"Obama is more like a cold shower."
                                                   Maureen Dowd

                                          "Whose side is Obama on?"
                                    Steven Pearlstein - Washington Post


Disenchantment seems to have set in among the formerly enchanted.

Like mushrooms sprouting after a rain, all of a sudden dozens of articles have appeared from among some of Barack Obama's most fervent supporters criticizing  the president; not just his policies, but his personality too.

That is what interests me, the disappointed supporters, I don't pay much attention to the ultra-right frothing at the mouth; I only wish that Barack Obama was half the evil socialist that the teabaggers make him out to be. I am interested in this breaking of the spell and where it may lead.

I am surrounded by the formerly enchanted, most people I know, friends, family and the people I correspond with all belong to the enchanted. I, alas, having never been enchanted  have often felt like the poor little lame boy who could not run fast enough to follow the Pied Piper of Hamlin, when, as part of his debt collection policy, the piper took away all of Hamlin's children and left the wistful little cripple alone without his dear playmates.

So I am a bit at a loss to find so many of my old chums straggling back, apparently having weighed up the piper and found him somehow wanting.

I use the word "enchanted" and talk about "pipers" because since I don't fancy myself smarter than everybody else I feel that a spell has been cast on everyone and I have somehow been mysteriously spared from its mind-clouding effects

I am still where I started with Barack Obama. I still don't know who he is. Nearly a year has past and I still find him mysterious. His actions don't give me any more clues than his words do. Things don't fit, don't fall into place.

I tend to believe that the truth is just lying there staring you in the face most of the time and that it is very  difficult just to see the obvious. To counteract this I often practice the art of "what-you-see-is-what-you-gettism" to good effect. So using that method I have come to a tentative conclusion. Nothing fantastic, it's very simple and it goes like this.

Barack Obama, in my opinion, has an almost supernatural gift which enables people to project all their fantasies on him. The teabaggers think he is Lenin cum the anti-Christ and his supporters think of him as Lincoln cum the Christ-Christ. They all see and hear exactly the same things, but up till now, at least, they all see and hear what they want to: they, not Obama, do most of the real work.

This is the essence of Obama's magic: to be a screen on which one and all can write their dreams or nightmares. Or like the clouds which seem to take shapes that different people see differently.

If we removed Obama's fabulous "gift" for a moment and imagined the same actions taken by a president without it, we would simply see a three year US senator, who spent most of that time running for president, someone who did a bit of time in a state senate, someone who, except for having lived abroad as a child, has no particular experience in foreign affairs, who has never managed any organization before in his life, who has never even worked as a junior executive in any large organizations before, whose staff is a pick-up team of individuals that come from previous administrations, not people he has discovered in long years in public office, with even the men closest to him, Axelrod and Emmanuel on loan from Chicago's Mayor Daley.

So just imagine the same presidency without the "gift".

Without the "gift", his indecisiveness and ineffectual stumbling from "historic" speech to "historic" speech with nothing achieved between speeches would be seen as perfectly normal. What would you expect?

Of course reality being as inconveniently obtrusive as it is, even the "gift" is not enough.

It doesn't surprise me that people of the left are waking up, they are supposed to be smart. I am waiting for the right to wake up too and realize that their nightmares are no more likely to materialize than the liberal's dreams. That might get him reelected.

I wonder when Obama himself will wake up. Maybe he has, maybe that is why the charm seems to be breaking.

                           Innocent until proven guilty?

Read the following excerpts about the New York trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and see if they make sense to you.

I am posting them in case anybody reading feels up to rebutting their simple argument:

If we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.

When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.

(...) How does Justice handle a defense demand for a change of venue, far from lower Manhattan, where the jury pool was most deeply traumatized by Sept. 11? Would not KSM and his co-defendants, if a change of venue is denied, have a powerful argument for overturning any conviction on appeal?

Were not KSM's Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but told that his family would be killed and he would be waterboarded if he refused to talk? (...) And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence? What do we do if the case against KSM is thrown out because the government refuses to reveal sources or methods, or if he gets a hung jury, or is acquitted, or has his conviction overturned?

