Rand Paul’s Mr Smith Moment

When reasonable people remain silent, should we shun a loony who speaks out?

I’m a little disturbed by the mad rush to trash Rand Paul for staging a showy filibuster against Obama’s assassination policy from people who might be thought to harbor some reservations about it. ‘Grandstanding’ and ‘non-existent dispute’ are two prominent terms in David Corn’s entirely typical account for Mother Jones, which strike me as the same sort of half-truth of which he accuses Paul.

The immediate topic of the marathon speech was about whether Obama has arrogated to himself the right to kill American citizens on American soil, and Corn parses the particularities of that, falling back on the Administration’s argument that in case of military attack, one retains the right of military self-defense. Obviously.

But there is a very real dispute that goes beyond this misleading example given that Obama has authorized targeted killings of hundreds if not thousands of people, including most notoriously an American citizen not charged with any criminal act and, following that, his 16-year-old son, apparently for the crime of being the guy’s kid.

Those killings took place in Yemen, so Paul quite legitimately wanted to know if Obama thinks he can do the same thing here. Okay, right, Paul’s probably stores saltines in a bomb shelter, thinks there are black helicopters and prays to Ayn Rand at night. Who cares? If corrupt liberals like Feinstein and Schumer refuse to ask these questions, I’ll settle for a wacko.

Paul’s filibuster was a ‘stunt’ from a ‘crass operator’ raising ‘a phony issue’, writes Corn. So how do you really feel about him? But did Paul really ‘distract from the real concerns’ with his action? I don’t think so. As Corn himself writes,

There are real controversies and disputes regarding the administration’s drone policy. The White House has declined to show the public the legal justification for its drone strikes overseas against suspected terrorists who are American citizens, and it has been reluctant to share legal memos on this matter with members of Congress and their staff, thus impeding oversight of these constitutionally dicey assaults. The White House has not answered questions on its general use of lethal drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

Yes, there are real controversies and disputes, and you’d never know that from listening to a whole shelf of safe, sane, reasonable and thoroughly cowardly Democrats. Paul shone the spotlight on presidential murders and thereby drew the ire of Lindsey (Pretty Boy) Graham and John McCain, who promptly praised Obama’s ruthlessness. Who’s the real ‘crass operator’?

I think the nutcase from Kentucky opened up a national debate by doing something flashy, showy, grandstandy, opportunistic, partisan, self-serving and also extremely useful. Democrats and Obama Kool-Aid drinkers should take advantage of it and stop sounding like apologists for the dismantling of our Constitution just because it’s being perpetrated by a guy they like.

"Beyond the Hills" - why Romanian cinema is so good

Watching a film from eastern Europe after sampling the latest from Hollywood is like visiting parallel universes. Even the best studio movies can’t help telling us not only what is happening but what we are supposed to feel about it.

By contrast, Polish, Czech or Romanian movies like Beyond the Hills, which I saw last night by the Romanian director Christian Mungiu, force you to glean the information just as you do in life, by picking tiny gestures out of the background and adding them up. The goods are there embedded in long, slow takes that give the impression of lives lived in real time—and without musical prompts to explain what emotion should be experienced—which is why these movies often stretch well past the two-hour mark. They require an investment, and there are no shortcuts; but the rewards can be great.

Mungiu is known for a harrowing film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, about getting an abortion in the Ceausescu era (plot summary: avoid this experience). This one is just as eerie in a completely different way: it mostly occurs in a strangely retro orthodox monastery where the sisters draw water from a well and use gas lamps, following a routine that looks alternately cozy and cracked. Modern Romania intrudes from the edges, but its attractions are highly dubious as well, from brutish nurses and dysfunctional transport to vaguely referenced goings-on at the orphanage where the two women protagonists spent their childhood.

There’s plenty of drama and even melodrama in the course of the nearly three-hour exposition, including exorcism, no less. But the telling details look almost accidental: in the very first sequence at a railroad station, an arriving passenger rushes to greet her friend with intense joy and rushes into her arms. If you’re not watching closely, you don’t even notice that she ignores an approaching train to do so.

Little by little and with the lightest of touches, this film lays bare an entire society, yet does not judge so much as mourn that there is not much room for women in it.

Torture now okay--but only if needed

The post-9/11 debate over the ‘ticking timebomb’ scenario was a hugely successful exercise in social grooming to prepare us for today’s torture-lite regime. We recall that this discussion, which reached even into the pages of The Nation and other liberal-ish venues in the early 2000s, was about when, how and under what circumstances it would be kinda-sorta okay to torture people. The debate turned almost exclusively on the mythic hypothetical of a terrorist suspect who knew that an attack was about to occur and could be compelled to spill the beans, thereby enabling us to suck our thumbs and contemplate precisely how many racks, electric cattle prods and waterboards would we then decide to apply to save these thousands of innocents.

