This post started as a comment at Fact-esque, trying to answer a question eRobin had asked: It's all well and good to talk about the Democrats finally getting tough ('No surrender, no compromise, no bipartisanship, no civility, no reaching out to Republican officeholders [as opposed to detachable Republican voters]: nothing but scorched earth from here to victory'), but realistically, she asked, 'what are their options?' Here's what I think one of their options is.

They can do what the Pubs did when they were out of power--stonewall. That's why Harry Reid is potentially such a good choice. He's a master parliamentarian and he's brilliant at looking innocent and trustworthy asnd helpful and oh so conciliatory even as he's building a casket that co-incidentally fits you like a glove. He's capable of playing as rough as he has to, and if the Dems stay united, he could make it impossible for the Pubs to do much of anything.

If he does, then they wait out the inevitable backlash when the Xtian fundies and the rabid right start screaming and eating their own, as they've already begun doing with Specter. It isn't going to take much more for the mods to realize their days are numbered with the fanatics leading the party--there's no Dem threat to unite them anymore and the fundie-rads want what they want and they want it NOW. Anybody who gets in their way is going to be mowed down.

I want Specter destroyed, humiliated. That's what it's going to take to make the mods, as in-denial as they are, realize that they have zero chance to survive the extremists unless they cross the aisle occasionally and flex their muscle.

I think in a few months, a year at most, we're going to see the barbarism lurking just under the surface break into the open. We've only had a little taste so far, and it's scaring all the people who were telling themselves Junior was going to back off in his 2nd term. He isn't, and it's becoming obvious he isn't. When the House floor starts to run with blood, all bets are off and a whole new set of alliances will form based on sheer survival.

The mods still don't have any real idea how much danger they're in. They're still telling themselves that compromise is possible, that Junior will finally start acting like a real democratic leader and deal with the opposition. They bought the Rove Show--the 'compassionate conservative who's a uniter, not a divider'--but that illusion is about to get busted into a hundred million pieces. The CIA, State, and the WH are being purged of any and all dissent and turned over to hardliners with no history of or interest in talking let alone listening. Anybody who doesn't get with the program and join the choir is 'the enemy', and that includes the mods, who will soon find themselves under fire from the right-wing Noise Machine, dissed and dismissed as RINO's. They will watch as the TB's from the far, far, whacko right are encouraged by the party leadership to take their jobs. They'll find themselves shut out of Republican committee meetings and their districts ignored when the pork is being handed out.

This will provide an enormous opportunity for the Democrats to forge an alliance with the mods without sacrificing their issues, moving further to the right, or descending into irrelevance shouting at an empty chamber. The mods will get NOTHING from the radical Pubs but contempt. Their only hope is going to be by making common cause with the Dems over issues like the deficit and the most egregiously un-Constitutional aspects of the PATRIOT Act, issues the Dems won't have to bend on at all.

The beauty of the psychology here is that losing the mods in a public way--and losing a vote or two to the mod-R/Dem alliance--will drive the extremists not to compromise but to harder positions, marginalizing them exactly as they've tried to marginalize everybody else. They'll lose it, and the brutality and animosity they have for democracy and anyone who disagrees, even in their own party, will become obvious. With the hardline religious right breathing down their necks, they won't have much choice, but the fact is that every one of them is incredibly arrogant and arrogance doesn't do compromise when it sees itself as 'in charge'. It gets huffy, outraged. It attacks those closest to it as 'betrayers of the cause'.

There are advantages to building a party around fanatics (advantages the Dermocrats never exploited even though they had the chance) but there's also a significant downside: fanatics aren't flexible. Fanatics don't respond to reality checks. Fanatics don't bend when the wind direction changes. And fanatics don't forgive people who do. Fanatics set their heels in even deeper and scrteam even louder and punish anybody who doesn't jump to obey. The radical/fundie right may have provided troops and energy for the win but they can turn on a dime if they're disappointed and provide the same troops and energy for destroying their previous champions.

Then, to stop the blood-letting, Junior starts another war as a distraction, probably with Iran, and all hell breaks loose.

