Originally posted at my site Bob Higgins

"We need to be realistic about operating in a mile of water”

Tony Hayward, the cherubic little weasel who serves as the front man for British Petroleum, BP, Beyond Pathetic or whatever they are calling their 'brand' this week, made the statement above, on camera to reporters while standing on an oil fouled Louisiana beach a couple of weeks ago.

Photo by Belize.com

Over the last several years as more people, organizations and governments began to take the prospect of global warming and human influenced climate change more seriously there has arisen a kind of 60 cycle background hum over the potential dangers of social unrest, disease, famine and mass movements of populations resulting from such change.

A few days ago while randomly browsing on the web I read an article at the Kansas City Star that sent a quick chill through my bloodstream: "Intelligence director: Worldwide economic crisis top U.S. security threat.

The story, by McClatchy writer Warren Strobel detailed remarks to Congress made Monday by National Security Director Dennis Blair, who in a significant break with the Bush administration policy of treating terrorism and weapons proliferation as the greatest threats to national security, gave clues that new focus would center on the potential social unrest resulting from the world financial crisis.

Retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair said the worldwide economic downturn could spawn political instability across the globe, hamper U.S. allies and drain support for the American-led international free-trading system.

"Time is probably our greatest threat," Blair said in prepared remarks before the Senate Intelligence Committee. "The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests."

There is an ongoing debate over the closing of America's most notorious detainment/torture center at Guantanamo and the legality and efficacy of using torture to extract "information" from detainees in that and other facilities.

In a piece in this morning's Washington Post titled Torture? Prosecute Us, Too Richard Cohen leads with this:

Harry Truman in a "bipartisan" moment with Lauren Bacall, a staunch liberal Democrat. This is about as "bipartisan as Harry got."

Last week was exhilarating for Democrats and, judging by the international media, for people all over the planet who have suffered for nearly a decade from the misguided and often criminal policies of George Bush and his terribly inept administration.

The swearing in of Barack Obama and the departure of the Connecticut Cowboy from our public affairs was something long anticipated, and, after our long dark winter, as welcome as the return of springtime and birdsong, at least in these quarters.

Fifty years ago today I was halfway through my sophomore year at WE Stebbins High, an almost completely segregated school in the almost completely segregated city of Dayton, Ohio, a town said at the time to be a southern city that happened to be north of the Mason Dixon line.

The school was "almost completely" segregated because it was located within a good Hail Mary pass of Wright Patterson AFB. I don't remember exactly the reasons but we were told that because the school received federal funds for students who were military dependents that it had to be integrated.

"Integration" was accomplished by the admission of two young Black kids, The boy was named Sam. I remember because we became friends for awhile until the transparent racist displeasure of my little Quaker Grandmother became thick enough to keep him from dropping by. She wasn't ready for a black president.

The girl's name is beyond my atrophied powers of recall. I can see their faces though; both were exceptionally attractive, beautiful in fact, bright, "A" students (National Honor Society), and the son and daughter of Air Force Officers. They weren't related, although they might have passed for brother and sister (to my eyes) and they knew each other from the Air Base (the Air Force at the time wasn't a lot more integrated than my high school).

Their presence among the lower and middle class adolescent white children of factory workers, shopkeepers and lower level bean counting managerial types caused no great stir. There were no serious problems (to my eyes) other than an occasional racist taunt, or snub. Civility towards them was rigorously enforced. The powers that be paddled freely and often back then and the sting of that paddle and its humiliation was seldom sought.

In an opinion piece in today's Washington Post Ruth Marcus poses the question:

"Should Bush administration officials be put on trial for crimes such as authorizing torture?"

The answer to that question is a simple and unequivocal "not yes, but, Hell yes, absolutely, yer darn tootin'."

Bear in mind that I live in a flyover state where many have limited tolerance for carefully parsed, nuanced or constipated prose, preferring instead to "throw it out on the lawn and see if any dogs come up and pee on it."

Ms Marcus says, less pithily and with a bit more ambiguity, that she is:

"just relieved to have this crowd heading out of office and its policies -- on torture, on indefinite detention, on warrantless wiretapping, on overweening executive power -- soon to be inoperative."

I share her delight in the departure of this gang of criminals but I fear that if they do not leave Washington in handcuffs and leg irons aboard a Federal prison bus that the chances of rendering the "policies" stated above "inoperative" are approximately ... zero.

For the last month I've we have listened to an unending series of conservative chowder heads prattle and moan about redistribution of wealth, socialism, Marxism, and the destruction of society by giving government subsidized tuna fish sandwiches to the poor.

