Tag Archives: Politics

The Disappearance of Flight 370: One of the most important events ever.

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Aside from its tragic nature and its apparent media value as a mystery greater than who will be the Next American Idol, the apparent disappearance of flight 370 has another meaning, I think, that has been entirely missed as far as I can tell.

The other day I was having a conversation with some colleagues, which led to someone quoting Stallman, which in turn led to noting that Stallman refuses to use a smart phone (or any cell phone, perhaps, can’t remember) because of the danger of being constantly tracked by the authorities. I note that my “smart phone” is dumb as a brick. Whenever I need it to know where the heck I am so it can tell me which way to go, it seems to say “Huh? What? WTF am I?” more often than not. If the authorities are tracking me based on my smart phone, the authorities are badly misinformed. Nonetheless, Stallman is right, this sort of technology is potentially privacy-threatening. But it may be that his thoughts are ahead of his time. Based on my own experience, I’m not sure that anyone is figuring out where I am because I have a smart phone.

(I have noticed the occasional ad show up on Facebook related to something I had recently walked by, but I’m sure I’m being paranoid. Right?)

Several years ago the Soviet Union stood as the world’s largest empire ever, more or less. It included in it’s grasp the majority of of Europe and about half of the rest of the world, plus or minus ambiguous associations with China by various states. Then one day, in a blinding moment of history, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall fell, and Eastern Europe was freed from its grey oppression. Remember that?

Of course, it was not all at once, but nearly so in historical terms. Archaeologically it would look like a discontinuous horizon of concrete rubble containing the occasional Lenin fragment separating material cultures that look similar but that have some important differences. You would not see the individual events at all.

But somewhere in there with all that wall knocking over and statue pulling down and Rose Revolutions and stuff there occurred a single event, before the rest of the events happened, that on one hand was singularly insignificant and on the other hand the most important thing that ever happened in history, and that event was much like the unexplained disappearance of Flight 370.

Surely you have guessed by now the event to which I refer. Mathias Rust’s epic journey.

On May 28, 1987, Rust flew his small single engine plane from Germany to a point next to Red Square, a bit down the street from The Kremlin, via Iceland and Finland. Nobody stopped him. He was noticed here and there but never challenged. Basically, Mathais Rust revealed an amazing truth: You can fly a small air craft from The West to The Kremlin, no problem! The emperor has no clothes, the empire has no air defense. It wasn’t long after Mathias Rust landed in Moscow that all the things we think of as the end of the Cold War happened. They happened for a lot of reasons, but Mathias Rust was far more than a straw placed at just the right moment on the camels’ back. More like a Cessna 172 landing on a bear’s back.

A Boeing 777 is big. One went missing in a heavily populated part of the world with a history of tension and warfare. I don’t expect Southeast Asia to have the same exact level of radar coverage as other parts of the world, but I do expect it to be difficult to have a Boeing 777 go totally missing there. I mean, after all, this is not Subsaharan Africa. Years ago, when I was actively working in Subsaharan Africa, I was contacted by an intelligence agency. They had the zany idea that I might know where a Boeing 737 they had lost track of might be. They were watching it, it was privately owned and being used for … various things, apparently … and one day the guy who checks on these sorts of things at a particular airport went to look, just routine, to make sure the Boeing 737 was in the same place it had been put after landing the night before and the damn thing was gone. It was so missing that they had stooped to asking anthropologists if they had seen the plane around anywhere. But that was then, and there, and this is now, and elsewhere.

Personally, I’m not too surprised this could happen, but the average person on the internet should be, as far as I can tell. Why, for example, does Edward Snowden have nothing to say about this? If the NSA and all those other agencies are able to track our every move, how can a Jumbo Jet vanish without a trace? (I quickly note: They’ll probably find it, but it is too late for maintaining any faith in The Watchers. If it is located now it will be bumbled upon, not found because someone, somewhere, knows where everything and everyone is.)

