A Recap that Lays It Out Mercilessly

The New York Review of Books comes out twice monthly and its essays are of a longer form by uniformly excellent writers. Most of them are posted on line. The latest edition has an essay by Peter Galbraith, son of the famous economist and presidential adviser John Kenneth Galbraith (of Ontario). Galbraith the younger has a deep background in foreign policy with most of his expertise being in the Balkans and Iraq. In recent years, he has been advising the Kurds in Iraq and has advocated the splitting up of Iraq into three autonomous regions based on ethnicity.

This essay stands back, looks at the Bush "Surge" strategy, and calmly and rationally takes it apart leaving no doubt that it is doomed to fail. Take away the magical thinking and there is nothing left. I can't believe General Petraeus, supposedly the brightest general the military has (per Tom Ricks in his book Fiasco), allowed himself to become the seal of approval for this plan -- an example of selling your soul to the devil if there ever was one. Petraeus was a hero in Fiasco for his enlightened strategies for combating insurgents. No more heroic status for him.

President Bush's plan has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference. US troops are ill prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure Baghdad. They lack police training, knowledge of the city, and requisite Arabic skills. The Iraqi troops meant to assist the effort are primarily Kurdish peshmerga from two brigades nominally part of the Iraqi army. These troops will have the same problems as the Americans, including an inability to communicate in Arabic.

Bush's strategy assumes that Iraq's Shiite-led government can become a force for national unity and that Iraqi security forces can, once trained, be neutral guarantors of public safety. There is no convincing basis for either proposition. The Bush administration's inability to grasp the realities of Iraq is, in no small measure, owing to its unwillingness to acknowledge that Iraq is in the middle of a civil war.

As everyone except Bush seems to understand, Iraq's Shiite-led government has no intention of transforming itself into an inclusive government of national unity. The party that lead Iraq define themselves—and the state they now control—by their Shiite identity For them, Saddam's overthrow and their electoral victory is a triumph for Islam's minority sect that has been 1,300 years in the making and a matter of historic justice. They are no going to abandon this achievement for the sake of a particular Iraqi identity urged by a American president.

One likes to think there is more information at the White house that one just doesn't see that would explain their decisions and actions. No, they just don't see what is plainly in front of them. Barbara Tuchman called it Folly, and we are seeing it and suffering from it again.

"Support Our Troops"

The subject refrain has become the chant of those who continue to support the failed policy of the war. It has already become as empty as the previous, and equally mindless, and now thoroughly discredited slogan, "cut-and-run". But the Bushies have no other point to make. The authoritarianism of the dead-enders leaves them snarling another empty phrase for the lack of any other effective talking points. And so we will hear it again and again.

So how to respond? This lays out the blunt counterpoint of "SAVE our troops". "Support our troops" is dishonest on so many levels -- inadequate armor provided, insufficient troops in the first place, inadequate funding for returning vets, terrible conditions at Walter Reed and other stateside military hospitals, failure to seal the borders of Iraq, failure to guard ammunition stored in Iraq, forcing multiple tours of duty with inadequate rest and refitting, decimated equipment and stores for reserve and regular army units, etc., etc. -- that is bound to become self-evidently a complete joke. Bush will never back out of Iraq, and "save our troops", because he prefers to sacrifice lives and national treasure to "support his ego", not "support our troops":

...the troops remain in Iraq, and will remain there indefinitely absent some Congressional action, in order to send a message that the Republican presidency of George W. Bush is not a failure.

Shameful and Dishonorable

This is another example of the mess we are in. We sure have taken care of those welfare queens. For how long can we continue to increase the spread between the haves and have-nots? What does history show about societies that stomp the poor while the upper classes waste and celebrate? It can't be healthy. It's not American and it certainly is not what make America once great. This is not even in the best interests of the Haves in the long run.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years...

The share of poor Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily over the last three decades. But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown "more than any other segment of the population," according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The Brutal Facts Strike Again

Peter Bergen, one of the authors of this study has been on the news shows for years as a well-recognized terrorism expert. What a mess. The money line from this study:

Our study shows that the Iraq War has generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third.

