Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai (second from right) on the way to Kabul

Hillary Clinton has been chattering brightly about fighting "corruption" in Afghanistan, and isn't that a beautiful idea? If you're looking for a target that nobody will defend, "corruption" is just about as unpopular as cancer, which is certainly a very bad thing.

Corruption!

Boooooo!!!

Honesty! Transparency! Good governance!

Hurrah!!!

And how difficult could it possibly be to eliminate what Americans call "corruption" in Afghanistan? Eliminating corruption is everywhere and always a simple two-step process:

1. Create a self-examining bureaucracy with lifetime job-stability and a university-educated bourgeoisie to staff it, and then...

Whoa! What's that first step again?

Create a self-examining bureaucracy with lifetime job-stability and a university-educated bourgeoisie to staff it, and then...

Whoa! How the heck can you create such a thing in Afghanistan, where all good things have inevitably passed through the sticky fingers of tribal chiefs for thousands of years?

And now it's time for a very brief excursion into the reality of Afghanistan...

Read more »

Returning to the same article by Scott Rasmussen in the Wall Street Journal that I wrote about yesterday...

Down the campaign homestretch, Mr. Obama's tax-cutting promise became his clearest policy position. Eventually he stole the tax issue from the Republicans. Heading into the election, 31% of voters thought that a President Obama would cut their taxes. Only 11% expected a tax cut from a McCain administration.

The last Democratic candidate to win the tax issue was also the last Democratic president -- Bill Clinton. In fact, the candidate who most credibly promises the lowest level of taxes has won every presidential election in at least the last 40 years.

A Rasmussen survey conducted Oct. 2 found that 59% agreed with the sentiment expressed by Reagan in his first inaugural address: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Just 28% disagreed with this sentiment.

So tax-cutters won every Presidential election since 1968, and likewise even 35% of voters who identify themselves as liberals agree that "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

And what was the biggest story in 1968?

2,000,000 Asians were killed...

A generation of orphans was created...


58,209 American soldiers sacrificed their lives for nothing...

And the majority of American voters never trusted their government again.

Along with a gaggle of progressive news aggregators, I keep an RSS feed from the Wall Street Journal on my desktop for balance, but mostly it's just noise.

Today was slightly different, with a column from Scott Rasmussen, a national pollster whom liberals love to hate, but although his conclusions may skew to the right, he can't really afford to play too fast and loose with facts, and today he showcased a few surprising items... surprising at least to me, because my immersion in the progressive blogosphere and deeply-addicted news-junkie brain-style sometimes makes me forget who else is out there, in the blur of political impressionism.

Down the campaign homestretch, Mr. Obama's tax-cutting promise became his clearest policy position. Eventually he stole the tax issue from the Republicans. Heading into the election, 31% of voters thought that a President Obama would cut their taxes. Only 11% expected a tax cut from a McCain administration.

The last Democratic candidate to win the tax issue was also the last Democratic president -- Bill Clinton. In fact, the candidate who most credibly promises the lowest level of taxes has won every presidential election in at least the last 40 years.

It gets worse.

A Rasmussen survey conducted Oct. 2 found that 59% agreed with the sentiment expressed by Reagan in his first inaugural address: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Just 28% disagreed with this sentiment. That survey also found that 44% of Obama voters agreed with Reagan's assessment (40% did not).

59% to 28% Americans believe that "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem!"

And what's the alternative, morons?

Corporate oligarchy?

Anarchy?

But pollsters don't ask follow-up questions.

Recent Paintings and Photographs

From the Guardian...

The rise in frequency is stark - from two admissions a fortnight a year ago to two a day now. "Most are in the head and spinal cord, but there are also many deficiencies in lower limbs," he said. "There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of less than two years [old] with brain tumours. This is now a focus area of multiple tumours."

This is a 700% increase in the course of a year.

Statistics on infant tumours are not considered as reliable as new data about nervous system anomalies, which are usually evident immediately after birth. Dr Abdul Wahid Salah, a neurosurgeon, said: "With neuro-tube defects, their heads are often larger than normal, they can have deficiencies in hearts and eyes and their lower limbs are often listless.

This story only gets worse.

Zainab Abdul Latif moves wearily between her three children, wiping their foreheads and propping them up in their wheelchairs. "Every day, they need intensive care," the 29-year-old Falluja mother says. Neither her two sons, Amar, 5, and Moustafa, 3, or daughter, Mariam, 6, can walk or use their limbs. They speak two words - "mama, baba" - between them. All are in nappies.

One of few people she can turn to is Dr Bassem Allah, the senior obstetrician who is chief custodian of Falluja's newborns. During medical school he had to search Iraq for case studies of an infant with a birth defect. "It was almost impossible during the 80s," he says. "Now, every day in my clinic or elsewhere in the hospital, there are large numbers of congenital abnormalities or cases of chronic tumours."

