Spoke to Ed Hayes Sunday 30 re the spectacular turn of events as Dick Cheney on TV challenges the Obama administration strategy to investigate and harass the Bush administration. The presenting issue is the CIA interrogation of suspect terrorist detainees with conduct that POTUS and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, both declare was "torture." John Kerry, Democrat of Kennedy, spoke on another TV program in support of the Obama administration. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of San Francisco, hesitated. John McCain, Republican of the US Navy, quibbled. The legend will grow that the Obama administration aims to right the wrongs of the Bush years by seeking justice no matter where the investigation leads. We are a few short months away from a brouhaha that will require popping popcorn.
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Moveon.org manufactured this clever, trite, meaningless, well-produced and loopy promotion of an illusion called "reform." The punch line is that these two whispering charmers are undertakers and will be put out of business if POTUS gets his way and transforms American health into the never-ending Shangri-La of Ronald Coleman's mesmerizing "Lost Horizon." You recall, no one ever ages as long as he or she remains in the idyllic valley that is impossibly concealed in the Himalayas. (Small unhappy downside if you step out of single-payer managed care: You turn to dust.) I submitted this script to my think-tank panel of eight cows in a pasture. Cud-chewing continued for some hours. The preliminary answer is that Moveon.org may have achieved a breakthrough in agitprop. Advocacy as farce.
These American League of Voters lobbyist-created 32 seconds challenging the Obama administration's healthcare reform notions just went viral thanks to the report that ABC, NBC and even CBS have questions about the facts. I have watched this video three times and cannot find any fact that can be challenged. There is the logic issue. If 8 cows are doing just fine in a pasture, and you add two more cows, will they do as well? This is a debatable fact? Hilarious. Let's try it again. Eight cows in a pasture. They volunteer to eat less so that two more cows can join them. Yes, I know. What kind of a cow volunteers to eat less? It was a tricky partisan example. The answer is, you need a bigger pasture -- or two of the volunteers have to leave.
Adding the reappointment of Fed Chair Ben Bernanke to the long chosen Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Keynesian gurus Larry Summers and Austan Goolsbee now completes the Obama administration financial team. The shrewd David Wessel, WSJ, (above) asserts that from now on it is POTUS to fault or praise for the performance of the economy, no more blame-shifting to the Bush administration. This is a dry observation. Of course the blame-shifting will continue. It will grow scales and a beard and span the continent. The Bush Panic of 2008 is the pachyderm in the room that will never leave and that the GOP must drag along like a cross of dross forever. POTUS may suffer disappointments, but he will never suffer for excuses.
Spin.
There is no good news on the budget or the deficit. "Far worse than they originally projected..." is how the WSJ's Deborah Solomon stated the facts. Above find Obama administration numbers priest and University of Chicago wunderkind Professor Austan Goolsbee, 40, spin like a Republican on the cliff-diving of revenue and moonshot of expenses for the first half of 2009. Goolsbee relaxes before he gets to the craters of the deficit for the next ten years. The Obama team has no room to shop. The money is gone with the wind. The trillion dollar stimulus package last March was their only chance at extravagance. From now on, they live on sentiment and shrugging, "Y'know?"
Blue Dog Democrat and Libertarian Republican Robert Welch, 1958.
"...what we hope the John Birch Society will help and even sometimes lead the American people to in the next 15 years... to restore the complete independence of the United States... get us out of the United Nations and get the United Nations out of the United States... 2... make our money freely redeemable in gold at some realistic price... 4. Withdraw all American troops... except on American soil.... Fifteen years from now we shall already be entering... a better world..."
Spoke to Ann Marlowe at Kabul on Sunday 23 to learn that the gross voter fraud in Karzai's favor is so massive and inept that the US is blinking and whining and looking for a remedy short of cancelling the election results. Karzai claims a 70% win over Dr. Abdullah's 23%, a result that is so out of line with pre-election polls and observations on the ground that no one seriously considers accepting the results. US envoy Richard Holbrooke is said to have warned Karzai that he must reduce his totals to under 50% and accept a second round. There will not be violence or demonstrations. This will be resolved in the Afghan way of compromise. However Karzai is now marked as a corrupt, greedy, reckless fool.
