Out of My Mind

After 712 posts, this blog has been moved:

http://thesyndicalist.blogspot.com

The reason for the move is totally not worth going into let alone the time needed to do so.

However, the new name in the URL will make it easier for the NSA to find us and make friends with us because we want to make friends with people supposedly protecting us -- or at least spying on us for our own damn good.

The great and wonderful Nicholas von Hoffman explains it all -- for dummies :)

From the War Room, wonderful news for haters of democracy and freedom i.e. our leaders and their supporters:

The Bush administration scored a major victory Thursday in its efforts to criminally prosecute journalists and others involved in the leaking and reporting of classified information. A federal district court in Virginia refused to dismiss a criminal indictment brought by the Bush Justice Department under the Espionage Act of 1917 against two former employees of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), who are alleged to have received classified information from a former Bush defense department official, and then passed it on to a journalist and an Israeli diplomat. Background on this extremely important case -- and the way in which it is being used by the Bush administration to enhance their ability to prosecute journalists -- can be found here.

In essence, this is the first time the U.S. Government has ever prosecuted anyone under the Espionage Act who was not a government employee and who did not have a security clearance. What is extraordinary about the prosecution is that the defendants are private citizens who merely received and disseminated classified information from a government employee -- something which investigative journalists, by definition, do every day. The Bush administration contended, and the court today ruled, that such conduct can be the basis for being charged with felony violations of the Espionage Act.

The essence of the district court's ruling (.pdf) today is that the Espionage Act authorizes the federal government to prosecute even private citizens (and therefore, presumably, journalists) who knowingly receive and transmit classified information. As the court put it (p. 53): "the government can punish those outside of the government for the unauthorized receipt and deliberate retransmission of information relating to the national defense."

The court additionally ruled that the imperatives of national security outweigh any First Amendment interests which a citizen might have in publicizing such information. As Secrecy News points out, this ruling would almost certainly expose those who revealed Abu Grahib abuses to criminal prosecution. It also strongly bolsters the Bush administration's ability to prosecute journalists involved in the reporting of the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program and the secret, lawless Eastern European prisons revealed late last year by the Washington Post's Dana Priest.

The GOP 2006 playbook is here.

Short version: Lie and spread fear.

This is from the Journal Op-ed page so of course it's demented crap but this guy has it so exactly wrong and ass-backwards. Israel, with US enabling, has weakened its position with the Lebanese excursion, as it were. Case close. And if these rightwing nutjobs see it as simple defense they're very mistaken -- and any Israeli reads that as true support for a demented policy birthed in military ignorance and political weakness -- well, God bless him or her. They'll need it....

However, the world as we know it today -- post-Holocaust, post-9/11, post-sanity -- is not cooperating. Given the realities of the new Middle East, perhaps it is time for a reality check. For this reason, many Jewish liberals are surrendering to the mindset that there are no solutions other than to allow Israel to defend itself -- with whatever means necessary. Unfortunately, the inevitability of Israel coincides with the inevitability of anti-Semitism.

This is what more politically conservative Jews and hardcore Zionists maintained from the outset. And it was this nightmare that the Jewish left always refused to imagine. So we lay awake at night, afraid to sleep. Surely the Arabs were tired, too. Surely they would want to improve their societies and educate their children rather than strap bombs on to them.

If the Palestinians didn't want that for themselves, if building a nation was not their priority, then peace in exchange for territories was nothing but a pipe dream. It was all wish-fulfillment, morally and practically necessary, yet ultimately motivated by a weary Israeli society -- the harsh reality of Arab animus, the spiritual toll that the occupation had taken on a Jewish state battered by negative world opinion.

Despite the deep cynicism, however, Israel knew that it must try. It would have to set aside nearly 60 years of hard-won experience, starting from the very first days of its independence, and believe that the Arab world had softened, would become more welcoming neighbors, and would stop chanting: "Not in our backyard -- the Middle East is for Arabs only."

It is true that Israel has entered into peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan that have brought some measure of historic stability to the region. But with Israel having withdrawn from Lebanon and Gaza, and with Israeli public opinion virtually united in favor of near-total withdrawal from the West Bank, why are rockets being launched at Israel now, why are their soldiers being kidnapped if the aspirations of the Palestinian people, and the intentions of Hamas and Hezbollah, stand for something other than the total destruction of Israel? And if Palestinians and the Lebanese are electing terrorists and giving them the portfolio of statesmen, then what message is being sent to moderate voices, what incentives are there to negotiate, and how can any of this sobering news be recast in a more favorable light?

The Jewish left is now in shambles. Peace Now advocates have lost their momentum, and, in some sense, their moral clarity. Opinion polls in Israel are showing near unanimous support for stronger incursions into Lebanon. And until kidnapped soldiers are returned and acts of terror curtailed, any further conversations about the future of the West Bank have been set aside.

