Remember when it was chic to accuse those of us not cheerleading America The Beautiful's Grand March To Liberate Iraq™ of treason? It seems that three years or so after the march to war got started, the debate is slowly, grindingly coming back into contact with reality. And it's not pretty.

The Poor Man Brings It On Home

Appreciate this. Understand that the people killing us in Iraq aren't motivated by Gore Vidal or inspired by Susan Sontag or organized by Michael Moore or in cahoots in any way with any of the right's celebrity piñatas - not literally, not metaphorically, not if you look at it in a certain way, not to any infinitesimal degree, not in any sense, not in any way at all. They do not lead a clandestine international conspiracy of Evil which has corrupted everything in every foreign country plus everything in America not owned by loyal Bush Republican apparatchiks; nor are they members of such a conspiracy; nor does a conspiracy remotely matching that description exist. To think otherwise is, literally and to a very great degree, insanity. It is insane.

And if you really want to help the American war effort, you can join the fucking armed forces and go to Iraq like thousands of others have, and then you can do the best job you can to show them that Americans care about them and want, above all else, for all of our futures to be better and more peaceful than the past, and get paid shit. You will then be my personal hero, really, and I hope you don't get killed or maimed or see or do something that makes you hate everything for the rest of your life, which is a very real possibility. If you, like me, are too much of a coward to risk your life and health on a mission like that, then you can donate to charities which help soldiers (although it is worth looking into where and what kind of help is needed – some places don’t need it as much as others). But the easiest thing you can do is influence the politicians who create the policies – and in some cases the military strategies - which are being carried out in Iraq, but to do this in a useful way you first have to make some contact with reality. Reality is that the situation in Iraq is horrible, the outlook for any lasting peace is grim, and that this has nothing to do with a nebulous, malignant, all-powerful “Left”, and everything to do with the people in power who make bad and stupid policies. You can pull your head out of your ass, stop dreaming up stupid conspiracy theories about how everyone around the world you don’t like is working together to destroy Freedom, and tell them that they need to do a better job. And if they won’t do a better job, the solution is not to get upset at people who aren’t waving their pom-poms or denouncing Saddam single-mindedly enough for you, it is to fire the fuck-ups so we can maybe have some chance at salvaging something from this fiasco.

That's the fucking message. Got it? Good. Now keep it.

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

Quoth Eminem: "This is Bin Laden; look at him noddin'."

This kind of gulag/interrogation thing won't effectively combat network terrorism. It didn't work for the Soviets in the '80s and it won't work for us now. It will, however, serve to further radicalize Muslims against the US. Oh yeah, and it's deeply morally wrong.

There's a great deal of angst in Democratic circles about the party's weakness on national security. But the boys in the Senate are showing signs of chutzpah.

Howdy, Gansta! Here's your script if you have the balls to read it:

"President Bush has played directly into the hands of the terrorists. He let them escape from Tora Bora. He's financed the worlds largest training camp in Iraq at with 1000s of American lives and hundreds of billions of American dollars. He's given them propaganda recruitment gold at Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo and now at in former Soviet Gulags in Eastern Europe.

What's worse, in spite of all the death, all the torture and all the terror alerts, United States citizens are no safer today than they were on September 11th, 2001. In fact, as unsettling as it is to say, it looks like we're less safe. Those who wish us harm are more numerous, more experienced and more organized, while our military is degraded from a foolish and unnecessary war and our emergency response capabilities are still clearly unable to cope with major catastrophe.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for a different approach..."

The proscriptive plan, politically speaking, can be almost anything. There are good ideas out there from the real heads, but nobody is going to be able to enact shit unless prominant national Democrats have the gall to call out the fact that by any objective measure Bush is losing his self-declared war on terror.

Redcross Fundraiser #3 - Thursday November 3rd!

My man the Tressler has been organizing red cross fundraisers off and on for a bit; he's getting more structured about it now, which is cool. This creates an interesting social-capital-building space. It's on the same night as Drinkin' Liberally, so I'll be there around 11 or 12, but I'll be showing. You should think about coming too.

