the entire WNJ piece on the ACORN imbroglio last week only really covered comments positive [John Kowalko] or negative [Wayne Smith] on ACORN, without actually providing any independently garnered information on what ACORN Delaware does.
[If, like me, you can't read a quote in which Wayne Smith accuses someone else of having politicized issues without smiling, you may not have noticed the WNJ oversight in this regard.]
Nancy Armstrong is a disabled USN vet and a blogger out of Wichita KS, who is interested in investigating ACORN's funding sources. She is far less sensational than most, and--a pleasant rarity in the world today--actually reports factual information that would run counter to her original thesis.
Armstrong recently published an investigative post about where ACORN is finding the money to do foreclosure counseling, and she lays out the organization's profit or potential profit from a number of lawsuits, including actions acainst HSBC and Sherwin Williams. That's interesting, but not germane to my point today.
Armstrong apparentely attempted her own sting operation in June 2009 to discover what kind of response people who turn to ACORN for mortgage foreclosure help get.
What drew me to this post is that her target was ACORN Delaware. [Who knows why a woman in Kansas calls ACORN Delaware?]
Here's what she writes:
ACORN has become directly involved in stopping foreclosures by doing foreclosure counseling with “housing experts.” Recently I spoke with the ACORN Delaware office purposely representing myself as a person who is in foreclosure in the State of Delaware to elicit details of the counseling. The polite and knowledgeable representative in the ACORN Delaware office answered my questions in full.
I told her that I needed to forestall a foreclosure. She informed me there were documents that I need to provide to the ACORN office to go “through the foreclosure counseling process.”
Here is a list of those items I needed to provide at “my appointment”:
1. Current mortgage statement
2. 2008 Federal Tax Return
3. Sheriff’s Sale Date
4. Current W-2
5. If you are disabled they require the follwing documents:
a. Current VA Award Letter
b. Current SSI award Statement
Uh, gee--the polite and knowledgeable representative in the ACORN Delaware office?
And for an intake interview, look at the documents required. Precisely what you would expect for somebody to make an initial determination of whether they could help you.
But, strangely enough, no major blogs or outlets for the MSM have ever picked up Ms. Armstrong's post.
Sometimes that can be written off to the fact that there is no news when things go the way they are supposed to go, but in this case it is also possible that ACORN has simply become to radioactive for the MSM to handle in any objective fashion. It's not middle class. It's pretty radical in its approach to a lot of issues. It has ugly corners while it is arguably doing some good work.
Easier to go with the pimp and the prostitute who were no more real than Ms. Armstrong's fictive Delaware citizen in foreclosure.
Here's my challenge for the members of our local blogosphere: if you are going to write about ACORN, write [as pretty much only Nancy Willing has heretofore done] about what's going on at ACORN Delaware. What are they doing and how well are they doing it?
What's fascinating is that the entire WNJ piece on the ACORN imbroglio last week only really covered comments positive [John Kowalko] or negative [Wayne Smith] on ACORN, without actually providing any independently garnered information on what ACORN Delaware does.
[If, like me, you can't read a quote in which Wayne Smith accuses someone else of having politicized issues without smiling, you may not have noticed the WNJ oversight in this regard.]
We have already failed in Afghanistan....
... which is something we need to admit before too many more young Americans, Brits, Canadians, Germans, and Italians die to prove it to our military and political leadership.
Yes, with the 40-45,000 additional troops that General McChrystal wants, we could win a short-term victory against the Taliban, at the cost of several thousand casualties over the next three years. But what then? Exactly how long is the United States willing to leave a garrison force of 50-100,000 in Afghanistan to enforce the so-called peace? Five years? Twenty?
Nor can we depend on the Afghan security forces, whose budget will be nearly four times the GDP of the entire country.
The Canadians, it seems, are being much more honest about this than the Americans, as The Independent reports:
It is instructive to turn at this moment to the Canadian army, which has in Afghanistan fewer troops than the Brits but who have suffered just as ferociously; their 130th soldier was killed near Kandahar this week. Every three months, the Canadian authorities publish a scorecard on their military "progress" in Afghanistan – a document that is infinitely more honest and detailed than anything put out by the Pentagon or the Ministry of Defence – which proves beyond peradventure (as Enoch Powell would have said) that this is Mission Impossible or, as Toronto's National Post put it in an admirable headline three days' ago, "Operation Sleepwalk". The latest report, revealed this week, proves that Kandahar province is becoming more violent, less stable and less secure – and attacks across the country more frequent – than at any time since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. There was an "exceptionally high" frequency of attacks this spring compared with 2008.
There was a 108 per cent increase in roadside bombs. Afghans are reporting that they are less satisfied with education and employment levels, primarily because of poor or non-existent security. Canada is now concentrating only on the security of Kandahar city, abandoning any real attempt to control the province.
Canada's army will be leaving Afghanistan in 2011, but so far only five of the 50 schools in its school-building project have been completed. Just 28 more are "under construction". But of Kandahar province's existing 364 schools, 180 have been forced to close. Of progress in "democratic governance" in Kandahar, the Canadian report states that the capacity of the Afghan government is "chronically weak and undermined by widespread corruption". Of "reconciliation" – whatever that means these days – "the onset of the summer fighting season and the concentration of politicians and activists for the August elections discouraged expectations of noteworthy initiatives...".
Even the primary aim of polio eradication – Ottawa's most favoured civilian project in Afghanistan – has defeated the Canadian International Development Agency, although this admission is cloaked in truly Blair-like (or Brown-like) mendacity. As the Toronto Star revealed in a serious bit of investigative journalism this week, the aim to "eradicate" polio with the help of UN and World Health Organisation money has been quietly changed to the "prevention of transmission" of polio. Instead of measuring the number of children "immunised" against polio, the target was altered to refer only to the number of children "vaccinated". But of course, children have to be vaccinated several times before they are actually immune.
The Independent also captures the change in NATO [which means "America"] policy in Afghanistan, which has gone from the traditional mission creep toward downright mission vacillation or even mission du jeur:
Colin Kenny, chair of Canada's senate committee on national security and defence, said this week that "what we hoped to accomplish in Afghanistan has proved to be impossible. We are hurtling towards a Vietnam ending"....
Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message. Afghanistan remains for him the "war of necessity". Send yet more troops, his generals plead. And we are supposed to follow the logic of this nonsense. The Taliban lost in 2001. Then they started winning again. Then we had to preserve Afghan democracy. Then our soldiers had to protect – and die – for a second round of democratic elections. Then they protected – and died – for fraudulent elections. Afghanistan is not Vietnam, Obama assures us. And then the good old German army calls up an air strike – and zaps yet more Afghan civilians.
But perhaps President Obama is beginning to realize the depth of the hole he has dug for himself.
He is now vacillating on the commitment of additional troops for Afghanistan, with the White House refusing to say when he will make a final decision, while at the same time our Bush-era military leaders [SecDef Gates, Admiral Mullen, Generals Petraeus and McChrystal] are growing increasingly impatient.
Meanwhile, NATO troops [most of whom are Americans] and Afghan civilians continue to die.
I understand the calls that will come from my friends on the right, not to abandon our troops, not to make vain the sacrifices already made, not to cut and run.
But here's the unpalatable truth: even if we give McChrystal 45,000 more American troops, and he executes his plan to perfection, thousands more Americans will be killed or wounded over the next three years, and within a decade the situation in Afghanistan will be back to where it was before 2001. Afghanistan is not a failed state, it is a non-state. Since World War Two we have operated under the delusion that the only possible social organization in the modern world is the nation-state with a strong central government. It's not, and in many cultures it is not even the preference of the people.
Outsiders since Alexander the Great have been trying to change that reality in Afghanistan for over 2,000 years, with a uniform lack of success.
It is not worth another American of Afghan life to discover we are not exempt from the major rules and forces of history.
It is not morally acceptable to remain quiet while President Obama vacillates and more Americans die in a war where even winning will not mean winning.
Yes, with the 40-45,000 additional troops that General McChrystal wants, we could win a short-term victory against the Taliban, at the cost of several thousand casualties over the next three years. But what then? Exactly how long is the United States willing to leave a garrison force of 50-100,000 in Afghanistan to enforce the so-called peace? Five years? Twenty?
Nor can we depend on the Afghan security forces, whose budget will be nearly four times the GDP of the entire country.
The Canadians, it seems, are being much more honest about this than the Americans, as The Independent reports:
It is instructive to turn at this moment to the Canadian army, which has in Afghanistan fewer troops than the Brits but who have suffered just as ferociously; their 130th soldier was killed near Kandahar this week. Every three months, the Canadian authorities publish a scorecard on their military "progress" in Afghanistan – a document that is infinitely more honest and detailed than anything put out by the Pentagon or the Ministry of Defence – which proves beyond peradventure (as Enoch Powell would have said) that this is Mission Impossible or, as Toronto's National Post put it in an admirable headline three days' ago, "Operation Sleepwalk". The latest report, revealed this week, proves that Kandahar province is becoming more violent, less stable and less secure – and attacks across the country more frequent – than at any time since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. There was an "exceptionally high" frequency of attacks this spring compared with 2008.
There was a 108 per cent increase in roadside bombs. Afghans are reporting that they are less satisfied with education and employment levels, primarily because of poor or non-existent security. Canada is now concentrating only on the security of Kandahar city, abandoning any real attempt to control the province.
Canada's army will be leaving Afghanistan in 2011, but so far only five of the 50 schools in its school-building project have been completed. Just 28 more are "under construction". But of Kandahar province's existing 364 schools, 180 have been forced to close. Of progress in "democratic governance" in Kandahar, the Canadian report states that the capacity of the Afghan government is "chronically weak and undermined by widespread corruption". Of "reconciliation" – whatever that means these days – "the onset of the summer fighting season and the concentration of politicians and activists for the August elections discouraged expectations of noteworthy initiatives...".
Even the primary aim of polio eradication – Ottawa's most favoured civilian project in Afghanistan – has defeated the Canadian International Development Agency, although this admission is cloaked in truly Blair-like (or Brown-like) mendacity. As the Toronto Star revealed in a serious bit of investigative journalism this week, the aim to "eradicate" polio with the help of UN and World Health Organisation money has been quietly changed to the "prevention of transmission" of polio. Instead of measuring the number of children "immunised" against polio, the target was altered to refer only to the number of children "vaccinated". But of course, children have to be vaccinated several times before they are actually immune.
The Independent also captures the change in NATO [which means "America"] policy in Afghanistan, which has gone from the traditional mission creep toward downright mission vacillation or even mission du jeur:
Colin Kenny, chair of Canada's senate committee on national security and defence, said this week that "what we hoped to accomplish in Afghanistan has proved to be impossible. We are hurtling towards a Vietnam ending"....
Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message. Afghanistan remains for him the "war of necessity". Send yet more troops, his generals plead. And we are supposed to follow the logic of this nonsense. The Taliban lost in 2001. Then they started winning again. Then we had to preserve Afghan democracy. Then our soldiers had to protect – and die – for a second round of democratic elections. Then they protected – and died – for fraudulent elections. Afghanistan is not Vietnam, Obama assures us. And then the good old German army calls up an air strike – and zaps yet more Afghan civilians.
But perhaps President Obama is beginning to realize the depth of the hole he has dug for himself.
He is now vacillating on the commitment of additional troops for Afghanistan, with the White House refusing to say when he will make a final decision, while at the same time our Bush-era military leaders [SecDef Gates, Admiral Mullen, Generals Petraeus and McChrystal] are growing increasingly impatient.
Meanwhile, NATO troops [most of whom are Americans] and Afghan civilians continue to die.
I understand the calls that will come from my friends on the right, not to abandon our troops, not to make vain the sacrifices already made, not to cut and run.
But here's the unpalatable truth: even if we give McChrystal 45,000 more American troops, and he executes his plan to perfection, thousands more Americans will be killed or wounded over the next three years, and within a decade the situation in Afghanistan will be back to where it was before 2001. Afghanistan is not a failed state, it is a non-state. Since World War Two we have operated under the delusion that the only possible social organization in the modern world is the nation-state with a strong central government. It's not, and in many cultures it is not even the preference of the people.
Outsiders since Alexander the Great have been trying to change that reality in Afghanistan for over 2,000 years, with a uniform lack of success.
It is not worth another American of Afghan life to discover we are not exempt from the major rules and forces of history.
It is not morally acceptable to remain quiet while President Obama vacillates and more Americans die in a war where even winning will not mean winning.
Why some days I really hate the internet
This excerpt from Max Blumenthal's new book Republican Gomorrah has gone damn-near viral on the web:
At the Charter School for Excellence, a school in South Florida inspired by Gothard's draconian principles that receives $800,000 in state funds each year, children are indoctrinated into a culture of absolute submission to authority almost as soon as they learn to speak. A song that the school's first-graders are required to recite goes as follows:
Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly.
For when I am busy at my work or play,
And someone calls my name, I'll answer right away!
I'll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say "Yes, sir!" "Yes ma am!"
Hup, two, three!
The larger excerpt is actually about the impact of Christian right self-help guru Bill Gothard, and don't get me wrong, Gothard and his devotees [who apparently include Mike Huckabee] are dangerous loons.
So much so that I wanted to find out more about this whack-a-doodle Charter School for Excellence in Florida.
There may be a footnote in Blumenthal's book, but there is not a note or a link in any of the excerpts I could find. So I went searching. Doing "Charter School for Excellence" Florida Gothard will only bring up multiple copies of the same excerpt at leftist blogs around the net. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.
