Friday afternoon heading home blogging

Noah in the Danger Room highlights a great new Navy report designed to highlight how unhip and out of touch their HR folks are.

There is lots of good stuff in his wrap up, but most interesting to me was that 32% of the 'millenials' surveyed self described themselves as less patriotic because of the war in Iraq.

During Vietnam most folks opposed to the war considered themselves patriotic no matter what the other side said. Today you often hear those in the chattering class who have opposed the war at various times continue to speak of themselves as the guardians of 'America'.

That these kids are willing to cop to being 'less patriotic' tells me two things. First, proponents have succeeded in framing support for the war as a with us or against us proposition. Second, and more frightening, this age group has responded by saying 'fine, if that's the case then fuck America.'

Sure this is bad news for Gates plan to add 50,000 troops, but it seems really bad for the future of American civil society if it becomes a long term trend.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/omg-navy-calls-.html

File it Under 'Are You Serious'

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=691EFAC3CE4DD7D01346664B4B2124EB.w5?a=106597&f=21

As a low level government paper pusher I am witness to all sorts of rediculous waste of all our tax dollars. But this story just blows my mind!

The ADL is forcing the Navy to spend 600,000 because some barracks designed 50 years ago sort of look like a swastika when viewed from above. Even better, the barrack is in restricted airspace so literally the only way you can see this is on Google earth (imagine if someone at CAIR admitted to using Google to look at military bases... you would never see the guy again).

The Holocaust and Naziism were really bad things. And were it just a case of 'maybe they should consider a different design' I probably would not have a problem. But seriously, we are talking about more than half a million dollars!

Buying a Skunk

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=105154&f=19

It looks like Congress is about out of tricks to "bring the war to a responsible close" or whatever the current triangulated phrase is. That said, for some time now I have been of the mind that the Dems do not from a poltical standpoint want to force any substantive changes.

Kevin Drum made the very smart point last week that the last thing the Dems want to do is set themselves up to have any culpability for this fuck up and particularly any deterioration of the situation in the future (a point Lindsey Graham alluded to when he noted that "Repubs own this war... And there may be consequences to that" today).

Sure it is disguisting to use soldiers lives as political props, but if one side is willing to do it you do not really have a choice. Politics is chess, not checkers.

Proof by Contradiction

RE: DMA's response

Interestingly, I did start out writing "Darwinian" when describing "survival of the fittest", then promptly removed it at the thought of the contradiction of conservatives and evolution.

However, if you think about free market, small gov't (which is fundamentally a free-market based philosophy), and a few other conservative economic principles, they are all founded on the belief that evolution-type equilibrium that emerges in all spectrum of life is efficient and should not be interfered with.

I guess conservatives do believe in evolution, just not the specific case of human beings having been evolved from apes.

Choice, evolution, and conservatism

For the most part I agree with HRP. Having a kid (like whining you cannot sit still until some lazy counselor gives you ritalin) is a choice, which is fundamentally at odds with the non-choice nature of a true disability.

But she writes:

The following statement probably makes me officially a extremist,
non-compassionate conservative: survival of the fittest has long been the
ruling force that drives development on all fronts, yet we now think we've
advanced enough that we should dispose of or even reverse that rule.

Real conservatives do not believe in evolution!

I Would Like to Thank the Distinguished Gentleman for Being a Dick

http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/news.jsp?key=92718&rc=dana_po

John Warner has long been lionized for his courageous maverickness. Most recently the Post did a few big pieces last week when he announced he wasn't running again, but these kind of stories have been going on quite a while.

That is why I was so excited to see Millbank spend an entire column on how Warner is a duplicitous piece of shit with a long history of stabbing each and every bipartisan measure he works on in the back.

Given the media's love affair with bipartisanship (which I think for most is simply because covering any solution that isn't bipartisan means folks on one side are gunning at them) it really is important for them to point out which dirty old men are most responsible for preventing bipartisan outcomes.

And for the record I wish all sorts of unmentionable bad things on the fucking spineless Republicans that voted against Webb's ammendment, which had nothing to do with ending the war and everything to do with taking care of the men and women serving the country.

Constitutional Right to Pump Milk??

Anything that one thinks one has a right to do is apparently argued as one's "constitutional right" in a court of law nowadays. I find it amusing to imagine the founding fathers discussing, debating, or even thinking about a woman's right to pump her milk as their write down the constitution.

Sure thing, just go ahead and do it. Who's really stopping ya?

The Boston Globe reports on a case of a medical student (female, and with a young child) suing the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) for not allowing her extra time in her 9-hour exam so that she can breastfeed her child.

I have almost made up my mind about the NBME being discriminatory and inflexible until I saw that the student is already taking her exam over 2 days instead of 1, and given a 45-min break on each of those days (others get one 45-min break in their one-day-nine-hr exam), because she has dyslexia and ADD.

