SCOOP: France-bashing at National Review!

John Derbyshire has to fill his column with something, so -probably in severe mental agony, who would want to point out faults in our good French allies- he writes about unscrupulous behavior that is in dire need of correcting:

Note the French govt's response to these unpleasant statistics — they stopped collecting the statistics!

The issue? Collecting data to establish how many 'sensitive areas' France has got. Sounds kinda sexy. But by 'sensitive area', the criminologist responsible for the data collection means those banlieux that are so unsafe that the only people you'll find there are the people who have to live there. Not even the police or fire brigade are safe. The number of sensitive areas had increased from 106 in 1991 when the project was started to 818 when it was cancelled.

For shame, French government! How dare you impede the flow of knowledge just to put a positive spin on things!

Luckily we have a man of principle: John Derbyshire, who's not afraid to assign blame where it is due.

Now if only the blogger he links to wasn't referring to a Figaro article that's dated February 1st, 2002 we might not have been too late to stop those dastardly French politicians.

And if only that 2002 Figaro article was not referring to research that had already been stopped in 1999, we would not have to scold the French government for something that was done by the previous government 5 years ago.

And if only he'd been able to show that similar data does exists in other countries, such as, for instance, the United States, and that nobody has tried to suppress the gathering of such data, he might have a point.

And if only he could show that only France uses PC euphemisms as 'sensitive area' where it should obviously say black ghetto Muslim No-Go Zone (Derbyshire's term), he might have a point.

And if only he could show that the police, the post office and the fire brigade are truly 'Western' institutions that were invented in the West or do not exist anywhere else, this term would be correct.

And if only John Derbyshire had read the newspapers, then he would have known that the Iraqi Health Ministry is a far better place to start when you want to accuse officials of hiding data from the public. The Ministry has stopped releasing casualty figures.

And if only John Derbyshire had read the newspapers, he also would have an inkling as to why the Iraqi Health Ministry has stopped releasing casualty figures. It might have to do with the fact that the figures that were released showed that the Coalition Forces and their Iraqi allies are killing twice as many innocent civilians than the terrorist insurgents are.

If only John Derbyshire had done all that, than he wouldn't be a total dumbass.

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Ron Reagan Jr. isn't the only son of a Republican president who'll not be voting for Bush

Here's Johnny!

As son of a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was. With the current administration’s decision to invade Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent, and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.

Via Atrios (do I really need to link? Y'all know where he's at.)

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GDP number revised upwards

Annualized growth in the US stood at a measly 2.8 percent during the second quarter of 2004. No more! The good people over at the Department of Commerce have calculated that in fact the economy grew at a magnificent 3.3 percent.

General Glut, over at the Globblog, takes a closer look at the numbers.

Let's start with trade. The preliminary revision of 2004:II GDP released late last month showed a trade balance of -$588.7bn. It's now revised upwards to -$580.3bn. It's a small revision and still chalks up the largest quarterly deficit of all time, but granted an improvement nonetheless.

If one adds $8bn to the 2004:II current account, the revision could bring the CA balance as a percentage of GDP down from -5.7% to -5.4%. Still a gigantic figure, and a US record.

The really big contributor to the upward revision in GDP is not trade, however, but gross private domestic investment. In the preliminary revision, investment was measured as growing 17%, but the final revision now says 19%. Equipment and software investment growth was revised significantly, from 12.1% to 14.2%, and that contributes the majority of the overall investment figure.

Note, however, that consumer spending was not revised at all, and still stands at 1.6% growth for the second quarter, the lowest figure since the 2001 recession when consumer spending in 2001:II rose a mere 1.0%.

Smugness time! This is the point where I interject and get to quote myself! Because as I pointed out in this -much earlier- post, the Bush administration has screwed this one up too! How, you might ask if you are interested in seeing me gloat? I'll repeat:

Apparently, [Bush et al.] did not try to stimulate corporations to hire more people, but instead stimulated them to invest more in hardware. The did this by allowing corporations to depreciate their investments faster than usual. This had to be new investments (post May 2003) and on January 1st 2005 things will revert to the old rules. But because companies are allowed to deduct depreciations from their profits and profits are taxed, this means a big temporary tax break.

Stimulating companies to buy more expensive equipment would mean good news for companies making expensive equipment. They would see more orders and would have to expand their workforce. Seems sound in theory, but in practice... Two problems according to Ritholtz:

1. A lot of that expensive equipment is foreign expensive equipment, and even most American manufacturors have outsourced the nuts-and-bolts bit of their production line. It might have worked in the 1950s, but today it is inevitable that a significant part of the money will flow out of the country and create jobs elsewhere.
2. In IT, the really big move forward nowadays for companies is installing very expensive all encompassing software systems to automate all processes. This software is specifically designed to make it possible to get the job done with fewer workers. Giving companies a tax break to make this software affordable is hardly the best way to boost the number of jobs.

I told you so I told you so I told you so I told you so. General Glut has the deal on what this actually means:

At first blush, 3.3% growth sounds pretty good all things considered. But what does the larger picture tell us? Incredibly anemic growth in consumer spending combined with vigorous growth in capital investment. This is the fifth quarter in a row now where GDP growth has outpaced consumer spending growth. In 2004:II non-residential capital investment actually contributed more to GDP growth than consumer spending did, even though the former is one-seventh the size of the latter. This is a pretty unusual occurrence. Since 1970 (over 138 quarters) it has happened just 14 times, 11 of those being either in a recession or in a quarter preceding a recession. Today's "recovery" is becoming almost solely investment driven, by capital which can find no consumer to match it.

Yet again, more evidence that overproduction and deflation will continue to be the name of the game.

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I hereby nominate Andrew Sullivan for a Silver Hypocritical Self-Contradictory Idiot with Oak Leef Cluster

Catholic homosexual and conservative nation-builder Andrew Sullivan has difficulty getting it straight in the best of times. But here's a Sullivan post where he gets it right and refrains from bashing Kerry/the liberal media/the looney left. That's because the Blog Queen has copy-pasted an email he received from someone evidently smarter and fairer than himself. Here's the entire email:

When the invasion of Iraq was being debated, I had just returned from two years in Morocco and my now wife had just returned from a year in Egypt. We both considered supporting the war. The Arab world is mired in a political culture obsessed with blaming others for their misfortunes and obsessing over Israel while doing nothing to find practical solutions to their own problems closer to home.

When I was in Morocco, there was a demonstration in Rabat that drew between half a million and three million demonstrators against the reoccupation of the West Bank in April of 2002. Never mind that Israel is on the other side of the Mediterranean and that their demonstration could have no impact on the Palestinians' situation. Never mind that their own government has occupied the Western Sahara against the wishes of the native inhabitants of that territory, a situation that in some ways parallels the situation of Israel and Palestine. Never mind that, in the early 21st century, they are still ruled by a Monarchy making only feeble gestures towards instituting a democracy, and have a stagnant economy barely able to keep up with the country's birth rate, let alone employ the millions of idle, jobless young Moroccans whose best hope in life is to emigrate legally or illegally to Europe in hopes of finding menial, low-wage labor. Few Moroccans will lift a finger to try to change their own situation, but they will pour into the streets for the sake of an impotent gesture on the behalf of the Palestinians. Political discussions tend to revolve around conspiracy theories involving "The Jews." The 10 year old who lived downstairs from me was convinced that 4000 Jews had called in sick to work on 9/11, tipped off by the Mossad that the attack was going to occur. His father would not admit to holding this view, but probably did and would say publicly that Bin Laden was not behind the attack (Powell promised a dossier in Arabic spelling out evidence of Bin Laden's responsibility for 9/11. This was never done, to my knowledge. A serious oversight.).

My wife had similar experiences in Egypt. We both thought that a shock to the system and a scheme to jar at least one Arab country onto the right track might be worth it. In the end, we both decided that it would be a bad idea, and for good conservative reasons. Utopian social programs rarely work domestically, in circumstances in which the architects of social engineering share a language and culture with their subjects and in which the surrounding society is stable and prosperous. If this is the case, how can we expect a radical experiment in social engineering to succeed in a foreign country with a radically different culture, and in which distrust of the United States is imbibed with mother's milk? Arabs are fixated enough on what they perceive as past humiliations, how can adding another defeat to the list help them?

Subsequent rationales for the war were not convincing. Engage the terrorists in Iraq or face them here? Does anyone really believe that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had a one-way ticket to the US and a scholarship at a flight school but decided to turn around and have a go at us in Iraq after he heard about the invasion? Iraq, in fact, supplies a theater for attacking the US that most of the fighters there, foreign and Iraqi, would not have if we had not given it to them. If Saddam Hussein were still in power, we could continue to contain him for 2 billion per year and when his system did finally collapse, it would be up to Iraqis to sort out the mess, not us. As for Blair's claim that Muslim militants hate the West for our very existence, I don't buy it. Resent us, yes. Envy us, sure. But if we didn't meddle in Middle Eastern affairs, I doubt they would attack us. Bush's claim in his first public statement after 9/11 that they hate us for our freedom is a close parallel to the claim of Muslim militants that we hate them for their core identity and values, that is, that we hate them for being Muslims, that we hate Islam as such. The Middle East is a disaster. Its economies are stagnant, its resources are minimal and being depleted, its population is growing, its infrastructure is crumbling, its literacy rates are low and so on and so forth. There will be no stability there in the foreseeable future and the correct response to this should be to minimize involvement with the region.

