MilitaryTracy and Dadler, the amount of info on French indochina compared to
Afghanistan, military and political... wow.

Know of any linkies to quotes about "it's a volunteer army or it's a bunch of mercenaries," made by significant figures between 2003 and now? I've heard and read them, but need somebody or somebodies big... wasn't there a meet the press where some pol said that these folks in the military "were not the best and the brightest," somewhere along 2007?

One valley name for those with long memories-- Dien Bien Phu...

This baby is almost writing itself, I'm suprised nobody at the War College has written a thesis on it. Or maybe they have, and it's not available to the public for some reason... Hah!

Was that a good Tweety impersonation?

May or may not be back on later today... it's the first visit, so

I'm expecting to get home and enter the realm of beer following this. 2 hr drive both ways.

Brooks seems livid and chastises his wingers-in-arms for not having seized the  opportunity in the debt ceiling negotiations to make steady, messy progress toward  conservative goals.  "There was a Democratic president eager to move to the center (sic).  He floated ideas that would normally be unheard from a Democrat.  ...WH officials talked about raising Medicare eligibility age, cutting Social Security by changing the inflation index, freezing discretionary spending and offering to pre-empt the end of the Bush tax cuts in exchange for a broad tax reform process."  

Brooks claims that Boehner took the offer seriously, and, from his own reporting, he attests that WH officials took the offer seriously.  This opportunity tragically missed by conservatives would have reduced the size of government by $3 trillion over a decade---amazingly big money since he notes, apparently for tea party consumption, three times larger than the cost of the Obama health care law.

Here's an excerpt:

The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay "Politics as a Vocation," drew a distinction between "the ethic of responsibility" and "the ethic of ultimate ends"--between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. These ethics are tragically opposed, but the true calling of politics requires a union of the two. On its own, the ethic of responsibility can become a devotion to technically correct procedure, while the ethic of ultimate ends can become fanaticism. Weber's terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a "leader's personality." Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad.

Representative Austin Scott, from the Hartzells' new state of Georgia, is the president of the House Republicans' freshman class. Last week, Scott, addressing the possibility that the United States might default on its debt, offered this blithe assessment: "I certainly think you will see some short-term volatility. In the end, the sun is going to come up tomorrow." It was Lenin who first said, "The worse, the better," a mantra adopted by elements of the New Left in the nineteen-sixties. This nihilistic idea animates a large number of Republican officeholders. The battle over the debt ceiling is a contest between grown-up sobriety and juvenile righteousness, which doesn't leave much choice.

Nor does it leave much hope. President Obama, responsibly acceding to the reality of divided government, is now the leading champion of fiscal austerity, and his proposals contain very little in the way of job creation. More important, he no longer uses his office's most powerful tool, rhetorical suasion, to keep the country focussed on the continued need for government activism. His opponents' approach to job creation is that of a cargo cult--just keep repeating "tax cuts"--even though the economic evidence of the past three decades refutes such magical thinking. What does either side have to offer the tens of millions of Americans who have settled into a semi-permanent state of economic depression? Virtually nothing. But if responsibility were fused with conviction--if politics were a vocation in Washington today--the Hartzells would be represented at the negotiating table.

Democrats don't do the same thing not necessarily because they're better people, but because they have a different view of what the costs are. Democrats tend to get freaked out by a tongue-lashing from the Washington Post editorial page over some bit of procedural bad sportsmanship, while Republicans not only don't care, they realize that no one else in the country does, either.

"Got Jobs?"

"Will Work for Policies That Do"

"Bad Compromises are NOT a Virtue"

"Where'd All The Democrats Go?"

"¿Tienes trabajo?"

"The Wages of Sin are All I Have Right Now"

"Wall Street Ate My Country"

"Underwater and Overqualified"

"We Really Can't Do Better Than This???"

T-shirt ideas anyone?

Apparently, the computer expert who found through his analysis and then testified in the trial that the computer had been used to go to a page about chloroform 84 times realized that there was an error in his analysis.  He found that the computer had only visited the page one time.  

He then informed the police and the prosecutors of his error on June 25th according to the article.

Guess what the prosecutors - still in trial at the time that they were notified of the error - did with his information?  Nothing.

Neo-liberals tend to favor a combination of market mechanisms and technocratic solutions to solve social problems. But these kinds of solutions tend to discount politics - and in particular political collective action, which requires strong collective actors such as trade unions. This means that vaguely-leftish versions of neo-liberalism often have weak theories of politics, and in particular of the politics of collective action. I see Doug and others as arguing that successful political change requires large scale organized collective action, and that this in turn requires the correction of major power imbalances (e.g. between labor and capital). They're also arguing that neo-liberal policies at best tend not to help correct these imbalances, and they seem to me to have a pretty good case. Even if left-leaning neo-liberals are right to claim that technocratic solutions and market mechanisms can work to relieve disparities etc, it's hard for me to see how left-leaning neo-liberalism can generate any self-sustaining politics.

And another settlement doled out because the NYPD is clueless about diabetes and almost killed another poor slob diabetic arrested for a non-crime.

Comments from Steve Wynn

as a general rule, how egregiously must one breach the ABA and state bar code of ethics, before one is subject to disbarment?

i have a specific reason for asking, not merely idle curiousity. rep. bachman has been publicly accusing an entire class of litigants of committing wholesale fraud, in their class-action (and fairly recently settled) suit against the agricultural dept., for race discrimination in farm lending. i refer to the pigford case, of an entire group of african american farmers, denied loans solely because of race.

this goes well beyond mere political campaign hyperbole, into outright slander/defamation. reps. bachmann and steven king have both asserted, in public, on multiple occasions, absent any tangible evidence to support their allegations, that members of the pigford class filed fraudulent claims.

if reps. bachmann & king had evidence to support these claims, why didn't they provide said evidence to the DOJ, while the case was ongoing? if they have no verifiable evidence to support their allegations, why isn't she being stripped of her license to practice law?

The temp has hit 98, the heat index is 110 here in aka Chicago -- and before 3 p.m., so the temps still are climbing.

This is horrible.  Did anyone else see the video of that fog yesterday that would have caused Carl Sandburg to swoon, the fog that closed the city beaches, when so many people most needed to stay cool?  Because the wind across the lake was hotter than the lake, the fog was so dense that lifeguards could not see folks in the water, even a few feet away.