Flight 370 tells us that they don’t know everything, they being, well, you know. They can’t do everything. Not only are you and I not being tracked, but clumps of hundreds of people all together including engineers traveling abroad, people without passports and, for chrissakes, Chinese People, are able to vanish from the face of the Earth without any agency or government being able to simply point and say “Oh, they’re right there, plus or minus a few hundred meters. We know where everyone is.” Because they can’t do that. They don’t have the technology, the resources, the time, or the inclination. And, most important of all: It turns out that Tom Clancey’s novels are fiction!

So, how do you hide a Boeing 777 from the US’s NSA, Chinese Military and Intelligence, and the intelligence and military communities of all the other countries? You don’t. They don’t know where it is already. Whatever you were thinking the Man was capable of, think again. Flight 370 shows us that the capabilities of Big Brother are highly exaggerated.

Republican Congressman Michael Grimm Wants To Throw Reporter Off Balcony

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This happened:

More here, including Grimm’s apology.

From Wikipedia:

Michael Gerard Grimm (born February 7, 1970) is the United States Representative for New York’s 11th congressional district, serving since 2011. The district, numbered as the 13th District during his first term, consists of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn. He is a member of the Republican Party. He is a former FBI agent, businessman, an attorney, and U.S. Marine, having served in the Persian Gulf War.

So he’s a former cop and a former soldier, and from New York. Such folk talk like this sometimes, I guess. But it must have been scary for the reporter, being right next to the balcony and all.

There was apparently some concern about Grimm misusing his authority as an FBI agent.

…Grimm had been involved in an altercation at a popular West Indian-themed night club in Queens called Caribbean Tropics, during which he was accused of misusing his F.B.I. authority.

He is a Tea Party favorite, according to this Daily Caller interview:

TheDC: You have the support of the Staten Island Tea Party.

MG: Overwhelmingly, yes. A lot of my volunteers have come from the Staten Island Tea Party. It’s an honor to have them. Some of the media wants to demonize them as fringe right-wing maniacs, and I have not seen that on Staten Island or in Brooklyn. I have seen good hardworking people that are frustrated and angry with the direction of the country and they’re standing up to voice their opinion and get involved.

From Wikipedia on the fund-raising controversy that prompted the flight off the balcony suggestion:

Fundraising controversy
Based on confidential interviews with followers of Orthodox Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, a January 2012 article in the New York Times reported that Candidate Grimm engaged in “questionable fundraising” practices during his 2010 campaign. These practices allegedly included repeatedly soliciting one follower who had already donated $10,000 to Grimm’s campaign for another $10,000, accepting cash donations exceeding $100, explaining a scheme to evade donation limits to another follower, and accepting a $25,000 donation for which the funds originated from a single person and passed through Rabbi Pinto’s former aide, Ofer Biton.[39]

In August 2012, the office of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York acknowledged that it was investigating Grimm’s 2010 campaign.[40] In November 2012, the House Ethics Committee decided to inquire into the campaign but agreed to “defer consideration” of it at the Department of Justice’s request.[41]

In January 2014, the FBI arrested Diana Durand, a Houston-based fundraiser for Grimm, on charges that she had illegally donated more than $10,000 to Grimm’s 2010 campaign. Durand allegedly gave the campaign $4,800, the legal limit, but then used straw donors to donate more than $10,000 illegally. The FBI also charged Durand with lying to Federal agents about the matter. Grimm denied any wrongdoing.[42]

On January 28, 2014, NY1 political reporter Michael Scotto tried to ask Grimm a question about the investigation while conducting an interview about the 2014 State of the Union Address. Grimm refused to answer and initially walked away. However, while Scotto was tossing back to the studio, Grimm abruptly collared Scotto and told him, “Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I’ll throw you off this fucking balcony.” When Scotto protested that it was a “valid question,” Grimm replied, “No, no, you’re not man enough, you’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.” Grimm later issued a statement defending his behavior, saying that he was annoyed by what he called a “disrespectful cheap shot” from Scotto. “I expect a certain level of professionalism and respect,” Grimm said, “especially when I go out of my way to do that reporter a favor.”

