The government's complaint in the Arizona case, which challenges the law commonly referred to as SB 1070, asserts repeatedly that the law frustrates the federal government's ability to implement national immigration policy. (In legal parlance, the argument is that federal immigration law "preempts" state statutory enactments.) Entirely absent from the government's argument, though, is any claim that the law encourages officers to racially profile Hispanic residents and violate their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches -- the aspects of the law that many people find the most objectionable.In legal and moral terms, this is just the wrong approach. In political terms, this is starting to look like yet another instance where Obama and the Democrats are handed a golden opportunity - in this case to shift major numbers of Latino voters to the Democrats and also to challenge the Republicans' toxic narrative on race-related issues - and the Dems trying hard to blow it. Fortunately, as Doty mentions in his article, the ACLU is mounting a legal challenge to those sections of the law.
That’s surprising, because a preemption argument is unlikely to fell the most controversial provision of the law: the requirement that officers investigate the immigration status of any person they reasonably suspect is in the country illegally. The government's lawsuit argues that this mandate impermissibly burdens the federal bureaucracy, but it's hardly intuitive that verifying immigration status with federal officials would thwart the goals or policies of the feds. (To the contrary, federal law specifically authorizes state officers to verify immigration status with the federal government.) In contrast, the notion that that the law foists raced-based decisions on law enforcement officers offers both a more compelling storyline and firmer legal ground.
Had General McChrystal's configured his organization solely with the destruction of the enemy in mind (as with his Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq, which undertook what the military euphemistically terms "high-value targeting"), his command climate would have been well-matched. But its mission was counterinsurgency, a practice that requires its own skill sets, techniques, and procedures, and, finally, a unique and uniquely sensitive, politically sophisticated command climate.Tags: afghanistan war, counterinsurgency
The cliché contains a kernel of truth: the predominance of the political and the psychological distinguishes counterinsurgency from conventional warfare. Physical effects—what the military calls "kinetic" action—matter less than intangible and mostly psychological outcomes. The complexity of all this cannot be overstated. As a precondition for success, a commander and his organization need to cultivate different perceptions and expectations among multiple and very different audiences. They must persuade the enemy and its supporters that the insurgency has been doomed to failure but also that laying down one’s arms and surrendering offers honorable and realistic options. They must convince local allies—in this case the Afghan people, government, and security forces—that the United States will support them, given certain conditions but regardless of consequence. And they must convince the American people and their elites that the counterinsurgency deserves public support and, indeed, will culminate in something other than a bloody and protracted stalemate or defeat.
Put simply, a strategic communicator ought to know how to communicate. Some military leaders, even supremely talented combat commanders like General McChrystal, have been tested and found wanting in this regard. While there were already rumors swirling within the officer corps to this effect, the explosive Rolling Stone article makes this truth plain for all to see. The command climate at McChrystal's headquarters was keyed to fight a war, but hardly attuned to the psychological and political elements of strategic level counterinsurgency.
Um eine Ideologie, um überhaupt ein gesellschaftliches Bewusstsein zu erklären, genügt es nicht, seine Bedingtheit durch die sozial-ökonomische Situation der Klasse aufzuweisen, der es angehört; vielmehr hat dieser Aufweis ergänzt zu werden durch das Studium der psychischen Mechanismen, welche die Verfestigung des ideologischen Gehalts bedingen und verstärken.The Frankfurt School would apply this approach to their attempts to understand the mass mobilization methods of National Socialism in Germany and of Fascism in Italy. Their attention was focused primarily on Germany, because of their German and Jewish backgrounds and because Germany was by far the more powerful player in world politics. Germany had also been the country that, until 1918-19, had been expected by socialists all over the world to be the lead country in replacing capitalism with a socialist system in which major industries and finance would be controlled by a democratic state.
[In order to understand an ideology, in order to explain a social consciousness at all, it is not enough to show how it is conditioned by the socio-economic situation of the class to which it belongs. Rather, this identification has to be widened to include the study of the psychic mechanisms which condition and strengthen its ideological position.]
