What do people do in between two demonstrations?

Tour Irani
The Green Movement has tremendously changed many lives in Iran
By: Yasaman Baji (Facebook Entry 2252010
A few hours after each demonstration, when the security forces go home, the street cleaners show up who have now mastered the art of cleaning the dirty streets of Tehran following bloody clashes. They first pick up broken glasses. Then they pick up burnt garbage that were set on fire to neutralize the effects of tear gas and get the streets ready for a normal life the next day.
Tehran municipality has switched out the plastic garbage bins with metals ones. Now people cannot burn these bins anymore but protesters have learned to use them as war drums. The day after demonstrations, normal life begins for Iranians. But for many Iranians this normal life is not the same normal life as it was eight months ago. The day after demonstrations they need to start looking for missing friends and relatives and they check every place: hospitals, police stations, Evin prison, Revolutionary Courts and of course the last place is the cemeteries like Tehran's infamous cemetery: Behesht Zahra.
Doctors and nurses who have created make shift clinics in order to attend injured protesters now have to work overtime and use their off time to care for their patients. General political discussions in taxi cabs and buses continue and even peak the day after demonstrations. According to a psychologist: "people try to remedy the psychological effects of repression by talking. This is a kind of an unofficial national mourning."
Government workers pick up their normal routine the day after demonstrations. Those who have access to the internet use the opportunity to publish news and statements and of course they also post secret government memos on the internet if they have access to them.
While opposition papers have been confiscated and journalists are either under pressure or in jail, people take it upon themselves to spread the news. Mina, a weblogger who is also a member of Balatarin.com says: "I have no set time for this. I am always looking for news to publish; be it at work, in a taxi cab or a bus or even shopping at a local grocery store". Mina had accidentally overheard the news about the description of someone who was killed on Ashoura (Dec. 27th, 2009) from two student girls on a bus. She had immediately gone to the location and had taken a picture of the memorial note on the walls and had posted the picture on the internet.
People try to wear the full Islamic hijab on demonstration days in order to not be identified easily. But on normal days they do not pay attention to the Islamic dress code. The ladies dresses have become shorter and in this cold season the girls are wearing colored hats instead of head scarves. The "Moral Police" have resurfaced and the games of hide and seek with youngsters have begun again. You can easily find alcohol on black market and mixed boys and girls parties at nights are still going on strong without fear of attacks from moral police. But these days it's impossible to avoid political discussions in these parties. Soccer which was the hot topic in the old days, has lost it's luster. Fans of two soccer clubs of Tehran, namely Esteghlal and Perspolis (blue and red) do not argue and bicker anymore. Movie theaters are still as popular but unlike past years, the International Islamic Fajr Film Festival was boycotted by people and there were no signs of big lines in front of movie theaters, unlike previous years.
Participation in anti-regime protests has gradually led to the creation of new friendships and small groups who have scheduled routine activities for themselves and this in turn has caused new social behaviors in the society. Mothers of detainees manage to find each other and form group sessions. Nastaran, whose son was arrested at Ashoura demonstrations, shows up at these sessions with manicured nails, bleached hair and tatooed eyebrows. She does not know the names of any political figures. Next to her is Mrs. Masoumeh who lives in the poor neighborhood of Khani-Abad-No. She is illiterate but each time she returns from visiting her son in prison, she memorizes the phone numbers of a bunch of prisoners and calls their families informing them that their loved ones are alive and in prison. Another mother, while visiting her son in prison, had smuggled out the statement by prisoners sending their condolences to Mr. Mousavi for the loss of his nephew.
Mr. Mousavi, in his statement #13 wrote: "We must be hopeful until this struggle engages the common conscious of the society in a way that it will make it difficult for any regime to combat it's effects". It seems like the Green Movement is slowly finding it's way to the normal lives of people.
Mrs. Fereshteh, 24 who lives in southern part of Tehran, an impoverished place, does not belong to any party or organization. She has formed a small group with her friends to help poor families who have their bread winners jailed in the last 8 months. She says: "the thought came to me when our neighbor's kid who was the bread winner of this poor family was arrested". Their small group has so far been able to identify 15 families of prisoners; they either help them directly or they turn their names and addresses to social centers. Alireza, 30, is an engineer. He, along with his friends write slogans on the walls at nights. He says, while smiling: "Almost every night, in the middle of the night we carry out our missions on motorcycles. Another group of friends provide the paint sprays and sometimes even invite us to dinner." All over Tehran, from large streets to small alleys and even the hills around Tehran are covered with green slogans. Street signs on highways have all been sprayed with green. The government has banned sale of green sprays but one can easily find them.

Alireza's mother who is not able to attend the demonstrations, sits home and writes on bank notes. Writing on bank notes has driven Ahmadinejad's government crazy. The central bank had announced that starting from last month, bank notes with slogans will lose their value. But there is hardly anyone who does not accept bank notes with slogans on them. Mr. Mahmoud Bahmani, head of the Central Bank was forced to retract and announce that there is no time limit in collecting bank notes defaced with green slogans.
Before the election, many sociologists were talking about the crisis of mistrust in Iran but these days the society is experiencing a common goal. Sometimes a smile is enough to make the connection. A professor in sociology who preferred to remain anonymous said: "the trust among people has caused people to open up their private lives for the sake of the struggle". Even on demonstration days many people leave their doors ajar for protesters who are running away from police or security forces.
Azar, a political activist says that she and her friends feel very lonely in between demonstrations. That's why they decided to have weekly gatherings. Azar says: "in these sessions we talk about news, about our concerns and worries, and also about funny stories that took place during the demonstrations and most of all we give hope to each other". There are no official statistics as to how many supporters the Green Movement has. But it's clear that the movement is vast enough enabling it to easily continue on despite the security and police clamp downs.
A political science professor at Tehran University who didn't want his name revealed said: "One can only see about 10% of the Green protesters on demonstration days. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Other supporters of the movement continue with their activities during normal days".

