Give a nice hot breakfast to Thump and Whip (who wades into the fetid swamp known as Pam Geller so you don't have to).

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day

As my friends are seeing their children start to go off to college, I become more and more glad that I never had any. What these people are going through trying to figure out how to pay for college for these kids so they don't come out with a six-figure mortgage hanging over their heads and no jobs is just heartbreaking. Mr. Brilliant and I are lucky in that we've been able to put money away for the years after we've both been dumped from the workforce for being too old. I dare not even call it retirement, since that implies something voluntary; a sigh of relief and a kick-back and enjoy whatever healthy years we have left kindof image. It's nowhere near enough; after all, I didn't sell out to corporate America until I was well into my thirties and Mr. Brilliant is in a field (desktop support and network administration) that is now more than ever seen as solely a cost center, the employees of which are to be paid peanuts. Actually, I should say he WAS in a field (and hopes to be again), having been jettisoned back in January in favor of a 25-year-old replacement.

We are over the threshold of the Ryan plan cutoff, so in theory we would just make it into the current Medicare plan. However, if you are 55 or older and think you can exhale, just think about the Gen-Xers and millenials who are going to be running the government over the next thirty years. Do you honestly believe these people are going to let us keep this plan that they and their peers and children were denied by the 2011 Republicans? Hardly. Either Medicare will be eliminated by them or we will. Hell, I have FRIENDS who are Gen-Xers who blame us for everything and wish we would just fuck off and die already.

So whether you are 54 or 56, ultimately we are all going to end up in the same leaky canoe, trying to steer it past the Koch bros. yacht. And here's what we have to do in order to be able to have a roof over our heads when we're older:

A 54-year-old today will have to save an additional $182,000 in their IRA or 401(k) before he or she retires just to pay for the House Republican plan to eliminate Medicare, an analysis released today by U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) found.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimated that individuals born in 1957 would need $182,000 by the time they retire at 65 to pay the additional costs imposed by the Republican plan if they live to 84. The analysis was included in a letter to Rep. Miller.

“Under the Republican plan, seniors will go into debt. They will be forced to sell their homes that they spent a lifetime paying off. And they will have to rely on their children just to pay for basic medical care,” said Miller. “This is not what anyone would envision as a dignified retirement.”

Last month, House Republicans voted to end the Medicare program, which offers guaranteed benefits, and replace it with a plan that would force seniors to find private insurance with the assistance of a voucher. Since the voucher’s value relative to health care costs would decrease over time and private insurance costs are higher than traditional Medicare, seniors retiring in 2022 under the Republican plan would be forced to pay much higher costs than under current law.

As a result, CEPR found that the average senior beginning in 2022 would have to save $182,000 to cover these additional costs, assuming a return of 3 percent in real interest during their retirement years.

I know any number of people, not just in my own household (including many of our readers) who are past fifty, out of work, and despairing of ever working again. How the hell are they supposed to save another $182,000?

Perhaps Mr. Ryan would like to answer that question.

Labels: baby boomers, economic death watch, We Are So Screwed

A treasure from Jim Earl in the form of a video of part of the last broadcast morning of the late, great Morning Sedition.

For the uninitiated, Brendan MacDonald (guy in navy shirt) is now the producer of Marc Maron's hit podcast, WTF. Give it a listen. The guy with the scruffy beard is Dan Pashman, now of The Sporkful, whose writings can also occasionally be seen in Vanity Fair. You've seen Kent Jones on The Rachel Maddow Show.

I still miss this show every day of my life.

Labels: Marc Maron, Morning Sedition, talk radio

After two days of listening to Republicans insist that George W. Bush alone deserves the credit for the successful Bin Laden mission and wingnuts everywhere dissing Navy Seals because God forbid Obama should get credit for ANYTHING, it's almost a relief to get back to life in normal America, where the most important priority is not the economy, or even national defense, but rather punishing all those slutty American women.

First, let's go back to redefining rape. Because while the tender feelings of people like me, who have spent 40 years having MY tax dollars pay for wars and tax cuts for the wealthy and other things I don't agree with, don't matter one whit, the tender feelings of those who love the fetus but hate the baby once it's here, are paramount:

In a 251 to 175 vote this evening, 16 anti-choice Democrats joined every House Republican present in passing H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. A chief weapon in the House GOP’s “comprehensive assault” on women this bill proposes some of the most radical and draconian restrictions on women’s rights. They include:

– Redefinition Of Rape: The bill sponsor Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) faced serious backlash after he tried to narrow the definition rape to “forcible rape.” By narrowing the rape and incest exception in the Hyde Amendment, Smith sought to prevent the following situations from consideration: Women who say no but do not physically fight off the perpetrator, women who are drugged or verbally threatened and raped, and minors impregnated by adults.