While the BP oil spill has been labeled the worst environmental catastrophe in recent U.S. history, a biofuel is contributing to a Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" the size of New Jersey that scientists say could be every bit as harmful to the gulf.There are very legitimate concerns about the downsides of ethanol, not only in terms of environmental issues but in terms of how it affects the overall food supply.
Each year, nitrogen used to fertilize corn, about a third of which is made into ethanol, leaches from Midwest croplands into the Mississippi River and out into the gulf, where the fertilizer feeds giant algae blooms. As the algae dies, it settles to the ocean floor and decays, consuming oxygen and suffocating marine life.
Known as hypoxia, the oxygen depletion kills shrimp, crabs, worms and anything else that cannot escape. The dead zone has doubled since the 1980s and is expected this year to grow as large as 8,500 square miles and hug the Gulf Coast from Alabama to Texas. ...
One of the authors of that report, agricultural economist Otto Doering at Purdue University, said that a 50 percent boost in the ethanol blend in gasoline will significantly raise corn prices, driving farmers to pull land out of conservation and pastureland and into corn production. They are also likely to add more nitrogen fertilizers to boost yields.
Corn ethanol has been heavily subsidized since the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s. Viewed by the corn industry as a lucrative market, ethanol is a perennial favorite in Congress. [my emphasis]
Commemorations of the Fourth of July in the early 19th century were caught up in a political tug-of-war between the Jeffersonian Republicans who revered the Declaration of Independence and the Federalists who were less enthusiastic. (The Federalists preferred to ignore or downplay those French-like passages about universal rights, equality, and the virtue of revolutions.) As the founding generation was dying off – both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1826 – civic leaders became more eager to preserve the history of the Revolution and to promote the nation’s birthday. The Jeffersonians won.Tags: declaration of independence
When the conflict over slavery heated up, abolitionists, of course, deployed the Declaration’s clarion call for equality as a rhetorical weapon. And slavery’s defenders rejected that call. In 1848, South Carolina’s famed senator, John C. Calhoun, announced that “There was ‘not a word of truth’ in the notion that men were created equal” and an Indiana senator said five years later that “the supposed ‘self-evident truth’ of man’s equal creation was in fact ‘a self-evident lie’” (quotes from historian Pauline Maier).
But the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln solidified the Fourth as a celebration of rights and equality. (Here I follow Gary Wills.) In an 1858 Fourth of July speech, Lincoln argued that many Americans of his day – the recent immigrants – could not literally trace their ancestry back to the Founding Fathers. But they could trace it spiritually:when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.The immigrants of that day – many of them despised in their time – had equal moral claim to equality in America.
Results are also expected today from test runs of vessel billed as the world's largest oil skimmer, which could be put into regular service in the gulf as early as this week. The converted cargo ship, A Whale, spent the weekend attempting to clean up a 25-square mile area just north of BP's blown-out undersea well.The weather has also not been cooperative for the testing, as reported by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Whale of a skimmer not ready to attack Gulf oil after weekend of testing 07/05/2010.
The Taiwanese-flagged ship is three and a half football fields long and extends 10 stories high. It's outfitted with 12 vents on either side of its bow, which experts hope will be able to suck up as many as 21 million gallons of oil-tainted water each day.
But its never-before-used technology means that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will need to sign off on the quality of the water that the ship dumps back into the gulf, after separating out the oil. Test results due back today will help the agency make that decision. [my emphasis]
But before the 1,115-foot-long ship with the big blue whale on funnel has even undergone testing, some experts are questioning whether it can fulfill those lofty expectations.Brunker also gives this summary of how TMT put this ship together:
"I don't think the concept is that bad, but I don't see how in this situation it’s going to be a significant player," said Dennis Bryant, a former Coast Guard officer who worked on implementing regulations required by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 before retiring and starting a maritime consulting business in Gainesville, Fla.