Look, I realize their hubris has lasted far longer than I or anyone else thought it could, but the one thing I know for sure is that it can't last forever. Eventually, their arrogance is going to force them across a line nobody can justify, and when that happens, they're finished. If the Dems are smart and play Harry's game, they can hasten that day. If they fudge and start moving to the right, they're finished, too.

The vulnerability in this argument isn't the potential radcon reaction, which as far as psychology is concerned is a lock, but the hold the surrender-monkeys of the DNC have over the Democratic party. They're convinced that the party has to roll over and show its belly or be eaten alive. If their chokehold isn't broken, yet another opportunity for the Democrats to build strength from weakness will be lost. Then we will have no choice--it will be a third party or nothing.

Greens, anyone?

From the Wilderness Society:

One of our last great wild places, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is under fresh attack from the oil industry and their allies in Congress and the Administration. That's why The Wilderness Society has launched an all-out campaign to protect the Arctic wilderness.

But we need your help.

We need to send Congress and the Administration a strong early message that we're NOT going to stand by and watch as America's wild places are sold off to the highest bidder. Take action today.

We can't lose the critical battle to preserve this precious, threatened landscape which is inhabited by wolves, grizzlies, caribou, and millions of migrating birds.

This looming threat is more serious, and more dangerous, than ever before. Anti-wilderness forces in Congress hope to use a backdoor budget process to sneak this giveaway onto the same federal budget the government needs to function. They know that they don't have the votes necessary to enact this ill-conceived plan through the normal legislative process that requires 60 votes to pass such highly controversial measures in the U.S. Senate. The decision to circumvent the normal rules is being made NOW.

Just last week, Rep. Richard Pombo (R-California), a vocal drilling advocate and chairman of the House Resources Committee, claimed that now is “The best chance we've had” to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (CNN.com, 11/10/2004)

Poll after poll has shown that the American people believe some places are so wild, so special, and so important that they should be off limits to oil drilling. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would ruin one of America 's last unspoiled and irreplaceable wild places for just a few months worth of oil that won't be available to consumers for ten years! There are far better ways to meet America 's future energy needs, like making our vehicles more efficient and investing in renewable forms for energy.

Please take a moment to remind your Senator that the vast majority of Americans want the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to remain just the way it is: wild, unspoiled, and free of oil rigs.

With your help, we will protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as an unspoiled legacy for future generations.

Thank you,

Kathy Kilmer
Director, Electronic Communications
The Wilderness Society

With the deficit reaching astronomic proportions and the dollar falling like a rock against--wait for it--THE EURO, for gawd's-sake, the Republicans are showing their usual brand of intense interest in the country's financial distress by raising the debt ceiling $$$800Bil$$$ worth, then hiding in their offices, not even bothering to show up for the debate on the floor.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - Faced with the prospect of a government unable to pay its bills, the Senate voted on Wednesday to raise the federal debt limit by $800 billion.

Though an increase in the debt ceiling was never in doubt, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress postponed action on it last month, until after the elections, to deprive Democrats of a chance to accuse them of fiscal irresponsibility.

The bill, if approved by the House in a vote expected on Thursday, would authorize the third big increase in the federal borrowing since President Bush took office in 2001. Federal debt has ballooned by $1.4 trillion over the past four years, to $7.4 trillion, and the new ceiling would allow borrowing to reach $8.2 trillion.

With no end in sight to the huge annual budget deficits, which hit a record of $412 billion this year, lawmakers predicted on Wednesday that the new ceiling would probably have to be raised again in about a year.

Democrats, still stinging from their election defeats, voted against the measure and argued that it should be accompanied by rules that would force Congress to pay for new tax cuts with spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere.

"I don't remember anyone during the elections making a promise to raise the federal debt to $8.1 trillion," Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, said. "What we're doing here is just writing another blank check and saying to this administration, 'Go ahead, continue to run record budget deficits.' "
(emphasis added)

They wanted to be 'fiscally irresponsible', they just didn't want the Democrats to be able to prove it before the election. Now, votes in hand, they're ignoring the debate that's taking place on the floor.

Your [puppet] government at work. The Pubs can't even be bothered to show up and defend their destruction of the US economy and the threat it poses to the world economy. But hey, who cares. The election is over. Move on.

