The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.
Please join me in tipping a birthday mug to “N in Seattle,” who turned 57 years old young old today, and to the memory of the late Walt Crowley who was a friend to liberals and taverns everywhere.
Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s thirteen Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.
Your weekly compilation of news you may or may not have seen or read regarding America’s most disastrous ridiculous war.
First, a moment of silence for local historian Walt Crowley and Essential Bakery founder Jeff Fairhall. I knew them both — principled progressives who died much too young this past week.
In Iraq, dying prematurely happens hundreds of times daily. But the killing of up to 25 Iraqi civilians by private Blackwater contractors set off a firestorm last week in both Baghdad and Washington. It also, not incidentally, showed just how irrelevant the Iraqi government is. Prime Minister Maliki immediately condemned the killings, yanked Blackwater’s operating license, and ordered its personnel to leave the country — a move which was summarily ignored by the U.S., as without private contractors our heavily privatized military effort would grind to a halt. (And besides, U.S. contractors are immune to Iraqi law.) But Iraqis were so enraged by the murders that U.S. personnel were confined to the Green Zone for four days anyway.
Less covered, but more significant, was the withdrawal last week of Moktada al-Sadr’s parliamentary allies from Maliki’s ruling coalition — not only splitting the Shiites, but leaving Maliki with less than half of parliament in his camp. Who’s left? The Kurds and the Shiite exile parties (SCIRI and Dawa) with little constituency in Iraq itself. If Iraq had a, you know, functioning government that followed the law, this would end Maliki’s rule; if you want to get all technical and stuff, without a ruling majority, his leadership (sic) is now illegal. But this won’t happen, for two reasons: first, Parliament rarely has a quorum, and second, the opposition can’t agree on anything anyway. Iraq’s “government” is a joke.
Also on that theme, the target date for Iraqi control of security forces was quietly pushed back again last week, from November 2007 to July 2008. It’s the second delay this year, and security forces are under Iraqi control in only seven of the 18 provinces. (Generally, the least violent ones.) Most Iraqis, as well as Gen. James Jones’ recent commission, have been calling for Iraqis to assume full control immediately.
More bad news in the “Iraqi Life Is Cheap” Dept.: Word last week that northern Iraq’s cholera epidemic, which has now struck some 5,000 people, has spread to both Baghdad and Basra, with first cases confirmed in both cities. Cholera is a disease that happens only when there’s no safe drinking water and the public health infrastructure has broken down completely — conditions more than met throughout Occupied Iraq.
In the “But Life Is Cheaper In D.C.” Dept., Congress continued showing its priorities last week, spending ample time debating the appropriateness of a newspaper ad while Republicans blocked measures to address the war itself. In the Senate, the Reid-Feingold bill to cut off funding in June 2008 failed 28-70 (Patty Murray voted yes, Maria Cantwell, no). The Senate also rejected Sen. Jim Webb’s bill to give troops equal time at home, 56-44, short of the 60 votes needed to break the Republican filibuster. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that even drawing down to 55,000 troops in Iraq (a proposal on nobody’s table), George Bush’s perpetual war would cost $25 billion a year, or up to two trillion dollars overall. Those numbers actually seem low. And the ever-busy Rep. Henry Waxman has a new target in his oversight investigations: State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who Waxman accuses of cover-ups in investigations of waste and fraud in private contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organization representing Foreign Service diplomats has joined in, calling on Krongard to resign.
In the latest confirmation of just how bad the internal refugee crisis has become in Iraq, a Red Crescent report last week says that not only have two million people (one in 12 Iraqis) fled their homes in Iraq, but a staggering one million of those were in Baghdad alone. What does that mean? Ethnic cleansing. Baghdad was one of the most ethnically diverse provinces in Iraq; all those people have been leaving because death squads would no longer allow neighborhoods to be mixed. Sunnis have all but been driven out of Baghdad, part of the de facto partitioning of Iraq that has already happened, much of it while the escalation surge was supposed to be putting an end to the problem.
In the latest US attempt at provoking Iran, last week the US arrested an Iranian trade diplomat in northern Iraq and accused him of smuggling IEDs into the country. The Kurdish government, which was hosting the man, protested strongly, but to no avail. And in the week’s most surreal bit of Iran-bashing — I know this didn’t happen in Iraq, but it’s too good to pass up — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, set to be in New York this week for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, was refused permission by the U.S. to lay a wreath at the World Trade Center. (In the wake of 9-11, there was an outpouring of support from both the Iranian public and its government — a measure of how things have changed in six years.) Why? Well, the request angered U.S. diplomats, who accused the Iranian leader of — gasp — “wanting to use Ground Zero as a photo-op.”
Well, if that’s the criteria…
Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:
7PM: Has WA “utterly failed” to do the right thing on reproductive rights?
That’s the strong assertion of state Rep. Brendan Williams (D-Olympia) after joining a rally outside Ralph’s Thriftway, where supporters of the pharmacy’s refusal to stock “Plan B” birth control verbal attacked female protesters, calling them “whores,” and asking a pregnant protester why she didn’t “scrape that baby out of her uterus.” Rep. Williams joins us for the hour.