Now, we are stuck fighting to try to democratize a polity that is inherently unstable. If there are democratic elections, the result is not likely to be a liberal democracy, but rather one of the illiberal sort. Defeat would be a disaster, victory will be hard to define and unlikely to bring great reward. I agree with Christopher Hitchens that it is shameful to be wishing defeat on the US in Iraq in the hopes that this translates into defeat for Bush at home. I agree that we have to face the fact that we are committed in Iraq now and cannot afford to talk about the past as though turning back the clock were an option. I am no fan of Kerry. Despite all of this, I don't want to hand another four years to a man who brought us unnecessarily into this predicament at such great cost and who waged this war so incompetently. This, combined with the irresponsible economic policy that you have also criticized, have convinced me to cast my vote for Kerry. We cannot afford to dwell on the past at the expense of engaging with the present as it is. But neither can we forget past lapses of judgment and hope that they will not occur again.

So there. Unfortunately, from someone as candid as Sullivan who is now bashing Bush for making serious mistakes and not owning up to them, one might expect some sort of mea culpa. He's a catholic blogwhore, what could be more right than a public confession? So one might expect him to quote or link to some of his older stuff, such as:

The second case [for invading Iraq, after WMD. j.e.], and one I stressed more at the time, was the moral one. The removal of Saddam was an unalloyed good. His was a repugnant, evil regime and turning the country into a more open and democratic place was both worthy in itself and a vital strategic goal in turning the region around. It was going to be a demonstration of an alternative to the autocracies of the Arab world, a way to break the dangerous cycle that had led to Islamism and al Qaeda and 9/11 and a future too grim to contemplate.

Or this:

The question I have asked myself in the wake of Abu Ghraib is simply the following: if I knew before the war what I know now, would I still have supported it? I cannot deny that the terrible mismanagement of the post-war - something that no reasonable person can now ignore - has, perhaps fatally, wrecked the mission. But does it make the case for war in retrospect invalid? My tentative answer - and this is a blog, written day by day and hour by hour, not a carefully collected summary of my views - is yes, I still would have supported the war.

(Both quotes can be found here.)

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Outsourcing Torture

The new bill implementing the recommendations of the 911 commission is being used by Republican congressmen (more specifically, Dennis Hastert of 'George Soros gets his money from drug cartels' fame) to hide a provision that will legalize extraordinary rendition.

Extraordinary what?

"Extraordinary rendition" is the euphemism we use for sending terrorism suspects to countries that practice torture for interrogation. As one intelligence official described it in the Washington Post, "We don't kick the sh*t out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the sh*t out of them.”

Apparently, the newspapers have not yet picked up on this. But over at Obsidian Wings, they hope to raise a stink and make this a media matter. Please read the post, and if you have a blog, link to it and let Google get the story out.

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Let's rant about big media...

If news outlets do their jobs right, they report accurately. Also, if it is in any way possible to tell the truth behind the facts, they should not hesitate. As a consequence, their audience should be well informed.

Why then, does the Annenberg Election Survey find this:

“In fact, Daily Show viewers have higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers -- even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration.”

Unfortunately, I can't see the Daily Show here in Amsterdam. I have to make do with newspaper websites. This only works if you also read Bob Somerby.

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Crawford newspaper endorses Kerry

You have probably already read about this, all the big blogs have mentioned this. So why the hell shouldn't I?

Crawford, Texas, has a newspaper, The Iconoclast. The newspaper has an editorial. The editorial has endorsed Kerry. Last time round, the editorial endorsed Bush. What changed? Well....

Few Americans would have voted for George W. Bush four years ago if he had promised that, as President, he would:
• Empty the Social Security trust fund by $507 billion to help offset fiscal irresponsibility and at the same time slash Social Security benefits.
• Cut Medicare by 17 percent and reduce veterans’ benefits and military pay.
• Eliminate overtime pay for millions of Americans and raise oil prices by 50 percent. • Give tax cuts to businesses that sent American jobs overseas, and, in fact, by policy encourage their departure. • Give away billions of tax dollars in government contracts without competitive bids.
• Involve this country in a deadly and highly questionable war, and
• Take a budget surplus and turn it into the worst deficit in the history of the United States, creating a debt in just four years that will take generations to repay.

And there's more, so read the whole thing.

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In defense of wanton executions - the Weekly Standard

Just as you think they can't sink any lower... they post this:

The AP photo landed in newspapers worldwide the following day. Without background or context, readers saw a merciless Loan and a defenseless Lop.

Just in case you are unfamiliar with Messrs. Loan and Lop, here is a link to the picture (beware: no background or context given!).

In what way, background or context is Lop not defenseless?
In what way, background or context does Loan show any mercy?

Brownshirt assholes.

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Now I Am One of The Initiated!

Undying thanks, and a permanent place of honor in my blogroll, go to Jeroen Reutelingsperger, who had the grace to send me a gmail-invitation despite my shameless groveling. He's a fellow Dutchie with a keen interest in American affairs and his mastery of English is, like his taste in music and literature, better than mine. Go check him out.

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Two flew over the cookoo's nest

Bush can't stop telling everybody how swell things are over in Baghdad. Maybe he should go over there for Thanksgiving again, and this time, do like the pilgrims and actually mingle with the local tribesmen. Eat some halal Turkey. Or maybe not.

According to some, the Bushtalk is getting further and further removed from reality. This is how Kevin Drum puts it:

And Thursday's press conference was just scary. It's no longer clear if George Bush is merely a cynical, calculating politician — which would be bad enough — or if he actually believes all the happy talk about Iraq that his speechwriters produce for him. Increasingly, though, it seems like the latter: he genuinely doesn't have a clue about what's going on. What's more, his staff is keeping him in a sort of Nixonian bubble, afraid to tell him the truth and afraid to take any positive action for fear that it might affect the election.

It might sound Nixonian to him, but consider this:

1. He's the de facto ruler of Iraq.
2. His scientists have him convinced that he's got a working (anti-)weapons program.
3. His view towards insurgency in Iraq is 'bring it on' because he's convinced that he'll win.

Forget about Nixon. This guy should start writing romance novels.

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André Hazes has died at 53

The best singer of het Levenslied that the Netherlands has ever known is no more. Het Levenslied, literally 'the song of life', is somewhat of a cross between the Portugese Fado and the German Schlager. For those of you who are interested in this aspect of Dutch culture, you can read all about it here.

André Hazes died of a cardiac arrest after being hospitalized with high fever. He was obese, a diabetic, a chain smoker, an alcoholist and he made the hours of a nightwatch. All this not made him any healthier, as can be surmized by looking at some of his more recent pictures here. He leaves behind a wife, two former wifes and children. (No, I don't know how many. He broke off all contact with his ex-wifes and their children. His last wife had two kids. Who knows?)

He was from a humble background, and started his career singing on the Albert Cuyp street market in Amsterdam at the age of 9. (Not that he had to, his background wasn't that humble, but it earned him a television appearance, so technically speaking it was his debut.) After school he worked as a factory worker, sailor, book binder, flower delivery man, bicycle repair man, chimney sweep, butcher's apprentice, builder, ground worker (whatever that is), demolition man, disc jockey, market trader (Albert Cuyp, not stock market), and waiter before he became a bartender at age 25, and started singing in bruine kroegen ('brown pubs') such as Bolle Jan (since relocated to the Rembrandplein). It took him two years to score his first hit (Eenzame Kerst, 'Lonely Christmas') in 1977, but he remained a star in the firmament of the Levenslied ever since, scoring, well, scores of hits.

It is hard to judge the quality of his music. For the entire Levenslied genre, well, de gustibus non est disputandum, you either like it or you don't, but in the eyes of most Dutchmen, he was probably the best of the lot. His music is like he was, emotional and sentimental. His lyrics are simple and cliché, which makes his songs all the more sincere. He was known to use a rhyming dictionary. He, more than any other Dutch folksinger, managed to be truly popular (without sniggering behind the back) in all echelons of Dutch society. He was adored by college students (especially those of the fraternity variety, such as myself - and yes, without sniggering. His CDs are in my collection.). His music can be listened to on every day in every Dutch expat bar around the world. I highly suggest Le Port d'Amsterdam in Paris: it's fun to see French guys hopelessly gawking at the blond Dutch au pairs singing and having fun. It's fun to be in Paris and pay less than 10 dollars for a beer. And the blond Dutch au pairs are fun as well.

As for André's lyrics: here's a literal translation of the refrain of 'the kite', in which a little boy asks his father to give him a kite for his birthday.

I have here a letter for my mother
who is high up in the heavens.
This letter I will tie to my kite,
that she may read it,
she who no longer is here.

The best insight into André Hazes life is the documentary about him that was made in 1999, called Zij gelooft in mij ('She believes in me', the name of the song he wrote for his third wife). This is how the review at imdb.com puts it:

This movie, or documentary, whatever you want to call it, is one of the most moving pictures I have seen this year. I was genuinely shocked by the sheer honesty with which director John Appel has portraited one of the most loved and also one of the loathed folksingers of The Netherlands. We follow this extraordinary man through a series of setbacks and successes, ranging from a concert that turned into a disaster in Benidorm, Spain, the almost divorce from his third wife and he also shows us where he grew up and we see very close and personal shots of this magnificent singer on stage. Truly, this movie should be seen at more festivals across the world. It already received some prices at the Internetional Documentary Festival Amsterdam in 1999. If you can, you should see this one. Trust me.