Smith promised to remove the language and while it is not technically in the bill, Mother Jones reports that House Republicans used “a sly legislative maneuver” to insert a “backdoor reintroduction” of redefinition language. Essentially, if the bill is challenged in court, judges will look at the congressional committee report to determine intent. The committee report for H.R. 3 says the bill will “not allow the Federal Government to subsidize abortions in cases of statutory rape” — thus excluding statutory rape-related abortions from Medicaid coverage.

In America now, it's Republican Congressmen, not your physician, who gets to decide what constitutes health care. And so under this bill, you would no longer be able to deduct the cost of abortion as a medical expense, nor would you be able to use pre-tax dollars to pay for your insurance if that insurance even offers to cover abortions:

The bill would prevent people from deducting the cost of an abortion from their taxable income, except when the procedure is performed in cases of rape, incest or when a physician certifies that a woman's life would be in danger if she continues the pregnancy.

Current law, known as the Hyde Amendment, bars federal money for abortions, with the same exceptions as those in the bill. But the bill would make the Hyde Amendment federal law, rather than a provision added to other bills that must be voted every year.

Abortion opponents have charged that the health care overhaul contains a loophole for insurance policies. Obama's health care overhaul, passed last year, creates state marketplaces for insurance known as "exchanges." It allows participating plans to cover abortions, provided they collect a separate premium from policyholders and that money is kept apart from federal subsidies.

The bill, written by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., disallows the tax credit for the expenses of a small employer health insurance plan that includes coverage for an abortion. Democrats said that amounts to a tax increase.

"I thought my Republican friends hated taxes, but apparently they hate reproductive freedom and women's rights even more," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif.

Supporters of the bill passed Wednesday say the health overhaul doesn't go far enough to make sure that no tax money is used to subsidize abortions. Congressional estimates say the bill would raise only a negligible amount of tax revenue.

Opponents say the bill would make it difficult if not impossible for many women to obtain medical insurance that covers abortions — even if they pay for it themselves. They say the legislation could put the Internal Revenue Service in the position of determining whether women who get abortions were sexually assaulted, so the agency can decide whether the procedure is tax deductible.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., said the bill is really an effort to prevent insurance companies from covering abortions.

Because in these troubled days, the most important thing to Republicans is to codify into law that women who are raped are really just sluts who are asking for it and should be forced to bear the children of their rapists. After all, they'll need cannon fodder for the wars THEIR future leaders are going to start.

Labels: abortion, hypocrisy, misogyny, Republican brownshirts, The Republican War on Women

In the United States, bullshit can almost be considered the Fifth Element, with Donald Trump being The Last Hairbender. And indeed, the actions of this administration of late seem to be less autonomous actions as they're reactions to the Donald's assertions and charges.

Just as Trump was building what in right wing circles was a noteworthy and sturdy campaign platform ("Show us the birth certificate!"), out came the long form birth certificate. Then, to make room for the President's announcement of bin Laden's death, Trump's program, Celebrity Apprentice, was preempted. Sandwiched in between this was Obama's standup act at the White House Correspondent's dinner that was half devoted to roasting Trump without his prior knowledge.

But Donald Trump is easy fun fodder for people who don't have to worry about black helicopters and JSOC legally bypassing posse comitatus. As easy as it is to make jokes about Trump and the Republicans who were unwilling or unable to get bin Laden for the last 10 years, we seem to have forgotten how to recognize the failings and to make fun of an administration simply because it's controlled by the Democratic Party and is led by a man with a reputation for intelligence and glibness.

For instance, consider all the things that went wrong in Abbottabad, Pakistan the night we supposedly killed bin Laden: Misjudging the altitude and air density at the compound, a Navy SEAL chopper was grounded at the foot of the compound's outer wall. This prevented the chopper's takeoff after the op, requiring the vehicle's demolition. In a way, this will remind some of us older folks about the abortive rescue operation in Iran in 1980. It was probably the one single biggest fuckup that resulted in Jimmy Carter getting ousted out of office by Ronald Reagan.

Even though Pakistan's government shared with us intelligence about the compound, we decided to go in with guns blazing without first notifying the Pakistani government. Which, considering how notoriously corrupt Pakistani governments always seem to be and how close they've been to al Qaeda, may not have been such a bad idea, after all.

