Summary here and here.

Segmenting a city: putting up our own little versions of the Berlin wall.

With Iraq’s post-war government struggling to promote a national peace plan, military units are doing the job piecemeal, walling in Baghdad suburbs behind concrete barriers and building local relationships with street-level leaders.

[snip]

Ameriyah is a mixed but largely Sunni area, where many resent or violently oppose US intervention. They also fear Iraq’s new police, which are controlled by a Shiite-led interior ministry and often accused of death squad links.

The irony of the current surge in violence, in which the once dominant Sunni minority now often finds itself in the firing line, is that it has pushed besieged districts back into the arms of the once-hated Americans.

Many Sunnis in war-torn west Baghdad now want US troops to protect them — and help repair infrastructure and create jobs — or at least they say so when reporters turn up under the protection of heavily-armed American units. Article

Related: Balkanizing and the breaking of factions into sub-factions increases insecurity and multiplies the uncivil instigators of and outlets and opportunites for chaos.

So how’s that security going under the nose of scores of thousands of troops?

U.S. military officers in Baghdad have said violence including murders declined in August from July’s high levels but that there are still about 56 attacks per day in the capital. Article

Marketing a morass: spin, spin spin. What generates positive reports are positive occurrences. When stuck with tins of spoiled meat, concentrating on the labeling to boost sales simply isn’t prudent; it’s the product itself that must be addressed.

U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq.

The contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a program to provide “public relations products” that would improve coverage of the military command’s performance, according to a statement of work attached to the proposal.

[snip]

The proposal suggests a team of 12 to 18 people who would provide support for the coalition military command as well as the Iraqi government leadership.

Prospective contractors are also asked to propose four to eight public relations events per month, such as speeches or news conferences, including “preparation of likely questions and suggested answers, themes and messages as well as background, talking points.” Article

Related:

… Look at the Pew Research Center’s most recent “global attitudes survey,” released this past June. In only four of the 15 nations surveyed (Britain, India, Japan, and Nigeria) did a majority of citizens have a favorable view of the United States. In six countries (Spain, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, and Jordan), Iran had a higher rating than did the United States. (In one more, Russia, the two countries’ ratings were tied.) Most remarkable, in all but one country (Germany), America’s presence in Iraq was seen as a bigger danger to world peace than either Iran or North Korea.

These views are widespread–and, by the way, they’ve grown steadily more prominent in the past few years–not because of “the media” or “blame-America-first” liberals, nor because Iran and North Korea have more skillful propagandists (or, if they do, it’s time for Condoleezza Rice to hire a better public-diplomacy staff). No, a country’s global image is usually formed not by what its leaders say but rather by what they do. Article

What was evident in 2005 (and before) is just as valid today, regardless of the ramping up of administration propaganda and mendacity.

Defective amnesia at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Lying in the morning, lying in the evening, lying at suppertime.

Under the radar: water as a commodity of conflict.

Cannot be harped upon enough: war crime.

UN and human rights organisations said yesterday that 13 people, including three children, had been killed between the August 14 ceasefire and Tuesday, and 46 people have been wounded.

“Every day we have to revise our count of what the scope of the problem is,” said Clark. “We just don’t know how big the problem is, only that it is huge at the moment and getting bigger every day.”

Human Rights Watch researchers have said that the density of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon was higher than any place they had seen.

[snip]

The UN Mine Action Co-ordination Center, which has so far assessed 85% of the bombed areas in Lebanon, has identified 379 bomb strike areas that are contaminated with as many as 100,000 unexploded bomblets. Article

Dealing with the deadly legacy, one by one.

MAG is one of the agencies tasked by the Mine Action Coordination Centre, a partnership between the United Nations and Lebanon’s National Demining Office, with removing the cluster munitions.

MAG had been in Lebanon for six years clearing land mines but the priority switched to unexploded cluster bombs after the July-August war because they pose an immediate danger to people wanting to return home, said Dalya Farran, media officer for the Mine Action Coordination Centre in the coastal town of Tyre.

MAG’s four teams will be backed up beginning Thursday by 19 Iraqi bomb disposal experts, said Sean Sutton, a MAG spokesman.