In the last months of his life, André Hazes suffered from a sudden loss of hearing. His career was effectively over and he was hoping that his hearing would return to a level at least sufficient to communicate with his family. This was not to be.

His website is open for condolences.

UPDATE: A memorial service was held last night at Amsterdam Arena stadium. 50,000 people attended.

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Ralph Peters and Godwin's Law... I lose

I'll try not to mention WW II or the Nazi's while reviewing this NY Post Op-Ed by Ralph Peters...

Ralph Peters is a nazi fuckhead and the NY Post stoops to the level of Der Stürmer by printing his vile crap!

Oops.

In WWII, broadcasts from Tokyo Rose in Japan and from Axis Sally in Germany warned our troops that their lives were being squandered in vain, that they were dying for big business and "the Jew" Roosevelt.

Today, we have a presidential candidate, the conscienceless Sen. John Kerry, doing the work of
the enemy propagandists of yesteryear.
...
As for involving the French and Germans, the truth is that they'd do more harm than good. These are the corrupt cynics who made billions from the U.N. Oil-for-Food program while the Iraqi people suffered. The French kiss up to every dictator willing to wink in their direction. The German military barely exists — it's just an employment agency for uniformed bureaucrats — and the French military's sole competence lies in slaughtering unarmed black Africans.

As for the United Nations, any day now we'll see a huge banner hanging from its Manhattan headquarters: Dictators For Kerry.

Even if I detested everything about President Bush, I'd vote for him just to rub it in the faces of the Germans, the French and all of the tyrants rooting for the Iraqi people to slip back into despotism. We Americans choose our own presidents, and we don't take orders from Europeans or from any of Kerry's other Swiss boarding-school pals.
...
The terrorists and their allies already intended to increase the level of violence in Iraq before November. But Kerry's pandering has encouraged them to pull out all the stops. I wish it were otherwise, that our election process had more integrity, but the truth is that every roadside blast and car bomb in Iraq is meant to support John Kerry.

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Finally I get the lesson

Back when I had to translate excerpts from Thucydides, my main beef with him was that these old Greek geesers were not as plainspoken as Dubya. Au contraire, for a people with direct democracy where every argument is made in front of all the citizenry (and a people without electrical amplifiers), those Athenian orators were remarkably longwinded. Even such smooth talkers as Alcibiades or Demosthenes. And with all that genitivus absolutus and aoristus stuff, I had to translate (word for word, looking up one out of three) right up to the end of the sentence before I even got as much of a sniff as to what those people were trying to tell me.

That's also why I hated The Secret History. I shamelessly admit that I stunk at Greek, but to read a thriller about some wizzkids that go from 'hoh, heh, toh' to speaking the language fluently in less than 6 months does not help me suspend my disbelieve. As far as I can Google, Miss Tartt has not learned Greek herself (I'm sure this would be mentioned in all the hagiographies interviews Google finds me). But I can tell you this: after learning Greek for five hours a week, for 5 years in a row in the equivalent of a US-highschool honors-class we still took our exams with the help of a dictionary and a grammar guide. So fuck you, Donna Tartt, for making us feel stupid. But I digress....

Because todays Thucydides lesson comes pre-translated from the Op-Ed pages of the LA Times. Thank you, Michael Kinsley. And because it's right on the money from beginning to end, I am copy-pasting the whole damn thing:

... Unless It's All Greek to Him

By Barbara Garson
Barbara Garson is the author of the 1960s antiwar play "Macbird" and, most recently, "Money Makes the World Go Round" (Penguin, 2002).

September 23, 2004

During a lull in the war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenians decided to invade and occupy Sicily. Thucydides tells us in "The Peloponnesian War" that "they were, for the most part, ignorant of the size of the island and the numbers of its inhabitants … and they did not realize that they were taking on a war of almost the same magnitude as their war against the Peloponnesians." According to Thucydides, the digression into Sicily in 416 BC — a sideshow that involved lying exiles, hopeful contractors, politicized intelligence, a doctrine of preemption — ultimately cost Athens everything, including its democracy. Nicias, the most experienced Athenian general, had not wanted to be chosen for the command. "His view was that the city was making a mistake and, on a slight pretext which looked reasonable, was in fact aiming at conquering the whole of Sicily — a considerable undertaking indeed," wrote Thucydides.Nicias warned that it was the wrong war against the wrong enemy and that the Athenians were ignoring their real enemies — the Spartans — while creating new enemies elsewhere. "It is senseless to go against people who, even if conquered, could not be controlled," he argued. Occupying Sicily would require many soldiers, Nicias insisted, because it meant establishing a new government among enemies. "Those who do this [must] either become masters of the country on the very first day they land in it, or be prepared to recognize that, if they fail to do so, they will find hostility on every side." The case for war, meanwhile, was made by the young general Alcibiades, who was hoping for a quick victory in Sicily so he could move on to conquer Carthage. Alcibiades, who'd led a dissolute youth (and who happened to own a horse ranch, raising Olympic racers) was a battle-tested soldier, a brilliant diplomat and a good speaker. (So much for superficial similarities.) Alcibiades intended to rely on dazzling technology — the Athenian armada — instead of traditional foot soldiers. He told the Assembly he wasn't worried about Sicilian resistance because the island's cities were filled with people of so many different groups. "Such a crowd as this is scarcely likely either to pay attention to one consistent policy or to join together in concerted action…. The chances are that they will make separate agreements with us as soon as we come forward with attractive suggestions." Another argument for the war was that it would pay for itself. A committee of Sicilian exiles and Athenian experts told the Assembly that there was enough wealth in Sicily to pay the costs of the war and occupation. "The report was encouraging but untrue," wrote Thucydides. Though war was constant in ancient Greece, it was still usually justified by a threat, an insult or an incident. But the excursion against Sicily was different, and Alcibiades announced a new, or at least normally unstated, doctrine. "One does not only defend oneself against a superior power when one is attacked: One takes measures in advance to prevent the attack materializing," he said. When and where should this preemption doctrine be applied? Alcibiades gave an answer of a sort. "It is not possible for us to calculate, like housekeepers [perhaps a better translation would be "girlie men"], exactly how much empire we want to have. The fact is that we have reached a state where we are forced to plan new conquests and forced to hold on to what we have got because there is danger that we ourselves may fall under the power of others unless others are in our power." Alcibiades' argument carried the day, but before the invasion, the Athenian fleet sailed around seeking allies among the Hellenic colonies near Sicily. Despite the expedition's "great preponderance of strength over those against whom it set out," only a couple of cities joined the coalition. At home, few spoke out against the Sicilian operation. "There was a passion for the enterprise which affected everyone alike," Thucydides reports. "The result of this excessive enthusiasm of the majority was that the few who actually were opposed to the expedition were afraid of being thought unpatriotic if they voted against it, and therefore kept quiet." In the face of aggressive posturing, Nicias appealed to the Assembly members to show true courage. "If any of you is sitting next to one of [Alcibiades'] supporters," Nicias said, "do not allow yourself to be browbeaten or to be frightened of being called a coward if you do not vote for war…. Our country is on the verge of the greatest danger she has ever known. Think of her, hold up your hands against this proposal and vote in favor of leaving the Sicilians alone."We don't know how many Athenians had secret reservations, but few hands went up against the war. In the end, the Athenians lost everything in Sicily. Their army was defeated and their navy destroyed. Alcibiades was recalled early on; Nicias was formally executed while thousands of Athenian prisoners were left in an open pit, where most died. The Sicilians didn't follow up by invading Attica; they just wanted Athens out. But with the leader of the democracies crippled, allies left the Athenian League. Then the real enemy, Sparta, ever patient and cautious, closed in over the next few years. But not before Athens descended, on its own, into a morass of oligarchic coups and self- imposed tyranny.

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Andrew Sullivan Death-Math

He recites this silly bit of nonsense:

The anti-war website Iraqbodycount.net estimates that between 11,487 and 13,458 Iraqis have been killed since the start of the war. Added to that are 1049 coalition deaths listed. That is a staggering 14,507 deaths since March 19 last year - a horrendous average of 28.5 people, real human beings, a day for the 509 days.How could this ever be justified? Wouldn't Iraq have been better off without this?It is estimated that Saddam killed between 500,000 and 1 million of his own people in the 13 years since the Gulf War, not including the effects of the sanctions. The lower number averages out to be 105 a day.Assuming Saddam had stayed in power, as the anti-war movement would have had, and assuming his regime did not fundamentally change, Saddam could have killed between 53,445 and 106,890 innocent people in the same 509 days. In other words, the war probably cost between 38,938 and 92,383 fewer lives than the so-called peace would have cost.

And then says he couldn't agree more, except that comparing the Saddam bodycount with our own isn't exactly setting a high standard for the coalition forces.

