We Can’t “Train” Our Way Out Of Afghanistan

According to a BBC news report, last week in Kabul “an American service member and an Afghan police officer got into an argument because the American was drinking water in front of the Afghan police, who are not eating or drinking … because of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan … (The policeman) shot the American and seriously wounded him, while other American troops responded by seriously wounding the (policeman).”

This depressing vignette spotlights the problem for American troops in Afghanistan. And it shows the problems Afghans have with ignorant foreigners whose boorish insensitivity would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.

A perceptive American military officer told The Washington Post that “Having US troops enforcing martial law where they don’t understand the people or speak the language — this is a recipe for disaster.” Quite so, although using the phrase “martial law” is a bit disconcerting.

The same applies to training the Afghan army and police, a key component of Pres. Obama’s escalation. Training and “mentoring” of Afghan troops and police by Americans – lush with shades of Vietnam-era condescension – won’t work and we can’t “train” our way out of the country.

Sounds Like “Stripes”

To begin with, along with the US Army, training is conducted by different nations, none of which use similar methods. Indeed, NATO and troops from other nations don’t have compatible rules of engagement, communications or logistics systems, equipment, command structures or domestic political pressures. NATO and the “International Security Assistance Force” have some 65,000 troops there. About half are American, but more than 30,000 other US troops operate under entirely US command, having nothing to do with NATO.

To say this is fucked-up is being polite. Here are the lordly superior nations of the West, intent on bringing law, order and clean government to Afghanistan – a land where none of the three has ever existed – and they do not have a single headquarters responsible for commanding all military operations.

If a young captain at West Point proposed such a structure in a term paper, he would flunk out of the academy. It all sounds like a scene from the Bill Murray and Harold Ramis film, Stripes. Except Stripes was a comedy and we’re talking about the real world.

There is no overall Mission Statement for the 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan. As the war intensifies, it is likely that national contingents now operating in comparatively safe areas will be subjected to action by warlords, Taliban, drug barons and other criminal thugs. If this happens – and we’re beginning to see some of it already in the previously peaceful north – there will be even more chaos.

Fiasco Looms

The US says that training soldiers is the responsibility of the Afghan army with our assistance. True, as far as it goes. But at least six countries are involved in training Afghans, a surefire recipe for confusion. So last April, realising that the training process had failed, NATO announced it would create a Training Mission with “a single commander for both the US-led Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan and the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan.”

Good luck trying, but it won’t work. What is needed is a stand-alone training system that could be designed in detail by a competent major in about a week.

One reason the US Army is so good is because all recruits are functionally literate and speak English, along with whatever other language they may know. The dedication and ingenuity of their instructors is utterly amazing. The logistics system is, for the most part, staggeringly efficient. A former Army drill sergeant once told me about one of his fresh-faced recruits with size 16 feet who showed up at basic training. The Army doesn’t stock size 16 boots so the quartermaster phoned the boot supplier; two pairs arrived the next day.

Afghanistan doesn’t have supply lines efficient enough to deliver food around the country, let alone a constant stream of goods and ammunition to troops in remote outposts.

Beyond supplies, it takes at least a year to produce a reasonably efficient soldier — and that’s with an almost perfect system. It would be criminal to ask a soldier to hazard his or her life before they were competent.

But Afghan army training is only 10 weeks, and 90% of recruits are illiterate. Worse, they seldom speak the same language as either their peers or the foreigners instructing them. Afghan instructors are keen but barely effective. US and other foreign instructors may be good but most are depressingly ignorant of Afghanistan’s language, culture and customs. Moreover, with a desertion rate of 25%, the country’s troops and police have a turnover rate that would cripple even the best training regimen.

Fighters Diverted To Training

It’s reported that, as part of Obama’s surge, one brigade of the 82nd Airborne will be deployed to serve as trainers. But the 82nd Airborne is a regular Army brigade trained hard and tough to fight; unit members are not trained to train.

What a farce.

The training system in Afghanistan won’t work, nor will the absurdly complex new command arrangements being put in place. For example, there will be a “new ISAF Upper Command Structure, (which) will consist of a higher operational Headquarters, ISAF HQ commanded by a 4-star General, and a subordinate 3-star HQ called ISAF Joint Command (IJC) HQ. Both will be located in Kabul …” And so on.

In a marvellous piece of military speak, another bulletin announces that “COMIC-J (emphasis mine) will be exclusively a NATO Commander, as opposed to COMNTM-A who will be double-hatted as NATO/ISAF Commander and Commander of the US-led Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A).”

COMIC? I couldn’t make it up. But it’s all too real, if barely believable.

Heaven help Afghanistan, our soldiers sent to fight and die there for no good reason, and the rest of us.

UPDATE 8: Goofy Sarah Gets Punked - Again

Once again, Sarah Palin got punked by a comedian.

This time, "reporter" Marg Delahunty - played by Mary Walsh - of Canada's long-running social and political satire show This Hour Has 22 Minutes tries to interview Sarah Palin at a book signing in Ohio.



So she's advocating repealing the "socialist" Canadian healthcare system and replacing it with a system that works so well in the US?

Hey, Sarah: Donchaknow your plane flies over Canada on the way to Wasilla?

h/t to Denis Campbell at The UK Progressive.

Obama’s Afghan Box Canyon

Anyone who’s been to Afghanistan knows that its eastern mountains bordering Pakistan are filled with countless box canyons from which the only way out is the same way you came in. They’re deadly – Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire in this nightmarish geography – because it’s easy for insurgents to rain RPGs, mortars and small arms fire down on soldiers who never see what’s coming or from where it’s coming.

Thanks to George Bush’s seven years of neglect, Pres. Obama finds himself in just such a deadly box canyon in Afghanistan, militarily, politically and financially. Tomorrow night, he’ll lay out a strategy to do the nearly impossible: Outline a way out without getting out or getting trapped.

Carefully leaked snippets of what he’ll say at West Point are telegraphing that he won’t agree that the best way out of Afghanistan is to leave. So, we’re likely to hear some new version of the old version of the story.

Beyond Bush, a good measure of Obama’s dilemma is that someone high up in the Pentagon or working on Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s staff in Kabul leaked his troop proposals to The New York Times and other reporters and then gave a public speech in London touting his views while the president was still forming an overall strategy; the speech earned the general a face-to-face dressing down from Obama on Air Force One as it sat on the ramp in Copenhagen after the president’s appearance at the Olympic Selection Committee. McChrystal got off easy because Harry Truman fired Douglas Macarthur for doing pretty much the same thing over Korea.

A combination of the leaked memo and McChrystal’s telling the Institute of International and Strategic Studies that a scaled down policy favoured by Vice President Joe Biden would lead to "Chaos-istan" narrowed Obama’s options. It gave Republicans a chance to scream “Listen to your general!” while allowing the left to accuse the president of opening the door to another Vietnam quagmire.

Even Bill Moyers – who was present at the creation of Lyndon Johnson’s mess – is expressing strong reservations. Besides announcing his retirement, Moyers devoted an entire Journal episode a week ago to a detailed recounting of how LBJ spent more time “listening to his generals” than to thoughtful people such as Senators William Fulbright and Richard Russell or newspaper publisher John Knight who, while recognising the domestic political risks, were telling the president Vietnam was a mistake, we should get out because Americans would be fighting for a decade and 50,000 soldiers would be killed.

How sadly prescient Fulbright, Russell, Knight, Sen. Wayne Morse and others were in 1965.

Military Debacle

As Danny Schechter wrote at Media Matters a few days after Moyer’s broadcast his cautionary warning, “The parallels with the present day, and the upcoming decision by President Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan, are unmistakable and undeniable.”

As did LBJ in 1965, today the words “winning” and “finishing the job” and “fighting terrorists” creep into nearly every discussion of Afghanistan. Politicians, so-called military experts, reporters, pundits, talking heads, Dick Cheney, and loudmouth idiots insist upon looking at the war through a cracked prism, one that sees Bullets Over Broadway as the only possible, logical outcome if we don’t throw everything we’ve got into a fight in Khandahar.

The fact is, there’s a military debacle awaiting Obama behind every boulder.

“Whether Obama can 'finish the job' in Afghanistan depends on what he defines the job as,” Juan Cole wrote at Informed Comment, his authoritative blog on the Middle East and South Asia. Cole continues, “If it is to build a 21st century Afghan state and crush the Taliban and other Muslim political movements in the Pashtun areas, then I am extremely skeptical. If it is to prop up a shaky … Afghan government and military before pulling out, then his odds of success, while still bad, do rise.”

Pres. Obama will reportedly send 4,000 military trainers as part of the escalation. He could send 40,000 and it wouldn’t make any difference. There are widely published reports that desertion rates in the Afghan army runs at 25% and illiteracy rates among soldiers is roughly 90%.