From The Sunday London Times
Gay hate wrapped in a Republican embrace
The party once preached tolerance but is now getting ever whiter and straighter
Andrew Sullivan
I had the pleasure of accompanying Nick Herbert, the Tory shadow environment minister, on some of his tour of conservative and Republican circles in Washington last week. I felt bad for him in a way. Not only did he somehow break the bath plug in the British embassy, he was also in favour of action on climate change as a core Tory pledge.
The Republican party doesn’t really believe in baths (some super-charged showers do the trick) and it certainly doesn’t believe in that “snake-oil science”, as Sarah Palin recently called climate change. But the best was yet to come. Herbert came here to give a speech on why conservatism can and should be inclusive of gays and lesbians. The speech he gave was terrific, largely avoided domestic culture-war politics and focused on what he believed the Tories’ experience could teach their sister party in the US, today’s Republicans.
“I can tell you what happens to a party when it closes the door to sections of our society and is reduced to its core vote,” he told the wide-eyed audience at the libertarian Cato Institute. “It’s no fun being in opposition for 13 years. And I can tell you what happens when a party opens its doors again and broadens its appeal. A successful political party should be open to all and ought to look something like the country it seeks to govern.”
The same week, the most popular conservative activist conference — attended by Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney, among many others — was full of rousing speeches. It is a kind of informal party conference for the grassroots, and takes place early each year in DC. It was, shall we say, an interesting contrast with Herbert’s message.
On one panel for the under-thirties, Jason Mattera, a rising conservative star, brought the house down. His new book is called Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation, and in his speech, adopting a black accent, he mocked what he called “diversity”, including college classes on “what it means to be a feminist new black man. Think of a crossover between RuPaul and Barney Frank”. RuPaul is a black drag queen and Barney Frank is the openly gay chairman of the banking committee in the House of Representatives and one of only three openly gay members of Congress (all of whom are Democrats). At the same conference three years ago, Ann Coulter, the bestselling conservative author of her generation, called former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards “a faggot” to rowdy applause.
Since I left the UK a quarter of a century ago as a supporter of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the gulf between American and British conservatism on this question has never been this wide. There is something of an irony in this. Gay conservatism first found its footing in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s — with the publication of Bruce Bawer’s A Place at the Table and my own Virtually Normal.
The gay left denounced us as “homocons”, but the gay and lesbian group Log Cabin Republicans — named after Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin — thrived. The push to integrate gays into the military — deemed by the largely leftist gay movement of the 1970s to be a violation of the “rainbow coalition” against the military and war — dominated US politics in 1993, long before it came to pass in Britain.
My own New Republic cover story, “A conservative case for gay marriage”, which argued along David Cameron lines that commitment and family should be valued among gays as well as straights, was published in America in 1989. In 1996, there were two openly gay Republicans in Congress, three years before Michael Portillo’s statement about youthful “homosexual experiences”. One of those congressmen, Jim Kolbe, was re-elected to his seat 10 times and addressed the Republican convention in 2000.
The founder of modern American conservatism, Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964, was a passionate supporter of gay rights in the early 1990s. When Bill Clinton botched the question of gays in the military in 1993, Goldwater quipped: “Everyone knows that gays have served honourably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar.” He added: “You don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.”
Perhaps the most telling symbol of the dramatic shift of the Republican party on this question is what happened during the Briggs initiative in California as long ago as 1978. The initiative proposed banning all gay people from being teachers in state schools. It is memorialised in the recent film on Harvey Milk, the gay rights pioneer. Reagan, a former California governor, was about to launch his presidential campaign and needed every evangelical vote he could get. Nonetheless, he opposed the initiative, writing a formal letter explaining why, and a week before the vote wrote an article against it: “Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.” Reagan’s intervention helped shift what was predicted as a landslide victory for the initiative to a landslide defeat. Last month, a poll of more than 2,000 self-identified Republicans asked: “Should openly gay men and women be allowed to teach in [state] schools?” Eight per cent said yes, and 73% said no. Sixty-eight per cent said gay couples should be barred from receiving any state or federal benefits. And this month, Bob McDonnell, the newly elected governor of Virginia, as one of his first acts in office, rescinded a non-discrimination clause protecting government employees from being fired because they are gay.
In all of this, of course, the Republican leadership — and the Christian base of the party — is moving in the opposite direction to the country as a whole. Depending on how you phrase the question, 60-70% now favour allowing gays to serve openly in the military (up from about 40% in 1993); two-thirds favour giving gay couples the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual couples (up from 40% in 1993); 47% now favour full civil marriage rights (up from 37% in 1993). And in the under-30 generation, 65% favour full marriage equality. In contrast, among all Republicans in a recent Washington Post poll, 69% opposed it.
This is a new kind of Republican party. It is not Goldwater’s Arizona libertarianism or Reagan’s California tolerance. It is getting whiter and whiter, and straighter and straighter. And among the heterosexuals, the hostility towards gay equality is becoming an intense and defining shibboleth of what the party means.
As I said goodbye to Herbert, there was a part of me that wondered why a gay conservative should have emigrated in the first place. But then I went home with my husband. There are some things that transcend politics. And he is one of them.
andrewsullivan.com