The return of the mass-murdering Abdelbaset al-Magrahi to Tripoli is the opening act of the next contest between the United States and the unacceptable, venomous Moammar Ghadafi. Yesterday, Ghadafi enjoyed his performance embracing al-Magrahi and prankishly praising the British Royals, as if the Queen and her sons were responsible for this stupid decision. Now we can expect the families of the victims on Pan Am 103, and the villagers of Lockerbie, to join in a protest not only to the conniving Gordon Brown government but also to Ghadafi's planned visit to the United Nations opening September 23. Claudia Rosett, FDD, told me Saturday 22 that the circus comes to town with all manner of usurper and hand-wringer -- and that the Libya embassy will not comment on the rumor that Ghadafi will greet visitors under a tent set up on the roof of the Libyan Embassy on 48th Street. The UN circus of self-loathing will also be attended by POTUS, Abbas, Mubarak and the usurper Ahmadinejad. Expect no traffic to move on the East Side, none.
Tireless Ann Marlowe writes from Kabul: "I was at the Abdullah campaign offices this morning and got some vote totals for Kabul, which show Abdullah substantially ahead." We will speak both Saturday 22 and Sunday 23. Meanwhile both Karzai and Abdullah have claimed a first round win of over 50% of the vote. Other reports are that the voter turnout was far lower than expected. Independent sources are that Abdullah won Kabul and the North. Karzai's totals swelled in the Pashtun regions of the East and South. The Obama administration desires a swift Karzai win so the Politburo can get on to appeasing the Taliban and getting out of AfPakia. Florida coming.
Demoralized Rolling Stone hipster Matt Taibbi joins in a moment of guilty grinning with the casually gloomy MSNBC scold Rachel Maddow -- before the pair observe that the Committee on Public Option Safety may have gone a league or two over the line in making deals with Big Pharma Satan and his Insurance Ghouls. You will recall that in the original Thermidorian Reaction, late July 1794, the chagrined revolutionaries voted the guillotine for the overwrought ex-representative Robespierre and his cronies. Does this mean that the tempestuous but weary revolutionaries, momentarily numbed by the blood-letting in the Democratic Party, have decided to turn on our modern Robespierres and Marats? Who might Robespierre be 220 years later? Wee, trim lad, likes to foment.
A political lesson from Apple is that the way to develop a brand is to keep it in plain sight while you pretend you are keeping secrets. What Apple products do is what everyone else's products do, similar to how all 100 senators and 435 House members do exactly the same thing, that is, talk about it. The percentage of the market that is Mac is tiny compared to PC. The percentage of IPhones and ITouches is not better. How to keep from disappearing in the flood of new products from MSFT, DELL and Blackberry? Make each product announcement as if it were a revelation. Build quality products for a restless, envious, possessive, educated consumer class and provide high-end and cosmetic Apple stores like frantic legations to the bourgeoisie. Preach that you are a software company (conceptions) while you maintain profits (donations) on the hardware (regulations). Who made this Steve Jobs created theatrical style sheet work for a pol? David Axelrod. What must happen when six months go by? Make ready to sell the same old Apple in a new wrapping -- or someone else will.
The White House now displays the message discipline of a summer camp as it denies the clear signal by Kathleen Sebelius that it is in retreat on healthcare. Sebelius clearly pointed to the casting away of the public insurance option on the Sunday CNN show. POTUS signaled the same in an op-ed, calling it a "sliver." Now, the day after, the White House zig-zags by e-mailing members of Congress that it continues to support and desire a public insurance option. I am not going to look for anything cunning or sinister. The Politburo messaging failed in the August heat of battle. There will be a sluggish, petulant recovery campaign; but the result will be stalling and compromise. The public insurance option is no longer viable.