When they weren't whining about Obama being some kind of closet Islamofacist commie they were pontificating about the sanctity of free markets, the evils of big government, the purity of privatization, the miracles of laissez faire capitalism and the horrors of such social tools as unemployment insurance, public welfare programs, food stamps and the minimum wage.

Photo: Some presidents get high schools named after them, others get highways and bridges. What does George W. Bush get? A sewage plant! Through a brilliant plan hatched in a bar, SF voters may be able to name the Oceanside Water Pollution Plant after our current president, George W., in November. dnguyen

In one of the more asinine posts I have read lately the Wall Street Journal today ran an opinion piece titled "The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace ," which I recommend to anyone needing a real howler to start the day after the stress and tension of a long and rancorous election season.

I voted Friday in Ohio and although at times in my life I have cast an occasional vote for a local Republican candidate, this time I reverted to my roots and voted like an old fashioned straight ticket Democrat. My Grandfathers would both be proud.

It felt good. No, it felt great as if I were striking a blow for freedom.

After eight years of thoroughly corrupt and incompetent government, the unrelieved horror of several nightmarish wars, the near destruction of American constitutional liberties, the pillage and plunder of our public treasury by wealth bloated plutocrats and oiligarchs, and the almost total loss of our international reputation I just felt safer somehow checking off the "D's."

Note: The cartoon is the logo of the real Joe the Plumber in Amarillo. Send him some business, I'm told that he's an Obama guy. If his website takes off because of all this attention maybe he can switch from actual plumbing to an online plumbing advice column. Bob

The month began with Sarah Palin celebrating her campaign's close identification and long association with "Joe Six Pack," the mythic every man vision of America that he and they dream that they represent.

During the 1968 election, one of the keystones of Dick Nixon's campaign was his "plan to end the war in Vietnam." Of course he had no real plan, or, if he did it was a poor one, evidenced by the fact that the war dragged on for seven brutal years after that sad election season.

It has been said in some quarters that the "plan" Nixon alluded to, but never spelled out, was a nutty scheme (nutty schemes seem to abound in the halls of power) to have Kissinger convince the Russians that Tricky Dick was just batshit crazy enough to use nuclear weapons if the North Vietnamese would not come to the table and end the war on his terms.

History has shown that Nixon was nuts enough. So was and is, Henry the K, but the Vietnamese, after fighting a collection of Yankees, French, Japanese and Chinese among others, for uncountable hundreds of years weren't impressed with new and improved threats, from new and unimproved enemies.

They had been hardened over the centuries to leave early for work knowing that they might have to bury their dead or rebuild a bridge or two on the way. They would not be cowed by threats of death and destruction; death and destruction was all around them, forever.

Last night's debate between six term Senator Joe Biden and the former Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

What I saw and heard:

Joe Biden was a picture of confidence and self assurance. He took the stage with over three decades of experience in the Senate and his stature as one of the preeminent legislators of the latter half of the twentieth century and a key policy maker in the current one, was inescapable.

For the most part he offered serious and thoughtful answers to the questions which were put to him and presented a solid supportive picture of the Democratic ticket and their intentions in office.

John Sidney McCain III made his first national "executive" decision a few weeks ago. He chose a person who was singularly unqualified to hold even city wide office to be his (and, unfortunately, our) Vice President.

I think that single decision shows us who John Sidney III really is, reveals him more clearly than anything I have seen in this or his many previous failed campaigns.

His choice, as far as I have been able to determine, may have been partially forced upon him by the darker forces of neo-conservative Republican politics. The Roves and the Cheney's intend to rule from Mordor long after their official tenures are over in Washington. They need their Bushes, their McCains and Palins.

It's crucial that John McCain return to Washington at this time, in fact, it is critical as he is titular leader of his party as well as its interim standard bearer. As someone who admittedly knows little about economics it is of the utmost that he be at the center of debate on this recently manufactured economic crisis.

As McCain says, in times of extreme crises like this we should suspend political debate and all this unseemly partisan electioneering and put Wall Street first.

There are a lot of people wearing Gucci shoes and Hermes neckties gathered in the halls of power right now, eagerly waiting for his assistance in the slicing of this historic pie of capitalist opportunity.

It is, or should be by now, plainly evident to most observers that the current crop of Republicans will run the kind of Rovian sleazoid campaign that has worked so well for them in the past.

They will co opt the message of the Democrats at every opportunity and swift boat anyone who gets in their way. They will, as in the past, use the politics of personal destruction, of sneer and smear, a style that has become a necessity in modern Republican strategy as it so purely reflects the mentality and ethos of a sizable and increasing fraction of their base.

