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WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Magpie is a former journalist, attempted historian [No, you can't ask how her thesis is going], and full-time corvid of the lesbian persuasion. She keeps herself in birdseed by writing those bad computer manuals that you toss out without bothering to read them. She also blogs too much when she's not on deadline, both here and at Pacific Views.

Magpie roosts in Portland, Oregon, where she annoys her housemates (as well as her cats Medea, Whiskers, and Jane Doe) by attempting to play Irish music on the fiddle and concertina.

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Saturday, August 25, 2007

I'd walk away from a nut case, too.

In the current issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has an interesting piece on the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy and how France is changing under his presidency. Buried at the end of the article is what I'd argue is the most important part of Gopnik's whole piece—for those of us who live in the US, anyway:

The catastrophe in Iraq has had an unlooked-for effect: not to stoke anti-Americanism in a new generation but to make America seem almost marginal. For almost two hundred years, Americanization in Europe has been synonymous with modernization—that’s why the Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor, as a gift of the Third French Republic, the fraught state that appeared after Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire failed. It was a gift not from a complacent old world to a nascent new one but from a newborn republic to one that, after its civil war, was firm and coherent. The point wasn’t that Europe would not abandon us; it was that we would not abandon old Europe to the despots.

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.
[Emphasis added]

Yet another thing we have Dubya's administration to thank for: Going from being the so-called world's only superpower to a new life as the crazy guy on the international block in only six years.

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| | Posted by Magpie at 1:13 PM | Get permalink



Friday, August 24, 2007

If you're going to lie about something ...

You should try to make your lie believable.

This is especially true if you're a public official, because some damned blogger is going to fact-check you. (This used to be the job of the 'mainstream' press, but you know how that's turned out.)

Today's case in point involves US director of national intelligence Mike McConnell. In an interview [transcript here] with the El Paso Times earlier this week, McConnell claimed that the requirement that spy agencies get a FISA court warrant to conduct a foreign intelligence wiretap is making it hard for the nation's spy agencies to fight terrorism:

Q: Can't you get the warrant after the fact?

A: The issue is volume and time. Think about foreign intelligence.... My argument was that the intelligence community should not be restricted when we are conducting foreign surveillance against a foreigner in a foreign country, just by dint of the fact that it happened to touch a wire. We haven't done that in wireless for years.

Q: So you end up with people tied up doing paperwork?

A: It takes about 200 man hours to do one telephone number. Think about it from the judges standpoint. Well, is this foreign intelligence? Well how do you know it's foreign intelligence? Well what does Abdul calling Mohammed mean, and how do I interpret that? So, it's a very complex process, so now, I've got people speaking Urdu and Farsi and, you know, whatever, Arabic, pull them off the line have them go through this process to justify what it is they know and why and so on. And now you've got to write it all up and it goes through the signature process, take it through (the Justice Department), and take it down to the FISA court. So all that process is about 200 man hours for one number. We're going backwards, we couldn't keep up.

200 hours of paperwork? That sounds like a lot of time to this magpie. It also sounded like a lot to Ryan Singel at Threat Level, and he actually did the numbers on McConnell's claim:

In 2006, the government filed 2,181 such applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court. The court approved 2,176....

That means government employees spent 436,200 hours writing out foreign intelligence wiretaps in 2006. That's 53,275 workdays.

Let's assume dedicated government employees work 40 hours a week with two weeks off a year. That means there were 218 government employees with top secret clearances sitting in rooms, writing only FISA warrants.

Leaving aside the question of whether it really takes 200 hours to prepare a FISA warrant, I'd suggest that all the time spent putting together the supporting info for a warrant is a good thing (and that most of the 200 hours McConnell claims is spent doing stuff that would need to be done anyway). Wouldn't you agree that the fact that intelligence agents (in McConnell's words) 'go through this process to justify what it is they know and why and so on'—basically, forcing them to make a good case for why a wiretap is needed— might help prospective wiretappers to better focus on what's really important once the FISA warrant lets them start eavesdropping?

Just asking.

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| | Posted by Magpie at 1:20 PM | Get permalink






Thursday, August 23, 2007

I think the press is finally noticing ...

... that Dubya is pulling reasons for staying in Iraq out of his butt.

Dubya's speech to the VFW yesterday (see this earlier post) seems to have finally pushed a number of US reporters over the edge. Good examples are this video clip featuring MSNBC's David Shuster [WMV file, thanks to Crooks and Liars], and this commentary by Joseph Galloway, McClatchy's senior military correspondent:

This week we saw two President Bushes in action. In a news conference in Canada, he acknowledged that while security has improved somewhat thanks to the surge, the Iraqis have made little progress toward meeting the benchmarks. Two days later, speaking at the National VFW convention in Kansas City, the president spoke at length about the need to stay the course in Iraq indefinitely.