How can a soldier be taught to stand and fight when they can’t read the manual that explains how to load a magazine cartridge into their rifle or clean the damn thing?

Moreover, soldier’s pay is low: Much lower than the $5 a day farmers, who are mostly non-political but whose families are starving, get paid by various insurgents for planting a roadside bomb or two before disappearing into the countryside. And, for the most part, working part-time for an insurgent group is a whole lot safer than being a semi-trained, illiterate, uniformed solider going into battle under corrupt leadership.

Regardless of the President’s strategy, there is disaster awaiting American, Canadian and NATO troops. Just ask Alexander the Great. Genghis Khan. The British. The Soviets.

Political Nightmare

There could be as much of a disaster awaiting Obama at home, where he hasn’t come across as fighting for serious health care reform, more interested in getting one or two Republican votes than in fulfilling a major campaign promise.

“It is extremely dangerous for him to go on alienating his base, which wants peace and prosperity,” Dr. Cole predicts, “with policies that make rightwing Republicans happy – coddling bankers in a jobless recovery and escalating an eight-year-old, increasingly unpopular war. The rightwing Republicans will vote for these in Congress but blame Obama for them, and benefit from Democratic disillusionment in 2012.”

Obama is in the same box canyon politically as he is militarily.

If he doesn’t send more troops, the deadly stalemate will continue and the GOP will have an election issue that could draw independents and moderate Republicans back into the fold.

If he sends more men and women to fight and die in Afghanistan, he won’t have any greater success at stabilising the country yet many Democrats and most progressives will feel betrayed again. Although Obama may enjoy a brief up-tick in poll numbers after his talk, as soon as larger numbers of American bodies come home in flag-draped coffins, and Walter Reed fills up again with the damaged bodies and minds of soldiers whose lives have been ruined, the country will turn against what it thought, in November, 2009, was a good idea.

Blank Checks

Even worse, the GOP will seize on the cost of escalating the war – which is something like $1-million per soldier per year – as an excuse to cut much-needed social programs at home: The public option, education, jobs, rebuilding infrastructure, converting to a greener economy, dealing with climate change, all will suffer as a result.

Moreover, fiscally conservative Democrats in Congress – of which there are far too many – will join in, effectively blocking what sound economists such as UC-Berkeley’s Dr. Robert Reich and Princeton’s Nobel Prize winning Dr. Paul Krugman – among many others – demonstrate is a much-needed additional stimulus to bring down the nation’s unholy unemployment and underemployment numbers, noting that current debt levels can be dealt with later because low bond rates show the market isn’t worried about how much the US owes.

As recently as Monday morning, Krugman wrote in his New York Times column a major new jobs programme is needed, warning that while “(a)ll of this would cost money, probably several hundred billion dollars … (b)ut has to be weighed against the high cost of inaction in the face of a social and economic emergency.”

The question is whether Congress would support such a programme. The House might but it’s likely to get bottled up in the Senate – along with nearly 1,000 other measures the House passed this year but the Upper House has yet to discuss.

Meanwhile, Obama is stuck trying to find his way out of a box canyon that, first, Bush’s neo-cons and, more recently, Gen. McChrystal led him into without getting another 3,000-to-5,000 Americans killed as needed programmes at home go wanting.

The Spirit Of Thanksgiving

Even after 19 years of living in Canada, it seems odd not to be gorging myself on a food fest the last Thursday in November at the start of a four day holiday.

Fortunately, Wednesday Addams reminds all of us of the true meaning and history of Thanksgiving.



h/t to Paul Krugman

Like Leaves, Life Always Drifts Back To Earth

By this time last November, I’d already wrenched my back shovelling. Twice. But this year, November in Toronto feels like May. Of course, May felt like March and August like late October so maybe it’s all just evening out.

It’s been in the 50s and 60s – called “double digits” in Canada, which insists on using the totally unfathomable Celsius thermometer – and sunny since Halloween. Knowing that such warm weather this late is like living on borrowed time, my dog and I are taking full advantage, spending afternoons in a nearby off-the-leash park. Prince, a Golden Retriever I adopted a few years ago, romps, stomps and rock-n-rolls with assorted friends – some familiar, some new, but to dogs it doesn’t make any difference and they greet all comers without prejudice. Finally, he hauls his tail over to where I’m sitting on a bench in the sun and lays down, panting, smiling and utterly exhausted.

He rests there contentedly, his white fur flecked with red and orange and brown bits of dried leaves, looking up at me every so often as if saying, “Thanks, pop, that was way too much fun!” If a buddy dashes over for more, all Prince has the energy to do is roll on his back, legs flailing at the air while making gentle, throaty sounds of joy as he plays mouth games with the other pooch. When the dog runs off to find a more active and eager buddy, Prince is content to let them go. At nine, he knows his limits; once he lies down, that’s it.

I know mine, as well, and it’s time for me to lie down.

I know this because, along with incredible weather, November brought me both a birthday and a report from the latest round of medical tests I underwent that had been administered by a long line of anonymous Torquemada’s dressed in identical white coats and pale blue scrubs some 10 days earlier. My cancer is back for a return engagement.

I’ve decided not to undergo more treatment. After I’ve-lost-track of how many rounds of chemo and radiation, plus a bit of surgery stuck in there someplace, enough’s enough. After thinking about it seriously, I’m not going to submit to months of feeling lousy – I mean really lousy – during treatment again only to be told six months later I need more treatment. I’ve heard “… and this should take care of it” one too many times to believe it anymore.

Naturally, my oncologist was beside himself and sent me off to see a hospital social worker. It was a pleasant enough exchange but not so pleasant I want to have another one. I did talk about this at length with my psychiatrist, who sometimes calls himself Flapping Lips, and while urging me to reconsider, he admits he doesn’t know what he’d do if he were in my situation and had lived my life.

I’ve had a great time during big chunks of that life.

When I was only seven, Warren Spahn taught me how to throw a baseball in the outfield grass at the old Milwaukee County Stadium before a Braves’ game. I couldn’t have learned from anyone better: Spahn went on to win more games than any left-handed pitcher in Major League history – a record he still holds today, decades after he retired from the game – and is in the Hall of Fame.

At one time or another, my work took me all over the world. I’ve been to all of Western Europe, much of Eastern Europe, China and Asia, and parts of Africa and South America. I've eaten dinner in the Eiffel Tower, stood in Red Square, played with a lion cub in a South African game preserve, walked on the Great Wall, watched jade traders at a street corner market on a Kowloon backstreet in Hong Kong, seen the sun rise on Bali and set over Phuket. There’s an elegant Chinese expression that, translated inelegantly, says "The same man does not return from a journey as the one who departed on it." I think it is true of all types of journeys and not just those involving travel.

I’ve lived in six great cities in two countries, absorbing bits of each along the way ranging from how I pronounce some words to a more expansive view of the world, and life, and me.

I’ve enjoyed five fairly distinct and generally successful careers; along the way, I was employed by only one place that I detested so thoroughly I couldn’t wait to get out.

I’ve met four US presidents, one in the Oval Office, and two Canadian Prime Ministers. I spent some fascinating time with two different men who played major roles in changing the face of Eastern Europe, and several days with a Chinese premier who turned his nation into the coming economic powerhouse of the 21st century before retiring. I’ve dined with authors, artists, playwrights, actors and artisans.

I’ve also met and written about the downtrodden, the helpless, the throwaway people who lost when life rolled the dice for them. In a few cases, what I wrote brought them to the attention of others who were able to help them turn things around, if even just a bit and for a little while.

I’ve seen the positive glow of pride and self-accomplishment that came into the eyes of more than two dozen adult illiterates I helped learn to read for the first time in their life.

And, since I fancy myself something of a writer, I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with a number of them, often on airplanes and typically by accident.

I met Hunter Thompson just this way: The computer assigned us adjacent seats. I seem to be blessed with a peculiar kind of karma with airlines; flights are usually late and the service minimalist, but computers keep plunking me next to wonderful writers. Besides Thompson, over the years I’ve sat next to David Cornwall - John Le Carre - on a flight from London to Paris, Jimmy Breslin on the Boston-New York shuttle and Margaret Atwood from Toronto to somewhere, among others. All were engaging travel companions.

(Of course, it also works the other way ‘round: On a dreadfully long, non-stop flight to Tokyo from Toronto, I endured 14 hours next to an ageing academic who had the pungent aroma of old cheddar cheese and even older moth-balls about him. He had just published a scholarly article on Nietzsche. The premise, he explained in excruciating detail as we crossed the Pacific, was that the brooding, ominous German philosopher’s ideas still can be found underlying many mainstream political theories. Oh, good: The Boys From Brazil are alive and well and having fun in capitals everywhere.)