Wingnut Rage Boils Over
by John Avlon The Daily Beast
What made Joseph Stack crazy enough to crash his plane into an IRS building, and why are some commenters praising him? John Avlon—author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, which predicted that anti-government rage leads to violence—on how tax protesters become unhinged.
Joseph Andrew Stack was a tax protester turned violent.
It's an old Wingnut lineage, with roots in both right-wing and left-wing resistance to the federal government. And yesterday's explosion in Austin, Texas, wasn't the first time that unhinged anger at the IRS resulted in a body count.
His rambling suicide note exhibited more than a man pushed past the brink of sanity by economic anxiety—it expressed the fury at both big business and big government that has fueled political protests during this 18-month manic recession. "They just steal from the middle class," Stack wrote of the big institutions of American life. "Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for their mistakes." Or turn themselves into airborne suicide bombers, as the case may be.
“When people feel helpless in the world, they do dumb, and sometimes morally horrible, things.”
Stack's tale of serial downsizing appears to have run into the IRS back in the 1980s. "Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having 'tax code' readings and discussions," Stack wrote. "This is where I learned that there are two 'interpretations' for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us…that little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000.00 plus ten years of my life and set my retirement plans back to zero. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie." The anger at America only increased from there. But let's take a step back and look at the larger shadowy movement he apparently embraced.
• Lee Siegel: The Problem with Joseph Stack
The Tax Protester Movement—or the Truth and Taxation Movement, as some advocates call it—began with the belief that the institution of the federal income tax under Woodrow Wilson in 1913 has at best been misapplied and at worst is unconstitutional.
By the early 1970s, two distinct schools of Tax Protesters had emerged: leftist anti-Vietnam war tax protesters who got to break the law and get rich(er) while feeling morally superior; and the right-wing Posse Comitatus movement, which argued that the federal government was essentially illegitimate.
Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America. By John Avlon. 304 Pages. Beast Books. $15.95. While the left-wing group faded with the end of the Vietnam War, anti-government activists on the right gained ground, seeding the "Sovereign Citizens" movement and the Patriot movements of the 1990s. These groups claimed that the highest government authority lay with county officials like sheriffs and that there had been a subtle subversion of the U.S. Constitution that reflected a "criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, disfranchise citizens, and liquidate the Constitutional Republic of these United States."
In 1983, tax protester and Posse Comitatus member Gordon Kahl murdered two federal marshals in North Dakota and a sheriff in Arkansas after they responded to his refusal to pay taxes since 1969.
The Southern Poverty Law Center details a series of potentially violent tax-protester plots against IRS facilities, hitting a fever pitch during the "Patriot" movement of the 1990s, including:
• "July 28, 1995—Charles Ray Polk was arrested for trying to blow up the IRS in Austin, Texas, and sentenced to almost 75 years in federal prison."
• "December 18, 1995—A drum filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil was found in the Reno, Nevada, IRS parking lot by an IRS employee. The device failed to explode and 10 days later, tax protester Joseph Martin Bailie was arrested and sentenced to 36 years in federal prison."
• "March 26, 1997—Militia activist Brendon Blasz was arrested in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for allegedly planning to bomb the IRS building in Portage along with the federal building in Battle Creek, a Kalamazoo TV station and federal armories. Blasz was a member of the Michigan Militia Corps Wolverines."
• "May 3, 1997—The IRS office in Colorado Springs was set aflame by antigovernment extremists causing $2.5 million in damage. James Cleaver, former national director of the antigovernment Sons of Liberty group, was sentenced to 33 years in prison."
Of course, not all tax protesters resort to violence. Actor Wesley Snipes argued that he was not required to pay income taxes and was charged with tax fraud and failure to file returns in one high-profile case, which is still on appeal. I spoke to one of Snipes' lawyers, Robert Barnes, a white-collar criminal-defense lawyer and litigator with the Bernhoft Law Firm, after Stack's suicide. I wanted to understand the incident and its shadowy world from the perspective of someone who has represented tax protesters.
"People without an organizational voice feel isolated and voiceless," Barnes told me. "They feel trapped by a broken political system that treats them as criminals because they don't understand tax laws more complex than quantum physics to grasp. When people feel helpless in the world, they do dumb, and sometimes morally horrible, things. It never excuses what they do, but it doesn't excuse the political system's too-typical response of deafness and force. The government's own actions keep unduly radicalizing people who were quiet middle-class neighbors a decade ago."
As the smoke was still clearing from the Echelon building in Austin, bizarrely, Facebook fan pages began to spring up surrounding Joseph Stack's suicide. "This man is a true American hero," declared one poster. "Finally someone who had enough of the government's bullshit and sacrificed his life to open the eyes of Americans. RIP Mr. Stack." Another more common-sensically countered, "But how the hell can anyone look at this and think this guy did a "brave" thing? He had NO idea who might be in that building, and honestly just the mind-set that killing IRS agents is a way to fight the IRS is absurd. They are people doing a job, like everyone else." And in our current Wingnut environment, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would weigh in with Revolutionary War comparisons: "Can the British casualties of the American Revolution be justified? These soldiers were fighting for their country and making a living, but they were also blindly oppressing people and they were attacked for it."
The presence of a digital fringe debate over the desperate and deranged act is itself a sign of our times. When the fires of anti-federal government anger are stoked, it can ignite the unstable among us. And in the case of Joseph Stack, he combined the two inevitables of life—death and taxes—into one murderous moment.
John Avlon's new book Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America is available now by Beast Books both on the Web and in paperback. The Daily Beast

The Blotter
Internet note posted by Joe A. Stack linked to plane crash
Thursday, February 18, 2010, 12:16 PM
Editor’s note: We found this note on a Web site being pointed at by social media users. A search showed the domain that the note was posted on is registered to Joe Stack of San Marcos. A man by the same name, who has addresses in both Austin and San Marcos has been linked to today’s airplane crash.
If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.
While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!
How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.

How did I get here?
My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.
The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.
That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.
Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.
On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.
The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.
In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.
Return to the early ‘80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.
For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).

SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.
(a) IN GENERAL - Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:
(d) EXCEPTION. - This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. - The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986. Note:
· “another person” is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.
· “taxpayer” is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.
· “individual”, “employee”, or “worker” is you.
Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.
During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.
After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.
Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.
Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.
Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.
By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.
To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.
So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.
When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to XXXX XXXX, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, XXXX knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.
This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.
I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.
As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.
I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.
I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.
I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Joe Stack (1956-2010)

From The London Sunday Times
Fear Palin, a warrior messiah on a mission
Sarah Palin’s speech last weekend revealed a woman driven by a sense of divine destiny
Andrew Sullivan

