HorsesAss.Org

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiNUkME9D9k[/youtube]

US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood held a press conference in Seattle today at Sound Transit’s Link Operations and Maintenance facility on Airport Way, to highlight how the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (i.e., the stimulus package) is funding sustainable transportation projects and putting people back to work here in Washington state. Joining Sec. LaHood at the podium were Gov. Chris Gregoire, US Senator Patty Murray and Mayor Greg Nickels, a pretty high-power group, but I thought the best explanation of the impact of stimulus dollars on our local economy came from Lee Newgent of the Seattle Building and Construction Trades Council, so that’s the video clip I’m posting first.

More clips coming as I slog through the editing process.

I can empathize with nearby residents inconvenienced by light rail, and I sure hope Sound Transit does its best to prevent or abate those unexpected screeching noises on the run through Tukwila. But… I have trouble feeling sympathy for homeowners complaining about noisy trains “knocking down their property values” when the homeowners knew full well that they were buying next door to busy train tracks:

David and Laurie Shumate, who moved into their remodeled 1920s home two years ago, take issue with Sound Transit’s November noise readings… “We don’t want to move, but … ” David Shumate said, sighing deeply before finishing, “I don’t know.”

The woman who’s lived in her house for 60 years… she’s got a reason to complain. But the Shumates, not so much. It’s like folks who buy houses near airports, because they’re such a good value, complaining about noise from airplanes flying low overhead.

Sound Transit is in the midst of conducting further tests, and if they determine there is a problem they will try various noise abatement methods, including soundproofing affected homes. But…

“That doesn’t help when we’re outside,” Laurie Shumate said. The Shumates spend their spare time converting what they disparagingly call the previous owner’s “English garden” into a lush yard full of plants native to the Duwamish River area.

Again… they bought a house across the street from elevated train tracks, and they expect to enjoy their lush garden in piece and quiet? That’s just bad planning.

Robert S. McNamara, chief architect of the Vietnam War, is dead at 93.

At Hullaballo, dday has an interesting post up called “The Lessons of Robert McNamara,” discussing the 11 causes and lessons from Vietnam that McNamara laid forth in his later years.

We have so frequently bungled into conflicts, presuming our role in them when the other participants see it differently, making shortcuts while rationalizing ourselves as heroic, changing the rules if found to violate them, and controlling the message of moral rectitude rather than the actions. I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don’t believe America is even wired to live up to them.

Not only did we ignore them in 2003, we somehow managed to make most of the same mistakes in Iraq. It may seem a long time ago, but in the summer of 2003 people who thought we were making a colossal blunder were being called traitors. I suppose the trolls are still calling us traitors, but these days jingoism isn’t much of a selling point politically.

And while things may be less bad in Iraq, that crucial fact is that we are still there, and are likely to remain there indefinitely, despite what any politicians promise.

My daughter and I are back from Brownsville, Oregon, after our annual orgy of small town Americana—a 4th of July weekend filled with horseback riding, softball, fireworks, swimmin’ holes, community pancake breakfasts… and of course, about five and a half hours straight of tossing pizza by a backyard, wood fired oven.

And let’s not forget the beer, a keg of some hoppy, ever-so-slightly fruity elixir from Ninkasi Brewing in Eugene.

Yum.

Now some might argue that the way we Americans tend to celebrate our nation’s birth—with fun and food and lots and lots of beverages—somehow trivializes our founders’ daring and dangerous struggle for independence, and the many hardships they endured, but I’d argue exactly the opposite. For what freedom is greater, and more worth celebrating, than a freedom we are free to take for granted? And what better way to honor this freedom than to do exactly that?

We live in the wealthiest, most powerful and most secure nation in the history of the world. I hope you enjoyed America this weekend as much as I did.

A remorseful blogger apologizes for making Sarah Palin resign. I can’t even guess what’s going to happen next in this train wreck. Will some major ethics violation be revealed? Will she change her mind about resigning and just pretend on the 24th that she never actually quit? With someone this nuts, anything is possible.

Last week’s contest was won by ‘Truth Teller’ in only 12 minutes. It was the National Gallery in Ottawa, Ontario.

This week’s is a little more rural, good luck!

– Iran’s religious establishment is dissenting from Khamenei.

– Soldiers in Colombia are killing innocent civilians and dressing them up as members of FARC in order to collect reward money (which comes out of our aid packages to their government).