I think these comments point out very efficiently and very graphically how contradictory the US culture of endless war is with our constitutional guarantees and how grotesque it can become when some sort of compromise between the two is attempted. I would find it very difficult to answer the questions this commentary evoke.

It looks to me as if the treasured constitutional traditions of the United States of America are going to be bent to the needs of a "show trial". That eventuality could end up doing worse damage to the republic, much worse, than anything Bush ever did.

This thing is so contaminated with politics that if English common law is still in force and if Johnnie Cochran were still alive, he probably could get KSM off. The trickiest, hungriest trial lawyers in the USA must be lining up to do this one pro-bono. Any shyster that could get KSM off will be the heavyweight champion of the lawyers.

And if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed walks the presidency of Barack Obama is toast.

If this is not a fair trial under our age-old rules than KSM will have done more damage to the USA through his day in court than he did with the airplanes.

What I also find interesting about the above comments is that they could easily come from the left, but in fact they come from the far, far, right, but not the neocon version, they come from the paleoconservative, old time, Father Coughlin, right: none other than Pat Buchanan.

Of necessity, I read a wide spectrum of opinion from left to right. I do this because we are all living in the same world and looking at the same reality, and like the famous story of  the blind men and the elephant, different people catch hold of different parts of the elephant. This practice helps me to constantly recalibrate my thinking... such as it is.

To enjoy reading somebody, I only demand that the commentator be intelligent, lay their cards face up and make well constructed arguments that challenge my preconceptions. Buchanan fits that.  Unlike the neocons, he isn't trying to fool anybody. You can see him coming from far off. He is an old  fashioned, pre-Vatican-II, lace-curtain, Irish Catholic, antisemite and anybody with Irish family probably has at least a great uncle like this, but not as smart as Buchanan, most likely.

So here is this rather perfect argument out of the pen of someone most of my readers loathe and despise. Go on, take a shot at picking his discourse apart. I confess that I cannot find any fault in it and I wonder how the US government has gotten itself in such a precarious position and dumb a fix.

"Living well is the best revenge"
George Herbert (1593 - 1633)

The Lisbon Treaty, the European Union's de facto constitution, is finally ready to roll out. For euroskeptics it is much too much and for many europhiles it is much too little. In my opinion it is just one more patient step toward European unity. All the phases of European Union dating back to the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951, have been such small, patient steps. Lets look at what has been done up till now:

The EU has developed a single market through a standardized system of laws which apply in all member states, ensuring the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital. It maintains common policies on trade, agriculture, fisheries and regional development. Sixteen member states have adopted a common currency, the euro, constituting the Eurozone. Wikipedia

The modern state is a European invention and the creation of the entities that became the states of Europe was far from instantaneous. The pooling of sovereignty, where powerful princes, wealthy cities and idiosyncratic regions, with all their traditional laws and privileges, submitted to be ruled by a single king didn't happen over night, or if it did it was usually accompanied by much blood; and even today there are quite a few regions in European states that feel restless. In  states such as Spain, France and the United Kingdom, the powerful centrifugal forces that were amply demonstrated in the disintegration of Yugoslavia are often active under the surface. So European unity is a work in progress... and always will be.

The Roman empire, created European unity and maintained it firmly under their sandals at sword point: until it finally fell apart. More recently both Napoleon and Hitler attempted to unify Europe at the point of a gun and both of them failed in rivers of blood. Today's unity is first and foremost about peace. Peace itself is the greatest conquest of all.

Europe has never before been such a peaceful place as it is today.

Europe has been the scene of the world's most horrific wars, both religious and mercantile and any euro-chauvinist would do well to remember what Mahatma Gandhi answered when asked his opinion of European civilization: "It would be a good idea", Churchill's "naked fakir" replied.