No offense to others with these "disabilities", but that just sounds like a whiner to me.

C'mon, you got the same amount of break time each day, for really only about half the exam length per day. I'm not saying that makes it a piece of cake, but they clearly cut you some slack on the "disability" front, why don't we just see the extra break time that you got as in part accommodating for your breastfeeding too?

Then it got me thinking: if the NBME chooses to accommodate dyslexia and ADD, which to me is more an obstacle than a real disability, then being a mom and having to breastfeed seem like an obstacle as well. It's inconsistent, if anything, that they're accommodating one problem but not another.

I understand in the ideal situation you'd like to breastfeed your child directly from your breasts, but perhaps for an exam like that, you can pre-pump the milk and leave your child with somebody you trust? I can't even begin to imagine her having the bring her kid to the exam anyway... what if the baby needs changing? You get extra time for that too?

To sue on something like that, when accommodations have already been made (I know I know, I have to separate issues here), seems nothing but frivolous to me. Oh, the sense of entitlement that (some) Americans have.

Now, onto the "disability" issue -- you can see I can't write it without put quotations around. I know I'm being very insensitive here, but frankly I don't much care about sensitivity if caring means people are going to blatantly and shamelessly throw bs at me.

Maybe I'm old school, but people have gone on with these "conditions" before now at school and elsewhere without any special accommodations, and many do just fine, albeit having to endure additional struggles. If we really start going down this path of calling various individual setbacks as "disabilities", can we start ranking every student according to their IQ and give those with lower IQ more time in exams, or grade them on a more gentle scale? I'm sure with further-enough advances in medicine we'll be able to find where in the brain people with low IQ are deficient -- hence establishing a physical defect / disability.

The following statement probably makes me officially a extremist, non-compassionate conservative: survival of the fittest has long been the ruling force that drives development on all fronts, yet we now think we've advanced enough that we should dispose of or even reverse that rule.

Let's throw this idea to investment banks: employees' salary and bonuses should be a function of both actual performance and their intellect / ability (I'm sure we can come up with some index for that). In particular, salary and bonuses should be inversely related to intellect. Because, c'mon now, for a less able person to come up with the same kind of numbers as a really smart guy, the dumb guy must've been a really smart dumb -- sorry, "disabled" -- guy.

Huh?

The usually coherent Tom Friedman left me utterly confused this morning. After taking us on an "I am SO much more worldly than you" travelogue he ostensibly takes on climate change. But his take seems to be pretty dismal; thanks to China and the Arabs and TNT (Europe's Fedex) the world is doomed and it is all the fault of you damn Americans!

It's a really bizarre sight and the only coherent piece I can find is Friedman's continuing thesis that the world is flattening (which I agree with) and everyone wants to be an American (which I vigorously disagree with).

Rather than outright mocking the small but real shift in American consumption patterns wouldn't it be more productive to either:
-make more than a cryptic reference to the 'energy matrix' and come out and say we need to put more money into the engineering and science of new clean sources

-Note that it will take a cooperative global effort REALLY SOON to do anything, and that we need to recognize "We will give up incandescent bulbs if you stop developing" is not a real starting point.

A Good Idea

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=103166&f=20

In reading this NYT piece on Iraqi's response to Patreus it seems to me the consesus there is things are bad, we can't see them getting better, but they can get a lot worse. From an Iraqi perspective having 160000 Americans isn't that terrible - we do kill plenty of bad people and there aren't nearly as many crazy GIs terrorizing the population as in Vietnam.

But I am still lost as to why AMERICANS would want to spend 150 billion a year maintaining a status quo. Basically pick any systemic, seemingly unsolvable problem in the US - schools, health care, roads, public transport - and it could get FIXED for way less than that. Instead we are using that money to spin our wheels in the Iraq desert.

That said, if we wanted to significantly decrease the carnage in a post withdrawl environment it seems to me that one easy and sensible solution would be to stop handing out briefcases of cash, assault rifles, and logistics training to all the folks most likely cause that carnage.

Fordized

The always astute Juan Cole raises something I have been thinking about lately. What happens if Dems win the election, withdraw, then immediately watch Iraq fall apart. Given the limited mental capacity and interest of the vast majority of Americans, are Dems going to just adopt a millstone briefly that allows the Republicans to sanitize their role and reembark on another 30 years of assendency/fucking up America?

Everyone who knows me knows how skeptical I am of democracy and the wisdom of the masses in the (dis)information age. Plus, I generally think liberals are too good hearted to win a street fight (not necessarily a bad thing on an interpersonal level, but collectively devistating). So can the Dems avoid the trap being left?

I think if Iraq is anything more than a collective bad dream in 4 years the Dems are screwed. The challenge of transnational terrorism will still be there making security a salient issue for voters, and the Republican candidate will make sure to tie our hopes and fears to the bedlam in Baghdad that broke out on Dems watch.

