I am probably the millionth blogger to comment on Major Hasan’s alleged massacre of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, and I’m sure it won’t stop there. I have to say, though, that the rhetoric I’ve been hearing over the past week has made it impossible for me not to toss my screed onto the growing pile. Commentators pretty much across the mainstream spectrum of opinion have latched onto this idea that Hasan was given the chance to do this heinous act by virtue of a culture of “political correctness” within the military, i.e. the Army being over-sensitive to Muslims within their ranks and overlooking Hasan’s failings. This strikes me as wildly off the mark and – worse – an attempt to utilize an unspeakable act of murder to make political points. It’s also part of the very common practice of mainstream commentators to avoid the elephant in the room when discussing matters related to our two simultaneous wars; namely, the true costs of such extended conflicts on those who fight in them, and the unwillingness of so many of the rest of us to share that burden in any meaningful sense.

One point few will disagree with – Hasan is a nut job who could have done a lot of things other than shoot up a roomful of people to express his rage. And his superiors obviously ignored many warning signs. But I think there’s a better explanation for this than “political correctness”, and it’s (wait for it): resourcing a major overseas deployment without conscription. They need trained professionals, and they sure as hell can’t draft them, so they take what they can get, even if they are severely incompetent. And homicidal maniacs? Who knows…  perhaps they get waved through, as well. We are sending them over to kill people, among other things. But in a nation run by politicians who would rather bankrupt us all than institute something as deeply unpopular as a military draft, the military must take the bad with the good in order to fulfill the demands of our seemingly endless wars. And even then, we’re talking about multiple deployments (some brigades on their fifth), reservists tapped, national guard troops sent overseas, the works.

So here’s this army psychologist tasked with counseling soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan – individuals who are having severe problems, no doubt. They are coming back from Iraq with stories of the kind heard in detail during the Winter Soldier hearings of a couple of years ago – telling them to a devout Muslim with fundamentalist leanings. This Major Hasan has a skinful of this stuff and is taking abuse about being a Muslim himself. He is told he is to be shipped overseas for the first time and is working on getting himself out of the military entirely. Like so many instances in the modern military, this was another atrocity-producing situation in the making. But the fact that this very screwed-up guy got as far as he did speaks volumes about how thinly stretched our armed forces are, particularly with 120,000 troops still in Iraq and major influxes planned for Afghanistan (it appears).

Not to worry, America – Joe Lieberman is going to investigate. Civilization is saved. I’m sure we can rely on him to get to the bottom of this issue, in a manner of speaking.  

luv u,

jp

Don’t know if you have credit cards with major TARP-rescued banks. I certainly do, and this week I received a notice from one of them telling me that they were summarily changing the terms of my credit agreement. In essence, they said they were raising the interest rate on my card to 23%. Yes, that’s right – 23% on a balance well below my credit limit, on a card I’ve had for at least a decade without missing a payment. You don’t seem surprised. Perhaps they’ve done the same to you… and, in fact, they are doing the same to everyone, as far as I know. It seems CitiGroup, the recipient of $45 billion in publicly funded bailout dollars, has settled on a business model that empties the pockets of American taxpayers a second time. Charging 23% and more on credit in an economic environment such as this, when people are losing their jobs, their homes, their shoes, for chrissake… and when institutions like Citi are drawing money from the Federal Reserve lending window at 0% to 0.25% interest. So… I guess when they’re earning less than 20% on your ass, you’re considered a non-performing asset.

Okay, so that’s one screw job. Not surprising that they would attempt to get all of their rate hikes in place before the consumer protection law goes into effect. Law of the jungle, right? Still… our government has a bit of leverage over these guys. Last I looked, we were the equivalent of major shareholders. And last I looked, CitiGroup’s executives were still making a pretty penny (top execs getting an average of $18.2 million – not bad). If this isn’t a case when pressure should be brought to bear, I don’t know what is. And lest this seems as though I’m just complaining about my own situation, I should say that this is not killing me – it’s people whose mortgages are underwater, whose kids are in college, whose jobs are on the chopping block… I mean, those folks really worry me. And if they’ve got a Citi card that’s shooting up to 23 or 29% and a JPMorgan Chase card that’s rifling 5% minimum payments out of them, they’ve got a problem.