I’ve covered one war, two major civil insurrections over war, race and poverty in America during the late 60s and early 70s, and three presidential campaigns that ended up being turning points in American history.

A raft of activists, actresses, models, centrefolds, musicians and an actual heiress called me boyfriend at one time or another. So have writers, businesswomen, scholars, shop girls, secretaries, a couple of lawyers and a few single moms.

Ten dogs and one cat have graciously allowed me to share my home and life with them.

On the other hand, parts of my life were overwhelming and deeply disappointing.

None was more so than my sister dying 10 years ago. As hard as it can be to lose parents, one has time to prepare if they live their three score and 10 or more. I saw mine age, lose the ability to do things for themselves that they always took for granted, attended funerals for their friends. But there was no way prepare for watching Janice go from healthy to dead in 11 weeks, of brain cancer. Her loss affected me profoundly, and still does in some ways.

There was a pair of short, disastrous marriages; countless ill-starred, putative relationships with women; one suicide attempt. I was 16 and a sophomore at university, thwarted only because Mr. Donaldson – our retired neighbour across the alley – happened to be awake at two or three o’clock that morning and saw me go into the garage behind our house on Logan Avenue. He was sitting in his darkened kitchen having coffee. Who drinks coffee at three ayem if they’re not working the night shift?

I don’t regret not having children but I do regret never hearing a woman say “I love you” to me and actually mean it. Once, it would have been nice.

I’ve made horrid choices in women, to the point where, sometime in the early 1990s, a friend from my Chicago days recommended that “the next time you meet someone who’s interested in you, run away!” It took another 10 years but I finally realised she was correct and stopped dating altogether. I’m not sure what took so long; maybe it’s living proof of the triumph of hope over experience. Experience finally won.

Experience with my ex-wives contributed but only partly. There also was Elise, the world’s best juggler who managed to hide her fiancé from me - and, I assume, me from her intended - until a week before her wedding; Louisa, the wacky wop; Jacquelyn, the drunken skater; Barbara, the dark creature from hell; Amanda, the bi-coastal bi-sexual who had a boyfriend in New York (me) and a girlfriend in LA; Grace, who was anything but; Holly and Riba and Sera, all of whom thought men were simply gold cards attached to a life support system.

And people wonder why I haven’t asked anyone out for so much a glass of wine since 2003.

Or why I feel disconnected from the world, especially now as my medical situation stares at me blankly, an expressionless reality that has more fight left in it than I have remaining in me.

So it goes.

Death will be patient, if I let it. No oncologist worth the Hippocratic oath will tell a cancer patient how much time they have left because, frankly, they don’t know and the really good ones admit they don’t know. Cancer is an intelligent and clever disease, capable of thwarting brilliant human talent and crackling machines worth millions of dollars. In my case, I’m told, one cell hiding somewhere in my body, invisible to even the most sophisticated of diagnostic tools, is sitting there throwing off cancerous cells that go directly to my colon.

Thus, should I undergo yet another round of debilitating chemo and enervating radiation, that hidden, little cell will lay in wait in some dark, moist place inside me until I’m pronounced “clear” and then start its dirty task all over again.

There doesn’t seem to be much point in playing medicine’s game another time.

Sorry to tell you this Chuck Grassley and Sarah Palin and Virginia Fox and Glenn Beck and the rest of the Teabaggers and people who think the richest nation on earth is doing just fine having one-third of its population uninsured or underinsured: The only death panel is the one inside each of us.

I’ll keep working and writing as much and as well as I can for as long as I can. When I think the time has come, then Prince, Sparky – my 10 year old cat of unknown and highly suspect origins – and I will cross the Rainbow Bridge and go together into the great void, returning to cosmic dust.

This appeared originally at QOR, a site that carries my work and whose contributors discuss culture, and modern life and living in words, images and music.

The Remake Of Pelham 1-2-3: Why So Many Movies Today Are So Lousy

I just saw The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 remake so I could better understand the inevitable sequel, The Putting Back of Pelham 1-2-3 Right Where It Belongs, and to compare it with the 1974 original, which spelled out the numbers in the title because audiences had longer attention spans back then.

The original, done in the pit of New-York-as-Hell era of filmmaking, was a crackling film packed with sturdy performances: Walter Matthau as the Bassett Hound subway dispatcher who deals with the hijackers; Robert Shaw as a steely-nerved soldier of fortune; Lee Wallace as a whiny, flu-plagued Mayor Ed Koch. But the real star was New York: Grim, shabby, broken, peeling. It looked like it smelled of uncollected garbage and bum’s socks.

Yet the movie was great. Everyone loves a crisp heist-and-caper flick, especially when you don’t know how the crooks will escape – or get caught. Add seasoned actors who knew how to inhabit a role and a director who lets the story tell the story instead of some jacked-up FX computer monkey doing it in the edit suite, and you had a superb, edgy film.

The remake is noisy, hyperactive, bright and incessantly vulgar.

We know the bad guy is bad ‘cause he shouts "Fucker!" frequently and "Motherfucker!" even more often. No, hold on; the good guys say that, too. Well, the bad guy is bad because he's an unhinged killer with a gripe, which is much more theatrical than Robert Shaw's deadly menace. With John Travolta, you know you're getting the former heart-throb, greased-up dance master, in his "I love being bad" persona first displayed in Pulp Fiction. After only a few scenes, we look forward to his death. You wanted Robert Shaw to get caught; you want Travolta to get shoved under a train.

But that's just part of the horror. Tony Scott is a hyperactive director who cannot hold a shot anymore than a frat boy can hold liquor; his enthusiasm sloshes and staggers and gets the spins, hurls left and right and up and down, and bears no resemblance to reality.

It exhausts, it annoys. It seems afraid to do anything else. By comparison, Transformers is The Sorrow and the Pity.

I just curled up in a ball and waited for the punches to stop.

UDPATE 7: Reviewing Goofy Sarah’s Goofy Book

Thanks to a friend at an on-line book seller, on Friday morning a courier delivered a preview copy of Going Rogue, Sarah Palin’s latest gyration in her bizarre, on-going odyssey into fringe folk-lore, self-promotion, and an increasingly pathological need to keep yelling “Look at me! Look at me!” like a whiny eight year old trying to get attention in a room full of grown-ups.

“If anyone else had written this,” read a note from my friend that I found in the envelope, “they’d be shipped off to a shrink and put on heavy meds. Instead, Palin is getting rich. Life’s not fair!”

The book is as unevenly written and, in parts, mysteriously unfathomable as Palin herself – despite having wordsmithing help from a sub-editor of an evangelical religious magazine. For example, the very first paragraph of the book includes a sentence declaring, “I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.”

Huh? I hope publisher Harper-Collins didn’t pay ghost-writer Lynn Vincent much money for whatever it is Vincent did with Palin’s text.

More to the point, beyond turning on the same McCain campaign that plucked her from obscurity and propelled her to the infamy that led to a $5-million advance for her memoirs, Going Rogue reinforces the well-earned perception of The Wicked Witch of Wasilla as so devoutly anti-intellectual, so thoroughly uncurious about the world, and so totally convinced that the fake blue collar image of her life means she knows all there is to know and only God knows all the rest, as to make her popularity among the remains of the Republican Party truly frightening.

Sadly, the book only increases her appeal to that very base of the shrinking GOP while leaving moderate Republicans, independents and anyone else who actually thinks about things out in the Alaskan cold.

Payback Time

Aside from the snippets of her life in Alaska – much of it true, some of it clearly part of the carefully-crafted storyline created about her by Palin’s handlers in the McCain campaign – the book is mostly a loosely-linked chain of self-aggrandizing, petulant slams at McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt and a handful of other professional pols who were trying to get their ticket elected against very long odds.

She comes across as an eager player in a blame game – something she’s been doing ever since high school, according to published accounts of people who’ve known her since her prom queen days.

Equally important, she polishes her campaign persona of “hockey mom” triviality. She confesses to being unfamiliar with the Middle East, the Iraq war, Afghanistan or Islamic politics. “I knew the history of the conflict,” she writes at one point, “to the extent that most Americans did.”

Oh? Better tell that to Rush Limbaugh, who claims Going Rogue is one of the best policy books he’s ever read. I gather this means what it implies: He doesn’t read many policy books.

And, anyway, “most Americans” don’t want to be vice president of the United States and aren’t manoeuvring to become a major party’s nominee for president next time around.

Just as astonishing, Palin argues without explanation that “there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.”

Anti-Everything

Palin writes that she and Todd are perfect to represent America’s Joe Six-Packs because that’s who they are themselves.

