Obama and Iran

President Obama's handling of the Iran uprising has been very tricky. Not surprisingly, the US far right is not happy with his approach. Though it is heartening to see these people stand in solidarity with modern young liberals fighting against a conservative theocracy that wishes to control every aspect of people's private lives. I'm sure the irony will be lost on them.

US meddling in Iran is what helped cause the theocratic revolution in the first place. The CIA-engineered coup which removed Iran's last democratically leader and installed a repressive absolute monarch may have been all the way back in 1953, but it's seared into the Iranian national consciousness... especially when the US lectures on democracy. That makes this situation particularly tricky.

I've been critical of Obama on many things but he's struck the right tone here. Iran's de facto leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his allies are desperately to paint the uprising in nationalist tones. They are trying to characterize it as being provoked by evil foreigners rather than acknowledging what it really is: oppressed people standing up for themselves against a repressive religious elite.

So far, the theocrats' line hasn't stuck because Obama has criticized the repression without taking sides in the electoral dispute. He is putting his vanity aside in order to not screw things up. That's how real leaders act. They are more concerned with the right outcome than the praise of the ninnies. If the last eight years have shown us anything, a leader without followers is no leader at all.

The second Obama takes the militarists, he hands the initiative to the theocratic oppressors by essentially validating their criticism and in turn discrediting the opposition. There's a reason most of the criticism of Obama's approach is coming from the US far right rather than from the Iranian opposition themselves. One side wants freedom to prevail. The other is more interested in Obama failing if they can't get the war they want. One side actually has to live up close and personal with the consequences of what ends up happening. The other will just sit in their comfortable air conditioned houses and wait for the next crisis to ignorantly beat their chests about and formulate war propaganda.

Only a few weeks ago, Obama's secretary of state green-lighted an unprovoked Israeli military attack on Iran. This followed on the heels of years of by both the Obama and Bush administrations to isolate Iran for pursuing what it calls a civilian nuclear energy program; attempts designed to pave the way for just such a military aggression.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will expand the sensible approach he's taken to the Iranian electoral dispute or whether he will revert back to the kind of belligerent arrogance that has disastrously fostered anti-Americanism all around the world and ultimately cost hundreds of thousands American lives.

Obama is right to reject appeasement of the militarists and focus instead of the success of freedom and democracy. Let's hope he continues this in all areas of his foreign policy.

Sweeps week in Albany!

My brother points out that C-SPAN could probably quadruple their ratings if they decided instead to broadcast proceedings at the New York Senate, as Planet Albany's account illustrates. The New York Times' also has a report on a farce that's simultaneously amusing and enraging.

And yet people remain mystified why I vote 'third party.'

The Times-(anti)Union

Bob over at Planet Albany reports that the Albany Times-Union will soon produce a list of employees it wants to expunge during its present union-busting campaign. The list is expected to include people who have been there long enough that they would have been protected under seniority provisions of the prior union contract.

He opines: Meanwhile, the only decent thing to do is cancel your subscription.

I don't subscribe, but I've ceased buying it on the news stand.

Matt Funicello at his T-U blog offers his pro-union opinion on the dispute... though curiously, the page has repeatedly had technical difficulties in displaying the actual text since it was published.

A coincidence, no doubt.

Your tax dollars in action!

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Every year, the non-governmental organization Transparency International publishes a Corruption Perception Index.

2005 was the first year that the index ranked both Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2005's index of 158 countries, there were 17 countries more corrupt than Iraq and 34 countries more corrupt than Afghanistan.

In last year's index of 180 countries, Afghanistan was the 5th most corrupt country in the world and only Somalia was more corrupt than Iraq.

Even notoriously corrupt regimes like Equatorial Guinea, the DR Congo, Nigeria and Cameroon as well as the lands run by the much demonized Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe are better off than the US-occupied former countries.

This is just one illustration of the wonderful Progress that's being made in those occupied lands and proof that we were right to Stay the Course.

If I've forgotten any empty catch phrases, please leave them in the comments field.

'The people's business'

I never thought I'd hear a group of people use a empty catchphrase more frequently than Rudy Giuliani invokes 9/11.

I was wrong.

I just got done watching a 20 or so minute interview on Capital Tonight with John Sampson, the new leader of the Democratic conference in the New York Senate. By my count, Sampson used the phrases 'the people's business,' 'the people's agenda' or 'the work of the people' at least 15 times. He solemnly invoked 'the people' at least another dozen times, probably more.