Then there was the supposedly open-ended ROE or Rules of Engagement: Capture bin Laden except if he resists. First we were told bin Laden traded fire with Navy SEAL and CIA operators. Then that was downgraded to, "Well, he may not have gotten off a shot, after all." By today, we were told by Jay Carney that he wasn't, in fact, armed at all, leading one to wonder what he could have done that could be construed as "resisting" and terminal force with extreme prejudice was deemed necessary.

And now NBC is telling us that bin Laden was captured alive then killed.

In fact, virtually everything we were told by the president and John Brennan, Obama's #1 counter-terrorism advisor, was a complete fabrication. Therefore, if we're to retain any sort of intellectual honesty, we have to wonder about what else went down in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

For those of you whose own memories don't stretch that far back, it may be worth it for me to remind you all that Brennan was Obama's first pick to head up the CIA. Then Brennan had to withdraw his name from consideration because of his prior statements that glorified torture, extraordinary rendition and other war crimes that we've been unsuccessfully denying for years.

Before becoming Obama's top counter-terrorism chief, Brennan headed up a company called Analysis Corp, a security company whose parent company's (Global Strategies) mercenaries have been criticized by human rights groups for human rights abuses.

So not only is Brennan a torture and extraordinary rendition-loving type of guy, he's also a fuckup and a liar who'd embarrassed the administration yet will still keep his job.


This is the first picture authorized by Brennan to be released of bin Laden's body.

Now, it ought to behoove us to remind ourselves of bin Laden's own murky and troubling history with our government and especially the CIA itself, an involvement that certainly did not end with bin Laden's and his mujahedeen's battle with the Soviets during the 80's. In fact, it's a matter of public record that bin Laden was still working with our government and his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were enjoying protection paid for by the US taxpayer as recently as two years before 9/11.

In fact, the al Qaeda-supported KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) was supported by not only bin Laden and his people but also by Germany and Uncle Sam. But don't believe me: This is coming from a former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. The KLA, you might remember, has long since been declared a terrorist organization by the US State Department.

Yet somehow, bin Laden's involvement with the CIA hardly ever makes it into the official narrative, especially any that's even tangentially devoted to September 11th. For instance, if you were to go straight to the index of Bin Laden, the Man Who Declared War on America by Yossef Bodansky, who's a former senior consultant to the Pentagon and U.S. State Dept., you'll note two pages of entries for bin Laden but only four mentions of the Central Intelligence Agency. That's hardly what I'd call an innocent oversight.

Compare that to Taliban, by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. His own index lists eight entries on bin Laden and no less than 11 about the CIA.

Speaking of intrepid journalists working abroad safely beyond the confines of the American corporate mainstream media, it may be worth it to look at a series of interviews that Greg Palast did for the BBC in the months before 9/11. Pay particular attention to what Michael Springman, a longtime veteran of that same State Department, says about how deep and incestuous was our involvement with al Qaeda. In fact, Springman said at the beginning of the first sound bite that he was ordered to issue visas to al Qaeda terrorists.

This was, of course, during the time when former CIA chief George HW Bush was still clinging to Reagan's coat tails in the White House.

I'm just dabbing at the many, many disturbing connections between bin Laden and the United States government. We know about the financing and training in Afghanistan and all that. What we may not know so much about was Dubya's inexplicable decision to pull back two attack subs near Afghanistan that had been in place for two years and were certainly in a position to take out the training camps if they'd been gotten the order (Clinton gave the order twice to do so but those were struck down by then CIA Director George Tenet).

Considering to what extraordinary lengths the Obama administration has gone to protect the war criminals of the Bush administration, is it really beyond the pale to speculate that perhaps the current administration was, in killing bin Laden, protecting not the United States but previous administrations?

Perhaps the whole idea was take bin Laden out before he could get to the trial phase. And, if anyone had a lot of secrets about our government, secrets that never should get out, that person was Osama bin Laden.

If you didn't see it last night, watch this segment from Rachel Maddow last night, in which she explains that Osama bin Laden's goal wasn't about Islam, or a caliphate, or even about U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia. No, like most rich kids whose wealth came from family money (including the one who occupied the White House when he attacked the US), his concern was about money:

Note in particular the Bin Laden quote from October 2004:

We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy ... as for the economic deficit, it has reached astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. The real loser is you. The American people and their economy.