So does tomorrow truly belong to her? I refer, of course, to the former governor of Alaska, who quit when she was barely past the middle of her first term because, as she explained, she was not a quitter. I refer to the first vice-presidential nominee in modern times to run for office without holding a single press conference.
I refer to a person who had no idea why there was a South Korea and a North Korea; who had trouble understanding that Africa is a continent, not a country; who believes that the first amendment guarantees the right of politicians not to be criticised too harshly; who thinks climate change is “snake-oil science”; who thinks gays can — and should be — cured; and who last weekend electrified a small gathering of Tea party supporters in Nashville, Tennessee, with a speech deemed so important that it was broadcast live on a Saturday night on every cable news station.
The answer, I am sorry to report, is: possibly. I watched Sarah Palin’s speech live and, if you leave any consideration of substance out of it, it was the most talented and effective performance of any Republican politician since Ronald Reagan. She has astonishing levels of charisma and a profound connection to her constituency: white, rural, evangelical, fundamentalist voters now roiled into ever greater levels of populist ire, with a president called Barack Hussein Obama who does nuance pretty well. She is also prepared to go where other, more — shall we say — responsible conservatives usually don’t.
Two lines stood out for me. The first was a sign that she believes and her followers believe that she has some kind of divine destiny. She has repeatedly written and said that everything is in God’s hands and that her future is simply to obey his will. In her question-and-answer session she explicitly called for “divine intervention” to save America from its current president, while openly declaring that she could well run for president in 2012.
Last week she cast herself in the mould of the biblical figure of Queen Esther, a story deeply embraced by the religious right. There was also her Eva Peron moment on Saturday in Nashville: “I will live, I will die for the people of America.”
This is not the rhetoric of a politician. You cannot imagine even a late-stage Margaret Thatcher saying such a thing without being laughed off the stage. It has the apocalyptic tones of the leader of a movement.
The second line was more ominous, and about the sitting president of the United States, leading forces in combat across the globe: “We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law.”
At every event she attends she begins by asking every service member to raise their hands for praise. She constantly invokes her son Track, who is serving in the military. And she constantly insinuates that Obama is not supporting the troops, is befriending the enemies of the United States and alienating allies. She is particularly irked that Obama treated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, by arresting him in the civilian justice system, as George W Bush did with Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber”, and as hundreds of terror suspects have been under Bush, Dick Cheney and Obama and every president before.
It was striking that the first third of her speech was about national security, impugning Obama for being too weak. She defined her strategy for defusing Islamism, tackling Al-Qaeda, withdrawing from Iraq, fighting Afghanistan and Pakistan as: “We win. They lose.” She also said that one way that Obama could regain the requisite image of “toughness” was by launching a pre-emptive war against Iran.
These two potent messages — delegitimising Obama as “the other” and as a weak-kneed near traitor to the troops and casting herself as the avatar of the real America, ready to die for its survival — are political gold for the core of the Republican base. But she adds something else to this equation.
She was widely mocked for scribbling some notes on her hand to guide her through the Q&A. But this endears her to those who form her strongest supporters — whites without college education who feel condescended to by liberal elites. She has found an almost perfect cycle: the more she is attacked and criticised, the deeper her base identifies with her, the more convinced they are that she is being persecuted the way that Christians, in their view, are constantly persecuted.
As her church demonstrates, she is a believer in the end-times. In the old days, rural, white America was anti-Semitic, isolationist. Under the influence of the new evangelicalism, which treats the Book of Revelation very seriously, there is a wide belief that the state of Israel represents the in-gathering of Jews necessary for the end of the world. Hence her recent statement: “I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”
This has serious foreign policy consequences and goes further than even those who sympathise with Binyamin Netanyahu’s government’s difficulties in reining in the settlements. What it reveals is her enormous sub-rational appeal as a female war leader for those bewildered by the events of the past decade. It would be foolish to underestimate the appeal of a beautiful, divinely chosen warrior-mother as a military leader in a global religious war. She is more radical than Cheney and a good deal more charismatic.
Could any of this happen? Could this person become president? The odds remain against it. A poll last week revealed that Palin’s favourability ratings have dropped to a new low of 37%; 70% of Americans believe she is unqualified to be president, up from 60% last November. Even among conservative Republicans her ratings have slid: 45% now view her as qualified for the presidency — 66% said so last autumn.
That poll was Valium to the soul. She has had a massive PR blitz wth her book and has a platform on Fox News to broadcast her views directly to her base. Her speech was a tour de force, yet fewer and fewer take her seriously while her supporters love her more and more. Even Michael Savage, the far-right radio host banned from Britain because of his hate speech, said last week: “If you want Obama for a second term, just make sure Sarah Palin is the Republican nominee ... She is not electable as president.”
There are two unknowns, it seems to me. The first is: who else have the Republicans got? No one out there equals her grip on the base or her charisma. In the primaries she has a solid phalanx of devoted supporters who are exactly the kind of voters who show up come rain or shine. If the Republican establishment tries to counter her with a blander candidate, she could easily run as a Tea party candidate — a George Wallace-style option and one that might well guarantee Obama a landslide.
The second unknown is the economy and the war. Both could get worse. A slide back into recession or a terror attack could give the sub-rational forces that Palin channels so well a real chance to break through. This is a country of deep and dark populist moments and she is seeking hers.
I have to say I fear her. Or, rather, I fear a country that has allowed such a person to come so close to power and to dominate its discourse quite so powerfully. It is a sign that all is not well. And the world needs an America which is more stable and more calm than the one Palin represents.

andrewsullivan.com

Test flight Suday

Icicles, Inside and Out
By MAUREEN DOWD NY TIMES
Barack Obama knew that the snow clogging the capital would melt a lot sooner than Dick Cheney’s heart.
But when he saw that Cheney was going on ABC’s Sunday morning show with Jonathan Karl, he braved the ultimate lion’s den. He took Jonathan Alter’s advice in Newsweek and called the former vice president to set up a private meeting in the Oval Office, hoping to use any combination of diplomacy and tongue-lashing that would make Cheney quit calling him weak.
Obama invited Bob Gates to the Saturday summit. Gates, after all, had originally been brought in as defense secretary by W. to be a common-sense counterbalance to the batty Cheney.
The president prides himself on winning over hostile audiences, but this challenge would give a peacock pause.
The three men sat before the fire in the Oval.
OBAMA: Look, Dick, you’ve called me out on various particulars. And I have no problem with that. That’s politics. You thought Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should not be tried in New York City, and that’s fine.
And we both know that any blowhard can call me weak. But you’re not just any blowhard, Dick. You were the architect of America’s defense against terrorism. And when those folks sitting in a cave in Waziristan hear you chest-thumping, saying our guard is down, they think, “Hey, this might be a good time to attack.”
You believe in the unitary executive. You believe that if the president says something is in the national security interest of the U.S., then it is. So I am the president now, and I’m telling you that you need to put a sock in it.
CHENEY: What are you going to do about it, Hussein? Mirandize me?
GATES: Dick, the president’s right. When a former vice president calls a new president weak, it emboldens terrorists.
CHENEY (contemptuously looking at Gates with his one-sided smile): If you take the king’s coin, you sing the king’s song.
OBAMA: You keep saying there were no terror attacks after 9/11, Dick. That’s like saying that blimps were safe after the Hindenburg. I wouldn’t have been caught flat-footed reading “The Pet Goat” to second graders.
CHENEY: No, you’d have been teaching a graduate seminar on “The Pet Goat.” Don’t you Muslims eat pet goats?
OBAMA (shaking head in disgust): You have the audacity to say I’m “pretending” we’re not at war. You let the Taliban regroup. I sent 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. I’ve quadrupled the number of drone attacks in Pakistan. The prisoners who returned to terrorism after being released from Gitmo did so under your watch. You released one of the terrorists behind the foiled Christmas Day plot into an art therapy program in Saudi Arabia. Nice work, Dr. Phil.
CHENEY: You’re such a Nervous Nellie you can’t even use the words “war,” “win,” “terrorism,” “enemy combatant,” “Bomb Iran,” “Fire Eric Holder” or “Fire John Brennan.”
OBAMA: You and W. liked Brennan well enough to put him in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center. And I didn’t want an attorney general who was a rubber stamp on torture.
CHENEY: The tea partiers agree with me about torture, and that’s why you’re already over, Mr. Charisma. First you lost Teddy Kennedy’s seat. Now you’ve lost his kid. Scott Brown will wipe the floor with you in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
GATES: Speaking of Scott, the new 41, why can’t you be classy in retirement like the original 41, Dick?
CHENEY: Scott’s an All-American winner — Sarah Palin with better legs and less sarcasm. And the hair extensions make her seem even more phony.
OBAMA: Consensus, at last.
CHENEY: You, on the other hand, have about as much hair on your chest as a hairless Chihuahua. Michelle has the biceps in this family.
OBAMA: Michelle is campaigning against obesity. You might listen up on that, Dick. At least the women in my family aren’t Mini-Me’s trash-talking about the commander in chief.
CHENEY (growling): Liz and I are right! You’re on the terrorist team!
GATES: Calm down, Dick. You don’t want to end up in the hospital like poor Bill Clinton.
CHENEY: Joe Biden’s going to end up in the hospital if he brags again that Iraq will “be one of the greatest achievements” of your administration.
OBAMA: If I don’t get re-elected, it will be because you ruined the country beyond even my ability to rescue it. Remember when you said deficits don’t matter, Dick?
CHENEY: Stop whining, Mr. Radical Chic. You won’t get a second term because you’re letting America fall into second place. Put that in your teleprompter.
OBAMA: Why don’t you go help W. with Haiti instead of spewing paranoia?
CHENEY (stomping out): Is that your Indonesian birth certificate in the Oval vault?
GATES: So, that went well.

