Investing While Democrat

Nice little tidbit on the Martha Stewart indictment here. Turns out that she's a major Democratic campaign contributor.

Explains why the SEC is suddenly so hot and bothered to throw her in jail for such a small infraction ($45,000, if I remember correctly). With "biggies" like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling (Enron) and Bernie Ebbers (WorldCom) still running around free, it's surprising that they want to spend the effort. Yeah, Martha's a jerk, but so are most billionaires. Comes with the territory. If being a jerk were a crime, we'd all be in big trouble at one time or another.

Looks like we have a new version of DWB ("Driving While Black"). The Supreme Court held recently that cops can make traffic stops based on race anytime they want, as long as the driver has committed a "real" traffic violation. Now, the SEC can go after Democrats at will, as long as they've committed a "real" crime. Problem is that the offences that the SEC is concerned with are things like "insider trading", which is sort of the stock market version of obscenity. ("I know it when I see it.") They didn't even get Martha on this; they went for "obstruction of justice" (ie, she really ticked off the investigators.)

So what do we call this? "Investing While Democrat"? Awkward.

How long before the charge is "donating money to a terrorist organization"?

(Via Charles Dodgson)

LATER -- Turns out that the "fraud" that she committed was simply declaring her innocence. This isn't "Orwellian" any more -- it's a witch hunt. "If she floats, she's a witch. If she sinks, she's innocent." (via Hesoid)

Somebody Gets It

At last.

New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill to require that new voting machines produce an auditable, recountable paper trail.

You'd think that this would be wildly noncontroversial. You'd be wrong. The folks making the "recount-proof" voting machines have very strong political connections. Republican connections. "Trust us" they say. "We have Procedures In Place to make sure that Nothing Can Go Wrong". What are they? "Sorry. Proprietary Information". Anybody who has had a six-month battle with a credit card company over a bogus charge (like I have) won't buy the "The computer can't be wrong" shuck-and-jive.

My thoughts on the subject are here. Important Websites are Sanford Professor David Dill's and Rebecca Mercuri's

(via Atrios)

Copycat

Kinky Friedman's response to the Dixie Chicks.

WARNING: Do not click immediately after eating. Not suitable for children or invalids. Cover all fishbowls. May be hazardous to small animals. Do not use near open flame. Do not operate machinery after clicking.

Coulda been worse. I'd head that Michael Moore was threatening to do this if the recall campaign got serious.

(via The Sideshow)

"David Nelson, You Have A Call from Mr. bin Laden ..."

I wrote about this a while back. We have a "no fly" list; people who aren't allowed on airplanes for any reason. We also have a much longer list of people who are allowed to fly only after an absurd amount of hassle. Supposedly, this is "for security reasons", but nobody will say who's on the list or why. There's no way to get off of it. It's an observational fact, however, that some people get hassled beyond any point of sense.

David Nelson, for example. Which "David Nelson"? After all, "David" and "Nelson" are both common names. Why, all of them, of course. If your name is David Nelson, you must be a Bad Guy. What kind of Bad Guy? Can't tell you, but we sure can't let you on an airplane without harassing you.

If your name is David Nelson, I'd seriously recommend checking into some good fake ID. It's completely legal unless you intend to commit fraud or tax evasion with it.

I see this stuff and remember "The Lottery", by Shirley Jackson. We have to have a show. Somebody has to be selected at random and torn apart for no other reason than to show the Power of the State.

Brrrr.

Good Theater

The rescue of PFC Jessica Lynch from a hospital in Nassiriya was definitely the cinematic high point of the war in Iraq. It had all the elements of a Hollywood war action movie - troops moving in under heavy fire to rescue a comrade who had gone down fighting, a brave native risking his life to gather intelligence information. Good stuff.

According to the Guardian, it had something else in common with a Hollywood action movie.

It was staged. There was no opposition. The guns were firing blanks. Doctors and patients were carefully kept out of the way.

This story has gotten no play in the US media (one squib in the Seattle Post-Intellegencer, and I rather suspect this is as far as it will go. The BBC is supposed to air this story on Sunday; we'll see what happens.

So now we see the future. No matter how bad the real situation gets, our beloved Government will have cheerful, staged, media events to keep our minds off of our troubles. Scary thing is, this will probably work. To most people, what they see on the Toob is more real than their own lives, and we seem to have a collective attention span of about two weeks. The war in Iraq is already Old News; nobody's interested in it any more.

(Link via Atrios)

LATER - Turns out this is old news. The Toronto Star published essentially the same story on 5 May.

STILL LATER – Older news! Here's an article from the London Times that's more than a month old.

So What Are They Doing?

You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.