8PM: Is it time to do what “believe is right” on same sex marriage?
San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, a Republican, and former Chief of Police, held an emotional press conference this week in which he reversed his opposition to same sex marriage, tearfully explaining that his daughter and several staffers are gay, and that he “couldn’t look any of them in the face and tell them their relationship, their very lives, were any less meaningful than the marriage I share with my wife, Rana.” Is it time for America, even Republicans, to finally do what we “believe is right” on same sex marriage?
9PM: Remembering Walt Crowley
Michael Hood eulogizes populist pundit Walt Crowley over on BlatherWatch, and he joins us by phone to remember his close friend.
Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).
The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.
Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s thirteen Drinking Liberally chapters is available here. And a heads up… the Southeast Seattle chapter meets tomorrow night (and the third Wednesday of every month,) 8PM at the Columbia City Alehouse. Come join me and my neighbors for a pint of Manny’s a few miles closer to its source.
Goldy (Founder/Blogger-in-Chief) —
David Goldstein is an accidental activist who stumbled into politics in 2003 with a satirical statewide initiative to officially proclaim WA’s serial anti-tax initiative sponsor, Tim Eyman, “a horse’s ass.” A conscientious political press corp, weary of Eyman’s outrageous antics, turned its coverage to Goldstein’s outrageous antics, sparking a spontaneous grassroots movement to gather nearly 50,000 signatures before a humorless Attorney General managed to get an equally humorless judge to issue an injunction shutting down the campaign.
A year later Goldstein transformed his campaign website into a local, political blog. A mix of snark, satire, muckraking, and surprisingly thoughtful analysis, HorsesAss.org quickly became the most influential blog in WA state, and one of the most widely read local political blogs in the nation. Goldstein also blogs at Huffington Post and Daily Kos, and is best known nationally for breaking the story about former FEMA Director Mike Brown and his disastrous tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association, and for his relentless coverage of adulterated Chinese food imports.
Goldstein was born and educated in Philadelphia, and now lives in Seattle with his daughter, dog, cat, and everybody else who lives in Seattle. In addition to blogging, he is the creator of the world’s most widely pirated rhyming dictionary software, and the co-author of an Off-Broadway musical flop. Goldstein has been published in The Nation and The Stranger, and can be heard pontificating about politics on “The David Goldstein Show“, News/Talk 710-KIRO, Saturdays and Sundays from 7 to 10 PM.
Geov —
Geov Parrish began writing regular political commentary when, in 1996, he founded the community newspaper and web site Eat the State!, which he continues to co-edit. The same week, he began a long-running stint as a commentator on KEXP-90.3 Seattle’s “Mind Over Matters,” airing each Saturday at 8:30 AM.
ETS! led almost immediately to an unlikely new career as professional columnist, with a decade put in at The Stranger and Seattle Weekly. Beginning in 1998 Geov also wrote regularly at various times for Mother Jones, In These Times, WorkingforChange.com, and for several years in national syndication in both print and radio. But now he’s given all that up to write for HorsesAss.org. He also posts nationally from time to time at Booman Tribune.
Prior to writing for a living, Geov also spent time as a: radio DJ and programmer, punk rock singer, community activist, East Asia scholar, convenience store clerk, zine publisher, strawberry picker, factory worker, bicycle messenger, public health and medical school instructor, and successful small business owner. None of which even remotely qualified him to have paid political opinions. Deal with it.
Darryl —
Darryl Holman brings to Horse’s Ass the sensibility of a good Midwestern upbringing (albeit in a single-parent household), an East Coast education (albeit at a State university), and West Coast angst. More importantly, everything he does is deeply rooted in the blues. In real life, he is an anthropologist and a demographer at the University of Washington specializing in biological anthropology, human reproductive ecology, and scientific and statistical modeling. Besides contributing to Horse’s Ass, he also writes for Hominid Views and, occasionally contributes to Jesus’ General.
Other than blogging, Darryl likes to play chess, fly airplanes, fix automobiles, tinker in his small machine shop, do things with computers, and play the guitar. Like almost everyone else in the greater Seattle metropolitan area, he is also building an airplane in his garage.
Darryl was born in Santa Maria, California, but was raised in Madison, Wisconsin where, at a young age, he was exposed to dangerous liberal ideas, Vietnam war protests, the radical environmental movement, and severe winter weather.
He has a BS and an MS in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin (with diplomas signed by Chancellor Donna Shalala), and a PhD in Anthropology and Demography from Penn State University. Bill Clinton spoke at his PhD graduation ceremony in 1996, but he was too busy in New Orleans that day to attend. He spent a few more years at Penn State as a Postdoctoral fellow before moving to Redmond, Washington in the fall of 1999.
He became immersed in state and local politics when he observed that the quality of life was perfect in every way in Western Washington except for the dysfunctional transportation infrastructure, and simultaneously learned about Initiative 695 (the initiative that gutted funding for transportation infrastructure). There are unsubstantiated rumors that Darryl was the mysterious “Statistician X” (a.k.a. dj) during the gubernatorial election contest.
