WhirledView

Just Wondering

by CKR

Why don’t we see something like these in the US instead of those flat Jersey barriers?

Bears in Jõhvi

Doves in Tallinn

More things I don't understand below the jump.

Liz Cheney-at-the-State-Department-Melodrama Reprise

By PHK

First, belated but sincere thanks to Justin Raimondo for correcting Liz Cheney’s State Department title on anti.war.com as I had asked and then quoting from WV – on an aspect of the ongoing Liz saga. Liz - for anyone who has tuned in late - is the State Department NEA PDAS who is taking off to have her fifth kid due in July. (If you’re not familiar with State’s alphabet soup and gotten into this story late, don’t panic. NEA means the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, PDAS means Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary. NEA is the regional geographic bureau that includes countries such as Iraq, Iran, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria.)

I’m not quite sure how Robert Dreyfuss’ insider State Department story in the June 6 American Prospect “The Commissar’s in Town” fits into current State Department political machinations since career Foreign Service Officer Jim Jeffrey was officially named to replace Ms. Cheney shortly before Dreyfuss’ article came out.

Nevertheless, Dreyfuss provides details on the continuing Liz Cheney-at-the-State-Department-melodrama that have all the hallmarks of authenticity. In my view, a major question may be whether Liz decides to drop number five kid on the nanny as she has the first four - or by now probably stable of nannies - and return to being daddy’s eyes, ears and mouth in NEA. Hopefully, the fifth kid will keep her at home – but who knows. If anyone can fill in that blank, please, please do.

But then even physically absent, who knows how deep Ms. Cheney’s tentacles reach into that lightening rod of bureaus in this administration – or for that matter elsewhere in Foggy Bottom. Dreyfuss refers to her close relationship with Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, but then he’s also reported to be leaving State soon – and for good.

I won’t spoil your reading of Dreyfuss’ article on Cheney in its entirety, but here’s a tempting tidbit. Marina Ottaway, senior associate and co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment who, according to Dreyfuss, “has worked with Liz Cheney on democratic reform issues,” described her as follows: “She has a mandate to do democracy promotion, but she had very little familiarity with the subject. They deliberately picked a person who was not a Middle East specialist, so that the conventional wisdom, well, let me rephrase, so that real, actual knowledge of the issues in the region wouldn’t interfere with policy.”

Ottaway is no one to quibble with on democratization or foreign policy issues in the Middle East and elsewhere – she’s a veteran researcher and writer on the topic who bases her articles and speeches on hard facts and careful, rational analysis. Too bad bubblehead Cheney fills the powerful PDAS position and not someone with Ottaway’s credentials.

Yet, it might have been worse. According to Dreyfuss, NEA was apparently saddled with the vastly under qualified Liz as the lesser of two evils.

Indonesia: Puppet No Longer

By PLS

If you don’t speak Indonesian, you wouldn’t have been astonished by what Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said at a recent press conference as he stood next to his visiting American counterpart Donald Rumsfeld. Or how he said it. If you do speak Indonesian, you know that something extraordinary happened: a profound, public insult. Almost a slap in the face, in fact, to a Bush administration out to bolster anti-terrorism efforts by deigning to resume military cooperation with an Indonesia it had been punishing for human rights violations in now independent East Timur.

The tone and content of Sudarsono’s remarks are a clear indication of how low the US has fallen in the eyes of the world. The Bush administration needs the world’s largest Muslim country, it seems, but Indonesia is not so sure it needs the US. At least not on US terms.

Wednesday Flower Blogging

by CKR

Let’s start with a cowslip.

There are a number of things I’d like to write about my yard: a robin taking a prolonged and detailed bath this morning, the lizards (one of which looks eggy), the plants that survived a difficult and neglectful winter and those that didn’t, and the differences in wild plants in dry and wet years.

However, I haven’t managed any photos of all that yet.

So I’m giving you some flowers from Estonia.

The Supreme Court Says: Only Slaves and Robots Desired for Government Employment

By PLS
After FBI agents stormed into a Congressman’s office, it looked as if Congress might wake up and take its constitutional status seriously, but our representatives seem to have fallen back into their more characteristic sycophancy vis-à-vis the executive. Now the Supreme Court has succumbed to the fatal G.W. Bush spell.

The Roberts’ Court has saddled us with Garcetti et al v. Ceballos, thus confirming some of the worst fears of Senator’s who voted against confirming him and Justice Alito to the Supreme Court last year, the fear that the third branch of government would begin toadying to the Executive. Those interested in good governance and First Amendment rights should read the decision in toto, especially Justice Souter’s dissent.

The decision, with a majority consisting of CJ Roberts and Associates Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, was a reversal of a finding by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s important to pause here and note that the Ninth is under sustained fire by Conservatives who argue that its decisions slant too often toward the liberal side of the political spectrum. The public argument is that the Ninth Circuit is unwieldy because it covers a vast territory, which is true, but beware: the real reason, if one examines the opinions of those apparently most sympathetically concerned about the workload, is ideology. Unfortunately, it appears that Conservatives can relax now. Decisions emanating from the Ninth will easily be annulled or reversed.

What Garcetti v Ceballos says, essentially, is that government employees are to be slaves, robots, drudges, who must not bring conscience or intelligence to the performance of their duties. If they do, if they worry about corruption or malfeasance in official memos, they may be demoted or sent to the organizational equivalent of Siberia. So, while they are at work they must shuffle around, shackled, lips buttoned, as if they were prisoners in chains and orange jumpsuits instead of professionals suited up for conscientious, respectable employment.