This is the casefile on Grimm from the DCCC.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE INVESTIGATION SUMMARY:

According to a bombshell report from the New York Times, Congressman Michael Grimm, together with a man under FBI investigation for embezzlement, raised more than $500,000 dollars in tainted campaign cash by taking contributions in excess of federal limits, taking contributions from foreign nationals, setting up “straw donors,” and personally receiving envelopes filled with cash.

Chris Kluwe, The Vikings, And Sports Privilege

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Utah has gay marriage. Say no more. It’s officially over at the highest levels, folks. You can’t spend decades legislating and ordering equality from the chambers of congress, statehouses, and the benches of the high courts before, eventually, it becomes part of our culture to assume that the state and society supports equality even if an obnoxiously large minority of citizens does not. Struggle is followed by reluctant acceptance and regulation which is followed by shifting norms. What happens then is interesting: You have to shut up. STFU in fact. If you are really against equal rights you need to do so in your head and maybe in the privacy of your own home or some crappy bar you hang out in, but otherwise keep it to yourself and stop infecting the next generation. Then, eventually, inequalities can be addressed without as much public fighting. We are moving as a society into that STFU phase.

Except in two areas: Gayness and football.

First, the gayness. It is not entirely clear to me why gayosity and all things related is so far down on the list of things to stop officially hating in American society. Yes, yes, there are post-hoc explanations aplenty but I’m not sure if anything really holds up. The thing is, that which is being “granted” to gays today, over the last year and a half and presumably over the next year or so, should have been granted to everyone ever a long time ago, and was in fact officially, legally, granted to almost everyone in the spirit of law and society if not everywhere always on the ground. Forty and nine years have passed from the passage of the Civil Rights Act to the year in which the tide turned and state after state started abrogating absurd anti-gay laws or enacting same sex marriage fairness. I quickly add that a turned tied does not equal an empty harbor; it is just the point at which things begin to flow mostly in a direction opposite, more or less, they were flowing before.

For those of you who don’t know, Minnesota experienced a major fight last year over same sex marriage and I find this deeply embarrassing as a resident here. If there was a state that could be pointed to as the state that gave our country the Civil Rights Act, it is Minnesota. It was the mayor of Minneapolis later elected as a federal representative and eventually Vice President who made that act happen. We are the Civil Rights State, dammit. And we almost passed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage! That election day this amendment, along with another bone-headed constitutional amendment that would have favored Republicans in subsequent elections statewide, as well as the Republican control of the state legislature, were swept away like the stinking offal that it was. But the issue should have never come up. General equality should have been something we had legally in this state decades ago. Making inequality part of our constitution would have been a heinous act by people I can only describe as social criminals. Kidnappers of rights, robbers of freedom, aggravated assaulters of the already repressed, punchers down. They even tried to argue that they were good people doing things that other people simply disagreed with. I think not.

But then there is football. When I moved to Minnesota, the football stadium was named the Hubert H. Humphrey Metro-dome, but most people called it the Metrodome, and only rarely the Humphrey Dome, as though they were embarrassed about Humphrey, the afore mentioned champion of civil rights. When I asked various long-time or born and bred Minnesotans about this, they denied that there was anything going on here. They just call it the “Dome” or the “Metrodome” because that’s easier to say. No anti-Humphrey stuff going on here. No implicit indirect passive aggressive resistance to civil rights going on here. Just easier to say. Dome. Metrodome. Nothing else.

Then, they added another name to the Metrodome. They couldn’t get rid of the Humphrey name but the added “Mall of America” to the name by calling the turf on which the play happened “Mall of America Field” so now the big ugly out of date sports stadium has a name that sounds like the full name of one of those British Counts or something: “The Hubert. H. Humphrey Metrodome, Mall of America Field, Also Known as the Thunderdome the Homerdome and The Dome. At your service.”