Will —
Will Kelley-Kamp is a young punk. At least that’s where it stands until he gets off his lazy ass and posts a bio.
Carl —
Carl Ballard is the pen name for Carl Balard, itself a pen name. Since unlike Goldy he tries to keep his personal life and blogging life separate, the rest of this entry will be entirely false:
Carl Ballard was born in a small Midwestern town. He doesn’t remember what town or even what state, but in fairness he was a baby at the time so remembering anything about it is pretty impressive. After earning a degree in Kickass from the University of Transylvania (minor in Rad!) Carl decided to travel the galaxy and will tell you that Neptune is nice. After returning to Earth, Carl earned a Masters in Making Fun of Righties where his thesis, “Fuck the Heck: Wingnuttia from Cesar to Sharkansky” was universally praised, and may be made into a movie. Carl puts his Making Fun of Righties degree to work on a regular basis at EFFin’ Unsound where he tracks local righties. He is getting sick of writing about himself in the third person.
Lee —
Lee Rosenberg is also a punk, although not quite as young as Will.
Hey, unfortunately, it’s not This Week in Bullshit, but here’s your weekly compilation of news you may or may not have seen or read regarding America’s most disastrous ridiculous war.
Well, speaking of Bullshit, Gen. David “Ass-Kissing Little Chickenshit” Petraeus spread it thick over Congress last week, touting “success” in Iraq (as did the Ass-Kissee-in-Chief in a nationally televised address) and dominating American media headlines. That’s too bad, because far more important stories were unfolding in Iraq itself, and they tended to directly and badly undermine Gen. AKLC Petraeus’s assertions.
The same day that Pres. Bush made his speech to that remaining fraction of the nation that cares what he thinks about Iraq, the tribal leader Bush had embraced only ten days previous in Anbar Province as an example of heroic leadership, uniting various Sunni tribes to try to rid the province of the widely despised Al-Qaeda and its foreign fighters, was assassinated. Thing is, the Americans are just as despised as Al-Qaeda, and so when Bush embraced the thuggish Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha as his kinda guy — Time Magazine described Abu Risha last week as having “a rather unsavory reputation as one of the shadiest figures in the Sunni community,” with a personal militia, a history of drug running, and a tribe notorious for highway banditry — he essentially signed Abu Risha’s death warrant. He was assassinated the day of Bush’s speech, somewhat undermining the claim that all Anbar is now happy and pro-American. While the White House blamed the murder on Al Qaeda in Iraq (of course), more likely it was a local hit, confirming the first rule of Middle East politics: the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
BBC/ABC/NHK polling last week showed just how unpopular the Americans are after the “success” of the escalation surge in Anbar. The results were grim enough in Iraq as a whole: 70 percent of Iraqis think security is worse in escalation surge areas now compared to before it began (and another 11 percent thought it unchanged, meaning over 80 percent of Iraqis believe the whole exercise has been a waste). A whopping 60 percent now think attacks on US troops are justified; 47 percent want the US to leave now, up from 35 percent before the escalation surge; and 35 percent believe American withdrawal would make further civil war more likely, compared to 46 percent who think it’d be less likely. Pretty damning stuff.
But in Anbar Province it was worse:
In a survey conducted Aug. 17-24 for ABC News, the BBC and NHK, the Japanese broadcaster, among a random national sample of 2,212 Iraqis, 72 percent in Anbar expressed no confidence whatsoever in United States forces. Seventy-six percent said the United States should withdraw now — up from 49 percent when we polled there in March, and far above the national average.
Withdrawal timetable aside, every Anbar respondent in our survey opposed the presence of American forces in Iraq — 69 percent “strongly” so. Every Anbar respondent called attacks on coalition forces “acceptable,” far more than anywhere else in the country. All called the United States-led invasion wrong, including 68 percent who called it “absolutely wrong.”
Every. Anbar. Respondent. So much for winning hearts and minds.
Another poll released last week was even starker. The British polling agency ORB, in surveying Iraqi families to find how many families had members who’ve died in the occupation and war, estimated that one in two families have lost at least one member, and that overall a staggering 1.2 million or more Iraqi civilians have killed so far. That number is roughly in line with the widely ridiculed 655,000 number published in an epidemiological study in Lancet last summer, and confirms not only that the civilian death toll has been far higher than official estimates, but that the violence has worsened sharply in the last year.
The escalation surge wasn’t popular in Baghdad, either: on Wednesday, residents of one of the few remaining areas where a Sunni and a Shiite neighborhood adjoin each other took to the streets to protest the U.S. military’s erection of a wall to segregate them from each other. The walls being built to “protect” residents from each other have been fiercely criticized by many residents themselves, who argue that they promote ethnic segregation, are as likely to keep attackers in as out, and separate family from family.
