China's Africa policy backfiring?

I'm not sure why Niger Delta secessionists should target China over any other country exporting oil, and of course they have targetted other countries' oil workers, but China better learn to deal with this before it blows up in their face. They can't just pretend they are not involved, because they are going to be involved on one side or the other of every dispute in Africa, whether they like it or not.

Need more proof that the Iraq war is counterproductive?

The CIA says so, officially. This is what you can read when the administration doesn't order them to cook the books on intelligence.

"US admits Iraq is terror 'cause'"
By Tom Baldwin
"Report says that 11,000 attacks worldwide shows the war has become driving factor for extremists"

"THREE years after its invasion of Iraq the US Administration acknowledged yesterday that the war has become “a cause” for Islamic extremists worldwide and there is a risk of the country becoming a safe haven for terrorists hoping to launch fresh attacks on America.

"According to CIA data released yesterday, there were 11,111 terrorist incidents last year, killing more than 14,600 non-combatants, including 8,300 in Iraq. Of the 56 American civilians killed by terrorists in 2005, some 47 of them were in Iraq."

Read the rest of the story.

Yes, it's true

They're trying to take the Internet away, and give it to the highest bidder. Say goodbye to the open-access Information superhighway, say goodbye to the democratizing of news and bebate, say goodbye to the new world of information equality. It was nice while it lasted.

Not a Republican war?

Tyrrell: Not just a Republican war

This is wrong and outrageous on so many levels. Let me count some of them:

1) American soil was attacked in the US embassy bombings in east Africa. Most Republicans insisted the real threat to the United States was Monica Lewinsky, and that Clinton and the Democrats were involved in a "wag the dog" strategy to distract America with a phony Islamic threat.

2) It is not "a" war. Iraq has absolutely NOTHING to do with September 11. For the first time in American history we are at two wars at once. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, famously said "one war at a time" when one of his cabinet officers suggested starting a second war to convince the seceding southern states to come back in the Civil War. We have to explain to people that Iraq was the "wag the dog" distraction from our real national security business.

3) Who made it a Republican war? Who politicized it by refusing to cooperate with Democrats? Who used national security for partisan political gain at the expense of the national interest? Who outed a CIA agent to take petty revenge on her husband? Who ignored the professional advice of non-political generals? Who invaded Iraq for no real reason and then tried to use the Iraq invasion for partisan political ends?

If the Iraq war, or even the war against Al-Qa'ida, is a Republican war (and don't forget that the latter started under Clinton and most Republicans refused to get on board) Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for their mismanagement. Democrats were not the ones who let bin Ladin get away, not the ones who lied America into an unrelated war that prevents us from dealing with our real enemies, not the ones alienating moderate Muslims, and not the ones who have been mismanaging the wars America finds itself fighting, one thrust upon us and one Bush chose.

We have to get the word out. Real information about these two wars has to reach the American people, so that articles like this one will no longer be taken seriously, and Tyrrell will be scoffed off of CNN. I have only dealt with the obvious errors here, but Americans in general need a crash course on the Islamic world and how the Bush regime is playing into the hands of our enemies. We don't need more lies about how Democrats are umpatriotic. Republicans have been losing the war. If Lincoln's administration had done this badly we would be reading about President McClellan in our American history books.

Clark, Firing Rumsfeld and politics

It was great to start downloading and listening to Wes Clark's "clarkcast" podcasts. I was especially pleased to hear the first one say that they would take a non-partisan tone, but that the policies of the Republican administration and Congress had to be gotten rid of. Listening to Clarkcasts is going to be a priority for me from now on.

I was also glad to hear that Clark had joined the increasing calls of other retired generals for replacement of Donald Rumsfeld. I'd like to add an additional reason for getting rid of Rumsfeld that I haven't seen offered by others yet. Rumsfeld is a Republican.

No, I'm not suggesting that Bush's cabinet should be replaced with Democrats. I'm still in favor of replacing Bush with a Democrat. When that Democrat (and I hope it's Wes Clark) takes office, I hope he replaces the Secretary of Defense with a Republican. We're at war.

It makes good political sense for the President and the Secretary of Defense to be from opposite parties, but no one figured that out before Honest Abe Lincoln appointed Democratic politician Edwin M. Stanton his Secretary of War. Secretary Stanton not only helped rally Democrats to the war effort but he eventually became a Republican himself.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt imitated Lincoln by appointing William Howard Taft's old Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, as his own Secretary of War as the United States prepared for World War II. Again this paid off by helping assure Republican support for the war.

Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson appointed a non-political technocrat, Robert McNamara, as Secretary of Defense. He may not have been the best Secretary, but he did help to keep the Republicans on board during the Vietnam War. Nixon had Republican Secretaries of Defense, Melvin Laird, Elliot Richardson, James Schlesinger, and (gasp) Donald Rumsfeld, but that only left Democrats more free to oppose the War.

Woodrow Wilson also had a Secretary of War from his own party, Newton D. Baker, during World War I. Of course the Republicans weren't about to oppose World War I. They'd been screaming for it when Wilson was campaigning as the guy who kept us out of it. But they sure weren't going to cut him any slack about his "League of Nations" idea when he came home from France with the Treaty of Versailles. He may have sold it to the Europeans but he couldn't sell it to the Republicans, not after he left them out of both the war cabinet and the peace negotiations. Reductionists might blame World War II on Wilson's decision (and it should bear part of the blame - it did doom US participation in the League of Nations, which might have helped stop the war before it got out of hand) but that would be going too far. Hoover's Secretary of State Henry Stimson (yes, the same Stimson) offered to help the League stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria if they would grow a backbone, but they turned him down. Still, it's easy to find fault with Wilson's "my way or the highway" attitude and most historians today would.

The lesson of history in this case? Yes, we need a Democrat president to replace Bush, but we also need a non-partisan administration that can unite the country afterwards. That means whichever of the Democrats who wins in 2008 should appoint a sane, honest, qualified Republican (assuming one can be found at this late date) as Secretary of Defense for the duration of the War against Al-Qa'ida and possibly beyond.

Need more proof that "Ann" Coulter is a man?

Try her "blame the victim" attitude to rape:

"Also, you can severely reduce your chances of being raped if you do not go to strange men's houses and take your clothes off for money."

Personally I don't mind seeing beautiful women take off their clothes. I've seen it before and I hope to see it again. I do mind that some people think that's an excuse to rape the women who do it. That would severely discourage women, especially beautiful women, from taking off their clothes.

More double standard?

"WASHINGTON, April 21 (UPI) -- The CIA has fired an employee for leaking classified information to the news media, the agency announced in Washington Friday."

So . . . when does the leaker in chief get fired? Don't tell me it's legal when he does it. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. That shouldn't be the issue. The issue should be that he is not interested in the national interest, or even national security. He is interested in his own short-term political future, in taking revenge on people who cross him, and his own crackhead delusions.

Darfur and the Chad insurgency

Chad has been providing refuge to refugees and rebels from Darfur in Sudan, probably less from sympathy than from inability to do anything about it. Wadai in Chad is right over the border from Darfur. Wadai and Darfur used to be neighboring kingdoms. The capital of Chad is all the way across the country, near Cameroon. Chad itself has never had a democratic government and is one of the most artificial, unviable and ungovernable states in Africa.

The government in Chad has accused the government in Sudan of supporting the rebels in Chad, as Sudan has accused Chad of supporting the rebels in Sudan. Maybe they have, maybe they don't have enough control of, or enough concern with, the area to do anything about it. Modern states in Africa are often more a way to get money from the International Community (OECD? G8+? what does that term mean?) in foreign aid, especially in French Africa where La France pays for the government expenses in order to maintain French as the official language.

The Chad rebels are promising a national conference, which has worked in many other Francophone countries, but as long as French is the official language, and as long as literacy rates (measured in French of course) are miniscule, there is not much hope for democracy.

Is the tide turning?

I decided to take a listen to wingnut talk radio yesterday, just to see what the other side was saying. I went to Shoutcast, got the list of talk streams, and clicked the most popular one that looked most clearly right wing. Sure enough there were ads for right wing bumper stickers, and ads telling me how to put my money into gold because the Federal Reserve Board was a bunch of conspirators trying to make away with my hard earned money. But what were they talking about?

IMPEACHMENT!

Yes, I couldn't believe it. They had a some guy from Vermont on the air talking about how to impeach Bush, and people were calling in wanting to know more. The news that President Bush himself had been behind the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame all along had finally gotten people to realize that this administration was not about national security at all.

Out of control hypocrisy

First the Bush administration reclassifies old documents needlessly.

Then they casually leak pertinent, sensitive, current national security secrets for political gain.

Finally they pretend they are protecting American citizens from foreign terrorists.

How can approximately one third of the country not yet see through these people?

