I missed this when it first came around I guess. It raises the question – how can Americans vote for someone as stupid as John Boehner, leaving aside the question of how the Republican Party make him the House Minority Leader?
– Carbon dioxide is a carcinogen? Huh? It’s a greenhouse gas John.
– CO2 from cows is a problem? Huh? It’s the methane John.
– When cows “do what they do” that’s a problem? Not that John can’t name it because he wants to use the word fart, but it’s not cow farts, it’s cow burps that are the issue. But since Boehner doesn’t know that….

Is he capable of getting a single fact right?

BTW, I don’t write here much anymore. When I have some short and outstandingly insightful (or stupid) remark to make, I make it on Twitter these days. Most of what I have to say, I’ve learned, can be said as well in 140 characters.

Scientific American has a great podcast, especially for those of us who believe in whacky theories like evolution, climate change and gravity. Tom Friedman has some great perspectives on why dealing with climate change is a good bet, even if the theory is wrong. To the doubters, he argues that our national security depends on a renewable energy source which, whoops, is what solving the climate change issue requires too.

Listen HERE.

Takeway quote: “Change your leaders, not your lightbulbs.”

Also, the interview with Jerry Coyne on evolution and creationism is worth a listen.

I heard a legislator bemoaning that Republicans were blocking the stimulus package just as a matter of partisan bickering. Really? Someone wants to spend nearly trillion dollars on nobody knows exactly what and the only possible explanation for someone having reservations about this is “partisan bickering”? To put it in perspective, the stimulus package will cost, in nominal dollars, three times what we spent to fight World War II.

When we fail utterly to see our opponents’ point of view, we have no hope of hashing out a solution. I think that’s where the legislator in question is. She reminds me of my favorite movie line ever, from Canadian Bacon. John Candy is trying to wind up the locals for a “strike” on Canada and in his pep talk he says: “There is a time to think and time to act and this. is. no. time. to. think!”

Newt Gingrich was the grinch, the man attributed with bringing a new level of nastiness and partisanship to the Congress. And so I was surprised to hear an interview with him on NPR saying that he said he gave Obama “extremely high” marks for his transition and lauded him for, unlike Roosevelt, taking action between election day and inauguration. Gingrich actually argued for doubling funds for the National Science Foundation. This after a decade of Republican attacks on scientific research.

He’s critical of all these huge bailouts, saying that the money is being wasted, which I think most Americans agree with. However, deviating from the classic Republican playbook, Gingrich is not against spending these huge sums. He’s against what he calls “pothole projects” meaning projects that employ someone to wield a shovel while the money lasts, but have no strategic importance. He wants to see projects like the transcontinental railway and the interstate highway system — big strategic spending that will benefit the American people for decades to come (and he didn’t bother to point out that both of these projects were started by Republican presidents).

And, I would never have thought it possible, he seems to really believe that the current crisis has put us past partisanship for the next few years. Either Obama will succeed and the country will be better off in three years or he won’t and nothing else will matter in 2012, so there’s no point in partisan snarking.

Gingrich even said there are things government does well, and audacious projects like the transcontinental railroad belong in that category. So much for “government is not the solution, it’s the problem” (Ronald Reagan). He does worry about government frittering away money on meaningless projects in each congressional district. As he says, Lincoln didn’t push for a small railroad in each congressional district, but a transcontinental railway. There’s a difference.

I think at one point, Gingrich hoped me might become the party’s next Ronald Reagan, but in office he turned out to be a nasty, petty politician. Out of office, though, he seems to be running to be his party’s Jimmy Carter — the politician who had terrible execution in office, but seems increasingly effective with each year he stays out of office. Almost makes me want to forgive the guy

If you want to be really afraid, read Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, a prize-winning history of the CIA based heavily on recently declassified internal documents and hundreds of interviews with former and current agents, including most living directors and some dead ones (the author has been covering the intelligence beat for quite a while). Legacy is a tragic and depressing read, but a good read for any citizen. It’s what I would call a “managerial” or “administrative” history of the CIA in the sense that it floats mostly on the level of policy and general direction and doesn’t get deeply into the details of CIA operations. In some way that’s disappointing, but it’s an eye-opening overview of the CIA.