But perhaps the biggest Iraq story of the week got almost no media play here: the oil deal cut by the Kurdish provincial government with Hunt Oil Co. of Dallas. Why is this a big deal? First, it means local governments are starting to ignore the Green Zone government entirely and cut their own deals, which is a death knell for the oil “revenue-sharing” law that is perhaps the U.S. government’s biggest benchmark for political “success” in Iraq. It also suggests that Big Oil is now betting on the failure of the U.S. mission in Iraq and the subsequent partitioning of the country. And the deal itself (along with one the Kurds recently cut for natural gas) makes that partitioning more likely, as the Kurds and Shiites have plenty of their own oil resources and need neither the Sunnis nor each other, let alone the phantom al-Maliki “government.”
The last element undercutting Gen. AKLC’s testimony last week was the Pentagon report it was supposed to accompany. That was quietly released just before the weekend, and showed that even with the administration’s extremely generous definition of “progress,” only half of Congress’s 18 benchmarks showed progress, exactly one more than in an interim report in July. That area was in allowing former Ba’athists into the government, and the “progress” there was only in a tenuous deal between a handful of politicians that has yet to be implemented — and that is similar to numerous such deals that have collapsed in the past. Meanwhile, a separate State Department report, also quietly released in a Friday Afternoon News Dump, revealed that — surprise! — religious freedom in Iraq is down sharply in the last year.
Somehow, this all is being spun as “success,” and Bush is now promising a “withdrawal” to celebrate it — next Spring, six months past schedule, back to pre-escalationsurge troop levels because the US military can’t sustain its current deployment without either extending tours (again) or starting a draft. Which is to say Bush is keeping in as many troops as he can as long as he possibly can, and then seeking credit for giving our poor men and women in uniform (the ones that survive his vanity project for a few more months, anyway) a long-overdue rest.
Or maybe he’ll just send them to Iran. That propaganda campaign also continued apace last week, with the US claiming that a fatal mortar attack on U.S. military headquarters was carried out with an Iranian rocket. Even if you accept the curious logic that the Iranian government is responsible for every Iranian-made weapon Iraq — after all, the U.S. has utterly flooded Iraq for the last four years with weapons now on the black market, and you don’t see Washington bombing itself — the evidence to support the claim that the rocket was Iranian-made turned out to be less than compelling. Here’s Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner: “Can I hold up a piece of fragment today that has a specific marking on it that traces this back to Iranian making? At this moment I can’t do that.” THEN SHUT THE HELL UP.
Yesterday Joel Connelly gave The Stranger a little heat for their coverage of the Seattle City Council race between incumbent David Della and challenger Tim Burgess. I didn’t really understand Joel’s First Amendment argument, but I suppose I kinda-sorta got his outrage at political purity, even if I disagree with it.
Should Burgess’ less than firmly pro-choice history, and past record of working for vehemently anti-choice groups disqualify him from serving on the city council? Joel says no. The Stranger apparently says yes. Well now WA’s leading advocate for reproductive rights comes in on the side of The Stranger, endorsing Della over Burgess.
“Typically we don’t make endorsements in Seattle City Council races because, in the past, all candidates were clearly pro-choice,” explained Karen Cooper, Executive Director of NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. “But questions and concerns arose over this specific race after we learned of Tim Burgess’s longtime association with Concerned Women for America, a virulently anti-choice, anti-woman organization,” Cooper added.
I talked with Cooper this afternoon, and she went even further than the press release, describing Concerned Women for America as “a hate group.”
The couple of times I’ve met Burgess I liked him. He seems like a reasonable, competent guy. But in the end we tend to vote for people who reflect our values, and when we don’t we’re bound to be disappointed.
Should Burgess’ years of working for Concerned Women for America absolutely disqualify him from office in this very blue city? I suppose not… at least not absolutely. But voters have a right to know the candidate’s entire biography, and our local media has a responsibility to report it. My guess is that if voters understood about Burgess what The Stranger and NARAL Pro-Choice WA understand about Burgess, he wouldn’t stand a chance in November. Perhaps that’s unfair to Burgess. But to keep that information from the public would be unfair to voters, and counter to the Democratic process.
There are pretty much two sides to the growth/density argument in Seattle. On one side is Knute Berger mentality, which says that “density will murder your children in their beds.” Then their’s my side, which says that growth isn’t a bad thing, and that it can be good for the city. I live near downtown. I like growth. When new buildings go up, it usually means more urban goodness. (“Grocery store! Indian food! Basketball court!”)
Of course, whenever a building goes up, that means some greedy developer stomped on a basketful of kittens made money off the whole thing. This is not always an evil thing.
I agree with Geov that the mayor is pouring it on a bit thick. His new plan isn’t going to save us. (But Al Gore can!) Perhaps the mayor’s enviromental record isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But a rule change to allow for some cheaper housing to be built in what is already a heavily urbanized area can’t be that bad.
Here’s what Erica C. Barnett thought about the mayor’s previous plan, mentioned by Geov:
Subsidizing middle-income housing makes sense, particularly for families. The larger the apartment, the larger the differential between “affordable” and market rate. For example, in one project being built in the University District under the current program, full-price one-bedrooms go for $1096, and apartments for those making 70 percent of median income go for $954—a $142 break. The break on two-bedrooms is much larger: $1,112 for a subsidized unit, versus $1,386 for an unsubsidized unit—a cut of $274.