“We know what it’s like to be on a tight budget and wonder how we’re going to pay for our own health care, let alone college tuition,” she boasts. “We know what it’s like to work union jobs ... We felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

One problem: The very economic policies she touts in the book, at her Facebook page, when she Twitters little nothings in the ears of her followers, and on the stump during the campaign have been killing union jobs and ordinary Americans since the days of Ronald Reagan.

Elsewhere, she writes about creationism, proudly confessing that she doesn’t hold truck with “the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” She knows as much about anthropology as she knows about the Middle East: Monkeys climbed into trees first, before learning to walk upright. Oh, and studies have shown that nearly all primates are “thinking, loving beings.”

But to Palin, God is in charge of everything in her life, a sort of personal concierge. “My life is in His hands,” she testifies. “I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”

I doubt whether Palin knows it, but that statement is the best argument I’ve read to support atheism. Surely, a caring, loving, all-knowing and all-seeing God would never give a Sarah Palin such a platform so there's almost a prima facie case that a God doesn't exist.

RedState.com’s Erick Erickson’s Head Officially Explodes

It was bound to happen sooner or later to poor Erick Erickson.

He runs the right-wing fringe website RedState.com and, after 10 months of increasingly pulsating throbs like a character in an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon with every move the Obama Administration has made, Friday morning his head absolutely exploded.

Why?

Because the Obama Administration has the audacity to return America to the rule of law abandoned by George Bush, Dick Cheney and their henchmen. Instead of a kangaroo court at Gitmo, the Justice Dept. will have Khalid Sheik Mohammad and four co-defendants in New York standing trial in federal court on terrorism charges relating to his role in planning and plotting 9/11.

In a frantic, fear-mongering, mass e-mail sent Friday morning, Erickson screams out his warning:

“In that trial, the terrorist will get all the rights afforded an American citizen in a criminal trial, (emphasis his) including the right to a fair trial, the right to a taxpayer funded attorney, the right to review all the evidence against him, potentially including classified intelligence matters, the right to exclude evidence against him including, potentially, any confession obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, etc.”

In other words, Erickson is aghast that an American president will use the American legal system and American rules of evidence to prosecute people who broke American laws.

In RedState’s view, apparently, Mohammad should have an unfair trail governed by no lawyers representing him, keeping secret evidence against KSM so it can’t be used in his defence, and prosecutors should use information obtained through torture.

That’s the true American way, according to this goofball who seems to have as solid an understanding of the Constitution, US laws and treaties, as those great legal scholars from the Bush era, John Yoo and Jay Bybee.

Uhm, I remember seeing videos of Osama bin Laden and several al-Qaeda spokesmen publicly stating after Sept. 11 that the group wants to destroy everything America stands for. Well, it seems Erickson is all in favour of letting the terrorists have their way, going so far as to demand Washington finish the job those four groups of highjackers started by destroying the rule of law.

Shouting Not To Be Heard

Before urging recipients to call members of Congress to object to bringing KSM or any of his cohorts to the US, Erickson dips into the bizarre.

“At best, this will be a show trial fit not for the American Republic, but a third world kleptocratic totalitarian regime. At worse, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will gain access to classified material he can then leak to other terrorists while New York yet again becomes a target for terrorists. We have already had occasions in this country where terrorists' sympathetic lawyers have conveyed information, orders, and plans to other terrorists.”

Not only does Erickson not understand the principles underlying America and its system of laws, he’s busy trying to rewrite history.

The Gitmo tribunals sent up by Donald Rumsfeld at the urging of Dick Cheney met the very definition of “show trial.” Clearly, Erickson hasn’t read much history of the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1930s, Josef Stalin’s frequent purges kidnapped hapless victims before dragging them in front of rigged courts after being tortured in the Lubyanka’s cellars. For good measure, they could neither see any evidence against them, question state witnesses or mount an actual defence before being either shot or sent to die in Siberian forced labour camps.

This is what Erickson thinks the US should emulate?

While I’m sure that calling Obama’s decision one that would be made in a “third world kleptocratic totalitarian regime” managed to rouse his readers – if they know what he meant – Erickson should have checked dictonary.com before using such big words. There are two definitions:

Klep-toc-ra-cy – [klep-tok-ruh-see]
noun, plural -cies

A government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal; rule by a thief or thieves.

A government characterized by rampant greed and corruption.

While this sort of behaviour was not just tolerated but rampant during the Bush years – in Washington, on Wall St., at outfits like Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater, and among defence contractors – so far, Pres. Obama hasn’t shown much tolerance for thievery.

Instead, he and the Democratic Congress increased spending for veterans by the largest amount in history. He’s working to bring health care to the one-quarter of the population who are either uninsured or underinsured and impose some semblance of rules on the health insurance cartel. He’s urging Congress to pass legislation that will allow workers to vote in secret ballots to form a union without management peering over their shoulders taking notes and naming names. He’s sort-of started cracking down on kleptocratic defense contractors who stole billions from the Treasury during Bush’s reign of error. Democrats in Washington are trying to re-impose rules on a resistant financial services industry rules to both level the playing field and give consumers a break.

Who’s Taking A Leak?

Finally, Erickson has his boxers all in a bunch because, he insists, a trial will make New York a target for more terrorist attacks and because KSM will see classified evidence that he will then leak to other terrorists.

Alas, dear Erick sees only red when the world is a bit more shaded than he wants to admit.

For openers, Erickson out-does even his own wing of the Republican Party in hyperbole by declaring there have been “occasions” – which was once – when “terrorists' sympathetic lawyers have conveyed information, orders, and plans to other terrorists.” Actually, one lawyer passed a personal message to an acquaintance of a defendant she was representing. No information. No secrets. No plans. And there was no evidence that the person who received the note was a terrorist, only that they happened to be of Middle Eastern origin and a Moslem.

Oh, silly me. In Erickson’s world that’s a prima facie argument they were a terrorist.

If RedState and the other right-wing grandstanders who shoved their way in front of TV cameras Friday afternoon are so concerned about leaks, like the self-promoting Joe Lieberman, why don’t they stick a sock in the mouth of Rep. Pete Hoekstra who gives away intelligence every time he grabs his BlackBerry and sends out a Twitter message? Especially since Hoekstra is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

Why does Erick Erickson hate America so much?

Billionaires Serenade Michelle Bachman’s Insane Capitol Rally

Our favourite group of indolent n’er do wells, Billionaires For Wealthcare, showed up at Michelle Bachman’s rally on the steps of the Capitol last week to serenade the crowd. Then, they marched into the halls of Congress itself to sing for Senators – you can spot John Kerry in the crowd – Representatives and staffers eating lunch.



In between songs, the group stood in the crowd shouting "Stock options, yes! Public option, no!"

To Hell And Beck

We’ll take as a given that Glenn Beck is crazy, in the same league as Michelle Bachman and people who show up at police stations wearing aluminium foil hats demanding the cops make Martians stop beaming radio signals into their head.

Who besides Beck would invite PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk on television to join him in criticising Nobel Prize winning former Vice President Al Gore for only cutting back on the amount of meat he eats, not eliminating it from his diet entirely, and then using this as the basis for lashing out at Gore’s new book, Our Choice?

Who other than His Nuttiness would praise nurses for their knowledge, care and understanding when they tended to him after he was hospitalised following botched hemorrhoid surgery only to turn on them a year later for supporting health care reform so people who don’t have Fox News’ lush group plan can get insurance?

Who else would provide Jon Stewart with such rich, delicious fodder for parody on a Daily Show segment? Beck’s emergency appendectomy this week gave Stewart an opening to tear out his appendix using a scalpel of satire.



Yet another reason why Stewart provides the most-incisive coverage of news on television.

Another Great Swindle: Doctors, Hospitals, Pharma As Much To Blame As Insurers

Six months ago, in a long-forgotten article, I quoted a Cleveland physician complaining that health care reform will cut his income so sharply he will be forced to curb his lush standard of living.

… a physician acquaintance in Ohio who is a highly regarded specialist with a seven figure income … complains to me that any of the current health reform proposals will cut his income in half, at least, as if his life would disintegrate if he had to live on only five or six hundred thousand dollars a year. Better 47-million people not have access to his training, skills and expertise than he drops one of his two country club memberships because of personal financial hardship.

While the health insurance industry’s immoral, amoral and, sometimes, illegal treatment of policyholders is an appropriate prime culprit and target in the current push for reform, the fact is that physicians, hospitals and drug companies are getting an undeserved pass by much of the media. They are as much to blame for health care problems and out-of-control costs as Aetna, the Blues, Wellpoint and other insurance companies.

Trouble is, not only is the media letting them off the hook, so is Congress.

One of the original key goals of health care reform was to lower the obscene cost of getting sick and recovering in America, whose citizens pay far more for everything from a simple visit to the doctor to complicated tests to prescription drugs than anyone else in the civilised world. Yet neither the likely House version nor the current Senate version of reform give cost cutting more than a flicker of attention.

