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Brennan's Obscene Testimony |
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Saturday, 09 February 2013 09:18 |
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Rothschild writes: "John Brennan tried to elude his questioners at his confirmation hearing as CIA director. On one question after another, he excreted octopus ink to dodge or obfuscate."
CIA Director nominee John Brennan testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Brennan's Obscene Testimony
By Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
09 February 13
 ohn Brennan tried to elude his questioners at his confirmation hearing as CIA director.
On one question after another, he excreted octopus ink to dodge or obfuscate.
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said, "Every American has the right to know when their government believes it's allowed to kill them."
Brennan tried to reassure Wyden that the government is "very disciplined and very judicious" in the way it makes these selections. He also said that the Obama Administration has not stretched to the "outer limits" of its justifications, which was not exactly reassuring.
After a welcome disruption by members of CodePink who denounced him and got ejected from the hearing, Brennan said that there is a "misimpression" and a "misunderstanding" about "the care we take" and - he added obscenely - "the agony we go through" in deciding who to kill. (Compare his "agony" to the agony of the families of the innocent people he's killed with his drones.)
"We only take such actions as a last resort to save lives when there's no other alternative," he said.
Well, then, what about his drone killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, the son of Anwar Al-Awlaki? Was that really a last resort to save lives? Unfortunately, I didn't hear a Senator ask that question.
Nor was Brennan reassuring on full disclosure, responding with classic doublespeak: "We need to optimize transparency and at the same time optimize secrecy."
Brennan also spewed out misinformation about the CIA's history of torture and paramilitary operations, saying that after 9/11, the agency got involved in activities that were "an aberration from its traditional role."
Actually, those activities were not an aberration at all but fully in keeping with what the CIA did in Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s and early 1970s, and what it did in El Salvador and Guatemala in the late 1970s and 1980s, just to name a few examples.
While he denounced and renounced waterboarding, he refused to call it torture.
And he confirmed that "foreign partners" were holding most of the people the U.S. has under interrogation today, and that the CIA is involved in those interrogations, sometimes directly. "The CIA should be able to lend its full expertise," he said.
That "full expertise" includes all sorts of techniques that are banned by the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
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Congress - Not Email - Destroyed the Postal Service |
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Saturday, 09 February 2013 09:15 |
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Tierney writes: "We have allowed the U.S. Congress to control the agency, and for decades - centuries, really - Congress has dictated that the Postal Service operate in ways that are politically useful for members of Congress even though they make no economic sense."
Dennis Carman, president of the letter carriers Branch 100, said the cuts to the Postal Service are not necessary. Organizers said the pending legislation would ultimately end door-to-door delivery. (photo: Andy Morrison/Toledo Blade)
Congress - Not Email - Destroyed the Postal Service
By John Tierney, Salon
09 February 13
The oft-maligned U.S. mail is actually quite well-run. Politicians steered it into the ditch.
 ou know that feeling of pleasure you get when you see someone stand up to a bullying, incompetent boss? It's viscerally satisfying, isn't it?
That's the way I felt this morning when I heard Postmaster General Patrick Donahue announce that the U.S. Postal Service intended to move forward with a plan to stop Saturday delivery of mail, effective sometime in August. In doing so, Donahue stuck his thumb in the eye of the U.S. Congress, the mail agency's ultimate boss. Bravo, Mr. Donahue.
You may think I have incorrectly identified the incompetent party here. After all, it's a deeply ingrained part of Americans' worldview that our postal service is the epitome of inefficiency and bad management, the perfect example of a bungling, poorly run government bureaucracy. That view gets reinforced from all kinds of sources - jaded journalists, editorial cartoonists given more to clichés than to cleverness, free-market economists, and others.
And it's certainly true that the Postal Service faces serious problems. Mail volume is falling. The organization's annual deficits are rising. The postal system is slowly circling the drain. If you pay any attention to postal issues, you're familiar with some of the proximate causes of these problems: Email is eroding first-class mail volume; Congress forces the Postal Service to prefund retirement benefits for employees it hasn't even hired yet; etc.