I always knew that the CIA’s “successes” had deeply damaged American security (I mean Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, and so forth), but I never realized how many catastrophic and damaging failures there were that they managed to keep under wraps during the Cold War. Nor did I fully understand the structural reasons for the idiocy of overthrowing governments and installing dictatorships (i.e. it goes beyond Cold War ideology and to the fact that the CIA was incapable of producing any useful intelligence on the Soviets or the Chinese, who had much more disciplined spy agencies).

The Bay of Pigs is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s also Indonesia, abysmal intelligence on the Soviets and the Chinese (worse than worthless). Not to mention fact that the CIA inadvertently supplied much of the operating budget for the Italian communist party for over a decade!
The book gives little hope that the CIA has gotten better or even can as currently structured. Virtually every president has asked the CIA to operate illegally and spy on US citizens within the US in direct violation of its mandate.

That said, Nicholas Dujmovic has a very long review of Legacy of Ashes that calls into question many of Weiner’s basic assertions and has some compelling demonstrations of Weiner’s fast and loose style that mistrepresents facts and quite often simple gets them wrong. In other words, these errors concern not complex matters of interpretation where careful scholars might reasonably disagree, but simple, verifiable facts like what year the president made a given speech. Carelessness is one of the cardinals sins of a historian and Dujmovic’s corrections are constitute an important critique of Weiner’s work.

Dujmovic is a CIA historian and his review appears on the CIA site. Despite the obvious bias inherent in that position, I do think there is a difference between a historian and a journalist, no matter how serious the journalist is. The standard for proof and how far one is willing to go from the facts, and the level of immersion in the specialty are different. In general, this is what makes historians more accurate and more boring than journalists. Of course, there are good historians and bad, good journalists and bad, but historians write primarily for other historians, so the impulse is to get it right even at the cost of being complex, boring and perhaps difficult to follow. Journalist write for non-specialists readers, so the impulse is to make the story compelling and readable and have an interesting narrative arc. Often scrupulous adherence to the facts suffers.

Being only a casual reader here, I can only guess at who to believe, but when it comes to basic facts, I would bet on Dujmovic. When it comes to broader interpretation, though, it’s an open question that I don’t feel qualified to answer. And thought Dujmovic quibbles with Weiner’s facts and his blanket judgements, in between is what I think are the essential conclusions of the book:

• the CIA was generally poor at intelligence, especially human intelligence and that was not just a recent failing. It has always been true. The US was never able to get decent intelligence on what was happening within the Soviet Union or China. Dujmovic would add that the CIA was good at surveillance intelligence (satellites and spy planes).
• Presidents need good, ideologically neutral intelligence and need to act on it, but that has never happened either because of the CIA’s inability to provide it or because of the president’s unwillingness to accept it. I think both authors agree on that.
• The CIA has been a weak institution, adept at creating mayhem, but not at keeping operations secret, except from the American public. I think they more or less agree on that, but would put it in starkly different terms and lay the blame in very different places.
• covert ops have, overwhelmingly been damaging to the United States and have achieved little of value. Perhaps the one exception, the ultimate outcome of which remains debatable of course, is arming the Afghanis, which played a significant role in bankrupting the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Since neither the future of Russia nor Afghanistan has been worked out, we can’t really know the legacy of those operations. Clearly, the covert ops in Iran, Chile, Indonesia, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were deeply damaging both to the people of those nations and to the long-term interests of the US. Dujmovic would disagree, no doubt, but then that conclusion is as much a matter of philosophy and the long view versus short view as it is a matter of fact in any way.

When it gets down to more specifics, Dujmovic certainly gives me pause to question many of Weiner’s assertions and, me being in journalist mode, or even worse, “journaling mode” here, this is from memory… so caveat lector. But here are some of Weiner’s other assertions as I recall them:

• Until Nixon, every president says he’s opposed to the covert service and just wants intelligence, and then quickly becomes drunk on the power of overthrowing governments and throwing elections and they all behave pretty much the same. With Johnson, and then with Nixon, intelligence, however, becomes entirely subservient to politics, a trend that of course had tragic consequences during the Bush admin. Dujmovic has some quibbles about Weiner’s assertions that the CIA more or less conned presidents into covert ops, but that critique, I think, supports the idea that the presidents could not resist the thrill of covert ops.
• The US overthrew governments and controlled or attempted to control elections in more countries than you can count: Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Chile, all the ones you know about. But the US also controlled the elections in Italy for twenty years through cash infusions and propaganda. Johnson actually spent more per voter on the elections in Chile than he did on his own presidential campaign. I’m not sure how one can prove that the US controlled democratic elections, but certainly money has its influence.
• Through the 1960s, the CIA had few intelligence successes. They predicted that the Soviets were at least three years from an atomic weapon and probably more like seven. Within the week the Soviets exploded a nuclear warhead. They said that the Indonesian government would not respond militarily to the CIA coup attempt for at least six months. As they were giving that briefing to the president, the president received a cable saying that the Indonesian army, [b]with intelligence help from the US military who still regarded Indonesia as a valued ally[/b], had bombed the CIA proxy forces to smithereens. Dujmovic particularly takes issue with the idea that the CIA intelligence was worthless and notes that Weiner gets some of his basic facts wrong, like saying that a CIA report from 1960 grossly understimated the number fo Soviet ICBMs, when in fact the report was from 1957, projecting ICBM levels for 1961.
• The CIA was full of loose canons and for many years the head of covert ops did not even report to the head of the CIA, but straight to our beloved Attourney General Bobby Kennedy. Dujmovic takes issue with many of the claims here as well though not specifically with regard to Kennedy.
• After failing utterly to gather intelligence on the Soviets (fact partly disputed by Dujmovic), the CIA got its act together in SE Asia and started getting good, actionable intelligence. Unfortunately, what their intelligence said, as early as 1964, was that the war was not winnable and we should get out. This was completely unacceptable to the hawks in the Kennedy and Johnson admins (Bobby, MacNamara, Bundy, all those). At one point, the CIA estimated there were at least 500,000 VC in South Viet Nam and probably more. The response from the White House and the Pentagon was that number was unacceptable and needed to be below 400,000 or the entire hiearchy of the CIA would be on the chopping block. The report was rewritten to say that there were only 399,000 VC in SVN.
  With Nixon it just gets worse and intelligence is put to political purposes to a degree previously unseen, at least in Weiner’s account.
• And Dujmovic essentially agrees with the tragic account of US intelligence in the Clinton and Bush years, that we all know too well.
• And then there’s the legendary incompetence and bumbling of the CIA (and Dujmovic would say that Weiner exaggerates). For decades, the covert ops service sent agents into Eastern Europe, North Korea and China with money and guns to organize local cells. Every one was rounded up and executed. During the 1950s, Kim Philby was passing coordinates of the drops to the Soviets. They rounded up these hapless “commandos”, had them radio back reporting a successful rendez-vous with the partisans, then executed them and took the gold bars and sent them to the Italian Communist Party. For over a decade, most of the funding for the ICP came from CIA gold.

One thing Weiner’s book brought home and Dujmovic’s review did little to dissuade was the feeling that Bobby Kennedy was an evil man. Of course, we know that he got his political start as a lawyer for HUAC hunting communists with another young, ambitious attourney, Richard M. Nixon. Bobby was also, of course, a foot dragger and obstructionist on civil rights issues who got religion on that issue late as well. Now, from Weiner’s book, one can see Bobby really coming into his own as Attourney General when he gets into his elbows with running covert ops, knocking off foreign leaders, throwing elections and generally usurping the power of the Director of Central Intelligence. I don’t know what was in JFK’s mind regarding Viet Nam, but I think this thing about how great the world would have been if John had lived or Bobby had gotten elected is a canard and the one thing the CIA got right is that we didn’t belong in Viet Nam and we weren’t going to win.

Meanwhile, every president ordered the CIA to conduct missions that were illegal by the terms of the CIA charter – spying domestically on peace activists, black civil rights leaders and so on. All the files on the CIA secret drug programs tested on Americans were destroyed because Helms felt that if released they would destroy the agency. Secret prisons and torture have always been a part of the CIA.

Anyway, as I said at the outset, and I am little dissuaded by Dujmovic’s critique, I always knew the “successes” of the CIA had had tragic consequences for the world, but I had never realized that their failures had done so much damage. And finally, I never realized that when they finally did have some intelligence successes, as in Viet Nam, it made no difference because the politicians didn’t want to get out.

…was trained in the in supermarkets and the farms of America. This is how your food is raised, and California Prop 2 aims to change that. As Shakespeare said: “All pity chok’d with custom of fell deed” (Jul. Caesar, Act III, scene I).

