It looks like Katrina helped the Republicans in ways that even the most cynical lefties might be loathe to say out loud. As Gustav approaches New Orleans gun sales are way up. First you convince people that government won’t be there for them by failing spectacularly. Then you encourage the population to arm itself heavily. People who can count on the government for major services or even the basics like keeping order, then don’t want to pay the taxes for those services. You get a nice little vicious spiral.

Gena at Deadly Stealth Frogs has an interesting post about the repeated cover ups of the rapes and murders of female soldiers. It’s worth a read and worth writing to your elected representatives about.

J. Edgar Hoover sent a plan to the White House just after the outbreak of the Korean War that would have suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned 12,000 Americans indefinitely, without access to a trial.

Fearing Fear Itself
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 29 October 2007

In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then.

Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president - including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination - have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns.

Consider, for a moment, the implications of the fact that Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.”

Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”

Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism - it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 - in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.

Meanwhile, the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees - and bombing is the only option, since we’ve run out of troops - is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead. There’s every reason to believe that an attack on Iran would produce the same result, with the added effects of endangering U.S. forces in Iraq and driving oil prices well into triple digits.

Mr. Podhoretz, in short, is engaging in what my relatives call crazy talk. Yet he is being treated with respect by the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination. And Mr. Podhoretz’s rants are, if anything, saner than some of what we’ve been hearing from some of Mr. Giuliani’s rivals.

Thus, in a recent campaign ad Mitt Romney asserted that America is in a struggle with people who aim “to unite the world under a single jihadist Caliphate. To do that they must collapse freedom-loving nations. Like us.” He doesn’t say exactly who these jihadists are, but presumably he’s referring to Al Qaeda - an organization that has certainly demonstrated its willingness and ability to kill innocent people, but has no chance of collapsing the United States, let alone taking over the world.

And Mike Huckabee, whom reporters like to portray as a nice, reasonable guy, says that if Hillary Clinton is elected, “I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.” Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power - which aren’t even allies - pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did.

All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy. Instead of treating the attack as what it was - an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weak, though ruthless adversary - the administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction.

Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up - perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base’s older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general.

And the base is looking for a candidate who shares this fear.

Just to be clear, Al Qaeda is a real threat, and so is the Iranian nuclear program. But neither of these threats frightens me as much as fear itself - the unreasoning fear that has taken over one of America’s two great political parties.

Can anyone out there defend capitalism in this context?

Southern conservatives are racists. The leaders of the movement are straight up, almost unrepetent segregation loving white supremacists. The rank and file vary. You may already know or believe that.

What you don’t know or don’t believe is this: they’re smarter than you.

Southern conservatives have twice had to learn a hard, but incredibly useful lesson about winning, holidng, and using power to support their racist goals. The first time was in the civil war. A lot of leading southern politicans opposed secession. Many, because they saw it as a sure loser rather than on any loyalty to the U.S. State nationalism was alive and well in most of the country. It was dominant in the south. In most states, the vote on secession was close. In some, the regional split within states produced, essentially, mini civil wars within the state. The south lost and learned that armed uprising against the federal government was a losing proposition. In the long run, it was easier to get the yankees out, disenfranchise the blacks, and reap the benefits of generally having a twenty something senator block with a relatively united ideology. The disputed election of 1876 gave southern conservatives the perfect vehicle for achieving this. They gave up the presidency for real power. The one party rule that emerged in the south after the civil war was almost a godsend. It allowed southern congressmen and senators to accrue seniority that vastly increased their already considerable power. The Democratic party’s emergence as the more liberal party, the party that drove real social change through the legislature gave southern conservatives even more power. They could easily use (and twist) the language of populism and be within the ideals that their party supposedly espoused. Southern conservatives were willing to compromise on economic and social policy with northern liberals at the cost that northern liberals would protect white supremacy in the south. It was a bargain that held sway for eighty years, giving the Democratic nominee a reliable block of electoral votes into the 1950s.