So Kaiser Permanente chief executive George Halvorson showed Ezra Klein of the Washington Post a series of revealing and extremely disturbing charts, comparing the cost of similar medical services in the US and five other Western countries plus US Medicare.

Kaiser is the largest managed care organisation in the US, founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry Kaiser, and consists of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and regional Permanente Medical Groups.

Since it insures some nine million people as well as operating not-for-profit hospitals and clinics, Halvorson has horses running in the race – but on both ends of the betting line. So while he is in a unique position to see the issue two ways.

Office Visits

According to Halvorson’s charts, it costs the typical patient in the US anywhere from $59 to $151 to see a doctor. In countries with a national health plan, the price is a fraction of what it is here. In Spain, the cost to see a doctor is $15; Germany $22; France $31; the Netherlands $32; and Canada $30. Under Medicare, it is $72. In Canada, for example, the fee for a doctor’s visit is negotiated between the government and the College of Physicians and Surgeons in each province; in the US rates are whatever the doctor can get away with charging, except when treating Medicare and Medicaid paitents.


Yet Congress is backing off trying to control even a portion of the cost of an office visit by refusing to roll back scheduled increases in what Medicare pays physicians to see each patient. No wonder the AMA gave its full-throated endorsement of the House bill – and reform generally – yesterday: Its member’s income won’t be affected one bit so my physician friend in Ohio will be able to keep both of his country club memberships.

Complex Exams

Nothing in the human body is more complex than the brain yet there are enormous spreads in the cost of a CT head scan between the US and other countries. In America, with “the greatest health care system in the world,” a CT head scan cost ranges from $950 to $1,800. In Canada, where I’ve had such a scan, the cost to the system ranges between $41 – really! – and $530. Germany is the most expensive of the six countries compared yet its cost per scan is one-third of the low end of the US range.


Prescription Meds

It’s just as bad in the US after the tests are done and a patient walks from the doctor’s office to a pharmacy across the street to fill a prescription.

Lipitor is a widely-advertised and often-prescribed medication for lowering cholesterol. In America, the pharmacist will collect anywhere from $125 to $334 before handing over the prescription bottle because drug prices are not regulated.

In one of Congresses most disgraceful sell-outs, in 2005 it prohibited Medicare from negotiating with Pfizer for what will be charged patients for the drug. Yet in each of the five other nations surveyed – where government negotiates the price of all prescription medications – patients pay a tiny fraction of what Americans must shell out.

What happens when the price of Lipitor is negotiated? It plunges. I mean plunges: In each of the other five countries, the cost per prescription is anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of what Americans shell out for the exact same medicine treating the identical ailment.


Yet Big Pharma got Congress and the Obama administration to agree to not set up a system to negotiate drug prices. So, every time any American needs to have a prescription filled, the pharmaceutical industry and member of Congress will make them wish they lived somewhere else. No wonder so many people in the US buy medicine in Canada.

As WaPo’s Klein notes, “There is a thudding consistency to the (charts): A series of crude bars, with the block representing the prices paid by American health-insurance plans looming over the others like a New York skyscraper that got lost in downtown Des Moines.”

There is a reason why American health care costs so much more than in any other country: We pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained to Klein, and both university studies and consulting companies confirm repeatedly, if you leave everything the same – number of procedures, days spent in hospital, number of operations done – but plug in prices Canadians pay, America’s health care spending falls by 50%.

This is more than enough to cover every uninsured person in the US.

UPDATED: Humana Trolls College Campuses For Whores

Here’s good news for college and university students desperate for a part-time job that won’t even require leaving a dorm room.

Humana, Inc., the fine and good corporate citizen that spends millions of its customer’s premium dollars to fight health care reform and a public option rather than using them to pay claims, now wants to use even more premium bucks to pay students willing to sneak on-line at places such as Facebook and Twitter to tout the horrors of any change to America’s superb health care delivery and financing system.

In other words, Humana is trolling college campuses looking for whores willing to accept money to be on-line promoters of an anti-reform policy that’s against the student’s own, best interests – or will be, once they leave school and are on their own. Given the state of the economy, no doubt Humana will be overwhelmed with applications.

On Monday morning, blogger Molly Horan reports that Humana is actively recruiting students to develop and implement viral media strategies designed to undermine support for health care reform among their unsuspecting peers, making the whole thing appear as if it’s coming from just another tea party protester who can use a computer.

Fortunately, the Federal Trade Commission is one step ahead of Humana.

New Disclosure Rules

Beginning Dec. 1, bloggers and TV shows alike will have to disclose if they’re getting cash for mentioning or touting a product or idea. Clearly, Humana’s paid corps of anti-reform student zealots will have to mention they’re getting more than a penny for their thoughts.

As N.E. Marsden wrote Friday in an Op-Ed piece at the Washington Post, “bloggers and, more important, stealth corporate marketers (must) post ‘clear and conspicuous’ disclosures when they receive payment for endorsing online. … The principle is sound: People have a right to know when someone is trying to sell them something.”

While I’m all in favour of the free marketplace of ideas, when the ideas are being slipped to a writer in exchange for cash, I’d like to know who’s footing the bill. This is on a par with George Bush secretly paying Iraqi journalists in 2005 to write glowing articles on the glorious wonders of the American invasion and occupation.

Humana’s strategy gives a new and broader meaning to its slogan, “Guidance when you need it most.” Under the circumstances, it might be more appropriate as “Guidance we pay for when we need you to shill for us.”

Is Everyone A Fraud?

Look, I know times are tough. Jobs scarce. The future scary. Real health care and insurance reform a toss-up. So, having been one once, I can’t really blame journalism students for trying to grab a bit of spare change where they can – although, hopefully, some will have the integrity to see the offer for what it is, and reject the idea of applying out-of-hand.

Still, I can’t help but shudder when I read the job posting:

Humana – Guidance when you need it most
Role: Political Communications Specialist (part-time, limited-term)
Location: Chicago, Ill. or work-at-home

Are you interested in politics and political communication? Have a way with words? Know your way around Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere? Put your skills to work where politics, communication and public relations intersect. You will:
• Help manage and track a variety of online (“Web 2.0”) channels
• Build a strategic new media and social media presence
• Contribute content for both traditional and new media
• Get a “foot in the door” and gain valuable experience in one of today’s most challenging and fast-paced public policy arenas – health care

This is PR flackery, pure and simple, and of the worst kind. Humana is trying to lure virgin minds onto the rocks of whoredom by singing a siren song promising money and “valuable experience” in exchange for selling out America.

It’s ethical fraud; not illegal but definitely immoral.

Of course, it turns out there’s as much ethical fraud being committed by mainstream and highly respected journalists, as well.

A week ago, the lead story on CBS’ 60 Minutes covered the supposed $60-billion fraud in Medicare payments. I sat watching it dumbfounded, wondering if this might pound a huge nail in the coffin of the public option. Pierre Tristam had the same reaction. But then, he decided to confirm the 60 Minutes reporting.

Tristam is an editorial writer for the Daytona News Journal. He started by calling the show’s producers who referred him to the person at the Justice Dept. who worked with 60 Minutes which, he eventually admitted, used a high figure in the “range” of “possible” and “believed to be” Medicare fraud.

So Tristam kept digging, finally publishing a remarkable Sunday piece titled “Loose With Numbers: Medicare Fraud Report A Fiction.”

Steve Kroft and his producers never bothered to trace their facts to the source for viewers, relying instead on the slob-journalist's cheapest cop-out: Attribution by estimates. Nor did they make the equally important point: Insurance fraud isn't unique to Medicare or government-run programs. If anything, it affects the private sector more. Shame on "60 Minutes" and the Justice Department for throwing around wild numbers. Those are the numbers – the fictions – shaping public opinion across the country and public policy in Washington.

Medicare fraud is a serious problem. But singling it out and exaggerating it beyond credibility won't fix it, although it may help doom any government expansion of health care. In that regard, the 60 Minutes segment did its death-panel best.

I feel as if the whole world has turned into the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, sneaking around behind everyone’s back, putting in the fix, winking and nodding at the rubes, and damning the consequences – as well as the rest of us.

UPDATE – Nov 3, 2009

It’s not just Humana that’s looking for students to be on-line trollers. Israel is also looking for people, according to the website Desert Peace:

“The Foreign Ministry unveiled a new plan this week: Paying talkbackers to post pro-Israel responses on websites worldwide. A total of NIS 600,000 (roughly $150,000) will be earmarked to the establishment of an "Internet warfare" squad.

“The Foreign Ministry intends to hire young people who speak at least one language and who study communication, political science, or law – or alternately, Israelis with military experience gained at units dealing with information analysis.”