We are not making the argument that without the Iraq War, jihadist terrorism would not exist, but our study shows that the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of the Al Qaeda ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea....

Our study yields one resounding finding: The rate of terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the average fatality rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks in the post-Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq, the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent respectively.

And even when attacks in both Afghanistan and Iraq (the two countries that together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of deaths since the invasion of Iraq) are excluded, there has still been a significant rise in jihadist terrorism elsewhere--a 35 percent increase in the number of jihadist terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, from 27.6 to 37 a year, with a 12 percent rise in fatalities from 496 to 554 per year.

Here's Your Death Tax for You

I could never believe that the repeal of the Estate Tax actually passed. When you look at it this way, which does not require a great deal of imagination, it is obvious how ridiculous it is. Is there any other term that applies more aptly than GREED?

If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

'nuff said.

A Must See Documentary on Journalism in Baghdad

Not for the faint of heart, but crucial to get a glimpse into what life is like in Baghdad, this documentary is riveting.




It's a bit long, but worth it.

Hiding Billions, Again

AMERICAblog is very good. I check him several times a day if I have a chance because he is very fast and prolific. In this case, his depth is pretty good, too.

The Bushies strike again, deliberately deceiving the public about the true medical costs of caring for the thousands of injured coming back from Iraq. The sourcing here is quite good. Check it out, and, literally, weep.

The Pentagon and the White House know perfectly well how many wounded and injured we have and how much it's going to cost. They're simply lying about the numbers so as to keep the public in the dark, and buck up support for the war. Sure, it screws our injured and maimed vets because there's now not enough money to provide them with the health care they need and deserve.

Clinton: The ultimate narcissist...?

According to J.R. Nyquist ofWorldNetDaily Bill Clinton is a narcissist too:

Every schizophrenic," says Dr. Alexander Lowen, "has an inflated self-image, which is out of touch with reality." Grandiosity, he adds, is itself "an expression of unreality." The narcissist, of course, is saturated with self-grandiosity. And Bill Clinton is no ordinary narcissist. He wants to transcend all limits. Perhaps he has become a soap bubble, floating into the sun.

But all soap bubbles are sure to burst.

Armchair diagnosing can be fun, but a little redundant, and apparetly variable depending on who's in power and what your preferred ideology is.

Another Obvious, Critical Point the Mainstream Press Misses

Frank Rich makes a great point in his Sunday column today in the Times. Rich is really good at putting together timelines and noticing what they say. I won't link to or copy the column since it is long and behind the NYT wall. Here are the key extracts making the point that the whole Iran weapons thing is pure propaganda:

Yet for all the sloppy internal contradictions, the most incriminating indictment of the new White House disinformation campaign is to be found in official assertions made more than a year ago. The press and everyone else seems to have forgotten that the administration has twice sounded the same alarms about Iranian weaponry in Iraq that it did last week.

In August 2005, NBC News, CBS News and The Times cited unnamed military and intelligence officials when reporting, as CBS put it, that “U.S. forces intercepted a shipment from Iran containing professionally made explosive devices specifically designed to penetrate the armor which protects American vehicles.” Then, as now, those devices were the devastating roadside bombs currently called E.F.P.’s (explosively formed penetrators). Then, as now, they were thought to have been brought into Iraq by members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Then, as now, there was no evidence that the Iranian government was directly involved. In February 2006, administration officials delivered the same warning yet again, before the Senate Intelligence Committee....

Iran is an unquestionable menace with an Israel-hating fanatic as its president. It is also four times the size of Iraq and a far more dangerous adversary than was Saddam’s regime. Perhaps Mr. Bush is as reckless as his harshest critics claim and will double down on catastrophe. But for those who don’t hold quite so pitch-black a view of his intentions, there’s a less apocalyptic motive to be considered as well.