My sister sent this to me. It's making the rounds, apparently. I don't think it's real, but I do think we're not that far from the time when it will be. In any case, I thought you'd get a chuckle out of it.

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a Texas A & M University chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

I should think so.

An internal memo shows that Porter Goss has made it official: the politicization of the CIA is now his policy.

"As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in the memorandum, which was circulated late on Monday. He said in the document that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road."

Oh, they're clarified. Beyond doubt.

1. Intel that doesn't match Administration policy will be buried


2. Analysis that doesn't 'support' Admin goals will be trashed


3. The services of agents, analysts, and assets who can't come up with information supporting Admin policies--no matter how loopy, Admin beliefs--no matter how disconnected from reality, and Admin goals--no matter how anti-democratic or Imperial, will be dispensed with


4. Following Bush policies in other areas of govt, screw-ups, incompetence, massive failure, and being immensely wrong will now mean promotion and success


5. Using raw, unconfirmed data that can be interpreted in the Admin's favor will be encouraged; it will not be confirmed because it favors the Admin view and must, therefore, be true, so confirmation won't be considered necessary
   

Another word for this is 'propaganda'.

Yes, it's true that Director-Hack Goss included this:

"We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker.''

--but it's a meaningless sop, a transparent attempt to stop the flow of blood from the coup, and everybody knows it. Bush wants the CIA brought under his heel. The new templates are C-TEG and OSP--propaganda units run by naive amateurs who 'support' the Emperor by telling him what he wants to hear--and anybody who doesn't 'get it' will be gone. The professionalism in the agency that John Deutsch worked so hard to create is history and the cowboys of the Nixon era are back, only this time as fantasists and fairy-tale writers.

In comments to my last post on this issue, Eric Martin of TIA posted a letter from a friend of his that said, in part:

I am afraid the President will not heed your suggestion to inform the CIA that he wants only information from it. This is because the President has already defined what he wants from the intelligence community, and, much to the dismay of any thoughtful American, it isn't information. Information is what the intelligence community tried to provide, and the Administration refused to accept. Rather, the Bush Administration wants the CIA to act as an advocate on behalf of Bush's policies, regardless of what the information that the CIA gathers suggests about whether those policies are wise or unwise.

The intelligence community does serve the Executive. But it does so by gathering information, not by advocating for the Executive's policies. The American public is better served by a CIA whose role is to gather all the intelligence relevant to proposed Executive policies and present it for consideration than by a CIA whose role is to gather only intelligence that supports the President's policy aims and ignore, even discard, intelligence that does not. Even a lawyer, whose job it is to advocate for one position regardless of the facts, cannot simply ignore or discard inconvenient facts. Why would we want our intelligence community (or even our President) to do so?

David Kinnecome (New York)

That about covers it. But Mr Kinnecome doesn't make it plain what 'advocacy' really means, so I will: it means the CIA is now nothing but a propaganda agency. It will exist to serve up excuses and phony analysis. Networks will be dismantled--who needs them? Nobody's listening anyway, and besides, we've got all these neat gadgets like satellites and stuff, so we don't really need human intel. In fact, we don't need intel at all. We'll just do what Chalabi did and make stuff up--tell the neocons what they want to hear and they'll believe anything. They're so gullible, those guys. Really. Makes you wonder how they manage the wherewithal to be up and around.

So the Agency is about to be sent back into the Dark Ages of Allen Dulles' obsession with the Soviets and his insistence that his agents provide proof of his paranoid fantasies about them, only instead of the Commies being at the center, it will be 'state-sponsored terrorism' because that's what Laurie Mylroie blames. The mischief Dulles did has never been completely understood, unfortunately, but you can lay at his feet all the 'supporting material' that bolstered the Cold War:

1. The so-called 'missile gap'? Dulles made it up. It didn't exist. In fact, his own agents were reporting that the US had a 2-1 advantage in numbers and an even bigger advantage in another way--our missiles worked.