People who have lived under governments that torture as a matter of state policy immediately grasped that this was a phony debate that should never have taken place. Such bizarre scenarios were mere window-dressing for the real aim, which was to enable our government to torture anyone it damn pleased and get away with it, and that is exactly what happened. The Bush/Cheney/Dark Side apparatus promptly took the mere existence of the debate as a resounding ‘Yes!’ and proceeded to apply ‘enhanced interrogation’ to anything that moved, including the obviously innocent, some of whom still reside at Guantánamo today. Anything to keep us SAFE.

No one was prosecuted for torturing bound and caged human beings except whistle-blowers or hapless low-level enforcers who didn’t have enough sense to cover their tracks. And that’s the situation Barack Obama chose to bury with pious murmurings about looking to the future and not the past.

So now we have an even faster descent into moral depravity as leading Republicans express outrage that Obama would dare to actually bring a terrorist suspect to trial rather than shipping him off to our official dungeon and beating the fuck out of him for the next 20 years. Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law is actually to get a trial in a courtroom, imagine that. As the Guardian article explains,

The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, accused Barack Obama of putting his desire to close Guantánamo ahead of the country’s security needs. The decision denied the intelligence community the opportunity to interrogate Suleiman Abu Ghaith to obtain information about possible harm to the US, McConnell claimed.

McConnell was quite explicit about why the evil Ay-rab had to be shipped off to the Cuban black hole:

“At Guantánamo, he could be held as a detainee and fulsomely and continuously interrogated without having to overcome the objections of his civilian lawyers”. [emphasis added]

What admirable clarity! We want him there because the rule of law will not apply, which is how much we care about that dusty old Constitution. If it will make us safer, we want it.

But the White House spokesman Josh Earnest brushed aside McConnell’s claim [that the spooks need the guy in Cuba]. “With all due respect, that’s not the assessment of the intelligence community”, Earnest said.

Note that Mr Earnest did NOT argue that torturing someone is wrong or that the U.S. has a system of laws that govern the process of accusation, trial and punishment. He argues strictly from utility and efficiency, i.e., we can get everything we need from bin Laden fils-in-law without having to torture him. Earnest also explicitly stated that the accused had committed crimes, which used to be left to that old-fashioned thing called a jury.

Earnest and his boss Mr O. thereby leave open the possibility and in fact probability that if a future case in which torture might actually give us good data, it will be duly applied. The only guiding principle is whether it will work.

Joel Klein, Hoowah

I realize that headline may be a little harsh—so my apologies in advance to hard-working prostitutes who may feel insulted by this association.

Klein, a former Bloomberg favorite as commissioner of education for eight years, has kept a fairly low profile lately given his embarrassing timing in becoming a highly-paid minion of scum Rupert Murdoch just as the appalling tabloid scandals burst open in Britain, you know, the ones where Murdoch’s employees were caught tapping the cellphones of the parents of kidnap/murder victims.

But that blew over, so Klein now has resurfaced to promote the Amplify Tablet, a device that is to be placed in the hands of K-through-12 pupils to improve their educational performance and, not coincidentally, the earnings of the Murdoch empire.

So there we have it: all that propaganda about how to repair ‘failing’ schools, all those diatribes against selfish teachers who refuse to be graded by test-score matrices, all that campaigning against unions, all those school shutdowns dictated from on high by King Mike with no community input—it was a marketing strategy to sell new gadgets.

Klein’s in the Business section of the Wednesday NY Times [no link--paywall] proudly showing off the handy-dandy device. Murdoch & Co. no doubt hope the Amplify will be forced onto the laps of millions of kiddies to the tune of many wonderful millions of dollars in diverted education spending, once teacher unions have been crippled and that $500 billion cash stream can be channeled away from frontline workers over to the private sector. This will be accompanied by reams of optimistic pronouncements about how much learning will emerge from little electronic boxes full of magical data and, no doubt, vast new testing procedures.

The possibilities to refine and automate testing and other types of vigilance are ample. As the Times piece explains,

If a child’s attention wanders, a stern ‘eyes on teacher’ prompt pops up. A quiz uses emoticons of smiley and sad faces so teachers can instantly gauge which students understand the lesson and which need help.

Gosh, we adults really missed out by being born too early! Just think how much fun it will be for schoolchildren to plug themselves into electronic monitoring devices that track their attention levels second by second! No wool-gathering there, Charlotte, you’re not going to earn your smiley-face!

No doubt the Klein/Murdoch hordes, fresh from finding out what distraught parents were saying on their cellphones when their children went missing, are also looking forward to the data mining possibilities when kindergarteners start using their devices. I can’t wait to hear about the algorithm some smarty-pants grad student is writing somewhere to figure out what brand of tennis shoes kids will want to buy based on their Amplify test scores.

Will the Klein/Murdoch sales pitch work? Well, as the article reminds us, Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’ program to bring technological innovation to the classroom is a potential funding source.

So I take it back, Klein isn’t really a whore. He’s actually a pimp, the guy who provides access. After eight years of faithfully carrying out Bloomberg’s attacks on teachers, Klein has transitioned smoothly into the next phase of the plan: to get teachers out of the way and install computer screens with Murdoch-produced curricula. Klein is therefore a remarkably successful example of a high-end procurer—opening the door for the marketeers to get their hands on millions of children.