Bush and the question from a North Carolina man

I originally heard this exchange on NPR, but I can't find it on their site. I have to give Bush praise for telling the audience to let the man speak, even if he was only being political about it. There is a real question historically about the limits of dissent in wartime, just as there is a real question, Constitutionally, whether we are at war or not right now. However, since the Vietnam War (or "conflict" if you prefer) there has been an emerging consensus that patriotic dissent is possible in wartime, and that it is different from treason, i.e. "levying War against them [i.e. the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Hopefully we won't see any Alien and Sedition Acts anytime soon.

Nevertheless, I wondered why the guy didn't ask the obvious question that's been bugging me for months, namely, why can't Bush get a warrant for his wiretapping, if he really has nothing to hide? I think maybe too many of us are too emotional, or maybe we find these questions to be too self-evident, that we don't always pose them correctly.

Bush is obviously trying to position himself as the defender of America, so he can rise in the polls and avoid a Congress that will investigate his illegal activities, and, if necessary, move to impeach him and remove him from office.

Bush and signing statements

from the Boston Globe

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

This presidency is the first time I've ever heard the idea that signing statements have the force of law, in fact that they have more force than the law being signed. I always thought they were just kind of a political speech in writing, a press release saying how nice it was that the law had been passed and how we should all thank the president for his support of it.

Of course this is red meat to those who hate America, not to mention the fact that it creates more and more such people. I don't hate America, and in fact what disturbs me about Bush is how his actions create more and more hatred of America. Pro-Union slave owners in the American Civil War denounced secessionists as "practical abolitionists" because they actually promoted abolitionism (against their intentions, of course) by seceding from the Union. Bush seems to be the most practical anti-American alive.

What I would like to know is whether his oath of office,

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

is modified by some kind of signing statement that gives him the right to ignore all or part of the Constitution of the United States.

A radical proposal for immigration

Radical doesn't really, originally mean extreme. It comes from the Latin word "radix" which means "root". Radical means getting to the root of a problem. In this case, let's look at what the root cause of out of control immigration from Mexico and Central America and see what can be done to control it. No one in the current debate is talking about it.

Why are so many people from Mexico and Central America streaming into the United States? Because they are desperately poor and they see prosperity and opportunity in the United States. There is almost no place else on earth where the developed and underdeveloped worlds meet so closely as the US Mexico border. On one side there are lawn sprinklers, soccer moms and SUVs. On the other side there are dusty desert towns with barefoot children begging for coins. The only other border that stark is the one between North and South Korea. Some Americans would like to see our border as fortified as the inter-Korean one, but for the time being, you can walk or drive across the US Mexico border. It's not so easy to cross the Korean border.

This is very similar to what is happening with Africans trying to get into Europe via the Canary Islands, or even Turkey trying to join the EU. But the borders between the developed and underdeveloped world are not so stark between Europe and Africa and Asia around the Mediterranean. The relative prosperity fades out even within countries (as in Italy or the former Yugoslavia - although we should keep in mind that factor is divisive in those countries) as much as it does between countries, and there are no economic borders as stark as that between Texas or California and Mexico.

The Hispanic population in the United States, which is mostly Mexican, is disproportionately young. The half the population was less than 26.0 years old, compared with 35.4 for the population at large (and it was even higher for the non-Hispanic population). In part this was because the Hispanic population was largely immigrant (which also explains the fact that there are more Hispanic men than women, the opposite of the case with the population at large), but this is more a result of fact that the Hispanic population, even the Cubans in Florida, is from underdeveloped countries, with high birth and death rates, especially infant mortality. This leaves a demographic pyramid that is wide at the base, narrow at the top, rather than the rough cylinder that is the population of the developed countries.

In underdeveloped countries children are not just the expensive hobby they are in the US, Europe and Japan. They are their parents Social Security and old age pension. It is not just sentiment that makes people have children there. It is naked, cold self interest. The only way to stop Mexican population from hemorrhaging into the US is to develop Mexico, and give the Mexican people the individual, personal self-interest in controlling their population that people in developed countries have now.

Can one country develop another by either foreign investment or foreign aid? I suppose if it could be done it would have been done somewhere, but it hasn't been. However, the United States has a very serious national security interest in seeing that Mexico becomes developed, and Mexicans become prosperous. This would mean not only investment, but the ability of Mexicans to collectively bargain, in their own country, for better remuneration from their employers, to raise Mexican living standards to the level of those in the United States.