So I decided to leave Gothard's name out of it, figuring that the school might not reference him on its website. For "Charter School for Excellence" Florida you end up with The Charter Schools OF [not "for"] Excellence in Ft. Lauderdale FL. This is definitely NOT a Christian front school, as anybody with educational experience can tell. They use the Core Knowledge approach pioneered by E D Hirsch of Cultural Literacy fame, including the same literature series currently in use in Red Clay, as well as Saxon Math.
Could it possibly be the same school Blumenthal mentions?
Careful searching led me back to this May 1999 entry at AANews [an atheist watch organization]:
In our AANEWS for April 28, 1999 we profiled a "character education" program in Florida head by an evangelical extremist. Children at the Charter School of Excellence were being trained in this program, which included the mindless and repetitive recitation of the following frightening ditty...
"Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly,
For when I am busy at work or play,
And somebody calls my name, I'll answer right away!
I'll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say 'Yes, Sir!' 'Yes ma'am!'
Hup, two, three!"
I have been diligently trying to track down the original April 28, 1999 post, but it does not appear to exist on the net [although it may still be lurking in some archive accessible in search terms I have not discovered yet].
I have, however, found this February 1999 article with all the same information in the Broward/Palm Beach Herald.
From that story I found another potential link between the current Charter School OF Excellence and the 1999 Charter School FOR Excellence: the current school, which was founded in 1997, utilizes as one part of its curriculum the Character First! program, which was, if you look really really far down the page, at least partly inspired by Bill Gothard. However, and it is a pretty big however, lots of public school districts and schools across the nation use Character First!, without knowing [I suspect] that this program has any connection to a Christian self-help huckster.
But that 1997 date was troubling: could the two schools be the same? Turns out they are, or maybe they once were. You decide.
On the list of the Board of Directors is one "Hamilton C. Forman, Secretary."
This is what the Broward/Palm Beach Herald reveals in its 1999 story: Forman is a liberal Democrat with deep pockets for political donations who was in fact on the board of the school that Blumenthal described, and even at one point tried to push the adoption of Character First! statewide. Then he fould out where it came from and what was in it--to include the songs being sung. This was his reaction:
Howard Forman now says he doesn't believe Character First! should be put in Florida's public schools. "I never heard of Gothard, and I think his ideas sound kind of screwy," Forman says. "I don't support the kind of character training where people sing songs about discipline. I don't support religious extremists of any kind."
Character First! is still around, and if you look at the Character Qualities and Leadership Perspectives documents you may agree that while they seem to harbor many pieces of modern education-speak they can also be a little creepy, and definitely more than a bit authoritarian.
On the other hand, The Charter School of Excellence is both a US DOE Blue Ribbon school and an Excellence Award Winner from EPIC, both of which are highly prized by virtually every school in the nation and usually considered to indicate extremely high standards.
And Character First! is carried among the approved links of the Character Education Project, whose national boards of directors and advisors read like a Who's Who in American Education. Junior Achievement of Delaware aligned with the program in 2005-2006.
The true story, I believe, is that this particular Charter School in Broward/Fort Lauderdale FL probably was engaging in these pretty extreme practices ... before 1999. But it has obviously been cleaned up and is nationally recognized as a mainstream leader in charter school education. The bona fides of Character First! probably need some serious examination, given the wide and uncritical use of the program around the country.
But Blumenthal discusses none of this in his side-swipe which makes it appear as if little kids are still singing the Obedience Song in today's Charter School of Excellence.
If I'm right [and I have laid out all the evidence for you to make your own judgment], this means that Blumenthal is at best guilty of shoddy journalism/research, and--at worst--is fully aware that the practice he cites no longer exists, was denounced by the supporters who originally bought into it, and that his paragraph does a severe injustice to what appears today to be an outstanding school.
Yet how long will it be before the uncritical begin citing this anecdote as evidence in public policy debates?
It's already running at The Nation, and given Blumenthal's close association with HuffPo I will not be surprised to see it there.
Why this is so dangerous is illustrated by the flap that President Obama got himself into on September 9, when he cited what turned out to be a BS story about a man who died after being dropped from his health insurance during chemotherapy.
Note what the White House said about the story:
I raised questions about the Obama claim with the White House on Sept 10. The White House told me that Obama's speechwriters picked up the story from Slate and never vetted the facts independently. If they had, they would have realized that the Slate report was erroneous.
And it is damn difficult, in many cases, to vet such facts independently [although I would think the White House should be able to do so if anyone could], so what are we left with?
Repeat anything enough on the net and people who are prepared to believe it will believe it without really questioning.
Which raises the interesting question: How much of the rest of Mr. Blumenthal's work on this occasion is equally questionable?
This post is not intended as a shot at liberals, just because the source and content it attempts to debunk was a liberal author and a liberal talking point in the making.
It is, however, intended pretty much as a warning for anybody who actually cares about the truth not to take things at face value just because they seem to align with what you already believe. God [or the Flying Spaghetti Monster] knows that I have been taken in on numerous occasions, despite my best efforts.
At the Charter School for Excellence, a school in South Florida inspired by Gothard's draconian principles that receives $800,000 in state funds each year, children are indoctrinated into a culture of absolute submission to authority almost as soon as they learn to speak. A song that the school's first-graders are required to recite goes as follows:
Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly.
For when I am busy at my work or play,
And someone calls my name, I'll answer right away!
I'll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say "Yes, sir!" "Yes ma am!"
Hup, two, three!
The larger excerpt is actually about the impact of Christian right self-help guru Bill Gothard, and don't get me wrong, Gothard and his devotees [who apparently include Mike Huckabee] are dangerous loons.
So much so that I wanted to find out more about this whack-a-doodle Charter School for Excellence in Florida.
There may be a footnote in Blumenthal's book, but there is not a note or a link in any of the excerpts I could find. So I went searching. Doing "Charter School for Excellence" Florida Gothard will only bring up multiple copies of the same excerpt at leftist blogs around the net. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.
So I decided to leave Gothard's name out of it, figuring that the school might not reference him on its website. For "Charter School for Excellence" Florida you end up with The Charter Schools OF [not "for"] Excellence in Ft. Lauderdale FL. This is definitely NOT a Christian front school, as anybody with educational experience can tell. They use the Core Knowledge approach pioneered by E D Hirsch of Cultural Literacy fame, including the same literature series currently in use in Red Clay, as well as Saxon Math.
Could it possibly be the same school Blumenthal mentions?
Careful searching led me back to this May 1999 entry at AANews [an atheist watch organization]:
In our AANEWS for April 28, 1999 we profiled a "character education" program in Florida head by an evangelical extremist. Children at the Charter School of Excellence were being trained in this program, which included the mindless and repetitive recitation of the following frightening ditty...
"Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly,
For when I am busy at work or play,
And somebody calls my name, I'll answer right away!
I'll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say 'Yes, Sir!' 'Yes ma'am!'
Hup, two, three!"
I have been diligently trying to track down the original April 28, 1999 post, but it does not appear to exist on the net [although it may still be lurking in some archive accessible in search terms I have not discovered yet].
I have, however, found this February 1999 article with all the same information in the Broward/Palm Beach Herald.
From that story I found another potential link between the current Charter School OF Excellence and the 1999 Charter School FOR Excellence: the current school, which was founded in 1997, utilizes as one part of its curriculum the Character First! program, which was, if you look really really far down the page, at least partly inspired by Bill Gothard. However, and it is a pretty big however, lots of public school districts and schools across the nation use Character First!, without knowing [I suspect] that this program has any connection to a Christian self-help huckster.
But that 1997 date was troubling: could the two schools be the same? Turns out they are, or maybe they once were. You decide.
On the list of the Board of Directors is one "Hamilton C. Forman, Secretary."
This is what the Broward/Palm Beach Herald reveals in its 1999 story: Forman is a liberal Democrat with deep pockets for political donations who was in fact on the board of the school that Blumenthal described, and even at one point tried to push the adoption of Character First! statewide. Then he fould out where it came from and what was in it--to include the songs being sung. This was his reaction:
Howard Forman now says he doesn't believe Character First! should be put in Florida's public schools. "I never heard of Gothard, and I think his ideas sound kind of screwy," Forman says. "I don't support the kind of character training where people sing songs about discipline. I don't support religious extremists of any kind."
Character First! is still around, and if you look at the Character Qualities and Leadership Perspectives documents you may agree that while they seem to harbor many pieces of modern education-speak they can also be a little creepy, and definitely more than a bit authoritarian.
On the other hand, The Charter School of Excellence is both a US DOE Blue Ribbon school and an Excellence Award Winner from EPIC, both of which are highly prized by virtually every school in the nation and usually considered to indicate extremely high standards.
And Character First! is carried among the approved links of the Character Education Project, whose national boards of directors and advisors read like a Who's Who in American Education. Junior Achievement of Delaware aligned with the program in 2005-2006.
The true story, I believe, is that this particular Charter School in Broward/Fort Lauderdale FL probably was engaging in these pretty extreme practices ... before 1999. But it has obviously been cleaned up and is nationally recognized as a mainstream leader in charter school education. The bona fides of Character First! probably need some serious examination, given the wide and uncritical use of the program around the country.
But Blumenthal discusses none of this in his side-swipe which makes it appear as if little kids are still singing the Obedience Song in today's Charter School of Excellence.
If I'm right [and I have laid out all the evidence for you to make your own judgment], this means that Blumenthal is at best guilty of shoddy journalism/research, and--at worst--is fully aware that the practice he cites no longer exists, was denounced by the supporters who originally bought into it, and that his paragraph does a severe injustice to what appears today to be an outstanding school.
Yet how long will it be before the uncritical begin citing this anecdote as evidence in public policy debates?
It's already running at The Nation, and given Blumenthal's close association with HuffPo I will not be surprised to see it there.
Why this is so dangerous is illustrated by the flap that President Obama got himself into on September 9, when he cited what turned out to be a BS story about a man who died after being dropped from his health insurance during chemotherapy.
Note what the White House said about the story:
I raised questions about the Obama claim with the White House on Sept 10. The White House told me that Obama's speechwriters picked up the story from Slate and never vetted the facts independently. If they had, they would have realized that the Slate report was erroneous.
And it is damn difficult, in many cases, to vet such facts independently [although I would think the White House should be able to do so if anyone could], so what are we left with?
Repeat anything enough on the net and people who are prepared to believe it will believe it without really questioning.
Which raises the interesting question: How much of the rest of Mr. Blumenthal's work on this occasion is equally questionable?
This post is not intended as a shot at liberals, just because the source and content it attempts to debunk was a liberal author and a liberal talking point in the making.
It is, however, intended pretty much as a warning for anybody who actually cares about the truth not to take things at face value just because they seem to align with what you already believe. God [or the Flying Spaghetti Monster] knows that I have been taken in on numerous occasions, despite my best efforts.
OK, this headline is just too good to pass up
Via Alphecca from other places:
Insane killer escapes on field trip to county fair
A criminally insane killer from eastern Washington is on the run after escaping during a field trip to the county fair that his mental hospital organized.
Pretty much leaves no room for additional comment, does it?
Insane killer escapes on field trip to county fair
A criminally insane killer from eastern Washington is on the run after escaping during a field trip to the county fair that his mental hospital organized.
Pretty much leaves no room for additional comment, does it?
And by the way, Hube, I think you're right
Solitary blogging leaves one vulnerable to lapses in inspiration, getting caught in ruts, and unconsciously bringing here the frame of mind you get into when things aren't going all that well in the rest of your life.
I've taken a look back over the past few weeks and you've got a point.
Working on it.
[This will only make sense to anybody else if you are a truly devoted follower and read every single comment.]
I've taken a look back over the past few weeks and you've got a point.
Working on it.
[This will only make sense to anybody else if you are a truly devoted follower and read every single comment.]
The new talking point: you're a hypocrite if you use the services your taxes paid for
Some of my (Delaware)Liberal friends think that the Kos-generated Teabagger Pledge is sort of the ultimate Gotcha for those who fervently believe in limited government. I'm not a Teabagger, but Libertarians are often attacked with the smug If you don't believe in government services, don't use them (asshole) [implied--unless donviti wrote it, in which case he is man enough to say what he's really thinking]. So cassandra, for example, appears to believe the following list is something like the final word [I have cut in my comments in bold:
I pledge to eliminate all government intervention in my life. I will abstain from the use of and participation in any socialist goods and services including but not limited to the following:
Note that this pledge says nothing of being able to avoid paying the taxes for those services I pledge not to use. So cassandra now wants to take my money AND argue that because I disagree with my money being taken I should deny myself access to these services.
Social Security
I'd love to sign this pledge, and I will on the first day the US government offers the option to stop having money withheld from my paycheck, and gives me back what I have already donated. As far as I am concerned, I will sign the "living will" right now that says the government can let me starve. Until that day, however, participating in the program is the only way to get back any of the money they took from me.
Medicare/Medicaid
State Children’s Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP)
Tough ones for me, as I have never argued against various forms of medical assistance, only disagreed with the forms we have. To date, however, I can say I have never used either of these services, and if the present government plans go through, with the burgeoning deficit, it may become a moot point by the time I would qualify for Medicare, anyway.
Police, Fire, and Emergency Services
I pay for those services, cassandra. I also generously support volunteer fire and emergency medical services.
