Pelosi's threatening to give Bush $50,000,000,000 more for Iraq, and this time she's serious!

It boggles the mind that our leadership in Congress continues to take Republican talking points seriously and tries to work with an opposition party and president who have made it abundantly clear that they are not interested or inclined to work with them.

Sad to say, only the Republicans have divined the secret of modern bipartisanship. First, remain intransigent. Then, let the other side move in your direction. Then, keep letting the other side move in your direction until they've reached your position. Finally, begrudgingly, agree with them, and let them proclaim bipartisan victory. Afterwards, everyone go out for a beer, slap each other on the back, and congratulate one another on some good legislatin'.

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I was just rewatching the classic 1940 movie by Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator. It's a great humanist testament that mercilessly ridicules the fascist regimes that were then ascendant in Europe. For anyone who hasn't seen it, do. If you haven't seen it in a while, see it again. You'll be glad you did.

The reason for posting a diary about it, though, is not just to recommend a great movie but to highlight the speech, sometimes called the "Look up, Hannah" speech, which Chaplin delivers at the end of the movie. Chaplin plays a Jewish barber with an uncanny resemblance to Adenoid Hynkel, the anti-Semitic dictator of Tomania. A chain of cirumstances leads the barber to be mistaken for Hynkel, and in order to save his own skin and that of his friend Schulz he is compelled to deliver a speech to a gathering of victorious soldiers which will also be broadcast to millions of Hynkel's followers. For your edification, the speech follows. You can also watch it here.

I know, I know, it's not the Petraeus Report; it's the White House report with a soupcon of Petraeus. Fine. But my point is this: even if it really were the Petraeus report, so what?

We all know - the country knows - the degree to which all federal departments, including the DoJ, NASA, FEMA, the EPA, and even the Peace Corps, have been assiduously refashioned into political departments of the Republican Party. What makes us think that the DoD is any different, whether in its civilian or its military personnel?

I have no idea where this is going - there's just too little news on it yet - but an article in today's Ft. Lauderdale paper reports that a high-profile Republican strategist named Ralph Gonzalez, a politically active Republican lawyer, and "a friend" about whom nothing is said were found dead yesterday at the Orlando address of the Strategum Group, a Republican political consulting firm. The address is also "a residence owned by the former Executive Director of the Georgia Republican Party" according to Crimeblog. Gonzalez managed the 2002 campaign of convicted Republican slimeball Tom Feeney, who (mis)represents Florida's 24th District.

Reportedly it was a double murder and suicide.

That's all there is so far. This may turn out to be nothing, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

The Saturday, September 16, opinion page of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel is a study in contrasts. On the one hand is an essay by Aslam Abdullah, a leading American Muslim, who flatly rejects the violent fanatics who claim to operate in the name of his religion. Far from being Muslims, he says, they are "anti-divine and anti-human" cowards who prey on "Muslim youth and children who are victims of despotism, poverty, and ignorance." "You are not us," he says. No love lost there.

On the other hand is Bill O'Reilly who trivializes torture in order to defend it and ridicules the notion that the ends do not justify the means. For Mr. O'Reilly, as long as we torture for the right reasons, all is well, and our moral purity and identity are intact. Excuse me, but isn't that the case that the terrorists make to justify their actions?

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There was a link on the Huffington Post the other day to a story posted at the conservative Human Events Online. The story is innocuously called Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway. It describes an enormous project between the US, Canada, and Mexico to build a new artery from the Pacific Coast of Mexico to the US-Canadian border in order to mainline containers of cheap East Asian products into the heartland of the continent without their ever having to stop at the border.

Keep reading, please. This is important.

Why are we all talking about immigration right now? Why, suddenly, is this the hot topic of the day? I'm not asking a rhetorical question here or one for which I have the answer. I am truly puzzled.  