"Mortgage Giant Overstated the Size of Its Capital Base," reads the headline of this morning's New York Times.

The headline tops a story by NYT writers Gretchen Morgenson and Charles Duhigg which, like so many articles on finance, quickly leaves me floundering in a murky wake of economic jargon, acronyms, and boardroom corporatese.

I understand the gist of what I read, though I would have opted for a different headline, something along the lines of "CEOs and CFOs of Major American Financial Companies Lie to Regulators, Shareholders and Public, Throw Markets into Chaos, Cost Taxpayers Tens of Billions."

Left: Deep in a Utah mine. Center: Crandall Canyon graphic, click on the Image for full size. Right: Robert Murray

"Our relationship with Mr. Murray has been stormy thus far. That is also the pattern of his relationship with MSHA at his eastern mines. Just wanted to give you a heads up on that. He may not be a willing participant if he senses that anything you do could impact his ability to produce coal." from an e-mail written by MSHA district nine manager Allyn Davis

"It is the quality of patriotism to be jealous and watchful, to observe all secret machinations, and to see publick dangers at a distance. The true lover of his country is ready to communicate his fears, and to sound the alarm, whenever he perceives the approach of mischief. But he sounds no alarm, when there is no enemy; he never terrifies his countrymen till he is terrified himself. The patriotism, therefore, may be justly doubted of him, who professes to be disturbed by incredibilities..." Samuel Johnson

The stage is covered with American flags, draped and propped and perched everywhere, to the left, to the right and behind the speaker's dais, which itself is covered with flag bunting and a covey of microphones nearly buried in a spreading nosegay of ... flags.

Is there anyone out there who still harbors the delusion that George Bush or most of his administration possesses the slightest shred of human integrity or the tiniest morsel of respect for the truth, for law, for the people of this country or any other?

Sorry, the question was rhetorical and asked out of personal frustration with the evil festering stew of lies, theft, brutality and domestic and international piracy that this administration has created in the place of what was once the USA.

Waterboarding is now as "American" as "Mom" and "apple pie"

The "distinguished jurist" told them in open hearings and in written communications that he could not call waterboarding "torture," and reportedly, pravately expressed his fear that doing so might open the gates for some executive department and military officials to lawsuits or criminal prosecution.

Notice here that what is important to this "distinguished jurist" is not the fact that the laws of the United States regarding the use of torture may have been violated by highly placed government officials, or that subordinates were directed to violate the law, but that those officials must somehow be shielded from civil or criminal sanction.

No matter that the practice known as waterboarding has been around far longer than any of the doddering graybeards in the senate,  has been the reason for the prosecution and imprisonment of soldiers and officers of the armies of many countries in this century and is proscribed by US law and international treaties.

The whackjob who calls himself "President of the United States" does not care about the law, in fact the very suggestion that the law might apply to him sends him into paroxysms of juvenile snorting and snickering.

His vice President and the former, now deposed Attorney General regard such things as the Geneva conventions as "quaint." The fact the "Democrats" in the Senate expected the gang of criminal psychopaths in the White House to send up a nominee for the highest legal office in the land who would be inclined to uphold the law, was absurd from the beginning.

It has been just over a year since about a dozen of the same "Democrats" voted in favor of the infamous "Military Commissions Act," a piece of "legislation" that reads more like it was enacted through the auspices a "Reichstag" of the last century than any American legislative body that I'm familiar with. 

Chuck Schumer said it himself in a revealing oped in the NYT a couple of days ago, amid the firestorm of anger and disbelief over his announcement of  intent to vote for the Mukasey nomination in the Judiciary committee.

Judge Mukasey's refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering - and I hope we will soon pass - a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.

The next time Michael Mukasey is called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee I suggest that he be strapped to a stretcher, a rag placed in his mouth and water poured in the rag until he begins to answer completely and truthfully the questions put to him by the committee.

Now that waterboarding has become an accepted form of interrogation in these United States, I recommend that it be utilized not only with Mukasey, but with all future witnesses before committees of the congress. I think that there are subpoenas kicking around out there for Condi Rice and other executive department figures who have been less than forthcoming in past appearances, so perhaps as our favorite republican tough guy Rudy Giuliani says, we should question them aggressively.

It might be a good idea if the voting public were able to use the same technique in questioning the presidential candidates on their positions. For the rest of the debates all candidates should be wheeled in strapped to stretchers and aggressively questioned using this simulated drowning method.