Calculated Risk's superstar "Jim the Realtor" contributes evidence of the reporting over the last months of the failure of the high-end in real estate and the continuing risk and worse to the big banks. The horse farm below rises to a multi-million dollar fiasco of high-end homes above, the whole development now foreclosed and back in Well Fargo's non-performing loans hamper. This connects to the warning from the Congressional Oversight Panel (Elizabeth Warren is a gifted brain) that banks-not-to-big-to-fail are not getting help with their non-performers. See the Colonial failure in Georgia this weekend. TARP is for the bad sausage of MBOs, not for fairy tale flops like the above. WF is stuck. Mark down 50-70%? Long way to fall. No California recovery in sight. Obama administration in denial of denial.
Calling Ann Marlowe at Kabul Saturday 15 re the pending election, re the martyr (shahid) op at the NATO (ISAF) HQ, re the darkening tones over Kabul. Also speaking to Bill Roggio, Long War Journal, re AfPakia week and the Coalition ops along the border and against the poppy fields, and also speaking to Michael Vlahos, John Hopkins, re the theory that the Saudis are seeking to buy off the Taliban and take control of Afghanistan through their Islamabad hireling Zardari and his Sind clan.
The Journal's Robert Lee Holz has great fun with astrobiological speculations on the bombardment period of early Earth, when the protoplanet was pummeled with the planetesimals of the early solar system. Perhaps we cooked the stew under a canopy of Greenhouse effects. Perhaps proto-organisms in the form of viruses or bacteria or protists or archaea arrived here inside one school of asteroids. What is fresh now is Kepler and the search for fifty Edens of all ages. Dimitar Sasselov will report on the early Kepler results Saturday 22. This Sunday 16, David Grinspoon of the Denver Museum will comment on new results from Venus Express and the prep for the Mars Lab next year. Clues to the origins of the first Earth reproduction.
The allegation of Turkey influence buying/peddling in Washington is not a well known issue, though I have touched on this strange, thrilling and paranoid brew of a story over the years. Often but not exclusively at the center of this byzantine byzantineness is the obsessive cultishness of the modern Turkey government to deny the facts of the several Armenian genocides in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries by the pre-World War 1 Ottoman Empire. Sibel Edmonds comes to the story late. Of the many wild stories she has told, many reported corroborated since her FBI firing in '02, one eye-popping whopper involves the alleged Turkey bribing of Dennis Hastert, who is now a registered lobbyist for Turkey. (She tells other stories of nukes, Bin Laden, Tehran, ISI, AQ Khan.) Long after Edmonds was in government, the Armenian genocide vote in the House was a strange brew of a controversy, in 2007. More and more to this tale. For now, I watch because my mother's family history includes the radical dislocation of my mother's family by the Ottoman Empire genocides against perceived enemies and non Moslems. If Eric Holder is responsible for Edmonds finally talking on the record, good for him, and good for POTUS. Let the apparent sunlight here continue.
The debate over Afghanistan is now ringingly political. Stanley McChrystal has not said something new about the struggle against the Taliban. What is significant is that the general has spoken out iconically on the eve of the Afghanistan presidential election. What is also significant is that the general has hinted at an imminent American non-victory, if not a defeat, with the background that the Obama administration is pursuing a Faustian deal to have Saudi intelligence buy off the Taliban and the ISI, to have the ISI make a deal with Al Qaeda to stand down and not use AfPakia to launch attacks on Homeland America, and to begin a rapid withdrawal of American troops from combat.
Spoke to Bill Roggio, Long War Journal, and John Loftus, John Loftus Show, and learned that the widespread reports of Baitulllah Mehsud's death by Predator were greatly exaggerated. No confirm. Bill says that five Taliban leaders have come forth to say that Mehsud is alive and feisty. The source of the death reports are the usual blowhards in Islamabad, using ISI and Pakistan Army sources. Wolf, wolf. Again. Why do US front pages leap so easily into reporting agitprop from the ISI? Isn't this the same old sin of leaping at agitprop from other (unnamed) capitals?