Things did really start to change in the 1950s, though. Eisenhower didn’t owe much to conservative southern Democrats. Ultimately, neither did Kennedy really, at least not compared to previous Democratic presidents. Eisenhower and the Kennedys could have given a weak and half-hearted federal response to the various Supreme Court decisions. The Kennedys in particular were vigorous in their push to end segregation and institutionalized, legally sanctioned white supremacy in the south. Consequently, Jimmy Carter’s 1976 run for the presidency is the only one since where a Democrat has carried the whole region. While this realignment was happening, Richard Nixon was a shrewd enough politician to see the writing on the wall and implemented his “Southern Strategy” to try to bring conservative southerners into the Republican party. As an increasingly liberal Democratic party marginalized the southern segregationists. Nixon welcomed them in terms they understood quite clearly without having to be the publicly direct, open racist and anti-semite that we know him to have been. In 1964, Strom Thurmond* was the first of the prominent old segregationist conservatives to switch to the Republican Party. Over the next 25 years, the trickle that started with Thurmond became a flood until the once solidly Democratic segregationist south became the solidly Republican segregationist south.

After the civil war, the southern conservatives learned that they couldn’t have actual slaves, but they could keep blacks in virtual slavery through sharecropping, segregation, and the Klan. They used a long term, calculated political plan to protect that system. After the civil rights era, they learned that they could no longer enshrine inequality into the law, but with another long term, calculated plan, they could keep white supremacy enshrined in the center of our culture. Over the last 25 years, they’ve also learned that blacks aren’t their biggest threat. They dropped out of the Klan. They changed the names of their “white citizen’s councils” to “conservative citizen’s councils”. They learned to package an agenda that pushes white supremacy in the values of our country: freedom, meritocracy, and equality. They’ve made an unholy alliance with big business, radical christians, and pretty much anyone else who thinks the country was better off the way they believe it to have been in 1880 than it is now.

That alliance has had one goal in mind for the last forty years: get control of the Supreme Court. Southern segregationists saw how their way of life could be turned upside down when the court demands equality for all. Religious nuts saw it in 1973 with Roe. Bush v. Gore was a naked power play that was designed more to permanently swing the court to the right than it was even to put Bush in power. Aware of what a dangerous thing they were doing, the decision was handed down, but specified as a one off decision that was not meant to set any precedent. For all the frustrating court decisions we’ve seen in the last five years, those of us concerned with equality and democracy may well look back on this time period as the proverbial “good ol days” before things really went to shit. We’ve already seen 50 years of precedent all but overturned on the question of racial diversity and equality in our schools. That was a judicial precedent we never really even lived up to in our society during those 50 years, but it’s gone. We’re rapidly seeing the erosion of our scant worker protections against harrassment and discrimination. Four of the five justices on our supreme court would probably be happy with the way this country was run in the 1920s. Three of those justices aren’t going anywhere. Clarence Thomas will only be 60 next year. Samuel Alito will be 57. Chief Justice John Roberts won’t even be 52 until later this year. These guys may well be on the court for the rest of my working life. At 71, Antonin Scalia is only in late middle age by supreme court standards. He could easily sit on the court another decade. If they get one more vote, you can forget damn near every good thing that has happened in our courts over the last 50 to 80 years. These guys openly espouse an ideology that would have (and did, prior to FDR’s “court packing” scandal) declared the entire New Deal and Great Society unconstitutional, that would have said the federal government has no right even to limit child labor. No matter what they say today about this or that principle, about “up or down votes’, etc., you can bet that even if we win the next three presidential elections, they won’t let us put similarly liberal people on the court as long as they’ve got 41 votes in the senate.