"In a case like the Exxon Valdez spill, where you had a lot of oil on the surface in a confined area, a vessel like this could have gone in and sucked up a whole lot," he said. "But in the Gulf, where the oil is pretty well dispersed over a vast area, I don’t see how it’s going to make a large dent."
Whether the A Whale, a Taiwanese-owned, Liberian-flagged ship, will even join the cleanup is unclear. TMT converted the oil/bulk ore carrier at a Portuguese shipyard over 10 days in early June without first obtaining a commitment from BP, which would need to sign the contract to enlist the ship in the spill response. Nor did it check with the U.S. government to ensure that the skimming operation would meet U.S. environmental and maritime standards.I've heard a lot of general gripes about useful help being turned down in the Gulf oil emergency response. But when the complaints get specific, like with this one, they may not be so convincing. Given how the Minerals Management Service (MMS) waved "red tape" aside to rush the Deepwater Horizon project into action, I'm not too impressed with the idea of rushing untested devices and technology into action on the oil cleanup. We may later wish the feds had been more closely restricting the use of dispersants and oil burning. (See David Biello, Is Using Dispersants on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Fighting Pollution with Pollution? Scientific American Online 06/18/2010)
Also, while the company says it conducted a successful test of the A Whale's ability to draw in oily water using fire foam, the concept has not undergone outside review. And Bob Grantham, a spokesman for the TMT Offshore Group, said Thursday that it's not yet clear how much oil can be removed from the water.
"Until we test the vessel in the oil spill environment, it is impossible to predict precisely how well it will perform," he said in a written response to questions from msnbc.com.
A Serious P L E A D! ALL that will please call or email Congress and demand more to be done in the Gulf OIL Spill! There is a HUGE Ship the A Whale just sitting on the coast that can suck up so much OIL and The Obama Admin and Congress are killing valuable time on STUPID Red Tape.Turn everything loose on this SPILL!My favorite fact-check sites don't seem to have much of anything on this particular controversy or on BP oil-disaster whoppers in general. But Politifact does have this one: Scalise blames Obama for 'inaction' on berm plan to contain oil spill 06/29/2010. This was about Louisiana Republican Congressman Steve Scalise echoing Republian Gov. Bobby Jindal's complaint about his pet scheme to put up berms to protect Louisiana's marshes, a project it was probably foolish for the feds to approve at all, because its usefulness is highly dubious and may divert scarce resources from more effective measures. (See David Biello, Slosh and Berm: Building Sand Barriers off Louisiana's Coast to Hold Back Oil Spill Has Low Probability of Success Scientific American Online 06/18/2010.)
http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
I have made 4 calls already today!
One hundred sixty-two House members, including a large majority of Democrats, sent a significant antiwar message to President Obama last night, forcing the White House to depend for Afghanistan war support on the Republicans who want to unseat the Democrats and Obama himself in upcoming elections.This is important. Of the Democrats voting on the latter measure, 61% opposed continuation of the Afghanistan War. Obama really has achieved his dream of bipartisanship on this war: he can only continue it with the support of Republicans who know that its unpopularity will damage Democrats' electoral prospects by de-motivating their base voters to go to the polls.
Despite claims by punditry that the antiwar movement has disappeared, stalwart Representative Barbara Lee gained 100 votes for her amendment rejecting $33 billion for 30,000 new troops already being sent to Afghanistan. Seven of her votes were Republicans. The measure would have redirected the $33 billion to expenses incurred in redeploying the troops out of Afghanistan.
More significant numerically, there were 162 votes cast for Representative Jim McGovern’s amendment, co-authored by representatives David Obey and Walter Jones, which articulated a game plan for ending the war. Only a year ago, the same measure was introduced as a general and non-binding resolution. This time the proposal required, as a condition of funding, an exit proposal including a withdrawal timetable, by next spring, before the president's announced plan to "begin" withdrawals in July. Further, in response to rising pressure to delay withdrawals, the McGovern proposal would require another Congressional vote if the administration succumbed to pressure from Republicans and the military to delay the beginning departure date.