It is a great pleasure to welcome to the new Saturday night show the charming and articulate A.O. "Tony" Scott, chief film critic of the NYT, who is now announced to be part of the new team for ABC Disney's "At the Movies." My memory of Julia Childs TV show was that it was on PBS, then called also Channel 13, and that it was vaguely like "I Love Lucy" episodes from my distant youth when Lucy would destroy the kitchen in some fashion before Ricky came home to demand some "'splainin' to do." Now that I'm a grown-up, I see that Julia Childs was much wittier than Lucy just because French cooking on TV wasn't supposed to be absurd. Tony Scott likes the new movie a lot -- it sounds cool and joyful, by the signature genius Nora Ephron --, and he likes Meryl Streep's performance more than a deal. "By now this actress has exhausted every superlative that exists and to suggest that she has outdone herself is only to say that she's done it again. Her performance goes beyond physical imitation, though she has the rounded shoulders and the fluting voice down perfectly
There looks to be a plush selection of Hollywood-built dystopian romances this summer and fall, and this strangeness, "Alive in Joburg," looks to be a gem despite the fact that it was made in 2005 as a short film by the director of the new "District 9," Neil Blomkamp, and is not to be released. I like everything about the notion of alien indigents disrupting the routines of deprivation in Africa and Asia. Saturday 8 and Sunday will be speaking to two authors, Helene Cooper and Kwei Quartey, who have books about Liberia and Ghana, respectively. Also hope to speak more than once with Ann Marlowe in Kabul waiting the Afghanistan re-election of the Karzai kleptocrats. Africa and Asia are familiar other planets, where poverty and the rudiments of fantastic wealth are all mixed in a fantastic landscape with compelling fundamental homo sapiens. "District 9" is a massively well-financed version of "Alive." The core vision is intact, who is an alien, and who says so? The other possibility is that the ransacked and needy spacecrafts and the junkyard aliens are all from America.
New video from Tehran source showing a rowdy street scene in Tehran on the night of 6/7 August. The usurper Ahmadinejad has closed the circle and completed the coup d'etat. The Supreme Leader Khamenei, who is dying and reported routinely heavily narcotized, depends upon his son Mojtabi to work with Ahmadinejad and the IRGC cadre that controls the military and security apparatus. The state is paralyzed except in terms of shielding itself from civil challenge. There is no order in Tehran; the economy is adrift; the mullahs at Qom are hostages to the MOIS. The center has collapsed. The turmoil in Tehran is now at a point where civil war in possible and panic is a certainty. The Obama administration has sound intelligence on the rot in Iran; yet it continues to pursue the fiction of demarche with a hollow, ravenous, illegitimate regime with nukes.
The dispute in this video is a product of a house-to-house confrontation between Jews and Palestinian provocateurs over the ownership of houses in Jerusalem. There is no such thing as East Jerusalem. It is entirely a fiction constructed in order to exacerbate the tensions. Mrs. Clinton's ceremonial criticism of the so-called East Jerusalem is another fiction constructed to appease the Fatah ops and the Hamas ops. The Obama Politburo is not an honest broker. It favors the Arab dreams of conquest and glory, another fiction. For now, whenever you hear "East Jerusalem," you will know it is not a serious matter. It is an agreed upon charade by diplomats and their political paymasters.
The bulletin from Pyongyang that Bill Clinton has arrived to negotiate for the two abducted American journalists is a political stunt that will enhance the Kim regime and weary the Obama administration. The opera of missiles and nuke tests and incoherent villainy now rules. Bill Clinton is a spectacular actor. The Kim regime is paranoid, brutal, self-satisfied, fragile, in transition. The two journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, are excellent props. The week has a fresh melodrama to replace last week's Crowley/Gates narrative. The risk to the White House is that the narrative is well away from POTUS. Also, it was not a secret that Bill Clinton ended last year's campaign with hard feelings for the abuse he received from the Obama supporters. The additional twist is that Bill Clinton is likely coordinating with Al Gore, since Lee and Ling are employee's of Gore's network. There is also the puzzle as to the unusual coincidence of the visit of George W. Bush to President Lee Myung-Pak in South Korea on August 1. Two presidents on the Korean peninsula within days. Unusual opera?