And so it goes.

A special h/t to Breandan Healy

Plamegate Rides Again: Early Peek At New Film

Thanks to the movie website Corona Coming Attractions, there’s an advance review of the new film Fair Game, based on the book by Valerie Plame, the CIA case officer who was “outed” by the Bush Administration when her husband called the president a liar in The New York Times in July, 2003, for claiming Iraq was acquiring nuclear weapons material.

Wilson’s Op-Ed piece led to a firestorm in Washington, an admission by the White House that it had exaggerated the claim in Bush’s State of the Union address during the run-up to the war, and a series of investigations that resulted in convicted felon Scooter Libby not going to jail thanks to his pal Dick Cheney.

The rest is history – and now a movie.

A test screening for Fair Game, which stars Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, was held a few days ago and someone at Coming Attraction caught an early cut of the film:

"Fair Game is really a tremendous, thought provoking film. It's based on the same titled memoir by former CIA Agent Valerie Plame, who of course worked for the agency as an undercover spy until her husband wrote an op-ed piece declaring that the Bush White House lied about Sadaam Hussein's efforts to buy yellow-cake uranium from Niger. Naomi Watts plays Plame (and as shown at the ending, really looks a lot like her), and plays her wonderfully. The story is set up through a sequence at the beginning showing her in action in the field, and in the CIA headquarters being completely dedicated to her job. She loves what she does for her country even at the price the travel and the secrecy puts on her family life.

"She's married to former Ambassador Joe Wilson, played by Sean Penn in what very easily could (and should) be his next Oscar nomination. Wilson is a man in turmoil almost from his opening scene, dining with friends who think they know everything about the world. They don't, Wilson doesn't, but he certainly knows more about the Iraq situation than they do and is glad to tell anybody about it who will listen. His expertise gets him looked at (through no suggestion of his wife) and requested of by the CIA to take a trip to Niger to investigate reports that Hussein was looking to buy uranium from that country, which Wilson was a leading expert on. He agreed, made the trip, found that there was no possible way that a purchase of yellowcake was made, and reported that back to the government. The administration, as we now know, chose to ignore this report, and used the incorrect intelligence as a key basis in its case for war.

"This destroys Wilson, who starts to speak up in the press, and the leak of his wife's identity was made. We're led to believe that the order of the leak was made by Karl Rove to Scooter Libby (played by a hilariously serious David Andrews), and the rest is history. Plame's career is destroyed, her marriage (and life) nearly go along with it, and a major investigation into corruption in the Bush White House is launched, ultimately leading to the fall of Libby.

"The film clocked in at roughly 1:50, and paced tremendously well. There was a side-plot they spent a bit too much time on involving an Iraqi family and Plame's valiant efforts to save them from the invasion, but that was really the only downfall of the film. Watts is excellent, at least as good as she was in Eastern Promises, and Penn is as good here as I've seen him. It's directed by Doug Liman who did an excellent job of it, and I believe he also served as DP, so kudos to him as I often forgot the camera was even rolling. Truly a wonderful human drama with political suspense that should interest anybody no matter how they vote. 9/10 (stars)."

Fair Game does not have a scheduled release date and often films are edited heavily based on audience comments at advanced screenings.

Confessions Of A Techno-Luddite

As the weekend arrived, The New York Times carried a semi-sneering piece on the tiny and ever-dwindling number of people who still refuse to have a cell phone. It cites a study done by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that finds more than 85% of all Americans now have a mobile; the Federal Communications Commission says cell phones caught on faster than either cable TV or home computers.

While Pew concludes that cell “refuseniks” generally are less educated and poorer than people who have them, it concedes grudgingly there is “a subset of adults who resist cell phones simply because they do not want them. They resent the way (cells) disrupt face-to-face conversation. They savour their moments alone and prize the fact that no one knows how to reach them.”

Exactly. Roughly 5% of Americans without cells simply don’t want one. People like me, and Gregory Han.

“It’s a luxury not to be reached when I’m out and about,” Han, a 34-year-old Los Angeles-based writer-editor, tells the Times.

D'accord!

The paper has a Toronto bureau but no one called me for the story. If they had, I would have been delighted to explain why I am a complete techno-Luddite: Not only do I not have a cell phone, I don’t own a BlackBerry, pager, PDA, laptop, digital camera, Webcam, iPod, iBook or, for that matter, iAnything, cordless phone, home network, WiFi, Wii, Skype, Kindle and whatever else took the world by storm yesterday. I don’t download music, movies or porn from the intertubes. I don’t bank, direct deposit or buy on-line, and avoid ATMs. My e-mail includes an instant message feature but I never activated it. For that matter, I’ve never sent a text message, visited a chat room, had a Facebook page or Twittered; no one cares that I’m leaving for lunch now or that I’ve just returned.

Who could possibly care whether anyone is leaving for lunch? And I don’t want people to interrupt me when I’m eating.

“Cell refuseniks are making a statement that they control their availability,” John Horrigan, research director at the National Broadband Task Force, speculates.

Precisely.

Little Protest

Maybe Horrigan is right, but I’m also making a different statement, a tiny protest that’s probably as effective as telling Lou Dobbs that immigrants are good for America: Just because technology lets you do something doesn’t mean you should or that it’s even a good idea.

Apparently, people like me are such an oddity that the on-line edition of the otherwise august and totally sober Columbia Journalism Review made note of the Times’ article.

It’s true, we are an oddity. When people ask for my cell number, they’re aghast when I explain I don’t have one, offering my old fashioned land line instead.

“No cell phone?” comes the incredulous reply. “Seriously? How do you survive without one?”

I survive just fine but Sheila Shirazi admits discarding friends who go without, telling the Times, “I don’t have the time and energy … to coordinate with somebody who isn’t mobile.”

Ms. Shirazi isn’t unique.

A few years back, a woman I was mildly interested in seeing dumped me during our first dinner together because I don’t have a cell. Over the decades, I’ve been rejected by women for countless reasons, good and goofy, but never because I refused to tote around a small piece of gadgetry. On Seinfeld, Jerry once stopped dating a woman because she ate peas one at a time; my fledgling romance was nipped-in-the-bud and died for about as rational a reason.

Get Serious

OK, I admit snatching at technology when it’s useful. I never grasped Dewey’s decimal system for library research at school but I mastered the art of crafty searching and rummage around on Google numerous times every day.

And I do see value in having a stand-by cell phone for some people: Those travelling lonely roads by themselves. Kids, so they can reach a parent quickly. The sick and disabled to get help quickly. Critical care doctors.

But come on.

I’ve followed tweeners through malls who were on cell phones the entire time. What could they be talking about? The Gap has a sale? Joey likes Deirdre? The math test was really hard?

I’ve eaten in spiffy boittes where everyone at a table was “celling” so why did they bother eating together? Hong Kong has it right: Most restaurants demand mobiles be turned off and checked with the maitre d’ before being seated.

I’ve ridden trains where cell phone users were forced to shout over the track noise, making everyone else in the car unwilling participants in the call.

I’ve sat in offices where the person across the desk wore an earpiece cell phone so I never knew if they were speaking to me or to the phone.

It’s a losing battle, I realise, my fight against cells and other techno-stuff. The 5% of us who don’t always want to be instantly connected to everyone else are like Dutch boys with our fingers in the dikes. We may stop one small leak but waves of water are washing over the top, drowning us in a sea of gizmos and gadgets.

Yet Again, The Army Fails Its Troops

Like politicians, institutional bureaucracies know the best way to bury bad news is to release it late on a Friday afternoon.

This is exactly what the Pentagon did in the waning twilight last Friday when investigators publicly unleashed a searing, 325-page report on the string of shootings last May in a combat stress and mental health clinic in Baghdad’s Camp Liberty that left four soldiers and one sailor dead. After repeatedly reaching out for help, Army Sgt. John Russell stole a gun from an MP, walked into the clinic where he had been treated briefly an hour earlier and opened fire.

The PR ploy worked. The report was ignored over the weekend by virtually every media outlet except Stars and Stripes. No doubt the Pentagon was relieved because the report tears a strip off the Army for not giving commanders in Iraq – and, by extension, Afghanistan – the necessary tools, training and guidance to handle at-risk soldiers.

So, once again, the Army fails to support its own troops and, worse, it’s failing and flailing over the same basic issue in 2006 that dragged the Army kicking and screaming into 21st century after it was criticized for punishing soldiers who sought mental health help during or after war zone duty tours. Supposedly, the Army changed its policy and began actively encouraging all personnel to get treatment without fear of retribution.

OK, so soldiers and officers can go for help without risking their career. The problem is the top brass didn’t bother to tell field commanders – from sergeants to senior officers – how to spot a troubled trooper or what to do with them when they suspected a problem.