Hard Mideast Truths
By ROGER COHEN NY TIMES
NEW YORK — For over a century now, Zionism and Arab nationalism have failed to find an accommodation in the Holy Land. Both movements attempted to fill the space left by collapsed empire, and it has been left to the quasi-empire, the United States, to try to coax them to peaceful coexistence. The attempt has failed.
President Barack Obama came to office more than a year ago promising new thinking, outreach to the Muslim world, and relentless focus on Israel-Palestine. But nice speeches have given way to sullen stalemate. I am told Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have a zero-chemistry relationship.
Domestic U.S. politics constrain innovative thought — even open debate — on the process without end that is the peace search. As Aaron David Miller, who long labored in the trenches of that process, once observed, the United States ends up as “Israel’s lawyer” rather than an honest broker. The upside for an American congressman in speaking out for Palestine is nonexistent.
I don’t see these constraints shifting much, but the need for Obama to honor his election promise grows. The conflict gnaws at U.S. security, eats away at whatever remote possibility of a two-state solution is left, clouds Israel’s future, scatters Palestinians and devours every attempt to bridge the West and Islam.
Here’s what I believe. Centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust created a moral imperative for a Jewish homeland, Israel, and demand of America that it safeguard that nation in the breach.
But past persecution of the Jews cannot be a license to subjugate another people, the Palestinians. Nor can the solemn U.S. promise to stand by Israel be a blank check to the Jewish state when its policies undermine stated American aims.
One such Israeli policy is the relentless settlement of the West Bank. Two decades ago, James Baker, then secretary of state, declared, “Forswear annexation; stop settlement activity.” Fast-forward 20 years to Barack Obama in Cairo: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.” In the interim the number of settlers almost quadrupled from about 78,000 in 1990 to around 300,000 last year.
Since Obama spoke, Netanyahu, while promising an almost-freeze, has been planting saplings in settlements and declaring them part of Israel for “eternity.” In a normal relationship between allies — of the kind I think America and Israel should have — there would be consequences for such defiance. In the special relationship between the United States and Israel there are none.
The U.S. objective is a two-state peace. But day by day, square meter by square meter, the physical space for the second state, Palestine, is disappearing. Can the Gaza sardine can and fractured labyrinth of the West Bank now be seen as anything but a grotesque caricature of a putative state? America has allowed this self-defeating process to advance to near irreversibility.
In fact, it has helped fund it. The settlements are expensive, as is the security fence (hated “separation wall” to the Palestinians) that is itself an annexation mechanism. According to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, U.S. aid to Israel totaled $28.9 billion over the past decade, a sum that dwarfs aid to any other nation and amounts to four times the total gross domestic product of Haiti.
It makes sense for America to assure Israel’s security. It does not make sense for America to bankroll Israeli policies that undermine U.S. strategic objectives.
This, too, I believe: Through violence, anti-Semitic incitation, and annihilationist threats, Palestinian factions have contributed mightily to the absence of peace and made it harder for America to adopt the balance required. But the impressive recent work of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in the West Bank shows that Palestinian responsibility is no oxymoron and demands of Israel a response less abject than creeping annexation.
And this: the “existential threat” to Israel is overplayed. It is no feeble David facing an Arab (or Arab-Persian) Goliath. Armed with a formidable nuclear deterrent, Israel is by far the strongest state in the region. Room exists for America to step back and apply pressure without compromising Israeli security.
And this: Obama needs to work harder on overcoming Palestinian division, a prerequisite for peace, rather than playing the no-credible-interlocutor Israeli game. The Hamas charter is vile. But the breakthrough Oslo accords were negotiated in 1993, three years before the Palestine Liberation Organization revoked the annihilationist clauses in its charter. When Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, that destroy-Israel charter was intact. Things change through negotiation, not otherwise. If there are Taliban elements worth engaging, are there really no such elements in the broad movements that are Hamas and Hezbollah?
If there are not two states there will be one state between the river and the sea and very soon there will be more Palestinian Arabs in it than Jews. What then will become of the Zionist dream?
It’s time for Obama to ask such tough questions in public and demand of Israel that it work in practice to share the land rather than divide and rule it.