But the deeper source of the Postal Services woes is the U.S. Congress, not some imagined incompetence on the part of its managers and executives. In fact, the Postal Service is quite well managed and operates as efficiently and effectively as we have any right to expect, given the constraints we have imposed on it. And the main constraint is political: We have allowed the U.S. Congress to control the agency, and for decades - centuries, really - Congress has dictated that the Postal Service operate in ways that are politically useful for members of Congress even though they make no economic sense. In the process, our elected representatives have steered the agency into a ditch.
Back in 1970, Congress dealt with the postal crises of that era by transforming the governing arrangements of the postal system, changing it from an old-line Cabinet department to a quasi-independent government enterprise that would supposedly be free to operate in a more "business-like" fashion, freed of the political constraints under which it had operated since the days of Benjamin Franklin.
But, of course, Congress was preternaturally incapable of keeping its paws off the Postal Service, essentially insisting on maintaining ultimate political control over all important decisions of postal policy.
For decades, postal executives, looking ahead at trend lines that portended financial ruin, have tried to take steps that would put the mail system on a more sustainable footing. They've tried, for example, to pare down the enormous network of tens of thousands of post offices. But when they try to shut down costly, inefficient little post offices at rural crossroads, the local congressperson rises up in indignation, a defender of the local community's "heartbeat."
In the past, when the Postal Service has proposed eliminating Saturday delivery, Congress has quickly stepped in to stay its hand. Even though opinion polls have consistently shown, for at least 30 years, that in excess of 70 percent of the American people would prefer to lose Saturday mail delivery if keeping it would mean faster increases in postal rates (or the demise of the Postal Service), Congress bows down before the power of the National Association of Letter Carriers and other politically influential constituencies (like drug delivery companies and weekly newspapers) that want Saturday delivery.
So, we see in the case of the Postal Service an example of the larger problem of American democracy: Members of Congress are so fixated on getting reelected that rather than serving the will of broad popular majorities, they pay attention to, and heed the wishes of, well-organized interest groups that represent tiny minorities of the population.
This is true across the board, on issues as diverse as gun control, farm subsidies and postal services. To put it baldly, Congress is full of cowards - politicians whose calculus is based on the intensity factor: They cravenly give in to those constituencies or groups that care most intensely about a policy (usually those who benefit from it), and blithely impose costs on the broader public whose members are less attentive or aware of how they're being screwed.
So, when I see Postmaster General Donahue hold a press conference to announce that he intends to eliminate Saturday mail delivery, I cheer him on. He's aware that he probably doesn't have the legal authority to take this step without congressional approval. He probably wanted to stir up a fuss and get the public engaged on all this. After all, efforts to fix the Postal Service's main problems have been kicking around Capitol Hill for many months, with the House of Representatives failing to take any action.
What the postmaster general did today is try to change the "scope of the conflict" over postal policy. He knows that if he expands the audience for the coming conflict over policy - something he surely achieved by his announcement today - he improves the odds of his winning. The underdog or expected loser in a political fight is always wise to try to expand the audience in the hope of changing the result.
He's not likely to win on this. Congress will probably do what it has done on countless other matters of postal policy; it will step in and say "no," its members all the while claiming that they're really looking out for the "public interest" here. Don't you be fooled by it. They'll be looking out for their own interest and that of politically influential organizations like the letter carriers. And the Postal Service will go down the drain.
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A New GOP? Not Yet |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5903"><span class="small">Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Friday, 08 February 2013 14:10 |
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Tomasky writes: "This is the Republican problem. The basic organizing principle of Republican campaigns for 40 years now has been: they are coming."
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at the Capitol, 02/28/12. (photo: Getty Images)
A New GOP? Not Yet
By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
08 February 13
Why it's going to take four more years before Republicans truly hit rock bottom-and begin moving back to the center. By Michael Tomasky.
ou remember the famous Bertolt Brecht line about how the government should just "dissolve the people and elect another"? I keep thinking about it as I read more and more about the Republican attempts at redefinition-Eric Cantor's speech, Karl Rove's new group, Fox's quasi makeover, Marco Rubio's beer with Ben Smith, and so on. They have all these fancy ideas about how to rebrand. But they can have all the fancy ideas they want. They still have an electoral base that sees politics basically as an arena to exact revenge for a series of resentments and grudges. Until they change that, they are stuck-and it isn't happening anytime soon.