Today's European Union came into being in order to solve a specific problem: how to end the "Great European Civil War (1914-1945)" which had destroyed much of Europe, caused it to lose its foreign possessions and killed, mutilated and displaced countless millions of human beings. In 1945 Europe was what the Spanish call a "broken toy". That was the defining problem of Europe and it has been solved with enormous success. Until that problem had been solved, nothing else of importance could be done.

Although the combination of the words, "peace" and "process" have been devalued like a Wiemar Deutsch Mark in the Middle East, the European Union is, in fact, the result of a successful and ongoing, "peace process".  Those who are eager for the European Union to begin to act in the fashion of a classic nation state, super power or empire don't really understand this process, where it has come from and where it is headed.

The European Union is above all a stewardship, a husbanding of human resouces, of infrastructure, of culture, of wealth, health and perhaps above all an idea of the quality of human life... of what it means to live well in every sense: prosperity with social justice. That is a combination absent from every other part of the world... certainly absent from the "G-2", China and the USA.

There are many commentators that fear that Europe is going to become irrelevant as the USA and China divide up the world between them. Their fear of Europe's demise is premature. In fact, the EU may find itself "the last man standing".

China and America are entwined and tangled in an economic embrace that could damage both of them, if not beyond repair, enough to make them hardly recognizable for quite some time.

The Chimerican era is drawing to a close. Given the bursting of the debt and housing bubbles, Americans will have to kick their addiction to cheap money and easy credit. The Chinese authorities understand that heavily indebted American consumers cannot be relied on to return as buyers of Chinese goods on the scale of the period up to 2007. And they dislike their exposure to the American currency in the form of dollar-denominated reserve assets of close to $2 trillion. The Chinese authorities are "long" the dollar like no foreign power in history, and that makes them very nervous. Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick - NYT

So much for the intensely "relevant" USA and China.

It should not be forgotten that none of the great superpowers, not the USA, not China, nor Russia, is capable of building a decent automobile, something that Europe does splendidly, while simultaneously providing the workers who build the cars with a decent social net. Europe with its internal market of 450,000,000 people is still able to manufacture goods of a quality unmatchable anywhere except Japan and even Japan still cannot approach Europe in making high profit margin luxury goods: a Lexus, although a wonderful car, is not a Ferrari Testarossa.

The Americans now drown in debt, with deteriorating educational and transport systems, seemingly limited to what they apparently do best: killing people and blowing things up. The Chinese on the other hand, work day and night making cheap junk, without unions or health care and live like refugees from a Jacob Riis photograph. .

All the while Europeans make top quality goods and protect their workers, maintain their infrastructure and health and education systems... and while the dollar and yuan race each other to the bottom, the Euro is a solid measure of value.

There is something of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper in all of this.

At the same time European regulations have become the world standard. The handiest example of this is the cell-phone, but this ability of the "faceless bureaucrats" of Brussels to define things like "butter" and "kilo" , or "plastic", or "bag", so that the entire world knows exactly what a kilo of butter or a cell phone or a plastic bag that can be sold to 450 million people consists of  is an achievement only rivaled by the law makers of ancient Rome. There is nothing irrelevant about this and certainly greater relevance is not gained by acting as the "tool kit" of an America struggling in the endless wars of its Götterdämmerung.

So Europe will continue its eternal round of boring committees, its purgatory of brain melting meetings that run into meetings and perhaps, someday, some dawn, the faceless bureaucrats of Brussels will stumble yawning out of another inconclusive meeting into the fresh air of a Belgian morning and suddenly realize that they have created the utopia that mankind has dreamt of since we trucked out of Eden.

The food pictured is a small plate or "tapa" of what is called "fideua", which is a Valencian paella made with saffron-colored noodles and little bits of chicken, pork and shellfish mixed in; the wine is a robust, Ribera del Duero red and the whole thing, standing up, went for €2.50, this very morning in the center of Madrid.

I thought that today, for a change, I'd rather write about this little meal than about all the crap that is going on in the world.

I had a camera with me  because my wife and I were out collecting wall graffiti for her to use in her digital artwork, which she hangs on her web page.