Not unlike the deep divisions between the values of red- and blue-state America, world Jewry is being forced to reconsider all of its underlying assumptions about peace in the Middle East. The recent disastrous events in Lebanon and Gaza have inadvertently created a newly united Jewish consciousness -- bringing right and left together into one deeply cynical red state.

The rest is here.

An Open Letter to Ehud Olmert

Dear Ehud:

Just in case you haven’t figured it out, Israel has lost the war so for the sake of your nation’s security, you better be working on a plan for the earliest possible cessation – well, not of hostilities but stupidity.

Again, the radical right-wing habit of talking trash from a position of weakness resulting in a completely pointless military excursion – excuse me – avoidable disaster.

Let me put it this way: You have weakened the security of Eretz Yisroel as well as the Middle East and points beyond.

In case you still don’t understand, you’ve empowered Hezbollah, weakened the non-sectarian Lebanese government (which wasn’t much to begin with but was at least a start), empowered Iran and radicalized more Islamofascists.

And I’m very scared that either you had no idea what you were getting or worse the Mossad was clueless.

(Note to myself: Add to those never to vote for: tough-talking pussies.)

VTY, &c.

Not here:

All this we know. Less well remembered nowadays, though -- in fact, almost never discussed in the major media -- was another implicit prong of the argument: that invading Iraq would be cheap and easy, leaving plenty of resources for other purposes. When White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey stumbled off message in September 2002 with his prediction that war could cost $100 billion to $200 billion, the administration flew into crisis mode. Budget Director Mitch Daniels was trotted out to label the estimate “very, very high.” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz opined -- in testimony to Congress, no less -- that reconstruction would cost virtually nothing in light of Iraq’s promising oil revenues. Daniels proffered an estimate in the $50 billion to $60 billion range, substantially less than the $80 billion inflation-adjusted cost of the Persian Gulf War. Lindsey, famously, was soon after fired -- for his troublesome cost estimates and, reportedly, the President’s annoyance at his poor personal fitness habits.



By April 2006, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) inquiry concluded that Lindsey’s estimate was, indeed, way off -- but in the other direction. Around $261 billion had already been spent. Given the human stakes, it may seem crass to worry overly much about the dollar cost of a military conflict. But the fact that a CRS report is needed at all, as opposed to the straightforward accounting that either the White House or the Pentagon could surely provide were they so inclined, points to the basic reality that the war’s proponents are continuing the prewar pattern of covering up the costs. And with good reason: They’re enormous. Scandalously enormous.

The same CRS report indicated that before it ends, the war will likely cost somewhat more than the $549 billion spent (adjusted for inflation) in the much more lethal Vietnam War. But even this figure will likely prove to be off by hundreds of billions of dollars because it accounts only for funds directly appropriated for war fighting. As Linda Bilmes, a leading Harvard budgetary expert, and Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz point out in their January 2006 paper, “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War,” the spending captured by the CRS, even in strict budgetary terms, is “only the tip of a very deep iceberg.”

The rest of the sordid, ugly story is here.

There's a lot of stuff here. Not the whole story but a start. Of course their sins are greater than just this stuff.

Humor in the Wall Street Journal (sub required)?

Our leaders are "pondering" for a post-Fidel era? They're great at that. We're waiting for them to start pondering Iraq and what a fabulous job they've done weakening our national security.

"Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything." -- Frank Dane

It obviously works....

As you reap, so shall you sow.

Mel's a radical Christian, a Catholic whose Catholicism is not very Catholic in pretty much any sense of the word. As such, a certain level of anti-everyone-elsism is part of his beliefs. Obviously not in an overt way but it's there.

Here's today's thought exercise: Is a miniseries predicated depicting the Holocaust from the point of view of Christians who help Jews likely to put a very accurate spin on what the Holocaust was about? Or more likely to focus on how strong Christian beliefs enable a couple of believers to help some Jews escape the Holocaust? Is the latter therefor likely to be historically accurate other than as a sidebar as it were?

In other words, from a historical perspective, at its most benign, who needs it?

And lets skip over "Passion" other than to say a sensitive believer would not have made a movie based on Anti-semitic medieval passion plays buts a good old bio of a(n allegedly) loving god.

So his asking Jews to help the healing is hypocritical crap.

Still, despite being a crap actor, he looks cute in his mug shot. Maybe even g@odd#m cute :)

And actually, IIRC, this is only Gibson's first run-in with the law with anti-Semitic overtones. I'm reminded, so to speak, by the accompanying graphic and by this one.

Meanwhile, the indictment is here in its glory.

And Bill Maher of all people nails it pretty well (obviously his Jewish half talking, not the good... Catholic boy half).

So post-democratic America.

But then, what does one expect from our current leadership? Resistance to the corruption of the proto-fascist state: Big contributions from Diebold and its ilk plus the ease of riggng elections -- how can they proto-fascists resist? And their principals benefit -- the principal of power at all costs.

The bad news is here.