It's not as if anything has changed for the better or worse on this issue. There have been no high-profile human trafficking busts, no busts on corporations that hire illegals. There have certainly been no new political breakthroughs in solving the problem. That would require serious political leadership from the Oval Office and not just playing rhetorical games or joking about presidential Speedos in Cancun. It would require Bush actually to exert himself, to play some hardball diplomacy with the Mexican government which is not about to shut off voluntarily the second largest flow of foreign capital into the country. Why should it take steps to develop its own economy if it can relieve the social pressures of grinding poverty by exporting its poor? And can we even ask the Mexican government to try to develop its national economy while we evangelize the new Moloch, globalization?

In a column last week in The Guardian indelicately titled Bush Didn't Bungle Iraq, You Fools,
THE MISSION WAS INDEED ACCOMPLISHED, Greg Palast discusses a meeting that was held in London about a month before the war began, about the same time as the meeting in the latest Downing Street memo. The meeting was held pursuant to "a 323-page plan for Iraq's oil secretly drafted by the State Department." Two of the key negotiaters were the CIA's lead oil analyst, Robert Ebel, and the former (and future) Iraqi Oil Minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum. Ebel was sent by the Pentagon "to finalize the plans for 'liberating' Iraq's oil industry." The result: "As per Plan Bush, Bahr Al-Ulum became Iraq's occupation oil minister; the conquered nation 'enhanced its relationship with OPEC;' and the price of oil, from Clinton peace-time to Bush war-time, shot up 317%."

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Repeating the tired canard that Democrats only criticize and have no ideas, the ethically (and grammatically) challenged Sen. Conrad Burns says, "It is us that's got the vision, the hope," the "us" presumably being conservative Republicans rather than Abramoff payees. Well, here's a snippet from last week's George Will: "Conservatives are happier than liberals because they are more pessimistic." Ah, the vision, the hope.

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On the second (web)page of their article, "How Bush Blew It", Newsweek writers, seeking a nice, neat, compare-and-contrast trope, repeat a bit of Republican-spun conventional wisdom.  Here's the quote:  "The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's response to Katrina -- like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into buildings on 9/11 -- was a failure of imagination."  

There are a couple things wrong with this.  First, the government's failed response to Katrina was not a failure of imagination; it was a failure to turn on the fucking television!  Images provided, no imagination required!  Of course what it really was was a failure to care, a failure to feel meaningfully connected to what was happening to other Americans, to other human beings.  The only Biblical ethos at play there was Cain's moi? moment:  "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Colin Powell, in an ABC 20/20 interview to be shown later this week, said this:  

"...it [the failed response to Katrina] wasn't a racial thing --- but poverty disproportionately affects African-Americans in this country. And it happened because they were poor."

The story on the interview is here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usweatherpowell;_ylt=AmsSU72Q57cHx7pOblY3.Ois0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxB HNlYwN0bQ--

Well, despite the apparent racial factor in the New Orleans non-response, I think he's right. Is racism evil? You bet. But racism has been consciously deployed by right-wing elements in this country for at least 150 years in order to distract, divert, and prevent poorer whites and poorer blacks from making common cause. In fighting racism qua racism, we are fighting a fight that the right is happy for us to fight.

Mr. Bush,

You ran on a platform of competence and compassion, but it is now plain for all to see that your government is the least competent and least compassionate American administration in modern times, if not in history.  Defunding the reinforcement of the New Orleans levees, staying on vacation in the face of days of advance warning about the force and likely target of Hurricane Katarina, fiddling while New Orleans flooded, then doing absolutely nothing while American human beings died (and continue to die ) like flies from lack of food, water, sanititation, and medical care while you're flying around fund raising and talking about issues dear to you but irrelevant to the present, immediate, gargantuan crisis -- how is your government's performance in any of these respects either competent or compassionate?  I suspect if the people in trouble were white and wealthy, you would have been Johnny on the spot.  As it is, you might as well have been reading "My Pet Goat."  God save us.

Over at Nieman Watchdog, General/Professor Odom methodically rebuts the arguments usually made against pulling our troops out of Iraq.  The gist of his remarks is that all of the bad things predicted to happen if we leave are already happening because we are there.  He also suggests some remedial measures we should undertake once we've gone.

Please go read the article at:

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00129

The Odom article is dated Aug. 3, so this may be a recommendation that has already been made.  Sorry if that's the case.