The first line of attack but the GOP against the "Scalito" meme seems to have been that it was an anti-Italian slur. Chris Matthews carrying the water there, original credit to right-wing smear ace Matt Drudge.

Of course, it won't work. I mean, really... the Left opposes Alito because he's a stinking wop dego? Come on. Y'all are slipping.

So the guy Bush puts up for the Supreme Court -- Sam Alito -- is roundly anti-abortion, thinks a husband is legally a co-owner of his wife's uterus, gets the nickname Scalito, etc. I'll be fighting this, but the odds are that he will be confirmed. Sorry.

Meaninful reisistance to movement conservatism is going to have to take place on the state level. They won't directly overturn Roe v. Wade in the sense of making a national ban on abortion, but they will continue to weaken federal protections for privacy, and push the strong stuff (things approaching outright bans) through state and local law. We can and must fight back in the same places.

That means organizing a whole lot more people. Luckily we've got some nacient organizations in place which are working on chapters. In the long run, I think we'll win. In the short run, things look pretty tough.

Got home, decided to peep a little C-Span. Woke up, decided this needed a little re-writing for clarity.

One thing that's striking to me that I haven't seen blogged about (though I'm sure others have observed it), is that part of Libby's intended alabi is that he was passing some information on without knowing if it were true. This was the manner in which he supposedly blew Valarie Wilson/Plame's identity: "well, you know what I hear? I hear the buzz from some other reporters -- you know, Tim Russert is one of the people who told me this -- is that this Wilson guy's wife works for the CIA. Oh yeah. What? No, I don't know if she does or not, but that's what I hear..."

In other words, the manner in which the office of the Vice President interacted with the Press -- which is not unlike how other public and political officials do -- is intimately bound up in the crime. It's quite a regular thing to traffic in rumors and nudge-nudge-wink-wink leaks like this, which I think is a problem with our public information ecosystem. That Scooter Libby was savvy (or devious) enough to use this to construct an alabi for a crime against national security serves to highlight the problem fairly well.

Libby seems to have been thinking that as long as that's the conversation that got traced, he could give the same story to an investigator as he used to spin off the fact-as-rumor to the press. Then Fitzgerald found evidence that Rove had told him previously, and that he had talked about it previously. He didn't learn it from other journalists. The result? Libby, called back to the Grand Jury, was actually forced to claim that, "yeah, Karl told me that, but see then I forgot and when I heard that "rumor" from Tim Russert, it was as if it were for the first time. "

Scooter Libby, born again virgin.

In terms of what's really going on here, I think billmon has a good take. Fitz really zeroed in on busting heavy on the coverup. He also essentially said in his press conference that because there was a coverup, he couldn't indict anyone for the explicit crime of outing Plame, because the statute that applies is pretty heavy. The presence of the coverup means you can't really tell what's going on, so best to prosecute that.

But the investigation continues. It would seem that the "anonymous" Official A listed in the indictment -- aka Karl Rove -- is in the sights, although there's a certain tempting logic that Fitzgerald will lean on Scooter to burn someone more powerful than Karl. Still, I don't think it will drag on too much longer.

UPDATE: However, that being said, this is also the truth:

The moral of the story, I think, is that we really need a public investigation through the political system to get to the larger conspiracy here - the cabal that took us to war under false pretenses to further their own unstated aims. Our challenge, as citizens, is to force the political system to live up to its obligations. This is where I am pessimistic for obvious reasons - when the Congress is in the hands of the President's party, it's hard to imagine a repeat of the Senate Watergate hearings.

The grand jury process is designed for secrecy, to protect information about individuals who don't end up charged with a crime, also to protect whistleblowers or people who testify against their superiors. Fitzgerald's investigation is not going to indict the whole White House Iraq Group, the cabal of Bush Administration figures (and a few select others, like Judy Miller), who conspired to "make the case" for invading Iraq.