Farran said the Swedish Rescue Services Agency also has two bomb disposal teams in Lebanon and the British organization Bactec is about to begin work. Article

Summaries here and here and here.

Pot. Kettle. (italics added)

Steep lending charges have long plagued servicemembers, but the problem has become a more urgent concern to the military as it has struggled to fill its ranks during the Iraq war. That’s because debt troubles can keep troops from going overseas.

“We’re seeing a growing trend of folks who are not eligible to deploy because of financial problems,” says Capt. Mark Patton, commander of Naval Base Point Loma in California. Patton says debt problems can cost some servicemembers their security clearances.

The report says “payday loan” stores (so named because their loans are often due on a borrower’s next payday) have sprung up by the thousands around military bases and elsewhere in the past decade.

Lenders typically charge $15 to $25 per $100 loan for two weeks, and most loans are extended for several weeks. The report says the average loan is $350 and has an annual interest rate of 390% to 780%. The average borrower, it says, pays back $834 for a $339 loan.

[snip]

Congress ordered the Pentagon to conduct the lending study. This year, the Senate passed an amendment to its annual defense spending bill that calls for a 36% cap on interest for loans to servicemembers. It would not affect loans to civilians.

The House version of the defense bill doesn’t include the amendment. A joint committee will begin working out differences between the two versions next month.

Such lending, the report says, hurts readiness and morale and “adds to the cost of fielding an all-volunteer fighting force.”

That’s a misguided critique of a valuable service, says Darrin Andersen, president of the Community Financial Services Association of America, the payday lenders’ trade group. The Pentagon, he says, “is in over its heads when it comes to … complex personal finance and lending issues.” Article

Like foot binding, other ‘traditions’ deserve to fade away. Guess what? It’s a tasteless bowl of goop.

Good news: Munch recovered.

Summary here.

Testimony in the hearings on Hamdania underway.

Lawyers for Corporal Marshall Magincalda, who allegedly bound Awad’s feed [sic] and kidnapped him, had asked that the hearing be closed to the public, arguing that it could prejudice the case, but investigating officer Colonel Robert Chester denied the request, saying the public had a “very compelling right to hear these proceedings”.

The prosecutor, Captain Nicholas Gannon, told Col Chester statements by three members of the squad included an alleged confession by squad leader Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins.

[snip]

Another hearing was also under way concerning Private John Jodka, 20, one of the defendants accused of firing on Awad.

The hearings, held under Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, will determine whether the men should be tried in a general court martial.

[snip]

…The charges include kidnap, murder and conspiracy. Article

With so much attention paid to the war on the gorund, sometimes it is too easy to forget the war for what is under the ground. And don’t for a second think, with oil prices high (and with nothing to temper them from reaching the $100 a barrel level) that, awash in profits, that the multi-nationals are not champing at the bit to lay claim to as much more as they can.

…In February [2006], the IRMO advisers accompanied eight senior officials from the Oil Ministry on a trip to the U.S., sponsored by the U.S.’ Trade and Development Agency. On the trip, they met oil company representatives to discuss the future structure of the Iraqi oil industry.

The same month, at the request of the State Department, USAID provided an adviser to the Oil Ministry, again from BearingPoint, to work directly on a new oil law, providing “legal and regulatory advice in drafting the framework of petroleum and other energy-related legislation, including foreign investment.”

The U.S. campaign on the fledgling Iraqi government has been successful. Following his appointment in May, new Oil Minister Husayn al-Shahristani announced that one of his top priorities would be the writing of an oil law to allow Iraq to sign contracts with “the largest companies.”

This would be the first time in more than thirty years that foreign companies would receive a major stake in Iraq’s oil. Oil was brought into public ownership and control back in 1975.

[snip]

…the draft law has not been seen by the Iraqi parliament. Meanwhile, an official from the Oil Ministry has stated that Iraqi civil society and the general public will not be consulted at all.

The issues could hardly be more important for Iraq. Oil accounts for more than 90% of government revenue, and is the main driver of Iraq’s economy. And decisions made in the coming months will not be reversible - once contracts are signed, they will have a major bearing on Iraq’s economy and politics for decades to come.