I’m not disagreeing with Josh that the mayor’s plan doesn’t solve the problem of affordable housing for very low-income people. But it never has been aimed at low-income people (unlike other city programs, such as the housing levy), and Nickels isn’t making any pretense that it is. In fact, the mayor sent out a press release saying as much, stating that the program is aimed at “middle-income wage earners … priced out of the market with few places to turn.” The city should do more to fund low-income housing, but we have a middle-class housing crisis, too; my rent, for example, costs me almost half my monthly income, substantially more than the 30 percent that housing folks agree is “affordable.”
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has spent a busy summer trying to line developers’ pockets, most notably with a proposal in June to expand property tax exemptions for builders for median income condos and (if any remain by 2008) apartments. But Hizzoner topped himself in the dog days late last month with a quiet proposal to gut permitting and environmental review requirements for new projects — a new pinnacle of cynicism not just because it’s another giveaway to developers that encourages the teardowns of what’s left of this city’s semi-affordable housing stock, but because of how he sold it.
From the mayor’s press release, entitled — I kid you not — “Mayor Nickels proposes ways to encourage smart growth: Changing SEPA thresholds to meet today’s climate change challenges:
Mayor Greg Nickels has submitted legislation to the City Council this week that will encourage environmentally friendly growth in Seattle neighborhoods, promote housing affordability and reform out-of-date land use regulations. “Every decision facing us today has a direct impact on climate change and our planet,” said Nickels…
The mayor’s proposal will change the threshold for SEPA review for downtown residential zones from 20 to 80 units, from four to six units in low-rise duplex/triplex projects; from 20 to 30 units in designated urban villages and urban centers. Thresholds will remain the same for industrial projects. Under the new thresholds, all parking will increase from 20 to 40 stalls.
Larger projects will be subject to the SEPA thresholds based on the size and location of a proposed project. The proposed changes will help to streamline permit review for new development, and reduce barriers that add delay, cost and risks to development of new housing and businesses.
SEPA, for those of you not up on your bureaucratese, is the State Environmental Policy Act, Washington’s equivalent to the federal Environmental Impact Statement. SEPA allows local municipalities to determine how large a project needs to be before its size triggers a SEPA review, and what Nickels is proposing is increasing that threshold by from 150 to 400 percent. If approved by City Council it would be a massive gift to developers.
It warms the cockles of one’s heart to think that Nickels is proposing such measures not because he’s in bed with their beneficiaries, but because he wants to save the planet. You see, according to Nickels, anything that makes more money in Seattle for developers by definition discourages sprawl, and therefore helps stop global warming in its tracks. Your new high-end condo could save a polar bear’s life.
But why stop there? Saving the planet is serious business; it won’t be accomplished simply with a tax break here and a gutted regulation there. Nickels needs to think bigger, and undoubtably he is. Look for these proposed measures soon:
* What’s this 20 to 40 stalls nonsense? Abolish parking. Cuts CO2 emissions (except for those clueless out-of-towners circling the block for hours…) and eliminates developers’ need to provide parking.
* Cut down all trees in the city. “More good, socially conscious projects get held up by some stupid old tree than any other single factor,” Nickels will say, before promising to minimize CO2 by replacing each tree with a new twig on a one-to-one basis.
* Abolish all height limits and setback requirements on new buildings. It’s the only conceivable way to save the Inuit way of life.
* Ban back yards.
* Bulldoze all environmentally sensitive areas. (Happily, the city has already gotten a head start on this one.) Lots of potential for new townhomes here.
* Have Seattle taxpayers pay for all construction costs. Expensive, sure, but so is building a levee to save downtown from rising sea levels.
* Rather than paying bothersome, expensive relocation fees to tenants whose homes are being destroyed, developers may simply pass the tenants along to the city, which will shoot them. (They didn’t want to live in Auburn anyway.)
These sure-fire environmental winners are a slam dunk to sail through city council. Just ask newly minted environmentalist Jean Godden, who, when asked for comment on the mayor’s planet-saving proposals, rolled on her back and asked to have her tummy rubbed.
The fact that these ideas, like the mayor’s current proposals, would help to make the mayor’s rich buddies that much richer, is strictly a coincidence. And the fact that they will force still more poor, working, and middle class people out of the city is — well, look, do you want to save that polar bear or not?
(A weekly compilation of news you may or may not have seen or read regarding America’s most disastrous ridiculous war.)
President George Bush unwittingly embarrasses himself on the topic of Iraq most weeks, but this was a banner week. First, there was an unannounced Labor Day stop in the massive Marine base in Anbar Province known to Marines as Camp Cupcake, owing to its 13-mile perimeter, over 10,000 troops, and complete disconnect from the chaos that is the daily reality outside its well-guarded walls. While there, Bush hinted that he might reduce troop deployments by the end of the year — but on the same day, the AP was quoting unnamed administration officials as saying that his senior advisors have already told Bush that the escalation surge is going swell and not to let up now. (Gen. David Petraeus is scheduled to testify before Congress on Tuesday — 9-11! Get it? — and his written report on the escalation surge is due by the end of the week.)