If we want accountability on that, it's got to happen through congress. If we want that, Democrats need to take control of either the House or the Senate. While I try not to villify the GOP en masse, I just don't seen them launching an investigation into the White House's use of false and misleading information in their effort to sell the war.

I dunno... I sort of loose interest here. Anyone who cared to pay attention three years ago could plainly see that a decision had been made to pursue an offensive against Iraq. Anyone who cared to look could see they were committed to whipping up support by any means necessary; humping the smoking hole at ground zero and vastly overstating the threat Saddam Hussein represented. Anyone who cared to listen could hear careful language -- misleading without being criminally false -- reflecting intention and planning.

But the people who mattered didn't care to see, or perhaps saw and didn't feel they could or should do anything about it. The simple fact is that the DC press and Congressional Democrats are accountable for the success of the Bush Administration's campaign of dis-information. The Bush administration is obviously accountable too, but we have checks and balances and a free press for a reason. With alarmingly few exceptions, everyone in power dropped the ball here. I'm not holding my breath for these people to come out and admit this.

Remember: regular folks never really supported this war. If you look at the levels of support, a greater proportion of American citizens were skeptical compared to those in congress or in the elite press corps, who were overwhelmingly either cooperative or openly cheerleading the war. The public was more right (or less wrong, if you like) than congress or the press. Don't forget it.

A few more thoughts about energy. Sunday morning I had brunch with A-Stock, who told me an interesting anecdote about how a financial heavy had made a bet it the middle of the '70s energy crisis that fuel would be more expensive in the 1980s, and that losing this bet caused him to come to the realization that it's not wise to bet on increasing costs for energy.

This is connected in my head to the blurbs from a book Bill Gates "loves" called The Bottomless Well:

Humanity is destined to find and consume more energy, and still more, forever.
...
Fuels recede, demand grows... but logic ascends, and with the rise of logic we attain the impossible—infinite energy, perpetual motion and the triumph of power.

Emphasis is mine. This is magical thinking. It is the opposite of science, but it is reflective of a kind of thought that is pervasive among the establishment. I am talking about the particular kind of narrow-mindedness which is grounded in the refusal to acknowledge the possibility that our civilization (indeed our world order) may fail, recede or collapse. I'm an optimist, but I also hew to the laws of thermodynamics and treat as serious the lessons of history.

A people's ability to extract, transport and apply energy through systems is its ability to affect the universe. Buckminster Fuller explains all this quite well, though he was optimistic enough to frame this as an issue for the species rather than any particular nation or coalition.

The point is that increased energy costs, in the long run, mean a net decline in all aspects of civilization. This is inconceivable to people who are invested in the righteousness of the status quo. However, there's nothing indestructible about our current world system. There's very little that is sustainable about it either, and as they say, if you don't change the direction you're headed, you're liable to end up where you're going.

Now, I think there are a lot of options. In our conversation, A-Stock mentioned Oil Shale. Shale has been on the radar since the 1960s, but there are problems with its viability. Currently, there is an idea floating around that we can build lots of small (read: relatively safe) nuclear power plants in these semi remote areas where the shale is, use the plants' primary generation phase to power our electricity grid and then re-use the still high-temperature steam in a co-generation phase to process the oil shale and slake our thirst for petroleum.

It's so fucking crazy that it might work for about 100 years, but what we'll be left with is piles and piles of waste, both in terms of spent nuclear fuel and byproducts from the shale, which is much more dirty than refining crude oil. And in the end we're still working off a relatively small finite resource base. And it will cost a ton of money to set up.

I think we need to spend a ton of money on energy research and infrastructure. But I think we should invest in something that will last, that can be built on by future generations. This can happen through a national "new deal" type program, or it could happen in a more decentralized fashion by establishing a marketplace which responded to environmental and human costs and regulating that market tightly to prevent abuse.

Given the nature of the energy industry, both are uphill battles. There will be strong resistance to any government-driven change which jeopardizes the current bottom line of any major players, probably on the grounds that it is "socialist" or some-such. There would be even more vociferous resistance, ironically most likely expressed through lobbying the government for sweetheart deals and protective legislation, to any attempt to introduce real competition and real prices into the energy market.