Apostles of Nihilism
Republicans are winning the war of political rhetoric. Here's how the president needs to fight back.
By Eliot Spitzer
The sense of hope that swept in with President Obama has been supplanted by existential doubt: Can the nation ever address its critical structural crises in health care, financial services, energy, and education?
Governmental gridlock has frozen us while many of our competitors—most notably the BRIC nations—eat our lunch. The notion is gaining traction that our system of government cannot confront tough issues and that other, more autocratic nations will be better-suited to the nimble shifts in policy that are needed to maintain a competitive position in the world. As Tom Friedman has said, "We need to be China for a day." Who's to blame for this mess? One theory that has some merit and current appeal is that legislatures—which by their very nature and structure are designed to protect the status quo—are responsible. Legislators get re-elected in their gerrymandered districts by appealing to the current establishment. Transformative policies do not have a broad enough base of appeal to sweep away local ossifying forces.
While it is true that legislatures generally are quicksand to transformative ideas, it is now also the case that within the Congress, the Republican Party has become the party of nihilistic opposition to any proposal for reform. The GOP does this partly by smartly exploiting the rules of the Senate but mostly by being much better at telling stories, narratives that through their simplicity appeal to the public.
Their principle narrative—the small-business owner creating jobs, government as interfering, destructive force—has dominated the past 30 years. After the economic cataclysm of the last two years, you might think that selling this narrative would have gotten tougher. But somehow the Republicans are still the masters at telling a story that grips the public psyche.
Exhibit one is health care reform, which fell prey to stories of "death panels" and demands by Medicare recipients to "get government out of my health care." The Republicans successfully exploited the public's disdain for government—even though it is government itself that is providing the Medicare they so prize.
Nobody is better at the use and mastery of this language than Frank Luntz, who helped script the demise of health care and has now told Republicans how to end financial services reform. Luntz has a new memo—"The Language of Financial Reform" (scroll down to see a PDF of the full memo text)—to manage the death-paneling of financial reform. In the memo, Luntz is effectively advising them how to use language of change and reform while stymieing every meaningful structural shift.
The clear political imperative of the memo is simultaneously to appear to be empathetic to the victims of the economic crisis and pro-reform while fundamentally opposing any change that might harm major financial institutions seeking Republican support. The political strategy is to turn government bureaucrats and low-income borrowers into the blameworthy parties.
Luntz's advice and language are simple: focus on what he calls "words that work." "Bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats" created the crisis; "Taxpayer bailouts reward bad behavior." "We don't need another federal government agency." "The architects of failure are now designing the rescue." "[T]he Financial Reform Bill and the creation of the CFPA makes it harder to be a small-business owner …"
In the face of this language, Democratic support for the critical elements of reform—implementation of the Volcker Rule, creation of a specific consumer protection agency, overhaul of the market for derivatives, and establishment of appropriate capital and leverage ratios—is crumbling.
There is a strong temptation for Democrats to sulk about the distortions of the other side and crawl off in self-pity at the public's failure to grasp the critical arguments we are making. That would be useless, but all too typical.
What we need, in the alternative, is a full-throated response to Luntz from the Oval Office. Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions for phrases Democrats can use to regain the momentum:
1.It is time to get the cops back on the beat and the bank robbers out of the bank vault. It is your money—not theirs.
2."Heads I win; tails you lose" is a first-grade joke—not a theory for our banking system. Yet that is the game that has been played on us.
3.If Wall Street wants to gamble on a casino economy, they will not use the American taxpayer as a chip on the table.
4.For the first 50 years after the Great Depression, we avoided disaster—but then Washington bought the oldest line in the book from Wall Street bankers—trust me. We have learned the lesson—and we don't, and we won't.
A counternarrative has to be told: A market needs rules, and those who play by the rules must be protected from those who do not. The Republican rhetoric must be called out for what it is: a defense of the very institutions that caused the crisis and a mere continuation of the "Party of No" ideology that has prevented us from moving forward. The public anger that has so far been channeled by Sarah Palin and Scott Brown must be redirected in favor of the necessary structural shifts.
This is the moment for the president to establish that he is, in fact, the great communicator we saw during the campaign. The alternative is to let the sense of foreboding that is sliding across the nation metastasize into something far worse—a sense of defeat and cynicism, a sense that another decade of stagnation will leave us dangerously at the precipice.
Eliot Spitzer is the former governor of the state of New York.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2244050/
Copyright 2010 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

The House of Tranquillity
By DAVID BROOKS NY Times
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and Joe Biden had a Felix and Oscar air about them. Obama was disciplined and professorial while Biden was tactile and approachable. Biden would make an off-color joke, while Obama would put on a contemptuous grimace. Biden would bound friskily onstage to the roar of the crowd. Obama would glide gracefully and even ask Joe to hold his coat.

It was not automatic that the two men would work well together once in office. When advisers from the Obama campaign interviewed Biden as a potential running mate and asked him why he wanted to be vice president, he told them that, in fact, he didn’t want the job. He’d do it. But he didn’t want it.

And, indeed, Biden’s first few months on the job were not entirely happy. He went off on one of his gaffe sprees, angering White House aides. It was common to hear Democratic senators say, “Joe is miserable. He’s doing this for the country, but he’s miserable.”

It was odd to interview him then. Normally a verbal gusher, his word rate diminished to a trickle. He paused and hemmed, like a man crossing a minefield.

But in recent months, Obama has found a way to use Biden’s skills, while Biden has found ways to be of use.

A big moment came when the subject of Iraq came up at a security meeting. Obama casually asked Biden to take the lead on Iraqi policy. This was a potentially dangerous moment in which the vice president could be tromping over ground occupied by the secretaries of state and defense. But Biden seems to know every player in Iraq down to the alderman level — and, so far, he seems to have done the job without stepping on too many toes. (Hillary Clinton’s influence on this and all issues is exceptionally hard to figure out.)

Biden also was asked to oversee the stimulus spending, a job that occupies 20 percent of his time. He has spoken to 49 governors and 100 mayors successfully policing the spending splurge and heading off potentially damaging stimulus projects, like a Napa wine train that would have shepherded tipplers from one vineyard to another.

Finally, Biden was asked to come up with a middle-class agenda. This is a surprisingly difficult job because many of these programs — credits for college affordability and child care — fairly reek of Clintonism. This is an administration that is staffed by Clintonites but does not want to appear Clintonian in any way.

Biden, for his part, has become the country’s leading Obama-ologist. Dick Cheney never spoke at meetings. Biden has his weekly presidential lunches, as Cheney did, but he does speak at meetings, depending on the president’s body language.

There are times when the president is leaning back when he seems to relish Biden’s interventions. During the Afghan debate, the president clearly used the vice president to push the skeptic’s case.

On other occasions, when the president doesn’t seem to have made up his mind, or when he is leaning forward, hunched over the table, Biden holds back, letting the arguments play.