2. The Soviet 'plans for world domination'? They didn't exist. They were forgeries. Dulles had them made up when his agents couldn't find any such plans because there were no such plans. As Hedrick Smith and ex-Ambassador Averill Harriman tried to tell us, the Russians have a historic fear of being 'encircled' by enemy states; they had no plans to dominate anything, it was all rhetoric designed for the home market--you know, like a Bush stump-speech. But that didn't suit Dulles' faith-based belief so he chucked it and invented material to prove what he believed.


3. The 'space-based weapons'? A Dulles fantasy. They didn't exist, they were nowhere near existing. He made it up.

That's what we can look forward to from now on: national policy, especially foreign policy, that's based on and built on lies and manufactured 'evidence' that the CIA--and other intel groups; Condi will be doing the same thing at State--will be expected to produce whether or not it actually exists.

And the media will no doubt continue to swallow the fantasies whole and help BushCo get the nation all worked up over imaginary 'threats'.

Canada's looking better and better, isn't it?

This is Old friends Week for the ABWA, and cul is one of the oldest.

I met cul heath months ago in the comments on Phaedrus' late, lamented No Fear of Freedom blog (and wherever you are, P, we hope you're doing well), which I think may be typical for cul--he writes comments on a lot of other people's sites, even here occasionally. He doesn't write a lot on his own blog, ratboy's avil, but what he does write is pithy and passionate. On the new website that lets people hunt and shoot animals--from their computer:

Why I Hate Humans #3261

This has got to the the stupidest, cruelest, most socially unredeemable and most perfect example that Texas is the nest for the world's most fucked up individuals I've seen yet....How about we set up an internet site that allows people to remotely drop bombs on this guys head with the click of a mouse?

He digs out a lot of overlooked items like that. His blog is always loaded with news clips and whole articles, and one way or another they all focus on man's inhumanity to man. In his own, quiet, unshowy way, cul uses ratboy's anvil to harp on blatant injustices but also on all those little everyday, soul-killing cruelties that go largely unnoticed but do so much damage to the people involved.

I go there every day for a double-dose: a shot of humanity and a soupcon--or more--of humor, laced with a dash of justifiable outrage, and I'm never disappointed. ratboy's anvil is a treasure, and cul heath somehow comes along with it. It give me great pleasure to present cul heath and ratboy's anvil with the Alley's

Third 'Awesome Blog of the Week' Award

ratboy's anvil

The Bush Admin and Rumsfeld's DoD is trying to conscript 4,000 members of the Independent Ready Reserve for active duty in Iraq. Two thousand of them are fighting the call-up.

The Army has encountered resistance from more than 2,000 former soldiers it has ordered back to military work, complicating its efforts to fill gaps in the regular troops.

Many of these former soldiers - some of whom say they have not trained, held a gun, worn a uniform or even gone for a jog in years - object to being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan now, after they thought they were through with life on active duty.

They are seeking exemptions, filing court cases or simply failing to report for duty, moves that will be watched closely by approximately 110,000 other members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a corps of soldiers who are no longer on active duty but still are eligible for call-up.

In the last few months, the Army has sent notices to more than 4,000 former soldiers informing them that they must return to active duty, but more than 1,800 of them have already requested exemptions or delays, many of which are still being considered.

And, of about 2,500 who were due to arrive on military bases for refresher training by Nov. 7, 733 had not shown up.

Almost a thousand of the remaining half have said they would report but would refuse to go to either Afghanistan or Iraq. The back-door draft is beginning to hit home, and I guess people don't care for it. Fancy that.

Randi Rhodes and Air America raised over $100,000 to pay for an independent vote count in Ohio (the state says the cost is $10/precinct). Sec of State Blackwell promptly upped the ante. Using the excuse that the cost to the state was 'outdated', he's now demanding $1.6Mil to count the vote.

