Wikileaks re Af-Pak

There's a fair level of agreement that not much that's truly new was revealed about the war efforts in the 92,000 documents leaked to the world via Wikileaks.  The main concern (beyond the usual political theatrics) is that much is revealed about the approach we take putting Intelligence and Policy-making Decisions together; and that means that other countries' intel communities will get a leg up on us.  There's also an argument that says even those countries we consider friends will regard us with greater suspicion because we allowed the leaks without retribution against the leakers and so we're less trustworthy than we were before blah blah blah.

One - were we ever really all that trustworthy?  And did any country (friend or not) ever place any great trust in us to begin with?  This one just tries to perpetuate the myth of "America: The World's Goodguy".

Two - if government is supposed to operate more like a business, then this is actually a great opportunity for improvement.  If you think you're losing the confidence of your customers because of the way you've been conducting your business, then the smart thing to do is to consider making some changes in the way you conduct business.

Just sayin'.

DIY Dentistry

Pure genius.

Dear Mr President,

If you're looking for a Democrat with some balls, check out Mr Weiner from NY.

Maybe the Great Minds working in the Whitehouse put him up to it, but I've seen this guy before, and I'm thinkin' he knows how and when to do this all on his own. And I'm thinkin' this level of frustration is partly a result of some weakass shit from Raum Emmanuel and the Dem leadership.

Also too, this is exactly what you and Reid and Pelosi need to do; you need to make the Repubs stand up and vote NO every fucking day on every fucking thing you can come up with.

You ran on some pretty specific issues, and you got elected because 53% of us agreed with a lot of your positions. Put the whole agenda forward and make 'em all vote against every item.



Update
PS) I mentioned that you won the office with 53% support - I need you to stop trying to dig into the numbers to see if that support is hard or soft; or if it can be parsed into so many subsegments or whatever. I'm not Blanche Lincoln or Ben Nelson or any of those Congress Critters - you don't have to check with me 4 times a day like some 13-year-old on Facebook to be sure I'm with you. Just do the fucking job we sent you there to do, will ya!?!

Crock Of The Week

And then, there was Part 2:

Brawn vs Brain

Contrast And Disconnect

Some politicians make lots of noise about how we shouldn't be in the business of nation-building, and that government just fucks it all up whenever it tries to do something to help straighten out a tough economy, so we should just sit tight and let nature take its course, etc. But somehow these are usually the same guys who're in favor of borrowing billions of dollars and sending that very expensive money to places like Iraq and Afghanistan in attempts to build those nations by investing in their markets and beefing up their infrastructures.

Why do we keep votin' for these guys?

US can't account for $8.7 Billion.

The failure to properly manage billions in reconstruction funds has also hobbled the troubled U.S.-led effort to rebuild Afghanistan. About $60 billion have poured into Afghanistan since 2001 in hopes of bringing electricity, clean water, jobs, roads and education to the crippled country.

The U.S. alone has committed $51 billion to the project since 2001, and plans to raise the stakes to $71 billion over the next year — more than it has spent on reconstruction in Iraq since 2003.

An Associated Press investigation showed that the results so far — or lack of them — threaten to do more harm than good. The number of Afghans with access to electricity has increased from 6 percent in 2001 to only about 10 percent now, far short of the goal of providing power to 65 percent of urban and 25 percent of rural households by the end of this year.

As an example of the problems, a $100 million diesel-fueled power plant was built with the goal of delivering electricity to more than 500,000 residents of the capital, Kabul. The plant's costs tripled to $305 million as construction lagged a year behind schedule. The plant now often sits idle because the Afghans were able to import cheaper power from neighboring Uzbekistan before the plant came online.

-and-

War is Theft (Juan Cole):

The reason is that in the chaotic days after the fall of the Baath government and the collapse of the old economy, Paul Bremer & Co. attempted to jump-start the Iraq market economy by giving out large sums in brown paper bags with no questions asked. They did not understand that the Iraqi market had been killed by decades of government control and that no magic hand any longer existed, so they might as well have taken that money and buried it in the ground. (Actually some of it probably was buried, in back yards in Fairfax County, Va.)

So maybe these two instances seem to illustrate the viewpoint of "conservatives" that
'government is bad', but of course, those same "conservatives" never say that the Military part of the government sucks - it's just all those civilian bureaucrats blah blah blah. Anyway.

Now we get to sift thru a little controversy over dueling estimations of how the Bush Bailouts and the Obama Stimulus either have or haven't saved us from an even worse outcome here at home. Intervention Helped Avert a 2nd Depression is an article in NYT that describes a study by a couple of econ brains.

The paper, by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice chairman of the Fed, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, represents a first stab at comprehensively estimating the effects of the economic policy responses of the last few years.

“While the effectiveness of any individual element certainly can be debated, there is little doubt that in total, the policy response was highly effective,” they write.

The article (of course) includes a quote or two from a guy at The Hoover Institution who questions their conclusions - he's "surprised" at their findings. Imagine my surprise at his being surprised.  And imagine my surprise that NYT felt the need to find somebody to disagree with the Blinder and Zandi article.

There's something really unhealthy about all this. It's like we're all in this defensive crouch, and that our default mode is Counterattack. We have to figure out what our shared basic assumptions are, and then we have to start getting back to them before our little experiment in self-government blows up in our faces.

The Great Flood Of Aught 10

Here's the first look at photo evidence of the near catastrophe.  Had we been another day or even several hours later getting home, it could've been a lot worse.

As it is, we have a bunch of carpeting that's been ripped up - pad removed - fans blowing under the rug in an attempt to "save it".  So far the net affect is that now the whole house smells of wet crappy carpet, while we wait for a few days to let the claims adjuster guys figure out what to do next.

Ten Years Of Hell

Ian Walsh observes:

Note that rates being so high is a classic case of market failure. The banks are charging more than they need to in order to make a profit. In an actual free market other banks are supposed to step in and undercut them, but that isn’t happening. We could argue about why (they’re a collusive oligopoly or they’re broke being the most probable causes), but in the immediate term, it doesn’t matter, what matters is fixing it.

I think there prob'ly won't be any real effort to fix the underlying problems.  If there's any possible way to spin the fix as an attempt to "set up the government to compete against the banks", the Big Bank Lobbyists will squawk, and their pet politicians will fold under the pressure like a buncha lawn chairs.

They're Pretty Smart, Those Harvard Guys

With Repubs refusing to change their tune even in the face of major rebukes in the last two election cycles, I think we're seeing the usual throes of a governing philosophy that may not be dead or dying yet, but one that's certainly not too healthy.  The effect is pretty much the same as we hear whenever some ideology or another gets pushed aside - "the system didn't  fail; our leaders failed the system."

From Nieman Watchdog:

As we approach another political season one question stands out. Why in the aftermath of the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression are the Republicans advocating precisely the same policies that spawned the disaster in the first place? If they were to succeed in promoting these policies again, do they expect a different result?

It is hard to imagine a more important or relevant question. What is so strange is that no one is asking it. It is as though the very question has been banished from public discourse. It is almost impossible to imagine, for example, David Gregory on “Meet the Press” asking a Republican leader how their present positions differ from those that have gotten us into trouble. And God forbid anyone suggest these policies might get us into trouble again.

Here's the political message the Dems can ride to some big wins:
"Don't vote for Republicans - they're all fucking crazy"

Tea Party Jesus

Who would Jesus hate?