Just a sampling of the photos and video on the Yes on Prop 2 website.

Remember Bill Clinton’s winning line: “It’s the economy, stupid!”. This election cycle the debate rages about “experience”. Does Obama have it? Does Palin? How can Obama supporters be such hypocrites to say Palin doesn’t have enough experience? Well, it’s not the experience stupid. First, let’s just name a few of the most experienced presidents and vice-presidents: Cheney, Nixon, Johnson, Truman. Let’s look at some presidents relatively inexperienced in politics at the national and international level: Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, Harding. Good and bad in both groups, though it is perhaps a bit troubling that Obama’s career is most like Harding’s. Harding arrived on the national stage due to a convention speech, served as a one-term senator and then won the presidency. Anyway, the point being that the presidency seems so unique as a job that it is not always clear what “experience” really counts.

The problem with Palin is not her inexperience, it’s just simply that she is a moron. George W. Bush is often tongue-tied and mangles the English language, but he is not a moron. He has had terrible judgement, but it’s more due to a triumph of ideology over fact (a problem that Palin would likely share). In truth, as Bush has served and seen the limits of his approach, he actually has become a better president. Sadly, he can’t undo all the damage he did in his first seven years of on-the-job training. And remember, Bush worked closely with his father during his father’s campaigns and presidency, and surrounded himself by one of the most experienced staffs ever to walk into the White House.

But Palin, who seems to share all of Bush’s weaknesses, adds flat out stupidity to the mix. Witness this response from an interview with Katy Couric.

COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the—it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.
— quoted by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek

This is beyond Bush’s mangling of the language. It’s not just that she doesn’t answer the question. It’s not just that it’s utter nonsense and completely incomprehensible. It’s that she seems to be laboring under the idea that she actually did answer the question.

She reminds me of some Maranatha Church members I’ve met. I’ve met some who are intelligent, knowledgeable and well-considered, but Maranatha seems to encourage their people to start proselytizing from day one. The problem is that some of these new converts only have the vaguest notion of what’s in the Bible and several of them have quoted the same few verses at me and a few have told the same story about a friend who was at a prayer meeting and a man started speaking in tongues and it was perfect “High German”. They say it like High German is somehow impressive as being a language of distinction, which shows that they have no idea what High German (Hochdeutsch) actually means:

High German is a geographical reference to where the dialect family that forms High German originates. It refers to the mountainous areas of central and southern Germany and the Alps. This is opposed to Low German, which is spoken along the flat sea coasts of the north (Wikipedia).

Along with the irrelevant and misunderstood detail, it’s always “a friend” who was there, a key marker of any urban legend.

In other words, they’re okay if they stick to the script and can recite the few verses and bogus stories they’ve been taught, but they get tripped up if the person they’re preaching to has actually read the Bible or knows what Hochdeutsch is. So it is with Sarah Palin. The $700 billion bailout was new news and the McCain campaign had not had time to give her a script. She’s the new convert, the person that most denominations would not put up on a soapbox in the public square with a Bible in hand (and even the Maranatha Church is more judicious in a public situation like that). Nevertheless, there she is and, if she has to speak for more than a few minutes or, God forbid, respond to a question for which nobody has handed her a written script, she runs out of Bible verses and urban legends and has to resort to nonsenical babbling.

At least someone should teach her to say “I don’t know” in an intelligent way as in “Well Katie, that’s a rapidly developing situation and I haven’t had the opportunity to meet with the economists who helped draft that plan, but as vice-president getting those briefings would be a top priority”.

So right now she’s locked in a closest memorizing scripts for the vice-presidential debates. If she comes off as anything other than a complete idiot, we’ll have to admit that she’s at least got a good memory, because she’s obviously starting from zero.

Please, let’s all tell Hillary Clinton to shut up with her false claims to be ahead in the popular vote (forgetting for the moment when she was ahead in delegates, she consistently said that the popular vote didn’t matter). If you believe her rhetoric, please do yourself a favor and read Jonathon Alter on The Problem With Clinton’s Popular Vote Math. In brief and in rough, it goes like this.