On Saturday, David Brooks trashed whatever credibility he may have had left as an 'independent' voice rather than a Bush Admin mouthpiece when he savaged the CIA's attempt to defend itself against the assault of blame marshalled by the BA to get itself off the hook for its refusal to respond to their warnings before 9/11 and its analysts' conclusions that Iraq posed no threat. The neocon cabal, in thrall to nutbag Laurie Mylroie and her whacko conspiracy theories of Saddam as the Professor Moriarty of terrorism, set up, out of Cheney's office and under Doug Feith's supervision, two agencies--the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group (C-TEG) and the Office for Special Planning (OSP)--to do an end-run around the CIA's experienced analysts by 'stovepiping' raw, unconfirmed intelligence straight to them. Whatever they found that fit Mylroie's tinfoil-hat paranoia, they believed without question and made policy without bothering to confirm whether or not it was true, which explains how ace con-artist Ahmad Chalabi came to dominate the neocons' unreal version of Iraq's reality.

The Company rapidly became the scapegoat for the Admin's refusal to face facts after Dick and W's Excellent Adventure in Iraq turned into a quagmire of quicksand, and the Mighty Wurlitzer of the right-wing Noise Machine was only too happy to trumpet that political twist. I said months ago, after the notorious outing of CIA covert-op Valerie Plame by the Bush Admin for political reasons, that the CIA wasn't going to stand for watching itself be politicized out of existence and its operatives blown for a few quick political brownie points. The absurd, not to say insane, appointment of GOP hack Porter Goss to head the CIA was bound to intensify the hard feelings and petrify the polarization between old hands who believed the CIA's analysis role was to be as non-partisan and accurate as possible, and the neocon newbies from C-TEG and OSP who saw analysis as another word for 'rationalizing what the Admin wants to do'.

And they didn't stand for it. When Porter Goss began to do the job he was appointed to do--turn the CIA into an Imperial foreign-policy spin machine--they began to fight back. Brooks makes not the slightest attempt to so much as acknowledge that they might have had some legitimate reasons to protect themselves from this politicization. No, to Brooks, the CIA's only job is to 'serve the president', and they should be ashamed of themselves for serving the truth instead.

President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.

At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.

Oh goodness me, the dastardly crime of 'undermining' the Emperor's Admin by defending oneself against its on-going assaults and scapegoating to cover its own mistakes and blindnesses is one we should never have to suffer in the Imperium. Why, the Imperial Viziers actually felt they had to hide their political agenda for fear the CIA would out them because they were all, you know, Kerry moles.

White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.

... Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.

'Insubordination'? What an odd word to use. And 'brazen' at that. Oh, and the truth 'violate[s] all standards of honorable public service'. Uh-huh. Right.

Ordinarily this would be a typically laughable piece of Brooksian idiocy and a good example of why I haven't bothered to read him but 3 or 4 times since the NYT caved under Grand Vizier Rove's insistence that they hire him, but his fawning over Imperial policy toward the Company and his automatic acceptance of its rank politicization are the above-the-water tips of icebergs looming off the Imperial bow.

Newsday reported yesterday (link thanks to The Agonist) that Goss has been ordered to 'purge the agency' of any officers considered 'disloyal to Bush'.

WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

Brooks' job on Saturday was to lead this story away from its Soviet-style 'off with their heads' quality into Imperial Spinland where it could be interpreted as punishment for 'brazen insubordination', and now we can begin to understand why he chose that word. The Bush Admin is going to use the blame-the-CIA-for-9/11-and-Iraq meme as an excuse to turn the whole agency into a larger version of C-TEG and the OSP: an NKVD-style political network whose job is to 'serve the Emperor' and his Presidium by endorsing--and enforcing--what they've already decided to do.

Given this, it would make sense if the first old CIA hand to go was the covert op director who kept telling them his Iraq network couldn't find any evidence that Hussein had WMD's or any capability to produce them, and that everything Chalabi was telling them was false. And guess what?

One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.

But the former senior CIA official said that the White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out." He said the job had already been offered to the former chief of the European Division....

The Emperor is, in sum, wasting no time consolidating his power, and in a few short months, we'll all have forgotten that there was ever a difference between the CIA and the KGB.

No wonder the Emperor got along so well with Putin. Birds-of-a-feather.

CONGRATULATIONS!!


You Did It!

The phone bill will be paid next week. Thanks to you, the crisis is over and the Alley is back in business.


Click the picture for Thank You card

The PayPal button will remain at Reality Check, and any further donations will be applied to the same cause. Normal blogging will re-commence on Monday after I recover.