A staff member on the House Armed Services Committee, who is not authorised to speak with reporters on-the-record, told me on Monday, “We have no idea how to budge the Army into doing something positive that actually works” when it comes to dealing with either enlisted personnel or officers who are suspected of having mental health issues.

“(Senior officers) come before the committee and say all the right things,” this staffer continued, “but it looks like they forget all about it the moment they walk out of the hearing room.”

Institutional Problem

The report damns what is, as my dad’s father would say in a thick dialect as he kvetched about lukewarm soup at Plotnik’s deli in Milwaukee, “Oy, a farshlepteh krenk” – a chronic complaint.

In doing its investigation, the Army interviewed Russell’s fellow grunts, commanders and doctors to trace the events leading to the shooting. The report chronicles widespread failures – one after another, in Russell’s case – to implement the Multi-National Force-Iraq mental health policy. No one from non-commissioned officers to field commanders are provided direction to carry out preventive mental health measures, according to the report.

In a statement that is both disturbing and sad, Russell’s sergeant said, “What I don’t understand is from the time a soldier has been identified that they may have behavioral health problems, what do you really do with them?”

Yikes.

The Army report insists that majors through lieutenant colonels “require precise instruction in effective suicide and behavioral problem remediation measures to effectively support our behavioral health professionals,” the report states.

At the unit level, “there is no real conception of when to command refer a soldier for assistance.”

Leaders with Russell’s unit “admitted they lack the fundamental skills to deal with behavioral health issues,” and had no formal policies or procedures to guide them, according to the report.

It gets worse. The investigation says there is no clearly defined procedure to track and monitor the issues once they are identified. Russell’s commanders were not aware he had threatened suicide or that his immediate supervisors had removed the bolt from his gun.

Who’s In Charge?

In Paddy Chayefsky’s great 1971 film The Hospital, George C. Scott – a worn down and worn out physician – explains the inexplicable death of a patient by saying, “We just neglected him to death.”

In a sense, the Army neglected Sgt. Russell to death – and the deaths of five other people.

The report details how the Army tells units dealing with a potentially suicidal soldier to use the “buddy system” and “unit watch” without providing “even notional reference to describe” as to what the terms actually mean in real life. They have been common in the Army for years, but there is no Army-wide standard or instruction for how to carry them out. Russell was supposedly on “unit watch” in the days leading up to the shootings yet his unit had no guidelines on how to actually do this.

“We’re looking into whether there will be hearings on this,” the Congressional aide told me. “The problem is, it seems like no one is in charge when it comes to mental illness in the Army.”
- - - - -
I wrote this piece originally for the LA Progressive, where it appeared earlier today.

Everyone But Fox And The Taliban Applaud Obama’s Peace Prize

No sooner was it announced that Barack Obama won the 2009 Peace Prize, than I heard from Ann Aurelius. An old friend from high school back in Minneapolis, Ann is as Norwegian as Lutefisk and pancake suppers in a Lutheran church basement during a cold Minnesota winter. When Garrison Keillor talks about the people of Lake Woebegon, he’s talking about Ann.

“Cheeky Norwegians! Good for them!” Ann enthused in an early morning e-mail shortly after getting word. “The world needs shaking up! I think they realize that his fight for justice (including) universal health care is as much about world peace as ending wars and conflicts. Even beer in the Rose Garden to smooth out racial issues. Sometimes, it's not about the big things but an entire attitude.”

The head of the Nobel Committee didn’t say it any better.



Except for the lowlanders at Fox and the Taliban’s official spokesman, most of the world is applauding the move in Oslo. Beyond the usual tributes from Obama’s fellow heads-of-state, a think piece in The Independent explains why he may have won.

The Independent observes “… the Nobel prize has a long history of being awarded more for the committee's aspirations than for others' accomplishments … The prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see the effort through, sometimes at critical moments … The Nobel committee has the audacity to hope that he'll produce a record worthy of its prize.”

Agence France Presse is considerably less inhibited, saying the president “sensationally won the Nobel Peace Prize …” And across the Channel, Peter Beaumont of The Guardian writes what is on the minds of many today, noting that perhaps the prize was “awarded to Barack Obama for what he is not: For not being George W. Bush.”

And over at the Grande Dame of broadcasting, Paul Reynolds of BBCNews.com writes, “The citation indicates that it is President Obama's world view that attracted the Nobel committee – that diplomacy should be founded ‘on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.’”

The Livid Right

I wonder if Fox News, The National Review and RedState.com are happy that they have something in common with the Taliban: Each blasted Obama receiving the Nobel Prize as soon as the award was announced.

In fact, because of the time difference between Afghanistan, Norway and New York, the Taliban may have scooped Fox this morning.

Under the headline “Becoming Jimmy Carter Faster Than Jimmy Carter,” RedState’s Erick Erickson whined “I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota … but that is the only thing I can think of for this news …” Apparently not knowing anything about the peace prize, including how or why it is awarded, Erickson is saying the only reason a black president could win the accolade is because he is black. And the right wonders why progressives brand so many of them racist when they write or talk about the president.

Not surprisingly, Fox has the wildest ideas.

Crazy Foxes

Tommy De Seno at FoxNews.com is no more informed of the process than Erickson. He carefully catalogues Obama’s first 12 days in office – that’s when the nomination period ended – and other than “skipping church” three times and “release federal funding to pay for abortions in foreign countries,” Obama did nothing. De Seno brushes off ending torture as “re-affirmed Army Field Manual techniques for interrogations” and “expressed desire to close Gitmo” as mere trifled.

Hey, Tommy: The nominations may have closed Feb. 1 but that doesn’t mean the Nobel Committee tosses all of the names in a hat and draws out one in October. There’s actually a lengty consideration and deliberation process involved and, I’ve read, often heated arguments between committee members over different nominees.

Not so this time: The Nobel Committee announcement said the choice of Obama was unanimous.

That didn’t stop Foxtails commenting on De Seno’s posting from acting like idiots. Here are a handful of the hundreds of comments written, without fixing spelling, punctuation or grammar:

Martmann, North Carolina: i have a funny inkling that acorn is behind this travesty by the nobel prize committie acorn acorn acorn thats what they do for there former lawyer and teacher at there institution.

ataube439 Massachusetts: I didn't think Barack Obama hated the Jews enough to win the prize. Go Figure.

Kathykwny New York: Obama's arrogance will know no bounds now that he has this bogus honor. (He) would rather see us marginalized and subservient to dictators around the world. Congratulations, Mr. President! You have finally done it!

Wooptyone Wisconsin: “Way to go Ole and Lena...

Truthproject Colorado: Kudos to Fox Network for Not pandering to this administration. The Nobel committee has proven once again that they can not discern egos from ethics. I am glad that Mr. Obama is not my savior.

thom1 Pennsylvania: Is he the first person from Kenya to win this? just wondering?

I’m not sure how Fox friend “martmann” manages to wrangle his mind in enough different directions until it links ACORN and the Nobel Peace Prize but he’s convinced of it enough to write a comment for the entire world to see. Meanwhile, “Wooptyone” is busy making derogatory comments about Norwegians and “atyube439” is revelling in his anti-Semitism.

I don’t know whether this is sad or scary.

I do know that when a sitting American president is named a Nobel laureate – including Obama, only Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson have been so honoured while still in office – it is a cause for rejoicing not just in the US but in the world. It also puts tremendous pressure on Pres. Obama to live up to the high standards and expectations the world has set for him.

Finding a near-term way out of Afghanistan would be a good place to start.

Was Jesus A Socialist?

According to Variety’s weekend tally of boffo box office receipts, Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story took in nearly $4.9-million in its first weekend of national release. While far more people went nut up instead of shut up and saw Zombieland than screened what Time magazine’s Mary Corbliss called Moore’s “magnum opus,” enough tickets were sold to land his frequently biting, often hilarious and totally frightening indictment of free markets run amok at number six on Variety’s list of the weekend’s most popular films – rare for a documentary but common for Moore and beating Fame, The Informant and Love Happens while tying with Whip It in the process.

I went to see Capitalism at a four o’clock show Sunday afternoon, the second time I’d seen the picture. Living in Toronto, I was startled to see the theatre more than half-filled; although I recognised a few familiar faces from Democrats Abroad, the audience was Canadian and I didn’t realise my adopted country would be so interested in Moore’s ripping apart America’s soft but well-paid and stock option-laden underbelly. Apparently so: Last night, CBC NewsWorld aired Sicko uncut, Moore’s searing denunciation of the US health care system, in prime time.