Cantor's "Make Life Work" speech Tuesday was more about repackaging than rethinking. He put forward one actually excellent idea, for which I give him credit. He proposed that colleges be required to make public data revealing employment and earning patterns among their graduates. Universities fear this to death, for reasons that education expert Kevin Carey explained in an article in the journal I edit, Democracy, as it could ultimately lead to a reduction in tuition costs.
So I applaud that one. Otherwise, the ideas ranged from OK to largely irrelevant to done before to actively bad. You've got to hold on to your wallet any time a Republican talks about "modernizing" Medicare. Endorsing a path to citizenship for DREAM Act recipients is fine, but small potatoes. It is interesting, though, as E.J. Dionne observed, that Cantor was mostly playing on the Democrats' side of the field, talking about using government to improve people's lives. Noted.
The Rove-Tea Party feud is a joyous thing to watch. Rove, after an utterly disastrous run around the track in 2012, is now suckering people into writing him checks for a new outfit that will allegedly hold the zanies at bay, filter out the Sharron Angles and Richard Mourdocks of the world, and promote electable conservatives.
First of all, I hardly have the words to describe how happy this makes me, after decades of watching conservatives chortle about unelectable Democrats. And second and more to the point, rather than freezing out challengers from the far, far right as intended, this seems almost certain to invite them. There's nothing those people love more than the idea that everyone, even their own party's establishment, is against them. And conservative voters will vote for that.
This is the Republican problem. The basic organizing principle of Republican campaigns for 40 years now has been: they are coming. They've mixed in a little positive stuff. Ronald Reagan did that well, Bush Sr. had his thousand points of light, Bush Jr. his ownership society. But fundamentally Republicans have won elections by telling the white majority that "they" are coming after your money and status and privilege. I was surprised to read in Tom Edsall's latest column, although I should not have been, that the GOP has won the white vote in every election except one going back not to 1980 or 1968, but 1952 (the exception was LBJ's '64 landslide).
Now, Cantor, Rove, and Rubio-sweet reason itself on immigration, or so he tries to be-are signaling in their different ways that it's time to stop playing resentment politics. But they have a base that's seething with resentments, resentments they themselves, Rove in particular, built and nursed going back to Goldwater's time. You can't just undo something like that in one election cycle.
What's coming, therefore, seems pretty obvious. A grand civil war between the rebranders and the dead-enders. The latter will run candidates against the former for Senate and House races in 2014. Those outcomes will be pivotal in setting a tone for 2016. If the rebranders win a majority of races, including the two or three the media eventually identify as somehow symbolic, then maybe they will have the momentum heading into the presidential election and will be able to get the party to coalesce around an electable candidate. (By the way: If this is supposed to be Rubio, let us pause briefly and note that Rubio is on most issues a far-right-wing politician and is almost surely unelectable, provided the Democratic campaign isn't completely idiotic. If it's supposed to be Chris Christie, that's perhaps-perhaps-another matter.)
But if the dead-enders prevail, or pull a draw?
I think the Republican Party right now is like an alcoholic who hasn't yet hit rock bottom. He's not fooling anyone anymore. Everyone's on to him. But he's still holding on to his job by a thread, his wife hasn't yet taken the kids and walked out on him, the cops don't happen yet to have been there as he swerved his way home from his usual bar. He can still, in other words, kid himself. Disaster hasn't struck yet.
In this case, disaster would be losing to Hillary Clinton three years from now. I believe that's what it will probably take to sober the Republicans up; most especially to sober up the base-to make rank-and-file conservatives realize that the age of victory via resentment is gone. That middle Americans who once identified with their grudges are now over them and sick to death of hearing about them. Cosmetic rebranding can't fix this.
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A Recipe for Nonviolent Parenting |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10329"><span class="small">Frida Berrigan, Waging Nonviolence</span></a>
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Friday, 08 February 2013 14:08 |
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Berrigan writes: "Seamus Philip is coming up on seven months old and is learning to use his hands to grab and pull and caress and play."