And I swear to you that as soon as the thing was called “Mall of America Field” the press stopped calling it conveniently “The Metrodome” (leaving off any mention of Humphrey) and started calling it the Mall of America Field. All the time.

Now, I’m sure that there is an excuse for this. The deal was made, the Mall of America invested in naming rights and thereafter the Free Press was required to use that name because they are required to attend to corporate interests. Nothing anti-civil rights, anti-DFL, anti-Humphrey going on here. Just the press being bought off by a major corporation. Go on home, folks, nothing to see here. Business as usual.

And all that is the subtle, nuanced, unspoken context in which the Vikings fired Chris Kluwe. Kluwe, one of the world’s greatest punters ever and in his prime, was one of those players who allowed people like me, who are marginally interested in football but unhappy about certain aspects of the game, to see hope. Kluwe tweeted, and his tweets were often … well, smart, and even progressive. He was also repressed. He once tweeted about how dangerous it might be to play on a solid-frozen open field not prepped for winter play (after the HHH Metrodome collapsed under snow one day). He was told to shut up. He tweeted that too. Eventually he tweeted about the gay marriage amendment, and in fact joined the political movement to defeat the amendment. In short, Kluwe did things that football players were not supposed to do: Think, speak, opinionate, not be a right wing bible-thumping shit.

Chris Kluwe was fired by the vikings because of his gay rights activism. He posted about it in a piece called “I Was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot“:

In May 2013, the Vikings released me from the team. At the time, quite a few people asked me if I thought it was because of my recent activism for same-sex marriage rights, and I was very careful in how I answered the question. My answer, verbatim, was always, “I honestly don’t know, because I’m not in those meetings with the coaches and administrative people.”

This is a true answer. I honestly don’t know if my activism was the reason I got fired.

However, I’m pretty confident it was.

Go read the entire piece. It is rather amazing. This is not a simple situation. The owner of the team seems to have been supportive of Kluwe’s activism. The coach seems to have been swayed to ask Kluwe to STFU, but reluctantly (he is, after all, one of the few African American coaches in the NFL and does not seem like a “pull the ladder up” kind of guy). The real bad guy in this scenario may be Mike Preifer, the special teams coach and thus punter Kluwe’s immediate boss. Preifer is painted by Kluwe as a real dick, telling the player that he’ll burn in hell with the gays and once stating “We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows.” Kluwe notes:

It’s my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of 2012, that I was fired by Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn’t agree with the cause I was working for, and two cowards, Leslie Frazier and Rick Spielman, both of whom knew I was a good punter and would remain a good punter for the foreseeable future, as my numbers over my eight-year career had shown, but who lacked the fortitude to disagree with Mike Priefer on a touchy subject matter.

Also, the Vikings suck. A year or so ago one might have hope that they’d move out of state and we could be rid of them but a new stadium is being built as we speak and they are here to stay. Therefore, they have to change. Hopefully the firing of Chris Kluwe will serve a positive purpose as a turning point. Next, we need to see the firing of Mike Priefer. A person in any management position in any profession in the United States who told his employees the things he said to the Vikings players would be fired. Except in sports, especially football. Sports teams, players, coaches, and owners seem to live in a world where they can be freely racist, anti-gay, and religious bigots. That really has to end.

GOP Rep. Randy Neugebauer

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People are getting mad.

GOP Rep. Randy Neugebauer Confronts Park Service Ranger at WWII Memorial: You Ought to Be ‘Ashamed’
On Wednesday afternoon at the Word War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) confronted a female U.S. Park Service Ranger as she was preventing non-veteran tourists from entering the temporarily-closed park due to this week’s government shutdown. “How do you look at them and deny them access?” Neugebauer asked the unidentified ranger. “I don’t get that.” In his breast pocket, he carried a small American flag.

“It’s difficult,” the ranger responded.

“Well, it should be difficult,” the congressman shot back.

“It is difficult,” she reiterated. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves,” Neugebauer insisted.

“I’m not ashamed,” the ranger replied.