Intriguing Question

I saw Capitalism again because I suspected I missed a lot when I screened it before the Toronto Film Festival. Then, it had me roiling with anger-bordering-rage like many people who watched it on opening night. In a mass e-mail Saturday morning, Moore wrote to friends:

“One manager … said, ‘It's a good thing we carry (candy) at the concession stand instead of pitchforks and torches! These crowds were ready to march over to the local Citibank and do something!’ Another manager said a crowd in the lobby formed around the little Chase ATM machine next to his popcorn stand and started to ‘yell at it.’"

Sunday afternoon I discovered I was right; I missed a lot and watched it more dispassionately.

What didn’t register at the first screening was the profound theological message Moore, a devout Catholic, wires into the film. He doesn’t do it in a way that even remotely resembles what the evangelical right does on a daily basis, treating God and Jesus like the personal Mr. Fix-It of believing evangelicals and, by extension, the world if it only accepted The Word The Way True Believers Know It.

Indeed, Moore makes it plain that he has no use for Christians – including Catholics – who use “Jesus” as a banner to argue against everything from eliminating poverty, taxes, science, abortion, immigration, health care reform and illegal wars. But he poses an intriguingly serious question that reviewers – including me – almost entirely overlook:

Was Jesus a Socialist?

For people of other faiths, it might be more appropriate to ask whether Moses had a progressive agenda? Could it be that Mohammad was a lefty? For non-believers or those who question the whole idea of religion, the question might be put more aptly as, “Can anyone with an ounce of humanity in them think it’s alright to pass laws and enact regulations that allows stealing from the poor to give to the rich?”

Heavy Hitters

Moore trots out some heavy hitting priests – including two Bishops – to answer in the affirmative: Yes, Jesus was a socialist. Although I’m not religious and wasn’t raised in a religious home, let alone a Christian one, I took enough comparative religion classes to remember that stuff about giving to the poor, the fishes and loaves, rich men squeezing through needle eyes and all the rest.

Judaism is on the same page, even if pre-dates Christianity by a few millennia and there aren’t any Holy Ghosts rumbling around in its dark hallways.

The Old Testament legislates laws which are a sort of tax for the benefit of the poor. The institution of the sabbatical year was so "that the poor of the people may eat" as well as to cancel debts about which the warning was given, "If there be among you a needy man, one of your brethren, within thy gates, in thy land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thy heart nor shut thy hand from thy needy brother …”

Even the Quran insists that Moslems have a special duty to take care of the needy, the less fortunate and the downtrodden.

Come to think of it, it’s really only right wingers in the US – which often means Christian fundy’s – who’ve perverted religion to argue for small, ineffective government, tax breaks only for the wealthiest, health care only for the healthiest, food only for the fullest, good schools only for the smartest, and clean air or water only for those who pollute.

I’m not here to start an argument over how to interpret religions but rather to point out that Moore’s real issue isn’t that capitalism needs destroying but that it has lost way. It has wandered too far from its basic, religious roots in helping ensure not just economic and social equality but a levelling of the great breach that’s opened between the rich and everyone else.

Since many on the right keep insisting that “America is a Christian nation,” maybe it is time for them – for the nation – to start acting more like Christians. If Jesus existed – even as a historical figure and forgetting about the fairy tale of him springing from the womb of a virgin as god’s son – I’m convinced, like Michael Moore, that Jesus was a socialist.

Only Video Of Anne Frank Found, Posted On-Line

In a way, this is very unnerving.

The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam just started a YouTube channel and one of its first uploads is a 1941 home movie of a wedding party leaving a building. As the camera pans around, Anne is seen looking out an upper floor window.

Not The Belly Of The Beast

This week, I re-enter the Canadian national health system for tests to see if my cancer returned since the last round of treatment ended six months ago.

For those of you in the States who might be starting to believe the Republican noise machine, be assured that I’ve not been on a waiting list or pleading my case before a death panel and, regardless of the outcome, I won’t be handed a staggering bill on my way out the door. The only inconvenience – besides waiting anxiously to learn the results – is that I couldn’t get an appointment when I wanted. I’d asked for Monday morning but am stuck with midday on Thursday.

Hardly a journey into the belly of the beast – apologies to Jack Abbott and Norman Mailer – as right wing lunatics keep insisting is the only possible outcome of a government-sponsored public option.

Yes, it’s personally unnerving and thoroughly unpleasant but at least I don’t have to worry about an insurance company pulling the rug out from under me because I’m denting its bottom line, forcing me into bankruptcy. Nor do I have to fret that whoever represents my riding in Parliament is a complete idiot like the grotesquely insensitive Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA). At a town hall meeting recently, he told a constituent suffering from years of clinical depression but can’t afford health insurance to pay for a psychiatrist to “go to an emergency room.”

Actually, the man did go to an emergency room – after he tried committing suicide.



As Georgia Liberal so aptly noted on Thursday, “Treating major depression is not a one-shot deal. That is like saying cancer patients should get treatment one night in the ER and it is all better.”

If only.

Oh, and in case Broun The Knuckledragger didn’t notice, people receive a bill for going to the ER. It ain’t free in the US which is why hospitals hire collection agencies, and sue patients who can’t pay, forcing sick people who are hapless victims of an awful system into bankruptcy.

Thanks Max Baucus and the ObstructaDems and the GOP and Fox and the medico-insurance complex. You’ve really done a number on America. The question for us is: Why are we sitting at home reading this instead of storming Washington demanding the change we voted for?

Glenn Beck Can’t Take Glenn Beck’s Heat

The website is clearly labelled satire and parody; in fact, it says so in very strong language on the home page for anyone who can’t figure it out for themselves. But Glenn Beck, never known for possessing a sense of wit – although some may call him a half-wit – is livid that Isaac Eiland-Hall launched glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.

Essentially, Eiland-Hall turns Beck on himself, using his own tactics in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of a time, one hundred lifetimes ago, when Edward R. Murrow demolished another rabid demagogue, Sen. Joe McCarthy by using McCarthy’s own words.

As if channelling Beck’s writers, Eiland-Hall’s site proclaims it, “exists to try and help examine the vicious rumour that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. We don't claim to know the truth – only that the rumour floating around saying that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 should be discussed. So we're going to do our part to try and help get to the bottom of this.

“Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations?” the website asks. “We're not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990 – in fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder, since he has failed to deny these horrible allegations. Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?”

Beck uses this identical approach to everything from claiming Pres. Obama is a white-hating racist to accusing him of indoctrinating young children by urging them to stay in school to insisting health reform is really a hidden plot involving death panels for granny.

Warning: Satire Ahead

Unlike, say The Onion, which everyone knows is satire as it tears apart every mainstream American convention, apparently many people going to Eiland-Hall’s site are missing a few pencils in their box and don’t get the joke. To assure the world – and protect himself legally – the site’s creator has a prominent disclaimer along the bottom of the home page.

Notice: This site is parody/satire. We assume Glenn Beck did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990, although we haven't yet seen proof that he didn't. But we think Glenn Beck definitely uses tactics like this to spread lies and misinformation.

Read the last sentence again. That's the point. Read it a third time and ignore the name of the site itself, because anyone who believes that we're trying to actually get people to believe Glenn Beck raped and/or murdered is *whoosh* missing the entire point. So don't be dumb like a lot of people are. I greatly expanded this text because so many people *read* it, and *still* didn't understand.

Not even an obviously fake video of a supposedly distraught woman convinces some that the whole thing is a grand send-up of someone – Beck – who increasingly parodies himself on Fox every day.



Et Tu, Glenn

Gee, here’s a surprise: Beck doesn’t like the site. Uninformed bullies seldom enjoy seeing themselves parodied.

But knowing full well that a federal lawsuit to block the site would fail miserably because courts have held for more than 50 years political satire and humor are protected by the 1st Amendment, Beck’s lawyers are trying an end-run. They’ve filed an administrative complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization. WIPO handles disputes over domain names. The complaint claims that the site was improperly using a trademark and the domain name was registered and being used in bad faith.

Yesterday, Eiland-Hall's lawyer, Marc Randazza, filed a response. In it, he says the site should be his because it's a valid critique of Beck's politics.

"The Web site is a legitimate criticism site, consists of political satire, and thus the Respondent has legitimate rights in the domain name," the brief says. "Mr. Beck's attempt to censor this criticism is improper and should be rejected."

To help the tribunal, Eiland-Hall’s lawyers helpfully offer a history of esoteric inside jokes that became Internet phenomena from "Mr. Spock Ate My Balls" to Richard Gere's unflattering "Gerbil story." But the case also makes a political point, noting an interview Beck conducted with Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), a Muslim, in which Beck said on air, "I like Muslims, I've been to mosques … And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview because what I feel like saying is, sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

Mr. Beck, what I feel like writing is, sir, prove to me that you are not completely unhinged. And, anyway, why won’t you deny rumors that you raped and murdered a young girl in 1991 so this whole thing can be put to rest?