Then it was on to Austria Australia, where, before meeting with OPEC APEC ministers, Bush blithely told Austrian Australian Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile that “we’re kickin’ ass” in Iraq. (My pet theory: Austrian Australian is not Bush’s native language, and in the awkwardness of trying to translate his remarks, he confused the subject and object. What he meant to say was “Our asses are getting kicked.” A totally understandable gaffe. The alternative, that the most powerful man in the world is living in a particularly destructive fantasy world, would be unthinkable.)
Bush was also embarrassed by a New York Times excerpt last weekend from a generally fawning new biography of him, in which the Commander-in-Chief expressed bewilderment that his administration disbanded Saddam’s army in the early days of the occupation, saying, essentially: “That wasn’t my policy. I don’t know how that happened.” The move is now widely regarded as an enormous mistake that put thousands of young Iraqi men with guns out of work and bitter toward the Americans about it — the nucleus of what became the insurgency. Thing is, Bush knew exactly what the policy was, because he ordered it — and Paul Bremer, then the US Viceroy to Iraq, promptly sent the Times the letters, memos, and documentation to prove it. Oops. (One more notch for the “fantasy world” theory.)
Petraeus’ report is expected to praise the military effort, but condemn Iraqi politicians for a lack of progress in reconciliation, signing over all Iraqi oil to American oil companies, and other “benchmarks” dear to US hearts and/or wallets. So, in its first week back after a month-long recess, what did the Iraqi Parliament do to scramble to impress the Americans with their determination to move ahead? They met for exactly 90 minutes, with only 154 of 275 members present — barely a quorum — and read into the record 10 minor noncontroversial bills, none having anything to do with American benchmarks or reconciliation. Most of their time was spent blaming each other for the country’s worsening violence (they don’t seem to share Bush or Petraeus’ view of the “success” of the escalation surge) and complete lack of basic government services or security. It doesn’t look good. At some point American media needs to figure out that the Iraqi government is a fiction outside the Beltway and Green Zone, and barely relevant inside those places, either.
Speaking of barely relevant: Congressional Democrats, in the runup to the Petraeus report, announced that in their negotiations with Bush they were willing to settle for a “goal” rather than “timetable” for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (I know: Democrats, Iraq, “negotiations with Bush,” and “willing to settle,” all in the same sentence. Shocking, but true.) And Ret. Marine Gen. James Jones, who headed a special panel looking into the effort to train Iraqi security forces, testified before Congress that his panel found the Iraqi army at least two years away from being able to operate independently, and that Iraqi police forces were so corrupt and so infiltrated by insurgent militia members that they should be disbanded. Gen. Jones concluded that “We should withdraw.” His testimony was essentially ignored by both the administration and national media.
The Brits, on the other hand, did withdraw: the last British soldiers pulled out of Basra this week, leaving Southern Iraq nominally under the control of the Iraqi Army, more realistically under the control of three mutually warring fundamentalist Shiite militias, and almost certainly about to receive American troops trying to push the chaos from one neighborhood, village, and province to another.
One more note, while folks concerned with Iraq await a report that was probably written in Cheney’s office a month ago: the ACLU filed suit this week to try to obtain Pentagon estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths. After denying for years that the U.S. government tracked Iraqi civilian deaths at all (what’s another dead Iraqi?), the Pentagon finally confirmed earlier this year that it does, in fact, produce intelligence estimates of civilian casualties — but has refused to make them public, just as it has refused to make public the secret formula by which it is calculating, in defiance of every known metric, that overall violence is down in the country due to the escalation surge. Perhaps this week they’ll let us in on the secret.
Or not.
From The Stranger, who have been putting the screws to city council candidate Tim Burgess over his smarmy guest column in the Seattle Times (printed after the ’04 election):
However, he acknowledges that he would not push his own pastor to perform gay weddings or lobby the leaders of his own denomination to allow them. “I’m just not there yet,” he said, adding: “I’m running for city council, not city theologian.”
To this, “Switzerblog” adds:
Why should he? Same-sex marriage in the church is irrelevant in this conversation; the separation of church and state means that churches can refuse to acknowledge or perform marriages for whoever they want. It’s relevant to the voters what he wants the state to do about the issue – not whether he’ll hassle his pastor.
Right on. I don’t care who churches decide to marry. It doesn’t affect me. What matters is that King County should be able to issue a marriage license to two consenting adults of any sex. Whether a specific church wants to bless the union is all up to them. I’m sure, being that this is Seattle, that there are plenty of “rainbow” churches.
21st Century Democrats will release a new poll later today, showing Democrat Darcy Burner with a 44% to 39% lead over Republican incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert in Washington’s highly competitive 8th Congressional District. 17% of voters remain undecided.