Let’s not forget that the White House’s stunt of repackaging old, fear-inducing news for public consumption has a long track record. Its reason for doing so is always the same: to distract the public from reality that runs counter to the White House’s political interests....
We know what Mr. Bush wants to distract us from this time: Congressional votes against his war policy, the Libby trial, the Pentagon inspector general’s report deploring Douglas Feith’s fictional prewar intelligence, and the new and dire National Intelligence Estimate saying that America is sending troops into the cross-fire of a multifaceted sectarian cataclysm.

That same intelligence estimate also says that Iran is “not likely to be a major driver of violence” in Iraq, but no matter. If the president can now whip up a Feith-style smoke screen of innuendo to imply that Iran is the root of all our woes in the war — and give “the enemy” a single recognizable face (Ahmadinejad as the new Saddam) — then, ipso facto, he is not guilty of sending troops into the middle of a shadowy Sunni-Shiite bloodbath after all.

Speculative but Insightful

This is from a psychiatrist who is one of the bloggers on Daily Kos and argues that Bush has a classic case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I'm sure the other side could be argued coherently. One key point:

The most disturbing aspect about narcissists, however, is their pathological inability to empathize with others, with the exception of those who either mirror them, or whom they idealize. Hence Bush's horrifying insensitivity to the Katrina victims, his callous jokes when visiting greivously injured soldiers, and numerous other instances.

Krugman Strikes Again Using McKinsey Report

Krugman's column this morning (all pasted below) takes off on the McKinsey report on health care cited here two days ago. Note the comments I have highlighted. Is our system disfunctional or what?

Is the health insurance business a racket? Yes, literally — or so say two New York hospitals, which have filed a racketeering lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group and several of its affiliates.

I don’t know how the case will turn out. But whatever happens in court, the lawsuit illustrates perfectly the dysfunctional nature of our health insurance system, a system in which resources that could have been used to pay for medical care are instead wasted in a zero-sum struggle over who ends up with the bill.

The two hospitals accuse UnitedHealth of operating a “rogue business plan” designed to avoid paying clients’ medical bills. For example, the suit alleges that patients were falsely told that Flushing Hospital was “not a network provider” so UnitedHealth did not pay the full network rate. UnitedHealth has already settled charges of misleading clients about providers’ status brought by New York’s attorney general: the company paid restitution to plan members, while attributing the problem to computer errors.

The legal outcome will presumably turn on whether there was deception as well as denial — on whether it can be proved that UnitedHealth deliberately misled plan members. But it’s a fact that insurers spend a lot of money looking for ways to reject insurance claims. And health care providers, in turn, spend billions on “denial management,” employing specialist firms — including Ingenix, a subsidiary of, yes, UnitedHealth — to fight the insurers.

So it’s an arms race between insurers, who deploy software and manpower trying to find claims they can reject, and doctors and hospitals, who deploy their own forces in an effort to outsmart or challenge the insurers. And the cost of this arms race ends up being borne by the public, in the form of higher health care prices and higher insurance premiums.

Of course, rejecting claims is a clumsy way to deny coverage. The best way for an insurer to avoid paying medical bills is to avoid selling insurance to people who really need it. An insurance company can accomplish this in two ways, through marketing that targets the healthy, and through underwriting: rejecting the sick or charging them higher premiums.

Like denial management, however, marketing and underwriting cost a lot of money. McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, recently released an important report dissecting the reasons America spends so much more on health care than other wealthy nations. One major factor is that we spend $98 billion a year in excess administrative costs, with more than half of the total accounted for by marketing and underwriting — costs that don’t exist in single-payer systems.

And this is just part of the story. McKinsey’s estimate of excess administrative costs counts only the costs of insurers. It doesn’t, as the report concedes, include other “important consequences of the multipayor system,” like the extra costs imposed on providers. The sums doctors pay to denial management specialists are just one example.

Incidentally, while insurers are very good at saying no to doctors, hospitals and patients, they’re not very good at saying no to more powerful players. Drug companies, in particular, charge much higher prices in the United States than they do in countries like Canada, where the government health care system does the bargaining. McKinsey estimates that the United States pays $66 billion a year in excess drug costs, and overpays for medical devices like knee and hip implants, too.