Of course, it goes beyond that. The banking sector is making life impossible for people’s employers, as well. It’s making it hard to get credit for capital expansion. It’s tightening up on educational loans, scrutinizing the financial profile of colleges and universities to a more stringent degree than even the Department of Education uses. It’s lobbying hard against its own regulation, particularly the proposed Consumer Protection agency. So it seems like we need to severely limit these people’s ambitions, instead of acting as though everything is still the way it was three or four years ago when nothing could ever go wrong, ever. Meanwhile, there seems to be no limit on the amount of money we can borrow to burn pointlessly (and, in fact, profoundly counterproductively) in Iraq and Afghanistan, year after year. It almost seems as though Obama is beginning to see the handwriting on the wall with respect to the latter war. I wonder when he’ll see it with respect to these rapacious financial institutions.

I suggest we all communicate with our Congressional reps about this, with a cc to the various committee leaders (and one to the President, as well).

luv u,

jp

Well, I don’t know if any of you were following it, but my neighboring Congressional District – New York’s 23rd – just experienced a national political dogfight reminiscent of the one we were treated to three years ago. In some ways, it was worse, actually. You may know the story. Long time Republican Congressman John McHugh was tapped by Obama to be Army Secretary, opening up a special election to replace him. Instead of being in essence a regional race for a national office, this became a clusterfuck grudge match between two wings of the Republican Party – the moderate-conservative and the lunatic-conservative. And the actual fighting took place not so much between office holders in the G.O.P., but among retirees, resignees, also-rans, and professional bloviators like Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich, George Pataki, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Army, and so on. The G.O.P.’s-nominated candidate was apparently not conservative enough to please these… these…. objects, so they inserted themselves into a district of which they have no knowledge, to which have no connection, and in whose welfare they have no interest, just to score a point for their brand of reactionary politics. They supported the Conservative party nominee, pumped money into the race, and packed the airwaves with their endorsement messages and attack ads. And, well… they lost.

It’s kind of comforting, actually, that a plurality of residents in the 23rd district was able to resist this kind of manipulation. This was pretty remarkably cynical, even for the modern Republican party. I mean, Fred Thompson – Mr. “wake me up when I’m president” himself – endorsing the Conservative Doug Hoffman by saying “he’s like us”. Like “us”? What, an ex-Senator? A Hollywood star? A somnambulant presidential wanna-be? Are there a lot of those in the Adirondacks? Before long, these fuckers were falling over each other to show who had the more genuine hard-right, tea-bagger bona fides. Even once-though “moderates” like Tim Pawlenty and George Pataki weighed in on the right, with Gingrich taking the Republican nominee’s side. Strangely cartoon-like… these people were so over the top that Gingrich was “Mr. Reasonable” for a time. Not a pretty sight.

I won’t join in with the chorus of voices speculating about the broader political implications of this race. I can only say that I sympathize with my northern neighbors of both parties. Three years ago, we were bombarded by vicious political advertising as the G.O.P. and, to a lesser extent, the Democrats poured millions into influencing the outcome of the race for a then-open seat.  (We even got a visit by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, endorsing the Republican. Not sure it helped much.) It’s the kind of thing that makes campaign finance reform seem a more urgent matter than either party is willing to admit. In that kind of atmosphere, it takes real effort to discern the actual political positions of the various candidates. Much of the advertising is intended to discourage people from voting, rather than changing their minds. I am a registered Democrat and received stacks of direct mail from the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, all of them flailing away at now-Congressman Michael Arcuri, the Democrat, accusing him of pretty much everything short of the Kennedy Assassination. None of it stood up to the most cursory review, but who has time to do research, right? Again… very cynical.

I’m expecting very much the same next year, when Arcuri is up for re-election. My guess is that this will be considered a relatively easy seat for the G.O.P. to pick up. Something to look forward to, eh?

luv u,

jp     

A lot of explosions are taking place in the imperial hinterlands these days. No matter how optimistic you might be, it’s a little hard to convince oneself that things are moving in anything like a positive direction. Of course, we live in an era when people point to Iraq as if it were some kind of success story. The truth is, that country is simply blowing up a bit more slowly than it was a couple of years ago.  I suppose you could say that the success of counterinsurgency strategy was to help bring a full-scale fratricidal war down to 2003-04 levels of killing. That is a bit like an arsonist taking credit for helping to put out a house fire he himself started – one that resulted in multiple fatalities. (Note to our “leaders”: Don’t expect a good citizenship award any time soon… aside from the Nobel prize.) I must admit, I find the “the surge worked” crowd more than a little nauseating – most of them were in favor of this disastrous war in the first place. If Iraq is to be presented as a model for future interventions, I can see why the Iranians might want to be building bombs. We’ve, in essence, destroyed Iraq, killed perhaps a million people, permanently displaced several million more. Anyone want the same out there? Anyone?