Think about where we are now: deficts as far as the eye can see -- deficits that the very people who used to wear 9/11 around their necks as "wingnut whistles" until a black Democratic president succeeded where THEIR guy failed (or didn't even try, as he ADMITTED barely six months after the attacks, when a visit to lower Manhattan still resulted in burning eyes) now insist have to be paid on the backs of the old and the poor. Think about the cost of two wars, one of which was sold to Americans as being for their safety when it had nothing to do with that. Think about the money shoveled into the pockets of Halliburton executives (including those of the then-Vice President) and other contractors -- unaccountable money resulting from no-bid contracts. Think about the spending for security theatre; for beefed-up patrols, for x-ray scanners at airports designed to make Americans accept being treated like criminals so that they can "feel safe." Think of the society we live in now as a result of a few hundred thousand dollars of expense by a guy who's essentially no different from Paris Hilton, except Paris Hilton buys chihuahuas and lends her name to perfume and likes to go to parties instead of pretending to be a holy man while living in a mansion and cynically recruiting the phony tough and the crazy brave to kill themselves for Allah.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Bill Maher was fired from his Politically Incorrect show on ABC for straying from the "terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center are cowards" line, pointing out that to take control of a jet you don't know how to fly and steer it into a skyscraper is many things, all of them horrible, but one thing it is NOT is cowardly. What IS cowardly is sitting in a Pakistan mansion, or even in an Afghan cave, knowing you can GO TO a mansion any time you want to and take a nice shower and have a good meal, knowing you have millions of dollars at your disposal, and let other people do your dirty work.

George W. Bush decided it was Saddam Hussein who was worth the effort, not Osama Bin Laden. Six months after the attacks, Bush had lost interest in the bright shiny object he'd vowed to "smoke out" "dead or alive" barely six months earlier. That Bin Laden was living in comfort in Pakistan ought perhaps to begin questioning again just what DID happen in Tora Bora, and whether Osama was really the black sheep of the Bin Laden family (which has become more difficult to believe, now that we know that HE was the one they all relied on for money), and why he was able to (or allowed to) escape.

Most of us felt after the 9/11 attacks that Afghanistan was a "just war" designed to bring the mastermind and financier of the attacks to justice one way or another. Over time, as we've installed a corrupt puppet in Hamid Karzai, and wandered in the desert for the last ten years, even that war has become just another American misadventure that is bankrupting us just as surely as the Soviets were bankrupted in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- while fighting Osama Bin Laden's minions, who were called mujahadeen then, and also called "our allies".

Many of us who weren't in thrall to the tough talk of the whiny little faux cowboy in the White House knew that Iraq was NOT a just war, that it was unnecessary, and that it was related to either oil (which has turned out to be true) or to George W. Bush's psychosexual issues with his father.

One war that may have started out just and has turned into a quagmire and another that never should have been fought in the first place. Both are wars from which we seem unable to extricate ourselves. Between the wounded and the dead, the body count of American servicepeople is approaching Vietnam levels. And that is the second great tragedy of 9/11 and what Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush have wrought (and what Barack Obama seems bound and determined to continue).

Captain Shannon P. Meehan writes in the New York Times what it's like to be a veteran of these wars:

As I sifted through the responses of my friends on social networks, I read comments like, “Great news. If only we hadn’t gotten off course with Iraq for so long.” Or things like, “Could have gotten him earlier if we hadn’t wasted our time in the illegal war in Iraq.”

All this made me realize just how disconnected I am from the killing of Bin Laden. The more I reflect upon it, the less I feel a part of it, and the less I feel that I was ever any part of our war against terrorism, in the public’s eye at least.

My war — the Iraq war — is being remembered as quite a different war than the “war on terror.” Its narrative, shaped by the media and the general public, breaks dramatically from that of the war in Afghanistan and the pursuit of terrorists around the globe. The Iraq war has become the “mistake war,” one so many critics feel we should have never been a part of.

I have come to realize that, regardless of my own personal beliefs and opinions, this is how the Iraq war will be remembered. And this brings me to question myself, my efforts and my own worth. How will our achievements and sacrifices in Iraq be remembered? Will all that I did while I served be nothing more than a mistake?

The more I travel and speak about my personal experiences, the more I feel the shifting cultural memory of this war. I’ve felt it devolve over time in those moments when I am thanked not for keeping us safe from terror, but rather shown appreciation mixed with pity for having had to fight in this “illegal”war.

I fear now that we soldiers will be remembered for being in the wrong war, fighting to bring the wrong man, Saddam Hussein, to justice. Consider the difference between the public reception of the killing of Bin Laden and the trial and execution of Hussein, a man responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers as well as years of oppression and systematic degradation of a land. The latter was met with questions and controversy. But the death of Bin Laden, a man who dared to bring horrific violence onto the shores of our country, has been met only with approval. Those differences are telling.