It is August, and you can tell it is August when the WSJ uses a Reuters video of lettuce wearing PETA-hired actresses to manufacture novelty news from Tokyo. Convince the Japanese to give up meat for vegetables? Japan is a fish-eating culture. Strange doings. The bystanders look to have enjoyed the silliness. When the world focus is a PETA news clip, it is safer for a few minutes. August continues a month noted for violent turns of the table. Coups in Russia are useful. Right now, there looks to be the making of a coup in Tehran, and this time the Ahmadinejad Twelver cult will win. Does Ahmadinejad look like a vegetarian to you? More a lamb eater, yeah?
It is striking to see the BBC and others give attention to a routine abuse by Hugo Chavez to take over 34 opposition radio stations and shut more than 200 in the near future. Controlling the message is reliable, effective method of concentrating power. Chavez is following the lead of Tehran, which is following the lead of Moscow. It doesn't much work, since underground communication fills the absence quickly and the flow of anti-regime information blossoms. It does cost money. Since Mary O'Grady, Wall Street Journal, told me the story two weeks ago that Chavez had called the State Department Latin America desk late int he evening, Washington time, to complain about the Chavez stooge Manuel Zelaya being turned out of Honduras, there has been a puzzle if Chavez was struggling with loss of face. The closing of so many stations points to a loss of face, or at the least, the opposition was grinning too much.
The immediate and lasting significance of mass show trials such as the Tehran opera in this video is that the illegitimate Tehran regime has moved into the role of most villainous civil cadre on Earth and therefore the Obama administration is derailed from its ambition at open appeasement on the nuke threat. Instead, the White House Politburo surrounding POTUS must needs find peace-making cookies by sending tireless George Mitchell and other gifts to the Assad regime in Damascus -- a tin-can surrogate for the usurper Ahmadinejad and his kindred of Cain. Show trials have the advantage of being predictable, so the mind is free to gauge the quality of the staging. Twilight Zone did this all better, and I will find the original TZ episode with Burgess Meredith (a TZ favorite) and post it soon. Meantime, the silence of POTUS on the Tehran blackguardhood continues puzzling to confounding. Why not comment? No cost. The Tehran regime is self-destroyed as a peace partner.
Jonathan Weisman, Wall Street Journal, is the White House corespondent along with Laura Meckler, and here he presents the best face imaginable of the ragged end to the Obama administration's helter skelter campaigns on the Hill. The low-key James Crowley narrative dominated the last two weeks of the month; it was compelling but not nearly as signficant or long-term as the fights on healthcare. The White House allowed the Crowley narrative to take over -- perhaps just because there was no structure to the healthcare agenda. When in trouble, get in more trouble -- just crash the limo into the milk cow. Crowley's dignity deprived the Obama administration of a snap thrill or quick moral win.
Milk Cow for Clunkers.
The Obama team sudden rush to embrace the novelty of Cash-for-Clunkers is a measure of their loss of momentum and planning. They are running to whatever appears to be hot in hope of a headline and a push in the polls. It makes for despair. The team is young, and it will recover. Perhaps it may learn that Congress is a separate and superior body of government. No. The limits of no planning. There is a probably a fault in here but not easily discerned from the outside. What happens in the first season is what stays in the memory of the historians. Andrew Jackson took on his whole Cabinet over a Jezebel tyro who was married to one of his billy goats, and it turned official Washington against him. Jackson used it as a strength and took on everyone potent to make himself the common man's president. Each weakness is an opportunity for a clever POTUS. By fall, the Crowley narrative will be cluttered with others, and the spin will be off to new accomplishments. A presidency is a chronicle of partisan disappointment and oppo glee. Same as it ever was. The oppo to Obama is mild as soap suds in comparison to the oppo to earlier presidents. Early yet.