Inside the administration, in other words, Biden doesn’t have the class-clown reputation that he has on the late-night comedy shows. White House aides speak of him respectfully and regularly mention his role when decisions are made. Among other things, he has emerged as the special assistant for body English — sent to Capitol Hill, Poland and beyond — when the administration needs somebody to hold a hand and show empathy.

The surprisingly smooth relationship between the administration’s top two officers is part of the broader White House culture. This is a fraught political climate. Liberals are furious. Moderates are running for their lives. Republicans believe, with much evidence, that an unprecedented wave of public rage is breaking across the land, directed at Washington. The uninformed float rumors that Rahm Emanuel is on the outs.

Yet the atmosphere in the White House appears surprisingly tranquil. Emanuel is serving as a lighting rod for the president but remains crisply confident in his role as chief of staff. It’s true that several top administration officials did not want to attempt comprehensive health care reform this year. But they are not opening recrimination campaigns. It’s no secret that many think the president needs to be more assertive with Congress, yet administration officials still talk about Obama in awestruck tones, even in private.

Some would say the administration is underreacting to the incredible shift in the public mood. Some would say they need more voices from the great unwashed. But no one could accuse them of panicking, or of scrambling about incoherently. In their first winter of discontent, they are offering continuity and comity. Whatever their relations with the country might be, inside they seem unruffled. The bonds of association, from the top down, seem healthy — especially for a bunch of Democrats.

The three dead Guantanamo men crying for justice
The US military insists three men who died in Guantanamo were suicides, but our correspondent is not convinced
Andrew Sullivan London Times
During the night of June 9-10, 2006, something nightmarish happened in the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Three prisoners, we were told, had committed suicide simultaneously by hanging themselves in their cells. Rear Admiral Harry Harris explained it thus: “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us.” A Bush administration official said the suicides — one by a man captured at 17, charged with no crime and scheduled for release — was “a good PR move”. At the time I remember thinking how off-key that sounded in response to three suicides. But then I moved on.

The US Naval Criminal Investigative Service took two years to complete an inquiry which came to the same conclusion as Harris immediately after the event. There have been many suicide attempts at Gitmo and hunger strikes. And collective suicide by terrorists is not unknown. Members of the BaaderMeinhof gang killed themselves in Stammheim prison in 1977. But that was accomplished by gunshots, impossible in such a tightly controlled jail as Gitmo. And the Alpha Block where their bodies were allegedly discovered is supposed to be closely monitored, with guard checks of every cell required every 10 minutes.

There were five guards for 28 prisoners. And yet the NCIS report found that the bodies were not discovered for two hours. More to the point, none of the guards on duty was ever disciplined for negligence, a baffling decision after such a massive and embarrassing breach in protocol.

The NCIS report was 1,700 pages long and heavily redacted. It was released only by court order through a freedom of information request. Last autumn a group of students at Seton Hall University law school undertook a thorough assessment of the report and found its conclusions incredible. I’ve read the full report. It’s bizarre.

The report claimed that the three men — not in adjoining cells — braided a noose from their sheets or clothing, attached them to the top of a wire mesh wall, hung sheets to prevent the guards seeing into their cells, bundled other sheets up to make it look as if they were in bed, bound their own hands and feet, tied cloths over their faces like a mask to muffle any sound they might make as they died, then climbed onto their sinks, or by some other means hanged themselves, swinging there for two full hours before being found. When discovered, the military said that rags were stuffed down their throats. They claimed these were the remnants of the cloth masks which had been “inhaled as a natural reaction to death by asphyxiation”.

Guards were immediately ordered not to write reports on the incident; some were warned that they had already made statements that the command viewed as untrue; the videotape of the cell block was impounded and the military stated that it contained nothing of any evidentiary value. A month later, half a ton of records were confiscated from all the prisoners’ lawyers — including those covered by attorney-client privilege — to find evidence of a co-ordinated plot. The military stated that suicide notes were found on the prisoners. When one of these notes was shown to the father of the youngest of the three — Yasser al-Zahrani — he replied: “This is a forgery.” The father also claims he saw needle marks on his 21-year-old son’s arms, when the mutilated corpse was returned to him.

When the bodies of the men were returned to their families, more surrealism: their necks, hearts and kidneys had all been removed, rendering a second autopsy examination impossible. Analysis of the necks would be crucial to determining a death by hanging. One prisoner had a broken hyoid bone, which the military claimed occurred accidentally when they were removing the neck for the examination.

Dr Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner for New York city, told Harper’s Magazine that “a fracture of the hyoid bone occurs more commonly in homicidal manual strangulation than in suicidal hanging”. How it happened in an autopsy is never explained. The military denied that the families had requested the missing organs. One of the families has produced the letter requesting them, delivered to the US authorities, dated June 29, 2006.

All of this would be bizarre enough, but in the new issue of Harper’s four members of the military intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta provide a very different account of what occurred. The most critical is a decorated noncommissioned army officer, Joe Hickman, who was on duty as sergeant of the guard on the night of June 9. None — amazingly — had been interviewed in the NCIS report.

Hickman was inspired to join the military by Ronald Reagan, whom he describes as “the greatest president we’ve ever had”. He kept silent until the Obama administration. He says he saw a paddy wagon transport three prisoners from their cell blocks in Camp 1 to a facility outside the perimeter of the main camp late that night. He claims the facility was known in Gitmo as Camp No, as in “No, it doesn’t exist”. Google Maps shows such a facility. Hours later he says he observed the paddy wagon returning — to the clinic. Another soldier, Christopher Penvose, says he was then told by an agitated NCO to give a codeword to a female officer in the chow hall. When he did so, he says she got up immediately and rushed out. Half an hour later the entire camp lit up with a rush of personnel centred on the clinic.

Hickman, concerned that something had happened on his watch, says he hurried to the clinic. From Harper’s: “He asked a distraught medical corps man what had happened. She said three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats and that one of them was severely bruised.”

Another guard that night confirms that is what he learnt as well. Two guards in watchtowers also confirmed to Harper’s that they saw no transport of prisoners from Camp 1 to the clinic that night. At 7am the next day, according to independent interviews with several soldiers, a senior officer gave a speech to about 50 troops telling them “you all know” that three prisoners died by having rags stuffed down their throats the previous night, but the official story would be suicide by hanging.