A few onlookers got involved in the conversation, including one federal employee wearing a bike helmet. “This woman is doing her job, just like me,” he told the congressman. “I’m a 30-year federal veteran. I’m out of work.”

“Well, the reason you are is because [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid decided to shut down the government,” Neugebauer said to the man.

“No, it’s because the government won’t do its job and pass a budget,” the onlooker said before the congressman turned and walked away.

“The House did its job,” another onlooker chimed in. “It passed appropriations; the Senate hasn’t.”

The Texan Republican was one of many House GOP members who voted to pass a government funding bill that would also delay the implementation of Obamacare. Senate Democrats and the White House would not agree to those terms, resulting in no budget and the shutting down of non-essential government functions.

Got it here.

There is a call for an ethics violation investigation against Neugebauer.

The horror of this event …

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We watch these events unfold through a veil of tears. And over time, it only gets worse as we learn the identities of some of the victims, and learn of the horrors of this particular kind of bomb attack. We wonder if the bomber knew that few would die but many would lose their legs, or if families of living vibrant people, standing together to watch other family members finish their run for some worthy cause, would be turned into a collection of news stories about the dead and the maimed. We also wonder why this target was chosen. Timothy McVeigh attacked a Federal office building to strike a blow against the government. The day care center he blew up was incidental to his goal. Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold slaughtered people in their classrooms, acts that are impossible to fathom but that at least fit the larger pattern of school shootings. Did this attack happen because it is April, when these things (such as all those just mentioned) tend to happen? Because it was Tax Day? Because it was Patriots’ Day? Was this bomber against runners? Was Boston the target? Was this merely a convenient gathering of Americans to use as targets to make some international terrorist statement? Was this angry white males from the woods of Michigan or the mountains of Idaho striking out against a liberal enclave?

Was it just some kid who thought this would be an outrageoius thing to do? Continue reading The horror of this event … →

Does Secular Humanism Have A Political Agenda?

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In March, 2012, I attended a conference called Moving Secularism Forward run by the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry. I spoke as part of a panel called Does Secular Humanism Have A Political Agenda? along with Ronald Bailey of Reason.com, Razib Khan of Secular Right, and former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder. This panel was assembled and moderated by Lauren Becker of the Center for Inquiry. Tom Flynn, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism and editor of Free Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism’s bi-monthly journal liked our session (for good reason, it was great) and asked if we could provide a written version of our remarks for publication in the journal, and the issue with those articles in it has just come out: Continue reading Does Secular Humanism Have A Political Agenda? →

A Political Sea Change

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Yeah, I’m bringing back the term “Sea Change” which was briefly popular a few years ago, in reference to the perception of party difference, the difference between Democrats and Republicans, in handling foreign policy. Let me say first that it has never been true that the Republicans were better at handling foreign policy than the Democrats. Individual presidents and individual congresses (if that term is appropriate) have varied a lot, and it could be that one party is not better than another. Having said that, I think Democrats have been better over recent decades, more or less. Imagine, if you will, George Bush Jr. in charge instead of JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis. OK, now that you’ve thought about this for a second, throw some cold water on your face and calm down. It didn’t happen, we’re OK. Now, consider the most reviled of the Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter. Count the number of bombs dropped or missiles fired by the Carter-Mondale administration. Zero. Now think about Clinton’s administration. Most people are unaware these days (or even then) of the slug-fest between Al Qaida and the US, and more specifically, really, Osama bin Laden and Bill Clinton. First, there was George HW Bush who let al Qaida operate in the US to the extent that a few weeks into the Clinton Administration, Osama bombe the world trade center. Meanwhile, George HW Bush had pushed us into a sensless occupation on Somalia. Clinton eventually disentangled us from Somalia, undoing the Republican Mistake, and then, Clinton kept Osama on the run for 8 years, forcing him first to move the the Sudan, then out of the Sudan (remember the baby food factory?) and having his navy address on the ground regular attacks from Yemen. Clinton also worked with the international community to contain Saddam, and Clinton basically solved the problems in Eastern Europe working with NATO. When Clinton left the White House, that allowed Al Qaida to operate freely again in the US, and that is when the second World Trade Center attack, and the Pentagon attack happened. Remember back to Reagan, the greatest of the Republican Presidents (according to some). Remember Operation Fury against Granada? Senseless showmanship designed to cover up a major foreign policy blunder is not good statespersonship. And that blunder, the Lebanon excursion, was one of the greatest shorter-term foreign policy blunders of the 20th century. A few years later, Reagan’s administration made up a fake attack on the US and responded by bombing Libya. Stop for a moment and consider the difference between Reagan’s messing around in Libya and what President Obama managed there. Some day we should have a contest to define the most appropriate metaphor to describer that difference, it could be fun.