The robo-poll of 509 registered voters was commissioned by 21st Century Democrats (who endorsed Burner in July) and was conducted on August 28, the day after President George Bush came to Bellevue, WA to raise money for Reichert. 85% of Democrats support Burner and 82% of Republicans support support Reichert, but independents break decidedly toward Burner by a 40% to 24% margin.
President Bush remains exceedingly unpopular in the district, with only 30% of respondents rating his job performance as good or excellent. 96% of Democrats and 83% of independents rate the president’s job performance as fair or poor, along with a substantial 36% of Republicans.
Yes it’s early, and yes this is an internal poll from a partisan ally. But it shows that Burner’s message of fighting to bring the occupation of Iraq to a responsible close is resonating not only with Democrats, but with unaffiliated voters as well.
UPDATE:
21st Century Democrats has issued a statement:
“Darcy’s Burner’s phenomenal success in using the web to reach voters with her message about ending rather than extending the war is clearly resonating with Democrats and Independents in the district,” said Mark Lotwis, executive director of 21st Century Democrats. “These poll results and Sen. Rodney Tom’s decision yesterday to drop out of the primary race and enthusiastically endorse Burner demonstrate that Burner’s courageous and principled leadership on progressive issues is not just the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.”
From the HA comment threads:
Stefan Sharkansky says:
The Democrat whom you’ll eventually support for Congress in the 8th District, Rodney Tom, also opposes the state death tax.
[…]
Stefan Sharkansky says:
I don’t care who wins the Democrat primary in this race. But I will have a bit of smug satisfaction in fall 2008 when all of you Darcy fans have to eat sh*t and campaign for a formerly nominal Republican turned nominal Democrat who supports photo ID at the polls, opposes the death tax and supports charter schools. tee-hee.
[…]
Stefan Sharkansky says:
Yes, but you’ll still be supporting disgruntled former Republican legislator Tommy Rod after he cleans Darcy’s clock in next year’s primary
[…]
Goldy says:
Thanks for the prediction, Stefan. I’ll be sure to quote this back at you when Darcy wins the nomination (or perhaps, when Tom withdraws next spring.)
Consider it done.
I’ve been on KEXP-90.3 on Saturday mornings for over a decade, and for the last several years we’ve been running an extremely popular weekly overview of news from Iraq. Since there’s a lot more of it than I have time to run through (and links don’t work well on the radio), for a while now I’ve also been posting the weekly summaries over at Booman Tribune. It occurs to me that it might make sense to post it locally, too. And so, with your indulgence (and hopefully interest), here is the first of a weekly compilation of news you may or may not have seen or read regarding America’s most disastrous war.
Much of the last week, in D.C. and the Green Zone, was spent by various parties trying to pave the way for their spin on the congressionally mandated report on the escalation “surge” due at the end of next week.
That included George Bush making a surprise Labor Day PR visit to Anbar Province — a profile in courage somewhat undermined in that he stayed protected by a 13-mile perimeter and 10,000 troops, not venturing outside the base to see for himself the wonderful progress he has been touting. But more importantly, days previous, Bush hinted that he’s already made up his mind regardless of what Gen. Petraeus has to say, suggesting that he would send still more troops to Iraq after the 15th and announcing that he would ask Congress for yet another $50 billion “emergency” war appropriation.
Meanwhile, the impartial investigative arm of Congress, the General Accountability Office, released a report that flatly contradicted the White House, finding little progress in Iraq during the escalation surge. Specifically, the GAO looked at the 18 benchmarks set by Congress. Unlike a White house report last month that tortured logic and semantics in order to find “progress” in only eight of the 18 benchmarks, the GAO found progress in only three and declared the war effort to be failing on all the most important ones.
Other indicators that things didn’t have the rosy glow insisted upon by Bush and his apologists: a New York Times report that while deaths this summer are down from their peak in Baghdad — perhaps because ethnic cleansing has progressed so far that there are fewer people left for the death squads to kill — nationwide the rate of sectarian deaths is double what it was in 2006. (Even in Baghdad, it’s still higher than 2006, just lower than the cooler months of Spring.) And the Center for American Progress released a study declaring that American troops can be safely withdrawn from Iraq in one year, again undercutting the war hawks’ argument that without all those American soldiers and weapons the violence would get worse.
Oh, and there was also the little-noticed tidbit that Gen. Petraeus intervened to “soften” the language of the recent National Intelligence Estimate to reflect recent “progress.” (Even so, the NIE basically said Baghdad was somewhere around the seventh circle of Hell.) Plus, the U.S. leaned on five leading Shiite and Sunni exile politicians to announce a “deal” on America’s desired give-Iraqi-oil-to-American-oil-companies oil law, prisoners, and a few other concessions. But it was largely for show, and American consumption: the deal didn’t bring Sunnis back into the government, won’t get any of the agreed-upon items through Parliament, and the remaining Iraqi politicians allegedly running the country are mostly returned exiles with no constituency outside the Beltway and no relevance outside the Green Zone.