He pauses, his thoughts seemingly interrupted by the gravity of his words, then slowly continues. "Now, believe me, it's like we are treating patients immediately after Hiroshima."

This nightmare is just another aspect of the legacy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and likewise Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who voted to continue funding our genocidal occupation of Iraq year after year after year, and continue to support and direct undocumented and extra-judicial assassinations in Pakistan and elsewhere even today.

According to a just completed study by the New America Foundation, the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President. During his first nine and a half months in office, (Obama) has authorized as many C.I.A. aerial attacks in Pakistan as George W. Bush did in his final three years in office.

"You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff," a former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack. (He watched the carnage on a small monitor in the field.)

Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: "squirters."

And isn't that a marvelously appropriate last word for an essay about the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan?

"Squirters!"

A trickle of lawsuits by US soldiers against KBR-Halliburton for toxic exposure from enormous open "burn-pits' at US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan is turning into a deluge as the number of suits more than doubled in the last few weeks.

Dozens of US military personnel have filed 34 lawsuits against US defense contractor KBR for allegedly incinerating toxic waste and releasing it into the atmosphere in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Susan Burke, one of the lawyers bringing the suits, said they have been filed over the past year, 18 of them in recent days.

"All the cases are being put together before a federal judge in Greenbelt, Maryland," she told AFP Tuesday.

"Every type of waste imaginable was and is burned on these pits, including trucks, tires, lithium battery, Styrofoam, paper, rubber, petroleum-oil-lubricant products, metals, hydraulic fluids, munitions boxes, medical waste, biohazard materials (including human corpses), medical supplies (including those used during smallpox inoculations), paints, solvents, asbestos insulation, items containing pesticides, polyvinyl chloride pipes, animal carcasses, dangerous chemicals and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles," the lawsuit claims.

This slow-breaking story includes wrongful-death suits from massive exposure to "thick, noxious smoke - coming off of flames sometimes colored blue or green by burning chemicals - to hang over U.S. bases and camps across Iraq and Afghanistan since 2004."

According to the complaints, "U.S. soldiers and other residents of themilitary bases and camps have become seriously ill, been diagnosed withserious and potentially fatal diseases and in some cases have died from the physical injuries and diseases caused by the exposure to hazardous smoke and fumes."

The burn pits are so large that tractors are used to push waste onto them and the flames shoot hundreds of feet into the sky, according to the lawsuits.

We're talking about a lot of waste! For example...

(Joint Base) Balad's average daily output of almost 250 tons of waste is three times higher than the average of 83 tons per day generated by the city of Juneau, Alaska, which has a comparable population.

And of course the US military is fulfilling its primary responsibility to make the world safe for Halliburton, by denying the danger of even (relatively) short-term exposure to toxins like asbestos.

Read more »

Unemployment statistics typically depend on multiple meanings of "unemployment," but in this nebulous domain, non-farm payrolls are endowed with a certain je ne sais quoi of relative solidity, and the story they told in October was more or less exactly the same as August and September, according to the Bureau Of Labor Statistics' monthly report.

Total nonfarm payroll employment declined by 190,000 in October. In the most recent 3 months, job losses have averaged 188,000 per month, compared with losses averaging 357,000 during the prior 3 months. In contrast, losses averaged 645,000 per month from November 2008 to April 2009. Since December 2007, payroll employment has fallen by 7.3 million.

Perceptive readers will notice that jobs are not disappearing as fast as they disappeared earlier this year, and that's the good news.

The bad news is that there are fewer and fewer jobs, month after month after month.

Meanwhile, back in the cloud of dubious definitions, the flagship unemployment statistic surged past 10.2%, as 558,000 people became "unemployed" in October, either by losing their jobs or unsuccessfully entering the workforce.

Obama and his playmates are claiming that their stimulus has created or saved about 640,000 jobs, but more than half those jobs were in education, and that statistic is even more nebulous than "unemployment."

Indiana, for example, reported saving or creating 13,232 education jobs with its stimulus money, but Cris Johnston, the director of the government efficiency division of the state budget office, said that it was difficult to say whether the state would have actually lost those jobs without the money.

"We can't make the statement that they were created or retained," Mr. Johnston said. Indiana, he said had followed federal guidelines in reporting how many full-time jobs were paid for with the stimulus money, which also paid for education supplies and other expenses. And while New York City officials have said the stimulus helped them save thousands of teaching jobs, it would have been politically difficult for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to actually lay off that many teachers while running for re-election.

So 558,000 people became "unemployed" in October alone, and meanwhile Obama's feeble stimulus has conceivably created or saved a grand total of 640,000 jobs, or about the same as the last five weeks of the long grind down.

First, readers' blogs disappeared from their box on the front page of TPM, and now we're all squeezed into the left-hand margin, far down on the page at TPMCafe.

What next?