I am trying to learn flash, but it's pretty heavy going. All I can do for now is to take a film made in Corel Video Studio and turn it into something that opens quickly and runs smoothly on the web page. I still have no idea how to construct all the lovely bells and whistles that morph  as you move the cursor across them.

Getting back to the photo: although I like to cook, to eat and to drink, I'm no foody. Good food and  good wine, without too much ceremony, in the informal atmosphere of a noisy Spanish bar, on a busy morning, is one of my pleasures. No big deal. That is important for me... that it be no big deal.

When people talk too much about food it makes me uncomfortable  for some reason, like when people talk too much about sex and  most dissertations about wine are insufferable.

Things that are better to do than to talk about.

The picture expresses some of that, I think.

The "peace process" explained

All night long they'd chatter away,
All day long they were happy and gay,
Swinging and singing in their honky-tonkey way.
"Aba, daba, daba, daba, daba, daba, dab"
"Aba Daba Honeymoon"
Words and Music By: Arthur Fields and Walter Donovan

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian authority, you know, the gray haired fellow with glasses that is always being photographed shaking hands with the Prime Minister of Israel or the President of the United States, or the the Secretary of State or all the visiting "envoys", which is basically all that he really does, has said that he has had enough.

Abbas had understood from Obama that he would force Israel to stop all settlement construction and then launch peace talks. (...) Taking his cue from Obama, Abbas made a full freeze of settlement construction a precondition for talks. But when the Americans backed down several months later after Netanyahu offered a slowdown but not a freeze, Abbas was left high and dry. JTA

Many think that Abbas's threat to resign is a bluff, but I take him at his word.

Read more »

Rupert Murdoch doesn't end in FOX "news" or "The Weekly Standard", his winning formula of neoconservativism and neofascism is a multinational phenomenon.

One of the jewels in his crown is the British tabloid, "The Sun".

Here is how The Guardian's 'take no prisoners' cartoonist, Steve Bell (may he live a hundred years) parodies this rag.

Those who consume Murdoch's American publications will notice the similarities, but will find Steve Bell's bare-knuckle treatment refreshing.
 

                  Why is this woman alway laughing so hysterically?

I never thought I'd write the following words, but is it possible that Obama's handling of the I-P peace process might actually end up being worse than George Bush's?  Stephen M. Walt

In his blog in Foreign Policy magazine, one of the sharpest critics of George W. Bush's policies in the Middle East, Stephen M. Walt, linked to a pair of devastatingly critical attacks on President Obama's treatment of the Israel/Palestine conflict by Tony Karon of Time magazine and by Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation.

Tony Karon summed up the general drift of both articles with this phrase:

The Obama Administration's bid to relaunch an Israeli-Palestinian peace process is falling apart faster than you can say settlement freeze -- in no small part because President Barack Obama began his effort by saying settlement freeze.

And as we read in his quote above, Walt then compares Obama's handling of the Middle East unfavorably with Bush's.

And this brings me to the title of my post: "What Obama could learn from Bush".

Read more »

So much of this story defies simple common sense that it is difficult to get to grips with it.

I don't know who was crazier, the shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, or the people that assigned someone with his profile the task of treating traumatized soldiers returning from fighting Muslims.

It seems to me pure sadism on the US Army's part.

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If you cant see this video in MS Explorer, try clicking here:
Dickday, TPM's guiding light, liked my Bush video, "Alfred E. Newman from Hell," a lot so I'm posting this one just for him... I've got another one that is really gross that I'll post later, if he likes this one too.

*To see it full size just press the little square "full screen" thingy.

                                 Alfred E. Newman from Hell
*If, for some reason, your browser doesn't show this video CLICK HERE to view it

There seem to be a lot of Republicans walking around with familiar smirks on their faces today.

This is entirely premature.

I know that Americans are famous for their short memories and  even shorter attention spans, but only one year has passed since a great affliction  and a daily humiliation was extirpated from our "hearts and minds".

I made this video over three years ago and I am reviving it in case there are any Republicans who think that people are going to soon forget what they have inflicted on the country and mankind.