Among Democrats, the vote for McGovern was 153-98, with nine Republican supporters. Significantly, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who this week predicted a strong Democratic push for a "substantial drawdown" by next year, voted with McGovern. [my emphasis]
If the Tea Party could be said to have a founding father, I'd name him as Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips. Deeply influenced by the Christian Reconstructionist theology of Rousas John Rushdoony, Phillips not only helped found the religious right, but created a political party that has served as a haven for such figures as Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry and neo-militia leader Matthew Trewhella. (Founded in 1992 as the U.S. Taxpayers Party, the organization adopted the name "Constitution Party" in 1999.)Tags: christian dominionism, radical right, republican party
Phillips also chairs the Conservative Caucus, a political organization that served, during the presidential campaign, as a virtual clearinghouse for anti-Obama messaging — the very messaging that would find itself amplified by the Tea Party movement. It was from Phillips' shop that I first heard the trope about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and heard tales of the future president's socialist past.
The Caucus works closely with the John Birch Society, and has featured Ron Paul as a speaker at several of its events. It is a tireless crusader against something called the North American Union, which it claims nefarious forces are trying to create after the model of the European Union. [my emphasis]
Well, the truth is, Chris, we have had virtually no oil. If you were on the Missippi gulf coast any time in the last 48 days you didn't see any oil at all. We've had a few tar balls, but we've had - we have tar balls every year as a natural product of the Gulf of Mexico. Two hundred and fifty thousand to 750,000 barrels of oil seep into the Gulf of Mexico through the floor ev'ry year, so tar balls are no big deal.Even last Friday, as large amounts of oil were just offshore and moving quickly toward the Mississippi Gulf Coast, ole Haley was sayin', "This shouldn't be a cause for alarm." (Karen Nelson, CLOSING IN: Oil now 3 miles from barrier islands Biloxi Sun-Herald 06/25/2010).
In fact, I read that Pensacola or the Florida beaches, when they had tar balls yesterday, they didn't even close. They just sent people out to pick them up and throw them in the bag.
The biggest — the biggest negative impact for us has been the news coverage. There has been no distinction between Grand Isle and Venice and the places in Louisiana that we feel so terrible for that have had oil washing up on them. But the average viewer to this show thinks that the whole coast from Florida to Texas is ankle-deep in oil.
And of course, it's very, very bad for our tourist season. That's the real economic damage. Our first closure of fisheries in Mississippi waters came just earlier this week after about 45 days.
So it may be hard for the viewer to understand, but the worst thing for us has been how our tourist season has been hurt by the mis-perception of what's going on down here. The Missippi gulf coast is beautiful. As I tell people, the coast is clear, come on down.
Mississippi had largely escaped the onslaught of the Deepwater Horizon oil slick, even as shoreline in Louisiana, Alabama and Florida was washed by both thick gooey crude or thousands of tar balls.The Biloxi Sun-Herald, which endorsed ole for election and re-election as Governor, raked him over the coals for his strange behavior in face of the oil disaster in this editorial last Saturday: A Crude Awakening: It’s time to stop daydreaming and face up to this nightmare 06/26/2010. They even addressed the distraction aspect of the pious gesture of official prayer days over the oil catastrophe:
But on Sunday, that respite ended.
"The amount of oil moving into Mississippi waters has greatly increased in the last several days, and the prevailing winds that cause the oil and its residue to move in our direction are predicted to continue, at least until the middle of the week,” Gov. Haley Barbour said in a statement. “We continue to press the federal Unified Command and BP to increase the amount of resources available to attack the oil beginning as far south as possible, through the passes, into the sound, and in the mouths of the bays"
Barbour, who once confidently predicted that the oil would skirt Mississippi, rushed back to the state on Friday from a fundraising tour he was making on behalf of Republican candidates. Sunday said the state was prepared to move alone if the federal government couldn't provide more resources.