– Norm Stamper excoriates Democrats for not using their power to roll back the drug war:

And the cause of this “drug war dementia”? I’m guessing it has something to do with a brilliant 2004 poll on the topic of medical marijuana. The poll asked two questions, the first confirming what had already been shown over and over again: that about 70 percent of people support the idea of legalizing marijuana, at least for medical purposes.

But then, pollsters asked something interesting:

“Regardless of your own opinion, do you think the majority of people support making marijuana medically available, or do you think the majority opposes making marijuana medically available?”

The result? In Rhode Island, where the poll was conducted, only 26.5 percent thought that most people support medical marijuana.

The lesson here? While many of our elected representatives privately support serious changes to our failed drug laws, they believe they are alone. They think if they stick their necks out they’ll be handed their heads come election time.

I’d argue that another aspect of this are the special interests within law enforcement and the pharmaceutical lobby who don’t want Americans to have greater freedom of choice when it comes to the substances they put in their bodies. But having politicians recognize that the public would be overwhelmingly on their side should they choose to move forward with drug law reform is a necessary first step.

I have a quick message for everyone still on the “Sarah Palin in 2012” bandwagon.

If you want to live in a country run by a woman who tries to silence the media, uses public resources for her own personal projects, believes in her own lies as if they are true, and pretends to be God, there’s already a country like that.

It’s called North Korea.

Enjoy the holiday everyone!

She should definitely call Zig immediately.

Imagine, if you will, forcing sending your entire office to see hot motivational babe Sarah Palin live at an arena near you for only $19.95. If your employees little worker scumbags won’t go they can spend the day counting toner cartridges.

Today’s Republican Party is a multi-level marketing scheme that sells faux resentment instead of generic cleaning products. Neither the particular product nor the particular resentment are of any great importance, if each fulfills the desired political objective of fostering yet another wave of profits in the form of anger and donations from the base.

It slices, it dices and it cuts this tomato paper thin, and if you order now you can can look at her legs.

Don’t delay!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucKTJqyobe4[/youtube]

(And there are some 65 other media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

In my post earlier today, I didn’t mention anything about what the Obama Administration is trying to do inside Pakistan itself, but it’s quite important and extremely disconcerting. Jeremy Scahill has a very good rundown on the extent that we’re operating across Afghanistan’s southeastern border.

Friday before a holiday. From KTUU-TV in Anchorage:

In a stunning announcement, Gov. Sarah Palin said Friday morning she will resign her office in a few weeks.

Speculation has swirled for weeks, perhaps months that Palin would not seek re-election in 2010 as she pursues a political career on the national stage. The former vice presidential candidate has long been rumored to be considering a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Palin did not address those rumors at the press conference at her Wasilla home, during which she did not take questions from reporters.

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will be inaugurated as her successor at the Governor’s Picnic at Pioneer Park in Fairbanks on Sunday, July 26, Palin said.

How very interesting.

Australia-based writer Gregor Salmon spent the last eight months exploring the world of Afghanistan’s opium trade.

“Poppy is not just a crop… it’s a financial system, a finely-tuned industry,” he said.

“It’s a low-risk crop in a high-risk environment.”

He got used to feeling a “constant sense of unease” and managed to talk farmers, police, government officials and Taliban.

And he found corruption is so rife in the police force and government that Afghanistan isn’t likely to shake its addiction any time soon.

When we invaded Afghanistan back in 2001, this wasn’t the mission we signed up for. We went there to remove a government that provided safe haven for the people who planned 9/11 and to capture the leaders of al Qaeda – who were based there and operating training camps for potential terrorists. We removed the government. The leaders of al Qaeda and the terrorist camps have gone elsewhere. But 8 years later we’re still there, trying to solve a problem that’s only related to terrorism because of how we’re dealing with it.

“There are farmers who I spoke with who will obviously tell you … ‘We don’t have much money, this is a lifeline crop, it’s against our religion and we don’t want to be growing this garbage, but ultimately we have no choice’.”

And Salmon says the Taliban are also finding enormous benefits in opium cultivation.

He says Taliban commanders and officials told him the general rule is the Taliban take a 10 per cent cut of opium income, giving them roughly $500 million per year.

That money, of course, buys a lot of weapons with which to continue their protection racket and attack American troops.

There are government attempts to eradicate the crop, but Salmon is critical of such efforts.

He tagged along with a poppy eradication team, but he says it was all for the cameras.

“It was a sham,” he said.

“The whole eradication [program] is corrupt. The poor people get their crops eradicated because they don’t have the money to pay off the government.

“You pay to have your crops spared.