US Postal Service
Mandated in the US Constitution, you know. And I don't use it to send packages or any form of paperwork that I can email; I use private services instead. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to impose such usage on my creditors, so I have to be able to get those of my bills they will not send me electronically. I'd love to be able to send first-class letters through a private contractor via my mailbox, but the government made that illegal.
Roads and Highways
Again, I pay for those services, cassandra, every time I pay for a gallon of gas, just like you. The fact that the government decided to subsidize the automobile industry by building major trunk-line highways and forcing private railroads out of the passenger hauling business is not something I have the ability to affect.
Air Travel (regulated by the socialist FAA)
Don't forget the TSA Gestapo here. Ah, here we again have the conundrum: the government has made it illegal for me to fly any other way. As a matter of fact, think about it: the government has made it illegal to travel long distances via ANY mechanical means of conveyance without using tax-subsidized transit. There is no free market remaining in passenger travel because the government ate it.
The US Railway System
Don't use it as a passenger--ever. But I pay for it every time somebody else does. As far as rail freight, I don't have any control over how the businesses I patronize move their products, and I don't ask.
Public Subways and Metro Systems
Public Bus and Lightrail Systems
Last I checked, I have to pay for my ticket every time I ride, and I have to pay taxes to support these institutions even if I don't. So the first part is voluntary, but I pay my own way. On the second part I have no choice.
Rest Areas on Highways
I'd love to frequent privately owned rest areas, but the government has made them illegal.
Sidewalks
The sidewalks in my development were paid for by the people who live here; many sidewalks around shopping centers and the like are often paid for by the developers or the merchant tenants. Again, within cities, they are paid for by the businesses and the users, through involuntary taxation. So I will decide to get off the sidewalks when you figure out a way I can quit paying for them without going to jail.
All Government-Funded Local/State Projects (e.g., see Iowa 2009 federal senate appropriations)
The trick here is for you to imply that these projects fall at my feet like Manna from Heaven, free money and new runways or new beach sand that is delivered to me gratis. Not quite, cassandra. These projects are completed--at least partly using my tax dollars--whether I like them or not. My only recourse is to vote against the people who voted for them. I do: on a regular basis.
Public Water and Sewer Services (goodbye socialist toilet, shower, dishwasher, kitchen sink, outdoor hose!)
Uh, my water company is a privately owned utility. They exist where the government has not made it illegal and imposed a State monopoly. Sewer services? In some places handled by private companies, in some places by the government. In neither place do I as the property owner generally get an option. There is no competition; the government has decided one way or another for me before I purchase the property.
Public and State Universities and Colleges
Public Primary and Secondary Schools
To use private schools K-12 now requires that an individual pay both for the cost of public school and then additionally for the privilege of not using it. As for higher-level education, the State has now made it virtually impossible to borrow the money necessary to attend a school without using the government as the lender or at least the broker for the money. Moreover, government subsidies and regulatory requirements have been the primary drivers that have insured that college costs have risen far faster than inflation over the past three decades.
Sesame Street
Sesame Street is actually self-funding. The millions that toys and other merchandising has brought in over the years have more than covered the cost of the program.
Publicly Funded Anti-Drug Use Education for Children
Most reputable studies have concluded that DARE programs don't work. That point aside, the government regularly uses them to provide outright propaganda [medical marijuana is bad and will lead to drug abuse] to the extent that I am just fine with being responsible for my children's drug-use or non-drug-use education, thanks.
Public Museums
Show me many significant public museums that are not massively [usually in the majority of their funding] by corporate and private donors and we'll talk.
Libraries
Public Parks and Beaches
State and National Parks
Public Zoos
These all exist and I helped pay for them--voluntary or not--just as much as you did. I pay all user fees and often contribute to the organizations I frequent. I don't agree with many of the funding decisions, but I have been provided absolutely no ability to withhold my taxes from any of them.
Unemployment Insurance
I pay for this, just like everyone else who works, because my employer writes off mandatory taxes against my compensation package. I personally agree with the idea, but I'd like to see an individual be able to opt out of the benefit, keep his money, and agree that government owes me nothing if I lose my job.
Municipal Garbage and Recycling Services
My garbage hauler is private; he also subcontracts my recycling. I pay for both: fees for use and taxes. Sometimes I haul my garbage to a private dump and pay for that. I turn as much as possible into compost.
Treatment at Any Hospital or Clinic That Ever Received Funding From Local, State or Federal Government (pretty much all of them)
Ah, the formulation itself admits that the government has pretty much established a regulatory and funding monopoly. I would love to be able to see an RN or PA in a "Wal-Mart clinic" for minor ailments and pay cash. Generally the State won't let me. It's busy protecting me from myself.
Medical Services and Medications That Were Created or Derived From Any Government Grant or Research Funding (again, pretty much all of them)
Curious. If the government controls the creation or derivation of new drugs, then why do the private companies who create them get patents of exclusivity? Just because big corporations and the State are in bed together does not make me a hypocrite for taking modern anti-depressents or beta-blockers. Nor have those government grants or research funding programs exactly reduced my costs, have they?
Socialist Byproducts of Government Investment Such as Duct Tape and Velcro (Nazi-NASA Inventions)
Ironically, there would have probably been far more spin-offs from the space program had it been privatized, instead of being conducted as a crash military program. The State made it virtually illegal for private companies to get into space by denying them access to, or use of, technologies created by other private companies and then declared "Top Secret."
Use of the Internets, email, and networked computers, as the DoD’s ARPANET was the basis for subsequent computer networking
Moronic argument. ARPANET was, as noted, a military development. The use of the military for defending the country has never been in question by those who advocate limited government. But primarily people who make this argument have never studied the role of the free market in taking that very limited protocol system and turning it into a world-wide communications net. If that net were not so completely and wonderfull chaotic, and still remained under government control, President Obama would not currently be pushing legislation to empower the State to take it over in the event of "emergencies."
Foodstuffs, Meats, Produce and Crops That Were Grown With, Fed With, Raised With or That Contain Inputs From Crops Grown With Government Subsidies
Brought to you by the same government that wants me to quit smoking and still subisidies tobacco farms. Brought to you by the same government that places artificial floors on the prices of milk and cheese products, uses protectionist taxation to keep cheap, high-quality foreign foodstuffs out of the country, and has addicted whole generations of Americans to high-fructose corn syrup via sugar tariffs.
Clothing Made from Crops (e.g. cotton) That Were Grown With or That Contain Inputs From Government Subsidies
Interesting question: why are there cotton subsidies in the first place? Because American cotton farms cannot compete effectively with foreign growers. So the State refuses to let me select the cheaper product at a competitive price.
If a veteran of the government-run socialist US military, I will forego my VA benefits and insist on paying for my own medical care.
Veterans paid for those benefits. While you were sleeping, they volunteered to take the low-paying shit job of risking getting their asses shot off to keep you safe. Ironically, more and more services for veterans and their families are being privatized by the Federal government with great success, the point being: just because we have an obligation to pay for veterans' health and medical services doesn't mean that the government had to become a single-payer.
Here's the bottom line: Folks who believe in cradle-to-grave government programs to cover virtually every aspect of life not only demand that everybody else pay for them, but they also demand that we publicly pretend we agree with them.
Then they call us hypocrites when, most of the time, the government has made it either illegal or impossible to avoid using those services, which we have paid for just as well as them.
It makes for cute blogging inside a self-referential community where everybody agrees with everybody else that it is immature, improper, or inappropriate to raise the issue of what the government should or should not be paying for, but it is in fact a cheap, lying talking point on the level with death panels or doctors performing amputations because they will make more money that way that by treating their patients.
In other words, the people promulgating this bullshit know it is bullshit, but they throw it against the wall just to see where it will stick.
I pledge to eliminate all government intervention in my life. I will abstain from the use of and participation in any socialist goods and services including but not limited to the following:
Note that this pledge says nothing of being able to avoid paying the taxes for those services I pledge not to use. So cassandra now wants to take my money AND argue that because I disagree with my money being taken I should deny myself access to these services.
Social Security
I'd love to sign this pledge, and I will on the first day the US government offers the option to stop having money withheld from my paycheck, and gives me back what I have already donated. As far as I am concerned, I will sign the "living will" right now that says the government can let me starve. Until that day, however, participating in the program is the only way to get back any of the money they took from me.
Medicare/Medicaid
State Children’s Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP)
Tough ones for me, as I have never argued against various forms of medical assistance, only disagreed with the forms we have. To date, however, I can say I have never used either of these services, and if the present government plans go through, with the burgeoning deficit, it may become a moot point by the time I would qualify for Medicare, anyway.
Police, Fire, and Emergency Services
I pay for those services, cassandra. I also generously support volunteer fire and emergency medical services.
US Postal Service
Mandated in the US Constitution, you know. And I don't use it to send packages or any form of paperwork that I can email; I use private services instead. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to impose such usage on my creditors, so I have to be able to get those of my bills they will not send me electronically. I'd love to be able to send first-class letters through a private contractor via my mailbox, but the government made that illegal.
Roads and Highways
Again, I pay for those services, cassandra, every time I pay for a gallon of gas, just like you. The fact that the government decided to subsidize the automobile industry by building major trunk-line highways and forcing private railroads out of the passenger hauling business is not something I have the ability to affect.
Air Travel (regulated by the socialist FAA)
Don't forget the TSA Gestapo here. Ah, here we again have the conundrum: the government has made it illegal for me to fly any other way. As a matter of fact, think about it: the government has made it illegal to travel long distances via ANY mechanical means of conveyance without using tax-subsidized transit. There is no free market remaining in passenger travel because the government ate it.
The US Railway System
Don't use it as a passenger--ever. But I pay for it every time somebody else does. As far as rail freight, I don't have any control over how the businesses I patronize move their products, and I don't ask.
Public Subways and Metro Systems
Public Bus and Lightrail Systems
Last I checked, I have to pay for my ticket every time I ride, and I have to pay taxes to support these institutions even if I don't. So the first part is voluntary, but I pay my own way. On the second part I have no choice.
Rest Areas on Highways
I'd love to frequent privately owned rest areas, but the government has made them illegal.
Sidewalks
The sidewalks in my development were paid for by the people who live here; many sidewalks around shopping centers and the like are often paid for by the developers or the merchant tenants. Again, within cities, they are paid for by the businesses and the users, through involuntary taxation. So I will decide to get off the sidewalks when you figure out a way I can quit paying for them without going to jail.
All Government-Funded Local/State Projects (e.g., see Iowa 2009 federal senate appropriations)
The trick here is for you to imply that these projects fall at my feet like Manna from Heaven, free money and new runways or new beach sand that is delivered to me gratis. Not quite, cassandra. These projects are completed--at least partly using my tax dollars--whether I like them or not. My only recourse is to vote against the people who voted for them. I do: on a regular basis.
Public Water and Sewer Services (goodbye socialist toilet, shower, dishwasher, kitchen sink, outdoor hose!)
Uh, my water company is a privately owned utility. They exist where the government has not made it illegal and imposed a State monopoly. Sewer services? In some places handled by private companies, in some places by the government. In neither place do I as the property owner generally get an option. There is no competition; the government has decided one way or another for me before I purchase the property.
Public and State Universities and Colleges
Public Primary and Secondary Schools
To use private schools K-12 now requires that an individual pay both for the cost of public school and then additionally for the privilege of not using it. As for higher-level education, the State has now made it virtually impossible to borrow the money necessary to attend a school without using the government as the lender or at least the broker for the money. Moreover, government subsidies and regulatory requirements have been the primary drivers that have insured that college costs have risen far faster than inflation over the past three decades.
Sesame Street
Sesame Street is actually self-funding. The millions that toys and other merchandising has brought in over the years have more than covered the cost of the program.
Publicly Funded Anti-Drug Use Education for Children
Most reputable studies have concluded that DARE programs don't work. That point aside, the government regularly uses them to provide outright propaganda [medical marijuana is bad and will lead to drug abuse] to the extent that I am just fine with being responsible for my children's drug-use or non-drug-use education, thanks.
Public Museums
Show me many significant public museums that are not massively [usually in the majority of their funding] by corporate and private donors and we'll talk.
Libraries
Public Parks and Beaches
State and National Parks
Public Zoos
These all exist and I helped pay for them--voluntary or not--just as much as you did. I pay all user fees and often contribute to the organizations I frequent. I don't agree with many of the funding decisions, but I have been provided absolutely no ability to withhold my taxes from any of them.
Unemployment Insurance
I pay for this, just like everyone else who works, because my employer writes off mandatory taxes against my compensation package. I personally agree with the idea, but I'd like to see an individual be able to opt out of the benefit, keep his money, and agree that government owes me nothing if I lose my job.
Municipal Garbage and Recycling Services
My garbage hauler is private; he also subcontracts my recycling. I pay for both: fees for use and taxes. Sometimes I haul my garbage to a private dump and pay for that. I turn as much as possible into compost.
Treatment at Any Hospital or Clinic That Ever Received Funding From Local, State or Federal Government (pretty much all of them)
Ah, the formulation itself admits that the government has pretty much established a regulatory and funding monopoly. I would love to be able to see an RN or PA in a "Wal-Mart clinic" for minor ailments and pay cash. Generally the State won't let me. It's busy protecting me from myself.
Medical Services and Medications That Were Created or Derived From Any Government Grant or Research Funding (again, pretty much all of them)
Curious. If the government controls the creation or derivation of new drugs, then why do the private companies who create them get patents of exclusivity? Just because big corporations and the State are in bed together does not make me a hypocrite for taking modern anti-depressents or beta-blockers. Nor have those government grants or research funding programs exactly reduced my costs, have they?