No wonder a recent poll showed that when asked what Iraqis thought were the three main reasons why the United States invaded Iraq, 76% gave “to control Iraqi oil” as their first choice.

Attempting to reverse this perception and change U.S. policy, lawmakers in the House and Senate have passed legislation stating that the United States should not exert “control over any oil resource of Iraq.” But usurping democracy here at home, Republicans stripped this language out of the bill’s final version Hoping for better luck the second time around, Senator Joe Biden successfully led the charge to add this language to another bill currently awaiting final passage.

In an ideal world, this legislation wouldn’t be needed after Bush promised that, “The oil belongs to the Iraqi people.” But actions speak louder than words. If democracy is to be upheld in Iraq and the constitution is to be protected, it should be the Iraqi people who decide how oil is managed, not the U.S. administration and Big Oil. Article

Summary here and here and here.

No more beating around the bush, please, media — it was, and is, a war crime.

…”It’s an outrage that we have 100,000 unexploded bombs among where children, women, civilians, shop keepers and farmers are now going to tread.”

Egeland criticized Israel for firing nearly all of the cluster bombs during the last three days of its month-long war with Lebanon’s Hizbollah.

“What’s shocking and completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution and an end of this,” Egeland said.

[snip]

About 250,000 Lebanese civilians still cannot get into their homes because they have been destroyed or are too close to unexploded shells or bombs, he said. Article

Keep a weather eye, again, on Nigeria.

Quite probably highly related is the announcement of plans to set up a separate Africa command withtin the U.S. military.

As technology and access accelerates, China tries to push back the tide.

Saudis further demote women in Islam.

What hath G. Walker wrought? Like Richard Nixon after Watergate, the ‘doctrine’ and its expositors have been arrested in progress and discredited in fact, but still lurk in the wings — waiting, plotting, wheedling, clutching for any toehold to allow the administration’s sultans of sophistry to reassert it.

Analysts across the political spectrum say the Bush Doctrine — preventive war, choking the roots of terrorism by planting democracy, and brandishing power to force others into line — has failed. Bush’s lofty goals, shared even by his critics, have been set back, perhaps decades, by the Iraq occupation.

[snip]

“The kind of thing people in the administration prided themselves in understanding, namely the use of power, was actually the very thing they proved not to be able to use effectively,” said David Holloway of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, which conducts research and training on issues of international security.

[snip]

World opinion, dismissed by top Bush officials, has undermined U.S. clout, said Joseph Nye, a professor of international relations at Harvard University.

Bush’s emphasis on force has cost goodwill around the world — nowhere more than among Muslims — and squandered the sympathy that empowered the United States to invade Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“A president has to be able to combine the hard power of military force with the soft power of attracting others to want to follow us,” Nye said. “In fighting a struggle against terrorism — where everything depends upon winning the hearts and minds of moderates — that loss of soft power is very expensive. The key to diplomacy is to divide your enemies, and Bush has in a sense united our enemy.”

[snip]

Said former Bush State Department official Jon Alterman, “It seems to me the key aspect of the Bush Doctrine is moral clarity. The problem with moral clarity is: How do you achieve better results in the here and now and not in the afterlife?”

[snip]

“For many decades, the United States was considered a model democracy and was an inspiration for democracy activists all over the world,” said Mike McFaul, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor of political science. “Today, it is most certainly the case that being affiliated with the U.S. is no longer necessarily a positive for democratic activists. You see this particularly in Egypt. You see it particularly in Iran.”

Larry Diamond, a former adviser to the U.S. provisional government in Iraq now at the Hoover Institution, agreed.

“There’s a very broad view among not only the established pro-American regimes — the Jordanian regime, the Moroccan regime, even the Egyptian and Saudi, and Qatar and Kuwait even more so — and among many secular democratic forces in the region, that we have just messed up very badly, and strengthened Islamic forces, and strengthened the instinct of a lot of these regimes to resist.”

[snip]

But the broad consensus is that staying the course is not working. The Iraqi death rate of the last two months translates to 40,000 a year, Diamond said, and “if that isn’t civil war, I don’t know what is.