Perhaps he can't agree more, but I certainly can agree less. Let me count the ways:

1. The 11,487-13,458 number (12,800-14,843 as of today) isn't the number of Iraqis killed since the start of the war, as the article wrongly claims, it's the number of Iraqi civilians killed. But without the war, some 4,895 to 6,370 Iraqi soldiers, most of them conscripts, wouldn't have died.
2. Another group of people that would still be alive if not for the war consists of all the people that were killed during the wanton violence and looting that occured after the downfall of the Ba'ath-regime. There still is much more crime-related murder than under Saddam. Living in a police-state had at least the advantage that the streets were safe. There are no exact numbers I know of, but the morgue in Baghdad reported 4,279 people killed in the 12 months since May 1st 2003. Baghdad is home to 5.6 million of the 26 million Iraqis. And no, people killed in large terrorist attacks are not included in this count. Baghdad now has a homicide rate twice that of Bogota, and ten times that of New York City. Like Rumsfeld said, freedom is messy.
3. 'It is estimated'... but by whom? No source is cited for the 500,000-1,000,000 number of 1991-2003 victims of Saddam Hussein. Chances are, this is a deliberately highballed estimate. How do I know? Well, the Republican Party uses the number 300,000 on it's own website, that's a clue.
4. Not only is 300,000 a more reasonable number, but it still doesn't tell you how many people Saddam Hussein would have killed if he were left in power. Why not? Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber has it all:

The 300,000 number includes 200,000 Kurds killed in the 1988-91 uprisings and 50,000 Shia revolutionaries killed in 1991. [This White House Fact Sheet comes up with the same number of 250,000 but places most of the casualties in Southern Iraq, j.e.] I do not want for one minute to minimise the enormity of this crime, nor to suggest that these peoples’ deaths did not merit punishment, but it isn’t credible to regard events which happened in 1991 to be part of the rationale for a war in 2003. Subtracting them from the total gives a figure of 50,000 Iraqis murdered, which averages out at just over 4,000 a year between 1991 and 2003; given that many of these murders would have been committed early in the period 1991-2003, the death toll could have been as low as 2,000 a year during the period in which war was being seriously discussed. ... But in terms of actual murders carried out by Saddam’s regime, the numbers in the FCO and State Department human rights dossiers seem to more or less agree with the residual estimate I made above; extra-judicial executions and disappearances in Saddam’s Iraq were in the region 2,000 a year.

So let's do the math of death:

Sullivan's estimate
Between 38,938 and 92,383 fewer lives lost in the first 509 days since March 19 2003.

Estimate not based on bullshit but on credible assumptions and known facts
Between 13582 and 18413 more lives lost in the first 509 days since March 19 2003.

You know what depresses me most? That in all probability Sullivan believes his numbers are correct. Here he is, scolding the Bush administration for living in an alternate reality (i.e. somewhere with their heads up their asses) and he still can't tell that the numbers he is spun are lies and hyperbole. If only he just were a cynical liar.

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In the category Most-Boldfaced, Up-is-Down, In-Your-Face Lie I hereby nominate George F. Will for a Bronze Wingnut with Oak Leef Cluster

Bush has mismanaged Iraq into a clusterfuck of a FUBAR. Most analysts expect Bush to start razing Fallujah and Sadr-City to the ground between November 2 and the Iraqi elections which are planned for January 2005. Nobody knows if this is a good idea, but the delay of the offensive until November 3 is obviously politically motivated.

This is how George F. Will scores his winner (emphasize mine):

Can [Kerry] find electoral traction by charging, plausibly, that administration incompetence is one reason the Iraqi police and military are unready to be much help in the fighting that evidently will be done in November and December?

Most of Kerry's dilemmas are of his making -

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Killian Memo Finale, part II: What He Said

I could try to recap all this stuff in as funny a way as he does.

I would fail.

KERNING-GATE
Last week, I made a rather glib posting about how the Killian memos were genuine, based simply on the fact that they were being disputed by hacks with a long and storied history of making bullshit allegations in order to confuse and distract the public. In the meantime, we have learned that the memo could not have been typed on a 1970's typewriter, except that it could; that these typewriters were far too rare and expensive for the military to have, except that they weren't; that you can reproduce the same document on MS Word, except that you can't; that there are obvious factual inconsistancies in the memos, except that there aren't; that CBS is backing off of their earlier statements in support of the memos, except that they aren't; and that document experts are united in their scepticism of these memos, except that they aren't. And, as if that weren't damning enough, Howie "Rush Limbaugh is a soft-spoken mainstream moderate" Kurtz just raised his eyebrow in a very wry manner. Oh, also, the document expert who first raised questions about the authenticity of these memos is the Renaissance man who tried to get Clinton disbarred. Therefore, Occam's Razor leads us to conclude that these documents, the factual accuracy of which is not disputed even by the White House, which accurately reflect the thoughts of Mr. Killian and which bare his signature, were forged in a fit of high spirits by the Elves of Mischief. Dan Rather should be shot. I am sorry that I have not kept my readers current on this extremely important story.

[UPDATE: I have just been informed that there is no such place as Texas, the Vietnam War never happened, and that all military records from the 1970's were kept on baked-clay cuniform tablets written in demotic Morlock. Advantage: blogosphere!]

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Killian Memo Finale

So... they're most probably fake. Here are my two eurocents on the matter:

1. What do they think?

The right wing is filled with glee. That was to be expected, but the glee is, well, inordinate. You'd expect barrel loads of chest-thumping and taunting in the chromosome-rich environment that constitutes LGF or the Free Republic. But they've gone way beyond that. They actually think they've struck a mortal blow to the 'mainstream media'. And it's not just a bunch of pseudonyms ranting away behind their keyboards, we are talking about (the wrong side of) CNN-panel material. Thanks to No More Mister Nice Blog for the quotes.

As in all revolutions, first, the old order must be destroyed, then we will learn both the strengths and the shortcomings of the new order. We got a glimpse of the Internet blogger's strength this past week.

Tony Blankley, Washington Times

This 50 or 75 years from now will be looked at by nonpartisan, noninvolved, people not even born yet historians, who will write about this is something seminal, as something monumental and momentous in the changing political makeup of this country.

Rush Limbaugh

But it's clear that Dan Rather doesn't understand what's going on any more than those poor last dinosaurs understood why the tasty green fronds became so hard to find when it got cloudy. As an icon of the old world of big media, his self-inflicted extinction will surely be recognized as the end of not merely Dan Rather, but the age of Dan Rathers.

Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online

2. Why is this ironic?

Because, as Matthew Yglesias points out, all the rightwing blogosphere did was keep the controversy alive for a couple of days, until the old, liberally biased, mainstream media (The Washington Post) could do a debunking based on comparing the memos with other material from Killian's office that was thorough enough and accurate enough and done careful enough to actually debunk the memos. All the stuff about kerning and Times New Roman and proportional fonts being impossible in the 70s turned out to be both irrelevant and largely unsubstantiated.

3. Why is this even more ironic?

Because Killian's secretary has already stated that he did, in fact, keep a CYA-personal file. And he did give Bush a direct order to take his physical. And she does remember typing memos for Killian on the Bush-physical-missing affair for his CYA-personal file. Just not the memos that CBS has got.

4. And what is to learn from all this?

The story is more important than the facts. The facts are unchanged, and best summed up by Kevin Drum. The story is that someone tried to besmear the president.

BUSH AND THE MEMOS....One of the reasons I'm annoyed by the whole Killian memo fiasco is that even if they're real they don't really add much to the story.
After all, here's what we already know:


Former Texas Speaker of the House Ben Barnes pulled strings in 1968 to get George Bush into the National Guard so that he could avoid the draft. This isn't something Barnes just cooked up recently for Dan Rather, either. He testified under oath about it five years ago.

In early 1972, with two years still left on Bush's Guard commitment, something happened. Nobody knows what happened, but for some reason he started flying again in training jets that he had graduated from two years previously; he began putting in simulator time; he had trouble making landings; and in April 1972 he made his last flight. He then refused to take his required annual physical and was subsequently grounded.

In May 1972, Bush left for Alabama and disappeared from the Guard. He showed up for no drills for the next five months, and, contrary to White House statements, he
never made up these missed drills.

Bush returned to Texas in late 1972, but in May 1973 his superior officers in Houston (one of whom was the now famous Jerry Killian) refused to rate Bush, saying he "has not been observed at this unit" for the past 12 months.

Oddly, though, official payroll records show that Bush was getting paid for attending drills during this period. The problem is that the payroll records documenting his attendance are completely screwy: Bush is credited for the wrong kind of attendance on some dates, he's given the wrong number of points for others, and weekday duty is frequently confused with weekend duty. What's more, even when you add it all up, Bush's attendance still didn't meet minimum National Guard standards.

The combination of these two things bears all the marks of someone backdating payroll records but doing a sloppy job. The likeliest explanation is that in mid-1973, after his superiors refused to rate him, someone pulled some strings and a bunch of payroll records were submitted for the previous year. However, the person who did it just checked off a few days for each month, instead of carefully making sure that the dates and duty types actually matched up the way they would if they were real.


In October 1973 Bush was discharged from the Texas ANG and moved to Boston to attend Harvard Business School. Although the Bush campaign said in 1999 that Bush transferred to a unit in Boston to finish up his service, they now admit that isn't true. Bush never signed up with a unit in Boston and never again attended drills.


