Category: Politics

Bad news for “the business of America“: Business is bad, and America finally knows it.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Worries about jobs and a possible U.S. attack on Iraq pummeled consumer confidence to its lowest level in nine years in October, a report said on Tuesday, boosting chances the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates next week.
Financial markets were rattled by the dramatic drop in The Conference Board’s October Consumer Confidence Index to 79.4, a low not seen since November 1993, and far below the trough of 84.9 carved after last year’s Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Gosh, maybe this is only a coincidence, but wouldn’t counting nine years back set us down right in the remnants of the last Bush administration?
Regardless of where the blame really rests, we can at least hope that a gloomy report of gloom like this does not bode well for the current regime’s partisan election hopes for next tuesday. Could voters possibly ask for more of the same after all they’ve already gotten?

I love The Onion, so I hope they will excuse me when I say that sometimes it’s enough just to read through the cheeky headlines. Well, at least when you’re in a big hurry. A small sample from the last two weeks:

NEWLY OUT GAY MAN OVERDOING IT
STARVING THIRD WORLD MASSES WARNED AGAINST EVILS OF CONTRACEPTION
AMERICAN PEOPLE SHRUG, LINE UP FOR FINGERPRINTING
DEFENSE DEPARTMENT TYPO RESULTS IN U.S. ATTACK ON IRA
63 PERCENT OF U.S. IMPLICATED IN NEW SCANDAL
SUNKEN OIL TANKER WILL BE HABITAT FOR MARINE LIFE, SHELL EXECUTIVES SAY WITH STRAIGHT FACE
LINEBACKER FACES SUSPENSION FOR GENOCIDE

Well, you get the idea. If you don’t, you probably aren’t reading this weblog.

The Washington Post redeemed itself this time. The later edition of their article on the D.C. anti-war demonstration is a pretty fair report. No, it’s a damn good one!

Luigi Procopio, 45, a social worker from the district, wore a pink triangle with “$ FOR AIDS NOT WAR” written on it. He said even though he normally focuses his activism on issues in the gay community, he and at least a dozen friends came to protest the war in Iraq.
“It’s time, man. . . .it feels imminent,” he said. “Congress has just rolled over.”

It’s a salon Premium article, so the regular Salon site includes only a precis, but it’s all that’s really needed to begin to put the story into perspective.]

The media is fixating on John Allen Muhammad’s Muslim beliefs. But the most relevant fact about him could be his record of terrorizing his family members — and how that didn’t stop him from getting his hands on guns. [Jaw–even while he was under a restraining order]

Perhaps equally casual about distinguishing between those who “are either with us or against us,” Bush’s “new friend” has “weapons of mass destruction,” and he doesn’t seem to hestitate in using them even “against his own people.”

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) — A raid by Russian troops to free hostages held by Chechen rebels in a Moscow theatre is coming under scrutiny amid fears a nerve agent used may have contributed to the deaths of 118 hostages. [JAW–the number, it is now believed, may exceed 200]

By the way, in another parallel to Iraq, Chechnyans are regarded by Moscow as “their [Moscow’s] own people,” since that is the official basis for Russian opposition to the nation’s secession, and Russia is alleged to have used chemical weapons there during the ten years of the current war.
Are we going to invade Russia now?

Clinton and his administration were no great shakes when it came to their domestic policy programs or their real successes, but Bush and his own people make their predecessors look like progressives and political geniuses if we look at not even a full two years of the current regime’s reactionary policy articulations and our concomitant economic and social disasters.
Hardly an argument there, but what about foreign policy? During the Clinton era the U.S. was basically at peace and seemed to be able to look forward to a continuation of peace. We were admired by a good part of the world, or so we were led to believe, and much if not most of the planet had or was about to adopt our own well-advertised recipes for both political and economic success, especially economic success (even if the economic prescription presented perilous consequences for many, here as well as outside the country). Today U.S. influence in the world has been disastrously compromised, and what remains is in great peril. The Bush administration has totally squandered the immense good will and support which had accrued to us after the disaster of September, 2001, but its policies independent of those events had already and continue to increasingly alienate the entire planet.
Brilliant in his judgment and the economy of words, Daniel Shore delivered a scathing assessment of the White House’s disastrous foreign policy failures around the globe on NPR this morning.