Using these methods we may begin to get the truth from our "public servants" and declared wannabes.

This will not work in Atlanta however, they don't have enough water at the moment to achieve any kind of satisfactory results.

Is there any area of our government, over the span of the last seven years, any area, in domestic or foreign policy, national defense, public welfare, the economy, name it, where the average, reasonably informed American might point to success, to signs of progress, of improvement, something, anything, to point to with satisfaction, with pride?

Yesterday I read an article by Steve Benin on the resignation of Karen Hughes from her post as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a mouthful there, and a job for which she was as ill suited and unqualified as the man who appointed her and in which, during her two year tenure, she accomplished little, if anything.

In truth, she accomplished nothing, unless you want to count convincing large portions of the world that all Americans must be as out of touch with reality, as clueless and unthinking as their current Commander in Chief, and at that she excelled, as anyone might, having been dispatched to the Middle East with the rank of Ambassador, but without knowledge of the language, culture, history, religions, and general pet peeves of the various states and peoples of the region.

The "Hitler comparison" should be shouted from the rooftops, as should the Goebbels comparison, the Himmler comparison, the Mengele, Stalin, Torquemada, Beelzebub comparisons and all the rest. If it struts like a Nazi, talks like Nazi, tortures like a Nazi and wages aggressive and illegal war like a Nazi... it's not a duck.

Eighteen months or so ago I wrote a post comparing Bush, Cheney and the boys from PNAC to Hitler, to the Nazi hierarchy and to the wonderful folks who gave the world kristallnacht, the terror bombings of Guernica, of London and conducted history's magnum opus of human carnage, the holocaust, the destruction of two thirds of the Jews in Europe and millions of other "undesirables."

I took a moderate amount of heat for what one local (Dayton) commenter called my "classlessness," and received a few surly EMails from people who are probably, to this day, driving around with "Bush/Cheney" bumper stickers on their Cadillac and Lexus SUVs but since I want so badly to be loved and admired, (or at least not ignored) I resolved to try to avoid using the "Hitler Comparison" after that.

I saw it used by others on the blogs and, guardedly, in the MSM, witnessed their reception of similar treatment and I realized that a taboo (see Godwin's law) had been created. "Disrespectful to the office of the President," some cried, "diminishes the horror of the holocaust and the brutality unleashed on Europe's Jews by the real Hitler," cried others, "the ultimate ad hominem attack," wrote one academic seeking to show that such comparisons were childish , demeaning to those who offered them and "kills dead," scholarly internet discussions.

I am sick to death of all the pussyfooting around the subject that has occupied the media for the duration of this premeditated, illegal war of terror that we the people of the United States have allowed to be waged against the people of Iraq, in our name, for the last several years.

No matter how much lipstick and rouge we smear on the face of this war no matter how we attempt to  dress up the evil and bestial acts that have been performed in its unholy name, it still has the hideous countenance of an evil swine from hell.

It is an illegal war, begun and conducted under false pretenses, by a group of criminal liars and thieves in the United States Government, abetted by a cowardly congress who abrogated their constitutional duties in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds and furthered by a complaisant press that ignored their obligation to remain independent from government, from their sponsors and report the facts. 

The members of the completely rogue executive department acted in their own self interest in a quest for personal power and wealth, in concert with the usual domestic and international corporate pirates who, in the depths of their insatiable greed, continually amplify human conflict to their own ends and bring poverty, war, suffering and death down upon the world.

There is no such animal as extraordinary rendition, nor do I know of the existence of any beasts called enhanced interrogation methods.

The first is kidnapping, it is illegal, a felony and the second word is torture, its meaning is clear:

When we evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops. Even worse, the government can no longer carry out one of its most basic core missions: to fight and win the nation's wars. Instead, the massive outsourcing of military operations has created a dependency on private firms like Blackwater that has given rise to dangerous vulnerabilities.The dark truth about Blackwater

The idea of privatization of American public and governmental functions has been at the center of the neo conservative movement and over the last decade has been presented as the cure for everything that ails us from Social Security to Medicare, prison administration to public education, law enforcement and even the waging of war.

This idea that private enterprise can accomplish governmental functions more efficiently, at less cost while providing better service is, of course absurd and, in fact, is nothing but an enormous lie, and, like all enormous lies, if repeated often and loudly by the right authority figures and affirmed in "scholarly" studies performed by the Heritage or American Enterprise think tanks, it will take hold and seem, to a sizable portion of the uncritical public, to be the truth, simply because they have heard it so many times from so many familiar voices.