We would give anything if a prayer or an advertisement could make this all go away.They were very explicit in condemning ole Haley's callous, irresponsible attitude toward the disaster:
But neither media bashing nor media buys will stop the oil or preserve our way of life.
That requires the unrelenting attention of everyone connected to mitigating this catastrophe, including all the governors of the Gulf region.
What happened offshore at the 30-mile and 10-mile lines of defense? What happened to the assurances that oil would be spotted and stopped long before it threatened either the Sound or the sand? [See the FOX News interview linked above for a version of Haley's hot air over this.]Given the volume of oil, even the most aggressive preparations and advocacy by Barbour and other state officials likely couldn't have prevented devastating consequences. But aggressive preparations and advocacy were not what ole Haley and his state administration provided during the first two months of the BP oil geyser:
And why, with more than two months to gear-up for this possibility, were officials still scrambling for gear at the last minute?
Why did it take such a crude awakening to shatter the daydreams of Gov. Haley Barbour and others entrusted with the safety of South Mississippi?
Perhaps if he had gone to that “photo-op” with the president and other Gulf governors in Louisiana weeks ago Barbour would have developed a greater sense of the peril and addressed it with more urgency and vigor.
With the smallest coastline on the Gulf, Mississippi’s ecology should have been the most defensible.
Yet an underestimation of the potential threat, particularly by Barbour, has left us more vulnerable.
Barbour’s focus has been more limited: he has spent much of his time being an advocate for the state’s tourism industry — and for the oil industry which threatens it. And, of course, he has been playing a very active role in Republican politics.
This is not to begrudge the governor his standing in the GOP. His political connections and how they might help Mississippi was one of the factors in his favor that twice won him this newspaper’s endorsement. However, his travels to distant places and engagement in political fundraising during these days of crisis on the Coast are questionable, even troubling. Barbour’s priority ought to be with his constituents in Mississippi.
No small part of Barbour’s responsibility is securing and sharing accurate and trustworthy information about all aspects of the oil spill and its threat to Mississippi. From BP’s inexcusable inaccuracy about the size of the spill to the hidden-from-view cleanup efforts for the last two weeks on Petit Bois Island, facts have been too hard to come by.
For those who have paid attention to Mississippi’s official response to the oil spill, it is clear that the governor set the tone that has permeated every pronouncement by those in authority, particularly Dr. Bill Walker, director of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources. Both Barbour and Walker have taken the media to task for doing its job, probably not the most effective use of their time and talents.
The frantic scramble for resources to defend the Coast this weekend is evidence of the too-little-too-late approach to this crisis.
BLOCK: Governor Barbour, I'd like to talk to you a bit about your own response to the oil spill because you have been criticized for seeming to minimize how bad the problem is. You've accused the media of exaggerating how much oil is on the beaches and you've been urging tourists to come down. You said the coast is clear. The coast is no longer clear, I guess.The facts on the day ole Haley was doing that interview were reported by Donna Melton of the Biloxi Sun-Herald in Oil hitting beaches by the ton 06/29/2010:
Gov. BARBOUR: Well, the people on the beach today in Mississippi and almost all the tourist areas, there hadn't been one drop of oil. We've had a small amount of oil. What we've tried to do is tell the public the truth. And the truth is that the national news media, particularly television, has given people the impression that the entire Mississippi Gulf Coast was ankle deep in oil.
The news media coverage did not differentiate from what was happening in Louisiana and what was not happening in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida. Even the president of the United States came down here and said exactly what I said. You know, the coast is beautiful, the beaches are pristine, the water is clear as a bell. And people shouldn't be canceling their vacations.
Yet because of the news coverage, millions, billions, perhaps, of dollars were lost by people in the tourism industry in my state, Alabama and Florida. That's not to minimize the size of this catastrophe, but it is to simply tell the truth.
BLOCK: Governor Barbour, I wonder if that's a fine line to walk. On the one hand you're worried about not having enough skimmers. You're worried about what might hit the beaches. At the same time, you're saying, come on down, the water's fine.