That means a strong domestic agenda plus a single non kinetic international initiative (think a shiney bow to distract the voters) will be vital to whoever is the President if they hope for two terms.

Also, it's the economy stupid! As Cole notes inflation plus fear of the crazy guys with towels coming to get us is a losing recipe. Since the latter will be a near certainty, the former really must be avoided.

Pointing fingers on the school yard

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=101321&f=19

In reading the NYT story on the Israeli barracks that were hit by a rocket thrre were two glaring factual ommissions:

1- Palestinian rockets aren't just "dumb" (ie nonprecision), they are the dumbest weapons out there. Not to say they aren't culpable for the results of firing them off. But for those soldiers it is a case of shitty luck, not some nefarious premeditation.

2- The night before IDF special forces conducted a brazen raid on a Gaza compound (wearing Hamas uniforms to get close) and abducted some fairly senior Hamas guys. Now the rocket may not have been a direct retaliation - after all these are launched every day, usually landing harmlessly in empty fields - but the larger point is that it isn't like Israel was just sitting there twiddling it's thumbs when big bad Hamas pointed at the barracks on a map and 2 minutes later boom!

After all, the article reveals that the Israeli's have been publicly considering cutting off the little bit of water and power that even gets to Gaza in their continuing quest to delegitimize Palestinian opposition to a de facto unilateral final settlement.

Best line was the author's attempt to use the random child in the street with candy as a prop to prove how those dirty sand monkey A-rabs are just frothing at the mouth and celebrating the deaths of the poor, innocent Israeli's being trained to kick down their doors and shoot them.

Wait till next year

Patreus has spoken and the answer is we are doing so well we are going to leave most of the previously-temporarily surged troops there for another year.

Of course this makes sense given that everyone not in the White House's Wonderland knows violence is getting worse despite there being fewer and fewer Iraqi's available for the militias to ethnically cleanse.

Patreus is a tool whose complicity in Bush's hubris is DIRECTLY responsible for the death of Americans, and he should be treated accordingly.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolpda/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_6986000/6986461.stm?

Props

Before I forget, I want to recommend Karen DeYoung's two front page stories in todays WaPo. I'm sure they will be much talked about elsewhere, but nothing else she deserves huge credit for writing good articles on really important topics and being willing to stand up to the Patreus propoganda machine. Maybe WaPo won't turn into the WashTimes. If only we could do something about Hiatt.

The Ride Home

I'm glad to read that Dems are thinking back Jim Webb's bill to guarantee troops time with their families in between tours in Iraq. Personnally I always throught that was the bill Reid should have picked his filibuster fight over. First because it is the RIGHT THING TO DO. Second because it offered the clearest media narrative of how "support the troops" is not synonymous with "stay in Iraq until the President says we can go home." I just can't even imagine (ok actually I can) McConnell explaining how letting Senators vote on giving troops time at home will embolden "the enemy" or perhaps how the troops are so committed they'd rather wander the streets of Iraq and wonder when the next IED will go off than hold their children.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=101765&f=19

Yesterays hearing on the new GAO report was amusing if for no other reason than listening to the DoD's new spokesman Sen. Coleman try to take Walker to task for not including the magical Statistics from August that have only ever been shown to Patreus and his PR goon squad.

How can we take the GAO report seriously if it doesn't even include all the data that DoD won't give them!

Two important highlights though:

1. Walker "there are a number of different official estimates about sectarian violence out there and frankly they do not all agree on what the trends are." Translation the data can say whatever you want depending on which offices stats you use.

2. Walker noted several times the lack of clarity in defining our strategic objectives in Iraq. Not that people are debating them. Not that they should be different or are not aligned with what we do. But that the Administration DOES NOT HAVE a set of strategic objectives.

Them's Fightin' Words

NYT this morning:

"a president who has unveiled four or five strategies for winning over Iraqis - depending on how one counts - may now be on the cusp of yet another."

I vote opponents of the war add that line to their talking points this month. Seriously, you'd think the strategy was just "let's try everything under the sun until something works". The bitter irony is that the one thing that might be able to save Bush circa 2007 is the humility advocated by Bush circa 2000.

(Re)Writing History

There's a great scene at the end of rhe movie Waiting when the protagonist decidws to quit his job. His boss reacts irrately by telling him he's fired and , when told he'd already quit, angrily protests "I write the history book and this is how it went down."

it will be important to keep this in mind over the next 16 months as the petulent President looks to rewrite history to obscure his abject failure of leadership. He's got WaPo reprinting his upcoming authorized bio, the recent "I'm a dissident too" speeches, etc. I am heartened to read the pushback by Jerry Bremer - by all accounts a decent man who was just overmatched by the challenges in Baghdad - in the NYT and Eugene Robinson in the WaPo. Stay tuned.

David