There are plenty more reasons to be skeptical about Bush's National Guard service, but leave those aside for the moment. What we know for sure is that Bush began having problems flying in 1972; refused his physical; was grounded; disappeared for five months; probably disappeared for an entire year; failed to sign up with a unit in Boston for his final year of service; and got an honorable discharge anyway.

And he's never come clean about it. We don't need CBS's memos to remind us of that. We already knew it.

5. And does it get even worse?

Yes it does. BBC and Observer reporter Greg Palast has the scoop.

Ben Barnes had always kept quiet about getting Bush into the Guard. Only when he had to testify under oath did the truth come out. That was in 1999. Bush was elected governor of Texas in 1994. Barnes was a powerful corporate state lobbyist (and a Democrat). Did he perhaps keep quiet so that he could blackmail Bush?

Sure. And not only did he try to blackmail Bush, he succeeded. He got Bush to stop a corruption investigation into the Texas State Lottery, that was run by a company called GTech. The investigation was blown off, the open bid for the lottery license was retroactively cancelled and GTech got its license back. And Ben Barnes received 23 million dollars in fees from GTech.

Let me recap: not only has Bush not fulfilled his duties as a member of the Guard, he has lied about it repeatedly, he still lies about it, he refuses to release all his records even though he promised to do so, he has condoned and participated in acts of corruption to the detriment of the State of Texas so he could keep this all covered up, and all the talking heads are blabbering on about is that the CBS memos are fake. The story is more important than the facts.

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Grownup Republicans

Brad DeLong has been searching for a while... he's on the lookout for Republicans with the guts to either correct Bush's mistakes or endorse Kerry. Here is his latest lament:

Now it is time to beg the grownup Republicans to actually do something. After Iran-Contra they did do the equivalent of a parliamentary system's intra-party change of government: a new NSC, a new chief-of-staff (Howard Baker), a promotion of Secretary of State George Shultz to be Grand Vizier for Foreign Policy. For the long-run sake of the country the grownup Republicans need to have a plan--if George W. Bush wins the election--for creating an executive branch that will not produce disastrous decisions on security and economic policy. Proponents of failed policies need to be replaced. People who have lost contact with reality need to be fired. It's not in the interest of the country to have the policy failures of the past four years continued and amplified. It's not in the interest of the Republican Party in the long run for it to sacrifice its reputation for fiscal conservatism and for competence in security policy.

What is their plan? For if they have no plan, they have a moral obligation to do everything they can to make sure that George W. Bush does lose this election.

Well, look no further. Courtesy of Andrew Tobias (who doesn't seem to use a permalink for his current column, but if you're interested it's dated September 13 2004), I bring you:

REPUBLIMAN! Now saner and more grownup than ever before! He hides his true identity, and is known to the uninitiated simply as "Pete McCloskey", former eight-term congressman and highly decorated Korean War veteran. But when noone else is looking, he dons his REPUBLIMAN suit and writes op-eds to the San Jose Mercury News:

Posted on Fri, Sep. 10, 2004

If you're a true Republican, you'll vote for Kerry

By Pete McCloskey

Although I'm a lifelong Republican, I will vote for John Kerry on Nov. 2. The choice seems simple under traditional principles of the Republican Party.

I first met John Kerry in the spring of 1971. Each of us was just back from Vietnam -- he as a Navy officer and I as a member of Congress -- and were appalled by what we had seen there. I found Kerry to be idealistic, courageous and, above all else, truthful to a fault. He demonstrated courage in Vietnam, but as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, the courage to speak against prevailing opinion in civil strife is often greater than that demanded on the battlefield.

During Kerry's public career after his election to the Senate, he has clearly grown and matured. I believe he is incapable of deliberate deceit or dissembling. This alone represents a refreshing hope for a return of public faith in our government.

That Kerry has attained the solid support of former Secretary of Defense William Perry, with whom he has worked for years on issues of nuclear proliferation, confirms his ability to study, listen and reach sound judgments.

The primary issue in November will be who can best lead us in the bitter struggle against the Islamic fundamentalists who perpetrated 9/11 and are willing to die to kill Americans throughout the world. The Iraq occupation has caused thousands of new suicide bombers to join the jihad against us; with Kerry as president, the nation will properly refocus the battle away from Iraq and against the true enemy, Al-Qaida.

As Kerry has stated, we desperately need the cooperation of every country in the world, friend and enemy, where terrorist cells can germinate and operate.

We need to be more humble in asking for this assistance. A return to the ``speak softly but carry a big stick'' philosophy of Teddy Roosevelt should be far more effective than the bluster, bravado and ``shock and awe'' firepower of the neocon advisers who have commandeered White House foreign policy.

There are many other reasons to support John Kerry.

The incredible budget deficits projected to be $2.3 trillion or more in the next decade, disrespect for the United Nations, international law and Geneva Conventions, secrecy in government -- all of these are positions Kerry would certainly reverse.

As a Catholic, Kerry is sure to maintain the constitutional separation between church and state, recognizing that while we are indeed a nation under God, everyone is free to choose his or her own faith in God.

He will also end the inordinate secrecy that has characterized this administration. It seems incredible that a matter as important as our national energy policy could be decided in secret by Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force -- individuals whose very names have been withheld from the public.

Kerry's record on environmental issues is superb, an area where the Bush administration has been a disaster.

Finally, there's the matter of John Ashcroft and prospective judicial appointees who could undo Roe vs. Wade, a woman's right of choice and many of the civil liberties we have earned over 225 years.

Each of the foregoing reasons for supporting Kerry is based on traditional Republican values of fiscal responsibility, limited governmental intrusion and the accountability of individuals.

In truth, John Kerry and John Edwards come far closer to the Republicanism of Teddy Roosevelt, Earl Warren, Barry Goldwater, George Bush the elder and, yes, even Richard Nixon, than does the present incumbent.

Ending secrecy and bringing truth and honesty back to the White House are reasons enough to elect Kerry and Edwards.

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What you already knew: Safire is no gem.

William Safire's column in the New York Times consists of his usual drivel. It is -of course- about the memos. A couple of pointers for Bill:

When you say: the "documents" presented by CBS News suggesting preferential treatment in Lt. George W. Bush's National Guard service have all the earmarks of forgeries., what's with the inverted commas? Do you think that forged documents aren't documents? Or are you simply in neocon Pravda denunciation mode?

You dare not say that the documents are forgeries. But you treat them as such. You call them "those discredited documents", you tell us that 60 Minutes II's story "came apart". You are treating as fact that which you are trying to ascertain. Sure, in the end you call for CBS to "re-examine sources and papers", but only to make them acquiesce to your version of reality. Your version is as unproven as CBS's. You just forget to tell anyone.

You think it is highly unlikely that a 1970s typewriter had Times New Roman, MS Words default font, installed. You forget to say that this makes it equally unlikely that a forgerer would choose this font. In fact, a forgerer serious enough to try and fool a national television network would presumably go through the trouble of Googling for other Bush-documents signed by Killian (like this one: scroll down to page 17) and try to duplicate the font in this authentic Killian document. It took me less than 20 seconds to locate that file.

You say "it may be that CBS is the victim of a whopping journalistic hoax, besmearing a president to bring him down." But what exactly do these memos add? As far as I can tell, they only add that (1) pressure from above was exerted to rate Bush higher than he ought to be rated, and (2) he was suspended from flying not just for missing a physical but also for "failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standards". What is the big deal? We already know that pressure from above was exerted to get Bush into the Guard, we already know he was suspended from flying after getting 1 million dollars worth of flight training, and we already know from examining his other records that he in fact did not put enough time in to actually qualify for honorable discharge. And we already know that Bush and his substitutes have told many lies about this over the years. These memos may indeed be forgeries intended to besmear the President. But bring him down? You do not need these memos to do that. The other records, and Bush's lies about it, are more than sufficient.

Why do you recommend that CBS re-examine its "sources and papers"? Would it not be far easier to recommend that President Bush release his full record -this would mean the Texas microfilm- just as he has promised all along but never done? After all, we know for certain that a lot of stuff is still missing. Why does Bush fight a FOIA-claim by AP when he has nothing to hide?

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Another housing bubble post: soft landing in Amsterdam!

The Economist has a new article about the global housing prices. In it, they argue that the recession Holland went through recently was a result of lower consumer spending caused by stalling of the housing market. If that is so, it is good news for two reasons:

• It means that us Amsterdammers might actually be lucky enough to see our real estate assets make a soft landing. We had a bubble and knew it. Having the prices level out until inflation catches up is the least painful way for a bubble to burst.
• We had a bubble and we knew it. We knew it was going to cause a recession sooner or later. If the last recession was not caused by the housing bubble bursting, then we would still have some very rough weather ahead. But maybe, just maybe, the skies are clear.

Anyway, here's the money quote:

Even a mere levelling-off of house prices could trigger a sharp slowdown in consumer spending, as the recent experience of the Netherlands shows. The rate of Dutch house-price inflation slowed from 20% in 2000 to virtually zero by 2003. This appeared to be the perfect soft landing; prices did not fall. Yet consumer spending dropped by 1.2% last year, the biggest fall in any developed country in the past decade, pushing the economy into recession.

Although house prices did not fall, borrowing against the capital gains on homes to finance other spending, which had surged in step with rising prices, declined after 2001. This removed a powerful stimulus to spending. Since such borrowing has provided similar support to consumer spending in America, as well as in Britain and Australia, economists�and policymakers�would be wise to take heed.