We’ve known for a long time now that the eradication program has functioned like this. Either farmers and drug lords pay the Taliban to provide armed protection against the eradicators, or they pay off local officials directly to keep the eradicators from their fields. And the poor farmers who have their fields eradicated often just join the Taliban. In the end, the Taliban ranks (and weaponry arsenal) grow and the drug lords and corrupt members of the government get richer. And Afghanistan still produces around 90% of the world’s opium when it’s all said and done. It would be hard to devise a more backwards strategy if one tried.

The Obama Administration has inherited this mess, and have shown signs that they can do something the previous administration didn’t… deal with reality:

“We are downgrading our efforts to eradicate crops-spraying, a policy we think is totally ineffectual,” [Richard] Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in his testimony.

The money spared would be devoted to stopping trafficking, pursuing drug lords and helping farmers grow other crops, he added.

“Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve spent on crop eradication has not done any damage to the Taliban. On the contrary, it’s helped them recruit,” Holbrooke said.

“In my experience,” the veteran US diplomat and negotiator said, “this is the least effective program ever.”

Holbrooke deserves credit for shattering that illusion, but what happens now that we’ve launched another major military offensive there? What exactly are we trying to accomplish? We’re not fighting quite the same kind of ideologically driven religious fanaticism that had overtaken Kabul in the 90s and welcomed Arab religious extremists to use their land as a safe haven. We’re fighting an illegal industry, one that through our attempts to stop it has become a new and far more potent threat to our occupation.

The new strategy appears to be aimed at the titans of that industry, the drug lords themselves. Can it be done? We can’t do it in Mexico, although the industry became concentrated in Mexico after we spent years trying to eradicate it in Colombia. It’s worth noting that while most of the cocaine in still grown in Colombia, the people who are now making the vast majority of money off of it are in Mexico. It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that we’ll end up with a similar dynamic along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where the crops are grown in Afghanistan, but the huge profits end up being shifted to the border area of Pakistan.

This is another situation where government officials continue to believe their own drug war propaganda. A person making money by producing heroin is not a terrorist. You may not agree with what they’re doing, but they’re not the same level of threat as a group of people training to kill civilians within the United States. We’ve made this shift in our objectives in Afghanistan to something completely different from what our original mission was. And the new mission is something that has only ever succeeded by moving the targeted problem elsewhere. Drug trafficking never goes away, it just shifts to different routes.

What’s even more odd about what’s happening right now in Afghanistan is that it’s causing reporters at The New York Times to completely make shit up:

With a nationwide election only weeks away, the paradox of President Hamid Karzai has never seemed more apparent: He is at once deeply unpopular and likely to win.

The article cites data from a survey conducted by the International Republican Institute which can be found here. On page 36, you can very clearly see that the “deeply unpopular” Karzai is in fact the most popular politician in the country, with a favorability rating of 69%

What exactly is going on here? And it’s not just the New York Times who’s been selling this lie, even while referencing the same polling data.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised when public officials get journalists to lie for them, but what’s the motivation for it? American officials have long been complaining about Karzai’s unwillingness to crack down on the corruption, but it’s also long been true that if he really cracked down the corruption, he’d be dead within a week. This is what happens in a country where an industry that’s roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of their GDP is made illegal. Even Karzai’s brother is making money from it. Does the Obama Administration really think that an election is going to change all of that? That it’s just a matter of motivation and will to stop it?

Afghanistan remains a place where our soldiers (and the soldiers of a number of our NATO allies) continue to fight a very real war – while our politicians appear to be fighting a propaganda one to convince us that this war is still the war we started there in 2001. It’s not. It’s a drug war now, and it’s one that makes no sense for us to fight and one that we have no hope of actually winning. Even if we recognize that there’s a more real terrorist threat next door in Pakistan, all we’re doing is handing those groups more and more of the profits that once went to people all throughout Afghanistan, some of whom were eager allies of the United States.

Another page (14) in the IRI survey showed the results when Afghans were asked to rate the overall performance of various entities on a scale of 1 to 5. Scoring dead last, below “The president”, “The police”, “The government”, “The Afghan National Army”, and even “The opposition”, was the “International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)”. The Obama Administration and Richard Holbrooke deserve some praise for ending our truly idiotic five-year attempt to wipe out Afghanistan’s opium trade by plowing the fields of poor farmers, but we still deserve a much better explanation for why we’re still there and what we think we can accomplish.

I’m on the road to Brownsville, OR for our annual 4th of July beer and wood fired pizza fest, and I’m traveling sans laptop. So don’t expect much posting from me this weekend apart from an occasional iPhlog. Um, like this one.