Millionaires lead GOP crusade against health insurance for working people

I never voted for Barack Obama and my criticisms of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") are on the record, but GOP attempts to hold the economy hostage to defund it and ram through other parts of their fringe agenda are despicable.

The Republican strategy is essentially this: get a bunch of guys with taxpayer-subsidized health insurance, most of whom are millionaires. Anoint them to be your spokesperson on why people who have to work for a living shouldn't necessarily have access to health insurance.

Let me know how that works out politically.

Lies and the lying liars who tell them

I’ve decided I’m not going to listen to the president’s sales pitch for yet another war with a Muslim country that poses no threat to us after hearing his secretary of state angrily lie, “We are not talking about going to war!”

If this administration is going to deem cyber attacks an act of war and then declare that cruise missile strikes are not, it’s not worthy of trust.

Syria bombing: so urgent, we can't upset Congressional holiday

The Obama administration's position on the situation in Syria can be summed up as follows: it's an *URGENT* moral imperative that we bomb Syria in order to (insert one of: punish Assad/protect civilians/send a message/keep our word/effectuate regime change). That's why it's going to wait a week and a half until Congress gets around to reconvening rather than bother them on their long holiday weekend.

Why are chemical weapons deaths worse than conventional weapons deaths?

Discussion topic: the UN estimates that approximately 100,000 people have been killed during the Syrian civil war (not all by Assad’s forces) with conventional weapons over the course of a few years. There has been no serious discussion of a response by external military powers in that time period.

Yet a single attack of chemical weapons that kills a small fraction of that number of people “necessitates” a global (ie: western) military response, we are told.

So why is it that the 1400 deaths caused by chemical weapons is more “morally repugnant,” to use Sec. of State Kerry’s phrase, than the 100,000 deaths that preceded it by conventional weapons?

If the answer is some piece of paper called a treaty, then the follow up question is why does that piece of paper value chemical weapons deaths more? Why does it view those deaths as more of a threat when, by any objective measurement, conventional weapons cause far more deaths and are much more of a threat to international stability?

When you sleep with snakes, they will bite you

Earlier this summer, I said that Egyptian liberals were nuts to align themselves with the corrupt, brutal military whose only concern was re-seizing political and economic dominance of the country. A few weeks later, the country’s leading liberal, Nobel Peace laureate Mohammed ElBaradei, was been arrested by the junta for the ‘crime’ of having protested the insecurity forces’ massacre of protesters. Shortly thereafter, the country's long-time dictator, convicted following the 2011 revolution, was released from prison. The intent of the coup against President Mohammed Morsi was always to reverse the revolution. The military is well on its way to doing just that.

Update: the coup leaders have now charged President Morsi with allegedly inciting deadly violence. The mass murderers are passing judgment on someone for murder. The snakes strike again.

If the major parties don't represent us, does that mean we're stupid?

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” –Albert Einstein

 The Independent Voters Network had this op-ed piece which opined that the two major parties 'clearly and strikingly' do not represent most voters. It offers scant little evidence for this thesis, other than there are an increasing number of independent voters.

The sort of lazy excuse for analysis in this article bothers me. Giving the voters a free pass for their choices may be nice populism but does not serve the national interest.

100% of Americans are represented by either Democratic or Republican Congressmen (obviously except for two vacant seats). 

99.3% of Americans are represented exclusively by major party US senators.

100% of Americans are represented by Democrat or Republican state governors. 

All of them are the result of (sort of) free and fair elections. 

If Americans don’t feel these two parties represent them, why do they elect exclusively them virtually all the time from among the 3-6 choices available in the majority of elections?

One can reasonably infer from this situation one of two possibilities: either a) Democratic and GOP elected officials *do* generally represent the views of most Americans or b) that voters are so stupid or gutless as to overwhelmingly elect people who don't represent them even though, in the majority of cases, there are non-major party alternatives. 

Which is it?

You can bitch and moan about your cable company or your cell phone provider but as long as you keep buying their product, they don’t care. They will have no incentive to improve. 

Politics is the same way. The corporate parties don’t give a toss about your whining, so long as you keep buying what they sell. 

If you keep voting for them, they’ll never have an incentive to change in any meaningful way. Sometimes people whine when politicians break promises but more often, the moaning comes about when a polician acts exactly as he or she suggested in the campaign! 

As PJ O’Rourke concluded in his excellent book Parliament of Whores: [I]n a democracy such as ours, the whores are us.

How the Baghdad bombing changed humanitarian affairs

This essay is part of an occasional feature on this blog that presents compelling stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, IsraelStine and the Trumped Up Enemy of the Month. A list of all pieces in this series can be found found here.

Ten years ago today, a bombing obliterated United Nations headquarters in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, killing 22 aid workers and UN staff members. This piece on the BBC website highlights how this attack fundamentally changed the work of not only the UN, but also of humanitarian aid organizations around the world. A subsequent bombing of the facilities of the Red Cross, generally considered the most respected humanitarian organization in the world, also had a shattering effect. In the subsequent decade, aid workers have increasingly found themselves the target of combatants, not merely bystanders.

Government criminalizes those who shine light on its crimes

In America, when the government commits crimes, it’s the people who reveal those crimes who are treated as criminals.

Only days after President Obama assured us that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program was in compliance with the law, The Washington Post has revealed that the program is actually a serial law-breaker.

Thanks to leaks provided by Edward Snowden, the paper reported that, according to the NSA’s own audit, the agency violated thelaw ‘thousands of times’ in the 12 month period of 2011-12.The NSA chief waved this off as nothing more than mere oversights. Do you think Snowden could get away with the same argument?

The head of the special secret court charged with oversight of the NSA’s activities has conceded that his ability to provide proper oversight isquite limited.

The statecan violate the law repeatedly and with complete impunity, but it’s Snowden who is the most wanted man in the world for publicizing these crimes.

This is yet another piece of evidence that, contrary to liberal self-delusion, the Obama administration is just as criminal as its predecessor.

Update: Looks like the UK government follows the same path. The Huffington Post reports that the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald was detained at London's Heathrow Airport under the country's Terrorism Act. Greenwald has been a high-profile critic of the UK's and US' attacks on civil liberties and has been instrumental in expose their abuses.