Please, oh Invisible Hand, let this be true! I have fretted about Dutch housing prices ever since I bought a Dutch house. I even wrote my very first post about them.

And for those of you who are not highly leveraged into a piece of prime Amsterdam real estate: the Economist finds things are bubbly not only in the Netherlands, but also in Spain, Ireland, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, South Africa, and the United States of America. All in all, these countries account for two-thirds of the world economy. They can't possibly all have soft landings (well yes they can, but it seems rather unlikely), and if even a soft landing means a 1.2% drop in consumer spending, imagine what the noise will be if all these bubbles go 'pop' round about the same time. Not nice.

(The thing that makes housing bubbles go 'pop', according to the Economist, is first-time buyers getting priced out of the market. So it seems to me that the more risk banks are allowed and willing to take with the money they lend out, the more a bubble can inflate. If they think they can sell the risk onwards to, let's say, Freddy Mac and Fanny May and the federal government.....)

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The Poor Man

Now that Memogate has degraded the debate to a level even below that of discussing Bush's past failures as the only way to get the country's attention to his present failures, I am thankful for The Poor Man. He really knows how to cut through the bullshit. Thanks to him, I don't have to worry about the kerning and superscripting abilities of ancient electric typewriters.

Let me save everyone a whole lot of time. They are genuine. How do I know? Because the internet is currently awash in wingnuts claiming the memos are fakes. Ergo, they are for real. Q.E.D.

Some people may feel that I'm just being flip here. Is that so, some people? Tell me: how rich would you be right now if, every time something was posted on a right-wing message board, or everytime Drudge had an exclusive, or any time Rush Limbaugh revealed a secret truth that the liberal media won't tell you, you called up your bookie and put down $20 even money on "bullshit"? The correct answer is: "pretty fucking rich". The correct answer is: "I would never, never lose." So, if anyone doubts my methodology, I have a crisp new $20 bill that just told me that I'm 100% right and you're just too dumb to see it. If any of you champs out there think me and Andrew Jackson are both wrong, well then, today's your lucky day, because we're paying 2:1. If you need us, we'll be on the couch playing ESPN NHL 2K5. Peace.

And not only does the Poor Man display such ironclad Vulcan-like logic on his website, he is also in the loop. When everyone is yearning for the release of Kitty Kelley "Dubya-is-a-fucking-cokehead-who-had-a-girlfriend-undergo-an-allegal-abortion" book , he dishes out the dirt with a spectacular pre-release!

Kitty Kelley's Shocking Revelations

Everybody is talking about Kitty Kelley's new book "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty". The scandal-hungry press is already salivating over rumors that the book will reveal George W. Bush's use of cocaine through the 1980's, the true story of his time in the National Guard, and the shocking details of the illegal abortion he procured for an ex-girlfriend. But the press doesn't know the half of it! I have obtained an advance copy of the book, and will now share the even more shocking revelations contained within!

1. Iraq didn't have any WMD, or any significant ties to al Qaeda! The war has cost over $200 billion dollars, and Iraq's oil wealth has not paid for reconstruction! Also, Iraqis have not welcomed coalition troops with flowers and candy, and over 1,000 American troops have died, the country's falling apart in ethnic and nationalist violence, and the best excuse for this clusterfuck anyone can offer is some happy talk about painting schools and turning metaphorical corners!

2. George W. Bush is not a West Texas rancher whose simple heartland values and quiet inner strength have guided his climb to political and financial success! Actually, he was born into a wealthy Eastern establishment family, his grandfather was a US Congressman, and his father was a US Congressman, Director of the CIA, and Vice-President and President of the United States! George W. Bush went to Harvard and Yale, where he didn't work very hard; he was a spoiled rich wastrel until at least his 40th birthday; he summers in toney Kennebunkport, Maine; he has relied on his family's wealth and influence to get everything he got in life; and his Southern accent is totally phony!

3. The economy is not strong, and it's not getting stronger! In less than four years, George W. Bush has lost 2 million jobs, taken the United States from record budget surplus to record deficit, saddled the American taxpayer with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of federal boondoggles, and transferred the tax burden of the ultra rich to the poor and middle class! Indeed, his former chief economic advisor, Paul O'Neill, wrote a book which charged the President neither understood nor cared to understand anything about economics!

4. The reputation of the United States has been demolished over the last four years! We have alienated allies, embarrassed ourselves in front of the UN, and undermined the struggle for human rights around the world by holding secret prisoners, sending innocent people abroad to be tortured, and torturing prisoners to death in Iraq and Afghanistan!

5. George W. Bush is an idiot! Really! He can't form a coherent sentence, he shows no aptitude for or interest in any intellectual pursuit, and he routinely embarrasses himself and the country with his shocking displays of ignorance! He falls down constantly, and he almost died eating a pretzel!

6. George W. Bush is a horrible President! When given a daily briefing entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack in the United States", he took no action, went on vacation, and a few weeks later 3,000 people were dead! Then he failed to get the guy behind the attacks because he had to invade another country which had nothing to do with anything! Now, North Korea and Iran are well on their way to developing nuclear weapons, view us as an immediate threat to their survival, and we lack the diplomatic clout or ability to organize the world against them! Meanwhile, Bush's major concerns are gay people getting married, putting a man on Mars so we can say we did, and getting steroids out of sports! America is weaker, poorer, less safe, less respected, and less sane than it was before George W. Bush became President, it's pretty much all his fault, and he just isn't interested!

There's much, much more, but I think this should serve to whet your appetite. I, for one, can't wait to see the outcry in the media and the public when these shocking secrets are finally revealed. The outrage will be unbelievable!

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Angry Bear explains: why did the Bush tax cuts suck?

Kudos to Kash over at Angry Bear. You can't make it clearer than he does. First he has a post up that shows you in three simple graphs that the Dubya recovery is the Mother of all stinking recoveries. Worse than the Dad-of-Dubya recovery 0f 1991-92.

• GDP growth numbers are comparable to those in 1992, but worse than those of other recoveries since the 1970s.
• Employment numbers truly outsuck any recovery that has ever come before.
• Industrial production numbers are also lagging significantly.

Then he has another post up explaining why this is Bush's fault. Giving tax cuts to rich folks who don't really need the money means that you can be sure they'll put a lot of it away for rainy days. This is deeply wrong. Why? The government is borrowing money (which is what a deficit driven tax cut really is). The government can use the borrowed money in three ways: it can spend the money itself (on education or infrastructure or, hey, the war in Iraq). Good. This stimulates the economy. It can give the money to others who spend it (extending unemployment benefits, a cut in pay roll taxes, an increase in the EITC). Also good. Or it can give the money to people who DO NOT SPEND IT because they are already raking in more than they can consume. Not good.

Kash has a nice graph showing a 70 billion dollar increase in personal savings in the third quarter of 2003. In July 2003, a 100 billion dollars worth of tax cuts came into effect.

But there's more (there's always more when dealing with the affront to reason that is Dubyanomics). They also gave a lot of tax breaks to corporations. Which is nice. Except they also managed to screw this one up. How? Kash points to this Slate piece by Daniel Gross (who quotes Barry Ritholtz). Apparently, they did not try to stimulate corporations to hire more people, but instead stimulated them to invest more in hardware. The did this by allowing corporations to depreciate their investments faster than usual. This had to be new investments (post May 2003) and on January 1st 2005 things will revert to the old rules. But because companies are allowed to deduct depreciations from their profits and profits are taxed, this means a big temporary tax break.

Stimulating companies to buy more expensive equipment would mean good news for companies making expensive equipment. They would see more orders and would have to expand their workforce. Seems sound in theory, but in practice... Two problems according to Ritholtz:

• A lot of that expensive equipment is foreign expensive equipment, and even most American manufacturors have outsourced the nuts-and-bolts bit of their production line. It might have worked in the 1950s, but today it is inevitable that a significant part of the money will flow out of the country and create jobs elsewhere.
• In IT, the really big move forward nowadays for companies is installing very expensive all encompassing software systems to automate all processes. This software is specifically designed to make it possible to get the job done with fewer workers. Giving companies a tax break to make this software affordable is hardly the best way to boost the number of jobs.

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Gay repubs refuse to endorse Bush

Finally, the Log Cabin Republicans have decided they can't stomach Bush and his Federal Marriage Amendment.

(Washington, DC)—Log Cabin Republicans are withholding their endorsement from President Bush for 2004. "Log Cabin's National Board has voted to withhold a Presidential endorsement and shift our financial and political resources to defeating the radical right and supporting inclusive Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives," said Log Cabin Board Chairman William Brownson of Ohio. The Log Cabin Board of Directors voted 22 to 2 not to endorse the President's re-election.

Now if only there was a club of Republicans for Fiscal Sanity.

UPDATE: the funniest comment award goes to Skippy:

so, the left aren't the only ones who think awol is too hard to swallow.

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Bush in numbers

Why does Bush suck? Let me count the ways...

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Yet another book bashing Bush

This time by Senator Bob Graham (D-Fl). The book's called Intelligence Matters and in it Bob Graham accuses the Bush Administration of covering up ties between 911 highjackers and Saudi Arabia.

This is from the Miami Herald:

WASHINGTON - Two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had a support network in the United States that included agents of the Saudi government, and the Bush administration and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship, Sen. Bob Graham wrote in a book to be released Tuesday.