What really happened? I do not know. But it seems to me that these credible witnesses should have at least been interviewed by the NCIS; that the official story has gaping holes of logic; that the autopsies are beyond bizarre; and that the slightest possibility that something is amiss requires further investigation. If there is any chance that these prisoners were accidentally tortured to death and their deaths then covered up as suicide, this is the biggest story in the grim annals of the Bush-Cheney era since Abu Ghraib. And yet, other than to carry a brief synopsis from Associated Press, no main US newspaper has delved into the Harper’s cover-story.

And indeed, a year ago Hickman and his fellows went to Obama’s justice department to explain what they believed needed to be investigated further. The FBI interviewed other witnesses who backed Hickman up. Last November, after months of waiting for a response, Hickman’s lawyer got a call from the justice department. The case was closed. The NCIS report stood. When Hickman’s lawyer asked why, he was told that Hickman’s conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported.

This is the change we were asked to believe in.

andrewsullivan.com

From The Sunday London Times
Listen up, the president is not for turning
Obama’s state of the union address is a clear signal to critics on both the left and right
Andrew Sullivan
We should know the pattern by now. Barack Obama has a way of seeming to let things drift, even dangerously so. His supporters start to panic; his enemies start to sniff confidence like a junkie out of a brown paper bag. Scott Brown’s remarkable victory in Massachusetts provided the glue, and the Republicans and the media almost passed out with the rush — and still the president remained somewhat aloof; distant.
As health insurance reform looked dead in the water, Obama seemed equally inert. The mood on the liberal blogs went from depression to panic. His presidency was over! Liberalism’s revival was a mirage! The atmosphere — and I wasn’t entirely immune to it myself — reminded me of the autumn of 2007, as Obama remained mired 30 points behind Hillary Clinton and seemed to be drifting back into obscurity; or when in 2008, after his stunning victory in Iowa, he lost New Hampshire and allowed the race to drag on for months. Or how healthcare reform seemed massacred by last summer’s town hall meetings, or how he chose to stay removed from the Iranian revolution last June.
And then there’s the comeback. This time, the setup was almost perfect: an already scheduled grand political speech playing to all of Obama’s strengths. And yet what was striking about the speech was how unlike Obama it was. It was conversational, self-deprecating, sometimes funny, intermittently aggressive, occasionally moving, conciliatory in tone. But what struck me most was not the delivery but the reception. I’ve listened to dozens of state-of-the-union speeches and I have rarely heard such a quiet talk meet such silence. It was the kind of silence that greets the truth.
The truth is that America’s problems have not been this grave since the 1970s. The long-term fiscal outlook is not grim; it’s catastrophic. The healthcare system fails to insure 40m people and offers stratospheric increases in costs for everyone else. Most Americans live with a gnawing anxiety that they are one serious illness away from bankruptcy. US hospitals provide some of the best medical care in the world — but the system makes the NHS look efficient. Slowly it is strangling the US economy and government.
The country, for good measure, is fighting two wars; one of them is unwinnable and the other is coming to an end with the probable result of Iraq imploding again into sectarian conflict. For 30 years American presidents have vowed to end the dependency on foreign oil, and the problem is as profound as ever. The economy is reeling from a recession deeper than any since the 1930s.
And yet if you look at the state of American politics, you see Democrats refusing to restrain some of their worst spendthrift instincts and unable to pass an important bill even with the biggest majorities in both houses in years. And you see Republicans who have no economic proposals except cutting more taxes and have actually now begun — like the hapless Tories in the late 1990s — to defend the most expensive parts of the welfare state. Worse, the Republicans have decided to use the grave financial crisis to play pure oppositionism, using any tool available to block, stop, decry and demonise virtually everything Obama campaigned on. They gave zero votes to a modest stimulus package that no serious economist believes was unnecessary. The media seem increasingly polarised, with one right-wing propaganda machine — Fox News — competing with rivals on the left to be the most vituperative about the other side. The vilification of Obama’s centrist course, too, has been as vicious on the left as on the right.
Call it the audacity of nihilism. You begin to wonder if the centre of America truly can hold, or if the passionate intensity of the worst of both extremes is combining to kill it off once and for all. Part of this is a result of the fatal shift of the political parties in the 1970s: the new divide somewhat scarily replicates the civil war faultline, with the south and the rural heartland seceding ever so swiftly into a kind of sullen, angry non-compliance, and the rest becoming more and more like a western European multicultural democracy. Part too is a debilitating ideological calcification, in which every policy is examined in terms of “left” and “right”, regardless of the circumstances.
Just as liberals refused to believe in the 1970s that their approach to government had become outdated, so today conservatives proclaim the almost theological need to return to a parody of Reaganism instead of adjusting their ideas to new realities. And the purists are growing on both sides.
On Tuesday night Obama stood between them all, like a teacher entering a classroom with spit balls flying and desks crashing. He cannot discipline; he does not have the constitutional power to dictate to Congress what it must do, and he is also determined to reverse the imperial style of presidency that has corroded the constitutional balance in the past few decades and especially the past few years. There is no headmaster to send the children to — just an argument that certain things simply have to be done: a bill to curtail the soaring costs and horrible inequity of the healthcare system; a way to fight terrorism without abandoning core western values; re-regulation of the banking industry; a serious attempt to resolve the long-term fiscal crisis with big entitlement cuts and tax hikes; and yet another shot at moving the economy off its fossil-fuel habit.
I do not know if Americans will respond to Obama’s reasoning, or if the short-term political posturing will dissipate. In the depressed economic climate, where tempers are high and anxiety is endemic, the odds of Obama succeeding seem remote. But what came through last Wednesday night, past the gentle conversational tone, was a determination to stay the course he set out in the campaign. “We don’t quit. I don’t quit” was his version of “the lady’s not for turning”. On Thursday Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, gave a similar pep talk: “You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get healthcare reform passed for the American people.”
With unemployment at 10%, who knows whether health reform can get passed, and whether Obama can build on that momentum for serious financial reform? What we do know is that he has not caved in or radically altered his agenda or lost his touch. He has done what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did at similar points in their first terms: dug in deep, with the same themes and same character he ran for office on. His poll ratings are almost identical to Reagan’s at this point, a moment when the entire political class wrote Reagan off.
We know how that story ended; we have no idea how this one will. But those who think this presidency is over are missing something. It is not just about Obama. It is about America at this particular moment in time. There’s a reason he was elected; and I have a feeling he reminded people of it last week. For all their legitimate anxiety, anger and bolshiness, my bet is they will not forget who is the only one acknowledging the depth of the crisis and proposing a way forward.
andrewsullivan.com