My guess is that this is what runs through the minds of sane people in Pakistan pretty much every time they see American military hardware flying overhead. Or every time they hear our Secretary of State providing cover for our southwest Asia strategy. I have to think that their minds turn to those other fortunate nations we have “helped” over the decades. Afghanistan, of course, is the closest and most current example, its very borders a product of imperial hubris from a bygone era. Hostility among Pakistanis to the idea of American military involvement in their country must at least in part be motivated by a desire to have their homeland survive as a minimally functional state, as opposed to the kleptocratic basket-case to their west. They have seen where this type of relationship often leads, and they don’t want to go there.

So what are we attempting to accomplish in Afghanistan-Pakistan? Making our own nation safer? How, exactly? By brewing deep-seated hatred amongst millions of people on both sides of the Hindu Kush? (Old Joe “Wrong Way” Lieberman probably thinks it’s a good idea… and has he got a health plan for you!) Responding to media questions in Pakistan, Hillary Clinton referred to the war to “drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan” back in the 1980s and how we had, after that was over, turned away from that country and left it for the buzzards to fight over. (My words, not hers.) She might have mentioned that we had begun meddling in Afghanistan’s internal affairs prior to the Soviet invasion, and that that invasion was, in part, a response to the fanatical insurgency our intelligence agencies had helped to set in motion – you know, the one that later spawned the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and a few other organizations we’ve heard from more recently. International interventions of this kind have consequences, intended or not, that seldom redound to our benefit as a society (to say nothing of the peoples we subject to our policies).  

Hey, Barack-o…. One way you can make America safer is by not making the same mistake your predecessors made – i.e. relying on bombs, spies, paid assassins, etc. to force your will on the world. Not a good track record there.

luv u,

jp

There’s a pretty strong essay by Andrew Bacevich in the November issue of Harper’s (“The War We Can’t Win”) that looks at the impasse of the Afghan war and the fallacy of believing we can make America safe by continuing to occupy a foreign land. One would hope that Obama reads it – I have my doubts he’s hearing this point of view with any regularity. Bacevich observes that Obama is carrying forward the legacy of failure his predecessor established in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and while I don’t agree with every nuance of his analysis, he’s spot-on when questioning the general approach to the “War on Terror” that Bush took and which has since become a matter of conventional wisdom (or lack of same). The impetus towards revenge, stoked by the Bush team, that swept us into both wars has proven a dismal failure, as Bacevich points out. It is also a criminal abuse of power that has sowed the seeds of future disasters.  

The September 11 attacks represented a colossal failure of our political leaders, our commercial airline industry, our national security apparatus, and our intelligence community, as Jim Ridgeway so aptly described a few years ago in The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11  (note: not a “9-11 truth” work by any means). The problem wasn’t so much in Afghanistan as it was – and is – right here. The attacks were planned largely in Germany and in flight schools in the United States. So… are we planning to occupy Germany and Florida? Prolonging and expanding the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan is not going to make us safer – it’s simply going to inspire more people to try to take a shot at the empire that’s subjugating two Muslim nations and helping to oppress a third (Palestine). Bacevich contrasts our policy in Afghanistan to America’s relationship with Mexico, pointing out the absurdity of the notion that an army of occupation can be used to impose a more effective, less corrupt government and to disable international criminal networks operating within that country’s borders. To suggest this approach in Mexico would be to invite ridicule – even more so when you consider the degree to which our own trade policy has fueled the disintegration of the Mexican state and created a flood of economic refugees and illicit drugs across our southern border.

Truthfully, our policy in Afghanistan is the same as though we had allied ourselves with some of the worst drug cartels in Mexico in the hope that they might someday voluntarily adopt at least the pretense of virtue as not to embarrass us any further. The objective is not good governance for the Afghans – it is denying Al Qaeda safe haven, and we seem willing to do anything to bring that about… including a lot of things that seriously undermine that very goal. Like support for figures like the warlord Dostum and his ilk who would, I’m sure, tolerate their former jihadist allies if they saw benefit in doing so. Like killing senior Taliban leaders, so that younger, more energetic, more zealous militants can take their places. Like sacrificing some of the best among us for an unworthy cause.