Socialist Byproducts of Government Investment Such as Duct Tape and Velcro (Nazi-NASA Inventions)
Ironically, there would have probably been far more spin-offs from the space program had it been privatized, instead of being conducted as a crash military program. The State made it virtually illegal for private companies to get into space by denying them access to, or use of, technologies created by other private companies and then declared "Top Secret."
Use of the Internets, email, and networked computers, as the DoD’s ARPANET was the basis for subsequent computer networking
Moronic argument. ARPANET was, as noted, a military development. The use of the military for defending the country has never been in question by those who advocate limited government. But primarily people who make this argument have never studied the role of the free market in taking that very limited protocol system and turning it into a world-wide communications net. If that net were not so completely and wonderfull chaotic, and still remained under government control, President Obama would not currently be pushing legislation to empower the State to take it over in the event of "emergencies."
Foodstuffs, Meats, Produce and Crops That Were Grown With, Fed With, Raised With or That Contain Inputs From Crops Grown With Government Subsidies
Brought to you by the same government that wants me to quit smoking and still subisidies tobacco farms. Brought to you by the same government that places artificial floors on the prices of milk and cheese products, uses protectionist taxation to keep cheap, high-quality foreign foodstuffs out of the country, and has addicted whole generations of Americans to high-fructose corn syrup via sugar tariffs.
Clothing Made from Crops (e.g. cotton) That Were Grown With or That Contain Inputs From Government Subsidies
Interesting question: why are there cotton subsidies in the first place? Because American cotton farms cannot compete effectively with foreign growers. So the State refuses to let me select the cheaper product at a competitive price.
If a veteran of the government-run socialist US military, I will forego my VA benefits and insist on paying for my own medical care.
Veterans paid for those benefits. While you were sleeping, they volunteered to take the low-paying shit job of risking getting their asses shot off to keep you safe. Ironically, more and more services for veterans and their families are being privatized by the Federal government with great success, the point being: just because we have an obligation to pay for veterans' health and medical services doesn't mean that the government had to become a single-payer.
Here's the bottom line: Folks who believe in cradle-to-grave government programs to cover virtually every aspect of life not only demand that everybody else pay for them, but they also demand that we publicly pretend we agree with them.
Then they call us hypocrites when, most of the time, the government has made it either illegal or impossible to avoid using those services, which we have paid for just as well as them.
It makes for cute blogging inside a self-referential community where everybody agrees with everybody else that it is immature, improper, or inappropriate to raise the issue of what the government should or should not be paying for, but it is in fact a cheap, lying talking point on the level with death panels or doctors performing amputations because they will make more money that way that by treating their patients.
In other words, the people promulgating this bullshit know it is bullshit, but they throw it against the wall just to see where it will stick.
ACORN affair gives the lie to Glenn Beck's ridiculous claim to being a Libertarian
First I read this at Kids Prefer Cheese, and it started me thinking:
"Beck is 45, tireless, funny, self-deprecating, a recovering alcoholic, a convert to Mormonism, a libertarian and living with ADHD. He is a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies - IF he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn't, necessarily; he's just asking questions. He's just sayin'." [TIME]
I assume that Mr. Beck is not really a Mormon, either. Both Libertarians and Mormons expect people to have a consistent set of beliefs.
Exactly how does Glenn Beck the Libertarian get all upset at ACORN representatives for (1) helping a prostitute find some way to launder her money so she can buy a house; or (2) helping said prostitute rip off the IRS?
Think about it: Libertarians generally hold that women own their own bodies, and that charging people for sex [as long as neither party is coerced] is their business and not the State's. Since the State insists on the same moralistic, coercive high-ground as Beck, there is no moral or ethical reason not to lie to the State in order to avoid its involvement in your life.
Likewise: since when did it become a no-no for Libertarians to want to reduce or avoid taxation?
Ah, but Beck--who is fully willing to use the power of the State to prevent same-sex marriage or enforce any law whatever consistent with his recently adopted Mormon social ethic, as well as willing to support US military interventionism anywhere in the world for pretty much any purpose--has been calling out ACORN in terms that only a good social conservative, authoritarian, State-loving Republican could do.
Which none of Eric Dondero's spin can fix.
Note to Anonone: feel free to explain once again how you--as an individual with no discernable ideology (your claim, not mine)--find it implausible that there are varieties of Libertarianism at the same time there can be boundaries between Libertarians and conservatives or liberals. The day would not be complete without it.
"Beck is 45, tireless, funny, self-deprecating, a recovering alcoholic, a convert to Mormonism, a libertarian and living with ADHD. He is a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies - IF he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn't, necessarily; he's just asking questions. He's just sayin'." [TIME]
I assume that Mr. Beck is not really a Mormon, either. Both Libertarians and Mormons expect people to have a consistent set of beliefs.
Exactly how does Glenn Beck the Libertarian get all upset at ACORN representatives for (1) helping a prostitute find some way to launder her money so she can buy a house; or (2) helping said prostitute rip off the IRS?
Think about it: Libertarians generally hold that women own their own bodies, and that charging people for sex [as long as neither party is coerced] is their business and not the State's. Since the State insists on the same moralistic, coercive high-ground as Beck, there is no moral or ethical reason not to lie to the State in order to avoid its involvement in your life.
Likewise: since when did it become a no-no for Libertarians to want to reduce or avoid taxation?
Ah, but Beck--who is fully willing to use the power of the State to prevent same-sex marriage or enforce any law whatever consistent with his recently adopted Mormon social ethic, as well as willing to support US military interventionism anywhere in the world for pretty much any purpose--has been calling out ACORN in terms that only a good social conservative, authoritarian, State-loving Republican could do.
Which none of Eric Dondero's spin can fix.
Note to Anonone: feel free to explain once again how you--as an individual with no discernable ideology (your claim, not mine)--find it implausible that there are varieties of Libertarianism at the same time there can be boundaries between Libertarians and conservatives or liberals. The day would not be complete without it.
UPDATED and corrected: The Usual Suspects: ACORN and the Delaware blogosphere
The ACORN scandal has appeared pretty much everywhere but here in the Delaware blogosphere, so I thought it might be interesting to do a round-up.
From the Right:
Cato, at Delmarva Dealings, seems to be channeling Glenn Beck:
While Barack Obama’s former employer is using YOUR tax dollars to assist child prostitution rings, YOUR representatives in Congress are doing all that they can to make sure that these criminals stay on the Federal Gravy Train.
Uh, not so much actually. The fact that some ACORN employees pronounced themselves willing to assist the child prostitution ring [singular; note to Cato: watches those pesky plurals], is not quite the same thing as using YOUR tax dollars to assist child prostitution rings, since no such ring ever existed and no money was ever spent supporting it.
David, at Delaware Politics, is a little more circumspect in that he says this of ACORN:
I am not contesting that ACORN has done some good work. I am questioning whether or not the government system of grants which favors the politically connected charities like ACORN over more effective local ones is a good one. ACORN skims money off the top which then goes to local organizations who would do the good work anyway.
Which kind of belies the title he gave the post:
Casey stands with Far Left Socialist Bernie Sanders in Defense of ACORN
Hube, at Colossus, is interested in equivalencies:
'Ya got that? "Being poor and minority in urban America" means ... enabling illegal immigration and child prostitution? Breaking tax laws? And since this is "just part" of being poor and minority in urban America, we should just continue to throw taxpayer money at it? Can you imagine the MSM outcry if a conservative had made such an ... insinuation as to why ACORN acted as it did on the sting videos? Then it would be the "most virulent form of racial stereotyping" in which people can possibly engage.
Resolute Determination, at [where else?] Resolute Determination, wants to know when Governor Markell is going to distance himself from ACORN:
Governor Jack Markell is an ACORN supporter. Governor Markell’s Political Action Committee, The Committee For A Better Future, paid ACORN over $14,000 in his 2008 Primary win over former Lt. Gov. Carney. Technically, he sent the money to “Citizens Services, Inc.” But, Citizens Services, Inc. has the exact same New Orleans street address as… ACORN. On primary day, it was widely rumored within Wilmington that Markell was paying ACORN “volunteers” twice the daily rate of $100 per canvasser. Now we know where the money was coming from – ACORN.
Will Markell publicly distance himself from a group that he paid $14,000 to to help him get elected?
The part I really love is where RD says
This organization needs to be investigated and shut down.
Notice that we don't actually have to worry about what the investigation finds; RD just wants it shut down.
Further left:
Nancy Willing, at Delaware Way had previous to the breaking of this story run a piece regarding John Kowalko's support for the work of Delaware ACORN:
And last but not least, this program would not exist today, serving all of the people of Delaware from Wilmington to Dover to Georgetown and all points in between, if not for the dedication and persistence of that often unfairly maligned group that I am a proud member and ally of, Delaware ACORN. Angela Walker and Darlene Battle and this magnificent group of community activists contacted a wide range of people in October and asked, begged and insisted that we had to save people’s homes. It was a simple message but displayed with such passion and insistence by ACORN that you couldn’t help but feel a sense of obligation and compassion that would lead to a successful conclusion. With a vast knowledge of other programs existing in Philadelphia and being constructed elsewhere, with a statistical accumulation of the horrors of the foreclosure crisis couched in real human terms and with a driven personality of compassion for the community, ACORN and its leaders would not allow us to fail in our efforts.
Today, Nancy has up a post regarding Media Matters' response to the issue:
Fox was running so wild with the story that they were willing to lower their already dubious standards. The first problem was one of logic. Four videos were being promoted as unimpeachable proof that all of ACORN is equally corrupt -- all 1,200 chapters and hundreds of ACORN employees. It was the opposite of how a credible investigation is supposed to function, in which conclusions are withheld until after all the facts are in. By comparison, here, the conservative media had a few isolated facts but were willing to extrapolate an entire thesis from them.
More important, Fox News failed to vet the tapes. This was made painfully clear with the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the fourth video to be released. In the footage, ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke claimed that she had murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse. On September 15, Beck and Sean Hannity both broadcast Kaelke's assertion. Beck, who had reported on the supposed confession during his radio program, added on Fox, "She never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead." Later that night, Hannity played the same clip, and in a rare moment of intellectual curiosity, asked about the veracity of the murder claim. "We're working on it," Giles said, which was enough for Hannity. The following morning, on September 16, Fox News' Gretchen Carlson repeated the allegation, saying, "She killed somebody? Despite this, some lawmakers want to keep funding the group."
Meanwhile, in a post intended to be reflective, but perhaps representing one of his weakest efforts, Liberalgeek, at Delaware Liberal, pulls out the equivalency card from the other direction:
I guess that the question in my mind is whether these are bad apples in ACORN or a systemic problem. Apparently, ACORN is conducting staff training to fix the problems in the next few days. But certainly the damage has been done.
Also, I wonder if the ACORN issue is a bit overblown. We are disturbed by the fact that a pimp and his prostitute would be helped to evade the tax law and make their activities look legitimate. But are we equally disturbed that there are many more multi-millionaires that are hiding their profits in off-shore tax havens with the help of accountants and lawyers at their beck and call.
ACORN does get dinged because they receive some federal funding whereas those lawyers are privately funded, but is that really what bothers us? I think that we have come to expect the rich to avoid taxes by any means necessary. Hell, I know people that have owned restaurants that avoided taxes as a part of their day-to-day operations.
All of these are distasteful, but now that ACORN has been tagged for it, real people are going to suffer. ACORN along with CLASI worked with the State of Delaware to ensure that people that are falling behind in their mortgages are able to get legal counseling to keep them in their home and to negotiate with lenders. That just happened this week, but things like this get overshadowed by the conservative witch hunt to find bad ACORN employees.
Usual suspects without a major post/comment on ACORN thus far: Tommywonk, kavips, Delaware Curmudgeon, Kilroy's Delaware, The Mourning Constitution, and Redwaterlilly.
What strikes me most about all of these responses is that they were all predictable. Nobody surprised me, with the possible mild exception of David Anderson's, I am not contesting that ACORN has done some good work.
In this we have apparently become a local microcosm of the national political faux debate.
For pretty much everybody on the right, ACORN is a rogue organization that has to held to account, and they have been exposed by intrepid crusaders for justice, and continue to be supported by dangerously left-wing politicians.
For the dwindling number of Delaware blogs on the left [more on that in a moment], ACORN is an organization that is doing the Lord's work in helping poor people, and is the victim of a witch hunt, the ferocity of which has scared away the organization's fair-weather friends in Congress.
[That left-blog thing: Dana Garrett's decision to fold up his tent--at least for now--at Delaware Watch has given us a seriously unbalanced blogosphere. Tommywonk, kavips, and Redwaterlilly all have thoughtful, interesting blogs, but they not really prolific--with the exception of kavips hatching new policy proposals, which gets encyclopedic. Delaware Way is far more policy oriented and less interactive; I would love to see Nancy promoting more of an on-line community, but so far have not seen it. Moreover, even though Delawareliberal arguably receives more hits per day than Delaware Politics and Resolute Determination combined, it is astounding to discover that such a Democratically controlled state really only has one major liberal/progressive blog left. Granted, Delawareliberal has a large cast and throws a wide net, but it's still only one blog. There have got to be some other First State liberals out there with keyboards and too much time on their hands.]