So, as much as I want to feel a part of this moment, to feel some sense that I contributed to it, I do not. As a veteran of the Iraq war, I do not feel entitled to any sort of meaningful connection to this achievement. Years of political and public criticism of the Iraq war has pushed me to believe that I did not fight terror, but rather a phantom.

After Vietnam, we hoped that this country would learn from that mistake and not enter into unnecessary wars ever again. We can still argue about Afghanistan, but as much as we recognize the honor the service and the self-sacrifice of Captain Meehan and others, we cannot face our feelings and our guilt about his feelings by recasting Iraq as some kind of noble cause when it so clearly was not. What we DO owe this man is again, a promise (this time to be kept) that we will not put his successors into a war without reason again, no matter how raw we are emotionally.

Such is the legacy of Osama Bin Laden: His enemy nation is on its knees, wracked by debt and declining standards of living and corporate greed and inequality. A nation whose citizens jump at the mere mention of Al Qaeda to the point that we have become willing to give up all of our privacy just to be able to believe, however falsely, that it won't happen again. A nation in which a Congressman can call McCarthyesque hearings demanding that people who are members of the religion Bin Laden professed to practice to somehow "prove" their loyalty to this country. A nation in which a President whose name is associated with Islam is hounded about what constitutes a valid birth certificate by people with no knowledge of legal documentation.

The demonstration in the street show that while George W. Bush wasn't "all that concerned" with Osama Bin Laden, Americans clearly were. We may be uncomfortable with the precedent of assassination (which may at some point in the future be used indiscriminately by another George Bush trying to prove his manhood to his father), and this does not mean the end of Al Qaeda or even of terrorism coming from the Middle East (as opposed to the terrorism brewing in our own heartland). But if we do not take time out from the celebrations and look at what we have allowed Osama Bin Laden to do to our country, not a decade ago, but in the decade since, then we deserve to continue our slow slog into oblivion.

More from Ezra Klein.

Labels: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, terrorism

(I belong to Alan Grayson's mailing list. This is Congressman Grayson's newest letter on the assassination of Osama bin Laden. My unitalicized comments will follow below.)

About a year after 9/11, I was sitting in an airport terminal, waiting for a flight, when nature called. I turned to the young lady sitting next to me, and asked her if she would watch my carry-on baggage while I went to the restroom.

She looked at me, she hesitated, and then she asked, “How do I know that you’re not a terrorist?”

She wasn’t kidding. She looked a little scared.

I thought about delivering some snappy retort, like “I used to be a suicide bomber, but I quit, because I didn’t like the pension benefits.” I could see, though, that she was actually feeling some fear, so I looked her in the eye and said, “I’m not a terrorist.” She thought for a moment, and then she said, “OK, I’ll watch your bags.”

And off I went.

After that conversation, I realized that 9/11 had not only radically altered our national security priorities, but also the way that many people thought about others. And the weird possibility grew in many people’s minds that any stranger could be a killer.

Now that Osama Bin Laden is dead, I hope that that feeling also is dead. The feeling that we live in fear. Judging by all the spontaneous celebrations, maybe that feeling is dead.

We have often heard the phrase, “if xxxxxxx, then the terrorists have won.” Martha Stewart once told her employees that if not enough of them attended her company Christmas parties, then “the terrorists have certainly succeeded.”

Here is one formulation of that formula that we didn’t hear: “If the terrorists make you feel terror, if they make you fear them, then the terrorists have won.”

I hope that that’s over, now.

We spend roughly $3000 for every American each year on the U.S. military. There is a theory that the reason for this is that the military-industrial complex controls our foreign policy, in much the same way that the medical-industrial complex controls our health policy, and Wall Street’s money-industrial complex controls our economic policy. That public opinion is simply irrelevant.

Maybe. But public opinion since 9/11 has been skewed by the real fear that many Americans have felt. Urged on, of course, by certain parasites in the body politic who want us to believe that they are the only ones who can save us from the threat.

In George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fundamental basis for the totalitarian state that he portrays is the fear and hatred of the foreign enemy, Oceania. A siege mentality, brought about by endless war.

I hope that the death of Osama Bin Laden will mean the death of the siege mentality. The end of the perceived need for foreign occupations, and the end of foreign occupations.

I hope for peace.

---

Some things need to be said here, things that, once again, the yellow-legged, yellow journalists who are trying to piss and shit red, white and blue will, as usual, never tell you.

First off, this was an assassination, plain and simple. As with the nearly 3000 who were killed at Ground Zero, the evidence was carted away with no real forensic analysis and no peer-reviewed findings presented to the public. Osama bin Laden's body, we're told, was buried at sea and a DNA analysis was supposedly done within hours of his extra-judicial killing. A full DNA analysis, especially when mitochondrial DNA is involved, takes days.