To put these numbers in perspective: McKinsey estimates the cost of providing full medical care to all of America’s uninsured at $77 billion a year. Either eliminating the excess administrative costs of private health insurers, or paying what the rest of the world pays for drugs and medical devices, would by itself more or less pay the cost of covering all the uninsured. And that doesn’t count the many other costs imposed by the fragmentation of our health care system.

Which brings us back to the racketeering lawsuit. If UnitedHealth can be shown to have broken the law — and let’s just say that this company, which is America’s second-largest health insurer, has a reputation for playing even rougher than its competitors — by all means, let’s see justice done. But the larger problem isn’t the behavior of any individual company. It’s the ugly incentives provided by a system in which giving care is punished, while denying it is rewarded.

Bloggers on Front Page of NYT

This article was on the front page of yesterday's NYT to make the point that the top bloggers are now doing important reporting as well as commentary. Firedoglake used to be one of my favorite blogs. I still check them out, but they became too much advocates and not enough analysts for my taste. This happened during the Lieberman vs Lamont race in Conn. They went off the deep end to me in going after Joe, although frankly, given what he's done since, they were absolutely right about Joe's extremism. Still a touch too partisan for me.

I like Jane Hamsher's writing and thinking especially. Unfortunately, she just underwent surgery for breast cancer for the third time during the beginning of the Libby trial and still joined the team in Washington after missing two weeks.

Highlights from the Times article:

Even as they exploit the newest technologies, the Libby trial bloggers are a throwback to a journalistic style of decades ago, when many reporters made no pretense of political neutrality. Compared with the sober, neutral drudges of the establishment press, the bloggers are class clowns and crusaders, satirists and scolds....

In the courthouse, the old- and new-media groups have mixed warily at times. Mainstream reporters have shushed the bloggers when their sarcastic comments on the testimony drowned out the audio feed. But traditional reporters have also called on the bloggers on occasion to check a quote or an obscure detail from the investigation.

Looking at Health Care Costs a Different Way

This post from Tapped, the very sharp group blog from The American Prospect magazine, summarizes a new study by McKinsey Group titled Accounting for the Cost of Health Care in the United States. It's ugly. The key conclusion: "We pay way too much, and get nothing for it. We pay because most actors in the system seek profits rather than wellness." I haven't read it all yet but the summary is digestible.

Jane Smiley's Latest

Jane Smiley is a major novelist who has been putting up a series of posts at The Huffington Post (a rich if hit-or-miss and sometimes sensationalist site) that are scary and just maybe correct. This one is the latest and is densely packed with ideas, not all of which are convincing, but she does make you think. Here are some highlights.

American soldiers might as well have been wearing signs on their backs saying "shoot me". In their desert camo uniforms, boots, and helmets with goggles, carrying all sorts of equipment, including weapons, of course, and driving in armored, but not sufficiently armored, vehicles, everything about their appearance showed that they did not fit into the local culture; every aspect of their appearance suggested to the local culture that they were alien....

What do people do when those who claim superiority over them don't act in a morally superior way and then show vulnerability? They attack. It's human nature. Iraq may be a multi-front civil war between groups with old enmities, but one thing they have shown themselves (and said themselves) to agree on is that the Americans ought to be attacked....

As a result of the Iraq war, we should thank the Bush administration for demonstrating the futility and cruelty of war as the Pentagon and its contractors have designed it. The Pentagon could have looked around in the fifties and seen that insurgencies were the wave of the future, but they didn't--they invested in something more expensive and more risky, and now we and our children are once again paying the price....

Secular western civilization, in my view, is valuable and worth preserving, but when we "fight for it" in Bush's terms, with contravention of such legal protections as habeas corpus, breaking down the separation of church and state, interference in scientific research for the sake of ideology, or torture, we wreck it ourselves....