Here's what I think of ACORN, by the way: the organization is the early 21st Century edition of urban community organizing in the tradition of the original 1960s Black Panthers. I don't think that's an insult: I have a lot of respect for what the Black Panthers attempted to accomplish, even if I never ascribed to their politics. ACORN is multi-layered, committed to social revolution, and makes a hell of a lot of people very uncomfortable while attempting to work in areas of the country that everybody else has pretty much written off.
More importantly, it belongs to an even longer American tradition reaching back past the Panthers through Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, and their contemporaries, all the way to the burial societies and secret fraternal organizations among African-Americans in pre-Civil War era Southern cities.
Political power among the poor and minority populations of this country has always been constructed differently, expressed differently, and always manifests itself at the fringes of the system. It is almost invariably marked by what the more genteel would consider graft and corruption, because organizations like that necessarily parcel out power and influence differently.
What is significant about ACORN is that the organization has mastered a trick to make Marcus Garvey turn green with envy: getting millions of Federal dollars funneled to it by sympathetic legislators and political machines. In the hands of people not experienced with the rules of the game (e.g., which kinds of corruption are politically correct and which are not), it was inevitable that ACORN would fall afoul of some public relations disaster.
By the way--and I seem to be writing truly disjointed posts this week--it doesn't offend me in the slightest that ACORN was willing to help a pimp and a prostitute evade the IRS or get a real estate loan, and I have no problem with them helping send the money into a political campaign. The whole underaged hookers from Latin America thing crosses a line, but when you watched the videos in which the ACORN woman smiles and goes along, I'm not thinking demented political genius, I'm thinking dumb as a post.
At least, after perusing the Usual Suspects and their entirely-too-predictable reactions to this story, maybe my reaction jostled you just a bit.
If so, you may deposit quarters in the hat on the ground.
From the Right:
Cato, at Delmarva Dealings, seems to be channeling Glenn Beck:
While Barack Obama’s former employer is using YOUR tax dollars to assist child prostitution rings, YOUR representatives in Congress are doing all that they can to make sure that these criminals stay on the Federal Gravy Train.
Uh, not so much actually. The fact that some ACORN employees pronounced themselves willing to assist the child prostitution ring [singular; note to Cato: watches those pesky plurals], is not quite the same thing as using YOUR tax dollars to assist child prostitution rings, since no such ring ever existed and no money was ever spent supporting it.
David, at Delaware Politics, is a little more circumspect in that he says this of ACORN:
I am not contesting that ACORN has done some good work. I am questioning whether or not the government system of grants which favors the politically connected charities like ACORN over more effective local ones is a good one. ACORN skims money off the top which then goes to local organizations who would do the good work anyway.
Which kind of belies the title he gave the post:
Casey stands with Far Left Socialist Bernie Sanders in Defense of ACORN
Hube, at Colossus, is interested in equivalencies:
'Ya got that? "Being poor and minority in urban America" means ... enabling illegal immigration and child prostitution? Breaking tax laws? And since this is "just part" of being poor and minority in urban America, we should just continue to throw taxpayer money at it? Can you imagine the MSM outcry if a conservative had made such an ... insinuation as to why ACORN acted as it did on the sting videos? Then it would be the "most virulent form of racial stereotyping" in which people can possibly engage.
Resolute Determination, at [where else?] Resolute Determination, wants to know when Governor Markell is going to distance himself from ACORN:
Governor Jack Markell is an ACORN supporter. Governor Markell’s Political Action Committee, The Committee For A Better Future, paid ACORN over $14,000 in his 2008 Primary win over former Lt. Gov. Carney. Technically, he sent the money to “Citizens Services, Inc.” But, Citizens Services, Inc. has the exact same New Orleans street address as… ACORN. On primary day, it was widely rumored within Wilmington that Markell was paying ACORN “volunteers” twice the daily rate of $100 per canvasser. Now we know where the money was coming from – ACORN.
Will Markell publicly distance himself from a group that he paid $14,000 to to help him get elected?
The part I really love is where RD says
This organization needs to be investigated and shut down.
Notice that we don't actually have to worry about what the investigation finds; RD just wants it shut down.
Further left:
Nancy Willing, at Delaware Way had previous to the breaking of this story run a piece regarding John Kowalko's support for the work of Delaware ACORN:
And last but not least, this program would not exist today, serving all of the people of Delaware from Wilmington to Dover to Georgetown and all points in between, if not for the dedication and persistence of that often unfairly maligned group that I am a proud member and ally of, Delaware ACORN. Angela Walker and Darlene Battle and this magnificent group of community activists contacted a wide range of people in October and asked, begged and insisted that we had to save people’s homes. It was a simple message but displayed with such passion and insistence by ACORN that you couldn’t help but feel a sense of obligation and compassion that would lead to a successful conclusion. With a vast knowledge of other programs existing in Philadelphia and being constructed elsewhere, with a statistical accumulation of the horrors of the foreclosure crisis couched in real human terms and with a driven personality of compassion for the community, ACORN and its leaders would not allow us to fail in our efforts.
Today, Nancy has up a post regarding Media Matters' response to the issue:
Fox was running so wild with the story that they were willing to lower their already dubious standards. The first problem was one of logic. Four videos were being promoted as unimpeachable proof that all of ACORN is equally corrupt -- all 1,200 chapters and hundreds of ACORN employees. It was the opposite of how a credible investigation is supposed to function, in which conclusions are withheld until after all the facts are in. By comparison, here, the conservative media had a few isolated facts but were willing to extrapolate an entire thesis from them.
More important, Fox News failed to vet the tapes. This was made painfully clear with the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the fourth video to be released. In the footage, ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke claimed that she had murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse. On September 15, Beck and Sean Hannity both broadcast Kaelke's assertion. Beck, who had reported on the supposed confession during his radio program, added on Fox, "She never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead." Later that night, Hannity played the same clip, and in a rare moment of intellectual curiosity, asked about the veracity of the murder claim. "We're working on it," Giles said, which was enough for Hannity. The following morning, on September 16, Fox News' Gretchen Carlson repeated the allegation, saying, "She killed somebody? Despite this, some lawmakers want to keep funding the group."
Meanwhile, in a post intended to be reflective, but perhaps representing one of his weakest efforts, Liberalgeek, at Delaware Liberal, pulls out the equivalency card from the other direction:
I guess that the question in my mind is whether these are bad apples in ACORN or a systemic problem. Apparently, ACORN is conducting staff training to fix the problems in the next few days. But certainly the damage has been done.
Also, I wonder if the ACORN issue is a bit overblown. We are disturbed by the fact that a pimp and his prostitute would be helped to evade the tax law and make their activities look legitimate. But are we equally disturbed that there are many more multi-millionaires that are hiding their profits in off-shore tax havens with the help of accountants and lawyers at their beck and call.
ACORN does get dinged because they receive some federal funding whereas those lawyers are privately funded, but is that really what bothers us? I think that we have come to expect the rich to avoid taxes by any means necessary. Hell, I know people that have owned restaurants that avoided taxes as a part of their day-to-day operations.
All of these are distasteful, but now that ACORN has been tagged for it, real people are going to suffer. ACORN along with CLASI worked with the State of Delaware to ensure that people that are falling behind in their mortgages are able to get legal counseling to keep them in their home and to negotiate with lenders. That just happened this week, but things like this get overshadowed by the conservative witch hunt to find bad ACORN employees.
Usual suspects without a major post/comment on ACORN thus far: Tommywonk, kavips, Delaware Curmudgeon, Kilroy's Delaware, The Mourning Constitution, and Redwaterlilly.
What strikes me most about all of these responses is that they were all predictable. Nobody surprised me, with the possible mild exception of David Anderson's, I am not contesting that ACORN has done some good work.
In this we have apparently become a local microcosm of the national political faux debate.
For pretty much everybody on the right, ACORN is a rogue organization that has to held to account, and they have been exposed by intrepid crusaders for justice, and continue to be supported by dangerously left-wing politicians.
For the dwindling number of Delaware blogs on the left [more on that in a moment], ACORN is an organization that is doing the Lord's work in helping poor people, and is the victim of a witch hunt, the ferocity of which has scared away the organization's fair-weather friends in Congress.
[That left-blog thing: Dana Garrett's decision to fold up his tent--at least for now--at Delaware Watch has given us a seriously unbalanced blogosphere. Tommywonk, kavips, and Redwaterlilly all have thoughtful, interesting blogs, but they not really prolific--with the exception of kavips hatching new policy proposals, which gets encyclopedic. Delaware Way is far more policy oriented and less interactive; I would love to see Nancy promoting more of an on-line community, but so far have not seen it. Moreover, even though Delawareliberal arguably receives more hits per day than Delaware Politics and Resolute Determination combined, it is astounding to discover that such a Democratically controlled state really only has one major liberal/progressive blog left. Granted, Delawareliberal has a large cast and throws a wide net, but it's still only one blog. There have got to be some other First State liberals out there with keyboards and too much time on their hands.]
Here's what I think of ACORN, by the way: the organization is the early 21st Century edition of urban community organizing in the tradition of the original 1960s Black Panthers. I don't think that's an insult: I have a lot of respect for what the Black Panthers attempted to accomplish, even if I never ascribed to their politics. ACORN is multi-layered, committed to social revolution, and makes a hell of a lot of people very uncomfortable while attempting to work in areas of the country that everybody else has pretty much written off.
More importantly, it belongs to an even longer American tradition reaching back past the Panthers through Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, and their contemporaries, all the way to the burial societies and secret fraternal organizations among African-Americans in pre-Civil War era Southern cities.
Political power among the poor and minority populations of this country has always been constructed differently, expressed differently, and always manifests itself at the fringes of the system. It is almost invariably marked by what the more genteel would consider graft and corruption, because organizations like that necessarily parcel out power and influence differently.
What is significant about ACORN is that the organization has mastered a trick to make Marcus Garvey turn green with envy: getting millions of Federal dollars funneled to it by sympathetic legislators and political machines. In the hands of people not experienced with the rules of the game (e.g., which kinds of corruption are politically correct and which are not), it was inevitable that ACORN would fall afoul of some public relations disaster.
By the way--and I seem to be writing truly disjointed posts this week--it doesn't offend me in the slightest that ACORN was willing to help a pimp and a prostitute evade the IRS or get a real estate loan, and I have no problem with them helping send the money into a political campaign. The whole underaged hookers from Latin America thing crosses a line, but when you watched the videos in which the ACORN woman smiles and goes along, I'm not thinking demented political genius, I'm thinking dumb as a post.
At least, after perusing the Usual Suspects and their entirely-too-predictable reactions to this story, maybe my reaction jostled you just a bit.
If so, you may deposit quarters in the hat on the ground.
The difficulty for politicians in the digital age: people fact-check them
It's not just President Obama, but he does tend to fall into the trap too often.
I don't really know anybody who has taken seriously those supposedly inspiring Presidential anecdotes that crop up in speeches all the time. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes--they all embellished the stories that their speech-writers fed them.
But it can really bite you on the ass in a speech that is at least partly about other people distorting the truth:
Last week, when the President addressed the Joint Session of Congress in a speech on health reform, he referred to some of the untruths – okay, lies – that have been spread about the plan and sent a clear message to those who seek to undermine his agenda and his presidency with these tactics: "We will call you out."
Unfortunately, as Lynn Sweet at Politics Daily points out, that speech came with an anecdote that ... wasn't true:
When Obama spoke to Congress about health care reform on Sept. 9, he attempted to put a human face on his push for a provision barring insurance companies from dropping patients with pre-existing medical conditions.
While not citing the person's name, the president said: "One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it."
It's just not true, which I pointed out in my Chicago Sun-Times column. I confirmed with the White House that the man Obama was referring to was Otto Raddatz, from a Chicago suburb. His insurance company did indeed yank his coverage in April 2005. But after a fight led by his sister, Peggy, an attorney and the Illinois attorney general, Raddatz got his coverage reinstated in a few weeks and never missed any needed treatments. And he did not die until Jan. 6, 2009.
I raised questions about the Obama claim with the White House on Sept 10. The White House told me that Obama's speechwriters picked up the story from Slate and never vetted the facts independently. If they had, they would have realized that the Slate report was erroneous.
This is, unfortunately, far from the first time that President Obama has fallen prey to incorrect factoids, as he did in August with the cost of amputations for diabetics:
At least three large physicians' groups, and many physician bloggers yesterday blasted President Obama for saying that a surgeon makes $30,000 to $50,000 to amputate the foot of a diabetic, while receiving a pittance to prevent the diabetes that necessitated the procedure in the first place.
That is wrong, said members of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the American College of Surgeons, and the California Medical Association.
And the President has been consistently playing fast and loose with the cost numbers of health insurance reform, routinely understating them by half, as pointed out here a couple of weeks ago.
Look: politics is no pristine game, and--unfortunately--everybody says what they think they need to say to accomplish their agenda no matter how much they need to stretch or distort the truth. The GOP has death panels and Federally funded abortions and a lot of other distortions out there about the various proposed reform plans.
However, I am puzzled by exactly one can take the high ground on calling out his opponents for their lies about his program, when he--in virtually all of his stump speeches and even a national address--is presenting information about the status quo that is just as erroneous.
Claiming a health insurance company killed a particular individual through cancellation of his policy during chemo when in fact that did not happen qualifies as a gigantic whopper by anybody's definition. I hope. Hiding behind the we didn't vet the story on Slate excuse might work for a blogger or even a Congressman from the Palmetto State, but not for the leader of the Free World. You put stuff in the President's speech, both you and he have the responsibility to know it's true. [And yes I have called GOPers on the same issue repeatedly.]