In a similar interviews last week, Sens. Pedro Espada, Hiram Monserrate and Tom Libous, all key figures in the circus, mouthed those exact same catchphrases with similarly nauseating frequency.

Although this particular phrase was noteworthy by its frequency, the amount of empty b.s. and transparent rhetoric these men spewed was remarkable, even by the standards of American politics.

These yahoos are spending so much time yammering in front of the cameras on about 'the people's business' and zero time at all actually doing the people's business.

Then again, even when the legislature was "functional", it never really did the people's business.

Bruno, Cheney come out

I see that former New York Senate majority leader Joe Bruno has come out in favor of same sex marriage. Bruno, who describes himself as a "conservative Roman Catholic," refused to allow the same-sex marriage bill come to a vote when he was majority leader. Though he did allow passage of the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in 2002. Bruno's comments came not long after former vice-president Dick Cheney also came out as being in favor of gay marriage.

While Bruno is in embroiled legal troubles and Cheney certainly ought to be, it's quite remarkable that these two conservatives are to the left of President Obama on this key civil rights issue.

Media bias quantified

I've written often, some have said ad nauseum, about the media bias against smaller party and independent politics and the perspective they could add to the political discourse if given the chance.

John Warren, over at Adirondack Almanack, recently provoked an interesting discussion with an essay on the same topic.

One of the commenters challenging John was Chris Morris, a self-described "upstate journalist" who works for "modest wages."

In the course of the discussion, Chris replied to one of my comments as such:

My original protests with John concern the sweeping generalizations he made about the "local media" having ignored [Eric] Sundwall, which are not accurate. Did the Post Star largely ignore his candidacy? Yes. Did the Times Union? Yes. Did the Press Republican? No. The Enterprise? No. WNBZ? No. Watertown Daily Times? No. And so on.

His claims don't stand up to journalistic scrutiny.

I search around the websites of the newspapers he implicitly praised for both the phrases 'Tedisco' and 'Sundwall' (as a search for 'Murphy' would've brought results unrelated to the special election). Republican Jim Tedisco, Libertarian Eric Sundwall and eventual winner Democrat Scott Murphy all ran in the recent NY 20th Congressional District special election.

WNBZ's online archive not go back far enough to analyze.

I couldn't get good numbers for The Adirondack Daily Enterprise, as their search mixed in letters to the editor and news articles and I think their search was limited to 100. However, the search gave 36 results for 'Sundwall' and 100 for 'Tedisco.' They definitely seemed to do better than the others. However even this least unfair local media outlet's reporting was (bearing in mind the imprecision of the numbers) still at least around a 3:1 imbalance for the Republican. That is considered 'good' in the current environment.

A search of the other two sites was more definitive as it gave articles only.

A 2009 Plattsburgh Press-Republican search for 'Sundwall' gave seven results total, two of which were identical and only two of which were local reports. Of those six unique articles, one was about Sundwall's exclusion from the ballot, four merely mentioned in a cursory fashion that he was running and one was about his declaration of candidacy and... ZERO mentioned anything about his platform or ideas.

A 2009 P-R search of 'Tedisco' gave 63 results.

A 2009 Watertown Daily Times archive search of 'Sundwall' gave one result, about the governor's call for the special election in which Sundwall's name was mentioned only in passing.

A 2009 WDT archive search of 'Tedisco' gave 88 results.

If this meets the definition of 'not ignoring,' zero articles in these last two papers that actually discuss his ideas or platform, then it's a sad illustration of how low the journalistic bar has been set and of exactly how suffocating this media bias really is.

The trials and tribulations of the print media are well-documented. I wonder if any will figure out that maybe it makes better business sense to not completely ignore the 25 pct. of the population who are neither Democrats nor Republicans.

Correcting Sen. Little

Following the recent coup in the New York senate, North Country Public Radio ran an interview with local Sen. Betty Little, who has apparently returned to the majority (unless there's a countercoup).

At the very end, she was asked about the anticipated closing of Camp Gabriels, a minimum security prison in Franklin County, northern New York.

She said it was possible Camp Gabriels might re-open as something like a drug rehab center, "but not as a correctional facility" (prison).

Now some has been made of the prison-industrial complex and its unfortunate economic prominence in the Adirondacks, a topic I've long intended to research and write about but haven't quite gotten to.

But it's a rather telling illustration of Sen. Little's fealty to the prison industry that she considers a place where you lock people up and throw away the key to be "a correctional facility" but not a place like a drug rehab center, where they actually try to correct people's behavior.