Secondly, among the first stories we heard after the shooting was the ROE or rules of engagement. No Navy Seal worth his weight in MREs is going to go into a tactical situation without first learning what exactly the ROE are. That's not to say they don't change during the op but no operator is going to engage an enemy without knowing what they can or can't do.

The ROE we were told was that bin Laden was to be taken alive unless he resisted. First we heard that bin Laden engaged the erroneously-named SEAL Team 6 then was shot in the left eye. Then we heard that bin Laden may not have gotten off a shot. By today, we were hearing that bin Laden may not have even had a gun but that he nonetheless resisted.

OK, question: How do you resist a SEAL team without a gun? How did he resist? By using harsh language? Giving them the finger?

This was an assassination, an extra-judicial killing that the Obama administration OK'd way back in 2009. We criticized him when we found out he'd ordered a hit on an American citizen who'd become a radical Muslim. But when bin Laden is concerned, we're suddenly OK with this because he wasn't an American.

I can't imagone what actually went on in Abbotabad, Pakistan that night but considering that five terrorists were allegedly killed without even so much as an American injury, one must conclude that the Navy SEAL and CIA operators had the situation fully under control from the beginning. In fact, it seemed they exerted so much control, they could've taken bin Laden alive to be interrogated.

One could make the argument that al Qaeda's longtime leader wouldn't have given them actionable intelligence. But then again, we could make that argument with any terrorist and use that as a rationale for extrajudicial assassinations. God knows we've done that before.

Our country shouldn't go around killing high value criminals such as bin Laden on the assumption we would never get actionable intelligence. We took Saddam Hussein into custody, got no information from him then executed him. We could've done that with bin Laden. But we'll never know what we could've gotten from him because bin Laden is fish food.

Congressman Grayson hopes, naively, that the end of bin Laden will mark the end of the era of fear that has warped this nation's sensibilities and priorities since 9/11. But what I'm hearing, starting with the top, is the exact opposite. All US military installations were ordered by the president to a higher state of readiness. Security has been beefed up in state and federal buildings, airports. The death of bin Laden, ironically, has had opposite the desired effect. Rather than putting us at ease, we're being told by our highest elected officials that our vigilance must not waver and that reprisals may be in the offing. Years ago we were told that we should be very, very afraid when bin Laden was alive. Today, we're being told we should be very, very afraid now that he's dead. When will it end?

Sorry, Congressman Grayson. The fear will never end. In fact, I can perfectly see the Department of Defense, still under pressure to feed the bottomless meat grinders in Iraq and Afghanistan, to note the young people in New York and Washington and to cynically use this as a recruiting tool.

The boy pictured above is Kevin Van Orden, who is shown in full military uniform near Ground Zero the night bin Laden was killed, even though he's not in the military. His brother is in the Army and it gives me chills to think that recruiting will once again see an upsurge as a result of the false patriotism that bin Laden's death is bringing about. It keeps me up at night thinking that bin Laden's extrajudicial killing could be cynically used as a selling point by a Department of Defense that's still fighting and feeding two wars that never should've been started in the first place. It keeps me awake at night thinking that kids like Van Orden, perhaps intent on following their older siblings into military service, may be fooled into enlisting, thinking perhaps that the world really is safer without bin Laden in it, fooled into believing in our nation's invincibility, an invincibility that was forever ended on 9/11.

(By American Zen’s Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort. - President Barack Obama, May 1, 2011

I can just hear it all now.

Republicans, who freebase war like crack addicts, will express skepticism at bin Laden’s death because, well, a black man can’t succeed where his white Republican predecessor did his damnedest to fail for eight years.

Democrats, equally bought and sold by the military-industrial complex, will rally around the president as if he was the one who’d personally shot Osama bin Laden in the left eye and turn this into a mantra as to why we should re-elect their man. But we must stay the course in Afghanistan because the fight is not yet over, comrades.

Conservative bloggers will sneer that it took Obama all this time to kill OBL without once mentioning that Bush could’ve taken him out many years ago when French snipers had bin Laden in their sights not once but twice and that Bush told them to back off or that we hustled dozens of members of the bin Laden family out the US two days after 9/11 despite the FAA’s moratorium and not allowing the FBI to interview a single one of them.

Teabaggers, who are even more woefully deficient in international affairs than they are on domestic issues, will simply mutter or say nothing.

Islamic radicals, terrorists and wouldbe terrorists will jockey for position in the alleged power vacuum and renew the fight against imperialist American forces and their sympathizers in an attempt to turn bin Laden into a martyr.