Insurance companies routinely do enough awful stuff without any of us having to make it up.
Who knows? Maybe one day politicians will get it: if you do your homework and tell the truth all the time, nobody can catch you out.
I don't really know anybody who has taken seriously those supposedly inspiring Presidential anecdotes that crop up in speeches all the time. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes--they all embellished the stories that their speech-writers fed them.
But it can really bite you on the ass in a speech that is at least partly about other people distorting the truth:
Last week, when the President addressed the Joint Session of Congress in a speech on health reform, he referred to some of the untruths – okay, lies – that have been spread about the plan and sent a clear message to those who seek to undermine his agenda and his presidency with these tactics: "We will call you out."
Unfortunately, as Lynn Sweet at Politics Daily points out, that speech came with an anecdote that ... wasn't true:
When Obama spoke to Congress about health care reform on Sept. 9, he attempted to put a human face on his push for a provision barring insurance companies from dropping patients with pre-existing medical conditions.
While not citing the person's name, the president said: "One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it."
It's just not true, which I pointed out in my Chicago Sun-Times column. I confirmed with the White House that the man Obama was referring to was Otto Raddatz, from a Chicago suburb. His insurance company did indeed yank his coverage in April 2005. But after a fight led by his sister, Peggy, an attorney and the Illinois attorney general, Raddatz got his coverage reinstated in a few weeks and never missed any needed treatments. And he did not die until Jan. 6, 2009.
I raised questions about the Obama claim with the White House on Sept 10. The White House told me that Obama's speechwriters picked up the story from Slate and never vetted the facts independently. If they had, they would have realized that the Slate report was erroneous.
This is, unfortunately, far from the first time that President Obama has fallen prey to incorrect factoids, as he did in August with the cost of amputations for diabetics:
At least three large physicians' groups, and many physician bloggers yesterday blasted President Obama for saying that a surgeon makes $30,000 to $50,000 to amputate the foot of a diabetic, while receiving a pittance to prevent the diabetes that necessitated the procedure in the first place.
That is wrong, said members of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the American College of Surgeons, and the California Medical Association.
And the President has been consistently playing fast and loose with the cost numbers of health insurance reform, routinely understating them by half, as pointed out here a couple of weeks ago.
Look: politics is no pristine game, and--unfortunately--everybody says what they think they need to say to accomplish their agenda no matter how much they need to stretch or distort the truth. The GOP has death panels and Federally funded abortions and a lot of other distortions out there about the various proposed reform plans.
However, I am puzzled by exactly one can take the high ground on calling out his opponents for their lies about his program, when he--in virtually all of his stump speeches and even a national address--is presenting information about the status quo that is just as erroneous.
Claiming a health insurance company killed a particular individual through cancellation of his policy during chemo when in fact that did not happen qualifies as a gigantic whopper by anybody's definition. I hope. Hiding behind the we didn't vet the story on Slate excuse might work for a blogger or even a Congressman from the Palmetto State, but not for the leader of the Free World. You put stuff in the President's speech, both you and he have the responsibility to know it's true. [And yes I have called GOPers on the same issue repeatedly.]
Insurance companies routinely do enough awful stuff without any of us having to make it up.
Who knows? Maybe one day politicians will get it: if you do your homework and tell the truth all the time, nobody can catch you out.
Jimmy Carter, race, and wondering if there is an Ike in the house
[I'm not referring to Tina Turner's ex.]
Curiously enough, though I am not their biggest fan by any means, I think that CNN has put out the most even-handed coverage of responses to former President Jimmie Carter's racism charges about many opponents of President Obama.
Unfortunately, the manner in which the article is written does not lend itself to excerpting, so visit it here.
I have been sorting out my own thoughts about the Carter assertion, which now have surfaced in two different venues, his NBC interview and his speech at Emory University.
From what I can tell, the Emory University speech constitutes [choose your term] either fine-tuning or back-tracking by the former President:
"When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds," the Democrat told students at Emory University on Wednesday.
"I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American," he added.
This statement concentrates primarily on a radical fringe element of demonstrators and lists specific actions that Carter feels inappropriate. Then Carter says that people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced by racism.
Compare that with Carter's original language:
Former President Jimmy Carter said in an interview Tuesday that Congressman Joe Wilson's "you lie" outburst to President Obama was "based on racism" and that many of the critiques leveled against the president have been made because of his black heritage.
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," Carter said in an sit-down with NBC's Brian Williams.
Carter specifically said that Wilson's comment was "dastardly" and part of an "inherent feeling" held by many Americans -- particularly Southerners -- that African-Americans "are not qualified to lead this great country."
It's a fairly far cry from equating Congressman Wilson's two-word outburst with people carrying signs that suggest President Obama should have been buried with Senator Ted Kennedy, isn't it?
Here [for exactly what it's worth] are my thoughts on the issue:
1] When Carter's position is that there a radical fringe element of demonstrators potentially motivated by racism, I think he's correct. It's difficult to draw an exact line, and both sides in the debate are interested for their own reasons in obscuring that line--but the racism among fringe critics of Barack Obama is undeniably there.
2] When Carter's position is that the overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is motivated by racism, he undercuts his own credibility because of the use of that phrase overwhelming portion. Watch the video; read the transcript. There's not much wiggle room in the original statement: former President Carter is saying that the overwhelming majority of President Obama's harshest critics are motivated by racism. So I proposed to myself a thought experiment: if we had a charismatic, forty-something white Senator who became President and was saying all the same things and backing all the same policies as Barack Obama, would there still be this much harsh criticism by social conservatives, neo-conservatives, and others?
My conclusion is that there would be significantly less far fringe (by about 60%), but it would still be there.
But I also think that the fear of socialism criticisms would be just about as strident (85-90% range) and that there would be just about as many of them (80-85%) range.
The GOP was not going to turn moderate upon losing the election of 2008 no matter who the Democrats elected. Had he been able to keep his pecker in his pants, and had he won the election, John Edwards would be facing damn near as much strident opposition from the GOP and conservatives. But then there's point three....
3] That 60% increase in the fringe, given the force multiplier of 24/7/365 MSM, the blogosphere, and viral videos has catapulted the rawest, most volatile and most polarizing aspects of America's long-deferred debate on race right into our faces. In a sense, the election of Barack Obama did not signify the arrival of post-racial America by any means; it merely eliminated our ability to keep dodging the fact that we have been dodging the issue for decades.
And here Mr. Carter wins absolutely no plaudits from me, because it is difficult to point to anything beyond driving some nails into homes for poor Black folk to use the power of his former Presidency to help us get to that debate. Where was Jimmie for the teachable moments when Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary? On Clarence Thomas? On Colin Powell? On Doug Wilder and the Robert E Lee image controversy in Richmond, Virginia? The answer: pretty much nowhere to be found.
[If he actually said anything in any of his books that's not an excuse, by the way, since pretty much nobody ever read any of them in the first place.]
4] Right now, unfortunately, both of our major political parties are playing the race card as hard as they can. Would Michael Steele have become RNC Chair if he wasn't African-American, and the color of his skin did not serve a political purpose? I have my doubts. On the other hand, from South Carolina forward Barack Obama's handlers and surrogates--as well as the man himself on occasion--have been more than willing to drop that card themselves.
The only thing I find as reprehensible as the conservatives' failure to call out their own fringe is the liberals' refusal to acknowledge that they have knowingly besmirched the innocent along with the guilty for political gain.
5] My only prediction: the whole mess is going to drive people back toward the political center in a big way, to the immense discomfort of both ends of the traditional political spectrum [and, no, I don't think it will be a boon for libertarians, either]. by 2012 a strong, charismatic centrist [leaning a little either to the right or left] is going be a major threat to Obama's re-election. That's not Hillary or any of the current crop of GOP midgets from Pawlenty to Romney, and it's not going to be a Senator, either. We're either going to see an obscure Governor (ala Clinton in 1992) or a completely non-traditional candidate come out of the woodworks--a David Petraeus, perhaps, running as the ultimate outsider (for the record, I don't want him for President).
What I'm saying is that in 2012 the country will be ready to like Ike if an Ike can be found. Once upon a time I thought that might be Colin Powell some day, but that plane left a long time ago. I do see the GOP actually willing to draft somebody like Tommy Franks if they could get him to run.
Not a real coherent post, but if you haven't noticed, these are not exceptionally coherent times.
Curiously enough, though I am not their biggest fan by any means, I think that CNN has put out the most even-handed coverage of responses to former President Jimmie Carter's racism charges about many opponents of President Obama.
Unfortunately, the manner in which the article is written does not lend itself to excerpting, so visit it here.
I have been sorting out my own thoughts about the Carter assertion, which now have surfaced in two different venues, his NBC interview and his speech at Emory University.
From what I can tell, the Emory University speech constitutes [choose your term] either fine-tuning or back-tracking by the former President:
"When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds," the Democrat told students at Emory University on Wednesday.
"I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American," he added.
This statement concentrates primarily on a radical fringe element of demonstrators and lists specific actions that Carter feels inappropriate. Then Carter says that people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced by racism.
Compare that with Carter's original language:
Former President Jimmy Carter said in an interview Tuesday that Congressman Joe Wilson's "you lie" outburst to President Obama was "based on racism" and that many of the critiques leveled against the president have been made because of his black heritage.
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," Carter said in an sit-down with NBC's Brian Williams.
Carter specifically said that Wilson's comment was "dastardly" and part of an "inherent feeling" held by many Americans -- particularly Southerners -- that African-Americans "are not qualified to lead this great country."
It's a fairly far cry from equating Congressman Wilson's two-word outburst with people carrying signs that suggest President Obama should have been buried with Senator Ted Kennedy, isn't it?
Here [for exactly what it's worth] are my thoughts on the issue:
1] When Carter's position is that there a radical fringe element of demonstrators potentially motivated by racism, I think he's correct. It's difficult to draw an exact line, and both sides in the debate are interested for their own reasons in obscuring that line--but the racism among fringe critics of Barack Obama is undeniably there.
2] When Carter's position is that the overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is motivated by racism, he undercuts his own credibility because of the use of that phrase overwhelming portion. Watch the video; read the transcript. There's not much wiggle room in the original statement: former President Carter is saying that the overwhelming majority of President Obama's harshest critics are motivated by racism. So I proposed to myself a thought experiment: if we had a charismatic, forty-something white Senator who became President and was saying all the same things and backing all the same policies as Barack Obama, would there still be this much harsh criticism by social conservatives, neo-conservatives, and others?
My conclusion is that there would be significantly less far fringe (by about 60%), but it would still be there.
But I also think that the fear of socialism criticisms would be just about as strident (85-90% range) and that there would be just about as many of them (80-85%) range.
The GOP was not going to turn moderate upon losing the election of 2008 no matter who the Democrats elected. Had he been able to keep his pecker in his pants, and had he won the election, John Edwards would be facing damn near as much strident opposition from the GOP and conservatives. But then there's point three....
3] That 60% increase in the fringe, given the force multiplier of 24/7/365 MSM, the blogosphere, and viral videos has catapulted the rawest, most volatile and most polarizing aspects of America's long-deferred debate on race right into our faces. In a sense, the election of Barack Obama did not signify the arrival of post-racial America by any means; it merely eliminated our ability to keep dodging the fact that we have been dodging the issue for decades.
And here Mr. Carter wins absolutely no plaudits from me, because it is difficult to point to anything beyond driving some nails into homes for poor Black folk to use the power of his former Presidency to help us get to that debate. Where was Jimmie for the teachable moments when Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary? On Clarence Thomas? On Colin Powell? On Doug Wilder and the Robert E Lee image controversy in Richmond, Virginia? The answer: pretty much nowhere to be found.
[If he actually said anything in any of his books that's not an excuse, by the way, since pretty much nobody ever read any of them in the first place.]
4] Right now, unfortunately, both of our major political parties are playing the race card as hard as they can. Would Michael Steele have become RNC Chair if he wasn't African-American, and the color of his skin did not serve a political purpose? I have my doubts. On the other hand, from South Carolina forward Barack Obama's handlers and surrogates--as well as the man himself on occasion--have been more than willing to drop that card themselves.
The only thing I find as reprehensible as the conservatives' failure to call out their own fringe is the liberals' refusal to acknowledge that they have knowingly besmirched the innocent along with the guilty for political gain.
5] My only prediction: the whole mess is going to drive people back toward the political center in a big way, to the immense discomfort of both ends of the traditional political spectrum [and, no, I don't think it will be a boon for libertarians, either]. by 2012 a strong, charismatic centrist [leaning a little either to the right or left] is going be a major threat to Obama's re-election. That's not Hillary or any of the current crop of GOP midgets from Pawlenty to Romney, and it's not going to be a Senator, either. We're either going to see an obscure Governor (ala Clinton in 1992) or a completely non-traditional candidate come out of the woodworks--a David Petraeus, perhaps, running as the ultimate outsider (for the record, I don't want him for President).
What I'm saying is that in 2012 the country will be ready to like Ike if an Ike can be found. Once upon a time I thought that might be Colin Powell some day, but that plane left a long time ago. I do see the GOP actually willing to draft somebody like Tommy Franks if they could get him to run.
Not a real coherent post, but if you haven't noticed, these are not exceptionally coherent times.
What you get when you put together free markets, Aussie creativity, and an automatic weapon
Just think of it as my daily contribution to the coarsening of the American dialogue on the Second Amendment.