Hugo = the revolution. So now what?

Venezuelans can be forgiven for being ‘stunned and wary’ upon realizing that the great Hugo Chávez has actually died, given how they were fed a steady diet of the leader’s quasi-immortality for the last decade and a half.

‘We are Chávez, Chávez is us!’ said one sign I read announcing his transubstantiation into the Body of the People, an apt echo of the mystical trappings of his reign. Perhaps someone will propose that mourners take communion at his funeral today using wafers of processed chavista writings and boiled in cabbage leaves.

Another good reason for shock and dismay among the citizens is the steady stream of lies and obfuscations delivered by the people around Chávez as his cancer progressed beyond hope of recovery. That didn’t stop them from making sure he won another 6-year term. As it happened, despite their promises that Chávez could serve another term, he never made it to his own inauguration.

Much has been written about Chávez’s attempts to give the poor of Venezuela a chance at a decent life, and it’s an indictment of his predecessors’ indifference to that task that the country took a sharp turn toward caudillismo. But neither does that excuse the hash Chávez made of his opportunities, which will now play out for all to see. It’s hard to be optimistic.

For starters, there is zero reason to anticipate that the country’s divisions will be resolved through democratic processes, compromise or negotiation after Chávez systematically destroyed any institutional channels for dissent and lambasted his adversaries with relentless name-calling so that anyone not glassy-eyed with ecstasy over Chávez quickly was touted as--and became--a mortal enemy.

At heart, the death of the big guy is yet another lesson in the dangers of concentrating all powers in the hands of one person or building a social movement on a cult of personality. Chávez might have ruled for another 30 years like a left-wing Stroessner, but sooner or later his departure would have ejected the country from the political deep freeze into which he stuffed it long ago.

Once that happens, the meats start to defrost; and if they were rotten when you put them in, they’ll still be rotten when you take them out.

Operation successful, patient dies

We’ve now settled into Sequester World with automatic cuts in government spending taking place without anyone’s direct action, and while blame can be dispensed as one’s wishes according to party or ideological loyalty, another possibility is that our rulers have achieved exactly what they wanted, including both the nutcake ravers and the coolly reasonable guys based in the White House. Maybe this is where they wanted to be all along, presiding over a crippled state. After all, the Dow Jones just hit an all-time record, so things are perking along just fine—if you own stock.

The Europeans led the way with their completely failed austerity program in response to the imbalance in state spending caused, in turn, by the recession. It makes no sense at all as expert commentators have repeated in every key as the cutbacks merely deepen the economic slump and push the countries further into debt (Greece first, Ireland, Portugal, now Spain, now Italy, and who knows which will be next). But it is an excellent way to smash the social safety net that Europe devised as a counterbalance to the now disappeared socialisms of the east.

Here at home, we have the Obama version of austerity, which is peddled to us as deficit reduction and which is assumed to be an urgent matter largely because the Republicans have said it is. The economic machine is revving up, and production is increasing, so who cares if it is occurring in China or the Philippines rather than Kentucky or Illinois? Has there ever been such America-firster jingoism unleashed on us and the world while at the same time less concern about the well-being of actual American? Our senators spend whole days raging about dangers to Israel or the consulate burned down in Libya, but they could care less about the destruction of Detroit.

Now that everyone is just sitting back doing nothing about the automatic spending cuts, we have become accustomed to the idea that there is no money for anything and won’t be for pretty much ever. A report issued yesterday here in New York described the city’s worst crisis of homelessness in history, and one can see from the proliferation of panhandlers that the ranks of the marginalized are bursting. But Obama is not blamed for having given away huge negotiating chips (like the Bush tax cuts, now made permanent) and paving the way for the loonies to make things worse.

Yves Smith warns at Naked Capitalism that the stratospheric Dow should not lull anyone to sleep:

The Fed has been trying to reflate asset values to goose the real economy. What it has done instead is goose the incomes of the top 1% while everyone else is on the whole worse off. But the central bank is suffering from a very bad case of “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” syndrome. It’s unwilling or unable to admit that its program is working only for a very few.

She goes on to argue that the U.S. economy is suffering from a number of deep, structural weaknesses and that policymakers’ provision of Amazonic rivers of cash will do nothing to resolve them. So it’s possible the top guys really haven’t a clue, but then again maybe they know exactly what they’re doing—they just hope we don’t figure it out.

Hey, here's a cool idea! Let's all cut our own heads off!

Scientists announced today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infectious Diseases (CROI) that they had cured a newborn of HIV infection, a feat never before accomplished.

Simultaneously today, an old ACT-UP warhorse, Gregg Gonsalves, tweeted that the sequester would cut the NIH budget by $1.6 billion, PePFAR by $280 million, the CDC by $289 million, the FDA by $209 million, and HRSA (which includes Ryan White monies that provide treatment) by $365 million.