The discovery of the financial backing of the two hijackers ''would draw a direct line between the terrorists and the government of Saudi Arabia, and trigger an attempted coverup by the Bush administration,'' the Florida Democrat wrote.

Hell, there must be one book on the face of this earth that will cost Bush his reelection?

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Saudi oil to the rescue

I told you about this before, and today get confirmation.

Via Campaign Extra!.

September surprise
Woodward told “60 Minutes” that Bandar has promised the president that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election - to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on Election Day. Woodward says that Bandar understood that economic conditions were key before a presidential election: “They’re [oil prices] high. And they could go down very quickly. That's the Saudi pledge. Certainly over the summer, or as we get closer to the election, they could increase production several million barrels a day and the price would drop significantly.”

-- April 18, 2004
LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices eased on Monday as top world exporter Saudi Arabia slashed prices for its crude sales to the United States and Europe in an effort to shift the large volumes it is offering to cool world markets.

-- Sept. 6, 2004

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One simple question

How many times have you been arrested, Mr. President?

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Bring it on! Kristof smears back.

Kristof of all people. I had long thought him a Stepford columnist. But at long last, it seems that the young lad cannot be tempted by the dark side.

I've steered clear until now of how Mr. Bush evaded service in Vietnam because I thought other issues were more important. But if Bush supporters attack John Kerry for his conduct after he volunteered for dangerous duty in Vietnam, it's only fair to scrutinize Mr. Bush's behavior.

Of course, most blogminded people already know all this. But when a story reflects poorly on the current President, we better make damn sure that this news story stays a news story. And somehow, the coke-snorting, flight-physical missing, not-showing-up-in-Alabama-when-he-didn't-even-have-permission-to-go-there story has died more deaths than the Bush cabinet has draft deferments.

So let's hear it for Kristof and the New York Times! Hell, he might even get a pat on the back from Bob Somerby!

I'll recap, just to get Google up and running on this one:

• Bush used his family connections to get into the Guard. He doesn't deny this. He only denies knowing about it at the time. He used to deny it entirely, but the guy who got him into the Guard had to testify about it back in 1999. He was speaker of the Texas house way back, and became a (state) lobbyist afterwards. The lobbying bit is also why he kept low key about it. No more. He's gonna be on 60 Minutes.
• Bush admitted (once) to being a draft dodger. He thought flying planes was more honorable than blowing out his eardrum with a shotgun. Truly answering the call of duty, this man.
• When Bush was governor of Texas, a guy over at the Texas National Guard claims that the Bush records were "cleansed". He can't prove it, but then again, Bush could disprove it but won't. Somehow, a FOIA-lawsuit is necessary to get Bush to release all his records. Read this Kevin Drum post for details.
• Bush only has one guy that claims he ever showed up for duty in Alabama. And that guy remembers seeying Bush on the base on days that we know for a fact he wasn't there.
• Kristof, on the other hand, produces not one but two guys who are certain Bush was a no-show. One was a full-time pilot instructor. Kristof got all this stuff from a retired Army colonel, read his report here. Beware, it is a 32-pager (pdf) .
• The transfer Bush requested (from Texas to Alabama) was denied (if memory serves me correctly: I'm sure Bush didn't play by the rules on this one, but perhaps there was no explicit denial, perhaps he just forgot to ask permission or something). Anyway, Bush went when he wasn't supposed to go.
• Whatever Bush says about doing his duty in the Guard, it's a fact that he got a million dollar-flight training and was obliged to fly for six years, but only flew for two.
• That was because he missed a physical. That was shortly after those physicals had started to include such things as, eh, drug tests.
• The Alabama campaign manager was a Bush family friend. He is dead, but his widow says that Bush was being too much of a nuisance in Houston. Bush didn't volunteer for campaign work, but rather was sent to Alabama to make sure he didn't get into any trouble in daddy's home state.
• And it gets better: mud-digger Kitty Kelley (of Nancy-Reagan-consults-with-astrologers fame) has dug and struck the motherload of mud. This will soon be slung at Bush when she releases her new book: The Family : The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. In it she gets a Texas Guardsman to claim that Bush liked to smoke weed and snort coke while in the Guard. Allegedly.
• If the past is any indication, when Bush gets confronted with his "youthful indiscretions" he easily out-obfuscates Clinton. Read it here. As one journalist described it: "Bush is a Fifth Amendment cokehead". And another: "the rumor is that he was born with a silver spoon in his nose". If he gets pounded on these coke allegations, his straight-shooter image will go down the drain. Not that he ever was a straight-shooter, he just plays one on tv.
• And, unrelated but too yummie a smear not to mention: Kelley also has a former sister-in-law of Dubya claiming he was a cokehead well into his forties. In fact, he snorted coke while hanging out in Camp David during his daddy's presidency. Allegedly. For all the goodies on Kelley's book, visit Oliver Willis.

Perhaps the Vietnam Veterans for Truth will prove to boost Kerry after all. With all the scrutiny on Kerry's war hero past, not even those fair and balanced guys over at Fox can decide to let these saucy allegations about Bush's past slip - again. And even if these allegations are just vile smears and utterly untrue, enough of Dubya's penchant for failing at everything he ever put his mind to will come up to show that he is Unfit to Command.

Let's thank John O'Neill for making it possible to rehash ancient history. Now the press can use the same dirt that has been gathering dust for four years that it should have used to deny Bush the presidency four years ago.

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The Europeans have done too little, too late

So argues David L. Bosco in a WaPo OpEd today:

He is editor at Foreign Policy magazine, and is talking about the size of the NATO-peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. Only 7000 man strong, this force is just about adequate to keep the peace in Kabul, leaving large parts of the rest of the country to the warlords and poppygrowers and, yes, resurgent Taliban.

The peacekeeping effort in Afghanistan sheds light on Europe's performance -- or lack of it -- because it is a case where the principal objections to America's "war on terror" do not apply. The military campaign to unseat the Taliban was an exercise in self-defense rather than preemption, and the war bore an international stamp of approval in the form of a U.N. Security Council resolution. After the Taliban's defeat, the United States helped arrange a broad international conference in Bonn to chart the country's future. In short, Afghanistan was done right.

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In Kosovo there was one international soldier for every 50 citizens; in Afghanistan there is one peacekeeper for every 1,000 Afghans. These paltry contributions come even as the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia has shrunk from 50,000 troops in 1995 to just over 7,000 today.

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The Europeans can justifiably claim that the United States has sent confused signals on Afghanistan. The Bush team's initial coolness to nation-building slowed the momentum created by the Taliban's rapid fall. Until recently the United States has focused on al Qaeda and Taliban remnants and kept its GIs away from providing general security, a posture that has no doubt discouraged other states from venturing far from their bases.

But at some point the European excuses wear thin. The United States has almost 120,000 troops in Iraq and close to 20,000 in Afghanistan hunting extremists. In this setting of sustained sacrifice, the European states should be able to cobble together more than 7,000 soldiers for a credible Afghan peacekeeping force. The hard truth is that European political leaders have not had the courage to seek to convince their skeptical publics of the need for a commitment to Afghanistan. At the same time, few European governments have invested adequately in their militaries, which are still structured for territorial defense and have trouble operating far from home for extended periods.

Unless European leaders are dissembling, they understand the significance of the transition underway in Afghanistan. They understand that failure will have strategic consequences for the West and terrible human consequences for the Afghan people. Disturbing enough on its own, Europe's performance in Afghanistan has even darker implications: It suggests that the hands-off policy in Iraq may be little more than military impotence and political weakness masquerading as principle.

Now, he's right you know. The chance for peace and democracy in Afghanistan is being squandered because insufficient resources are put into the whole project. But whose fault is that? Let me quote Mr Bosco again:

The United States has almost 120,000 troops in Iraq and close to 20,000 in Afghanistan hunting extremists.

If I recall correctly, after 911 the NATO invoked article 5 of the Treaty. The NATO-partners offered to help with toppling the Taliban and, presumably, with the subsequent peacekeeping.

Bush declined, chosing to rely instead on the warlords of the Northern Alliance. You know, those same warlords that now cannot be dealt with because of the lack of resources.

And which Western country was the one that had the biggest resources in the region, but chose to divert them to the Persian Gulf even before the Taliban and Al Qaeda were completely crushed? Right.

The international conference in Bonn was a disappointment. The Europeans did not fork over enough money and troops. But can you blame them? They saw the Americans doing the same. Now nation building or even peacekeeping is never easy. But it is especially difficult in a country with a geography suited for guerrilla warfare. And a history of it. Not to mention a history of warlords and ethnical and tribal strife. (Them Afghans, they beat the Red Army! Before that, they beat the British imperial army. )

The only way to go in there would be to get it right the first time. Remember the Powell-doctrine? Something about using overwhelming, rather than proportional force, having clear objections and a good exit strategy so you can get your soldiers out once the job is done instead of having them staying around as targets peacekeepers indefinitely. Whoever this Mr Powell is that came up with all this, he sure doesn't have much clout in the Bush administration. The Europeans, on the other hand, seem to have listened to him more carefully.