[h/t Real World Libertarian]
Thinking differently about history
I have said many times here that I am a Constitutionalist, and I do believe that within the US Constitution and Bill of Rights one of those rare events occurred wherein something fundamentally important about a free society was set down on paper and enshrined into law. I enjoy reading Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Paine.
But I also feel--both as a scholar and a teacher--the need to examine completely divergent viewpoints: not to debunk them, but hopefully to learn from them. One historian who always teachs me to re-frame the familiar is Francis Jennings--one of America's leading scholars on Native American studies.
About a decade ago, Dr. Jennings wrote The Creation of American: Through Revolution to Empire, and I have been reading it again as I somewhat unsuspectingly agreed to conduct several in-service trainings for History Teachers in the colonial/revolutionary period this fall [I thought I was agreeing to do the Civil War era; really do have to learn to read the fine print in those contacts].
Jennings' book is a powerful counterpoint to most historical narratives that are thrust upon our public schools, and I offer this excerpt from his summary--not because I agree with all of it, but because it is brilliantly crafted to retell the story from a different perspective, and because [if you actually have a cranial pulse] it will make you think:
As a federal republic, the United States was formed by partnership of thirteen colonies cloned from the British empire. All of them had been founded as enterprises to conquer the peoples previously occupying North American land, and all were intended to seize and repopulate the land. Part of the new population was brought in duress as slaves from Africa.
At a given point in growth, the most powerful colonials chafed against ultimate rule from Britain and decided to break free from the British empire in order to establish their own empire. The proclaimed much war propaganda about resisting slavery and demanding liberty, but the issue was power--whether ultimate power should rest in Britain or among the ruling classes in the colonies. Definitely this was not an uprising of the whole people except possibly in New England but doubtfully even there. John Adams estimated off the cuff that a third of "the people" wanted independence, a third opposed it, and a third were indifferent. Adams's remark requires more analysis than it has received.
In the first place, "the people" for Adams did not include all persons of the human species--only those recognized as legal entities. Indians and slaves were not people. Clearly they also were not among persons wanting independence. Indians took arms against the Revolution, and slaves fled from it when given the opportunity. Even among the fully legal persons, more than seventy thousand Loyalists fled to Halifax, Ontario, the West Indies, and Britain. How many stayed in place regardless of harassment cannot be estimated. In Pennsylvania, Loyalist sympathies were so strong that Adams organized suppression of them by armed force. Blow away all the rhetoric and what is left is a minority determined to establish its own power by force, not only against Britain, but also as against opponents in America.
The Continental Congress conducted the Revolutionary War with no liberty for opponents of any kind. Basic objectives included conquest of the Indians (not "conquest of the wilderness") and seizure of their lands on any pretext or none. Southerners--slave-owning Southerners--insisted on confirmation of their peculiar institution and got this at the same time that Britain was in the process of ending slavery.
The Revolutionaries wanted to reduce Indians and slaves permanently below human status. The means for this was to classify them together as nonwhite. This racist classification served all purposes of social caste as well as legal disfranchisement. It has survived in less intense but still genuine form through Civil War, Reconstruction, Indian reservations, massive immigration, industrial revolution, and urbanization....
A question arises: If membership in the British empire was so lethal to liberty, how did Canada manage to grow into the prosperous, independent country it so plainly is? Pursuing heresy further, if the American Revolution had never occurred, or had failed, would the horrors and bloodshed of the Civil War have been avoided? This is to court punishment for sacrilege, yet it seems legitimate and perhaps useful as speculation.
There are some rather strained interpretations within the foregoing, but it nonetheless begs the question that I always ask of my advanced students [and of teachers]: how do you construct an historical narrative for any period that includes everybody who was living in America and treats them all as Americans?
Just a random Wednesday night thought, dedicated primarily to townie 76, Anonone, and kavips--who all like to mull over questions like that.
But I also feel--both as a scholar and a teacher--the need to examine completely divergent viewpoints: not to debunk them, but hopefully to learn from them. One historian who always teachs me to re-frame the familiar is Francis Jennings--one of America's leading scholars on Native American studies.
About a decade ago, Dr. Jennings wrote The Creation of American: Through Revolution to Empire, and I have been reading it again as I somewhat unsuspectingly agreed to conduct several in-service trainings for History Teachers in the colonial/revolutionary period this fall [I thought I was agreeing to do the Civil War era; really do have to learn to read the fine print in those contacts].
Jennings' book is a powerful counterpoint to most historical narratives that are thrust upon our public schools, and I offer this excerpt from his summary--not because I agree with all of it, but because it is brilliantly crafted to retell the story from a different perspective, and because [if you actually have a cranial pulse] it will make you think:
As a federal republic, the United States was formed by partnership of thirteen colonies cloned from the British empire. All of them had been founded as enterprises to conquer the peoples previously occupying North American land, and all were intended to seize and repopulate the land. Part of the new population was brought in duress as slaves from Africa.
At a given point in growth, the most powerful colonials chafed against ultimate rule from Britain and decided to break free from the British empire in order to establish their own empire. The proclaimed much war propaganda about resisting slavery and demanding liberty, but the issue was power--whether ultimate power should rest in Britain or among the ruling classes in the colonies. Definitely this was not an uprising of the whole people except possibly in New England but doubtfully even there. John Adams estimated off the cuff that a third of "the people" wanted independence, a third opposed it, and a third were indifferent. Adams's remark requires more analysis than it has received.
In the first place, "the people" for Adams did not include all persons of the human species--only those recognized as legal entities. Indians and slaves were not people. Clearly they also were not among persons wanting independence. Indians took arms against the Revolution, and slaves fled from it when given the opportunity. Even among the fully legal persons, more than seventy thousand Loyalists fled to Halifax, Ontario, the West Indies, and Britain. How many stayed in place regardless of harassment cannot be estimated. In Pennsylvania, Loyalist sympathies were so strong that Adams organized suppression of them by armed force. Blow away all the rhetoric and what is left is a minority determined to establish its own power by force, not only against Britain, but also as against opponents in America.
The Continental Congress conducted the Revolutionary War with no liberty for opponents of any kind. Basic objectives included conquest of the Indians (not "conquest of the wilderness") and seizure of their lands on any pretext or none. Southerners--slave-owning Southerners--insisted on confirmation of their peculiar institution and got this at the same time that Britain was in the process of ending slavery.
The Revolutionaries wanted to reduce Indians and slaves permanently below human status. The means for this was to classify them together as nonwhite. This racist classification served all purposes of social caste as well as legal disfranchisement. It has survived in less intense but still genuine form through Civil War, Reconstruction, Indian reservations, massive immigration, industrial revolution, and urbanization....
A question arises: If membership in the British empire was so lethal to liberty, how did Canada manage to grow into the prosperous, independent country it so plainly is? Pursuing heresy further, if the American Revolution had never occurred, or had failed, would the horrors and bloodshed of the Civil War have been avoided? This is to court punishment for sacrilege, yet it seems legitimate and perhaps useful as speculation.
There are some rather strained interpretations within the foregoing, but it nonetheless begs the question that I always ask of my advanced students [and of teachers]: how do you construct an historical narrative for any period that includes everybody who was living in America and treats them all as Americans?
Just a random Wednesday night thought, dedicated primarily to townie 76, Anonone, and kavips--who all like to mull over questions like that.
A non-partisan note for the times: pharmacy cards
My wife and I discovered this about two months ago and I have been meaning to blog about it sooner.
We have the State of Delaware prescription plan and do our business with the local Eckerds. One day the pharmacist suggested to us that we really should have the Eckerds' pharmacy card, which is free.
I had always thought that those pharmacy discount cards were for people who did not have good prescription plans.
He showed me the error of my ways: on the particular generic medication we were refilling that evening, the 90-day supply was (no kidding) nearly $12 cheaper than through my prescription plan.
It isn't always the case, but on about one out of three drug purchases we make at Eckerds the store discount card comes out to be cheaper than the prescription plan.
Here's the catch: they are not automatically allowed to check and give you the best price between the two. You have to ask, each time you are filling a new prescription. That's a pain, but doing so, for a family of six that has three people who use a lot of medications, has already saved me $126 over the State plan in just two months.
I have no idea what Happy Harrys or anybody else has in the way of such discount plans, but it is certainly worth checking out if you shop there.
We have the State of Delaware prescription plan and do our business with the local Eckerds. One day the pharmacist suggested to us that we really should have the Eckerds' pharmacy card, which is free.
I had always thought that those pharmacy discount cards were for people who did not have good prescription plans.
He showed me the error of my ways: on the particular generic medication we were refilling that evening, the 90-day supply was (no kidding) nearly $12 cheaper than through my prescription plan.
It isn't always the case, but on about one out of three drug purchases we make at Eckerds the store discount card comes out to be cheaper than the prescription plan.
Here's the catch: they are not automatically allowed to check and give you the best price between the two. You have to ask, each time you are filling a new prescription. That's a pain, but doing so, for a family of six that has three people who use a lot of medications, has already saved me $126 over the State plan in just two months.
I have no idea what Happy Harrys or anybody else has in the way of such discount plans, but it is certainly worth checking out if you shop there.
DeJa vu all over again: building an Afghan Army
From Reuters regarding President Obama's rather vague strategic goals for Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Topping Obama's objectives, according to a draft document obtained by Reuters, was improving Pakistan's counterinsurgency capabilities and building up Afghan security forces so that the role of the United States could be reduced.
But the document offered few specifics and set no target dates. It said the administration would assess its progress against the goals by the end of next March.
Now let's go off the net for the moment, and examine Thomas T. Hammond's Red Flag over Afghanistan, which is pretty much seen today as the definitive contemporary short work on the Soviet experience there:
From page 160, the sub-section entitled "The Disintegration of the Afghan Army":
The Soviets probably assumed that the Afghan Army would be of great assistance in suppressing the rebels, but they have been disappointed. In fact, one might say that the Afghan army has been a liability. Many Afghan soldiers, either individually or in groups, have deserted to the enemy, taking their arms with them. For example, in Kunar Province Colonel Abdul Rauf defected to the rebels with 2,000 of his men. In addition, there have been several mutinies. The continued infighting between the Khalq and Parcham factions of the People's Democratic party ahs been particularly ruinous in the army because Khalq traditionally has had more followers in the armed forces, and many of them resent the dominant position that Parcham nows has in the government. As a result of desertions, casualties, and the difficulty of obtaining new recruits, the Afghan army, which numbered about 90,000 to 100,000 at the time of the Soviet invasion, had dropped to about 30,000 by early 1981 and was still about that size at the beginning of 1983.
The Babrak regime has had to resort to extreme measures to draft recruits for the army, sending out impressment gangs to make house-to-house searches and conscripting youths fourteen years of age or even younger. In an attempt to prevent the army from getting still smaller, the government in January 1981 issued a new draft law that lengthened the term of service by six months, but this brought about riots in Kabul and mutinies by some army units. Low in numbers and morale, the Afghan army has been doing little of the fighting, and some of the officers have even cooperated with the rebels.
We--being Americans and wearing white hats--will of course have no such troubles in expanding the Afghan army and police to somewhere between a quarter and half a million men in a region marked by inter-tribal violence at a level that makes even the Sunni-Shi'a conflicts in Iraq look tame.
Nothing to worry about. Between them, President Obama, Admiral Mullen, and General McChrystal are collectively smarter than every general since Alexander the Great who thought he knew how to get these folks organized for his own purposes and not theirs.
Topping Obama's objectives, according to a draft document obtained by Reuters, was improving Pakistan's counterinsurgency capabilities and building up Afghan security forces so that the role of the United States could be reduced.
But the document offered few specifics and set no target dates. It said the administration would assess its progress against the goals by the end of next March.
Now let's go off the net for the moment, and examine Thomas T. Hammond's Red Flag over Afghanistan, which is pretty much seen today as the definitive contemporary short work on the Soviet experience there:
From page 160, the sub-section entitled "The Disintegration of the Afghan Army":
The Soviets probably assumed that the Afghan Army would be of great assistance in suppressing the rebels, but they have been disappointed. In fact, one might say that the Afghan army has been a liability. Many Afghan soldiers, either individually or in groups, have deserted to the enemy, taking their arms with them. For example, in Kunar Province Colonel Abdul Rauf defected to the rebels with 2,000 of his men. In addition, there have been several mutinies. The continued infighting between the Khalq and Parcham factions of the People's Democratic party ahs been particularly ruinous in the army because Khalq traditionally has had more followers in the armed forces, and many of them resent the dominant position that Parcham nows has in the government. As a result of desertions, casualties, and the difficulty of obtaining new recruits, the Afghan army, which numbered about 90,000 to 100,000 at the time of the Soviet invasion, had dropped to about 30,000 by early 1981 and was still about that size at the beginning of 1983.
The Babrak regime has had to resort to extreme measures to draft recruits for the army, sending out impressment gangs to make house-to-house searches and conscripting youths fourteen years of age or even younger. In an attempt to prevent the army from getting still smaller, the government in January 1981 issued a new draft law that lengthened the term of service by six months, but this brought about riots in Kabul and mutinies by some army units. Low in numbers and morale, the Afghan army has been doing little of the fighting, and some of the officers have even cooperated with the rebels.
We--being Americans and wearing white hats--will of course have no such troubles in expanding the Afghan army and police to somewhere between a quarter and half a million men in a region marked by inter-tribal violence at a level that makes even the Sunni-Shi'a conflicts in Iraq look tame.
Nothing to worry about. Between them, President Obama, Admiral Mullen, and General McChrystal are collectively smarter than every general since Alexander the Great who thought he knew how to get these folks organized for his own purposes and not theirs.