Ouch! You can go back and look at her previous posts as well. I, of course, think she is a little over-the-top in her anti-capitalism. One can interpret her critique (as in the previous posts as well) as a valid one of untrammeled, unbalanced capitalism.

Paul Krugman Does It Again

Paul Krugman is the best political columnist, bar none. I can't link to him for you because he is behind the wall for NYT columnists. His columns are usually devastating to administration policies and decisions. What's so especially troubling is the abundance of topics he has to address. Here's today's on Iran in Iraq.

Attacking Iran would be a catastrophic mistake, even if all the allegations now being made about Iranian actions in Iraq are true.

But it wouldn’t be the first catastrophic mistake this administration has made, and there are indications that, at the very least, a powerful faction in the administration is spoiling for a fight.

Before we get to the apparent war-mongering, let’s talk about the basics. Are there people in Iran providing aid to factions in Iraq, factions that sometimes kill Americans as well as other Iraqis? Yes, probably. But you can say the same about Saudi Arabia, which is believed to be a major source of financial support for Sunni insurgents — and Sunnis, not Iranian-backed Shiites, are still responsible for most American combat deaths.

The Bush administration, however, with its close personal and financial ties to the Saudis, has always downplayed Saudi connections to America’s enemies. Iran, on the other hand, which had no connection to 9/11, and was actually quite helpful to the United States in the months after the terrorist attack, somehow found itself linked with its bitter enemy Saddam Hussein as part of the “axis of evil.”

So the administration has always had it in for the Iranian regime. Now, let’s do an O. J. Simpson: if you were determined to start a war with Iran, how would you do it?

First, you’d set up a special intelligence unit to cook up rationales for war. A good model would be the Pentagon’s now-infamous Office of Special Plans, led by Abram Shulsky, that helped sell the Iraq war with false claims about links to Al Qaeda.

Sure enough, last year Donald Rumsfeld set up a new “Iranian directorate” inside the Pentagon’s policy shop. And last September Warren Strobel and John Walcott of McClatchy Newspapers — who were among the few journalists to warn that the administration was hyping evidence on Iraqi W.M.D. — reported that “current and former officials said the Pentagon’s Iranian directorate has been headed by Abram Shulsky.”

Next, you’d go for a repeat of the highly successful strategy by which scare stories about the Iraqi threat were disseminated to the public.

This time, however, the assertions wouldn’t be about W.M.D.; they’d be that Iranian actions are endangering U.S. forces in Iraq. Why? Because there’s no way Congress will approve another war resolution. But if you can claim that Iran is doing evil in Iraq, you can assert that you don’t need authorization to attack — that Congress has already empowered the administration to do whatever is necessary to stabilize Iraq. And by the time the lawyers are finished arguing — well, the war would be in full swing.

Finally, you’d build up forces in the area, both to prepare for the strike and, if necessary, to provoke a casus belli. There’s precedent for the idea of provocation: in a January 2003 meeting with Prime Minster Tony Blair, The New York Times reported last year, President Bush “talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire.”

In the end, Mr. Bush decided that he didn’t need a confrontation to start that particular war. But war with Iran is a harder sell, so sending several aircraft carrier groups into the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf, where a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident could all too easily happen, might be just the thing.

O.K., I hope I’m worrying too much. Those carrier groups could be going to the Persian Gulf just as a warning.

But you have to wonder about the other stuff. Why would the Pentagon put someone who got everything wrong on Iraq in charge of intelligence on Iran? Why wasn’t any official willing to take personal responsibility for the reliability of alleged evidence of Iranian mischief, as opposed to being an anonymous source? If the evidence is solid enough to bear close scrutiny, why were all cameras and recording devices, including cellphones, banned from yesterday’s Baghdad briefing?

It’s still hard to believe that they’re really planning to attack Iran, when it’s so obvious that another war would be a recipe for even bigger disaster. But remember who’s calling the shots: Dick Cheney thinks we’ve had “enormous successes” in Iraq.

THIS is Clear Thinking on Iran's Alleged Meddling

Joshua Micah Marshall casts his clear-eyed gaze on the smoke being generated on Iranian involvement in Iraq. Conclusion: "Iran is a distraction."