If you see this as nothing more than partisan cheerleading or fearmongering, as simple “go team go!” on the part of a very partisan Democrat, then you’re not paying attention and you’re part of the reason they’ve been able to get this far. This is a chess game. The electoral left, no matter how broadly or narrowly defined, is planning our moves over the next two to maybe four years and often badly at that. The right is planning theirs over the next two to three decades. If you don’t believe me, spend a little time looking at the position papers that The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, and dozens of other less famous (but equally connected and influential) conservative think tanks started putting out in the 70s and 80s. They’ve had a vision. They’ve been willing to build coalitions, accept short term compromises, and make sacrifices to ensure their long term vision. I often hear liberals and leftists complain about politicians who are willing to accept something less than the full glorious worker’s revolution right here and now as sell outs, as being no different that the Republicans, etc. Tell me, who is more principled: the person who only gets 40% of what they want today, but uses that as a means to get 80% of what they want over the next 20 years or the person who gets all (or more likely none) of what they want today, but watches the social and economic problems they’re working to fix actually worsen over most of their lives? If neither is more principled, then tell me who is more effective at actually serving their principles.

*Thurmond, many years later did moderate his stance on race.

 ”Only a president clinically incapable of understanding that mistakes have consequences could take the action he did today. President Bush has just sent exactly the wrong signal to the country and the world.” - former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.

For a moment, I really couldn’t believe it when I saw this flash on CNN at the gym yesterday afternoon. Then the weight of 6+ years of precedent kicked in and the surprise quickly passed. Of course, he did this. I don’t know whether it was just cronyism, the fear the Libby would talk, or some combination of the two, but this kind of thing is precisely what we should expect from Bush. Let’s just make sure that no more prosecutions of his cronies go to judge and jury before January of ‘09.

This is from an email that Elizabeth Edwards sent out to campaign supporters. I think the exchange between the two of them demonstrates precisely why we’re not just correct on the issues, we’re better than much of the right wing as human beings:

Last night I had an important talk with Ann Coulter and I want to tell you what happened.

On Monday, Ann announced that instead of using more homophobic slurs to attack John, she will just wish that John had been “killed in a terrorist assassination plot.”

Where I am from, when someone does something that displeases you, you politely ask them to stop. So when I heard Ann was going to be on “Hardball” last night, I decided to call in and ask her to engage on the issues and stop the personal attacks. I told her these kinds of personal attacks lower our political dialogue at precisely the time when we need to raise it, and set a bad example for our children.

How did she respond? Sadly, perhaps predictably, with more personal attacks.

John’s campaign is about the issues—but pundits like Ann Coulter are trying to shout him down. If they will not stop, it is up to us cut through the noise. Help us fight back—please give what you can today.

www.johnedwards.com/rightwing

You can read more about the exchange in this article at CBS News.

I now have to admit to having an iota of respect for John Ashcroft.

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting little article on the melting polar ice caps. It looks like we’ve drastically underestimated the rate at which the ice is melting. The polar seas may be navigable in summertime before too long. They may be ice free in the summer by 2050. That stuff is the focus of the article. At the end of it, though, is some info that may explain why the Europeans are so much more serious about cutting back CO2 emissions than the US is. April was the 8th straight month of warmer than usual temperatures in Germany, the 13th in France. April 2006-April 2007 was the warmest 12 months in England in the last 350 years. I’ve seen this even better explained in some temperature maps that I’ve seen online in the last year. The U.S. has certainly had some weird and warm weather at times over the last couple of years, but nothing that’s really out of bounds for us and not nationwide. Based on what Europe has seen over the last couple of years, it’s not unreasonable to think they’re at the beginning of a permanent climate change. While the early phases of that are hot, we have no way of knowing yet how that will play out long term. Climate is so complex and depends on the interplay of so many factors, that it’s hard to predict how things will end up. One theory says that global warming could bring the end or the significant decrease of the Gulf Stream system, ultimately resulting in a colder, dryer UK and western Europe. Whatever the end result, significant climate change in Europe would devastate the region’s agriculture and agribusiness.