Ah, the good war: the drug war
From Coyote the only sentence you really need to read to know we're simply insane:
In the US last year, 754,224 people were arrested for possession (not dealing or production) of marijuana.
Three-quarters of a million people.
At that rate, we arrest 2.5% of our population every decade.
Damn demon weed.
In the US last year, 754,224 people were arrested for possession (not dealing or production) of marijuana.
Three-quarters of a million people.
At that rate, we arrest 2.5% of our population every decade.
Damn demon weed.
There was once a day, not so long ago...
... when a President of the United States would actually request network time to explain the use of US military force in a new venue--like the recent raid into Somalia.
The President would lay out for the American people his reasoning, discuss the importance of Somalia to US global policy, and even sketch for us the parameters by which he would continue to order such actions.
Sadly, those days no longer exist. Presidents, Democrat or GOPer, simply conduct foreign policy and order military interventions large and small without the slightest nod in the direction of public accountability.
Strangely enough, nobody even thinks this development is newsworthy anymore.
The President would lay out for the American people his reasoning, discuss the importance of Somalia to US global policy, and even sketch for us the parameters by which he would continue to order such actions.
Sadly, those days no longer exist. Presidents, Democrat or GOPer, simply conduct foreign policy and order military interventions large and small without the slightest nod in the direction of public accountability.
Strangely enough, nobody even thinks this development is newsworthy anymore.
BREAKING! US raids into Somalia!
From Anti-war.com:
Following confirmation by the French military that they definitely weren’t in the process of invading Somalia, the United States military is now confirming that it is, in fact, American forces that are pouring into the southern portion of the country in a helicopter-backed invasion.
US military officials confirmed to the Associated Press today that forces from the US Joint Special Operations Command had invaded the lawless African nation, and were the ones responsible for the attack on the tiny village of Barawe this morning that was the first staging ground of the attack.
What the officials wouldn’t comment on was exactly why the United States, which launched a failed “peacekeeping” operation in the nation in 1993 and backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2007, had decided to launch yet another foreign adventure, though media outlets speculated that it was probably something to do with al-Qaeda.
The United States has recently been supplying the self-described Somali “government” with “tons of arms,” according to the State Department. Yet reports on the ground suggest that forces loyal to this faction, which only controls a handful of city blocks in the capital city of Mogadishu, have generally just sold the US-supplied weapons on the open market.
Though without any concrete information about what the American military actually intends to do in Somalia it will be difficult to speculate about the size and scope of the invasion, with roughly 200,000 soldiers committed to Iraq and Afghanistan (and more escalations on the way in the later) it seems hard to imagine the nation is looking to commit to yet another long-term occupation.
The most fascinating part about this expansion of President Barack Obama's wars--there has been a consistent run-up toward US military intervention in Somalia since SecState Clinton's Africa trip--is that the President himself has yet to lay out a cogent foreign policy stance. Instead, we're left examining his actions: slowing down the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq while maintaining larger force profiles there than his predecessor; doubling down in Afghanistan; and now launching raids into Somalia.
I can only think of one other President whose foreign policy this looks like.
Following confirmation by the French military that they definitely weren’t in the process of invading Somalia, the United States military is now confirming that it is, in fact, American forces that are pouring into the southern portion of the country in a helicopter-backed invasion.
US military officials confirmed to the Associated Press today that forces from the US Joint Special Operations Command had invaded the lawless African nation, and were the ones responsible for the attack on the tiny village of Barawe this morning that was the first staging ground of the attack.
What the officials wouldn’t comment on was exactly why the United States, which launched a failed “peacekeeping” operation in the nation in 1993 and backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2007, had decided to launch yet another foreign adventure, though media outlets speculated that it was probably something to do with al-Qaeda.
The United States has recently been supplying the self-described Somali “government” with “tons of arms,” according to the State Department. Yet reports on the ground suggest that forces loyal to this faction, which only controls a handful of city blocks in the capital city of Mogadishu, have generally just sold the US-supplied weapons on the open market.
Though without any concrete information about what the American military actually intends to do in Somalia it will be difficult to speculate about the size and scope of the invasion, with roughly 200,000 soldiers committed to Iraq and Afghanistan (and more escalations on the way in the later) it seems hard to imagine the nation is looking to commit to yet another long-term occupation.
The most fascinating part about this expansion of President Barack Obama's wars--there has been a consistent run-up toward US military intervention in Somalia since SecState Clinton's Africa trip--is that the President himself has yet to lay out a cogent foreign policy stance. Instead, we're left examining his actions: slowing down the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq while maintaining larger force profiles there than his predecessor; doubling down in Afghanistan; and now launching raids into Somalia.
I can only think of one other President whose foreign policy this looks like.
This is why Libertarians suck
Delawaredem, in the latest Sunday Around the Horn, gets his funny on with Tyler:
Tyler Nixon and Jason Scott (our own Jason330) will be filling in for Rick Jensen this week. The quality of the discussion has improved already 200%. Jason will reveal all of Delaware Liberal’s secrets and scandals, and Tyler will review why Libertarians suck. :)
I wish I could pretend he's (even whimsically) wrong, but a simple two-part proof shows why the Libertarian movement sucks.
Part one: here is one of the many, many reasons that the Patriot Act should offend not just libertarians but constitutionalists and American citizens of almost any party. From EPIC:
The implications for online privacy are considerable. For example, the Act increases the ability of law enforcement agencies to authorize installation of pen registers and trap and trace devices (a pen register collects the outgoing phone numbers placed from a specific telephone line; a trap and trace device captures the incoming numbers placed to a specific phone line -- a caller-id box is a trap and trace device), and to authorize the installation of such devices to record all computer routing, addressing, and signaling information. The Act also extends the government's ability to gain access to personal financial information and student information without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply by certifying that the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.
Part two: this, on the other hand, is what confused-neo-conservative-who-thinks-he's-a-libertarian Eric Dondero persists in declaiming to the world:
The correct Libertarian position is TO SUPPORT THE PATRIOT ACT.
Anonone and others suggest that I have my own, carefully parsed definition of libertarianism, and perhaps that's true. I do not, however, recall finding any serious libertarian thinker, philosopher, or candidate who thinks that the State's increased ability to gather personal information about people without any suspicion of wrongdoing is a good thing.
So, yes, DD, the movement I am loosely associated with will continue to suck as long as we don't disown the neo-con birthers in drag who are [wait for it] ... dragging us down.
A footnote: since Eric reads this blog, you can soon expect to be able to visit the comments section if you really yearn to read somebody calling me a defeatist pussy who supports terrorism. Enjoy.
Tyler Nixon and Jason Scott (our own Jason330) will be filling in for Rick Jensen this week. The quality of the discussion has improved already 200%. Jason will reveal all of Delaware Liberal’s secrets and scandals, and Tyler will review why Libertarians suck. :)
I wish I could pretend he's (even whimsically) wrong, but a simple two-part proof shows why the Libertarian movement sucks.
Part one: here is one of the many, many reasons that the Patriot Act should offend not just libertarians but constitutionalists and American citizens of almost any party. From EPIC:
The implications for online privacy are considerable. For example, the Act increases the ability of law enforcement agencies to authorize installation of pen registers and trap and trace devices (a pen register collects the outgoing phone numbers placed from a specific telephone line; a trap and trace device captures the incoming numbers placed to a specific phone line -- a caller-id box is a trap and trace device), and to authorize the installation of such devices to record all computer routing, addressing, and signaling information. The Act also extends the government's ability to gain access to personal financial information and student information without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply by certifying that the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.
Part two: this, on the other hand, is what confused-neo-conservative-who-thinks-he's-a-libertarian Eric Dondero persists in declaiming to the world:
The correct Libertarian position is TO SUPPORT THE PATRIOT ACT.
Anonone and others suggest that I have my own, carefully parsed definition of libertarianism, and perhaps that's true. I do not, however, recall finding any serious libertarian thinker, philosopher, or candidate who thinks that the State's increased ability to gather personal information about people without any suspicion of wrongdoing is a good thing.
So, yes, DD, the movement I am loosely associated with will continue to suck as long as we don't disown the neo-con birthers in drag who are [wait for it] ... dragging us down.
A footnote: since Eric reads this blog, you can soon expect to be able to visit the comments section if you really yearn to read somebody calling me a defeatist pussy who supports terrorism. Enjoy.
Comment rescue: Marshfox on finishing what we started
In response to one of my usual rants against interventionist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, commenter Marshfox raises an important point:
Here is what I remember about 9/11, I went back to war, for the second time in my career. Only this time, the attack was on us. I have a problem with the WMD issue, and history says that the odds are against us in Afgan.
That being said, I know now what the Vietnam Vets feel like, alone and abandoned, they did what they thought was right, and look what they got for it. I equate my position on this like that of the commander of the U-Boat in Das Boot. He is my kind of patriot, compared the the true beliver Nazi first officer he had. You may find fault with my analogy yet it fits for me.
My eyes aren't blind, I am no mindless robot, but we started it now we need to finish it, if not you betray those who gave their lives already. I am old, but I go and volunteer for the kids, they need old hands and maybe I will bring them all home again safe one more time.
War is cruel and ugly, we agree there, and there is never a good one, but I will do whatever it takes to keep my men safe, and as long as I am not asked to draw my sword against my own, I will keep doing my duty. I remember a King lost his head once partly because he helped a bunch of rebels fight tyranny, sure he wasn't pure in his motives, but I wonder if he thought it was worth the price he paid?
To point out something at the start: I am a 21-year military veteran, and have lost people in Iraq, and have had people I trained or trained with at risk in both wars. As a platoon sergeant and then a first sergeant I understand completely the necessity of doing whatever it takes to keep your people safe and accomplish the mission.
As a soldier, it was necessary for me to believe that I was being asked to risk my life and the lives of my people based on sound policy, honorable intentions, and good decision-making. They tell us where to go, who to kill, what to break, and we do that because having people who will do that on order is essential to protecting our country.
As a citizen, I have different responsibilities. There I am accountable for insuring that--as far as possible--no troops are ever asked to make futile sacrifices, to go into harm's way for reasons of politics rather than legitimate strategy, or placed in conflicts they cannot possibly win.
A soldier's job is to figure out how the hell to win the war no matter what the odds, and to keep trying to execute that plan until death comes or the recall is sounded.
A citizen's responsibility is to help figure out when there have been sufficient deaths, when there is no longer a reasonable possibility of victory, and when the war itself has been a horrible mistake.
You do not keep faith with your troops who have died by getting others killed unnecessarily.
This is what too many people don't understand: if I believe that Afghanistan is the wrong war, that Afghanistan is an unwinnable war in the current context, and that our military commitment to Afghanistan has more to do with corporate profits, the Israel lobby, and the interests of China and Russia, then keeping faith with my fellow troops requires me to tell what I see as the truth loudly, repeatedly, and without equivocation.
I will keep doing so, as much as I respect many of the people who disagree with me.
Here is what I remember about 9/11, I went back to war, for the second time in my career. Only this time, the attack was on us. I have a problem with the WMD issue, and history says that the odds are against us in Afgan.
That being said, I know now what the Vietnam Vets feel like, alone and abandoned, they did what they thought was right, and look what they got for it. I equate my position on this like that of the commander of the U-Boat in Das Boot. He is my kind of patriot, compared the the true beliver Nazi first officer he had. You may find fault with my analogy yet it fits for me.
My eyes aren't blind, I am no mindless robot, but we started it now we need to finish it, if not you betray those who gave their lives already. I am old, but I go and volunteer for the kids, they need old hands and maybe I will bring them all home again safe one more time.
War is cruel and ugly, we agree there, and there is never a good one, but I will do whatever it takes to keep my men safe, and as long as I am not asked to draw my sword against my own, I will keep doing my duty. I remember a King lost his head once partly because he helped a bunch of rebels fight tyranny, sure he wasn't pure in his motives, but I wonder if he thought it was worth the price he paid?
To point out something at the start: I am a 21-year military veteran, and have lost people in Iraq, and have had people I trained or trained with at risk in both wars. As a platoon sergeant and then a first sergeant I understand completely the necessity of doing whatever it takes to keep your people safe and accomplish the mission.
As a soldier, it was necessary for me to believe that I was being asked to risk my life and the lives of my people based on sound policy, honorable intentions, and good decision-making. They tell us where to go, who to kill, what to break, and we do that because having people who will do that on order is essential to protecting our country.
As a citizen, I have different responsibilities. There I am accountable for insuring that--as far as possible--no troops are ever asked to make futile sacrifices, to go into harm's way for reasons of politics rather than legitimate strategy, or placed in conflicts they cannot possibly win.
A soldier's job is to figure out how the hell to win the war no matter what the odds, and to keep trying to execute that plan until death comes or the recall is sounded.
A citizen's responsibility is to help figure out when there have been sufficient deaths, when there is no longer a reasonable possibility of victory, and when the war itself has been a horrible mistake.
You do not keep faith with your troops who have died by getting others killed unnecessarily.
This is what too many people don't understand: if I believe that Afghanistan is the wrong war, that Afghanistan is an unwinnable war in the current context, and that our military commitment to Afghanistan has more to do with corporate profits, the Israel lobby, and the interests of China and Russia, then keeping faith with my fellow troops requires me to tell what I see as the truth loudly, repeatedly, and without equivocation.
I will keep doing so, as much as I respect many of the people who disagree with me.
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