Eric Ferguson has written a piece that fills us in on the last few years, comparing President Obama with the Republicans, and focusing on September 11th. But not that September 11th, rather, Romney’s Meltdown. Eric makes the point that it is now more than ever plausible to assume that when it comes to foreign policy, Republicans suck and Democrats do pretty well, and more importantly, that public perception is moving in that direction. He provides evidence from polls and from an analysis of Romney’s Meltdown to show that a Sea Change is likely occurring after which the argument that having an “R” next to your name is not equivalent to having an impressive resume on foreign policy. Indeed, it may well indicate the opposite.

…when Romney denounced Obama for expressing sympathy for the attackers who killed someone at our Benghazi consulate (the numbers and identity were then unknown), which Obama didn’t of course, he showed how grotesquely unfit he is to handle foreign policy or international crises. He reinforced the impression he made when he screwed up so much in Britain that a conservative newspaper called him “Mitt the Twit” on its front page, when he said Israel is doing better economically better than the Palestinian territories because of a superior culture and ignored the occupation, and when he publicly criticized the Obama administration for handing a dissident back to China when they were actually negotiating to bring him to the US.

Read Eric’s piece here, and therein you will find links to interesting polls and a recent timeline of events.

Democratic Primary is Today in Wisconsin

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This is the special primary for the Democrats (the Republicans have one too) in which voters will choose who will go up against Scott Walker, the hater-governor who is being recalled. The recall election will be next month.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is in the lead in that primary and will likely take it. He is the guy who was defeated by Walker in the previous election for governor, in 2010. The margin then was about 5%. Continue reading Democratic Primary is Today in Wisconsin →

Climate Change and the State of the Union Address

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i-ad9657c4a95ea2c8a4e8bbddd35e291a-President_Barack_Obama_Delivering_State_Of_The_Union_Address_2012-thumb-250x416-72165.jpgI liked Obama’s State of the Union Address, and I liked the fact that a lot of other people seemed to like it. He made strong and positive statements about energy.

Imagine what we could accomplish … A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world….

Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values….

… and his comments about traditional energy called for greater use of natural gas, which if used correctly, provides some advantages over coal and even oil, as it is shipped (usually) without the use of fossil fuels, is cleaner, and is often otherwise wasted during recovery of oil.

His call for opening up new oil reserves was tempered with a reality check.

I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy…. I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here. We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising. Pass clean energy tax credits and create these jobs.

Continue reading Climate Change and the State of the Union Address →

I am the Angry Left. But if I was in Congress I’d still be polite.

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We know that the right wing revels in stupidity; Willful stupidity and well practiced stupidity are thought to be the way elitist anti-populous tax-the-middle-class Republicans capture support from the masses. Seems to work rather well. But increasingly this trope of (ig)noble ignorance is being supplemented by large doses of mean spirited in your face angry verbal assault. Imagine a member of congress saying to an expert witness at a committee hearing “As long as I’m sitting here and you’re sitting there, I can call you whatever I want.”

Seriously. The last time I heard that kind of talk in real life was in a bar, late at night, everyone was drunk, and the words were slurred.

I would like you to look at two freshly produced essays reflecting on one recent incident:

Continue reading I am the Angry Left. But if I was in Congress I’d still be polite. →