This is Dishonor

Doug Feith and the neo-cons have been denying that they ever stove piped unsubstantiated intelligence to the White House saying there was a direct connection between Saddam and Osama. Larry Johnson, a former CIA guy, obliterates these up-is-down-isms.

Incompetent Dogcatchers Running the Country

This post and video was sent to me by Eric. Paul Pilar, the State Department expert on Iraq during the run-up to the war, is visibly disgusted during this testimony. I've seen him before, but never so evidently emotional.

Common Sense in Spades

William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, who was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan has written an op-ed in the Washington Post today that is a solid analysis Iraq and a rough roadmap for getting us the hell out. First, we must admit failure -- it's a brutal fact. Face it and deal with it. It's not hard to do this if it's inevitable. Among other great points are these in particular:

First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly "constitutional" -- meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq....

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation....

We must continue to fight in order to "support the troops." This argument effectively paralyzes almost all members of Congress.... But the strangest aspect of this rationale for continuing the war is the implication that the troops are somehow responsible for deciding to continue the president's course. That political and moral responsibility belongs to the president, not the troops....

Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order [not, impossibly, a "democracy friendly to America"] will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond? Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.

This last point may not be true, but it sounds much more realistic and hard-headed than our current, doomed "objective", particularly since it is self-evident we need, at a minimum, help from all key players to salvage the disastrous situation.

Australian PM Getting Sucked In to the Iraq Mess

TPM posts comments and links to Australian PM John Howard getting into the quicksand of American politics on Iraq. He sounds like Joe Lieberman. Note the stinging comments from Aussie readers.

Gradually Adding Recommended Blogs

I have added two more to the Recommended Blogs list. I'll keep gradually adding to the list, but I want to keep it selective and personal. PBD is posted just once a day, usually between 8 and 9 AM, and links with comments to the most significant progressive issues and blog postings of the previous day and night. Talking Points Memo is one of the longest running blogs and is posted by Joshua Micah Marshall, a well-known professional journalist and very sharp political observer. If he is on an issue, it is sure to be a meaningful one.

Oy!!

What else can you say about this poll of congressmen on the existence of man-caused global warming? How can the overwhelming majority of one of the two major parties in the United States of America in the 21st century have these beliefs? I note in the comments that several of the Repubs hang their vote in the poll on the qualifier "beyond reasonable doubt", but that perhaps reveals more than you might think. Are they cravenly obfuscating and trivializing to pander to their head-in-the-sand constituents rather than responsibly facing up to the problems we are passing on to our grandchildren? And what about the concept of risk? Must the prospect of such a catastrophic phenomenon be 100% certain before action is taken?

Greenwald Eviscerates Gordon of the Times

Glenn Greenwald is one of my favorite bloggers. I think of him as the hardest working guy in blogdom (apologies to the late James Brown) and this posting of his is a good example. He usually posts only once a day, with what he calls "updates" in the ensuing hours, and, being a lawyer, the posts take the form of briefs with multiple citings and references to devastating effect. He does these intensively researched posts while writing books at a now furious rate.

This posting has the bonus of excerpts from Dan Froomkin's list of basic journalistic rules, which are themselves excellent and will now inform anything I read in the press. Froomkin has an always excellent Monday-Friday blog called White House Watch at the Washington Post web site.

I don't understand how the NYT could be so shoddy and "nose-led" on such an important topic. I love the Times and read it every day, but this is inexcusable.

Getting Started

I decided to set up this blog when suddenly the theme of it popped into my head. It is the dishonor of the Republicans in power that continues to astound and confound.

Consider the formal definition of honor in the sense that I mean:

Honor: a keen sense of ethical conduct : integrity, "wouldn't do it as a matter of honor" b: one's word given as a guarantee of performance, "on my honor, I will be there"

I do not at this point want to engage in an analysis of why these people are like this. This blog will instead focus on examples and particularly sharp analyses of just what the hell is happening.