Rank and file Americans who still feel it their duty to accept as gospel everything the government tells them will have OBL Day in Times Square, sailors kissing nurses and chanting “Fuck yeah, USA!” at Ground Zero.

And liberals, progressives and other free-thinkers will express skepticism that not only was bin Laden’s body conveniently buried at sea and that not one photograph exists of his bullet-riddled corpse, but that this brazenly disingenuous administration that has done nothing but lie to us and flipflop practically from Day One is essentially telling us, once again, to Trust us.

My personal thoughts on the subject? I do not know if al Qaida’s leader is dead nor do I care because it simply doesn’t matter. It goes without saying that the world is a better place without Osama bin Laden but that would be to also suggest that the world would be an even better place without a United States that creates monsters the rest of the world has to slay. Osama bin Laden, as stated here earlier, is the ultimate blowback, a perennially unlearned object lesson delineating what happens when we rashly choose, train and finance allies based not on common, noble interests but simply on having common enemies.

As a figurehead and proxy that took on the Soviets in Afghanistan, bin Laden and his mujahedin served their purpose. It was still and always will be Charlie Wilson’s War but even those of who’d seen the Tom Hanks movie still give the Afghan freedom fighters and the rich scion of a Saudi construction empire who’d led them credit for kicking out the hated Communists. As it was, it’s a miracle we didn’t try to make bin Laden another TE Lawrence, Lawrence of Afghanistan, firing Stinger missiles at our common enemy so we couldn’t be officially accused of reckless adventurism abroad.

And now we’re supposed to be relieved and overjoyed at our President grimly telling us last night that Osama bin Laden, the scourge of American imperialist and corporate interests, is dead. We’re supposed to do our duty and assume that, just because the American government and our president tell us something, it must be so. And we’re not supposed to be mindful of the irony that bin Laden, once our excuse for covert involvement in Afghanistan, is still and will continue to be our excuse for our overt involvement in Afghanistan.

Just remember how truthful and sincere Colin Powell sounded during his presentation as to why we should go to war with Iraq before the UN Security Council in February 2003. Just remember how very truthful and sincere Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and all those other very serious and powerful people seemed when they gravely intoned veiled and not-so-veiled threats about smoking guns and mushroom clouds as they stole our civil liberties from us by the handful.

They’re civil liberties that still have not been given back to us nor should we persist in believing that disingenuousness and fear-mongering are purely Republican traits. The only difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration is that the latter finally got around to making bin Laden irrelevant, ergo expendable.

Goldstein’s usefulness to Big Brother was most invaluable as a symbol, a fabrication designed to stir up not only Oceanic patriotism but to stoke fear in the proletariat and party members by more than tickling our innate and inherent anti-Semitic fears and prejudices. Orwell’s naïveté was in assuming that Big Brother and the government of Oceania would never need another symbol like Goldstein.

But the United States has proven very adept at creating not only enemies but symbols who are killed and rekilled and yet live to fight another day. The most common chestnut is, of course, Hitler, whose death was also supposed to be taken on faith despite there having been absolutely no photographic or forensic evidence whatsoever to quantify his death and giving rise to decades of outlandish conspiracy theories and hopes through Nazi and neo-Nazi circles that Der Fuhrer still lived in one way or another.

The biggest mistake the Obama administration ever made in this matter was in not taking pictures and shooting videos that would’ve conclusively proved that bin Laden is dead. The rationale for this is clear and betrays more cowardice on the part of the Obama administration, the same cowardice that led Obama to turn tail and not release the torture photos and videos: It would incur the wrath of al Qaida, a terrorist network we’re hardly closer to closing down than we were when they supposedly brought down the twin towers nearly a decade ago.

And, as stated, it doesn’t matter if bin Laden is dead or not. There will be other bin Ladens, other Goldsteins, other Hitlers we can manufacture to rally the masses around the next guy who’s momentarily put in charge by the military-industrial complex, the petroleum cartels and the Bilderberg Group. Hell, in 1988 Noriega practically ran on the same ticket as HW Bush.

Because whatever political party’s in charge, there will be other blowbacks, other figureheads, other symbols that we can use to one advantage or another for one purpose or another in a neverending dance of death and destruction in which bad guys are the good guys then are unmasked as bad guys and only the victims, the poor and powerless, remain the same

And whether or not you want to believe that Osama bin Laden’s dead, don’t be too overjoyed or rather, be overjoyed. Eat, drink and be merry and enjoy the euphoria while it lasts. Because if you think this means we’ll be getting our troops out of Afghanistan anytime soon, think again. Afghanistan is the new Vietnam, the new South Korea, a slog of a war having nothing to do with al Qaida, one that has long since lost that new war smell and has been tucked away in the backs of our minds as a dim hum.