“I literally do not know anyone outside the administration who thinks that simply staying the course we’re on now is going to work,” he said. “I know people who think we need to do a lot more. I know people who think the current level of troops is about right, but we need a very different strategy in terms of how we use them and proceed politically. I know people who think we need to start heading for the exits.” Article

Related:

…if the rhetoric of the Bush revolution lives on, the revolution
itself is over. The question is not whether the president and most of his team still hold to the basic tenets of the Bush doctrine—they do—but whether they can sustain it. They cannot.…

[snip]

The reversal of the Bush revolution is a good thing. By overreaching in Iraq, alienating important allies, and allowing the war on terrorism to overshadow all other national priorities,Bush has gotten the United States bogged down in an unsuccessful war, overstretched the military, and broken the domestic bank. Washington now lacks the reservoir of international legitimacy, resources, and domestic support necessary to pursue other key national interests.

[snip]

Whether Washington’s European allies, or anyone else, for that matter, accepted the administration’s logic was thought largely immaterial. According to the administration, success in Iraq, which few top officials doubted, would have a positive spillover effect elsewhere in the Middle East, at which point U.S. allies would start to come on board. U.S. leadership, the thinking went, consisted not of endlessly consulting pessimistic allies to see what they had to say,but of setting out a bold course, decisively following it, and winning over allies through victory rather than persuasion. revolution meets reality Needless to say, everything has not turned out as planned.

[snip]

Accordingly, the new direction of Bush’s foreign policy is far from irreversible. Although the Bush team has been forced by reality to work more closely with allies and to set aside the doctrine of regime change by military intervention, many in the administration still believe that the threat of terrorism allows—or even requires—the United States to operate under different international rules from everyone else, limiting the degree to which the administration can continue to adapt. Moreover, powerful figures within the administration—not least the vice president—will continue to argue against the new pragmatism. Indeed, part of the “revolutionary” premise of the foreign policy of Bush’s first term was the notion, harking back to the Reagan administration, that determination, optimism, and U.S. power would eventually prevail, regardless of what Democrats and foreign critics might assert.It is a convenient thesis,but one that does not allow for self-correction; it paints any lack of domestic or international support as a badge of honor and apparent failures as only temporary setbacks rather than as reasons to change course.

[snip]

Still,it would be rash to exclude a returnto a more radical approach, especially from a president who believes he is on a mission and who has time and again proved willing to take massive risks and surprise his critics. If such a return happens, brace yourself—because there is no reason to believe that round two of the Bush revolution would be more successful than round one. Indeed, without the resources, international legitimacy, and degree of political support Bush had the first time around, it might be considerably worse. Article

Like a three-year-old who has lost interest in a shiny new toy, like a bragging slacker who ducks out when the real work is at hand, so the G. Walker administration.

Remember when peaceful, democratic, reconstructed Afghanistan was advertised as the exemplar for the extreme makeover of Iraq? In August 2002, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was already proclaiming the new Afghanistan “a breathtaking accomplishment” and “a successful model of what could happen to Iraq”. As everybody now knows, the model isn’t working in Iraq. So we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s not working in Afghanistan either.

The story of success in Afghanistan was always more fairy tale than fact - one scam used to sell another. Now, as the administration of US President George W Bush hands off “peacekeeping” to NATO forces, Afghanistan is the scene of the largest military operation in the history of that organization. Personal e-mail brings word from an American surgeon in Kabul that her emergency medical team can’t handle half the wounded civilians brought in from embattled provinces to the south and east. American, British and Canadian troops find themselves at war with Taliban fighters - which is to say “Afghans” - while stunned North Atlantic Treaty Organization commanders, who hadn’t bargained for significant combat, are already asking what went wrong.

The answer is a threefold failure: no peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction.

[snip]

The sad part of the story is this. Despite the Bush administration’s sham “peace” and fake “democracy”, it might have made - might still make - a success of Afghanistan if only it delivered on that third big promise: to rebuild the bombed-out country. Most Afghans, after the dispersal of the Taliban, were full of hope and ready to work. The tangible benefits of reconstruction - jobs, housing, schools, health-care facilities - could have rallied them to support the government and turn that illusory “democracy” into something like the real thing. But reconstruction didn’t happen. When NATO-led forces moved into the southern provinces this summer to keep the peace and continue “development”, Lieutenant-General David Richards, British commander of the operation, seemed astonished to find that little or no development had so far taken place.