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Rummy in Vietnam: "Realpolitik" trumps democratization

By PHK

“Realpolitik” trumps “democratization” in US foreign policy for a change

Ironic isn’t it that our illustrious Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has finally discovered Vietnam while the CIA and the Pentagon have been playing with fire in Somalia - helping to destabilize that warlord torn country even further. Interesting, too that Condi apparently decided to wait until Rummy was on the other side of the globe at an IISS conference and far from his phalanx of neocons to announce a major shift in US policy towards Iran. Or maybe it was just coincidence.

It’s unfortunate that Rummy’s Vietnam discovery was couched in terms of containing the Chinese. Regardless, rapprochement with Hanoi makes sense for any number of reasons. Economic realities head my list. In fact, US-Vietnamese relations were reestablished under President Clinton in July 1995 after a hiatus of twenty years. This bipartisan effort happened with strong support from former POW Senator John McCain.

Nice to see that the W administration’s chief attack dog has finally caught on too - even if it comes over a decade after the opening first began.

The irony, of course, is that despite all the “democratizing and transformational diplomacy” rhetoric coming out of the administration these days, Rummy’s new friends, the Vietnamese, operate a Communist regime. In fact, their brand of Communism makes the Chinese look good.

Election Fraud Bush Campaign Style?

By PHK

Robert Kennedy Jr.’s article “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” in Rolling Stone Magazine took me back – not to the Stones’ heyday – but to the presidential election results of 2000 and 2004 that catapulted George W. Bush into the presidency and the US into what is becoming an eight year nightmare of bad decisions and misadventures.

I spent election night 2000 on the 93rd floor of what was once the World Trade Center, Tower 2 as New Mexico’s State Manager for then Voter News Service (VNS). I was not involved in exit polls; my job was simply to oversee the relaying of election results from hundreds of precinct and county reporters I had recruited who were fanned out across the state waiting for the polls to close: these VNS reporters even included a group of high school honors students. My reporters then phoned in the results to central VNS phone banks as soon as the local and county election officials publicly released the results. For the precinct reporters it meant a single phone call shortly after 7 pm. For the county reporters it often meant a very long night calling in frequent updates.

New Mexico was a battleground state which made it interesting. Had the election gone differently our five electoral votes might even have made the difference. The New Mexico outcome hung in the balance that night and well beyond because of ineptness in the most important county clerk’s office and a misreading of the final tally by another. The Republican county clerk in question lost her job and her elections supervisor was fired as a consequence. The best report of what went wrong in New Mexico Elections 2000 was published as a front page feature by the Wall Street Journal on December 15, 2000. But I and my reporters were off the hot-seat once the situation in Florida began to turn into the fiasco it became because VNS exit polls and pollsters predictions there did not jibe with the vote tallies being reported by VNS reporters from the precincts and county clerks' offices and from the latter by AP.

Even so, it was a long, suspense-filled night that rapidly became the gray sky of morning – not because of the reporters I had recruited – they did their jobs – but because of a few county clerks’ offices and the razor-edge presidential election results that were being reported. The chief problem in New Mexico Elections 2000 was ineptness at the county clerk level, not complicity to commit electoral fraud, although we know now that a Diebold company representative with ulterior motives or instructions and/or a county clerk or elections supervisor who wants to manipulate the electronic paperless voting machines can do so prior to the elections.* However, I never heard charges of deliberate malfeasance in “The Land of Enchantment” for Elections 2000 but there have been concerns expressed about the fairness of the presidential count here Elections 2004.

I watched elections 2004 at home. VNS had been disbanded after elections 2002 because of a colossal failure due to bad decisions made by Ted Savaglio, VNS’ inept new and last head. As I followed the 2004 elections and their aftermath covered only by AP, it seemed as if every accusation of electoral malfeasance was answered with a plausible response to the contrary. The exit polling model was wrong yet again – for instance. And as Kennedy now describes it, the consortia of media who funded VNS and now support the AP-run elections coverage blamed the new pollsters’ models for the discrepancies.

Election fraud or suspicious coincidence? Where does the truth lie?

Crusader Castles, Minutemen and War 21st Century Style

By PLS

A Humvee hits a mine in Iraq. A marine is killed. His buddies get mad and take it out on civilians.

I’m sorry your comrade lost his life, but it’s war. You were ordered to poke your noses into someone else’s country, and–surprise! surprise!—much of the population wants you out or dead. You probably don’t want outsiders to blow up American buildings and force transformation on our “decadent” society, but you assume the administration’s desire for “regime change” in Iraq permits you to bust into a house, execute everyone in sight and then (since you know deep down you’ve done something really disgusting) lie about it?

Answer me this: how do you resist a government that has a vast monopoly on power? How do you resist a hegemon with so much firepower that a head-on encounter would be suicide for a platoon or even a brigade? With suicide bombs that waste only one person. With well-hidden remote controlled bombs on the road. With melt-away snipers on roofs. It’s rational. It’s logical. It’s practical. It’s the only way.

So this is war today. But there are precedents in American history. Seventeenth century British generals sneered at American revolutionaries for waging an ungentlemanly war. What happened to the Redcoats as they marched from Lexington to Concord? They were picked off by snipers lurking behind those famous stone walls. Afterwards the irregulars went home to their families, so I suppose the British should have kicked down the doors of those quaint New England salt boxes and slaughtered the civilians who harbored the rebels—and were, in fact, rebels at heart.