The only way this is going to work out is if the Public Interest can somehow get out front on these issues. I strongly doubt the sincerity of a lot of recent "we know oil's going to run out, help us find a solution" PR that's coming out of a number of the big companies (e.g. Chevron's willyoujoinus dot-com). This includes even BP and their redesigned logo. The name of the corporation is still British Petrochemical, even if their slogan was changed to "Beyond Petroleum." Have some statistics:

BP’s total six-year investment in renewable technologies was US$200-million – the same amount it spent on its “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaign. Nearly US$45-million of this went to buy Solarex Corporation – meaning BP’s renewable energy investment was 0.05% of the US$91-billion it spent to buy oil giants Arco and Amoco back in the 1990s.

Now, the only reason they spent that $200M on the ad campaign, and the only reason Chevron spent whatever it spent to create and publicize willyoujoinus.com, is because they know that some opinion leaders are getting nervous. Depending on the effects and severity of ongoing economic shock we might see concerned citizens continue to drive the agenda. Some believe 50 to 100% increases in home heating prices this winter may lead to a decline in holiday shopping, which would badly harm many US retailers who are dependent our culture's annual year-ending orgy of consumption to balance their books. If it's bad, and if energy is identified and accepted as a root cause, we could see something where, like what's happening with GM and health care, very large corporations begin to join with progressive citizens in calling for the overhaul of our economic infrastructure.

But again, even if that happens, the outcome it really all depends on who seizes the initiative. The insurance industry currently retains the upper hand on issues of health care just as the petrochemical, coal and nuclear industries retain the upper hand on issues of energy. Maybe this will change, but in spite of what free marketistas would have you believe, it's not the pattern of history for consumers to direct the action of producers.

Technorati Tags: energy, oil, shale, BP, chevron

Apropops of what I wrote before about work, one of my favorite Snarkbloggers is joining a campaign. Fuckin' a, man. Just come on back sometime and make fun of the bastards again.

Earlier today Markos put up a con call invite for a GOP spin-session on the Meyers nomination. Someone got on an recorded it. It's not really all that interesting to listen to, but for the real wonks out there it might provide some fodder. Good for research anyway.

I think it's more of an novel phenomenon -- infiltration and exposure of a nominally "closed" organization though via the net -- than a breakthrough event. The call-in info came out on a blog and the recorder used Skype to get the audio. This sort of thing just might have future uses.

To be horridly wonky for a second, why doesn't anyone point out in this controversy over Bill Bennett's statement that aborting every black baby in America would lower the crime rate that the pretense of an underlying logic -- which as been the matter of some debate -- lies not in crime rates but rather arrest and conviction rates.

Why? Because apparently it's taboo to point out the flawed nature of our criminal justice system and the way in which it can easily be perverted by racial prejudice, conscious or subconscious. It's not just false convictions. Black people are more likely to face arrest for things that otherwise might be let slide or demoted to a non-criminal infraction. Do the phrases "non-violent drug offender" and "mandatory minimum" mean anything to you?

Here's how it works. You criminalize an activity that an enormous number of people (including, on occastion, yours truly) partake in. Then your leave the choice as to what happens when this activity is discovered by the State in the hands of the Police (for choosing what evidence to collect and whether to even make an arrest at all) and the Prosecutors (for choosing what charges to bring and whether or no to invoke manditory minimums). Then you let the wheels of the criminal justice system grind away.

Now, there are many other factors underlying the higher arrest and conviction rates for african american citizens. Broadly speaking poorer education and health care leading to fewer career options ("life chances" as the sociologists say) are the most stastically significant. I'm just surprised that no one has pointed out the underlying flaw in the presumption that arrest and conviction rates accurately reflect demographic levels of criminality.

We'll someone did say it; Max Sawicky, who was one of the first politicla bloggers I read back in the day but who sort of fell off my radar. His site is looking awesome and he's a smart motherfucker.