BUSH FOREIGN POLICY — NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr assesses President Bush’s commitment, expressed during the 2000 campaign, to a foreign policy based on humility.

[Sorry, but I’m only able to link to an audio record, not a printed text.]

The Washington Post is certainly not repeating its brave record of the Viet Nam war era. The paper has been diligent in pushing a very conservative foreign policy agenda and dramatically demonstrating its support for the war fever of the White House junta, but the coverage it gives to today’s massive anti-war demonstration in the Capital, its home town, is unspeakable.
It is now after 7:30 in the evening, and the protest began this morning, but at this late hour the continuously-updated Post website reports, “Demonstrators by the hundreds [my italics] gathered near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Saturday . . . ”
Other sources, even other commercial news media, have already reported that easily tens of thousands or even over one hundred thousand people participated.
Protestor numbers are always a difficult and very political call, but It looks like the truth lies somewhere between the two hundred thousand claimed by some organizers and the twenty thousand reported by a number of press sources. [The huge range I describe reflects how bad I personally am with numbers, and the fact that I wasn’t able to be there today to see for myself.] “By the hundreds” is a disgustingly transparent political call by what should be an important print and web-based news source.

“For the Bush administration is an extremely elitist clique trying to maintain a populist facade.” Paul Krugman deconstructs the short-term strategy of the Bush administration and then, inexplicably, he says that he is confused.

What remains puzzling is the long-term strategy. Despite Mr. Bush’s control of the bully pulpit, he has had little success in changing the public’s fundamental views. Before Sept. 11 the nation was growing increasingly dismayed over the administration’s hard right turn. Terrorism brought Mr. Bush immense personal popularity, as the public rallied around the flag; but the helium has been steadily leaking out of that balloon.
Right now the administration is playing the war card, inventing facts as necessary, and trying to use the remnants of Mr. Bush’s post-Sept. 11 popularity to gain control of all three branches of government. But then what? There is, after all, no indication that Mr. Bush ever intends to move to the center.
So the administration’s inner circle must think that full control of the government can be used to lock in a permanent political advantage, even though the more the public learns about their policies, the less it likes them. The big question is whether the press, which is beginning to find its voice, will lose it again in the face of one-party government.

So the media is our only remaining hope? I don’t feel so good.

What does the world look like today, compared to what it looked like just two years ago?
No, the dwarf in the White House can’t be blamed for everything, but he certainly can’t be credited with anything.
Admittedly he has done great things for his donors, precisely the people who don’t pay serious taxes, only serious gratuities. Wow, have they gotten good service!
But why on earth are we being told how extraordinarily “popular” he is? I’m afraid to think too much about an answer to that question.
Oh, and has anyone seen a non-war issue lying about lately? I guess, since there’s still a full week and a half before the election, there’s still plenty of time. That is, unless sometime in the next days we see our national sniper standing behind the presidential seal to make a very serious announcement.
We’re probably already doomed, and the world with us, unfortunately.

Washington chickenhawks don’t like what all of the top intellegence agencies are telling them, so they’ve erected a creature, responsible only to them, to give them the answer they want.

Some officials say the creation of the team reflects frustration on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and other senior officials that they are not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations.
But officials who disagree say the top civilian policy makers are intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq.
In particular, many in the intelligence agencies disagree that Mr. Hussein can be directly linked to Osama bin Laden and his network, Al Qaeda, or that the two are likely to make common cause against the United States. In addition, the view among even some senior intelligence analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency is that Mr. Hussein is contained and is unlikely to unleash weapons of mass destruction unless he is attacked.

(Deputy Defense Secretary) Wolfowitz almost certainly doesn’t understand the irony in his argument for the new Pentagon “intelligence” unit.

He described “a phenomenon in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won’t, and not see other facts that others will.”