For that failure the US is to blame. Until this year, the US-led coalition assumed sole charge of “security” operations outside Kabul, but it never put enough troops on the ground to do the job. (Sound familiar?) As a result, aid workers (both international and Afghan) lost their lives, and non-governmental aid organizations (NGOs) withdrew to Kabul or, like Medecins Sans Frontieres, left the country altogether. Private contractors who remained in the field found themselves regularly diverting project funds to “security”, so that, as in Iraq, aid money poured into operations that belonged in the military budget.

[snip]

A recent audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) using “an accounting shell game” to hide mammoth cost overruns on projects - as high as 418% - resulting partly from such security problems. There’s every reason to believe that an audit of Afghanistan reconstruction by many of the same firms under contract to USAID would reveal similar accounting practices used for the same reason. Without peace there can be no security, and without security no development.

The reconstruction shell game But there’s more to the story than that. To understand the failure - and fraud - of such reconstruction, you have to take a look at the peculiar system of US aid for international development. During the past five years, the US and many other donor nations pledged billions of dollars to Afghanistan, yet Afghans keep asking: “Where did the money go?” American taxpayers should be asking the same question. The official answer is that donor funds are lost to Afghan corruption. But shady Afghans, accustomed to two-bit bribes, are learning how big-bucks corruption really works from the masters of the world.

A fact-packed report issued in June 2005 by Action Aid, a widely respected NGO headquartered in Johannesburg, makes sense of the workings of that world. The report studied development aid given by all countries globally and discovered that only a small part of it - maybe 40% - is real. The rest is “phantom” aid; that is, the money never actually shows up in recipient countries at all.

Some of it doesn’t even exist except as an accounting item, as when countries count debt relief or the construction costs for a fancy new embassy in the aid column. A lot of it never leaves home. Paychecks for American “experts” under contract to USAID, for example, go directly from the agency to their US banks without ever passing through the to-be-reconstructed country. Much aid money, the report concludes, is thrown away on “overpriced and ineffective technical assistance”, such as those very hot-shot American experts. And a big chunk of it is carefully “tied” to the donor nation, which means that the recipient is obliged to use the donated money to buy products from the donor country, even when - especially when - the same goods are available cheaper at home.

[snip]

The Bush administration often deliberately misrepresents its aid program for domestic consumption. Last year, for example, when the president sent his wife to Kabul for a few hours of photo-ops, the New York Times reported that her mission was “to promise long-term commitment from the United States to education for women and children”. Speaking in Kabul, Laura Bush pledged that the United States would give an additional $17.7 million to support education in Afghanistan. As it happened, that grant had previously been announced - and it was not for Afghan public education (or women and children) at all, but to establish a brand-new, private, for-profit American University of Afghanistan catering to the Afghan and international elite. (How a private university comes to be supported by public taxpayer dollars and the US Army Corps of Engineers is another peculiarity of Bush aid.)

[snip]

The criteria by which contractors are selected have little or nothing to do with conditions in the recipient country, and they are not exactly what you would call transparent. Take the case of the Kabul-Kandahar Highway, featured on the USAID website as a proud accomplishment. In five years, it’s also the only accomplishment in highway building - which makes it one better than the Bush administration record in building power stations, water systems, sewer systems or dams.

The highway was featured in the Kabul Weekly newspaper in March 2005 under the headline “Millions wasted on second-rate roads”. Afghan journalist Mirwais Harooni reported that even though other international companies had been ready to rebuild the highway for $250,000 per kilometer, the US-based Louis Berger Group got the job at $700,000 per kilometer - of which there are 389. Why? The standard American answer is that Americans do better work - though not Berger, which at the time was already years behind on another $665 million contract to build Afghan schools. Berger subcontracted to Turkish and Indian companies to build the narrow, two-lane, shoulderless highway at a final cost of about $620,000 per kilometer; and anyone who travels it today can see that it is already falling apart.