Obama is 450K votes ahead not counting caucus states, 560K ahead if you count them. He is 63K behind if you count FL and MI where he was not on the ballot of course. If you count the uncommitted votes from Michigan, though, that brings him up by almost another quarter million voters. Leaving those votes aside, if the expected settlement happens – FL and MI get 50% of their votes/delegates counted – O is still ahead 325K in pop vote.

Meanwhile, Clinton is keying her people up to say the nomination was “taken away”. For reasons I’ve discussed ad nauseum, I won’t support Clinton because of past votes, but for a while in the middle of the campaign, I was starting to warm to her. Recent events such as claiming a popular vote lead and positioning herself as the candidate of white workers who think the black dude is a Muslim are just so crass it suddenly makes me understand the Clinton haters of the 1990s (when I was partly out of the country and never really got it). In short, they will do anything for power, no matter how damaging to the causes they believe in.

Before these last weeks I had nothing particular against Hillary Clinton except my commitment to not vote for any senator who voted in favor of giving Bush unlimited war power. Now I actually fear seeing her in the White House.

Four Nobel-winning economists and over 280 other economists just posted a letter arguing that the best studies suggest that the gas-tax holiday is a bad idea that will lead to windfall profits for the oil companies, will encourage consumption and provide little relief to consumers. One thing I didn’t hear on the news report or on their site, that I also object too, is that it provides a tax break to everyone, whether they need it or not. Bill Gates gets the same break as Joe Schmoe. Why should Bill get a break on gas? Makes no sense.

Hillary Clinton just denounced the Nobel-winning economists’ advice as elitist talk and said she won’t be throwing her lot in with economists. Bill Clinton was criticized as a closet Republican because he hired the best economists he could find and tended to follow their advice whether it fit his ideology or not. Some people say he went too far, but one can make a good argument that part of the reason that the economy was so strong under Bill was because, less than most presidents, he didn’t play politics with the economy. Apparently, Hillary would rather adopt ill-advised policies that will do little or no good for working people rather than taking the tough road and doing what makes sense.

By the way, if you have a car that gets 20mpg and commute 40 miles per day, the gas tax holiday will save you 36 cents per day. Most people could save that much by using cruise control and checking tire inflation. For the people who can’t afford gas, this won’t fix it. If you really want to help working class people, give them a transportation subsidy, which can be used for gas or mass transit, and phases out as income rises, so that people who make more than a certain amount don’t get the subsidy. That way, unlike Hillary and John, my plan does not give a tax break to Bill Gates. Nothing personal Bill, I just don’t think you or Steve Jobs (or The Ranter for that matter) need the $0.18 per gallon tax break (assuming the oil companies don’t just skim that profit).

I recently said that race wouldn’t hurt Obama, unless it was the racism of the North. Then I got a shock in South Carolina. Despite Obama’s landslide victory, he came in third among whites. THIRD! I should say that I meant that race wouldn’t hurt him in a general election when up against a Republican, because any Democrat is likely to lose the South (unless Obama gets 80% of the black vote as he did in the SC primary; Clinton has no such advantage).

So then I looked at the real breakdown of the SC results and found them not as discouraging as one might think.

• Clinton beat Obama by one percent among white males. Edwards trounced them both among white males (45%) but even that is not that discouraging. Obama got 80% of black males. So we’ve progressed to the point that white males are more willing to vote against their race and gender. Clinton won among white females by an even smaller margin (42% to 36% for Edwards and 22% for Obama).
• Things are getting better. Only 15% of non-black voters 60 and over voted for Obama. 52% of non-black voters 29 and under voted Obama. That suggests that race is becoming a less significant lense through which to see the world. Maybe we’ll see the Confederate flag disappear from South Carolina some day (why are Confederate flags allowed on government property in America, but the Nazi flag is not allowed anywhere in Germany?)
• Obama won among poor people, which is no doubt a result of the fact that blacks tend to be poor, but it suggests that the Edwards agenda of looking out for the poor will have to be on Obama’s agenda too. Edwards did best among those earning over $200,000/year, which suggests that his war on poverty message fell on deaf ears.
• 49% of Democratic voters who identify themselves as conservative voted for Obama. That bodes well for the general election.
• Obama polled 64% of those who go to church more than once a week. That is likely partly because of black religiousity (always undercounted when talking about the “religious” vote), but still bodes well for going up against a Republican in November.

Source: CBS Exit Polls