He pleaded for the patience he said is needed to win in Iraq, and surprisingly put forward the example of the Vietnam War and our withdrawal from there after 10 years and 58,249 dead American troops as a reason why we must stick to our guns in Iraq.

He trotted out his administration's now shopworn fear tactics, arguing that persisting in this senseless war will prevent a massacre of millions in Iraq and attacks on us at home by a reinvigorated al Qaida.

The more things change in this administration, the more they stay the same.
[Emphasis added]

In fairness, though, I should point out that McClatchy (and its previous incarnation as Knight Ridder) has been almost the only mainstream US news organization that's been critical of Dubya's Iraq adventure right from the start.

Via McClatchy Washington Bureau.

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| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink



Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Ooooooh, shiny!

I bet you didn't realize that you needed to watch a Finnish-language cover version of YMCA.


70's hitmakers Gregorius work it hard!


But you did, didn't you?

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| | Posted by Magpie at 7:12 PM | Get permalink



Cheney does it again.

And while we're on the subject of lying and historical revisionism (see the post below), I see that VP Dick Cheney is once again claiming that the vice president isn't part of the executive branch.

My brain hurts.

Via The Hill.

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| | Posted by Magpie at 10:39 AM | Get permalink



Iraqi insurgents = Al-Qaeda = Khmer Rouge.

To most people, the logical leaps needed to make that equation would be impossible, but nothing is too difficult for our Dear Leader.

In a speech given to members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars earlier today in Kansas City, Dubya unloaded some of the most preposterous misunderstandings (and outright lies) about the world's history since the Second World War that this magpie has had the misfortune to hear. For example, the prez said that the US was responsible for the decolonization of Asia and after 1945. (It wasn't.) He likened the 'war on terror' to the war against Japan and the Korean war. (As a historian, I can't think of any significant similarities.) And he attributed the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia to the fact that the US withdrew its troops from Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. (In fact, the success of the Khmer Rouge was due to a CIA-sponsored coup that replaced a neutralist government with one more sympathetic to US war aims in Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge wouldn't have had a chance without a US-backed enemy to fight against.)

However, all that pseudo-history pales when compared to Dubya's main contention: If the US withdraws from Iraq, Al-Qaeda will not only wreak destruction on the Iraqi people like that suffered by Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge years, but Osama bin Laden will bring a similar reign of terror here to the US.

Bin Laden has declared that "the war [in Iraq] is for you [the US] or us to win. If we win it, it means your disgrace and defeat forever." Iraq is one of several fronts in the war on terror -- but it's the central front -- it's the central front for the enemy that attacked us and wants to attack us again. And it's the central front for the United States and to withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating.

If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities. Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home. And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America.

This, of course, completely ignores the facts that 1) there was no al-Qaeda threat in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion; 2) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; and 3) the US occupation of Iraq is what has turned that country into a terrorist magnet and training ground. But hey, facts never get in Dubya's way when he's trying to support some stupid policy that he's already committed himself to.

If you have a strong stomach, I strongly suggest reading Dubya's whole speech. I'm sure the GOP is already sending out talking points based on what he said, so you might as well get a good handle on the arguments for the occupation that the 30-percenters will be tossing at you between now and when the administration has to make its Iraq progress report to Congress next month.

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| | Posted by Magpie at 10:05 AM | Get permalink



Adding injury to injury.

If you think things are bad when your mortgage goes into foreclosure, just wait until the Internal Revenue Service gets done with you.

Via NY Times.

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| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink



Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Batten down the hatches!

Unless we are very lucky, a global recession is in the cards.

As this excellent post explains, the US housing bubble is really just a symptom of a more widespread problem that is currently battering the world's financial markets. (And, yes, Dubya's administration bears some of the blame.)

The global economy cannot survive for long on the traditional credit creation process, and unless Wall Street can revive confidence in its securitization process almost immediately, a global recession starting later this year is a high likelihood. Wall Street might have a chance if it could make public very soon the nature and extent of the problems with its credit creation process. But this is one of the key differences between the two processes – problems in the commercial banking system are quicker to surface, and there are regulators ready to intervene. Not so with the complex, sprawling, opaque, and unmanaged Wall Street process, whose raison d’etre seemed to be to generate fat bonuses for many involved, with little thought to the systemic and economic risks being created.

We shall see what good the Fed and other regulators can do with interest rate cuts and any other interventions they can think of, but the problems are so large and unwieldy that no one should hold out much hope. The implosion of the Wall Street credit creation process is unprecedented in its depth and international scope, and the global economy will be fortunate indeed to avoid severe and prolonged damage.

I highly recommend reading Numerian's whole post at The Agonist. It's the best explanation of what's going wrong in the economy that I've seen.

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| | Posted by Magpie at 12:16 PM | Get permalink




Liar, liar, pants on fire!


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