Gov. BARBOUR: Well, ma'am, it's not a fine line to walk. All you got to do is tell the truth. Just lay the facts out for people and people can make their own decision.
Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Team workers scoured the beaches in Harrison County [Mississippi], scooping more than a ton of contaminated sand mixed with tar patties, mats and balls into clear-plastic garbage bags.Accompanying the article was this photo of the beach at Gulfport, on the day ole Haley was telling NPR, "You know, the coast is beautiful, the beaches are pristine, the water is clear as a bell."
Tar balls are weathered oil; patties are just like balls, but newer and with a more liquid consistency. Tar mats can be a combination of the two mixed with debris such as sediment or plant matter.
The state departments of Marine Resources, Environmental Quality and Health extended the beach advisory in Harrison County from the Gulfport Small Craft Harbor east to Azalea Avenue in Biloxi.
According to a jointly issued news release, the beach in this area had significant amounts of tar mats and tar patties. The heaviest concentrations were between White Avenue in Biloxi and Cowan Road in Gulfport.
The truth-telling Governor then went on to talk about how the BP oil catastrophe proves ... that the free market works, by Galt:Well, look, in every part of the government there is a role for good regulation that is properly done. But the idea that more regulation is necessarily better, I think a very suspect idea. In the case of this well, I believe it will be shown that if the regular protocols had been followed, that this well wouldn't have blown out. We'll see what the facts are.Mississippi, still the poorest state in the Union, needs the very best advocacy and representation from its public officials. Haley Barbour certainly hasn't provided it. But Haley's a good ole boy. And he shore has a downhome accent, don't he?
But I am comfortable that's what the facts are going to be. And that if there had been somebody from MMS on the well to make sure they had done it, well, maybe that wouldve made a difference. But I think right now every oil company in the world says, I don't want to pay $100 million a day to cut corners on drilling a well. And that's where I believe the market system works. Nobody's got more to lose in this deal than BP.
The time has come to move up a grade. The time has come to grow up and understand that everything is political - that the real solution to our problems is political, and thus the battle can only be political. Perhaps, borne on the waves of the pseudo-protest over Shalit, with blue and white shirts and yellow ribbons, we will finally wake up enough to raise other questions, less emotional but far more serious.I'm sure there will be many who will be outraged, or at least claim to be, over Levy's criticism of the Shalit solidarity march. And I didn't follow the story closely enough to have a distinct opinion on how well the march itself was handled.
The struggle to secure the release of the captive soldier has turned into a soap opera. There is his brother falling in love with a young woman in the protest tent, there is Tami Arad in a sweet photograph with her daughter on the cover of the newspaper, there are the noble parents and the impressive grandfather marching together, and there is the question posed to the prime minister: What would have happened had it been your son? With such opening credits, it is easy to mobilize support - as though if Shalit had had grumbling parents and a screeching grandfather, from Mitzpeh Ramon rather than Mitzpeh Hila, their fate would be less cruel.War is obviously a very sentimental thing. And the treatment by the enemy of one's own prisoners is an enduring cause of resentment and hatred in any conflict.
Participants in the protest are careful to claim that it is "not political," as though a "political struggle" were a dirty word for forbidden and degrading activity, of the kind that would mar and stain the picture. That is an extremely childish kind of discourse. Shalit's fate arouses understandable emotions: Every parent thinks of his own son. But when the discourse is confined to the emotional realm, the real questions are blurred and swept under the rug beneath which we love to hide everything.
It is not only a question of the price we are being asked to pay for Shalit's release - and permit us to guess that some of the marchers will protest against it when the time comes. It is also a question of the next Gilad Shalits. If very few people are speaking honestly about the prisoner exchange, nobody at all is speaking about the more important question, of what Israel is doing to prevent more unnecessary victims like Gilad. That is political. But the answer can only be found in the political arena. There is no other option. [my emphasis]