Cheney and family are more than happy to trumpet this as some kind of triumph. Obama should know better than to follow in their footsteps.

luv u,

jp

I suppose on some level I must be an optimist because I can’t seem to dispel the notion that something good might come out of the health care debate, even when confronted with such a hopeless legislative clusterfuck as the Baucus bill. Maybe it’s our recent experience with the topic of global warming that nudges me in that direction. Think of it – a few short years ago our leaders were disputing the science of climate change with some confidence. Now that skepticism is the province of the tin hat patrol and the policy debate is over how much (or how little) to do about the problem. Too little, too late? We did lose precious years during the Clinton and Bush administrations (particularly the latter) when fundamental changes might have been set in motion, but were stonewalled. Those changes will come harder now, and perhaps to insufficient effect. Nonetheless, there was a kind of sea change in 2007 and I suppose something like that could happen with health care in America. If we could all recognize the existence of the problem and its fundamental nature, that would be a big step forward.

The reason I think of this as a possibility, albeit a remote one, is the fact that right now the only real alternatives are some kind of have-measure hybrid (like what Baucus coughed up) and single payer. What else is there, aside from meaningless modifications of what we have right now that won’t stop the eventual breakdown of this for-profit system? I think there’s fairly broad recognition right now that the current situation is unsustainable and will not remain as it is, even if now legislative measures are taken. Everywhere you look, companies are changing up their health insurance or dropping it altogether. So we’re left with some ineffectual public-private partnership or expanded Medicaid for all. Looks as though we’ll get the former in some respect; when (and I do mean when) that fails abysmally and millions more find themselves unable to hold on to adequate coverage, there will be only one alternative: the same one used by every other industrialized nation in some form. Single freaking payer.

This is similar to the experience of the early nineties in that we are starting out with a watered-down solution and compromising right-ward from there, as if the “magic of the marketplace” still holds a great deal of promise in the wake of last year’s economic meltdown. The rhetoric, by and large, has been anything but inspirational. A lot of talk about “bending the cost curve” – whoa, there’s something that will get the rank and file heated up. And yet, single payer is avoided by the liberals and used as an epithet by the right… even when it’s clear that it would be the most cost-effective means of providing health coverage. I’m convinced that the reason why there is so much talk about “choice” in this debate is to undermine the case for single payer… as if “choice” of health plans is the highest value one can imagine. I’m in the goddamned private market, and what choice do I have? One freaking plan that pays for anything. That’s it. And I’m among the luckiest. Seems to me we should concentrate more on giving people security. Seems like we should think of it more like we do about our fire departments or other life-saving services. It’s really about having that reliable resource, not choosing between competing vendors as a value in itself.

They say the arc of history bends towards justice. I would like to believe that’s true. Maybe if we press it a bit, it will bend a little faster.

luv u,

jp 

Has it really been eight years since we started this phase of the Afghanistan catastrophe? I can hardly believe it. Even so, those dark days of late 2001 are beginning to seem like a long time ago now. It was a difficult time, to be sure, on so many different levels – a nation still reeling from the 9/11 attacks, lashing out at one utterly destroyed by decades of warfare, much of it stoked by our government (with the cooperation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia). We are now told that the place is being overrun by religious fanatics – the Taliban – who want to bring the place back to the 13th century. From where it stands now, that wouldn’t be a very long trip.

The Soviets pounded the living piss out of the place, to be sure, but we made a very conscious decision to fund and support hyper religious elements within Afghan society as the core of that nation’s resistance efforts – some say before direct intervention by the Soviet military, and certainly thereafter. Our relationship with Pakistan’s ruling general Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq during the Reagan administration helped transform Pakistani society into one that is now, if not ruled by fundamentalist Islamists, at least defined by the degree to which that extreme brand of religiosity has constricted civil society.

So, if we go back eight years, we should certainly go back another 20 years before that… and more, when the Carter Administration started funneling support to the Mujahideen – a policy later carried forward with great enthusiasm by the even more craven Reagan, who built the effort up into the largest C.I.A operation up to that point. That was when legions of fighters from Muslim countries (including that guy named Osama) flocked to the Afghan frontier to fight the Russians and, into the bargain, any thought of secularism in that country. When the Russians left, we lost interest and the place went even more profoundly to hell, descending into fratricidal war and chaos that made even the Taliban’s tenuous rule seem stable by comparison. But the one-eyed mullah and his pals, along with Sheikh Osama and his, were creatures of our own manipulative foreign policy.