How do we teach our children to be nonviolent? (photo: unknown)
A Recipe for Nonviolent Parenting
By Frida Berrigan, Waging Nonviolence
08 February 13
 y son has fat little hands - the kind where the knuckles sink in instead of stick out. Seamus Philip is coming up on seven months old and is learning to use his hands to grab and pull and caress and play. He's not going to be operating machinery or doing intricate bead work any time soon, but every day his adeptness grows and he adds fine motor skills.
I look at his hands sometimes and try to imagine what they will be like years and decades from now. These impossibly small and pudgy fingers: Will they grow up and wear a wedding ring? Play the piano? Fill beakers with bright chemicals and noxious compounds? Tickle a new generation of chubby children?
Will his hands know how to tie knots on the high seas? Pump a heart that has stopped beating? Load, aim and fire a gun? Will those hands point that gun at a target, or a deer, or an enemy? Will his hands learn how to paint beautiful nature scenes like Grandmother Liz? Wield a hammer to build a house or an armoire or a bomb shelter? Will his hands grow vegetables? Prune trees? Harden into fists? Weave tapestries? Click computer keys (or will computers even have keys in the future or will they be inside our brains)?
Some of what I can imagine his hands doing makes me happy and misty-eyed and other possibilities terrify me. How do I ensure one outcome and not the other? Can I do that? As a mother, can I write the script of his life? Is Seamus my very own Choose Your Own Adventure tale come to life? No way, man!
That is the worst possible thing to attempt. The harder I tried, the more I would fail.
Can we make him a nonviolent person? His father and I could take a hard line. We could try and control what he is exposed to, shape what he likes, police his interests and make sure nothing we disapprove of gets through. Modern dance instead of football? Contact improv not kung fu? Sesame Street not Transformers? That would be hard, for lots of reasons, not the least of which would be that we would have to come to some sort of agreement about all those things (a whole other layer of nonviolent parenting).
What do we do? We will encourage him to play with blocks and trains instead of Battletanx: Global Assault (that should not be so hard), and make sure that no GI Joes march into our house. But what about cowboys and Indians and pirates and policemen? They could all be violent too, right? We'll shoo him outside and run around in the woods and fields with him as much as possible. We'll show him how to love nature and living things. But exploring nature could include pulling the legs off daddy-long-legs and throwing rocks at squirrels (I did both of those mean things when I was little). We will expose him to music, instruments, melodies, encouraging him to hear and make and feel beauty with his ears and voice and rhythms. But what if the music he ends up loving or making is loud and endless and bone-shaking and teeth splitting? We'll feed his imagination with books and stories and make believe. But what if he heads in a dark direction; dreaming up twisted, strange, magical plots and sharing them endlessly? It made J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman and the Brothers Grimm rich and famous. Would we try and nudge him down safer and brighter brain paths?
What if, what if, what if?
As I try and imagine (and fight the urge to shape) my son's future, a refrain keeps surfacing, a line from a Sweet Honey in the Rock song. "Your children are not your children, they are the sons and the daughters of life's longing for itself." It is a line from a poem by Kahlil Gibran and it is heavy duty wisdom for parents like me - controlling, egotistical, quite sure I am right. It is worth quoting at length. As you read, imagine Sweet Honey in the Rock's rich harmonies and subtle syncopations.
They come through you but they are not from you, and though they are with you, they belong not to you.
You can give them your love but not your thoughts. They have their own thoughts. You can house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You can strive to be like them, but you cannot make them just like you.
Eureka! That is it, right? Strive to be like them! Seamus is warm, loving and expresses what he needs and wants. He is free of artifice, guile and hidden agendas. He has no ego or baggage or insecurity. If I can work to be like him, wouldn't I be a better person? Rather than trying to shape him in my image (good grief, Charlie Brown!), why don't I embrace his boundless wonder and inexhaustible curiosity and hearty appetite for life! That is the answer, or at least part of it. He does have his limitations, though - don't get me wrong. He's not perfect. He spits up a lot, poops in his pants and can't even say please or thank you, yet. So I am not striving for total regression, believe me!
Strive to be like him (in some ways) and try to do what my parents did: provide the tools, impart the wisdom, love and protect the person and let go of the rest. Oh, and never lie.
That is a tall order. But maybe it adds up to a recipe for nonviolent parenting.
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arlier this week, 