[snip]

Is it any wonder that foreign aid seems to ordinary Afghans to be something only foreigners enjoy? At one end of the infamous highway, in Kabul, Afghans complain about the fancy restaurants where those experts, technicians and other foreigners gather, men and women together, to drink alcohol, carry on, and plunge half-naked into swimming pools. They object to the brothels - 80 of them by 2005 - that house women trafficked in to serve the “needs” of foreign men. They complain that half the capital city still lies in ruins, that many people still live in tents, that thousands can’t find jobs, that children go hungry, that schools and hospitals are overcrowded, that women in tattered burqas still beg in the streets and turn to prostitution, that children are kidnapped and sold into slavery or murdered for their kidneys or eyes. They wonder where the promised aid money went and what the puppet government can possibly do to make things better.

At the other end of the highway, in Kandahar city - President Karzai’s home town - and in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan, Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah is reported to have more than 12,000 men under arms and squads of suicide bombers at the ready. They ambush newly arrived NATO troops. The embattled British commander, Lieutenant-General Richards, recently issued a warning: “We need to realize that we could actually fail here.” Article

Under the impetus of dire and immediate need (and clearly extenuating circumstances), ye old scribe has no doubt whatsoever about how this situation should be resolved*. Where do you stand?

*In an instance of active, severe and ongoing civil emergency and devastation, with the official channels and elements of public safety overwhelmed, unavailable or circumstantially unable to respond, the documented commandeering of the vehicle by a citizen to preserve and protect life and safety in the face of immediate peril, in extremis, is the trump card.

As he was acting in the highest interest of the commonweal and, for all intents and purposes (and without the seeking of compensation) in lieu of official agents, any legitimate recompense for damage or loss to the vehicle above and beyond that covered by insurance should be paid out of public funding.

Summary here and here.

Developments in Diwaniyah. Also here.

Sending Gonzales to Iraq to yap about the rule of law is like sending Al Capone to a business symposium to gush over the merits of tax compliance.

Duly noted, the Declaration of Peace.

Restraint is fast wearing thin. Developments here and here and here.

Summary here.

Panic. Frenzy. Disruption. Clampdown. Fear.

Um, never mind, it was just an “unfortunate” diatribe.

…at the same time, five senior British officials said, the suspects were not prepared to strike immediately. Instead, the reactions of Britain and the United States in the wake of the arrests of 21 people on Aug. 10 were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike.

[snip]

While officials and experts familiar with the case say the investigation points to a serious and determined group of plotters, they add that questions about the immediacy and difficulty of the suspected bombing plot cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the public statements made at the time.

“In retrospect,” said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department, “there may have been too much hyperventilating going on.”

[snip]

While the arrests were unfolding, the Home Office raised Britain’s terror alert level to “critical,” as the police continued their raids of suspects’ homes and cars. All liquids were banned from carry-on bags, and some public officials in Britain and the United States said an attack appeared to be imminent. In addition to Mr. Stephenson’s remark that the attack would have been “mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” Mr. Reid said that attacks were “highly likely” and predicted that the loss of life would have been on an “unprecedented scale.”

Two weeks later, senior officials here characterized the remarks as unfortunate.… Article

More here.

Short version: Rummy in the last throes of classic transference.

Prescient then, and more timely than ever.

” The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination…”

[snip]

“…Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties…. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction…. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man….”

[snip]

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.” Source

Haven’t mentioned G. Walker’s misbegotten “faith-based in initiatives” in quite a while. Voila.

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Pratt didn’t mince words. Officials at Iowa’s Newton Correctional Facility had become, he wrote, far too entangled with religion by establishing a special wing for Prison Fellowship’s InnerChange program. InnerChange, Pratt declared, is suffused with religion.

“The religion classes are not objective inquiries into the religious life, comparable to an adult study or college course, offered for the sake of discussing and learning universal secular, civic values or truths,” Pratt wrote. “They are, instead, overwhelmingly devotional in nature and intended to indoctrinate InnerChange inmates into the Evangelical Christian belief system.”

Later in the ruling, Pratt observed, “For all practical purposes, the state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one of its penal institutions, giving the leaders of that congregation, i.e., InnerChange employees, authority to control the spiritual, emotional, and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates. There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates.”