And all these years later, here we are again, poised on the brink of yet another policy decision. Will Obama, Nobel Peace Prize in hand, commit another 40,000 troops to an effort he just shored up with another 17,000 a few months back?  I’m almost certain that the answer will be… more dynamite from the Nobel laureate, for the people of Afghanistan. Change comes hard. Mighty hard.

luv u,

jp

A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health provided us with a useful portrait of the true cost of our current health care system. The study found that uninsured Americans have a 40% higher risk of death than those who have health insurance. Based on current levels of uninsured – somewhere around 45 million people – they estimate the annual death toll of our profit-focused system at around 45,000 lives lost. Lack of insurance is now one of the most deadly medical conditions in this country, ahead of kidney disease in the number killed. That is to say nothing of the number sickened, disabled, and bankrupted in addition – many of the last category, I’m certain, immediate kin to the dead. I would imagine this would be shocking news anywhere else in the world. Here, it merits perhaps a brief reference on the evening news… then it’s time to move on. Yep, 45,000 dead from lack of health insurance. Man, that’s a lot of bodies, Ken! Up next, here’s Brad with tonight’s sports, then it’s over to Kristen for our weather forecast.  Only in America.  

Imagine for a moment what would happen if, instead of lack of health care, a terror attack took 45,000 American lives. Think about it. We lost 3,000 lives in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and it nearly cost us our constitution. (In fact, I’m not certain it didn’t… the jury is still out on that one.) Much as political pundits seem to recall this time of unity and mutual support, it was in fact a time of public panic and governmental authoritarianism. And just as the attacks opened a sickening hole in lower Manhattan, they also created an opening through which some of our worst tendencies as a people crept on all fours. I heard people openly discussing the use of nuclear weapons on… well, on just about anybody. (Some of that came from Franklin Graham, purported “man of God”.) We curtailed civil liberties for whole classes of people, we invaded and occupied two countries, and we made torture an integral part of our military culture, instead of something done only in the shadows. It was a shocking and terrible time, and it resulted from the murder of 3,000. Now… imagine if such an attack killed 45,000.  And if that attack took place every year.

What would happen? As a nation, we’d turn ourselves inside out to respond. We’d transform ourselves into a police state, no doubt, completing the terrifying odyssey we began eight years ago when those planes struck the twin towers. And yet, think about it – that magnitude of loss, and all the additional pain that proceeds from that, is occurring right now. Not as the consequence of some catastrophic terror attack, but of something much more easily prevented. To my mind, that makes this all the more insidious. We are allowing tens of thousands to die, hundreds of thousands to suffer, and millions to lose their shred of prosperity just to preserve the profitability of the health insurance industry. We are allowing a narrow segment of corporate shills to shut out the interests of our entire nation by preventing us from having the kind of public health system that every other industrialized nation enjoys. What the hell does that say about us? Much as I hate to channel Bob Dole, where is the fucking outrage? 

Bin Laden doesn’t need planes, suicide belts, or truck bombs. All he needs to do is stand back and let our dysfunctional privatized health insurance do the job for him. 

luv u,

jp 

As I write, the G-20 is gathering in Pittsburgh, ostensibly to discuss what measures they can all agree on that will prevent another global financial meltdown from happening (i.e. at least the kind that threatens the G 20). Money and power will be well-represented, and as much as the gathering is described as an expanded club of economic powers, there is one global economic power that is not on the guest list. Which one? To borrow a time-worn phrase, the workers of the world – all those folks in all those countries who make the whole thing run; workers that are paid, underpaid, and unpaid…. everyone from the office drone to the subsistence farmer to the domestic slave-spouse. The folks that carry all those wealthy people on their shoulders – they will be severely underrepresented in Pittsburgh, and with good reason. If they start informing global economic policy, well then…. that would be a different game altogether.

You’ll see some of these non-participants out on the streets, carrying signs. But the vast, vast majority won’t come anywhere near the place. Frankly, nearly all of them are too busy making ends meet to do a road trip, even if to confront the sprawling international power-elite that immiserates them. Let’s face it – life is exhausting, especially for the poor, the overworked, the sat-upon, spat-upon. Many of them lined up for the 9/12 march on Washington a couple of weeks ago, goaded by cheap-seat demagogues like Glenn Beck to rally against even the vague hope of a slightly more equitable order. You have to ask yourself, why would anyone who has a lousy job with no benefits stand in a crowd that’s shouting down universal health coverage? I could see them complaining about the way it’s configured (a half-assed, public-private “solution”), but when the poor march against social democracy in any shape or form – even their own medicare benefits! – you know they’ve been hoodwinked. Whatever protocol emerges from the G-20 summit, it is unlikely to bring greater security to the un-rich because they are so disconnected from one another by circumstance, by distance, by distrust, and by cynicism born of generations of hard living.