Because out of all the factions listed above, the only one whose opinions matter, the ones that will continue shaping policies is the faction that says, “But we must stay the course in Afghanistan because the fight is not yet over, comrades.”

Heh. From Pam:

And that photo reminded me again of this:

(Yes, I know, he's going to break our hearts again by selling out on reproductive self-determination, or on Social Security, or on tax cuts. But for now I'm going to smell the roses and eat the chocolate and pretend that it really IS going to be different this time, baby.)

Labels: President Barack Obama

So what do you think the wingnut response will be to the killing of Osama Bin Laden on Barack Obama's watch?

I'll start:

"How DARE he keep children awake on a school night delaying his remarks!"

"He kept Americans, some of whom lost loved ones on 9/11, waiting while his speechwriters told him what to say."

"This is George Bush's victory. After all, it was he who started the war in Afghanistan."

"This proves Obama is a Muslim. Obviously other Muslims turned Bin Laden in."

Post your own projections and overhearings in the comments.

POST-SPEECH UPDATE: It's doubly sweet that this has happened on Codpiece Day. And kudos to Obama for NOT giving credit to George W. Bush, who let Osama Bin Laden go at Tora Bora and barely six months after the 9/11 attacks, was saying this:


ANOTHER UPDATE: Oy. Ida Siegel, reporting from lower Manhattan for MSNBC, just referred to "Obama" being dead. Barack Obama has been president for over two years already. You'd think people would know how to pronounce his name by now.

Labels: 9/11, Osama bin Laden, wingnuttia

Just saw from Joe Sudbay at Americablog that President Obama is to address the nation any minute with the topic being National Security. MSNBC will have video.

10:50 PM: MSNBC is reporting that Osama Bin Laden is dead. President Obama to speak shortly.

Labels: national security, President Barack Obama

I'm sure you've heard about pyromaniacs who become firefighters -- guys who set fires so they can share in the glory of putting them out.

Would you want a pyromaniac in YOUR town's fire department? Of course not. So I wonder why so many people want to put Republicans in charge of our nation's fiscal house, given that they seem always to create massive deficits and then talk incessantly how they are the ones to fix them:

In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.

Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds. “In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.

Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.

Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

Big-ticket spending initiated by the Bush administration accounts for 12 percent of the shift. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have added $1.3 trillion in new borrowing. A new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients contributed another $272 billion. The Troubled Assets Relief Program bank bailout, which infuriated voters and led to the defeat of several legislators in 2010, added just $16 billion — and TARP may eventually cost nothing as financial institutions repay the Treasury.

Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, a favorite target of Republicans who blame Democrats for the mounting debt, has added $719 billion — 6 percent of the total shift, according to the new analysis of CBO data by the nonprofit Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate.

It's no secret that Republicans have wanted to do away with all programs that help actual people -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, school lunches, nutritional assistance to the poor, libraries, and on and on and on. In the Republican Randian dream universe, people like Donald Trump and the Koch brothers, all of whom inherited their money, are lauded as visionary hard workers, while the rest of us slink off, and in the prescient words of former Rep. Alan Grayson, die quickly.

So it's hardly surprising than when you look at the numbers rather than the talking points, it's Republicans since the dawn of the Reagan Doctrine who create the deficits. It is, after all, the easiest way to generate the kind of crises that have any possibility of winning enough public support to fulfill their dream of a society of the rich and corporations, by the rich and corporations, and for the rich and corporations.

The rest of us don't even qualify as people.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, incompetence, pouring gasoline on a blazing fire

It doesn't always seem that way, but there is:

In numerous interviews in the low-income Alberta neighborhood here on Friday, shortly before President Obama and other officials toured what is now an unimaginable wasteland, residents said they had few complaints about the handling of the aftermath by state, local and federal agencies.

Many expressed mild frustration about limits on their access to damaged homes, the pace of road clearing and power restoration, and traffic jams caused by roadblocks and nonfunctioning signals. But most agreed that government and charitable agencies were coping as effectively as feasible with immediate demands for shelter, food, water and medical care, along with search and rescue operations.

“It ain’t like Katrina,” said Darius Rutley, 21, whose house in Alberta was obliterated. “We’re getting help.”

Labels: FEMA, natural disasters, President Barack Obama

This is some funny shit. He should do this more often.

Except there are idiots out there who will take this as an admission that he was born in Kenya.

Labels: "birthers", Barack Obama, White House Correspondent's Dinner