[snip]

On paper, InnerChange was open to any inmate who wanted to take part. The reality on the ground was something else. The program was so saturated with the conservative, biblically literalist form of Christianity favored by Prison Fellowship that members of other faiths found it inhospitable. During the trial, several inmates testified that they found InnerChange impossible to reconcile with their own religious beliefs. Article

Yuppers. (emphasis added)

…President Bush emerged from a meeting and, flanked by advisers – including the secretaries of labor, commerce and the Treasury – announced to reporters, “Things are good for American workers.”

The comment is preposterous.… Article

Welcome aboard. Now let us tell you about the rest of reality.

It’s mentioned far too little, but never, never forget the man behind the man behind the curtain.

As we head into election season, the midterms this November still bode well for putting the brakes on the woebegone G. Walker administration and reviving a regimen of oversight and accountability.

More telling is that the smartest Republican political minds agree. “The issue matrix and political dynamics are not good for us,” says Representative Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican. “Only some big national or international event before the election can change that.”

Bill McInturff, the pre-eminent Republican pollster who sees survey data from all over the country, isn’t any more sanguine. “The national mood is like that of sweep elections,” he says. “People are angry about Iraq, about gas prices, about health care.”

Privately, Republican congressional leaders are bracing to lose 20 to 30 House seats — more than the net 15 gain that Democrats need to take control of that chamber — and to barely hold on to their Senate majority.

[snip]

Even with a slight Democratic majority, the next Congress is likely to be just as stalemated on big issues such as reducing taxes or overhauling entitlement programs like Social Security. With Bush wielding a veto pen, Democrats aren’t going to enact any important domestic initiatives.

The most important difference — and the reason the White House desperately hopes to avoid a Democratic House — will be much more aggressive oversight. With tough lawmakers like Dingell of Michigan and Henry Waxman of California setting oversight agendas, defense contractors such as Halliburton Co., eavesdroppers at the national security and intelligence agencies and anti-environmentalists at the Interior Department will be in for a rough few years. Article

If you are not yet registered to vote, do it now.

If you are eligible to vote but are/will be overseas, you can do it here.

One year later, ye old scribe went back to look at some initial posts on hurricane Katrina and was reminded of this, which merits a re-post.

…the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

[snip]

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness. Citation

Ye old scribe will never understand the mindset that is willing, even eager, to shell out billions to kill, but balks when it comes to spending for help.

Tracking the reining in of mercenaries bill in South Africa posted about here on Aug. 19.

South Africa passed an anti-mercenaries law on Tuesday that could bar thousands of its nationals from working for security companies in global hotspots such as Iraq and in other national armies.

Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota told lawmakers before the bill was passed by an overwhelming majority that one of the intentions of the measure was to stop local mercenaries “subverting democracy” across Africa.

The government wants to stop civilians and former soldiers — many trained in the apartheid army — from fighting or offering security services after South Africans were found to be involved in a number of attempted coups and conflicts in Africa. Article

Satire (but chillingly not far off the mark of the extremist timorous beasties): Science reliance defiance.

Need five grand? Spread your word.

Summaries here and here and here and here.

Chaos abides.

…Often, the only evidence is the bodies discovered in the streets. Several commanders in the Mahdi army said in interviews that they act independently of the Shiite religious courts that have taken root here, meting out street justice on their own with what they believe to be the authorization of al-Sadr’s organization and under the mantle of Islam.

“You can find in any religion the right of self-defense,” said another commander, senior enough to be referred to as the Sheik, who was interviewed separately. Like the others, he lives and works in Sadr City, a trash-strewn, eight-square-mile district of east Baghdad that is home to more than 2 million Shiites. They spoke on condition that their names not be revealed and that specific areas of Sadr City under their control not be identified. Article

Noted in Iraqi media:

Last week’s much touted reconciliation meeting has apparently failed in bid to bring the disparate and warring Iraqi groups together.

Sources close to the meeting described the gathering as “ceremonial”, saying they doubted the parties taking part seriously believed in the reconciliatory and peaceful tone of the words in the final statement.

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Although major Iraqi factions each with separate militia forces were present, the meeting did not include any of the resistance groups which bitterly oppose the presence of foreign troops.

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…the militias are so entrenched that no power in the country, including United States, has the ability to have them disband. Article