And there are other reasons for the Europeans to have cold feet in Afghanistan. Most European countries have armies that are still too focused on defending Europe from the Soviets. They may have troops, but lack the logistic backup (planes, aircraft carriers, foreign bases) to be able to project force in Afghanistan without American support. And support means leadership. There has to be a clear line of command that is able to respond quickly. Without force to back you up, or a clear command structure, peacekeeping is not nice. Just think of marines in Beirut, or the Dutch in Srebrenica. If Bush wants the Europeans to go in as an organised, adequately backed peacekeeping force of adequate size, he has to have the US army lead them in the same way the US army leads the coalition forces in Iraq. There is no reason for the Europeans to come on board if they expect the mission to fail.

Finally, there is the Pottery Barn Doctrine. You break it, you own it. Now I don't know who Mr. Pottery Barn is, but he sure doesn't seem to have much clout in the Bush administration. The Bush administration seems to think that it is alright to leave the nation building in Afghanistan to others. Such as poppy growers and warlords and 7000 European peacekeepers. But it was the Bush administration that toppled the Taliban regime. In normal circumstances, the US would probably not shirk its responsibility and lead the way in rebuilding the country. But these are not normal circumstances, because Bush chose to wage a second war, one that wasn't "done right" and one that most Europeans opposed.

Now Mr Bosco seems to think that Europe has a responsibility to pick up the pieces in Afghanistan. Why? Because the Europeans should feel they have a duty, a moral obligation, to relieve the overstretch in the US army that was caused by a war elsewhere that the Europeans opposed. They are supposed to send their sons and daughters to a country filled with warlords and zealots, a country that could not be controlled by the Red Army, to fight a sideshow fight that might very well turn out to be a far more difficult fight than the one in Iraq.

So the Europeans just smile and send a token force to Kabul, making damn sure that these soldiers stay safe and stay close to the airport for an emergency exit. If Bush is unwilling to fix Afghanistan, why should they do it for him?

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The torture never stops. Robert Samuelson explains why tax cuts don't matter.

This is the part where I imitate the behaviour of the eminent professor DeLong and bang my head against the wall for being confronted with a WaPo economic pundit who dares not tell the truth. Is he a diehard republican who will forego reason for party loyalty? Is he a diehard supply-sider who will forego reason for a lower marginal rate? Is he a coward who's afraid of sounding shrill and unbalanced by telling the truth even when it's ugly? I don't know and I don't care.

Why is the US jobs market lousy? Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post lists three possibilities:

• Bush's taxcut
• Outsourcing
• Rising productivity

He blaims it on the rise in productivity, and quotes Charles Schultze of the Brookings Institution:

The bigger cause of slow job growth, he [Schultze, j.e.] contends, is higher productivity. Companies and workers became more efficient. That's ultimately good; it raises living standards. But higher productivity can temporarily lower employment. Fewer people are needed to do the same work, and new jobs don't instantly materialize. From late 1995 to late 2000, productivity (output per hour worked) grew 2.6 percent annually. During the next three years, annual growth averaged 4.1 percent. If it had stayed at the lower level, there'd be 2 million more jobs, Schultze estimates. Unemployment would be about 5 percent.

Which is fine. Except that it's not. In his own paper, Schultze calls his numbers the result of "an (admittedly mechanical) simulation". What he's done is take fourth quarter 2003 non-farm GDP and calculate how many workers it would have taken to produce that if the productivity growth had stayed at 2.5 percent since 2000 instead of going up to 4 percent (he doesn't use the numbers 2.6 and 4.1 that Samuelson states). But never mind the numbers, it's cheating. Because productivity growth raises living standards by raising the GDP. The workers that are no longer needed to make the stuff they used to make go on to make other stuff (at least, some of them will). A lower productivity growth would have meant a lower fourth quarter 2003 non-farm GDP and something definitely less than 2 million jobs extra. Schultze says so himself: obviously if the alternative scenario had occurred, with its lower productivity growth and higher employment and worker income, the time-path of GDP itself would have been affected, although it is not obvious exactly what the net outcome would have been. Why does Samuelson pretend that Schultze's simple simulation is "an estimate"?

He also quotes Schultze on outsourcing. Again Schultze pulls some numbers out of his ass.

Although outsourcing could be the reason, it probably isn't. The stories about software jobs and call centers moving to India aren't make-believe. But the numbers are small. Charles Schultze of the Brookings Institution concludes that perhaps 155,000 to 215,000 business-service jobs shifted abroad between late 2000 and 2003. Similarly, Schultze reports that government surveys attribute only about 4 percent of mass layoffs in the past two years to "import competition" and "relocation overseas." Even if these estimates are too low, they suggest that the impact of job loss abroad is exaggerated, Schultze writes.

Schultze has to, of course, they're the only hard numbers available to him. That's what he tells you if you'd read his paper: These numbers, however, do not capture all of the layoffs and other effects on U.S. employment from changes in overseas outsourcing and imports. They exclude smaller scale layoffs (less than 50 at a time). In some cases import competition can indirectly result in a loss of sales in ways that may not be apparent to or identified by the losing firm. Moreover the estimates cannot pick up any effects on employment that might show up, not in layoffs but in a reduction of domestic hiring by offshoring firms who would otherwise have been adding to their workforce.[emphasis added, j.e.] Where outsourcing takes the form of contracting (directly or through intermediaries) with independent foreign suppliers, rather than transferring operations to majority-owned foreign affiliates, some respondents may not report this as a “relocation”.

Schultze does make a convincing case that outsourcing has only a small, perhaps negligible impact on the US economy. He looks at data on the US import of services and sees no sudden spike. He looks at Indian tech-related exports (2003: less than 10 billion dollars worth -duh- of which 6 million to the US, of which 2.6 billion is implemented in the US itself. You end up with 3.4 billion dollars worth of tech-stuff done in India for Americans. If Bill Gates just farts the size of the US tech industry will have changed by more). Why does Samuelson quote the less meaningful numbers? Didn't he read Schultze's paper in full? Does he hate his readers?

And if I can add something: the fear of losing one's job to outsourcing might cause people to accept lower wages, even if the percieved threat is much bigger than the real one. The effect of outsourcing on GDP is in all probability negligible, but the effect of how that GDP is divied up (less wages, more profits) might be bigger than expected. And, no, I don't have numbers. Not even meaningless ones.

But luckily, Samuelson also takes on those who think that Bush's tax policy has influenced the job market to any degree. What says he, homo economicus, on tax cuts?

Over the long term, budgets should be balanced. But in an economic downturn, they should move toward deficit to stimulate private spending. Well, you can't fault Bush there. In fiscal 2000, the surplus was $236 billion; for fiscal 2004 the Congressional Budget Office projects a $422 billion deficit. It's possible to condemn (as many Democrats do) Bush's pro-rich tax cuts. A more middle-class tilt might have translated into more consumer spending. It's also possible to retort (as many Republicans do) that Democrats would have moved more slowly toward providing a stimulus. Regardless, the tax cuts bolstered private spending. But the resulting economic growth produced fewer jobs than expected. Why?

Here is fair-and-balanced staring you in the face. Samuelson gives us the Democratic side of the story (the tax cuts were lousy as quick, temporary demand stimulus), and the Republican side (the plans for the tax cuts were in place when the recession hit. The Democrats had no plans, so there).

BUT SAMUELSON DOESN'T TELL YOU WHICH OF THE TWO SIDES IS RIGHT AND WHICH IS WRONG!

And even more egregious: Samuelson doesn't give numbers. Are there numbers? Yes there are!

WHY DOESN'T SAMUELSON PROVE HIS POINT WITH PROOF?

Is that too much to ask? Is it too much to ask that if he looks at 3 factors of employment he doesn't quote the wrong numbers on one, he doesn't mislead his readers by presenting fantasy figures as credible estimates on the other, and doesn't forget numbers (and reason) altogether on the third? Is it too much to ask?

Luckily, for all my loyal readers (hi mom!) I have taken the time and made the effort to Google for five minutes and come up with the answer Samuelson dares not answer. What have the tax cuts and unemployment to do with each other? Now I am no economist, but over at the (left-of-center) Economic Policy Institute they have an abundance of economic policy wonks. These are the types that get to testify before Congress on stuff like tax cuts and unemployment.

First off, the Republican claim that the Democrats had no plan is untrue. It was called Senator Daschle's stimulus bill. Besides, the Bush plan was phased in. This was to make the costs look less than they really were. No matter how early the Bush tax cuts were conceived, what matters is when they were adopted.

Second, the good people over at the Economic Policy Institute have compared the impact of that bill with the impact of Bush's tax cuts. They think the Bush plan sucks. Since it will still cost money when the need for a stimulus is over, it will cost the economy about 750,000 jobs over the next 10 years. It will cost $670 billion over that period (A measly 670 billion, you ask? remember, this is only the first tax cut).

Third, they are not the only ones saying this. They have a statement signed by 10 nobel prize winning economists (and another 450 runners-up) telling everybody that the Bush tax cuts stink. And the numbers done by the government's own Council for Economic Advisers also point to a net job loss in the long term because of the tax cuts. Somehow you can find these numbers in the EPI testimony to Congress (page 6), but you can't find them in the CEA's own list of publications. Funny, but somehow they forgot to add the long term numbers to this paper called Economic Consequences of Stimulus Legislation.

You'd think that Samuelson would be able to point this out. You'd be wrong.

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