On the other side of that wall, a far more damning measure of how the escalation surge is going, namely how it’s affecting actual Iraqis, emerged last week. Over 5,000 cholera cases have now been reported in Northern Iraq, primarily among refugees living in shanty towns in areas of the country without much fighting. (The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated last week that 4.2 million Iraqis, one in every six, has been uprooted by the war.) Why is this important? Cholera is a disease of the extremely poor, normally seen only in areas where poverty is extreme and government services nonexistent. In this case, as in much of Iraq, there is no longer clean drinking water and, of course, no public health sector to speak of. The government has no presence, local militias and tribes can only do so much, and many of the doctors and technocrats have fled the country or been killed. That’s what the escalation surge means to the average Iraqi.
Want more? Iraqis are no longer eating fish out of the Tigris or Euphrates Rivers, in part because there are so many dead bodies in the rivers — which the fish nibble on — that Iraqis are afraid of contracting diseases associated with cannibalism.
In the south of Iraq, 52 people died last week in Karbala firefights (widely reported in the US as “riots”) between members of Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Maliki-aligned Badr Organization, both Shiite militias vying for control (and wider imposition of sharia law) as British soldiers complete their withdrawal from southern Iraq. After the fighting, al-Sadr ordered the Mahdi Army to stand down for six months to try to avoid widening the civil war. We’ll see how long it lasts. Prime Minister Maliki, the great American-sponsored statesman, blamed Sunni clerics from Saudi Arabia for somehow provoking the Karbala bloodshed, in an effort to deflect attention from his Badr friends. This is our voice of political reconciliation during the escalation surge.
Another important front was emerging in coverage of Iraq last week: a widening scandal (finally) over corruption and where all that American money and weaponry I mentioned earlier has actually been going for four years. McClatchy newspapers reported that hundreds of thousands of dollar in U.S. rebuilding money went to insurgents (still only a fraction of the billions that went missing overall). The Army accused Lee Dynamics International of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to US officials to get $11 million in contracts. The New York Times reported that several federal agencies are investigating weapons sales, disappearances, fraud, kickbacks, and black market profiteering by US officials. And one investigation involves senior official who worked with a Gen. David Petraeus — yes, that Gen. Petraeus — when he was heading the effort to arms and train Iraqi militias and death squads army and police units in 2004-05. (Heckuva job, Davie.) Also from the Times: US weapons given to the Iraqi army are being found used by criminal gangs in Turkey. (No surprise there — we’ve flooded the black market in arms the world over by handing out AK-47s etc. like candy in Iraq.) And, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Paul Brinkley (another political appointee) was accused last week by a DoD task force of mismanaging government money in Iraq — and also engaging in public drunkenness and sexual harassment.
Big picture: The Project on Government Oversight reported last week that the top 50 Iraq contractors paid over $12 billion in fines and restitution for violating various federal laws over the last 10 years. Being scofflaws not only hasn’t disqualified them from the Iraq feeding trough, but seems to be an entrance requirement.
Finally, in the most unintentionally hilarious incident since Larry Craig got Restless Leg Syndrome, the U.S. military characterized as “regrettable” a Baghdad incident last Tuesday in which eight Iranians, including two diplomats, were released hours after being arrested. In a country awash with guns and where security details are essential for normal travel for VIPs, the eight were singled out because the Iraqi security guys they’d hired had an “unauthorized” AK-47 and two pistols in the trunk of their car. Not entirely coincidentally, President Bush was in Reno that day, telling an American Legion convention that Iranians were arming the insurgency, as part of the steadily increasing PR campaign for a military strike on Iran — which several credible reports this weekend, including this one in the Times of London, say will be massive and imminent. Attacking Iran would not only be illegal and immoral, but politically, militarily, and economically disastrous — the time to mount public opposition to this insanity is now.
Secretary of State Sam Reed has issued a press release comparing voter turnout rates throughout the state in WA’s first ever August primary, and well, it really doesn’t contain any surprises.
The 2007 State Primary demonstrates that the people of Washington prefer to vote at home.
Among the poll-site counties of King, Kittitas, and Pierce, the projected overall turnout is 25%. Turnout in the state’s two largest counties, King and Pierce, was driven down by poll voters. Combined turnout for poll voters in King and Pierce is expected to reach only 8%, while combined turnout for those voting by mail is likely to reach 33%.
“When voters receive their ballots at their homes, they are more likely to vote,” said Handy. “The 25% turnout difference between poll voters and vote-by-mail voters in King and Pierce really underscores why counties in Washington are moving to vote-by-mail.”
It also underscores why many Republicans, like our good friend Stefan, adamantly oppose King County’s proposed move to all vote-by-mail, as the status quo clearly gives Republicans a demonstrable advantage in statewide elections by depressing the turnout in the state’s most populous and Democratic county. And they seem totally unconcerned by the hypocrisy of bemoaning King’s status as the only county without an elected elections director, at the same time they fight tooth and nail to make it the only county without all vote-by-mail.
I’m guessing there might be a Republican-championed election reform whose goal or effect hasn’t been to depress or even suppress the vote, but none immediately comes to mind.
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