-- Talleyrand

Let's see. We didn't stop the looting of the Baghdad Archaelogical Museum or the National Library. Yeah, the damage seems to be a lot less than we thought. Excellent news, but still no excuse.. We didn't protect hospitals, banks, or Government or Ba'ath Party records. We didn't secure known nuclear materials, which have disappeared. Our WMD teams are going home. Iraqi civilians are rooting through the latest batch of mass graves looking for family members instead of waiting for forensic help that would give much better results. Looting proceeds apace; many Iraqis are afraid to leave their homes. The "shoot to kill" order is an admission of failure. In these situations, you always shoot the wrong people.

So what are we doing in Iraq? We have, what, 150,000 troops "in theatre"?

Well, my guess is that the combat troops are doing patrols looking for an army, the maintenence guys are doing maintenence, the logistics guys are schlepping supplies around for the rest of the military. The brass is holding meetings.

In short, just what they've been trained to do. They have no training with "nation building" whatever the <bleep> that means. They have no training as cops. Very few of them speak any Arabic at all.

We base our operations on "war games". When the "game" is over, everybody goes home and writes their "after action report". Well, we've achieved our objective. Our training says that, when the exercise is over, it's over. No more need be done. We have no training for dealing with an occupation.

The "occupation" seems to have no planning at all behind it. Except, perhaps, "Move Chalabi into Iraq. He'll do what's necessary."

It's too early to call this a "quagmire". What we have here is a mess. If we don't find the handle on this soon (and I see no signs of this), we will have a quagmire on our hands.

Stuff I Read

Note the new "Stuff I Read" block over on the right, replacing the "war info" links.

The original Useless Web Pages were inspired by some guy posting a listing of his CD collection as a Web page. This seems to be the classic "Who cares?" item. My "Stuff" list is probably in this category, but what the heck, it's my blog. I read 'em, but they're not in the category of "things that I think that you should read".

Of course, I reserve the right to move them around, add or delete items, and move them in and out of the "must read" block at whim. I will try to keep them current; far too many folks' "blogrolls" never get maintained and are full of dead links and blogs that haven't been updated for years.

Anyway, here they are. Enjoy. Or ignore. Your call.

Looking in the Right Place

Seems like we've been looking in the wrong place for Saddam's <echo_chamber>Weapons of Mass Destruction</echo_chamber>.

Guys, this is the Twenty First Century. Internet Era. Global Economy. Get with it! Digging around through caves is absolutely nineteenth century.

Billmon has the scoop.

Note that Billmon's Whiskey Bar has been added to the list over on the right of Blogs That You Should Read. He has a mixture of humor and analysis like I try to do, but he does it better.

President AWOL; Some Background

Orcinus has a summary of the hoohah over Georgie Bush's military record. It's good. Go read it.

Basically, Georgie's photo op on the Abraham Lincoln dredged up the story of his military service, and this time the story seems to have gotten enough legs for the Republican propaganda machine to have taken a bit of notice. The Ornicus post has pointers to most of the relevant "hard" info. Georgie could end the whole thing by simply releasing his military records, but to do so would be absolutely un-Republican.

However, a lot of the "soft" info has gotten lost in bad or selective memory or wishful thinking. The Vietnam war was not a pleasant national experience. Herewith, some recollections:

"Don't Get Shot"

Remember, we had this thing called "the draft". This seems to be one of the things that has dropped into the memory hole. It was the central item in the life of any male from the age of about sixteen to 26, or until he got a permanent deferment or went into the military. Basically, the Government would tell you to report for duty, and you did, Or Else. Draftees generally got the really nice jobs, like clearing minefields. Nobody has ever adequately explained to me how this isn't "involuntary servitude" as in the context of the Thirteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court's response to challenges to the draft translate as "pthhhht!"

Basically, the idea that college boys had (not men; can't vote, can't drink, can't sign contracts) was to avoid getting shot (some believed in the war and signed up; we're not talking about them). The options were:

• Get a deferment. Student deferments were easy to get, but didn't last forever. Medical deferments are the best; ideally, you could get a letter from your own doctor about any medical condition that would keep you out. Ideal ailments were those that didn't show and tended to come and go. Rush Limbaugh's "pilonidal cyst" is about ideal.
• "Conscientious objector" status got a lot of play, but is effectively impossible unless you were a devout, lifelong Mennonite or a member of a similar religious group. And yes, they took the "lifelong" and "devout" parts seriously. Also, COs tended to get drafted anyway and get shipped to non-combatant jobs in combat zones (medical, generally). Basically, you still got shot at but you couldn't shoot back.
• Go to jail. The "politically correct" option. Nobody I knew took this option. The problems are obvious, starting with the sad fact that the sentence for draft evasion was wildly variable - up to 25 years depending on how nasty the prosecutor and judge wanted to get.
• Arrange to be out of the country on your eighteenth birthday. If this is the case, you register for the draft with the local American consulate. You'd still be officially part of the draft pool, but the "overseas" draft quota was zero. This is how Bill Clinton stayed out of the draft. If I remember correctly, you had to be out of the country for an appreciable time - day trips to Canada or Mexico didn't count.
• Go to Canada. Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy. Canada was not pleased at being an escape hatch, and had all kinds of restrictions about who could hold a job. Other countries (Sweden was popular) were even stricter about who they let in.
• Draw a high number. In an attempt to make the draft "more fair" (there was considerable evidence that the draft was anything but random. Protest on Monday, drafted on Tuesday.), the Selective Service established the "draft lottery". Every man of draft age got a number, based on his birthday. Guys got drafted in numerical order. Draw a high enough number, and you're effectively exempt. Unfortunately, this is a gamble, and, near as I can tell, nobody was ever able to "game" the system. Also, there's the problems that "high enough" depended on the particular draft board you'd registered with.
• Get drafted. Not good. The draftee hitch was two years instead of the standard Army three or Navy or Air Force four, but you were treated like utter garbage by the entire military organization. Basic training was cheap, and there was an effectively infinite supply of draftees. You're an expendable munition.
• Join up. A bit better chance at a "good" stateside job, but it's three or four years chopped out of your life. Also, there's no guarantee that you won't end up in 'Nam. They need file clerks/radio techs/whatever there, too. The fact that you're not carrying an M-16 through a rice paddy doesn't mean that you can't get caught in a rocket or mortar attack.
• ROTC sounds like a good idea, until you look at it too closely. After all, if you're going in anyway, you might as well go in as an officer. Unfortunately, what they wanted were infantry officers - exactly what you don't want to be.
• National Guard. This is the ticket! It's military, so you're not officially "evading your commitment". The commitment is six years instead of four, but it's "military lite". Basically, the politicos gave an ironclad guarantee that the Guard would never be sent to Vietnam. The downside? There's a waiting list. A long waiting list. And VIP's kids bypass the list. Nice political plum to hand out - "support the war and your sons won't have to fight in it".

Effectively, for most guys, there were only two ways to avoid getting shot:

1. Get a deferment.
2. Join the Guard.

The first took money and you really had to have a "deferrable" problem. The draft boards generally didn't check up on letters describing medical conditions, but doctors could get into really serious trouble for writing fake letters. For example, Ménières syndrome was regarded as the "perfect" problem. Episodically disabling, but essentially impossible to prove. Even if you had it, the draft board probably wouldn't accept it. Too many fakes.

The second one took political "pull". This Georgie Bush had in abundance. Not only did he get in, ahead of the waiting list, but he got fighter pilot training, the biggest plum the Guard can offer.

Fighter Jocks

I've known a few fighter jocks. The one thing they have in common is a total obsession with flying. They'll do anything to stay flying.

Georgie got the E ticket. And he blew it off. To me, this is one of the most puzzling aspects of the whole affair. The usual hypothesis is that either

1. The Guard had started requiring drug tests at pilots' physicals.
2. Georgie was doing "community service" for an offence that was expunged from his record. He couldn't get back in time to take the physical.

Both are true, but I don't like either as an explanation. The first falls on the fact that early drug tests were a joke. They might detect opiates or barbiturates. Anything else, forget it. The second falls because this would seem to be a "legitimate excuse"; Georgie almost certainly could have rescheduled. The military does not like losing pilots to administrative problems.

The only thing I can think of that makes sense is that Georgie simply got tired of his shiny new toy and went on to other things. Another thing that supports this hypothesis is that he never got a private pilot's license. This fact alone tells me that he was never a "real" fighter jock. Also that he had serious pull. Your friendly average military type (of whatever rank!) doesn't have the option of simply blowing off an assignment, especially one that involves some very expensive training.

The Guard

During the Vietnam war, the National Guard did not have a good reputation. Their exemption from duty in Vietnam did not sit at all well with the other services. I have no personal knowledge of what went on in any Guard unit, but muckraker extraordinaire Jack Anderson did many columns on the Guard. They described incompetent officers (mostly silly-incompetent, not nasty-incompetent), enlisted men who screwed off all the time and smoked vast quantities of pot, and crooked but amazingly incompetent supply officers. The Texas Air National Guard came in for particular criticism. We have no equivalent of Jack Anderson any more. Alas for American journalism.

The Current Military

Let's just say that nobody with any brains is pining for a return to the Good Old Days of the draft. The current military, from absolutely all reports I've heard, is vastly superior in every respect to the Vietnam era military. The only ones pushing for a new draft are boneheads who want a whiter military. (Am I saying that the people calling for a new draft are racists? Yes. Also stupid.)

Another Handy Household Item

To go with your household explosives.

Build your own golem. This is a project that could have some real use -- a golem sounds to be a lot more tractible, and probably less destructive, than the usual run of illegal or semi-legal "help" that you can hire normally.

Unfortunately, it seems to work only for Jews of the highest level of spiritual purity and religious devotion. This is the usual religious escape clause. "Faith can move mountains." Mountain didn't move? Not enough faith.

(Via Making Light)