It’s hard to imagine world political leaders – let alone the obscenely overpaid heads of global financial institutions – having any grasp of what it’s like to scrape by. I’ve had more than one taste of it, though always with a kind of familial safety net (crucial difference). Still, making the bills on $500 a month or less tends to focus the mind a bit, even if you’ve got generous kin who invite you over for dinner on the weekends. You’re always gambling on nothing going wrong, and something always does. If the car breaks down, you’re basically fucked – better luck next month. I had one credit card that kept me rolling for a few years – that was my rainy day, in essence. And I had no kids (cats, though). Can’t imagine what people do with dependents in a situation like that. What energy is left for organizing? I’m always amazed by the poor in countries like Haiti, where people have organized and faced down very powerful forces, decade after decade, setback after setback… and yet still they link arms and try again.

I think of those folks when I hear our leaders lecturing the third world on their behavior, and I am ashamed, frankly. We should follow the “global south’s” example and learn to fight for our own interests, even if it seems hopeless sometimes.  Call it G 2.0 – the other globalization.

luv u,

jp

Just a few short takes in the waning days of summer. Here goes…

Color blind. This week former president Jimmy Carter gave voice to another inconvenient truth; namely that racism is still a force in the United States and that it is a factor in some of the more vitriolic opposition to Obama’s presidency. I would think that this might seem obvious to anyone who’s lived on this planet for more than five minutes and is not a member of the Glenn Beck army of morons. The specious claim about Obama’s non-U.S. birth, his secret life as a Muslim, his resemblance to Hitler or the “antichrist”, and similar bile is apparently rooted in the desire to portray the president as “the other”, the ultimate expression of which, in America, has always been the person of color. Of course, people from the center to the right are jumping all over Carter, accusing him of introducing race into this incredibly high-minded national conversation we’ve been having (ed. note: irony). As always, we’re all supposed to pretend that racism doesn’t exist, except for the black-on-white variety. Carter got the same for his observations on Palestine, which were pretty solid in my view, so I say good on him for sticking his neck out once again instead of resting on his Nobel laurels like most of his colleagues tend to do.

Missile offense. I was glad to see Obama scuttle the ludicrous missile defense plan for Poland and the Czech Republic. The whole M.D. boondoggle has been mostly about profit defense for military contractors anyway, but this intiative to build batteries in Eastern Europe was beyond stupid. The freak chorus of neoconservatives is howling about how this is a cave to mother Russia, but if they say it’s a bad idea, it almost has to be a good one. (One wonders what their reaction would be if Russia were to base ABM batteries in, say, Cuba to protect Venezuela from attack by Israel, which really does have a nuclear capability.) Unfortunately the administration appears determined to place more interceptor missiles in the vicinity of Iran, something that smells to me like a back door build-up in support of a future attack against Tehran. Obama (and likely folks like Dennis Ross) have a clock ticking on Iran that will run out at the end of the year. What then?  

Shocked, shocked! I see the House (including an overwhelming majority of Democrats) wasted no time in cutting ACORN off from federal funds, punishing the organization for the shocking revelation that some of their low-level employees didn’t follow the script when dealing with abysmally poor people. I’m not sure how they think a lot of inner city poor people manage to support themselves. Earth to Congress: there is an underground economy in America. It’s there because the overground one doesn’t work for the poor. Inner city counseling is not an easy job – it’s mostly triage.  Still, I’m glad Congress is holding someone accountable for a change. I imagine next we will bar Halliburton from any federal contracts because their shoddy workmanship electrocuted 18 U.S. soldiers overseas. (Oh, wait – they got $30 million in bonuses.) Or that they’ll cut off Blackwater (now Xe) because they killed a bunch of folks in Nisour square in Baghdad (whoops – still working for us). Or that they’ll bar that firm guarding U.S. facilities in Afghanistan – the one manned by those dudes drinking gin off of each other’s asses. Or that they’ll take back all of the countless billions we gave to major banks and AIG because they were patently irresponsible in every imaginable way and nearly brought the financial system down.

Don’t hold your breath.

luv u,

jp